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  The story of my being was like this. It always seemed that I took part in, saw, heard, fretted at, laughed at the coming of the baby that was me. I’d heard it often enough to know it by heart. When I was five days old my mother took me by train from Spencer Street away from Melbourne where I was born up into the Mallee where my father waited for us.

  Dad worked on the line as a fettler; his section was the flat long miles skirting the Hattah Desert country at Nowingi. My mother was station-mistress cum postmistress at Nowingi. This office served Kulkyne cattle station, twelve miles away. As far as the eye could see there was only one house besides ours, that of another fettler and his wife. This woman looked after the office when Mum was in Melbourne. In the crowded, laughter-filled days of childhood I never thought it strange that Mum should go down only one day before my arrival and return as soon as I could travel. She wrote to Dad from Melbourne. Two days later the engine-driver pulled his train up when he saw the gang at the side of the track.

  ‘Where’s Albert Smith?’ he called. A letter had come in the mailbag and the fettler’s wife at Nowingi had sent it up to him. Everyone knew he was awaiting news of the baby. The driver climbed down from his hot cab onto the track and delivered the letter. He waited while Dad read it aloud.

  Squatting beside the railway line on the red soil of that red, dusty land where the desert meets the acres man has claimed, he read from my mother’s letter to his mates, some standing nearby rolling cigarettes, another tinkering with the motor of the Casey Jones.

  ‘The baby,’ he read, ‘was born on the thirty-first of May, has black, curly hair, weighs eight pounds, and should not be upset by the long journey home.’ The men laughed. ‘When are you going to wet its head, Albert?’ My father wasn’t a drinking man, but today was different. He asked the driver to bring him a billy of beer on the run back the next day. ‘I’ll fix you up for it then.’ Fettlers never carried money, or, as Dad said, never had any to carry.

  Next day on the way back the engine was pulled up and the driver and guard climbed down carrying a black billy of beer each. The fireman followed them, mopping his neck with his sweat-rag. ‘It’s as hot as the hobs of hell up there today,’ he said, and nodded up to where the heat shimmered in his cab. When all the mugs were full Kelly the ganger lifted his and said, ‘To Albert’s son. May he be half the man his father is.’ ‘Good luck to you, Albert,’ the others toasted him. They drank the flat, warm beer, one mug apiece, and the driver and the fireman climbed back on the engine. The guard stood beside the track ready to jump onto the step when his van came by.

  ‘I’ll have him up here on the footplate in a few years,’ the driver called down.

  ‘I might nab him first,’ said the guard. ‘Make a shunter out of him.’ When the train had rumbled off, blowing a congratulatory cock-a-doodle-doo on its whistle, the gang picked up their crowbars and returned to their toil. As the men heaved in unison, levering a new rail up, Kelly said, ‘They’ve got Buckley’s chance. We’ll keep your kid in the gang.’

  ‘Too right!’ said the men.

  When Mum arrived and they found I was a girl they were just as happy.

  ‘A little dancing partner,’ the bachelor ganger said. Any sort of baby was a novelty to them. There wasn’t another white infant for twenty miles. Had they been more experienced they would have seen nothing enchanting about this baby. I had been so ill all the way up I was in bad need of a bath; so was my mother because of me. In the privacy of the little four-roomed wooden house she told Dad, ‘She’s been crying all the way, food coming up, pants to be changed. I don’t know what to do. I’m alarmed for her.’ The train had left Spencer Street at 6 p.m. and had not arrived till the afternoon of the following day. It had jolted slowly, sickeningly, the 300-odd miles. The night had been bitterly cold.

  ‘I put the small thing under my coat near my body to keep her warm,’ Mum said, as if to prove that nothing she had done had brought on this debility. ‘Time and again when the train stopped I went to the engine and got water from the driver. But she couldn’t keep even boiled water down.’

  The gang had organised their work to be near Nowingi when the train arrived. Now Dad went out and told them the baby was ill. She must be taken to the baby health centre at Red Cliffs, twenty miles up the line.

  Kelly the ganger took Mum and me on the popping Casey Jones while Dad jogged off with our horse and jinker to pick us up from Carwarp on our way home. Here, ten miles from our home, the ganger lived. The wind was dry and strong as the Casey exploded its way along, and ganger Kelly took off his big black velour hat that had no dent in the crown and held it above my head to keep off the sun.

