Read Roundabout at Bangalow for Free Online Page A
Authors: Shirley Walker
be glued to picture frames, or fastened around a crocheted milk-jug cover.
This household not only exists in the present, it is continuous with the past, like a ship that sails through time with its living freight, its totem objects and its family lore. We are shown the round table, its top pit-sawn from one slab of red cedar by our Grannyâs uncle Oliver Jones, a famous shipwright at Coraki (it is now in a museum). There are the bedspreads crocheted by her mother from heavy cream cotton, the patterns (for instance the âwheatsheafâ) centuries old, and the tinted portraits of her family behind convex glass in heavy oval frames. More important perhaps is the intangible past, the stories brought from Ireland by her husband: of an ancestor who married the daughter of the Bishop of Londonderry during the siege; from these illustrious loins (that is the Bishopâs) we are descended and must never forget it; or of the distant relationship to those heroines of the Irish resistance, Eva Gore-Booth and Constance Markiewitz (good Protestant girls, according to our Granny, and certainly no revolutionaries).
There are stories too of the more immediate past: of coming as a young and gently reared bride to the Keerrong valley, then clothed to the tops of the hills with the impenetrable rainforest; of carrying the washtub down to the creek each afternoon to wash the clothes in the sweet water beneath the wild cherry trees; of being accosted by wandering Aborigines and disarming them with gifts of food while her little children hid under the bed; or of the terrible day in 1914 when her husband lay dead and her youngest child was not yet born. These stories, true or half-true, are myths of their origins for the listening children, marking them out as special, particular, set apart from the ordinary people of the race. Fifteen years ago, in Ireland, I was able to verify the connection with the Gore-Booths, but the descent is from the Dean of Londonderry not the Bishop â such inflation is typical of family stories.
This house is always busy with the coming and going of family and neighbours; it is redolent with the smells of cooking and alive with contending emotions, for life here is lived at a passionate level of affection, gossip, recrimination, indignation and reconciliation. The peach trees come right up to the kitchen window and the scent of honeysuckle and jasmine fills the air. The possums play in the peach trees and come into the roof at night, peeing down through the ceiling. Huntsman spiders scuttle on the ceiling at night, or hide behind the amateurish oil paintings of Highland cattle or flamingoes standing in lily ponds, the relics of the genteel pursuits of long-dead great-aunts. The children are safe, though, beneath the snowy mosquito nets. By day they sit on the bench below the casement windows and listen in on the latest family drama. They can see for miles down through a paddock that is halfway between rainforest and pasture. This is the graveyard of the rainforest, caught at a stage between that primal Eden and the featureless pastures of the dairy farms around. The stumps, some of them six foot high, now stand in the harsh glare of midsummer, some colonised by strangler figs and passion vines. Inkberries and cape gooseberries flourish along with stinging nettles and Patersonâs curse, lush green grass and arrogant weeds. Aunty Millie cries Sookie, Sookie, Sookie and bangs the bucket and the jersey cow runs to be milked. Granny puts out a saucer of milk for the black snake. Uncle Walter lies in wait, seizes it by the tail when it comes to drink and cracks its head on the tank stand. The children greedily eat peach pie swamped in yellow cream, or steal biscuits from the biscuit tin with the Rosella parrot on the side behind the kitchen door.
A young man comes up on a tall chestnut horse and ties it to the garden rail where it stamps and sweats and flicks the flies away. This is Uncle Bob, a veteran
This household not only exists in the present, it is continuous with the past, like a ship that sails through time with its living freight, its totem objects and its family lore. We are shown the round table, its top pit-sawn from one slab of red cedar by our Grannyâs uncle Oliver Jones, a famous shipwright at Coraki (it is now in a museum). There are the bedspreads crocheted by her mother from heavy cream cotton, the patterns (for instance the âwheatsheafâ) centuries old, and the tinted portraits of her family behind convex glass in heavy oval frames. More important perhaps is the intangible past, the stories brought from Ireland by her husband: of an ancestor who married the daughter of the Bishop of Londonderry during the siege; from these illustrious loins (that is the Bishopâs) we are descended and must never forget it; or of the distant relationship to those heroines of the Irish resistance, Eva Gore-Booth and Constance Markiewitz (good Protestant girls, according to our Granny, and certainly no revolutionaries).
There are stories too of the more immediate past: of coming as a young and gently reared bride to the Keerrong valley, then clothed to the tops of the hills with the impenetrable rainforest; of carrying the washtub down to the creek each afternoon to wash the clothes in the sweet water beneath the wild cherry trees; of being accosted by wandering Aborigines and disarming them with gifts of food while her little children hid under the bed; or of the terrible day in 1914 when her husband lay dead and her youngest child was not yet born. These stories, true or half-true, are myths of their origins for the listening children, marking them out as special, particular, set apart from the ordinary people of the race. Fifteen years ago, in Ireland, I was able to verify the connection with the Gore-Booths, but the descent is from the Dean of Londonderry not the Bishop â such inflation is typical of family stories.
This house is always busy with the coming and going of family and neighbours; it is redolent with the smells of cooking and alive with contending emotions, for life here is lived at a passionate level of affection, gossip, recrimination, indignation and reconciliation. The peach trees come right up to the kitchen window and the scent of honeysuckle and jasmine fills the air. The possums play in the peach trees and come into the roof at night, peeing down through the ceiling. Huntsman spiders scuttle on the ceiling at night, or hide behind the amateurish oil paintings of Highland cattle or flamingoes standing in lily ponds, the relics of the genteel pursuits of long-dead great-aunts. The children are safe, though, beneath the snowy mosquito nets. By day they sit on the bench below the casement windows and listen in on the latest family drama. They can see for miles down through a paddock that is halfway between rainforest and pasture. This is the graveyard of the rainforest, caught at a stage between that primal Eden and the featureless pastures of the dairy farms around. The stumps, some of them six foot high, now stand in the harsh glare of midsummer, some colonised by strangler figs and passion vines. Inkberries and cape gooseberries flourish along with stinging nettles and Patersonâs curse, lush green grass and arrogant weeds. Aunty Millie cries Sookie, Sookie, Sookie and bangs the bucket and the jersey cow runs to be milked. Granny puts out a saucer of milk for the black snake. Uncle Walter lies in wait, seizes it by the tail when it comes to drink and cracks its head on the tank stand. The children greedily eat peach pie swamped in yellow cream, or steal biscuits from the biscuit tin with the Rosella parrot on the side behind the kitchen door.
A young man comes up on a tall chestnut horse and ties it to the garden rail where it stamps and sweats and flicks the flies away. This is Uncle Bob, a veteran