Goodbye Girlie

by Patsy Adam-Smith

  I decided early on I would never take a tripod with me, not only because of the additional weight but because my shots were invariably taken ‘on the run’ and I really didn’t want studio-type shots – I wanted people as I saw them.

  My friend the chemist sold me a pigskin camera shoulder-bag for all the attachments, globes, etc. and with that and the great amount of equipment that was necessary I set off. This camera turned out beautiful work and I loved it. It was one of the great pleasures of my life to go out with all this weight on me and see what I and the camera could do together.

  Down to the Sea in Ships

  THERE WAS A SMALL WHARF at Ulverstone at the mouth of the River Leven, but there was little cargo to be got now, so was it fortuitous? remarkable? or just plain lucky that the children and I happened to walk that way on our daily visit to the beach. ‘There’s a ship!’ the kids cried and the three of us ran. It was the Willwatch, a tiny, old wooden tub that could scarcely keep afloat even at a wharf, and yet I learned it spent its days in the dangerous waters of Bass Strait. There were hundreds of birds strung from the rigging and I called to the Captain, ‘What are they?’ and he said, ‘Mutton birds, from the Bass Strait islands.’ I had never heard of them. He told me they were one of the most plentiful birds in the world, and that they travelled annually from the southern hemisphere to the northern but always returned to the Bass Strait islands to lay and hatch their eggs. ‘Tasmanians have lived on their flesh for a century’ he said. ‘It’s a romantic and exciting story’ and he leapt over the side of the ship and began to walk off to Paddy Bourke’s hotel. ‘How do I get there?’ I shouted at his back. ‘A little plane once a week, but if you have any sense you’ll go by boat and learn the whole story.’ So I did. The children went to stay with my Mother for the school holidays, and eventually I wrote two books: There Was a Ship and Moonbird People about the islands, people and the birds. It was, in a round-about way, the beginning of my life at sea for six years.

  * * *

  A woman can sense the presence of another woman having been in her domain (perhaps the same is true of a man?) and when I returned to Ulverstone after this trip the vague odour (emanation?) of another’s body was in the house. A woman’s body. Without hesitation or thought I went to his wardrobe, to the top pocket of his suit, and my fingers brought out a packet of condoms. Condoms! There is something unlifelike, unjoyful about rubber. I could never willingly accept them – he had always made me use the ‘devices’. Now they were merely an assurance that intuition had not failed me.

  I waited until he came back from wherever he had been and he returned with a young man, who he said was living in the house with him. And I’m sorry I did what I did in front of the younger man. I never knew his name, never saw him again, which isn’t surprising because I forgot the most basic of all civilised behaviour and waved the coat and the condoms and shouted and generally went berserk. The children’s father, also not surprisingly, was furious with me. He shouted, stamped his foot (twice) – and that took a bit of sting out of the proceedings because I’d never seen anyone stamp their foot although I had seen it written of in books. The young man said he would leave but my children’s father said no, that it was I who should leave, but on saying that he himself stumped out, leaving me with the young man who said he was very sorry, didn’t say what for but he was inoffensive and he did appear to be sorry, for whatever. I told him I’d be back when I picked up the children who had stopped off to play with the local doctor’s kids.

  ‘There’s a lot of talk’ my doctor friend said. ‘What about?’ ‘You’ve been on a ship!’ he laughed, and kept chuckling. ‘A pretty, young wife going off alone with all that temptation around her!’ I thought of that most unglamorous ship and wondered what sort of temptation that could possibly offer.

  At that moment I decided to leave forever. And I never looked back – physically, emotionally or intellectually. Hans, my beautiful Dutch friend, had already gone and two other ‘war brides’ had left to go back to the mainland, one to return to her parents’ farm in Queensland, the other to Sydney. As for me, I had never given deep or serious thought to leaving, just day-dreamed about it up till this day. I now set the kids to gathering up their toys and books and I packed two suitcases.

