Moving Among Strangers (8 page)

16

Carey was keen to keep driving so we could see White Peak before dark, the sheep station where the Carey family lived and worked for thirty-six years. The property was named after a conical hill of limestone that had been mined for many years, providing masses of limestone for the building of Geraldton harbour. White Peak was still primarily a sheep station, consisting of twenty thousand acres, including fourteen kilometres of coastline. I had tried to call the owner to warn of our visit but there was no answer.

The old homestead was set on a small rise some way from the dirt road that had led us away from the main highway. Although it was clearly inhabited, the place looked deserted. Carey parked and we slipped through the barbed wire fence to get a better view and perhaps seek an audience with the current owner. I was tempted to jump the boundary fence and trespass on those grounds where my father had once walked and played and laboured. I would perhaps understand him better if I could just sit still for a while in his landscape. But both Carey and I were from Protestant stock and schooled in respecting rules and boundaries.

The setting was dry and scrubby, distinctively West Australian: the kind of landscape you might call Stow Country. The house was solid with wide verandahs, built by convicts around 1857 for John Drummond, who had been appointed Police Sub-protector of Natives for the area, which was then known as Champion Bay. Drummond had the first three rooms fortified with iron bars – ‘put there', according to my grandmother, ‘to keep the natives out'. In the back paddock was a long stone wall built by convicts that served no purpose at all: constructed in the searing West Australian heat for the purpose of keeping the men busy.

On either side of the entrance were two palm trees planted by my grandfather to mark the birth of his twin sons. The gardens had once been well established. The homestead was more Australian than the European style of Ellendale but retained the same sense of dry isolation, the surrounding landscape scrubby and monotonous. This would have been a lonely place to grow up. At least in town Stow had neighbours nearby and dozens of cousins to play with. My father, I imagined, would have had few people to talk to outside the immediate family.

In another family, my father might have reminisced about the wind-driven generator, underground water tank (seven above-ground), stables, shearing shed, blacksmith's shop, baker's oven, dam, cow shed, and the room for smoking meat. They kept chickens, ducks and turkeys, horses for riding as well as a draught horse for the plough. His father Henry also maintained two vegetable gardens: one winter and one summer. With the assistance of a maid, his mother Erica cooked and baked and made jams and chutneys. She even churned her own butter. All this, and five children to look after as well.

In another family my father might have sat me down as a child and told me stories about the shearers that came to stay every shearing season, about the limestone quarry nearby where scores of workers' families lived in tents, about the two interned Italians who were locked up at night in a room with barred windows and sang sad Neapolitan love songs. He might have told me that he bought them a monthly four-gallon cask of red wine from Houghton and told them to make it last but that the two sentimental Italians always drank it all in one night. But he didn't tell me anything. Not one single story. I know now that this is because he felt guilty. And, like my sister, my father dealt with difficulties by leaving them unsaid, by censoring, and by rewriting his life narrative in a way that left out pain and grief, conflict and indecision, and anything else that might have helped to make sense of this capable country boy turned tragic urban intellectual.

*

My father rarely spoke of his parents, although I knew he had an uneasy relationship with his mother, a woman committed to upholding Victorian attitudes and values. Henry and Erica were cousins. ‘There were so few people to choose from,' my aunt told me later, that in Western Australia first cousins often married.

Stow had written to me saying that although he didn't really recall my grandmother Erica, he had ‘an impression that the women in my family thought her (or she thought herself) rather a grande dame'. In some ways it seemed that all my father's wild radicalism was aimed at his mother, but that couldn't explain his deep-seated grief and guilt. Until I learnt more of his childhood, I didn't see the possible source of his melancholy.

Erica's firstborn were twins: my father Alexander and his brother Godfrey. But the boys were premature and Godfrey was so small he came home from hospital in a shoe box. Then three girls were born in quick succession: Rachel, June (Carey's mother) and Dawn. Each girl had her own pet kangaroo, galah and puppy. They kept orphaned joeys in a pillowslip behind the door with pink ribbons around their necks to show that they were pets. The boy twins had their own room and played together day and night.

One day in the summer of 1930 they had just returned from a picnic at the beach. It had been a lovely evening, with all five children playing on the shore. The next morning everyone got up except Godfrey.

Erica phoned Geraldton but the family doctor wasn't available. By the time the locum arrived the seizure that had gripped Godfrey during the night was over and he was asleep. The doctor, recently returned from England, had been taught that seizures were caused by too much blood pressure in the head. Bleeding Godfrey would relieve the pressure, he told Erica.

Rachel watched from the crack in the door as her mother held a white porcelain bowl under her brother's wrist, which dripped with blood.

That evening Godfrey died. Erica emerged from the room and made an announcement: ‘Godfrey has turned into an angel.' Then she instructed each of the children to go into the bedroom and kiss him goodbye.

What did this feel like for my seven-year-old father? To kiss goodbye the image of himself, his sibling, his twin and his best friend, with whom he had spent every day of his entire little life?

