Lizzie's Tale

by Graham Wilson

  Chapter 12 - A New Start

  Lizzie decided that she had to start her new life in the west with an outward appearance of confidence and prosperity.

  She had bought a neat second hand bag in Perth for her clothes, and a couple of light but smart outfits, which better suited this weather She had also bought a cheap gold ring which now sat on her finger, an indication of a married status even if on her own. She asked to be taken by the local taxi to a good quality hotel in the town.

  Once there she decided she would settle in today, have her lunch in the hotel dining room with her baby on proud display, then wait to walk the streets of the town in the evening cool so as to familiarise herself and be seen about – a well-bred woman of means. Tomorrow she would start to enquire about the town and what it offered, both the chances for employment in better quality establishments and also the potential to start a business of her own. Before she could form a firm plan she needed an understanding of what enterprises were already in the town, and what opportunities existed. She would also look at other possibilities such as giving children’s tuition using her own schooling knowledge.

  From her experiences in Melbourne she had formed a view that, in most places, there was an opportunity for competent hard working people who lived frugally. She also knew that her education gave her opportunities for advancement. She thought that, if she managed her money carefully, it would allow at least six months before she had fully used it up. In that time she felt certain she could gain a new income. She had confidence in her ability to charm people with a smile and a polite turn of phrase. She had discovered an ability to read peoples desires and understand and meet their needs. She knew money flowed from this. She was particularly interested in a business that she could do from a house that she lived in. This would assist with caring for her child and reduce her overall expenses.

  The next three days were spent visiting many businesses in the town, mostly talking to the local people but also giving small fragments of information about herself, that she was a Sydney girl, that her husband had died soon after her baby was born, that she had inherited a small parcel of money, not much but enough to live frugally, that she had felt his loss so keenly that she had decided to leave her home and come to the other side of Australia to make a new life there.

  She wove facts and inventions together with skill, already she had job offers to work in three shops. She told these people that she would think carefully and seriously about the offers, but she first needed a few days to settle in, get her bearings and find a place to live.

  She sensed that she was a minor sensation in this hot, sleepy little town. No one questioned her motivation; those who were born here seemed to be content in this place and considered it natural that others should want to live her too. Those who had come here from afar, like she, understood this was a land of opportunity where each had to make their own way. Some had stories of a past from another life that they chose to keep hidden, for others it was a step towards advancement and a future return to softer climes in the big cities of the south.

  What set her apart was that, as a mother of a small child, she had made this move by herself. She sensed a level of admiration for this. By the second day of her inquiries she realised most people knew who she was and were exchanging their own stories about her, but this seemed to mostly lead to polite curiosity not distrust.

  She learned that those who worked for the pearling luggers made good money, and that there were also a range of government employed workers who were relatively well off. In addition there was an obvious aboriginal population of mixed status, some station people who visited and other transient people who passed through the town.

  All the eating establishments seemed to have a good custom, and the food was limited in type, of variable quality and expensive. In part this appeared due to limited fresh fruit and vegetables, but even more it seemed due to a lack of imagination by both the business owners and their patrons. With its ocean front position the town had access to high quality sea food, along with a ready supply of meat from surrounding stations. There also seemed to be Chinese market gardeners who grew fresh fruit and vegetables which seemed to be of high quality.

  She had in mind both a business that served meals in the town and prepared good food that could be sold to the pearling luggers for their trips out, along with sales to stations and travellers who sought variety from otherwise monotonous diets.

  Her mother’s culinary skill came to her mind, making much from poor and limited ingredients; tasty stews, fresh salads and a range of dishes which utilised the wealth of the sea, along with a range of deserts which kept well in a hot climate. She also had in mind meals which could be frozen and reheated, suitable for stations, pearling luggers and people travelling out to work in remote places where good keeping and flavour after storage were important.

  In Melbourne and Sydney she had enjoyed Italian and Greek culinary delights; pasta, spicy meat dishes, olives and dips. Most town people had refrigeration, as did the boats and station owners. So she had an idea if a business where they got to enjoy good food and all its flavours, served in her own restaurant, but could also buy similar food to take away and eat later at their convenience.