  ‘I’ll shelter her with me hat,’ he shouted above the motor.

  The clinic was sterile, antiseptic, and smelt of soap, carbolic acid and fresh fly-spray. Kelly held the door open, still trying to hold his hat above the baby’s head and getting under Mum’s feet all the way.

  ‘Shut that door!’ the clinic sister snapped. Kelly was noted for his whisper, which was reputed to be audible thirty feet away. Now he whispered. ‘An old maid! I bet I know more about bringing up dingo pups than she does about babies.’

  He may have been right, for when I was next presented at the clinic, weak, thin and puling, it was discovered I was dying of malnutrition. Mum thought I should have cow’s milk, but the nurse insisted that I be kept on the powdered baby food she had recommended. On the way home on the Casey, Kelly burst out: ‘Powdered milk! I was away from my camp once. A bloke, a careless sort of a cow I realised too late, he gave my wolfhound bitch powdered milk. Do you know what it did to her? Gave her worms!’

  That night Dad set off across the roadless plain to Kulkyne homestead.

  ‘Have you brought a halter?’ said the cattleman when Dad told him of his sick baby.

  Yes, he had a halter but ‘About the money. I haven’t any. I could come and see you on pay day.’

  ‘That’s all right. You better pick a sturdy little cow and get going. You’ve got a long walk ahead of you.’ And Dad set off for home leading the sturdy little cow twelve miles over the stunted mallee growth in the night light.

  In four weeks’ time I was flourishing and this led Dad to claim proudly, ‘Just shows what we who live in woop-woop can do when we try!’ (Dad always subscribed to the belief that the poor come from ‘woop-woop’ and the affluent ‘live on the land’.)

  KATHLEEN-CUM-MICK

  Long before I learnt that babies were found beneath paddy-melon plants I thought that my sister Kathleen who was called Mick had been conceived in my mother’s dreamworld and moulded to life in her hands. My mother was psychic, gently so, yet often with an element of tragedy within her premonitions. Two years after their marriage she woke my father and said, ‘I dreamt we had a baby. She had red hair and blue eyes but no clothes at all.’ Dad teased her.

  ‘You’re sure it was our baby?’

  ‘Yes, she called me Mummy.’

  That afternoon there was a funeral in Warragul, where they then lived. Mum was returning from shopping when she saw it.

  ‘It was very sad,’ she told Dad. ‘There was only one man and a priest walking behind the hearse. I wonder who the poor man was burying?’

  It was his wife, the mother of his three tiny children. The priest told Mum when he called next day. The man was alone in Australia, had come from Ireland and couldn’t find work. The family had been living in a tent and there the mother lost her life giving birth to a dead child.

  ‘There’s two small boys left and a tiny girl,’ the priest said. ‘Will you take the little girl?’

  ‘Yes.’ With no more hesitation than that Mick had a mother. That evening Mum told Dad.

  ‘But our own children might come along some day,’ he reasoned. ‘Would it be kind to take a child that may later be less than one of our own?’

  ‘When our babies come we’ll have time enough to worry about that. In the meantime this is our baby.’ Next day she went down to Pakenham, where t
he father lived. There, washed, waiting for her in the tent, was a red-haired, blue-eyed toddler. Her dress was freshly washed but threadbare.

  ‘Has she no clothes?’

  ‘No, that’s all,’ the man said. He was nursing the two little boys, one on each knee. Now he put them down and, kneeling to the earth, pulled a tin trunk from beneath the bed.

  ‘Rita was making this. It was for Mickie. That’s what we called Kathleen sometimes.’ He handed her a tiny cream dress only half-finished, the needle and thread slipped in under the hem where it had been left by the woman now dead.

  ‘What will you do with the boys?’

  The man was vague with bereavement. He thought he would be able to care for the boys in the bush alone.

  ‘But I’ll miss my red-headed Mickie.’

  Mum tried to console him. ‘She’ll miss you, too.’

  ‘No, it’s her mother she misses. Looks for her all the time.’