Godfrey's headstone was ordered: over the inscription they placed a small sculpture of an angel scattering blossom petals. Henry took Alex to the funeral; the girls were not allowed to attend. At the graveside my grandfather sobbed uncontrollably while his oldest friend, Arthur Altorfer, tried to comfort him.

Afterwards at White Peak, Erica would not tolerate displays of emotion. Kathleen, the Irish nanny that the family had employed for five years, was a ‘companion help', which meant she ate in the dining room with the family. When Godfrey died she couldn't stop crying. Even at the table, she cried over dinner. Erica told her to stop.

‘How are we ever to recover if you go on like this?' But Kathleen couldn't stop so she was dismissed.

*

Carey and I climbed back into the Mercedes and drove away from the heat and the dust and a house that had seen so much and could say so little. Carey was clearly pleased to have placed his feet on family ground, the source of so many bedtime stories.

‘Wouldn't it be great if we could find some way of buying it back?' he said.

Family lore told the story of the young Godfrey as the natural inheritor of White Peak.

‘Apparently he was a born naturalist,' said Carey. ‘Even at age seven he knew all the names of the plants on the property.'

And so the story had developed over the years, a myth that if Godfrey had lived, he would have gladly become a farmer and White Peak would have stayed in family hands.

Back on the road, we were going to look for Godfrey's headstone. The Geraldton graveyard had been moved relatively recently; there was a chance the headstone had gone missing – but we found it without much trouble: a small marble block with a plinth on top, where the angel, which had long since fallen off, had once stood.

In Loving Memory of our darling little Godfrey, loved son of H. and E. Carey, died 4
th
Jan, 1930. Suffer little children to come unto me.

Standing before my little uncle's headstone, I wondered how long it took for my father to recover from the death of his twin, a brother who was also his closest friend. Stow once said that what he strived for in his poetry was to capture ‘something like the silent communication that twins sometimes have
'
. Perhaps my father never recovered from the loss of this perfect kindred communication that has no need of language. Perhaps this might explain, in part, his deep sorrow and his final decision.

17

Carey and I were driving back through the outskirts of Perth, when I saw we were about to drive right past my mother's old home in Middle Swan.

‘Look, there's the sign,' I said. The huge Houghton Winery sign signalled the road that led both to the Houghton winery and to Oakover, where Carey and I had played together as children during the summer holidays of 1969. Stow had also spent many a day around the vineyards, even occasionally helping out with the harvest.

One year, I think 1951, I was able to repay your grandfather's hospitality a little: there was a strike of grape-pickers for more pay, and he recruited me and another Guildford boy to help out. There possibly still exists a 1951 Houghton White in which I, and Craig Mackintosh, had a hand.

Stow was sixteen when he was picking grapes for my grandfather, the same age as my son now. At the time, the young writer possibly believed he was destined to be a farmer, like almost all the men he knew.

I remember feeling pleased when I read the letter that Stow could recall my grandfather's hospitality and a little sad that these old-fashioned virtues – hosting and being hospitable – seemed lost to another era. In Sydney we don't host anymore, we network.

Carey turned off down a dirt road past the house of the ‘legendary winemaker' Jack Mann, and on to where we might at least glimpse the Oakover beauty that Stow remembered so well. At Oakover now, there was no hospitality on offer.

As the house came into view several large dogs ran towards us barking aggressively. The place looked deserted. The sky had turned grey and as we looked to see the overarching oak tree we drew breath. It had been cut down to a stump. Carey had kept the engine running. We wouldn't have got out of the car even if we'd been invited for a visit because the dogs were the kind you keep to scare people and we were scared.

I gazed back out the window at the stump of the oak, aghast that anyone could destroy something so beautiful. Stow's description of the Oakover of old came to mind, and the remembrance that he'd been buried under an oak tree in an oak wood. One of his favourite poets, John Clare, had written a famous poem about a felled elm. I was glad my mother and Stow would never see the axed oak of Oakover. The entire property, once a place of ‘wonderful tranquillity and beauty' in this light seemed transmuted into yet another haunted land.

*

On the luxurious grounds of the Houghton winery the final busload of visitors was just leaving. The Houghton homestead, once the home of my great-uncle, has been immaculately renovated, as offices for the winery. The rose gardens, where my mother had first learnt about gardening from her Aunt Mildred, remain beautiful.

The Houghton winery has long been a favourite destination in Swan Valley for locals as well as tourists. Carey had been there many times before, as a child, to play with his cousins, and then as an adult, to visit the cellars.

These days Houghton is a brand, transformed from a family business to a corporate enterprise. There is a car park, picnic tables, a café, tasting rooms and trophies on display. We wandered around looking at Houghton hats and aprons, pens and corkscrews.

