by Kim Hodges
On that day, lost in my daydreams, I built a dam out of small stones to fill in time. My father paced alongside my microscopic dam and I remembered why I was here.
“When is it coming?” I excitedly asked, not looking above the line of my father’s boots.
“Should be soon,” my father replied. I sensed his anticipation as he busied himself adding the final touches to our well-kept block, probably the most well groomed vacant block in Coolah, the state of NSW, and possibly Australia. For the past few weeks this block of land had been mowed, manicured and cared for as if it were a precious prize, valued well beyond dollars.
“There it is!!!” squealed one of my brothers. I looked up from the gutter and saw an oversized truck negotiating a turn as it headed towards us.
“Quick, over here,” my mother beckoned. We all gathered around her on a safe side of our block. My father proudly claimed the sidewalk his own. My mother stood so tall, with her chest inflated. They had done it. Bought a house. There it was, half a house on a truck pulling into our street. My father waved to the truck and stepped back. The truck navigated the gutter and parked parallel to the house’s foundations, which had been laid two weeks earlier. It stopped its engine. We jumped up and down, clapping and shrieking with joy. I turned around to see that a handful of neighbourhood kids had gathered to watch. This was the first time I saw Anthony. He stood taller than the others kids. His upright posture and jet-black hair caught my eye. I noticed his very freckly face.
Half of our house had arrived. Following our mother, we walked around it, but only once. Ten minutes later the other half of the house arrived. Again we assembled next to my mother. We jumped up and down again! I could hear the neighbourhood kids talking behind me. This time we stood on the other side of the road watching while the oversized truck positioned the remaining half of the house onto the foundations. My mother beamed. We were all so happy. I looked at my father, who was holding his chin, being so serious as if this seriousness could have ensured that the house would be placed correctly. I sensed joy underneath his serious expression. After that, my mother and the children went back to our rented house. My father stayed on, presumably to help the blokes set up our new house. “Our house arrived between 2 P.M. and 3 P.M. on a Saturday, in October 1974, on two trucks,” I wrote in my diary later that night.
By the next afternoon when we returned there was one house rather than two half houses. The house was propped up on giant bricks and the oversized trucks were gone. A week later we all moved into the house. The house had one bathroom, a toilet, a living room, a small kitchen and dining room and three bedrooms. It was modest but it was ours. This transportable house was eventually filled up with parents, kids, a dog, a cat, a piano and a few possessions to become our home.
As my mother cooked in her new oven, the sweet smell of cakes and the aroma of roast lamb dinners wafted through the rooms and settled in our nostrils, seeping into our subconsciousness. The smells cemented that this was our home, not just any house anymore. My three younger brothers shared a bedroom, as did my parents. As the only girl in the family I was allocated a small bedroom to myself. This was the only bonus to having all brothers as siblings. I had my own space. I kept looking for the join where the two halves met, but I never did find it.
*
After we had settled in, all of our games took place on the spare block. Our home block was constantly manicured and groomed, unlike most of the nearby blocks. A double garage was built. My father constructed several large vegetable gardens and installed a compost bin. Our home block was boring in comparison to our wild overgrown spare block. It was never mowed, to my brothers and the other neighbourhood kids’ delight. I occasionally saw that freckly-faced boy, Anthony, on our new street, but he never came to play on the spare block. I was unsure as to why my parents had deliberately let the spare block become overgrown until four months after we had moved in to our home.
“It’s burn-off time!” exclaimed my mother early one morning. Her eyes grew wide and her face lit up. On this particular day, the sun shone and the wind was still.
“What’s that?” one of my brother’s queried.
“You’ll see!” she exclaimed in response.
Burn-off was so exciting for all of us kids. My mother and father began by clearing the edges of the spare block. My brothers and I were told to stand back. Mum then poured kerosene on the grass, in a very straight line to the centre of the block, and then finished with a circular shape in the middle of the block.
“Watch,” my mother said. Her determination and concentration brought an unrecognisable look to her eyes, as she pulled out a snatch of dry grass and soaked it in kerosene. Then she struck a match, lit the grass in her hand and ceremoniously plunged it onto the trail of fluid she had laid. A blazing fire ignited. All of us kids stared, our mouths wide open and eyes bulging. “This is a burn off!” she yelled, like a creature possessed.
My parents now had to contain the fire to prevent the nearby houses catching alight. A full bucket of water and a hose was always on hand just in case. My parents had obviously done this before. We all stood watching them. “The fire has got away. Bloody do something!” my mother commanded, looking at my father. The rising flames and unpredictable sparks were igniting new fires quicker than my parents’ stomping could put them out. My mother ran for the hose and, with full pressure, she tried to hose down the fire. My father filled and then threw many buckets of water onto the fire, but not quickly enough. This fire was disobedient. I watched the fire’s tempo rise, sensed the frenzy and panic as my parents ran with determination back and forth between our water supply and the fire. “Call the fire brigade, Stan!” my mother again commanded. “Get back to the house, all of you, now!” she said, pointing to us kids. I rounded up my brothers and we retreated to the back steps of our home. Our sense of danger put us on high alert whilst we stood on our back veranda.