  She knew any business had to be well located to capture the passing trade, but it also had to look inviting, both inside and out, particularly to town people, as repeat custom was the lifeblood of any business. She learnt from her last profession that those who left well satisfied mostly returned and they frequently recommended the services to others.

  So she now started to look for an attractive cottage, with the makings of a good garden, something that could be brought to life with a little care, and which gave space to grow some fresh salads and vegetables for use. In addition a couple trees to provide shade from the hot sun and a verandah for casual dining seemed important. She thought, if she could rent something like that for a few months, then she could make it work.

  Her ideal house had a functional kitchen, a room for her own living, a room for dining tables, and a display room for purchases, supplemented by a verandah that could serve for daytime use, serving tea and cakes as well as cold drinks and ices, and which adjoined a shady part of garden.

  This was her image, now she must find and rent it. Then she must fit it out to serve its purpose. She hoped that, once the place was found, she would also have enough money to pay for some limited help, someone to serve as she cooked and who could also learn these same cooking skills.

  To help her money stretch she decided to take a part time job, working each afternoon in a shop which sold pearls and other curios to the town and the passing trade. It was run by Elena, the wife of a pearl lugger captain. He was often away at sea and she had two small children, one of three years, and one of only one year. Elena managed her domestic life and the shop with another part time girl.

  What Lizzie liked most was that she had a sense of kindred with Elena, only a few years older than her. She was also raising a family of small children largely on her own while her husband was at sea. She sensed they both had a hunger for advancement, and a high level of intelligence and interest in the wider world that set them apart.

  She hoped they might become friends and each help the other as the years went by, she also knew that making contact through her with other pearlers was a good business move. Her only reservation was that she was yet to meet her husband, Alec, away at sea for over another week. However she could always leave this work if he proved unfriendly or difficult.

  So she came there to work, beginning at lunch time each day. She minded the shop for the first hour while Elena finished preparing lunch and dinner for the day and fed her children. She watched the speed and efficiency with which Elena worked with awe.

  Within an hour Elena, could prepare a lunch, feed two small children and have a dinner prepared to cook slowly over the afternoon. With her Greek hospitality she would always offer Lizzie a plate of food on arrival, which Lizzie would
place below the counter and eat quickly at times when the shop was empty.

  Broome town activity revolved around two main things heat and tides. The tides were massive, beyond anything that Lizzie had seem. At low tide vast mudflats filled the bay, at high tide the water rose thirty feet and came right up to the town, lapping at its edges.

  There was a steady stream of arrivals and Broome seemed like an oasis to many of them. The heat in the inland drove people to this place, a few miles inland from the coast it was often well above one hundred degrees, with a hundred and ten not uncommon. Here it was generally in the nineties in the afternoon, hot, but bearable out of the sun. So people came from driving through the inland, heat blasted, and felt a huge relief to arrive in this town.

  Broome sat on a peninsula which jutted out into the ocean. This gave it a cooling afternoon sea breeze, absent from inland. But now, as spring moved to summer the streets were baking hot to stand in once the sun was well up; someone joked you could fry an egg on the pavement to make your midday meal. People looked for shelter from the afternoon heat. Elena used this to draw custom.

  A movement was beginning of long distance travellers, older people who wanted to see the whole of the country of their birth. They would pack up cars, utes, vans, sometimes Land Rovers, with camping gear and would come from Perth or the eastern states.

  They would slowly work their way around the vast country, stopping at small towns along the way; a day or two each. Many saw Broome on the map, fourteen hundred miles above Perth, over half way to Darwin, as an obvious place to aim for. Broome was the start of the exotic Kimberley, place of strange fascination.

  Few understood how far and how hard a trip it was on these bad roads to come here. So the people kept drifting through, many hoping to make it through to Darwin before the wet season cut the road.

  The road south was said to be terrible. It was 400 miles to the next significant town of Port Hedland, in a region called the Pilbara. There was a small roadhouse half way to Hedland called Sandfire Flat. Otherwise there was no human habitation in these four hundred miles. This road was reputed as one of the worst in Australia, corrugations big enough to eat a regular car, which continued for hundreds of miles, patches of sand, and bulldust holes to bog and break the springs of the unwary vehicle. Many less well built cars limped into town badly damaged, shredded tyres, broken axles, springs or engines which had broken their mounting brackets. Some abandoned cars and trips and caught the boat home, some paid for expensive repairs before heading on, a few stayed.