  The little girl had not looked up. Now it was time to go and the man put his hand on her silky head and led her out into the sunlight. There in the clear light she suddenly saw . . . a woman’s skirt. Stumbling on her little legs, without looking up she ran across and clutched it.

  ‘Mummy,’ she sobbed. ‘It’s Mummy.’

  Mum lifted her up in her plump, warm arms and without looking back carried her across the paddocks to the railway station to wait for the train. Many years later she told us, ‘She knew I wasn’t her mother, but she so badly wanted me to be that she made herself believe. All the way home in the train she nuzzled into me whimpering "Mummy", over and over again. She didn’t look up to my face once.

  ‘From the moment she clutched my skirt she had hold of my heart. I was the one she needed. Love for her brought the desire and strength to protect her. I knew then that her father, no one, would ever take her from me.’

  No one did. The lonely father never came to see her. Shortly after, he was found dead in the bush from a gunshot wound. He died alone.

  Kathleen was seven years older than me. She was my father’s favourite. She was a laugher, a girl without care, a dare-devil. Dad even named a racehorse after her, Miss Mickie. I didn’t mind coming second best to Mick in Dad’s affection. I loved him more for loving the things about her that I loved her for.

  ‘Ginger Mick and Paddy-the-next-best-thing,’ he’d introduce us, and I’d be proud. Mostly she was known as Mickie; Kathleen! only to be rebuked. (My name was Patricia Jean but I mostly got Jeanie.)

  A Welsh stockman from Kulkyne station used to play ‘bunyips’ on the floor with Mick. His bodily contortions, facial grimaces and fearsome blood-curdling yells made me dislike the game, but Mick loved it.

  ‘Who is this brave bunyip with the red hair?’ he asked.

  ‘That,’ said Dad, ‘that is Kathleen-cum-Mick.’

  After his departure from Nowingi, Taffy wrote, sending his love to ‘Kathleen-cym-Mick’.

  THE WILD LIFE

  The Mallee, that stretch of country in north-west Victoria, was being turned into a dust bowl by steam-driven ‘mallee-rollers’ and tree trunks dragged behind horse teams with heavy chains. They rolled down every tree, shrub, bush and plant and then grubbed out the stumps of the stunted trees and sold them in the cities as ‘mallee-roots’, leaving the top-soil to be blown away by the willy-willies, the Cock-Eye-Bobs that swept in off the desert during the hot summer months. The hot, dry winds whirled the dust up high as the sky where it travelled until it reached the coastal cities and fell on the streets and houses, and women ran around shutting doors and windows crying, ‘Quick! It’s a Mallee dust storm!’ and we were nearly three hundred miles away from them.

  The olive-green mallee scrub disappeared and left a land where emus, kangaroos and lizards up to six feet long were the only permanent residents in a temperature that could hover around 112°F for days at a time.

  Before I could walk I knew of Reg Negri, a small, slightly built man who arrived to work on the rail track. The hard ganger of the time looked at him and said, ‘You won’t do. Get back on the train. You won’t stand up to the work; it gets up to 112° in the shade here.’ ‘Who in the hell works in the shade?’ little Negri snapped back. It was Reg Negri caused that ganger’s transfer. I’d watched Dad coming in stooped at night from the track. ‘He won’t let us kneel down to weed,’ he told Mum as she rubbed his back. ‘Makes us stoop to weed the track. All day.’ Then he came home one night. ‘Little Negri took the big fellow on today. We’d swung the twenty-eight pound hammers all day straightening rails the heat had bent like a dog’s hind leg, and then he says we had to work back to finish pulling weeds near the end of the track. "Bend your backs," he told us. "None of your loafing down on your knees." Little Negri watched the rest of us bend our backs and then he got down on his knees. The big fellow said he’d fire him. Negri said, "Tell that to the Road Foreman," and darned if he’d seen the inspection motor coming. We all kept working, Negri down on his knees, the rest of us cracking our backs. And what do you think the foreman said? He told us to all get on home and come back tomorrow and go down on our knees.’ Dad was smiling away in that quiet way he had. ‘I reckon we might have seen the last of The Kaiser.’ They had. The ganger was transferred and dear old ganger Kelly came back. Dad always said Negri could have done his job in. ‘He is a brave man that Negri, he’s got courage.’

