Hear the Train Blow
Page 1
Allen & Unwin’s House of Books aims to bring Australia’s cultural and literary heritage to a broad audience by creating affordable print and ebook editions of the nation’s most significant and enduring writers and their work. The fiction, non-fiction, plays and poetry of generations of Australian writers that were published before the advent of ebooks will now be available to new readers, alongside a selection of more recently published books that had fallen out of circulation.
The House of Books is an eloquent collection of Australia’s finest literary achievements.
Patsy Adam-Smith was one of Australia’s best-known and best-loved authors. Awarded the OBE in 1980 for services to literature and the Order of Australia in 1994 for services to recording oral history, she was the author of thirty books, all of which have topped or appeared on bestseller lists.
Among her most popular books were Hear the Train Blow (the story of her childhood), The Shearers, Australian Women at War, Heart of Exile, There Was a Ship, Outback Heroes and The Anzacs, which was joint winner of The Age Book of the Year Award in 1978. Prisoners of War received the prestigious triennial Order of Australia Association Book Prize in 1993.
HOUSE of BOOKS
PATSY ADAM-SMITH
Hear the Train Blow
The Classic Autobiography of Growing Up in the Bush
This edition published by Allen & Unwin House of Books in 2012
First published by Thomas Nelson Australia in 1964
Copyright © Patsy Adam-Smith 1964
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.
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ISBN 978 1 74331 573 6 (pbk)
ISBN 978 1 74343 293 8 (ebook)
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
PREFACE: DOWN AT THE STATION
1 WORKING ON THE RAILWAY
2 KATHLEEN-CUM-MICK
3 THE WILD LIFE
4 ON YOUR BLOCKS
5 ON THE WALLABY
6 THE BEST YEARS
7 WE WERE ‘PATS’
8 SITTING LOOSELY IN THE SADDLE
9 THEY’RE OFF
10 MESSAGE IN GREEN
11 THE TRANSPLANTED SHAMROCK
12 THE COLONIAL THISTLE
13 HO! HO! TALLYGARO!
14 VELLY NICE FLUIT
15 THE OPEN ROAD
16 THE SWAMPLANDS
17 HOMETOWN
18 SUCH IS LIFE
19 GETTING OUR IRISH UP
20 DAD! DAD!
21 DAD
22 KINDNESS AND COURAGE
23 THE CONVENTUAL LIFE
24 LAUGHTER AND TEARS
25 SCRIM WALLS
26 BLOOD AND WATER
27 THE CUP OF KINDNESS
28 THE NEW LINE
29 BOB’S MATE
30 THE LAST DANCE
EPILOGUE
PROLOGUE
In some ways childhood is in all ways the age of innocence; later we may learn that it was our age of ignorance or, worse still, the time when we knew everything but could turn a blind eye on the sufferings of others, the greed, the lust, the sacrifice and the dishonour that goes to make up everyday life. But overall, our recollections are of the good times – interspersed with the horrible times when things didn’t suit us alone.
Hear the Train Blow is a true story. The names of two minor families have been altered; that is all. The rest is as it happened during the Great Depression as we, the ‘respectable poor’, lived through the worst of times, the best of times. Like most lives, the living of it seemed the most natural, the only real way to live. All our closest friends lived and worked on railways; three of my aunts, my mother’s sisters, were in charge of railway stations or post offices in places as isolated as were we, and other aunts waited on small, hungry farms in Gippsland for their railway-fencer husbands to come home from the little cabin on wheels shunted into a lonely siding.
Because we were busy getting on with life it didn’t even seem hilarious at the time that the struggling dairy farmers, such as my mother’s family, looked on the timber-getters from the hills, such as Dad’s family, as ‘wild’ and undisciplined; and those free, independent men of the tall timber country looked with disdain on the time-imprisoned ‘cow-cockies’.
Dad’s father and his brothers (there were eight boys until World War I) were said to have cut more railway sleepers than any other family in Australia. ‘Those Smith boys were all born with a broad axe in their hands,’ they used to say in the Gippsland forests back of Neerim.
When looking through my mother’s Box Brownie album for material for the illustrated edition of this book I found the newspaper advertisement for the brown overcoat in which she so proudly posed, standing in our garden at Monomeith: 2s 6d a week for £8 10s 0d worth of weeks, 36 weeks. It was 1934 and the opposite page of The Leader was wholly taken up with the weddings of the year: Hordern-Bailleau, Brooks-Gengoult Smith and Haynes-Syme. We were so far removed from the city, the social scene, the mores and movements of the age that these would truly have been reports from another world. In 1934 little girls were ‘in’ as bridal attendants. ‘The most photographed little girlie, Marguerite Manifold, had to be carried over the heads of the crowds that thronged outside the church to get a glimpse of the bride.’ And ostentation was the rule: ‘Seven bridesmaids for the Haynes-Syme wedding were dressed alike in blue and white, copies of the Romney picture The Age of Innocence. The groom’s gifts to the seven bridesmaids were bracelets of platinum, turquoise and pearls. The bride’s mother’s frock was of brown ring velvet, the deep wide cuffs of Kolinsky fur lined with gold tissue.’
