Down the Road to Gundagai

by Jackie French

  ‘Well, I’ll see you at the party tonight. Enjoy yourself this afternoon.’

  ‘I will.’ Blue strode into the women’s changing room. She would never lose the wonder of being able to walk properly, to run and dance. The scars on her legs were surprisingly small, given the anguish they’d caused for so long, each about the size of a squished-fly biscuit in fact. She smiled at herself. She had to get out of the habit of calling them squished flies. Though perhaps a less dignified nickname might help them sell even better …

  She peeled off the white-and-blue overall that all employees wore, then slipped on dark green slacks. Joseph had asked her to wear trousers for some reason this afternoon. Maybe he’s got Mrs Mutton to make up a picnic basket, she thought. They might ride along the river before the party …

  She ran a comb through her hair as the sound of an engine rumbled outside. She rose on tiptoe to peer out the window. Jamie and his brother, Peter, Mr Thompson, Mah and a small crowd of women were clustered around a man in black leather on a motorbike. She hurried out, intrigued.

  ‘Look!’ yelled Jamie.

  She looked. Joseph grinned up at her. ‘Like it?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She walked around the motorbike, then grinned back at him. ‘Do you expect me to get on this thing?’

  ‘Well, you’ve ridden an elephant. Why not a motorbike? It’s a graduation present from Flinty,’ he added.

  ‘Flinty bought you a motorbike?’

  The grin grew. ‘Actually, she gave me the money to buy a second-hand car. She doesn’t know anything about King Solomon yet.’

  ‘King Solomon?’

  ‘A match for the Queen of Sheba.’

  Blue laughed. ‘How does this thing stay upright anyway?’

  Joseph grinned. ‘Speed.’ He waited while she put a scarf over her hair and under her chin, then flung her leg over the seat behind him. ‘Hold on!’

  She did.

  The air turned to wind, the wind to dust. She laughed. She couldn’t help it. Suddenly she felt as free as the day the circus had left Willow Creek, when she had looked at the line of the horizon and known that she would travel through it, and keep on travelling day after day.

  Down past the railway station and the paddock where the circus had stayed, two years and what seemed like a lifetime earlier, up the road to Drinkwater. Trees shivered against a cloudless sky. The sheep watched them with the vague expressions of animals who had seen carts and sulkies, automobiles and trucks, and had no interest in any of them unless they carried hay.

  The motorbike rumbled beneath her, moving too fast even for flies to gather in her eyes.

  Suddenly Joseph turned the motorbike off onto a side track. They rumbled through the dust, around potholes, past a faded sign that said Moura, and then between two ridges, rocks hunched like guardians.

  They were in a valley, small, the rearing cliffs streaked with eagle droppings. A creek muttered between round pink rocks, dappled with she-oak shadows. It was cool, after the heat outside. A breeze wandered up from the creek. Above them sat a house, solid and hand-hewn, the timber grey with age. The verandah about it looked more recent — replaced perhaps — as did a new wing that Blue suspected held a kitchen and dining area, a useful precaution in case a burning log tumbled from the stove onto the wooden floor. New-looking poles carried a telephone line on which the currawongs had already learned to perch.

  Joseph turned off the engine. In the sudden quiet she heard what she had learned was lyrebird song, an alarm call to say humans were near. A lizard rustled between the thorn bushes. Above them an eagle hovered over the cliffs, then veered down into unseen ranges.

  ‘Like it?’

  She nodded. ‘Who owns it?’

  ‘Matilda. It was her father’s land, long before she bought Drinkwater. He built the house. She lived here for years. Her cousin, Pete Sampson, lived in the house for a while, before he built his own place at the Overflow after the war. Come and have a look.’

