I sailed with five different captains, only one of them really bad, but another got drunk and ran us aground and that drove us all into a Marine Court of Enquiry – which we saw merely as a nuisance because it caused us to miss the tide at the narrow bridge and thus made us sail south ‘round the Raoul’. I only knew of one poor Captain. He was with us for one trip only but it was eerie: he had never had deep, wild water beneath him, he was a river man and very young. He lost his nerve, or never had it, and ran to an isolated bay, anchored and wouldn’t move. Our mate, a very old man, refused to take authority and he too shut himself in his cabin. Soon the cook was also shuttered in his cabin (not that that was so very unusual, the crew knew he kept a fair ‘cupboard’ beneath his bunk).
As a radio officer I had no authority to initiate a message or instigate action, though I still had to work the radio on the regular schedules. As the third day dawned the engineer suggested we attempt to make contact with the general manager. I waited until 11 am, a time when traffic was very quiet as we wanted to keep our dilemma as private as possible. Things moved quickly – we had been due into port the previous night, thus we would now be three days overdue and by giving our position Hobart Radio would know there was something amiss. I was to stand by and await a call. It came. ‘Is the ship at anchor?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Where?’ I named the bay. ‘Can you see open water?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Is it calm?’ ‘Yes.’ Again I was told to stand by. I still have a copy of the next signal, sent at 5.56 pm to the Captain. ‘Your cargo is to be discharged immediately on arrival Stop You are expected to be here to commence on Saturday Stop Advise position with definite indication your intention Signed Baird’ (he was the State Transport Commissioner). But by now the young Captain was not speaking or moving. He just lay on his bunk. He wouldn’t answer. He was terrified of this fierce coast. Eventually the manager of the State Transport Service, Captain Alastair Maddock came to our rescue and took over the vessel. He had a master’s ticket but little sea experience and the crew were sceptical and hostile. They changed their opinions when they learnt Alastair was as strong as an ox. As a young officer in 1943 in New Guinea he had fought the American heavyweight boxing champion. (He didn’t win, instead he had his nose broken in the tenth round and that left him with a rather attractive ‘skew-wise’ nose, as the deck hands said.) He turned our little ship into a business; where we had always run at a loss, now he turned it into a profit. We worked harder and for longer periods than ever before and almost doubled our wages. For me it was marvellous, all fear left me, I could now afford schooling for my children, a car, a house of our own, a housekeeper when needed, and regular visits for all of us to the mainland.
A country bank manager must have had great foresight and recognised a ‘goer’ when he saw Mum. The bank staked her, she first bought into a share farm, Mum supplying the herd and the owner the land. She moved from farm to better farm (seven altogether), building up her reputation with bank managers – a far cry from the depression days when she ‘put it on the slate’. Now she had a lovely property in one of the richest spots in luxurious Gippsland, with a many-roomed homestead, ‘The Gables’, on a hillside. It had verandahs, gables, and looked down on gardens and paddocks sprinkled with daisies and daffodils, a herd of good jersey cattle and an expensive sire in the bull paddock, barns, cowsheds and a horse to haul the sled carrying milk out to the roadway for pick-up to be taken to the butter factory. The kids adored their visits there and Mum loved having them stay.
For much of the time, my daughter was at sea with me. We had two berths in the radio shack and Cathy had brought her usual uncountable mass of toys and dolls, and the crew added to that and petted and spoiled her. She fished over the side of the ship with the cook, was carried ashore from work boats to play on the sand. One day I heard the mate bellow, ‘God almighty! No wonder the loading’s going so slow, there’s two of the crew building sand castles for her!’ And so the siren was sounded and Alex and Pete reluctantly went back to labour.
