No Job for a Woman

by Sallyanne Atkinson

  My schooldays began in Colombo when I was five and with them the exhilaration of learning to read. I can pinpoint very clearly the exact moment when I could read; the place, the book. Well, not actually the book but certainly the author. Mum, herself a great reader, used to read us a book by Mabel Lucie Attwell and I knew it by heart. The moment came when I could suddenly match memory to the words on the page in the book on my lap, under a tree in the park. When I studied ancient history at school and read about the German professor who could suddenly decipher hieroglyphics, I could totally relate to his excitement. Years later, on my first grown-up visit to Colombo, I had a driver and asked him to take me to that park … and there was the tree.

  The first school I went to, and with enormous excitement, was what was called a dame school. It was indeed run by a dame, Miss Raffel, and it was held in a room in one of Mum’s friends’ bungalows with 12 small pupils, all children of friends. We must have learned the basics, but what I remember most is the smell of the Lakeland coloured pencils and an Easter activity when we wrote letters to the Easter Bunny (so we did learn to write, too) and left them for the postman in the bungalow’s letterbox. I don’t remember whether they got us results.

  I made my first stage appearance in Miss Raffel’s Christmas play, where I played Wee Willie Winkie, and was very jealous of my friend Jane who was Mary Mary with cockle shells. It was on the back terrace, the guests sitting in the garden, and I had to ‘run through the town’, which I did with my head down and eyes lowered in a paroxysm of shyness.

  Mum decided to come back to Australia, bringing Louella and me to Sydney in early 1949 on the Orion. I have never really understood the reason for this decision, but perhaps my mother adopted the prevailing view that the tropics were considered unhealthy for European children. Those were the days when newspaper reporters would meet the big liners out in Sydney Harbour and get stories on, and pictures of, the passengers. There could have been no big stars or important people onboard, for we were photographed for the social pages. I think Mum must have had an instinct for publicity: in the picture Louella and I are wearing Breton-style hats trimmed with organdie and flowers, which would have caught the photographer’s eye. We were made to wear them to Sunday School in Sydney and oh, the embarrassment.

  We lived with our grandparents in Avenue Road, Mosman, where bread was still delivered by the baker’s horse and cart and the iceman carried up the ice for the icebox. We were staying there to save money because of the high cost of living in Colombo. The four of us, for Jill was there too, slept in one bedroom. But no sooner had we departed than Dad moved first into the Galle Face Hotel, and then into a ‘chummery’ with two mates, where he lived very comfortably indeed and where I imagine the cost of his social life outweighed any savings our move might have made.

  I started at Queenwood, a private girls’ school overlooking Balmoral Beach and where the school song began ‘Happy is our school around us’, to the tune of the German national anthem, despite the recent war against Germany. I like to tell my children and grandchildren how, at six, I would catch the tram from Balmoral Beach up to busy Military Road at Mosman Junction, collect Louella from her kindergarten at the top of Avenue Road and the two of us would walk all the way home to our grandparents’ house near the bottom. Parent pick-ups did not exist then, nor apparently did fear of child assaults.

  Queenwood was where I had my very brief and longed-for ballet career. Through my first term I used to avidly watch my classmates’ ballet lessons. When I finally convinced Mum to let me learn too, I already knew the feet and arm positions and was level with the other girls. That year I was given a proper role in the school concert in the Mosman Town Hall. But, alas, it was the end of my dance career. From then on, no schools I attended had ballet lessons until much later, when we couldn’t afford them anyhow. I’ve always thought about what might have been …

  The other ‘performance’ I enjoyed was an odd one: reading aloud from the Sydney Morning Herald. My grandparents’ neighbours were a newly married couple who sailed every weekend in Mosman Bay and would bring their friends home for a drink afterwards. I don’t know how it started but they would pop me up on the kitchen table, a very small six-year-old, and have me read great swathes of the very serious Herald to loud applause. I greatly enjoyed the attention. I’d come a long way from Wee Willie Winkie. I had no idea what caused the applause, because I took reading for granted. The first grown-up book I read was Nevil Shute’s A Town Like Alice when I was eight.