  It was a good house, made with love: two bedrooms and the sitting room, the verandah wide for watching the moon rise, the living-room windows angled to see a pool like a brown mirror in the creek, and the gleam and shadows of the valley down to the sheltering ridges. As she’d thought, the new addition was a kitchen, scullery and storeroom, and another room that might be a bedroom or office. She wandered back through the empty rooms. A leaf lay on the polished wood floor. Someone had opened the house earlier for them, had swept up cobwebs and dust, had polished and repainted. It needs a sofa here, thought Blue, and four armchairs there. A cane setting for the verandah …

  Joseph had wandered out to the front steps again. ‘Used to be a vegetable garden down there.’ He sat on a step and gestured towards the creek. ‘Wouldn’t mind having one again, though I don’t suppose either of us will have time to tend it. One of the Drinkwater men could come up twice a week, do the garden, chop the wood. Need someone for the housework too. Not live-in servants, just coming up each day.’

  She sat next to him. ‘You want to live here?’

  ‘Yes. Matilda offered it to us last week.’

  ‘Won’t her boys want it one day?’

  ‘She says not. She said her great-grandmother, the one she calls Auntie Love, would want you to be here. Says that you’ve spent two years learning a man’s world. Now it’s time to teach you women’s lore.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘She wouldn’t say. Not to me anyway. You know Matilda.’

  How to tell if the land will be generous next year, thought Blue. How to sit and feel the heartbeat of the earth under your fingers. Miss Matilda had taught her a little already, despite her preoccupation with the factory. Now it seemed there would be more. Suddenly she remembered the hymn this dear young man at her side had sung her, two years ago, when she had still been crippled, dependent on charity. And when we find ourselves in the place just right, ’Twill be in the valley of love and delight. She had found the place, the love, the delight. Now Miss Matilda was giving her a valley too.

  She grinned at him. ‘Just one problem.’

  He looked at her with sudden concern. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘We’re not married. You haven’t even got round to proposing. And let me tell you, sir, Madame taught me to be most respectable.’ She could almost hear Madame’s approving laugh at that. Madame’s view of respectable was so gloriously different from her aunts’. I lost my mother, she thought, but I have been so rich in mothers too.

  He smiled. ‘Do you want me to go down on one knee?’

  She grinned again. ‘These steps will do.’

  He looked serious for a moment. ‘I didn’t want to ask you when things were uncertain. You might have wanted to go back to Melbourne.’ His smile grew again. ‘Even off to Gundagai. Now it’s a real choice.’

  She was touched, but shook her head. ‘I knew where I belonged two years ago.’ They had been good years, learning business management, working with Mah and Mr Thompson, even for a few months at Laurence’s Shoes, despite Mr Cummins’s disapproval and the manager’s apprehension. But she had won him round in the end, especially once he realised that no matter how much she learned, his job was safe. Those factories had been Grandpa’s empire, and her father’s. She and Mah would build their own.

  She and Mah were part of Gibber’s Creek now, members of the Country Women’s Association, scone and sandwich makers for the bushfire brigade, regulars at the Sunday afternoon tennis matches. Even more importantly, they were threads of the tough fabric of the community. A piece might fray, or even break, but others would help to hold it together. Each member of the circus had finally found their Gundagai, just like Madame had when she had met Monsieur so many years before. Ebenezer and Ephraim wrote each month, via their daughters, telling of the talents of their grandchildren and the price of bananas. The Olsens were happy, over in California. Now and then postcards arrived, variously signed Your old friend Les or Your cousin Gladys, but each, she knew, from Fred. Perhaps, of all of the
m, Fred had not found the heart of his life yet. She hoped he would.

  Only Sheba to settle, she thought. The old elephant had been lonely in her paddock with Blue and Mah away so much, but having her at the factory wasn’t working out either. This would make a good paddock for an elephant. Two elephants, or even three, old females too tired for the circus …

  She heard Madame’s voice in the murmur of the creek. ‘No one wants the girls …’

  You taught me well, old woman, Blue thought. Mah and I will give women jobs, with proper wages. When the squished flies make enough money we’ll fund scholarships for girls to learn law or medicine or accountancy, and all the subjects a nice young lady isn’t supposed to know.

  ‘You know, it’s usual for a girl to give a bloke her full attention when he’s proposing to her.’ Joseph’s voice had no complaint.

  ‘I am. I was … remembering. Happy remembering.’