My son, being older, was enrolled in St Virgil’s College in Hobart and I showed the Brothers how to pick up my radio messages on shortwave and thus relay them to Michael. The Brothers got quite a kick out of all this and sometimes they would be down at the wharf waiting with Michael when we arrived in port – and the Captain always asked them on board for a drink. The greatest coup was for two of them to come up the coast by bus to Swansea and sail down to Hobart with us. ‘We thought it would give the boy a longer time with his mother’ was their excuse. Eventually I had to tell them that their kindness must stop, that Michael must not be given privileges the other boys in the college did not have.
The few of us who stuck the sea-going life for any length of time had different reasons for staying. I stayed because the money was good, or so I told myself at first. In time I knew I stayed for a different reason. As the months went by and I saw men who had been used to manual labour giving in, I developed a sort of stubborn pride that I was still hanging on. But there came a time when I must ring ‘Finished with Engines’ to my own motors and step over the side for the last time. I debated long and alone. I knew I had to make a break before I got to the point of no return.
My last trip would be to the Furneaux Islands and out to Babel Island to load the season’s mutton birds in their casks, and to take the birders off the islands and return them to Lady Barron Island. It was school vacation and my children would be with me, so that when I left the ship the way of life that would then end would be a bond between us, not a barrier.
Seamen have a bond, they might hate one another’s guts but even that is a bond. They have shared labour, laughs, hardship, cheating in a way that is unique, and they feel the loneliness when they go ashore. Even I have some of this though I have been away from the sea for so long.
Once, in Florentine’s restaurant in Melbourne, a Greek waiter put the plate down in front of me with special care and attention. I scarcely noticed. Next he said ‘I do hope Madame will remember this pleasant meal.’ I looked up into the face of Hero, one of the Greeks who were in our crew the night the Mutton Duck sunk off Babel Island. He lowered an eyelid – much too subtly for it to be mistaken for a wink – and I told him I would ‘greatly enjoy my meal’. And he almost ruined our meal bursting his boiler to make everything perfect for us – to the bemusement of my friends.
Another day, one of our crew went by me in the street in Melbourne and gave a most discreet wink. He’d passed by before I could say ‘Good-day, it warms my heart to see you again.’
Alastair
INEVITABLY ALASTAIR AND I FELL in love; inevitable, not because we worked in such close proximity but because we were so similar in vigour, spirit, toughness, roistering good humour and furious, almost murderous tempers that always ended in cuddles and laughter. We both had that nicety of knowing how to keep the lid on the boiling kettle, and when to let the steam blow and the whole shooting match to begin. We never fought in public, but many’s the time we barely made it to privacy and battle began as the door banged shut behind us.
On the Richter scale we would have hit twelve – full typhoon force. Once he grabbed me from the front and ripped the buttons, twelve of them, off my new overcoat in one mighty wrench, not in sexual passion but with bottled-up fury because of something that happened – I can no longer remember, but I do remember those beautiful buttons shooting off as if from a cannon. And our laughter when we got over the shouting.
Once I deserted him on the top of Mount Wellington because he wanted to stay up there in the snow and I wanted to go down and took the car. We never discussed that one again. He had got home near freezing. But neither of us held spite. We both had marital partners who, perhaps understandably, were cross with us although they didn’t know any more about us than did any other citizen. And there were some wondrous, exotic guesses being bandied around.
My most beautiful, tempestuous, furious, and gentle lover warned me about ‘people’ but I said, ‘It’s nothing to do with anyone but us.’ Of course
I was foolish, I truly didn’t know what a vicious creature the Public can be. But I soon learned.
Alastair and I shared such years that I cannot regret one hour of our wonderful growing-up together, for that is what our time was. Neither of us had known lovemaking of a real kind, neither of us had had a partner that matched in all ways: mercantile, travel, hard-labour, love, and sexual romping like children discovering it for the first time – as we were.
My children had had such a testing time that when they eventually met him they took to Alastair as if he had been at their birth. He, like me, was young. He was a great picnicker. ‘Hey! The sun’s out! Get the billy and bread and I’ll get the car out!’ We drove from one end of the island State to the other. The kids followed Alastair everywhere. He was interesting, interested, entertaining and firm, never harsh or unfair. They blossomed.