  Our siding was on the line to Mildura but to the west, out in what some called The Great Desert and we knew as Sunset Country, a rail track was being built to nowhere. Well, that’s where it ended. Nowadays on railway maps it is noted as ‘The Nowingi towards Millewa South’ and the sixteen miles of rails stop at a small gypsum mine. It had been planned to cross the dry Sunset Country to the South Australian border to serve the soldier settlers who came full of hope when the government rolled down the mallee and called it farmland. Then, as now, in this red, dusty land, the only words on maps west of Nowingi were Government Bore, or Salt Pans. Salt was gathered there for a time and one day Mum with her Box Brownie snapped a camel train laden with sixty bags of salt coming out of the desert and lumping towards the railway siding.

  Two hundred construction navvies toiled to put down a track that the sand claimed as swiftly as they laid it. Their materials were hauled by ‘The Red Terror’, a goods wagon with a tractor engine mounted on top of it. On occasions the men came in on this to Nowingi and ‘jumped’ the train to Red Cliffs for a ‘bout on the hops’, as they said to Dad. Not that Dad could have much converse with these rovers of the construction world – Mum saw to that. ‘Not a respectable married man among them, living like nomads, gambling their wages, getting drunk and belonging to no one anywhere.’ Mum was the wife of a settled man and she saw to it that the wild lads of unfettered horizons got no chance of putting ideas into his head. The one thing the respectable fettlers had in common with the navvies up there was the sand. Here, where the sand had decayed to fine dust that sat across the land like a fixed cloud, Dad’s gang was issued with industrial respirators, but Dad said he’d ‘fly backwards like the crows do up here’ rather than wear one.

  When the men knocked off work on a Saturday they had to bring in everything movable; the more careless construction men once left their shovels and crowbars standing upright in a pyramid and when they returned on the Monday morning the tools, along with the line, were hidden under five feet of sand.

  To defeat the sand blowing onto the track up in this country the innovative fettlers experimented with scores of gadgets. One, made of a curved sheet of galvanised iron which they called a Sunset Sand Chute, was placed beside the track in such a manner that the wind funnelling along it blew the sand straight up and over the rails to the other side of the track. They’d spend their lunch half-hour and weekends refining this device, such as making it narrower or angled differently to cause the sand to be blown at a greater speed, thus having it travel further from the line.

  Nowingi was Mum’s first post as station and postmistress. On being sent here she had been tol
d that the relieving station-master would stay a few days to ‘show her the ropes’, such as despatching trains, decoding departmental telegrams and attending to post-office routine. But when she arrived the lad hopped on the departing train leaving a note under her office door, ‘I am very sorry to do this to you Mrs Smith but I’ve been here six months. The last five families haven’t stayed here long enough to get unpacked and even before I got here the past two families before that had applied for and got compassionate transfers to go anywhere at all rather than here.’

  That was only one of the misfortunes in the first twenty-four hours there. During the morning, Belle, the Irish wolfhound dog Granddad Adams had had imported for Mum for hunting had got at a parcel of meat that had been thrown onto the platform from a passing train and had eaten the lot. It had been consigned to an Indian hawker who would call for it. By the time he arrived Mum had decided she must pay him for the loss. It took all the little money she had – and pay day was a fortnight away.

  Belle, a romping great puppy the size of a Shetland pony (we kids used to ride her round the bush), set a fashion for those parts and several men sent away later for wolfhounds for ’roo hunting. While she was still the only one of her kind there Belle romped into a rabbiter’s tent one night and in a gregarious fit began to lick the face of the man asleep on the ground. ‘My Gawd! I thought it was a damned great wolf slavering over me!’ the man screamed. ‘I thought I was going to be eaten alive in me bed.’

  Few patches of scrub interrupted our view of the encircling horizon dropping over the rim-like edge of the dry saucer on which we lived. Our Welsh stockman friend was following rabbit traps one day and got lost in the sameness of our landscape. The railways sent an engine to run up and down the line blowing its whistle to guide him to the railway. At night he saw the engine headlight and later my mother heard a sound at our door. She opened it and Taffy fell in.