Forgetful of the people who were there to gain knowledge – and were paying for it – we two immediately left and went to Kylie’s room, talking for hours. From then on I often visited her in Sydney.
Staying at her home and listening to the wisdom of Roddy, who himself could use a pen and had given her the freedom to write and travel, was good for me. I’ve never mixed with authors – never been in a position to do so – but this was different. Kylie and I were friends first, writers by habit, and the force of family pressures each of us were under and didn’t speak about bound us even tighter. She knew my writing. ‘I like lively writing’ she said. ‘We owe it to our readers.’ She wanted me to put my feature articles into books – ‘You’ve got to write books!’ And from that encouragement I began work on Hear The Train Blow.
Then I became interested in Hobart’s splendid Georgian architecture, and the artist, Max Angus, and I published several books on this subject.
While living in Hobart I read my own stories and gave talks on the ABC radio. Later I was one of three women on a weekly panel on TVT6 Hobart where we discussed problems of the time.
Later I had a folklore session of my own on this station, and during this time I discovered something that had puzzled me since first coming to the island State: when little boys were being troublesome, here they were called ‘nointers’. ‘He’s a real nointer.’ It was a word not known on the mainland, yet it was widely used on the north-west coast of the State. And so I asked for help in pinning it down. Many letters came in to say the writer – and sometimes their mum and grandma – always used the word, but none knew the origin. Until an old man from the Midlands phoned in (and three others wrote in). The story was total ‘folk’ as any lore recorded anywhere could be. In the 1800s there was this great big man in the Midlands (of Tasmania) who bet that he could eat a whole sheep in one meal. A local woman offered to cook the sheep and make mince pies to make it easier for him to handle. Seemingly, the meat from the carcase yielded ninety pies, and the big man ate them all – and from then on he was named ‘Ninety’ or, in Tasmania-speak, ‘Nointy’. And so legends are born and little boys ‘stacking on a turn’ (including mine) became ‘nointers’.
I had been collecting folklore long before I knew its title. My parents, grandparents and great-grandparents had handed stories down to me as a child and I had believed that all the forests were peopled with spirits and lonely, lost souls. As I grew older I began to read what could broadly be called ‘folk stories’ from a book, actually from the only book I owned as a child: The Children’s Treasure House which my parents got for me by saving coupons from the Melbourne Sun newspaper.
In an area where you come upon place-names such as Bust Me Gall, and Break Me Neck, and Black Charlie’s Opening, you knew you had a story, and Tasmania had all of these and many more.
I once met a hermit, the only hermit I ever knew (apart from Denny King across on the south-west coast), but Mr Stanley Gurney denied he was a hermit. ‘I did not retire from the world as a hermit chooses to do, the world receded from the horizon of my being. That is not the same thing as being a hermit.’ To get to this aged man’s residence – a tumble-down old shop, where once a boom town of 1500 miners had ‘dished’ for osmiridium – I had to get help. I borrowed a four-wheel drive vehicle and someone to come with me – as it was, we bogged countless times and at one stage had to build a ‘bridge’ that fell down under us and later on, when the old gentleman was stewing tea for us, we went out into the perpetual mist of that area and saw our vehicle disappearing down into the ground. ‘Yes’, said Mr Gurney in his charming, modulated voice, ‘The old well.’
During the day I had walked for four hours round the small ghost town and had met two ‘hobby’ miners, Charlie Cooper and Wally Constable which, as Mr Gurney said ‘now made a population of five souls’. Darkness falls swiftly here. It was 6 pm and already dark in the forested gullies between the mountain ranges. We sloshed along in the mud to Wally Constable’s ‘cottage’ and he lit a huge fire and fed us, in the meantime going outside and banging loudly with an iron spoon on the bottom of a frying pan. Charlie heard the signal and splashed over. But the only vehicle – other than the disappearing one – had a wheel missing. So they jacked up the sinking vehicle enough to get off one of its wheels, fitted it on to Wally Constable’s vehicle, and slowly we began to creep back along the Adamsfield Track. Charlie walked ahead with a lantern until Wally ‘got the feel’ of the slabs of wood that made the track beneath us. The two men came with us all the way with picks and shovels.
And yes, I did return – five years later as the old gentleman had invited me. ‘I had food for thought for many months after our conversations’ he told me. ‘I have been looking forward to your next visit and the subjects we would discuss.’
* * *
I was ordered to a warm, dry climate and nothing could have been better, not only for my health but for my writing.
The first time I travelled right around Australia I travelled with the poet, Roland Robinson – a gorgeous travelling companion as long as he stayed with his poetry and his bush craft. In any other field he was, um, difficult. We fought so badly that on our way home across the Nullarbor after two months together I couldn’t bear him any longer and I told him to pull up and throw my camel-skin bag out. When he said no I opened the door, so he pulled up and I got out and sat on the roadside and waited four hours before another car came by. I didn’t have to do anything to ‘thumb’ a ride. Thirty-odd years ago things were very different out in the bush to what they are today. A pleasant group was driving across ‘the long stretch’ and they not only picked me up but shared their food and took me all the way to Adelaide – where Roland was waiting for me, sitting on the steps of the Adelaide General Post Office. ‘How long have you been here?’ I asked. He looked at his watch, ‘Sixteen hours’. Then he said, ‘Where have you been all this time?’ He was irrepressible.