Alastair’s marriage was broken, so was mine, and for each of us work was paramount. And so was money. We both had children to keep. We were both toilers, both had a brain and the want to exercise it, and we separately and together wanted to charter a ship on our own. We ran the Naracoopa for eight months straight, two crews, one off, one on, but we two worked unbroken time. And, dear God, how hard we worked.
We brought down timber (wired in great packs) from the east coast. The crew, including the engineer and sometimes the cook, would work up to forty-eight hours without a break (except for meals) to enable us to make the turn-around. My work on these trips was not physically hard: I had to tally the timber on board and was answerable to the timber mill and the ship. But as the hours wore on, particularly at night, my feet began to go numb and have no feeling at all as I stood at the wheelhouse window, making sure each pack was swung in-board and not taken back out for some reason. I had to note the numbers of every pack. Sometimes they would hover, swinging in the air for long periods when the men in the hold were rearranging cargo, and just before sun-up, when the energy had ‘leaked out of our finger tips’ it was tricky to remember if you had entered the number. You couldn’t ask the men – in their state any little hiccup by this time would have caused near-mutiny. By now the calves of my legs and my thighs would be ‘dead’ and I’d try to use the high ‘mate’s’ stool, but one could never take short cuts on a ship.
We proved we could work hard, and everyone knew it. But it nearly killed the three of us who went the whole distance. We were shaken, jittery and thin. Apart from our splendid engineer, there was no one else to talk to and he, like us, was exhausted.
When the last pack of timber was chained on the deck and the cargo was all aboard, it was ‘all lines gone’ and we’d head south, Full Speed Ahead, and as often as not I took the wheel as the sun came up and gave the men a rest for two or more hours.
We bought a house overlooking D’Entrecasteaux Channel and when we’d return from our sea-going, we’d spend nights flounder and flathead spearing, sometimes wading, other times in our flat-bottomed boat. We found secluded Randalls Bay and holidayed there many times, driving down all packed in the little 1940s black, square Ford with the row boat tied on top and our tents on top of that, a big water container strapped on the back and the four of us so squeezed in with gear and food that Smoky, our cocker spaniel, usually sprawled over the shoulders of the children. Smoky always went out with Alastair and the kids in the boat when they went fishing, but he always leapt over the side and swam ashore to relieve himself before paddling back out again. This lovely hideaway was never invaded because when any car pulled up the kids raced to assure the newcomers there was no drinking water and no toilets. We had this bay to ourselves for as long as we lived in the midst of the then vast apple orchards of Tasmania, along a bush track twenty-five miles from Hobart.
I was always glad that my two children had seen both Alastair and I at work at sea so that by the time the two of us were bonded the children knew our background, friends and workload, and each had become a part of this affection – and love.
We had never thought of parting – we were too busy. We were not only working the Naracoopa but Alastair was sent to New Zealand by the Tasmanian Government for many months to supervise the buying of three ferries that would not be needed any longer once the new bridge was built at Auckland. We had a grand time there. Each weekend, from mid-Friday to mid-Monday, we were guests on great yachts with men and women who delighted us with their way of life. In New Zealand I wrote a dozen stories for the magazines of the day. We were feted – Alastair and I had never known such times.
The yacht I most liked to be invited to sail on was owned and skippered by a now-elderly New Zealander who had won his wealth from the kauri forests: he had pioneered the building of quite big dams to enable the logs to float down the rivers where they were dammed until the whole big wooden structure was tripped, the waters crashed through the dams and logs floated many miles to ports – just as Canadian lumberjacks had done for a century. I was taken to visit his old Maori friends, and once he arranged for me to stay for three days with guide Betty at her home in Rotorua where she cooked our vegetables by dipping them into the boiling waters bubbling up from the geysers. I can’t remember much of this visit. She was a stalwart drinker. I went down to the South Island with deer hunters, a painful cold place, walking across snow and ice and camping well, but it was still too cold for my desert-bred blood. I wrote some of my best features for leading Australian magazines at this time.