  Still they came. After surviving this ordeal many looked towards a day or two of well-earned rest in this place. With them came money and with money came opportunity.

  Lizzie had heard people talk about the immense summer storms, lightning and torrential downpours, along with the regular cyclones that bore down on this coast. Most years they came from December to March and locals would talk about how peace returned to the town once the rains came. They also talked with awe and fear about the cyclones which ripped through this town.

  Roeburn Bay, next to Broome, was protected from the worst by the headland jutting into the Indian Ocean on which Broome sat. It was the place where the original huge pearl shells were discovered. These formed the foundation of the town and it was now a site for a new cultured pearl industry. It was also where the boats could run to for shelter from these massive cyclones, storms with winds that ripped the land apart. Houses not well built were lucky to be still standing at the end of the wet.

  Broome still had a dusty small town feel, but it was the largest town between Carnarvon and Darwin, over 3000 miles of coast. Other towns like Hedland with their iron ore deposits were fast catching up.

  But Broome had its pearls and shell. For eighty years people had harvested these jewels from the sea. It began with the aborigines in the shallow water, then the Japanese divers in pearling luggers. Lizzie walked a row of almost one thousand graves that bore silent testimony to their contribution to this place; many were young men, dead from the bends.

  The shop was often busy around lunch time as visitors came and strolled around the centre of town. People coming would visit the old town buildings, look at the boats, sometimes floating, sometimes lying on mudflats in port, and buy food.

  An afternoon quiet time came for a couple hours, when the heat drove people into shade, and a sort of siesta took over. Many businesses closed for these hours and Elena tried to use this time to do bookwork and orders. However she avoided closing her doors at this time. With the heat came a steady trickle of people, mainly visitors, looking for things to do. Often she made her best daily sales at this sleepy time.

  She had a ceiling fan in each room and this gave comfort while the rest of the town sweltered. She placed comfortable chairs on the verandah, to encourage people to rest in the shade. She used the windows facing the verandah as display cases. It gave the shop a welcoming feel and escaping from the heat of the bare streets brought them in. She offered all her visitors a glass of cold water, with a squeeze of lime if they desired. Often she would have tiny Greek delicacies sitting in a corner with an invitation to try. It was subtle but very persuasive marketing which gave Lizzie her own ideas.

  In the first week that Lizzie worked here she used her mornings to look for her own business premises, but nothing came up that reasonably matched what she needed. She remained in the hotel, her wages just covered this, and she did not want to commit to a lease of a place until she found something to suit her business ideas. Plus she must maintain the appearance of the well to do for success to follow.

  After a week of working there Lizzie sought Elena’s advice on establishing her own business. She outlined her ideas. Elena was instantly enthusiastic.

  “But off course, it is a great idea, I will help you look for a good place, our businesses can each help promote the other. Once you have a menu and a business sign I will place a copy here and encourage people to go and try it, you can have a display case in your sales area with small items and information on my shop and where it is. Perhaps I can teach you to cook my husband’s and his boat crew’s favourite Greek dishes. When they are in town I often cook meals for these men, give them the food like their Mamas made. So, when I don’t wish to cook, I can send them to your place for some real Greek food.”

  Two days later they found a place that they both agreed was right. It was in the next street back from Elena’s shop, but near the corner where the road turned as it came into the town. Its location meant a sign placed out the front could be seen from the road corner. It had a kitchen and three other good sized rooms, one could be Lizzie’s bedroom, one a place for inside tables, one could be set up as a little shop for selling food and other items, and also serve as an office in which she did her books.

  The room she selected for her bedroom had a door which opened to the back of the house, thus allowing her to come and go without walking through the business. The best feature was a large verandah which ran the length of the front of the house along with two large trees in the front garden which provided extensive shade to the house. This garden could also be used for outside chairs if she wished. The outhouse, which served as bathroom and laundry, was at the side of the house and separated the front and back areas. There was also a useful back yard with good sunshine. It could serve as a kitchen garden for vegetables and salads.