  Dad came out to Sydney in July 1950 on the six months’ leave that Europeans in the tropics take every couple of years. By the time he arrived, two awful situations were in play. Sydney was having its wettest July ever and Louella and I had ringworm, one of the nasty childhood conditions of the time (the others were boils and impetigo). The cures were pretty nasty, too. We often got boils and our mother would apply hot poultices of antiphlogistine to the offending spot to draw out the pus. We would scream with the heat and the pain. Ringworm, apparently caused by contact with a cat, though we didn’t have one of those or even know one, were circular red weals all over the skin. Louella had them all over her body, including on her scalp, and had to have her head shaved. The treatment was bathing in a mixture of Condy’s crystals, which stung like mad. As ringworm was highly contagious we weren’t allowed near any other children, so I didn’t have a birthday party that July.

  When I think of childhood medical complaints, screaming is very much part of the memory. In Colombo I had my six-year-old molars removed. I was sitting up in my parents’ bed in our Bagatelle Road house and our doctor, Dr Thiagarajah, came in and perched on a chair. I started screaming then, and presumably stopped only when he held the jar of chloroform over my face and the dentist yanked out my teeth.

  The rain and the ringworm meant that our father didn’t want to spend his leave in Sydney. He had met a woman who had been on holiday to Surfers Paradise and Dad thought that any place with a name like that had to be okay. We never heard where he met this woman. Perhaps it was on the long flight from Colombo to Sydney, a flight that stopped overnight in Darwin where its passengers spent the night before climbing aboard next morning. But anyway, to Surfers Paradise we went.

  It meant a long train journey from Sydney to South Brisbane, and then another train journey that ended at Southport. Brisbane was a terrible shock, its wooden houses with their rusting tin roofs a contrast to the redbrick suburbia I’d been used to in Sydney. Southport then was a country town, and the house that we had rented on the Esplanade was a typical old Queenslander, with enclosed side verandas and steps leading down to a large backyard. It was called ‘Beach Villa’ and Mum absolutely hated it. There was linoleum on the floor throughout and cockroaches scurrying everywhere. Paradise it certainly was not, and at some stage in our four-month stay we moved out and into a guesthouse called ‘Ocean View’, which wasn’t luxurious but at least didn’t need housework.

  Years later Southport and Surfers Paradise became part of the Gold Coast, but in 1950 Southport was its own town where ordinary people lived, and the big houses belonged to the wealthy graziers from western Queensland who went there to escape the heat and take the sea air. Surfers Paradise was a hotel with a zoo attached where there was a talking horse and a six-legged cow. The horse didn’t actually talk but tapped its foot in response to questions, and the cow’s two extra legs were rather disgusting limbs hanging around its neck. The most interesting house was in Cavill Avenue, named for the builder of the hotel, a two-storeyed white wooden home with a board in front of it on which was written, in full, the Joyce Kilmer poem beginning, ‘I think that I shall never see/ A poem lovely as a tree’.

  We often swam in the Broadwater or walked across the Jubilee Bridge to Main Beach. The ringworm meant we weren’t allowed to play with other children, and Louella wore little cotton caps to cover her shaved head when we went out in public. So it was a strange existence, though good for family bonding, and I do have happy memories of cat
ching a boat to Stradbroke Island and the bus to Burleigh Heads to walk around the headland, hoping to see a koala.

  It was probably about this time that our parents began to think about the future and our ultimate home. Dad’s leave would be up in December and Mum had obviously started to think of our education, in spite of the fact that I was currently missing six months of my present one. Sitting on the shore of the Broadwater, that wide expanse of still water that leads to the mouth of the Nerang River, she watched nuns step fully clothed into the bathing boxes and come out the other side, lowering themselves discreetly into the water. She assumed they were Anglican nuns from St Hilda’s. It was on that basis that St Hilda’s was later chosen as our school. (It wasn’t until years later that Mum discovered the nuns were actually Sisters of Mercy from the Star of the Sea convent; there were no nuns at St Hilda’s.)