  He returned and was furious to see his friend had gone (I didn’t tell him his young friend had given me a hug and wished me good luck). For the fiery woman I could be I was very still now, silent. I attempted to move but he grabbed me and held me by the shoulders, shaking me against the wall and shouting ‘Remember you are a married woman! Behave like one!’ He didn’t speak again but kept up the shuddering of the upper part of my body against the wall and I said nothing, I just kept thinking ‘When he stops all this I must be very careful.’ Eventually I sensed the violent exercise was tiring him and I sidled out of his grip. I fed the kids and put them to bed and read them to sleep. There was no further discussion that night. I slept in the guest bedroom with the door locked and there was a lot of beating on the door and threats, even an offer to ‘forgive’ me ‘if you stop all this writing nonsense’.

  By 7 am the children and I were off up the road to the railway station, my boy carrying one suitcase and in his other hand a big bundle of children’s books and his meccano set, me carrying my portable sewing machine in one hand (they were heavy things in those days) and the big suitcase in the other, with Cathy clinging to its handle while she gathered in her other arm an amazing bundle of dolls as well as her favourite, Diddeley-Witzy. This was a doll as tall as herself that my Mum had knitted for her and to this day we still wonder about the origin of her/his name. At the time, when asked why she created this name, her reply was always ‘Because he’s a diddeley-witzy, of course!’. In later years she could remember every bit and piece she had gathered into a bundle to carry that day. It reminded me of Kathleen and I, as railway children forever moving to a new station, hiding every shard and tatter of our old life into every nook and cranny we could find in the rail truck that would transport us to a new home.

  I didn’t then, and never have had, any doubts that I could support myself and my family and I think that was, and is, a prerequisite for a future life if a mother of dependent children is without a partner’s monetary assistance.

  Friends took us in until I could get furniture for a place I had rented ‘up the mountain’ (Mount Wellington) – a charming stone house with a startlingly beautiful panorama and a garden. Although the charm of it dulled for me with the first snow fall, which froze me to the bone, the kids built snowmen and put woolly caps on their heads and loved it all. On occasions, when the snow blocked the mountain road, the school children were billeted with city folk, and this made me uneasy not to have my brood with me. We were a tight little family, and remain so.

  There were lots of reasons for my leaving, but it is a poor thing who would kiss and tell everything. My children’s father (I never referred to him in any other way, it was always ‘my children’s father’) never discussed our relationship. My attempts to talk about it had brought the regular reply ‘Don’t be stupid.’ I can say that he frightened me more than anything or anybody could have done when he said, in answer to my comment ‘We ought to do something, go somewhere. We can’t just sit here and mark time’, and he replied ‘What else is there to do until you die but mark time?’ I tried to forget those words he had said, but they had gone too deep to get rid of them. It seemed like digging a grave before time.

  He told people I was frigid. No lover has ever said that to me. Au contraire! Ah well, time told, didn’t it!

  Does anyone know the trigger finger that finally percusses the gun? Which moment from among the many horrid moments between an ill-matched pair releases the deepest feeling of finality? I know the day, the scene, the apprehension, and what came out of my mouth – which I will always regret for it must have hurt him, although I never really knew what did move him in life. He was always berating me for something – my actions, interests, friends, clothes, r
elations, children, food, interior decorating of the house, my piano, my violin, my not keeping the children quiet (why? I wondered), the list was always open-ended. His only love and interest was his vegetable garden, which neither the children nor I were permitted to touch. One day I watched through the window as he came towards the house, a broken onion stem in his hand (dear God! Could anything have been so banal?) and my head, my heart and my truth came into concert and spoke: ‘When I watch you,’ I said before he could berate the child who had broken the onion stem, ‘I weep for poor Richard the Third having to bear that terrible hump on his back for life. I know the feeling but I don’t know how to tear the hump off my own back any more than did poor Richard.’

  In a sense, the marriage didn’t ‘break up’. It had never been a marriage. All there had been were two people who met briefly during a war, away from home and their own separate kind of people, she too young among the hysterical excitement of the times, he too prematurely old, worn out by a long war.