  ‘Good. I have already told your next of kin that my prospects are excellent. As of this morning I am officially a partner in Dr Thomas’s practice at Gibber’s Creek.’

  ‘My next of kin?’ For a moment she thought of her aunts, remote and polite. No, not the aunts. Nor Uncle Herbert, resident of Pentridge Prison, his vague connection to the aunts a perpetual shame to them. Then she saw Joseph’s grin.

  ‘Sheba,’ he said. ‘Her majesty gave me her full permission, in return for a bag of carrots. Will you marry me, Bluebell Magnifico Laurence, also known as the Mermaid of the South Seas?’

  She laughed. ‘Yes.’

  ‘And will you solemnly swear that if we have a daughter you won’t call her Poppy, Gladiolus or Magnolia?’

  ‘How about Daffodil?’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘All right then.’ She held out her hand. He slipped a ring on it, a sapphire — of course it would be a sapphire — almost the colour of the sky. ‘I had the jeweller measure the one Matilda lent you, to get the fit right.’

  ‘Clever, aren’t you? I suspected something was up when she so innocently asked me if I’d like to borrow a ring. Speaking of Miss Matilda, we’d better get back. The party is starting at six.’

  ‘No hurry.’ He bent and kissed her, his lips as warm as the soil, as the wind. He tastes of the river, she thought, and the mountains, of rocks and all good things.

  It was late when they left the valley, the house creaking as its roof lost the sun. Darkness spread like a blanket across the paddocks. The headlights picked out a path in front of them. The air whispered hot against Blue’s face as the motorbike rumbled down the track, its sound deeper than an elephant’s.

  Lights blazed along the Drinkwater drive, lined with cars, sulkies and carts. The whole of Gibber’s Creek, it seemed, was celebrating the coming Christmas with the Thompsons tonight. Long white tablecloths covered the trestle tables on the verandah, with punchbowls and silver cups on one side and, on the other, platters of cold chicken, turkey, ham, potato salad and all the other glories of Mrs Mutton’s kitchen, carefully placed under netting to keep off the flies. Over in the shed, garbage bins held ice and bottles of beer. The generator thudded beneath the song of laughter and conversation.

  Blue stopped and looked at her slacks. ‘I forgot to get changed!’

  ‘You look beautiful. No one will notice.’

  She shook her head, grinning at him. Nice girls did not wear slacks to parties. Except, perhaps, at Drinkwater, especially if they’d arrived on a motorbike. She shoved her scarf into a pocket and fluffed her hair.

  They headed towards the shed. A couple of violins sang to the thump of the piano and the strum of Cookie’s ukulele. The long table had vanished. The space was filled with dancers: Mah in a silver lace dress, waltzing with Andy McAlpine, Joseph’s sister Flinty and her husband, each cradling a baby as they danced, Kirsty with a slightly bewildered beau she’d brought down from Sydney, Sergeant Patterson gay in a polka-dotted tie with his wife, Mr and Mrs Sawyer, the man, Ben Atkins, who Sheba had rescued, swaying with one of the women from Mah and Blue’s factory. Everywhere she looked there were friends, family, neighbours, the biscuit factory workers with their boyfriends or husbands, the wireless factory employees with their families too, stockmen and their wives and girlfriends.

  Blue glanced up at the stars, jewels cut out of the fabric of the night. Beyond the music and laughter and beat of the generator she could hear a mopoke call and the faint complaint of sheep. This is my world, she thought. Mine to share and to create …

  ‘Look!’ She had to speak close to Joseph’s ear because of the noise.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Mr Thompson’s dancing! He doesn’t even need his stick!’

  ‘He’s waltzing Matilda,’ said Joseph. He held out his hand to her. ‘Do mermaids dance, Miss Magnifico?’

  She put her hand in his. ‘All the way to Gundagai and back.’ There are many roads to Gundagai, she thought, for every one of us. Perhaps my journey has only just begun.

  They stepped into the shed together.

  Notes to the Reader

  It is customary to state that no characters in a novel are based on any person, living or dead. The characters in this book are based on many people, and elephants, who most decidedly lived, and in some cases still do. To those who recognise themselves, thank you for enriching my life and the world.