There was no bitterness in our reading of this. If they did not know we were out there in the bush in our home-made dresses and O’Gilpin’s ‘nothing over 2/6’ pearl necklets we just as casually took no notice of them down there ‘dolled up in feathers and fur-belows’, as Mick would have said. That the power of some families may influence or make or mar our lives was something we didn’t speak of. If we knew it. Mum was innocent of such matters. All Dad ever said about wealth was, ‘We mightn’t have much money but we can have a lot of fun.’ And we did.
It was the sort of fun that made a firm padding around the body of the spirit and cushioned you when you left home and shut your eyes and jumped into the boxing ring.
Like many another I learnt a lot about myself while serving during the war. Not that I had a hard war – on the contrary. I was with one of the most interesting and newest hospitals in the army, the First Australian Orthopaedic Unit. Bone banks were new, bone grafts almost as new; much of the skill of our surgeons and physiotherapists had been perfected during the poliomyelitis outbreak of the late 1930s; we were a small, compact unit that travelled together around the eastern States, set up our tents, unpacked our equipment, cleaned up and worked and spent our time off together. We remain fr
iends to this day. But there is a level ground each of us finds when catapulted into living with a crowd, an unmoving place where we can live a life apart, but not alone, or set up as a stage and present ourselves as we wish the world to see us and thus keep intact our deep private self.
Then the church bells rang out all over the land and we ran up and down the streets of Australia shouting ‘It’s over! The boys will be coming home!’, or we crouched in a corner crying for the boys who wouldn’t be coming home and praying for the boys we hoped were alive and would be discovered in POW camps.
From the noisy, happy, sad, tragic, brave and fearful world of hospitals full of young men where I fitted so well, I went to live in Tasmania. For a writer this was virgin country. From that day of my first flight, when I got off the long, backless, wooden stools in the army plane and jumped down onto that island, I knew I would write and write and write. Over 300 feature articles for national magazines poured out, as did radio serials for children under seven (little children before education cramped their imagination and mental courage), short stories – the writing form I prefer – radio talks, and later guest speaking engagements.
Then Kylie Tennant befriended me. By now I was at sea. Literally. I had again shut my eyes and jumped, this time onto a tramp trader, and for six years sailed as deck-hand, cook-radio operator, first on a 60-tonner and then on a 300-ton wooden ship from the Port of Hobart to islands off the Tasmanian east coast and Bass Strait. By the time I met Kylie I’d seen men die, heard one dying and couldn’t help him, lived hard, and worked too hard. I’d been with CSIRO teams banding birds on uninhabited islands, camped with leading artists and scientists, made many overland journeys on ‘The Mainland’, as Tasmanians call it; some journeys I drove ‘the whole way round’ Australia, others were shorter trips to the inland of six or seven thousand miles. I’d been to much of the back country; I’d camped with Aborigines for seven winters when my lung turned sulky and I needed to escape Tasmania’s winter.
‘Mary Woollong would have fixed you up,’ Dad had said, half-joking, to cover his concern for my health and half-suggesting a possible remedy. But Mary Woollong, whom we had known at Nowingi when I was small, had now died with the sad title of ‘the last of the Kulkyne tribe’. The thought of the days when I had run as a child beside her on the red sandhills out in Sunset Country and breathed in the dry, sweet desert air sent me off north of 26 degrees, and there the dispossessed tribesmen befriended me until soon I was ready to take on the world once again.
Sometimes I’ve knuckled down to indoor work, such as advising and enrolling Adult Education students in Hobart for six years, and then I was offered the position in Melbourne of Manuscripts’ Field Officer, the first such position in Australia, to search the country for historic documents, letters, diaries, property and family records and encourage the owners to deposit them in the State Library of Victoria as a donation to the State and, ultimately, the Nation.
‘You must get these experiences into books,’ Kylie ordered. ‘You’ve known Australians and Australia like few of us can. Write it!’
So my real time has been spent writing about the ordinary – extraordinary? – women and men of our land, the timber-getters, farmers, bushmen, railwaymen, seamen, Aborigines, battlers and the legendary generation of World War I. Sometimes I think, fleetingly, of going back to music, of university, but I don’t think like that for long. I leave these things to those who have never heard the steam whistle blow and great engines thunder past our simple homes in the bush, a sound and a smell that can shunt you back to your own childhood and that of a nation.
When I set to work to write Hear the Train Blow I wondered how I should go about it. In 1960 I was more sophisticated, no longer the ‘bush rat’ that the Man in Grey on Spencer Street railway station once called me. But then I remembered Mr Martin, our neighbour long ago. He used ‘big’ words and one night playing cribbage he said to my mother, ‘So you come from Gippsland, Mrs Smith. That is very undulating country.’ After he left for his home Mum said, ‘Why couldn’t he say hilly?’ He was known to us from that night on as ‘Undulating Martin’. And I recalled the thin young woman at Waaia who had nothing good to say of anyone. She was known as ‘Vinegar Lips’. Such memories guided my style for this, my first book. But that was after I began it.
