No Job for a Woman

by Sallyanne Atkinson

  Like Queenwood in Sydney, it had been founded by one of those indomitable women who did so much for the education of girls in the early twentieth century. It was known as Miss Davenport’s Private School until it was bought by the Archbishop and the Church of England in 1911. It was a Church of England school (Anglican had not yet become a brand name) and religion played a major part. We had assembly with prayers and hymns every morning (I still know most of those hymns by heart) and the dormitories were called after early English saints – St Cuthbert, St Wilfred, St Audrey, St Chad and St Bede. Every Sunday the boarders would walk to nearby St Peter’s Church, two-by-two in a crocodile line, wearing white frocks.

  Louella and I yearned to be boarders, imbued as we were with Enid Blyton’s tales of boarding school at Malory Towers, and Angela Brazil’s school stories. It was quite common then for small children of five or six to be sent to boarding school for various reasons. Two of my best friends in the early days were girls whose mothers had died. My chance came when I was twelve, when Mum had to go to Sydney for some specialised dental treatment, taking Louella and Holly with her. I was a boarder for a term and absolutely loved it.

  The next year, we were boarders for the whole year when Mum and Holly went back to Colombo. We spent the school holidays in May and August with our grandparents in Sydney and flew from Coolangatta. The memory of those plane trips are still with me. The planes were the old DC3s and I vomited most of the flights. In fact, I would start to feel sick a few days before we were due to travel, so there was little pleasure in anticipating the journey.

  Many years later the 1982 Commonwealth Games in Brisbane were to be the beginning of my passion for sport, though not then or ever as a participant. I was always very bad at sport at school. I was not actually very bad at running and swimming, but seriously awful at ball games. It was common practice in sport sessions for two girls, obviously stars, to be picked as captains and for them to pick their teams. So it was a case of, ‘I’ll have her’ and, ‘I’ll have her’, and as the pool of team members shrunk, I’d be standing there looking at my sandshoes and knowing that I would be the last to be chosen. No one wanted me on their team for tunnel ball or netball, perfectly ghastly games where I would drop the ball and be hissed at by everybody else.

  When I later told this story to my doctor sister, Kim, who was good at sport and had actually been in the school hockey team, she was appalled and said that this rejection must have been damaging for my psyche. But I don’t think it was. I just knew I was bad at ball games, and I concentrated on what I was good at. That has proved to be an important lesson throughout my life and one I share with young people – find what you are good at and know what you are not. And understand that not being good at something is not all that bad.

  What I was good at, and enjoyed, was being on stage. My first starring role was in Christopher Fry’s The Boy with the Cart in which I played ‘The Boy’. At fourteen, skinny-legged and flat-chested, I looked right for the part. Dad had to come to a performance because Mum was in hospital. When I asked him afterwards what he thought, hoping for compliments on my acting talent, he said simply, ‘Fancy being able to learn all those words by heart.’

  Dad was never a great supporter of our drama and choir activities. He thought they interfered with schoolwork, but I think they are an important part of education. There’s the brainpower needed to learn the lines and the discipline of having to turn up to rehearsals and take directions. Drama at St Hilda’s cut across age lines. As I was a shy child and a stutterer, just being able to walk on a stage was a huge boost to my confidence. It’s somehow easier to be playing a role because then you are not actually yourself.

  My stutter was a huge burden to me, though interestingly none of my friends or family remember it. In class we would each read out a paragraph aloud and I would count ahead to see what I was getting. If my paragraph began with a consonant I knew I was in trouble. I developed coping techniques. If the word was, say, ‘King’, I would cough and say ‘ing’. The odd thing was that on stage I didn’t stutter.