The fire truck arrived, looking taller and more powerful than the fire itself. My brothers and I jumped up and down with uncontainable excitement. We knew the two local firemen, but that was the first time that we had seen them in action. They managed to extinguish the escapee fire with a long powerful fire hose. We left the steps and stood near the fire truck, once the fire had been contained. My two younger brothers got to sit in the fire truck.
“Bloody big burn-off,” the older, slightly porky fireman joked with my mother.
“You trying to burn down the neighbourhood, Carol?” baited the younger skinnier one.
“Gives you blokes something to do, rather than sitting round reading the paper!” she teased them. Both firemen laughed and shook their heads.
“See you next burn-off. Hey Stan, try and keep your missus under control,” said the older man, extending his hand.
“Thanks,” my father replied sheepishly reaching out to shake each of their hands in turn.
“You owe us a beer mate,” said the older fireman.
“Don’t you encourage his bloody drunken behaviour,” Carol blurted out.
“Settle down Carol, we just saved your home and the entire neighbourhood. Be more careful next burn-off. You know our number,” the older fireman winked at her as he climbed into the fire truck. Rumour had it that the firemen then drove off laughing to themselves about Carol being a pyromaniac who was possibly mad in other ways too.
The firemen got to see that crazy look in her eyes many times after that. My mother loved to light fires. She had often revelled in the role of fire chief, until the fire escaped her control and the flames leaped high. Her instinct was to keep fighting it, but her volatility and vulnerability emerged when she panicked instead. On that day, she had to settle for smothering ashes until there was enough regrowth for the next burn-off. She was a pyromaniac, but she also loved the challenge of trying to contain a fire. In the four years the spare block was owned by our family, my mother had eight burn-offs. Half of the burn-offs got away from her. My father, under my mother’s instructions, made the necessary p
hone calls to the Coolah Fire Brigade each time.
After that first burn-off day, we had cautiously resumed our play. Once a section was burnt, we played in that still smouldering area with our shoes on. We collected dry twigs to light from the dying flames. Many days later, our games resumed with some modifications; one could not lie down in the soot, or become invisible in the long grass anymore. For weeks after a burn-off, we had to tiptoe straight to the shower, covered in soot after playing on the spare block. The more dirt and soot the better the games.
*
“Coolah was good to us. It put us on the map.” My father’s mantra never varied in the two decades following the arrival of our house. In my twenties, I learned that our new home had cost twelve thousand dollars. It had required my parents to sign up for their first big bank loan. The Dubbo based company that built our home designed and built transportable houses for low-income families. My mother had initially stayed at home to care for the four children and my father worked to earn a good, stable but very modest income for a family of six, so we fitted the criterion. It was my father’s first ever experience of home ownership. The Department of Housing had sheltered his fractious family over the period when he had been brought up, without his biological father, but with many substitutes. No-one could take this home away. With home ownership came great responsibility and a mortgage—my parents proudly met every repayment on time. My mother regularly stated that she had, “Gone without, so we all could have a roof over our heads.”
In retrospect, in my late teens during what I thought of as the big ordeal, I too had gone without. For example, I had gone without getting a second opinion from a doctor in a nearby town, or perhaps even a third opinion or a referral to another specialist. I don’t know what specialist but simply someone else. Having been given an accurate diagnosis at that point could have avoided what turned out to be a very dark period of my life.
chapter three
I AM A TOWNIE
By the time that I was ten years of age, I knew I was a townie. It was like an invisible tattoo on my forehead. I was unbothered and unembarrassed by this—I simply accepted it. Townie kids attended the local government school and lived mostly in modest houses on the fringes of the township. The majority of their parents worked in town. All of these things were true of me. Then there were the graziers. They were the wealthy land-owning farmers in the community. My mother told me that the graziers thought that their blood was a different colour to ours. This division between the blue-blooded graziers and the red-blooded townies existed outside of the school as well. In the main street of Coolah I observed that graziers either avoided, or passed a townie without acknowledgment. They might deliberately cross the road much earlier than required to avoid a townie encounter, if another grazier was nearby. At other times they said hello to the townies easily, exchanging pleasantries if the other graziers were out of sight.
To my young ears, the townies could retaliate with comments that were unforgiving. If a grazier’s action or intention was disliked by a townie, or there was room for these to have been slightly misinterpreted by the townie, an opportunity for judgment stood tall. A stereotypical label was slapped on to an offending grazier. “Snob,” “elitist,” “toff” or “stuck- up blue bloods” left the townies mouths and stuck forever. My mother was a master at this very pastime.
One exception to the grazier-townie division was the “blow-ins.” They included the local chemist, the doctor and a small group of other families. They lived in the big houses up on the hill on the edge of the township and had professional qualifications. Most blow-ins had been posted to Coolah for a couple of years. They blurred the rigid local class divisions by being invited to both the townies’ and the graziers’ functions. Blow-ins themselves were accorded a high status. The “postings” were another exception. They included the teachers, police officers, nurses and ambulance personnel and their families who, like the blow-ins usually stayed between one and five years.