What happened was this: after Kylie had cajoled me into ‘getting experiences into books’ I wrote a long account – 500 pages – of my years at sea, the ships and the island people. I didn’t show it to anyone. It was as though I was waiting for something else. And then it came: I sat down and began to write the story of my childhood and the fear that hovered like a wraith about me, and of Mum and Dad and Miss Mickie. I finished it in three weeks and sent it off to Ure-Smith and they published it as it was. (The long work on my years at sea fell into two halves that later became Moonbird People and There Was a Ship.)
It is not immodest of me to say that Hear the Train Blow was a success. It was called ‘a minor classic’ by Kenneth Slessor. Lord Casey wrote to me, ‘Everyone will think they can write of their childhood after reading your book. Writing simply looks so easy.’ Nearly thirty years later I am still receiving letters from all over Australia and from England and Ireland.
The first letter I received was from May Asquith from Euroa in Victoria. ‘I saw the book advertised,’ she wrote. ‘I thought, I never heard of anyone writing a book about ordinary people like us before. So I bought it. It was the second book I’ve bought in my life. The other was the Book of Common Prayer. They were both great investments.’ May Asquith and I still correspond.
I sent a copy to Mum. I waited. There was no word. The reviews, letters, warm messages from readers were nothing if Mum didn’t care for it. Then her letter arrived.
‘Some of the things you wrote were very hurtful. But so much was very beautiful. And we love you for being honest. And we love you.’ The truth of the matter was that that was all that mattered.
PREFACE: DOWN AT THE STATION
The troop train was so long that when we’d got through the checking barriers with our kitbags, tin helmets, gas masks and the rest of our gear we had to walk the length of ten carriages before we reached those set aside for nurses. Now, four hours later, we were all aboard – the soldiers, sailors, airmen, nursing sisters and us enlisted Voluntary Aid Detachments. The engine attempting to move off with us made slow progress.
Over on No. 2 Platform the civilians who had waited patiently for the four hours now began to wave and sing. ‘You are my sunshine,’ they sang. Most of the nurses and many of the men had parents and friends there to wave them goodbye. I looked out on to the now empty No. 1 Platform. It was as I knew it best.
‘Do you know Spencer Street railway station?’ our kindly matron had asked before we left on final leave.
‘Yes, matron,’ I nodded solemnly. ‘I know Spencer Street.’
The Man in Grey, that mine of information of the Victorian Railways, spoke a final warning into his microphone and his voice resounded down the platform along the crowded carriages. ‘Train leaving Number One Platform. Stand clear, please, stand clear.’ Then, ‘God bless you, boys, and a safe return.’ He left his little box then, his day’s work done, and walked across to the iron railing and watched us go. His eyes met mine as the train slowly passed. I waved.
‘Goodbye, sweetheart,’ the old man called.
‘Goodbye,’ I replied. I thought perhaps he remembered me. I took off my hat with the badge of St John of Jerusalem on it so he would see my ink-black hair that he once had remarked on.
‘Goodbye,’ I called again.
‘Goodbye,’ he called back, and began walking along outside the iron railing, keeping abreast of my window. The civilians on No. 2 Platform were now singing, ‘Wish me luck as you wave me goodbye.’
‘Good luck, girlie,’ the Man in Grey called as he kept pace with the train. For a moment I hesitated – could he tell I wasn’t yet eighteen? No one else had . . . ‘Good luck,’ he called ag
ain. I laughed, the train was gathering speed now and as it got faster the wheels began to sing:
Tallygaroopna, Tallygaroopna,
Ho, Ho, Tallygaro . . .
We had passed the end of the platform. I leant out and the wind of the train’s movement blew the hair across my eyes. ‘Goodbye,’ I cried. He took his peaked cap off and waved it, the only man left on the long platform, standing there waving until we were swallowed up.
WORKING ON THE RAILWAY
My parents were railway people and we lived beside the tracks all our life. My mother was station and postmistress of lonely places where often our house was all there was of the town named on the railway signpost. Sometimes our four-roomed wooden cottage was on the platform and as we lay asleep the great steam engines crunched by like nailed boots crossing our bedroom floor.
My father wore the badge of the navvy, the scarred hands and leathered neck of a lifetime of toil on the tracks where pick, shovel and 28-pound hammer were the only tools of trade.
My sister played groom to me as horse in trucks that were shunted into our playground, the siding, for all the years until it was time for her to take over as station-mistress.
In those days before TV, radio and even electricity came to our harsh areas on the edge of the outback, we talked and listened a lot. We spent cold desert nights in front of our red-gum sleeper fire and in summer, after mirage-hot days, we sat outside watching the stars slide across the big sky and taking in the lore of our household. Stories were told and retold, embellished or honed down to polish them in the mould of all traditions. If the telling one night did not excite or interest the listeners, the next night the emphasis would be different, the timing, the tone, the silences altered. But always the core remained constant. In this way, by the time the child was conscious of telling the story herself she had become melded into the people, the land and the movements of the stars; time wavered and it was as though she took part in the events and ages that were in reality her grandmothers’, her parents’ time.