  As teenagers, we always had to have a boyfriend, an accessory as necessary as a handbag and an obligatory status symbol. During the Easter break, just before we turned 15 my friends Joan, Elizabeth and I realised we didn’t know many boys and decided a good way to get to know some was to have a party. As we didn’t know any to invite, we made lists of the sons of our mothers’ friends. There was Tom the doctor’s son and Eric the chemist’s son, and John who lived over Elizabeth’s back fence and his friend Earle, and Len, Joan’s friend Kay’s first cousin. The party, which turned out to be great, was in Elizabeth’s backyard. We jived to Elvis Presley and Bill Haley and Elizabeth’s father, George Ross, devised a game where the girls walked under the Hills Hoist hung with sheets and the boys had to guess whose legs they were. At the end of the party, I kissed Kay’s cousin Len and was gauche enough to inform him that he was the first boy I’d ever kissed. I don’t remember his reaction to this important piece of information.

  In my second last year at school I played the princess in the school play, wearing a beautiful white dress of Mum’s cut down. This produced a result that had nothing to do with theatre. Boys from The Southport School always came to the dress rehearsal to give us an audience. The captain of the First XV Rugby team was smitten with me and subsequently asked me out. We were to be an item for the rest of the year.

  The best holidays of my childhood were in the Queensland outback, that mythical place we call the ‘real Australia’ even though we are one of the most urbanised nations on earth. In my sub-Junior year, I was invited by my best friend Jennie to spend the August holidays on her family’s sheep station near Boulia in western Queensland. These were the days when Australia rode on the sheep’s back, when wool was worth a pound per pound and the graziers who produced it were our aristocracy. We travelled up from Southport by train and were met at South Brisbane station by a man from Dalgety, the stock and station agent, who took us to our hotel then out to dinner and the movies that night. We stayed at the Canberra, a temperance hotel, alcohol-free and safe for young ladies. In fact, it was so safe that when we would stay there a few years later, to go to parties and dances in Brisbane, the doorman would not allow any young male to cross the threshold. The next day we were dropped at the airport and flew to Winton, where we were met by Jennie’s father who drove us the 360 kilometres to Boulia. Before we set off he took us to lunch at the North Gregory Hotel, where the waitresses wore frilly aprons over their black dresses and frilly white caps: the hotel is still there, albeit without the fancy waitresses. Winton is where Australia’s national song ‘Waltzing Matilda’ was first sung, and in that hotel are the sandblasted glass doors etched by the famous artist Daphne Mayo. In a nice twist of fate, I’m now on the board of the Waltzing Matilda Centre in Winton and I have been named an Ambassador for the North Gregory Hotel and always stay there.

  Gordon Pooley, Jennie’s father, had won Pathungra station in one of the land ballots of the 1950s. Since 1916 the Queensland government had raffled off crown land and would-be graziers could enter the ballot. But it was no easy win. Pathungra was more than 400 square kilometres, of which a large part was desert, and the Pooleys with their four young daughters started from scratch. Many of the ballot winners had no experience farming that kind of land. Gordon Pooley had been a citrus grower at Gayndah. But they worked hard, putting up fences and digging holes for the outdoor dunnies. It was shearing time that August, and Mrs Pooley spent her days baking scones and cooking meals for the workers. Mustering had to be done, and though I’d never ridden a horse I didn’t want to be left at home. On the first day my horse threw me off about 15 kilometres out from the homestead and there was nothing for it but to get back on, which did earn me some kudos. My greatest fear was of rats, which I was told came in waves across the flat parched land, so that when I had to go to the lavatory in the night I ran down the backyard to it and just as quickly back again.

  When I was 1
6 I went with my friend Joan to visit her relatives in north Queensland. We stayed with Joan’s aunt, Betty Perkins, and her family in Townsville, and it was here that I had my first taste of alcohol – not with the family but at the local amateur races, a big social event and my first experience of the racetrack. Actually, it wasn’t my first taste of alcohol because I would sip my father’s whisky and my mother’s shandy, but this was the first drink that belonged to me and it was champagne. I remember what I wore, a red dress with white trimmings that I had seen in a Simplicity pattern book and that was made for me by Joan’s mother, Edie. It’s funny how often a long-ago memory comes complete with fashion illustration. From Townsville we went west by train to Richmond, a 500 kilometre journey, with stops along the way at stations where the cafes served strong sweet tea.

