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teacher and poet, Andrew Wotherspoon. A Scottish migrant, a Master of Arts from the University of Glasgow and a friend of John Dunmore Lang, he was the first schoolmaster in Canberra (then Captain’s Flat) and the second in Lismore, and was well known in both places as a fiery and quarrelsome lay preacher. His public arguments on matters of church doctrine with Campbell of Duntroon, the biggest landowner in the Molon-glo District, are a matter of public record. It is said that Campbell paid the fares of the family to transfer to Lismore, so anxious was he to be rid of the lot of them.
    Aged eighteen, Alice Wotherspoon goes to an Orange Lodge picnic at Clunes, and meets our Grandfather, a migrant from County Donegal and a fervent member of the Lodge, with all its bigotry. They marry; he takes up a selection at Keerrong; they have ten children in eighteen years; he then dies of a heart attack. In the past thirteen years he has, with the help of Hindu labourers, ruthlessly cleared the rainforest from more than 150 acres, and these are the rich paspalum pastures which our Granny now owns, and lets out to tenant farmers.
    Usually a sensible person, she has nevertheless absorbed from her father and husband a fierce and self-righteous intolerance. She had heard from her father an account of the Edith O’Gorman Riot in Lismore, when an escaped nun lectured the Protestants on the excesses (usually sexual) of that faith. A violent sectarian riot broke out in the street after the lecture and a number from each side were arrested and had to face the District Court in Grafton. Her father, according to our Granny, was not only acquitted, but most generously paid the fines of some of the Roman Catholics (she always gives them the full title). This made an enthralling tale for little girls held captive under the mosquito net in a high white bed with their Granny or Aunty Millie.
    The knockout though, the real tear-jerker, is from a small book called The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk. This tells of a convent in Quebec where the nuns, innocent country girls, are enslaved, tortured and raped by lascivious priests, the resulting babies being strangled and thrown down a well. We have no idea how these babies come about, but thrill with horror at the dark convent circled around the well of death, the sneaking priests and the piteous little babies, and don’t doubt the story for a moment. Years later I find a reference to this scurrilous book in Barbara Baynton’s Human Toll, look for and find it in the Mitchell Library, and realise that it really exists, that it is not simply an invention of my Granny. Other sectarians (Baynton was a Presbyterian) have read it, believed it, and have no doubt also terrified their grand-daughters with it.
    While my mother goes in for massed annuals, my Granny’s garden is a projection of her extravagant nature; a profusion of climbing roses, wisteria, plumbago, may bushes, lasiandra, honeysuckle and, most dear to me, the jasmine. This is the poet’s jasmine, originating in Arabia and Spain and grown in the South of France as the basis for the most delicate perfumes. It is common in old gardens in the colonial cities of the far North Coast of New South Wales, and now haunts the Australian night with its fragrance. A cloud of it shelters the front verandah of this house under the bullnose iron, and beneath it grow freesias and shivery grass. Our Granny is the old lady of the garden; all plants flourish for her. Cuttings pushed into the rich soil strike for her, thrive, bloom and reproduce themselves everywhere. This garden is an emblem of continuity. Grown from cuttings from her mother’s and aunts’ gardens and from those of neighbouring farms, it carries the genes of the old garden favourites down through time. The riotous garden is a paradise for children, from the old seagrass chairs under the giant jacaranda tree, to the boxes of shells under the house, collected at the beach to