  The house was an old timber house and very shabby, the garden was overgrown, the paint was peeling, and some floor boards needed fixing. But it was dry, the roof was sound, there was no evidence of termite damage. With a month of work, a coat of paint and minor repairs, it could be transformed into something of beauty.

  Elena was already planning for a day of work when the crew returned to port. In return she and Lizzie would prepare a feast of the same food these men’s Mamas would cook. To make it doubly attractive she would invite the single girls from around the town, the nurses and teachers who visited her shop looking for little gifts. This work would get the ga
rden tidied and the house repainted at a minimal cost.

  The former elderly owner had died a couple months previously. While initially the son in Perth was inclined to sell, he had found the offers, thus far, disappointing. So instead he had decided to rent it out for a period of time before deciding what to do. The rent asked was twenty five pounds a month, with a three month down payment and paid monthly in advance from there. A six month lease was required.

  Elena even offered to lend Lizzie the money if she was short. Lizzie thanked her but said she had sufficient of her own to cover the first six months lease. But she particularly thanked Elena for her offer to solicit the crew’s help for the initial tidy up and repainting. This would help conserve her limited funds and speed up business establishment.

  So the next day she signed the lease papers, and took the keys. There was something both exciting and reassuring in having a place to call her own. She could picture it so clearly with its beauty restored, she and Elena sitting on the verandah, each of them sipping an icy cold drink as their children played below in the shade.

  She spent an hour doing some quick tidying. Then she went looking for some basic furniture, something to allow her to move in and get started on the fix up, the choices were limited and the cost was more than she wanted, she decided she would ask around before she spent this money, so instead she went off early to work with Elena. She found she was brimming to tell Elena about her plans and thought she might have better ideas about the furnishing.

  As it was a quiet day Elena took out a pen, ruler and paper. Together they drew up a plan for a fit-out. Elena said Alec was very clever about these things; she would talk to him when his boat returned the next day. She also said she would not open the next day as she always closed on the days he returned to port to give him time and attention. Lizzie decided to use this day to get seriously to work on her new house, particularly to clean up the accumulation of rubbish and get it ready for painting.

  She passed the next morning working there steadily, cleaning out the old kitchen, cleaning the stove, emptying old rubbish from mouldering cupboards, picking up dead branches and making piles in the garden; it was slow and physically hard.

  It was starting to occur to her there was a lot more work to fixing this house than she had imagined and she was not hardened to working with her hands. By lunch she had several blisters and the heat was sapping her energy. She decided to rest in the shade for a while and to give Catherine some needed attention. She sat there, dispirited by the amount of work still before her, lost in dreamy remembrance of a soft life in Melbourne, sitting with Becky and babies in spring sunshine. She must write Becky a letter now she had a known address.

  A toot of a horn roused her from her daydream. It was a ute with a powerfully built man driving. The passenger on the other side was part hidden by his bulk, then she recognised Elena’s wave. She had brought her husband, Alec, to meet her new friend; he had come in on the early morning tide.

  She instantly liked Alec. He was not much taller than Elena but built like a bull, broad shoulders and thick neck. She showed them around and watched as he assessed what was required with a quick eye. Elena made a comment here and there.

  When this was finished he said, “Now you come to eat with us, we have a special lunch to celebrate my return and Elena’s new friend. She tells me I must help you with the fix up before I go away again.”

  With this he slapped his hand on his forehead. “You know, I go away from Darwin with Elena because my mother is always saying what to do. Now I come to Broome and Elena is always saying what to do. So I go to sea and all the crew try and tell me what to do. It is my life, yes; many other people who all want to tell me what to do.”

  With this his face burst into a broad grin. “But for you, Elena tells me you are a good friend who helps her much. So I am happy to help you too. Tomorrow I will bring the crew for the day and maybe the next day as well. When this is done your house will be beautiful again.”

  She started to say. “I am not sure if I have enough money to pay for all these people.”

  But he waved her aside. “For Elena’s friend, no payment. But once you have fixed it up, and learned how to cook Greek food, you can invite us all for a big Greek dinner.”

  Lizzie laughed and clapped her hands, this man’s good humour was infectious, “But of course; what else does one do with ones friends, many dinners I think.”