  Understanding the country is really important for city children, and the only way to do it in an authentic way is to live the life. Queensland is not only large but also diverse. Wandoan on the northern fringe of the Darling Downs, where I stayed with Helen Turner and her family on ‘Glendoan’, is very different from Winton and the Channel Country, while Kingaroy where Mary Lewis’s family held an annual race meeting on their property, ‘Burrandowan’, is very far in every way from the Gold Coast. But it’s all Queensland.

  SWIMMING UPSTREAM

  A childhood in retrospect is a collection of memories, happy and sad, all jumbled up. Teenage years are always turbulent, but for various reasons one particular year turned out to be especially traumatic.

  In 1956 Dad had come out to Southport on leave, which turned out to be a bad career move; while he was in Australia he lost his job in Colombo. His job loss was part of the process of independence of Ceylon. The government of Ceylon under Prime Minister Bandaranaike (whose wife later became the world’s first female prime minister), had embarked on a program of nationalisation. This made Sinhala the only official language and forced all businesses to employ a quota of Singhalese. So Dad, conveniently out of the country, was told not to come back.

  For the first time in his life, Dad was out of work. He had spent his entire career at the same firm, a company that made tea-producing machinery, going from office boy in Belfast to chief accountant in Colombo. There was no tea-producing machinery in Southport and he had no business contacts. So, at the age of 55 and with a young family to support, he took to the streets selling insurance. We sold our lovely old Queenslander, which had been Mum’s pride and joy and the first house we had owned. We moved to a smaller house in Labrador on the Pacific Highway, which had been called ‘Rumah Puteh’ by a previous owner from Malaya. This was a house with a flat underneath, which Mum and Dad planned to rent. But when they did, it turned out not to meet with Council approval.

  At the time it all seemed very inconvenient and most disruptive. It was only years later that I felt enormous respect and admiration for my father for picking himself up after being sacked and starting life in a new country in a new business. In many ways it was great training for politics because he was an insurance man of the old-fashioned sort, who knocked on doors to make a sale and then cared for his clients when they had a claim. Many times the phone would ring late at night and Dad would go out to help a fisherman fill out the forms for a storm-damaged boat. Dad made me understand the importance of caring for people and their problems, and doing it personally.

  In April 1957 my brother Charles was born, the first boy after we three girls and the son to replace Michael who had died many years before. But when he was 15 months old, two days after my sixteenth birthday, something terrible happened – an event I cannot think about, even now, without choking up.

  My mother used to hang a toy on a string on the rails of Charles’s cot, and his head got caught in it. That day Mum had kept me at home from school to look after her because she was sick, and I had gone out into the garden when I heard her scream. She had got up to have a bath and come back into the bedroom to find Charles choking and blue in the face. She picked him up and carried him across the busy highway, with me running beside her and holding up traffic, to the doctor around the corner. After the doctor had taken them inside, I sat on the wall beside the beach across the road and prayed, ‘God, if you let Charles live I’ll become a nun.’ For years afterwards I felt guilty about that, surely God knew I would never have become a nun.

  It was too late. Charles was dead. Louella and Holly were taken away by caring friends, and I was left alone with my anguished parents. There are so many pictures still in my head – our well-meaning rector saying it was God’s will and Mum screaming at him; Dad sobbing, ‘My son, my only son!’; Mum saying, ‘No man can feel what it’s like to lose a child.’

  When it came to arranging the funeral, neither of my parents was able to do it. So I did, and that was when I began to grow up. I began to realise that even in marriage people can be terribly alone, for my parents were no support to each other. I remember nothing at all about the funeral in St Peter’s Church, but I can still see Mum throwing herself on the grave as the little coffin was lowered.