He accused me of punching him. ‘When?’ ‘Up at Geraldton.’ ‘Two months ago, for God’s sake!’ He had jumped out of the Volkswagon we were driving down from Geraldton at about 50 miles per hour. The wild flowers were out, miles and miles of them as far as the eye could see – and in the ecstasy of it all he jumped. Luckily he somersaulted and rolled, and by the time I’d stopped the car and run over to him he was rolling over and over, intoxicated with the joy and colour. ‘We’ll make love!’ he shouted, but I was still too startled to even tell him to go to hell.
Roland could woo a bird down from a tree with his voice and fluid, sensuous verse. We had met in Hobart in my Adult Education Office; I had fixed for him to do a series of poetry readings around Tasmania and he later wrote in one of his books that I had seen a loose strand of wool in his tie, had reached across my desk and snipped it off and tied it round my little finger. He also wrote of a night on my rug in front of the fire when the two most lovable and erudite men I had invited for dinner had gone home. I think it might be the only part of his book worth reading.
Roland dedicated a poem to me:
For Patsy,
Exhausted, this migratory bird
carried far southwards off its course,
lost to the consistent streaming flight
of its companion’s polar force,
Swift that, emerging from cold rains
passed on between two skies of stars,
failing towards the deep, to find
branches to cling to: shrouds and spars
Spirit or derelict, mere hunched sweep
of wings that fold within the fire
of elemental storms that burns
blood, flesh and sinew in desire
Identifies me, and I hold
to frozen ropes of those cross-trees;
a hunched sweep of mere pinions, bone,
spent on the dark Antarctic seas.
from Roland.
Max Harris took us to lunch. Gwen Harwood had that day taken the mickey out of the Bulletin by using the device of sending a mess
age down the first letter of every line. Hers read: ‘Goodbye Bulletin. Fuck all editors.’ As soon as it was discovered the magazine was recalled from all newsagents, but Max had grabbed some and had a copy each ‘for you two intrepid and beautiful travellers’.
The ‘intrepid and beautiful travellers’ fell out again that very night. We were invited to a ‘literary’ function up a mountain and Roland was encircled by buxom girls and he ignored me. So I called loudly, ‘Could I have the key of our room, please?’ He asked why did I want the key. I replied, ‘To get my contraceptives, I’m going out.’ And while everyone else went string-lipped and silent, the two of us burst out laughing and ran out the door and went to the river bank where he told poetry and wooed.
* * *
As the children grew up I became more independent and was able to travel more freely. My children have never been surprised at my loose-footedness. How could they be? It would be a case of ‘the pot calling the kettle black’. Cathy has been a courageous traveller and has been to scores of foreign places, including some not visited by me. She once chased a man in Iran and hit him on the head when he attempted to steal her friend’s handbag. She also got caught up in Afghanistan in the bloody sport of riding for the body of a goat! Michael has taken his wife and family to live in Canada for a year, and they have had a long string of moves, although he has settled in Australia again – for the moment.
When I was free to travel I found the heat of the northern area of Australia, from Cairns across to Broome, was splendid for my lung trouble. For many years I left the south and spent four months of each year in the north, mostly in the Kimberley. I first went to the Kimberley in the days before the roads were sealed. Sometimes I travelled with stockmen, sometimes I holidayed with the nuns who cared for the lepers at the leper colony at Derby, and sometimes I lived on properties as a locum caretaker with a man who taught me much about the outback – Gerry Ash, a well-known head stockman on some of the greatest properties in the Kimberley. I’d been told to ‘try and find’ Gerry. ‘You ought to look him up,’ they said. ‘We reckon he’s the greatest ringer in all the Kimberley.’
Together with his friend, Whip, an Aboriginal woman who was one of the best cooks in the camp musters, we looked after four different homesteads and properties over a period of ten years for the owners or managers who needed a holiday. This was great for me because there was no white woman there to make me feel obliged to stay in the household with her. Many’s the time I heard a shout from outside, ‘Hey, Pat! You couldn’t hop in the truck and go and get (such-and-such), would you?’ Another time, it would be, ‘Hey, Pat! Hop on one of the horses for us, we haven’t enough boys.’ So off I’d go. Nowadays, of course, the horses are not used in this manner and riders only help to bring in the cattle which are rounded up by helicopter. But even rounding up cattle in an open-sided helicopter, or riding in the bull-buggies as they catch the wild bulls in the bush, was exciting.
Back in the days when there was magic in the land, there was no place in Australia like the Kimberley. The times when you sensed men in the land but didn’t see them, when they were like the rocks, dark and deep, living within the soil, attuned to all things as though the sky and the men and grass and animals were not separate but each a part of the other. These are the times men make poetry on the land.