When my time to go back to Tasmania came I was happy to leave as I was returning to bring my children home from college. Alastair had to stay but would follow in two months time. We two lovers parted with no thought of the hatred that was about to end our idyll.
Shortly after we parted the children’s father wrote to me, in a peremptory way, that he was going to use as evidence for the divorce that I had been ‘guilty’ of adultery. This was the 1950s when divorce, adultery, all things that should be private matters, were the province of the open courts; indeed, police were sent out to investigate such allegations. No adult in those days, particularly a female adult, was unaware of the penalty of copulation outside of marriage: it was a crime and police could investigate. That the man had been living with a woman was of less concern. Private investigators were said to ‘sniff the chamber pot under the bed’ to learn who had been in a room – at night. (One wonders if, in those inhibited days, few knew ‘it’ could be done in daytime?)
Alastair returned to our home from New Zealand. He had delighted in ‘Ahava’, the house and property my Mother and Father had bought on Phillip Island. Mum had given the house sign to Alastair to put on our house because he had so much liked the transcription, ‘a place of peace’. Now our ‘Ahava’ was the lovely home among the Lady in the Snow apple trees.
And then, one night our bedroom window was smashed in. I was in shock when the man stuck his head in and formally stated that he was a private investigator who had been paid by ‘the lady’s husband (who is with me) to find evidence and sue for divorce’. By now the children had wakened and run up to my room. Afraid they would cut their feet on the glass I leapt out, dressed in my long, winter nightdress, and gathered them up on to the bed just as Alastair’s car came into our grounds and the two men ran away. I heard their car start up as Alastair came running up the hall to our bedroom. He held the children tightly to him, calming them as I told him what had happened. He, Alastair, was savage. I remember being very calm because of his rage. ‘But it’s our home!’ he said. I remember that, I remember he said it again and again. ‘People can’t sneak into a person’s home and perve on citizens.’ He was rigid with indignation. ‘What sort of person would do this? What sort of man would peep through windows? How can the law condone it?’ I realised he was in a state not so much of shock as of disgust. ‘It’s not right!’
While I made cocoa and settled the children he hurtled off in his car. ‘The dirty brutes’ he was saying. ‘What a grubby mind.’ And hours later when he returned he said, ‘They’ve dirtied “Ahava”.’
I didn’t t
hink anything of that at the time, what with mopping up the last of the glass and getting the children to sleep. Alastair came back with a policeman who took notes and drew diagrams of the room but left, saying, ‘I don’t think they’ll trouble you again Captain, it’s the evidence they were after.’
And then, one night Alastair said, ‘When are we going to get married?’ And I said, ‘No.’ ‘You mean you won’t?’ We sat for a while throwing the words around a little. I knew he wanted us to be married but I knew I didn’t. I said, ‘We’re getting along very well as we are, why spoil it?’ He said no more, never mentioned it again. But that was the beginning of the end, and the end was bitter, destructive and costly while we fought for our possessions and the estate we had built up. All the threads that had held us together had suddenly gone, in the way threads do snap rather than unravel.
I didn’t notice for some time that the house sign was no longer on our wall. Alastair had taken it down. Not until we parted was it returned to its rightful place.
There was still work to be finalised in New Zealand but Alastair went back alone. Christmas was coming closer and I expected him home. I phoned his apartment in Auckland. When he answered I knew there was someone with him and my common sense told me it must be a woman. ‘When will you be home for Christmas?’ ‘You take the children to Victoria for Christmas’ he said. There was a popular song at the time and I heard it running through my ears: ‘Put your sweet lips a little closer to the phone, Just pretend that we’re together, all alone … Tell the man to turn the jukebox way down low, And tell the girl there with you she’ll have to go.’
Goodbye Girlie Page 15