  But for now, Dad’s return to work took priority. In December 1950, aged eight, I embarked on my fifth ocean voyage. We set sail from Sydney on the Orontes. These three-week voyages were great adventures for children. There were sports competitions and fancy dress parties and in between we ran about the ship. We had Christmas at sea that year.

  When we arrived in Colombo we moved straight into the Grand Oriental Hotel, known as the GOH. Bella Sidney Woolf, sister of Leonard, had observed in 1905, ‘If you waited long enough in the hall of the GOH, as it is known throughout the world, you would meet everyone worth meeting.’ The hotel looked over Colombo Harbour, then one of the busiest in the world, and was located in the middle of the Fort, the busiest business and shopping area of the city.

  We went to school at Bishop’s College, a Church of England girls’ school run by the Sisters of St Margaret. Today there are Bishop’s girls all over the world, including Australia. It was there I had some early uncomfortable lessons about exclusion, and not in the classroom. Most of my fellow pupils were Ceylonese and from wealthy families. There were only three European girls in my class and we were certainly made to feel different. We ate our lunches alone together and were never asked to the homes of our classmates. This was a time when there was intense snobbery and racial prejudice, and I felt it acutely. I understood, even as an eight-year-old, that I was not being ostracised personally but that these girls felt they came from a superior class. I have never forgotten the discomfort, and I think it was about that time I started stuttering.

  Mum was friendly with the headmistress of another school in Colombo, the Royal Naval School for the children of the British service personnel still in Ceylon after the war, and so we left Bishop’s and went there instead. It couldn’t have been more different. The teachers were a mix of civilians and navy personnel. One of our subjects was mental arithmetic, taught by Lieutenant Fox in naval uniform of white shirt, shorts and long socks. He used to march between the desks rapping us with a ruler for wrong answers. I have blamed him ever since for my being bad at maths. Our school houses were named after English seafaring heroes, Mountbatten, Nelson, Rodney and Cunningham. We were in Mountbatten, whose colour was blue. The school was in a collection of military huts on the edge of the sea close by the Colombo Fort. The greatest treat was when naval ships were in port, they would have parties for children with a canvas slide that was actually the sling transporting sailors from one ship to another.

  By 1953 my parents had finally reached a decision about our future schooling. Once again Mum, Louella and I set sail from Colombo on board the Himalaya. We didn’t know it, but this was to be our last journey from Ceylon. We also didn’t know that Mum was pregnant. I claim some credit for the pregnancy. The year before, when I had begun to tire of playing with dolls, I had started to nag Mum about having a baby and she did. This must have been a deliberate decision because she and Dad had moved into separate bedrooms when I was six. Holly Margaret was born in November, and I was rarely to feel such an outpouring of love as I did for this baby that I felt was mine. It also skewed my attitude to birth control later; I implicitly assumed that babies only came along after some intellectual decision and that you wouldn’t get pregnant without having made such a decision.

  When the Himalaya steamed into Sydney Harbour in April 1953, we again attracted the attention of media photographers. Freezing in the early morning, we were huddled together in Mum’s fur coat and so we appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald. But we were not staying in Sydney this time. Once more we made the journey to South Brisbane and took a train to Southport.

  I don’t think it was sentiment for those significant transits that made me, years later, nag Queensland Transport Minister Don Lane into preserving the old South Brisbane station when it was redeveloped. That station had been the gateway into Queensland from the south. At Southport we moved into a flat attached to the Bauer Street house of real estate agent Mr Harding Smith (whose daughter Holly was to give her name to our sister) and we made lifelong friends among the families in the street. At 11 I was the oldest child and I organised the games and the plays and allocated the parts. I think this was the start of my bossiness. We played games of imagination: Burke and Wills on the vast expanse of sand behind the houses on the river side of the street, and Robin Hood and Maid Marian in the trees that lined it. Sir Edmund Hillary climbed Mt Everest and I cried because I had wanted to do that. The Queen was crowned, but we could only see that at the movies because television had not yet come to Australia.