  * * *

  I was doing so well as a freelance writer that magazines began asking me to accept assignments, which meant I had all expenses paid as well as the fee for the feature. One of these assignments came my way through the Tasmanian Government Transport Commission. I was to ‘cruise on a glamorous little passenger ship around the islands circling Tasmania’. Of course I’d go! Knowing that most of my work was done in tough, rough, sometimes dangerous areas, the Public Relations Officer added, ‘Give you a chance to wear your glad rags!’ So I began to sew. I made two dresses, one of a thin black and white striped cotton, and the other a silky pale green (perhaps for evening wear? I thought).

  Sometimes, in retrospect, I permit myself to feel pleased, even proud of my spur-of-the-moment decisions and actions. This was one such. I minced along in my slim-fitting, black and white dress, knowing it looked good on me, and wearing my three-inch-heel platform shoes. I walked along the Hobart waterfront for the first time and there was so much to see I nearly missed the boat. In fact, I passed it a couple of times before recognising the ‘glamorous little passenger ship’. It was a wooden vessel, three-hundred feet long, two-masted, and the crew loading stores looked like clones from The Term of His Natural Life. The name Naracoopa was painted on the bow and stern so I knew this was my vessel – and I fell in love immediately, and loved her until she was lost many years later. She was my home, my pride and my saviour for almost six years. She was grubby, grimy, sails patched, rigging in some disrepair, but she was mine. And then I met the Captain, forty years older than me, and fell into step with him too. His cap was a bit rakish, his eyes actually did twinkle, and he looked at me teetering on high heels and said ‘The owners didn’t tell you what the Naracoopa is?’ ‘I don’t care’ I said, and I didn’t. I knew that what I saw was what I wanted. I may not have known exactly what it was I wanted, but I knew intuitively that I would find it here on this ship. It was this seventy-six-year-old man that made it possible for me to live the most free, happy, contented life a woman could have. And it all happened by chance.

  As a cruise the voyage was a disaster. The ship was far too small to handle sixteen passengers plus the crew of seven, the steward was far too grubby to have been permitted to serve meals, the cook was often drunk – and so were the passengers as there was a Lilliputian bar on board over which the malodorous steward presided. The old Captain, who knew Tasmanian waters better than any man alive, was aware of the lack of quality of his crew so he spent most of his time, night and day, in the wheelhouse, trusting none but the engineer who, like all ships’ engineers I met, was totally reliable. Two days out from Hobart the motors coughed and stopped. The engineer called up on the voice pipe to the bridge: ‘The cylinder head’s cracked Captain’. The Captain said ‘Nothing can be done?’ The engineer began to explain why nothing could be done but the dear old man up top interrupted, ‘I’m an old steam man, I don’t understand these motors.’ He went out on deck and reversed the flag at the stern and began hauling it up and down the aft flagpole, the signal of distress. There was nothing in sight, yet within two hours a fishing boat bobbed over, took our message, and sent news to Hobart via their own radio. When the shipping manager arrived by the lighthouse boat, he spent less than five minutes below on our drifting ship. Then, ‘Alright ladies and gentlemen, I’ll have a tow arranged and here before nightfall. If anyone wants to leave you can come with me, otherwise I’ll be at the wharf in two days from now to meet you when the tugs bring you safely into the port of Hobart.’ And over the side he went, into the borrowed lighthouse boat, and as the motor leapt into action he called to me, hanging over the ship’s rail, ‘You ought to get a great story now, Patsy Adam-Smith!’ And there was nothing about him at that time to warn me that he and I would spend six tumultuous years together.

  When the rescue boat arrived the tug mothering us relieved us of our immortality and reminded us of the morrow. The magical moments of the timeless day had gone. The ship was little and smelt horrible and the passengers were always ‘looking for something to do’. I escaped up top-side and knocked on the wheelhouse door and asked Jack, the Captain, if I could join him. The tow rope was very long, its great length weighted down beneath the water with mighty anchors to prevent its ‘whipping’. So far away from us was the tug that it was out of sight and we sailed silently, sail-less, in a waveless ocean in a windless world. Later in the night, far ahead, a thousand feet above the sea the lighthouse on top of the peak of Tasman Island sent out its warning. No other light showed. The whole world, it seemed, was water.