  Afterwards, I went back to school and to an inter-school sports day in Brisbane as though nothing had happened. There was no counselling support then. For Mum and Dad, I suppose, it was a case of just getting on with things. For me, apart from the grief and shock, there was a feeling of bewilderment that I had acted as an adult for those few days and was now being treated like a child again.

  But the year was not unhappy as a whole, and it makes me realise how resilient is youth. It was my sub-Senior year, today’s Year 11, with the important public exam to take place the following year. It was a time when it was possible to follow your interests in particular subjects, knowing that the year after was the one for hard work and focused attention. An extra layer of excitement was that many Southport School Senior boys had come back to school just to row in the school Eights and play Rugby. They were older and had cars, and because they didn’t have to study they were available to us girls. We would spend our Sundays beside the pool at the newly built Chevron Hotel in Surfers where the manager encouraged us, presumably as a bit of indirect marketing. The pool was very fancy, with glass windows people could look through and see the swimmers underwater.

  There was teenage angst too. A friend who lived around the corner took me on a double date with two Sydney boys, Sydney being a code word for sophistication. At sixteen I was still flat-chested so I shoved Kleenex tissues down the front of my dress to give me a bosom. There was never any danger that those tissues would be dislodged. The next Saturday was the school swimming carnival, and it had not long started when my friend said in excitement, ‘The boys have come!’ I was absolutely mortified. In my cotton-knit Speedos there was no hope of disguising my shape, or rather lack of it. I spent the whole afternoon with a towel around me.

  Actually, cotton-knit Speedos were a factor in the demise of my swimming career. We would train in the afternoons after school, then hang up our swimsuits in the dressing sheds ready for training early the next morning. In the cold early morning they were still wet and slimy, and I’m afraid I just stopped training. I obviously didn’t have the temperament of Kieren Perkins or Susie O’Neill.

  Our senior year, 1959, was Queensland’s centenary year. It was 100 years since Governor George Bowen had declared this state to be separate from New South Wales and installed his wife Lady Diamantina Roma in what is now Old Government House in George Street. I was charged with writing the editorial for the school magazine that year (Mrs Hunter, our English teacher, was the editor). Having mentioned the importance of the centenary I wrote:

  St Hilda’s School is Queensland in miniature. It would be hard to find a school that is more thoroughly representative of our great State. We have girls from the capital city of Brisbane; from Coolangatta on the NSW border to Cairns in the tropical North; from cattle stations and sheep properties; from cane farms and the wheat districts of the Darling Downs. There are very few aspects of Queensland life that are not represented among u
s.

  I was a boarder for that final term. Miss Horton, the headmistress, had thought that I would be able to study better at school than at home with the younger children and Mum about to give birth; she was pregnant again. Being a boarder at that stage was a little irksome. At home, even in the midst of the family and studying at the kitchen table, I had been able to set my own pace and could study until 10 pm. At school we had regulated prep time and lights out at 8.30 pm and as a result we sixth formers would take our books into the lavatories and sit there for a couple of hours. Goodness knows if the powers that be ever noticed that a group of senior girls might appear to have bowel and bladder problems. We were a dedicated lot, and the results showed. There were only 15 in our class, and of those, ten went on to higher education, six with Commonwealth scholarships to university.

  The big event of my Senior year was the birth of my youngest sister Kim. She happened to be born on 26 October, the day of my first exam, the English paper. The next day I went to visit her and Mum at the Southport General hospital, conveniently located across the road from the school. A few weeks later Mum brought her up to school for me to show her off to the class. Needless to say I was the only girl in my year whose mother had given birth during our senior year. A few months earlier Louella and I, walking down the street after school to catch the bus home, had discussed the possibility that Mum might be pregnant (‘She’s knitting booties!’) and how bizarre that might be.

  It did mean that during the Christmas holidays I was sometimes on babysitting duty, but it hadn’t made any difference to my exam results and I can say, modestly now, that I left school with a swag of prizes for English and history. I won the Barnes Cup for Languages and the Baker Cup for Citizenship.