At Christmas 1984 Gerry, Whip and I were caring for a very run-down property. The few stockmen and the mechanic had been kept on while others were ‘turned out to grass’ because they had no special skills and wouldn’t be wanted until the Wet was over. The Wet is the northern season, roughly from December to March, which is the monsoon period and the heat in these areas of no air-conditioning is truly indescribable. The men who are left behind on the properties go ‘on benders’ no matter how the boss keeps his eye on them. This time we were about 80 km from the nearest small town and they would still get into the town and go on such a bender there was no way you could get them back, other than throw them on the back of a lorry and drive them back. Once, the police lent us their hose to wash the men down before we set off. It was a hard life.
On Christmas Eve I phoned my Mother about 10 pm. I was sweating to such a degree that the phone piece slipped out of my hand. I excused myself to my Mother and she said, ‘You ought to put the phone down, dear, and have a cool shower’. I’d already had six showers that day; it was just a matter of standing in my cotton dress and knickers and letting the water pour down until I could cope again.
When I finished my telephone call, Gerry suggested it might be as well if we got in the truck and drove to a waterhole and sat in it. We set off with a little tucker and my blow-up mattress, which was always a cause of much ribbing from the folk up there. I took a photo the following morning of my waterhole and I thought, ‘we got it all for free and people down south, whether it is hot or cold, could never be in such an idyllic spot’. Further up the river, Gerry in his waterhole called out, ‘I’ll light a fire and make you a cuppa in a minute, Pat’, and I thought ‘I could live like this forever’. But the legendary days were ending and it’s a very different life there now.
There were stories galore. Living in such isolation, hardship, unbearable climate in all but the Dry season, has developed a different personality from those who have had life easy. In the early days when I went there I travelled with a group that had only one white man, the head stockman, among twenty men. I once asked Gerry why they didn’t come and corroboree for us as I could see them dancing in the distant firelight. Gerry said he wasn’t against having corroborees, it was just that by daybreak they must be ready mounted and off after the cattle. But he called them and asked if they’d like to have a corroboree, so in their own good time they did dance for us, and it was not at all like the stage because the wildness and the wandering in and out of these natural performers was so superior to the confines of our European-style stages. The artists didn’t announce themselves so much as infiltrate our consciousness. The dancers were still going at midnight and I could have watched forever. I later learnt that it wasn’t polite to show too much interest in the dancing. Because of the long hours worked on camp muster or droving, the few hours of darkness are needed for sleep.
One time we were locum caretakers at a big, very well-known property with a decent homestead. This property had a 30 km beach frontage and the homestead was a stone’s throw from the Ninety Mile beach. Just when I was beginning to think it was the most marvellous area I’d ever been in, Cyclone Chloe swept in over us. The three men left on the property leapt to their feet as soon as they saw the storm blowing in from the Indian Ocean, and as the black wall came towards us they shouted to me, ‘Batten the house down’. I yelled out ‘Where are you going?’ and they said to tie down the windmills – and there were over forty on the property. They lowered the big radio pole to the ground and secured it, then they went off in trucks in various directions to secure whatever they could. The battens were well made and easily fixed on the windows, and the homestead also had a partially-underground room. However, I wasn’t putting my trust in that as there was still a watermark to show where the water had risen in there during the last cyclone. Our two-way radio went off the air immediately, and we then went for two weeks without contact with the outside world. We were without refrigeration. The ‘hands’ were complaining about lack of fresh meat so Gerry set off at sunset ‘after a killer’. He is, of course, a superb shot. He ‘dressed’ the beast as it is called and we loaded the still quivering meat on to the flat-backed truck and set off for the homestead several miles away. But the old truck ‘gave up the ghost’ or, in southern parlance, the motor broke down. No lights, nowhere to sit (I’d been riding on the step and was now frightened to get on to the ground for this was snaky country,) and all the coo-ee-ing in the world wouldn’t reach the homestead. Hours later Gerry got the motor moving and it slowly groaned home. The owners were away on the east coast of Australia. We’d been due to leave that day to go to Port Hedland to stock up on food and supplies, so i
t was very much a case of living on ‘hard tack’ – canned and dried food – until we were able to get out to the road.
I learnt that cattle are apt to panic and bolt into the sea at such times, but I doubted whether any would do so during this cyclone. What I had never expected was the vast amount of magnificent seashells that were washed up on the beach. I walked there one day after the cyclone passed and tried not to crush any of them but it was no use, there was no space in between the shells to put my feet. As fast as I picked up one shell I picked up another two, some quite rare.
We had an ordinary radio set in the homestead and we had batteries so we could hear what was going on in the outside world, although no one could call us. The heat was terrible but the humidity was worse. Water rolled down our faces, our clothes clung to our bodies.
We had just got things tidy when the cyclone swung back again and the whole performance was gone through once more. When it had exhausted itself we set off in the old truck down the coast to get supplies. There was still plenty of water around and we were late getting to Port Hedland so stayed overnight and drove back the next day with the truck laden. The heat and humidity was still intense. Once we stopped and walked into a river fully clothed, and another time we took it in turns to stand under a flowing bore – we just pulled the plug out of the top and the lovely cool water came out like a fountain. But as soon as we stepped away from the bore the clothes dried on us and we sweated again.
Goodbye Girlie Page 19