  Without thinking, I said to the old man ‘I can work hard physically for twelve hours without a break, I’m quick and reliable, I can take orders but I won’t take nonsense.’ (I am told he later repeated this speech of mine to the whole waterfront.) And the old man said ‘Sure, I’d take you on.’

  Shortly after that deplorable voyage on the Naracoopa I travelled to Launceston in a car with the Commissioner for Transport in Tasmania and the Manager of the Transport Commission Shipping Service. ‘And how did you enjoy your trip?’ the Commissioner asked me. I had had time to think about the things that were wrong – from the passenger side – and how they could be righted, and told him. Before we reached Launceston I had been offered a job on the ship, with the same pay as the seamen, which was far more than I could earn on shore – and as I had grave family responsibilities this was important. A cabin would be built on deck for me as a radio shack (as it was called on board ship), if I would give a guarantee to stay twelve months, all providing the Captain was in agreement. ‘Oh, he likes me’ I said truthfully. The old man and I had got along well.

  I have often been asked ‘But how did you get started? How did you first get on a ship?’ More women are interested in the going to sea than the actual life and work and the sea itself. The majority are prevented and get no further than daydreaming about it through a haze of romantic paperback literature. From the time the first logs were paddled across rivers, seamen have been used to women on vessels. The fact is that seamen have never objected to a woman sailing if she knew and performed her duties and had ordinary common sense.

  I knew the Naracoopa was a beautiful little ship. She was only sixteen years old, not at all old for a wooden vessel. She had been built expressly for the island trade. There’s a saying among Straitsmen that the little wooden island trader that hasn’t scraped the bottom has never been properly worked. These craftsmen-builders knew this and they built accordingly.

  While the radio shack was being built on the Naracoopa I decided it would be a good idea to get some experience on small ships. It was school holidays and the children were on the farm with my parents when I flew to the Furneaux group of islands and met Les Jackson, ‘Wallaby’ to his friends for his feats in ‘jumping’ the shoals that surrounded the isolated islands. I had been told the Jackson family on Flinders Island might be able to give me a job, and that was how it came about that the first ship I worked on was the Sheerwater, a scruffy, eighty-ton wooden
ketch. There were three little ships tied up at Whitemark jetty on Flinders Island and I was told they all belonged to the Jackson family. ‘Wallaby Jackson would take you on board’ the proprietress of the only hotel on the island told me. Wallaby came from one of the old island families. His grandfather, father, mother and sister had worked small ships including the Sheerwater, Margaret Twaits and Prion. With no questions asked Wallaby said ‘Yes, I’ll take you on board’, and we set off through the notorious Vansittart Shoals and the Potboil that surround the forty-two islands and its wreck-strewn waters.

  On the Sheerwater the Manning Regulations demanded only one man be certificated, the Captain. The rest of the crew were the flotsam and jetsam of the land who sailed just for a job. There were men who were willing to work for a handout when we made port, men who were brought to us by probation officers, and many more came direct from gaol knowing nowhere else they would be employed.

  I slept well in my hammock-like bed, I ate like I hadn’t eaten since I was a child. Since I came on the ship I hadn’t had time or the solitude to remember things that time doesn’t always heal, no matter how the sanctimonious tell you it will. Most of the voyages on the Sheerwater were of only a few days duration. One day, after I had been at sea for six months around the islands, the ship returned to Tasmania and we tied up at Town Pier in Launceston. Rene, a girlfriend, came to tell me she had found ‘just the job’ for me, teaching piano and violin in a girls’ school. I told her, because the crew were within earshot, to ‘stick it up her jumper’. This delighted the crew. Not only had I refused what they considered a ‘very posh job’ and had preferred to remain at sea, but I had also used a crude expression in doing so. They thought it was something I’d learnt from them.