  I started at St Hilda’s, wearing a navy tunic and distinctive red beret. At first I was teased for my posh English accent and my habit of saying, ‘I say!’ But the teasing had no effect and soon stopped, as did the accent. I was used to being thought of as different – in Colombo I had got attention for my Australian accent, at Bishop’s College I was white and at the Naval School I had a civilian father.

  St Hilda’s was to be where we would stay, as day girls and boarders, to finish our education. And Southport was now our home. We were Queenslanders.

  NOT YET THE GOLD COAST

  The gold coast was an idea whose time had yet to come. Southport, at the northern end of a long strip of seaside villages, was very much a typical country town where people lived and worked, where the professional folk socialised together. The doctors and the dentists, and there were only three of each in the 1950s, were friends. The bank managers and their families lived above the banks in Nerang Street, and I used to love going to their places to play after school.

  Because it was by the sea, people visited for holidays. Families from the bush had big houses, mainly on the Esplanade facing the Broadwater. Brisbanites made the journey from the city; back then it took a couple of hours by train to get to Southport station, followed by a drive to Surfers Paradise. Surfers consisted of the Surfers Paradise Hotel built by Jim Cavill in the late 1930s, which had become a convalescent home for servicemen during World War II. This was long before the frenetic postwar development that continues today. Further south were the Currumbin Bird Sanctuary where multicoloured lorikeets were handfed by visitors, and Jack Evans’ porpoise pool at Coolangatta.

  There was a definite pattern to south coast holidays. Queenslanders came down in December and January to spend the Christmas holidays. From May through the winter months of June and July, visitors came up from the south, mainly from Melbourne. These were the people, amazed by the winter sun and the still-warm sea, who would invest in and ultimately create the Gold Coast. I have always thought it interesting that all the major investment from the 1950s onwards came from the south. Brisbane people somehow just took the south coast for granted. Bruce Small (later Sir Bruce), the first mayor to promote the area actively to the rest of Australia, began his working life with a small bicycle shop in Melbourne that became a national company. He retired to the coast, became a property developer, and gave his canal and island developments glamorous though inappropriate names such as Capri, Sorrento and Miami, creating the glitz that became the Gold Coast.

  Sixty years on, the Gold Coast is a city of skyscrapers by the sea. To have no physical evidence of the place where
you grew up is disconcerting, to say the least. I was in Surfers recently, staying on the thirty-first floor of a hotel on the site of the original two-storey Surfers Paradise Hotel, and from my balcony I looked at even higher buildings. At the bottom is a huge shopping centre that could have been in Singapore or Hong Kong. Almost the only buildings left from my childhood are the bathing sheds on the Broadwater and at Main Beach, although it is still possible in the morning to gaze at the sun coming up over the glistening ocean, and there is still that wonderful strip of sand that stretches from Southport down to Burleigh Heads. When I swim at Main Beach, where I first swam in the Queensland sea, I walk over the sand, keeping my eyes firmly ahead as I plunge into the surf.

  St Hilda’s, my fifth school in a little over five years not including the six months when I went to no school at all, was essentially a country boarding school, and in 1953 there were 250 girls, of whom about 60 were day girls. Now St Hilda’s is called St Hilda’s Gold Coast rather than St Hilda’s Southport, and its 1250 girls include only 250 boarders. (There was a brief time during the war when boys from Toowoomba Prep School were moved down to the coast while the girls were evacuated to Stanthorpe. Oddly, all girls’ schools on the east coast were evacuated west, but little boys were presumably considered expendable.)

  St Hilda’s had wonderful grounds, acres of mainly bushland, which must have made the country girls feel right at home and made me feel truly Australian. There were six tennis courts, and as tennis was considered a compulsory accomplishment for country life we had to play every afternoon. I have always thought we were lucky to grow up in beautiful surroundings. Schools now seem to measure their standing in terms of bricks and mortar.