  Matilda’s Riverview Estate is based on Hammondville, a settlement at Liverpool, NSW, for families evicted from their homes, founded by Canon RBS Hammond of St Barnabas’s Church, Broadway. Although this and similar Depression settlements were usually near major cities, and easier for evicted families to reach, it seemed feasible that the radio factory at Gibber’s Creek might attract enough unemployed people to make a settlement likely there.

  Jumping the rattler, the men shanghaied to work loading wheat for a pittance, the farmers who made sure no one would bid more than threepence if a fellow farmer’s property was being auctioned by the bank for failing to pay the mortgage, are all based on real events, as are the circus acts and the circus life at the time.

  From the 1850s to the Depression, circuses, theatre companies, vaudeville acts and sideshows toured Australia. Even a small country town would have a theatre, with often a new touring company putting on a play every week, from musicals to Shakespeare or the romantic film melodramas of Australia’s fabulous Lottie Lyell, such as Why Men Love Women, Her Love Against the World and The Midnight Wedding. Along the main rail and river routes, there was a far wider choice of live entertainment than there is today, with dozens of circuses touring Australia at any one time.

  Unfortunately for my Magnifico’s, the heyday of travelling circuses had ended with the Depression, or even with World War I. Although circuses still toured Australia — and do today — there were few of the ‘monster shows’ of former days in the 1930s.

  Conditions on the road varied enormously, from circus to circus. Some paid good wages and, where possible, the members were put up at hotels so they could use a proper bathroom and hot water; others were more hand to mouth. While small children, including Indigenous children, were taken from orphanages to train early, and some trained with methods we’d think barbarous today, most circuses were genuinely family affairs, with much love and camaraderie.

  THE DEPRESSION

  Unemployment was a major problem in Australia from the end of World War I. Tens of thousands of returned servicemen had no jobs. In Melbourne on 14 March 1920, more than five hundred returned servicemen marched, demanding ‘a sustenance allowance’ till they found jobs. But the Minister for Repatriation refused.

  In 1927 the economy and life in Australia took a sharp turn for the worse when the US stock market crashed due to speculation in stocks that had driven them up far beyond their value. When the stock market dropped a little, people panicked and started to sell their shares before the price dropped even further. Overnight millionaires became bankrupt.

  Australia had borrowed from British banks to pay for sending troops to World War I. Now the British bank
s wanted the loans repaid. Much of Australia’s wealth came from exporting wool, wheat and minerals, but the prices for these dropped dramatically too.

  As in all depressions, one ‘knock’ led to another — jobs lost meant less money to spend, less money to spend meant that demand for goods and services dropped further and even more jobs were lost.

  In some areas one man in three or four was unemployed. There are no records of how many women were unemployed — in those days the ‘real’ jobs were held by men, even though women supported about a quarter of Australian families back in the early 1930s. Thousands of men went ‘on the wallaby’ — travelling around the country, hoping for a job. Many ‘jumped the rattler’, hiding on goods trains to get from one district to another, though they had to jump off while the train was still moving. Many were injured, and some killed.

  Families who couldn’t pay their rent or meet their mortgage payments were thrown out onto the street. Long queues grew outside any factory that might have advertised a single job.

  All the government could offer was a small unemployment benefit paid out as food rations, not money — ‘the susso’ (short for sustenance payment) or ‘dole’. The amount varied from state to state, but it was worth about ten shillings a week for married men and five shillings for single men.

  Women were not eligible for the susso, even when they were the only support for their families. As Matilda told Blue, in 1932 Victoria’s Minister for Sustenance, Mr Kent Hughes, said that no women would get any help from the government while there were any jobs available as servants — no matter how badly paid or what the conditions were, or even if they couldn’t leave their children to live and work in other people’s homes.

  Those ‘on the susso’ had to turn up once a week at the local relief station or police station with their hessian sacks for the flour, hunk of meat, golden syrup, sugar, tea and other staples. Many towns limited strangers to only one susso ration and then they had to move on, to stop a ‘susso camp’ growing up nearby.