Teachers posted to Coolah did not choose it. The Department of Education point system placed them there. The longer a teacher spent teaching in an undesirable school, such as Coolah Central, the greater the number of points that they gained, and so the greater their chances of relocation to a desirable suburb in Sydney, or a highly sought out coastal region. The teachers called living in Coolah “doing time.”
Genevieve was a good friend of mine in the later years of primary school. She came from a grazier family and had two sisters. In year seven she went to a Sydney boarding school, but in the school holidays, I was invited to stay at Genevieve’s home. I noticed that their curtains and bed linen all matched. The sisters always dressed nicely when they came to town. White collared shirts, or floral dresses from Laura Ashley. The local shops had never stocked that brand. Laura Ashley was expensive. Genevieve and I played together on her property. Occasionally, when I asked her if she had liked being at boarding school, her reply was always “It’s okay.” That was our only discussion of the matter. She was a grazier and I was a townie. By the time we were both teenagers we had stopped bothering with sleepovers, but we still said hello to each other in the main street.
*
I now had a choice to either drive with my mother and three brothers to our school, ride a bike, or walk. I was eleven years old and in year five. My youngest brother had started kindergarten. My mother had taken on a job, three hours in the school office of a morning, and she was thrilled to be bringing in more money to the family. It fitted perfectly with being home with the kids after school. I could never have envisaged in advance the detrimental effect that her new position would have on my school life. I often rode my bike to school. The freckle-faced Anthony who lived in my street gave me giant smiles and waves as I passed his house. Mostly, I pretended not to see him. One day, as I walked to school, he appeared from nowhere and walked by my side.
“How’s it going?” he greeted me sunnily.
“Are you following me?” I asked him looking straight ahead.
“No. I only want to walk with you and be your friend,” he smiled back at me.
Being new to Coolah and my transportable home being in his street were, I felt, two good reasons to be friends, even though he was a boy and was in the year above me at school. Another was that the circle of girls at Coolah Central School was so deliberately tight that no gap existed for me to sneak in through—let alone to be welcomed in, bitchy and exclusive as those girls could be. Although Anthony’s freckles stood out more than his other facial features, it never worried me. It was okay, I had decided. From that moment, our friendship began slowly, building on a respectful foundation. We hung out together. We walked to the pool and we rode our bikes. We went to and from school side by side. I felt safe with Anthony. I liked that he was different from the other townie lads.
Anthony lived in a modest home in Oban Street, with his four brothers, a mother and a father. His father John and his brother Arthur worked on their mother’s farm, ten kilometres from Coolah. At times, Anthony dressed like a townie, wearing t-shirts and shorts, walking bare foot to the local pool. At other times, he dressed like a grazier, in Blundstone riding boots, jodhpurs and a collared shirt. Although Anthony moved between the townies and graziers he was part of neither group, simply himself, Anthony was one of the rare individuals who did not need to fit in with a “side.” He avoided the superiority and airs and graces that went with being a grazier and the rough mannerisms of the townies.
*
Creepy Wayne lived in the next street from me. His eyes crept over girls’ bodies and lingered with an unsettling stare. I saw him do this and felt his eyes upon me.
He told me Santa was not true when I was about eleven years of age. I still wanted to believe in Santa so after that I didn’t trust him. As he told me, his eyes tried to undress me, with a stare that penetrated through my shorts to get to the high part of my legs. I really disliked and avoided him and certainly did not trust him for a moment.
Creepy Way
ne’s house was a mess and his mum and dad smoked like chimneys. Occasionally, I had to fulfil an obligation, never by choice, and visit Creepy Wayne’s house. The pool table lured my father and he dragged our entire family down there. The house was full of clutter, except around the pool table. Because I sensed Creepy Wayne’s eyes upon me, I walked to the kitchen pretending I needed a glass of water. I deliberately never allowed myself to be alone with him. I also felt some comfort in knowing that I could outrun him if I ever had to. Every single item, the walls, food, chairs and table all smelt of smoke. My own skin and clothes smelt of smoke every time I left their house and we all had to go straight to the shower on our return home and scrub our skin. I was so pleased that my parents had never touched a cigarette. I felt well off and clean compared to his family.
My mother’s friendship with his mother consisted of drinking cups of tea and gossiping. Wayne’s sister Kylie was slow, most likely an undiagnosed mental disability. Her piercing stare was just like Wayne’s, except she never undressed anyone. I felt worried for Kylie having a creepy brother like Wayne.
*
In year five, I made two more friends, Suzie and Sam, the townie twins who moved from the Catholic school to the Coolah Central School. I felt more settled in school now. The twins shared stories about the nuns and the other Catholic teachers, including their free use of the cane on their pupils. The twins had the fear of God in them. They spoke about that fear in words such as: heaven and hell; right and wrong; good and bad; with sin and without sin; and fire and damnation. I had never had any fear of a higher being; my rampant fears included being judged, by my mother and by myself. Their religious beliefs and my non-belief had no impact on the friendship that we formed and maintained throughout our school years. Thank goodness I’m not a Catholic, mass takes up so much time.
