Read The Road from Coorain for Free Online Page B

the Sydney newspapers, even though they came a week late. My mother read avidly about the rise of fascism in Europe. We heard them discuss when war would break out, and what the conflagration would be like this time. My mother, ever passionate in her opinions, was scathing after listening on the crackling radio to Chamberlain’s speech about “peace in our time.” My father, remembering the Somme and Passchendaele, was less certain. Every evening after we children were sent to bed, they sat, by the fire in winter, or in summers on the veranda, while she told him what she had been reading. My bedroom was close to both, so that I have dim memories of her describing the earliest reports of the persecution of the Jews, of Mussolini’s Blackshirts and their use of castor oil. The most heated discussions concerned the rise of Japan as an industrial power. My mother was an avid reader of Pearl Buck’s novels and had a strong sense from them of international rivalries in our Asian Pacific world. She predicted that after Hitler provoked war in Europe, the Japanese would begin to expand in the Pacific. Such conversations always ended with my father reminding her of the might of the British navy and the impregnability of bases like Singapore. Very shortly we were all gathered around the radio straining to hear Churchill’s great speech after Dunkirk, my mother weeping, my father looking very grave.
    I hero-worshiped my older brother Bob, six years older than I, and the leader of our childhood expeditions. He was tall for his age, blond, with vivid blue eyes. From an early age, he impressedpeople with his sense of composure and unusual emotional and physical energy. When you were with him you
knew
interesting things would happen. He was just enough older than I and our brother, Barry, to be allowed to ride the biggest horses, shoot the best rifles, carry out commissions to do this or that on the place alone. There were enough years between him and me for him to treat me gently as his baby sister, whereas I scuffled and occasionally quarreled with my brother Barry, four years my senior. Of our family, Barry’s was the sunny disposition, and the gentlest of temperaments. Both boys were generous in playing with me, reading to me, entering into my various forms of make-believe. When we were older, both were ready to take me along on the projects I longed to be part of. We rode fences together, often too deep in conversation to pay more than passing attention to the state of the fences. We explored, stopped to climb trees, investigated eagle’s nests, and out of sight of the house, broke the rules against the galloping of horses. As a trio, we were so close to one another that each knew without speech what the other was thinking and feeling.
    Mindful of her own childhood, my mother encouraged a strict equality between us. As I played more with my brothers, I was inclined to run to her when the going got too rough. It was not tolerated. “Don’t come running to me,” she said. “If he hits you, hit him back.” On the next occasion when my brother Barry hit me, I had a cricket bat in my hands. Remembering the injunction, I struck out furiously and broke the two newly grown front teeth, previously part of Barry’s customary sunny smile. My parents were shocked, but my mother kept her part of the bargain. “I told her to do it,” she said. “No one must scold her.” Later, away from the heat of the moment, she explained that she had meant hitting back with one’s fists, not more dangerous weapons.
    I learned to read sitting under the table where my brothers were being taught school. Miss Grant, their governess, a short, stocky young woman of limited imagination, was perpetually attempting to establish what she thought the proper schoolroomdiscipline. Hers was a taxing job. Her young charges were both of energetic and inquiring minds which quickly moved well beyond the store of knowledge she had acquired in her country high