*

Many people can recite tales of a lost family fortune, but not so many are reminded of it whenever they're in a bottle shop. The Houghton label always reminds me of the Ferguson family farm, the beautiful acreage that my mother grew up on, and the tradition that decreed that despite being the eldest, as a woman she would never inherit the fruits of all that Scottish Protestant industriousness.

My mother used to tell me that my great-great-grandfather Dr John Ferguson had emigrated from Scotland because the medical profession in Dundee was overcrowded. But of course the story is a lot more complicated than that and the Fergusons' voyage from dreary Dundee to a sun-filled Swan Valley vineyard was long and by no means direct.

My great-great-grandparents John and Isabella already had two children when they decided to emigrate. They may have been encouraged to make their decision after seeing the prospectus for the Western Australian Land Company, a private enterprise initiated by a group of London investors, which offered free passage in exchange for a commitment to stay at least eighteen months. The optimistic prospectus for Australind, south of Perth, showed a detailed plan including a town square, church, a school, stores, a mill and public hall. John Ferguson purchased a land order of one hundred acres.

When the Ferguson family arrived in 1842 there was little more than a forsaken stretch of beach. Another false utopia. They had travelled in the
Trusty
with their two servants, William and Margaret Forrest. The humble Forrests were to become famous when their son grew up to be the fearless explorer Lord John Forrest, leading an expedition in search of the lost Leichhardt twenty-one years after he'd gone missing. Although the valiant Forrest never found any remains of the German explorer, Queen Victoria appreciated his efforts and awarded him the Order of St Michael and St George. The comedy of an English monarch rewarding a Scottish immigrant for failing to find a half-mad German explorer in the deserts of a far-flung colony was something Stow made full use of in
Midnite.

Within two years of the Fergusons arriving, Australind's population of a few hundred people had already started to dwindle. Poor soil, dry summers and wet winters drove them away and little of the planned town was ever developed. John Ferguson struggled to establish wheat crops but, by 1846 the tiny settlement had been largely abandoned and the Western Australian Land Company had gone bust. With a wife and four children to support, Ferguson had only seven acres of grain to harvest. ‘New Holland is a barren place,' bewails the traditional song, sung by Byrne in
Tourmaline.
‘In it grows no grain.'

Fortuitously, the position of Colonial Surgeon became available; Ferguson applied and was awarded the post. The family packed up the failed farm in Australind and moved to Perth, where my great-great-grandfather decided, as many medical men did in those days, to invest in a property for farming. He started with wheat but then turned to grapes, producing his first barrel of wine, twenty-five gallons, in 1859.

‘Look at this, Carey!'

Inside a glass cabinet was the winery's first award: a silver plate with an Order of Merit inscription from the 1880 Great Melbourne Exhibition.

‘Couldn't you keep just
one
thing from our heritage?' I had asked my mother when we had visited Houghton together many years before and she had confessed to donating the last valuable item of her inheritance.

‘I just thought this was where it belonged,' she had said.

Now my cousin and I walked down the steps into the old cellar where the infamous bushranger and escapologist, Moondyne Joe, had been caught drunk by my great-grandfather Charles Ferguson. On the wall was a larger-than-life portrait of his stern Scottish father, John, with his long, wiry beard. The narrow cellar was lined with fragrant barrels and the atmosphere was cool and damp. During my two Christmas holidays at Oakover as a child, this was where I had retreated on insufferably hot summer days. I hadn't liked the musty smell, but this was the one cool place when even the shade of the oak tree wasn't enough.

I thought back to the letter from Stow about how the Fergusons had struggled during the Depression.

It was a grim time, and a lot of people simply walked off their farms and stations, leaving them to the banks. I should think the Fergusons would have been vulnerable.

Had my mother's family really been at risk of losing Oakover? Was this what sent my poor grandmother to her bed for more than a year and consequently forced my mother to assume full-time caring and home duties at the age of fifteen? I had often heard about Grandfather having a difficult time trying to make a living from selling wine in those days, when people mostly drank spirits. How he travelled from one corner pub to the next in a horse and sulky, sometimes only selling a couple of bottles at each stop. However, I also knew that my mother played tennis, had been schooled at the Church of England Perth College for girls and wore shoes. In other words, she had a comfortable, middle-class upbringing. Surely, if the Fergusons had been close to the brink, she would have gone barefoot like the poor children from the Swan Boys Orphanage whom she saw at church every Sunday. Surely the fact that they owned a huge property, albeit an unprofitable vineyard, put them in a completely different category from those many homeless and unemployed.

(That was another story I had heard many times also – about the men who constantly called at Oakover asking for work. ‘They were always on foot,' my mother told me, ‘and wore a kind of uniform – grey shirt and shorts and boots. I believe they slept with their boots round their necks, for fear of losing them.')

In Joan's very brief attempt at autobiography – a mere three handwritten pages produced under pressure from my brother – she wrote:

My father had a very hard time when we were young. It was the beginning of the Depression and you could sense the battle he was having to survive it. His brothers put him under pressure to sell the vineyard but it was fortunate he resisted this. He had an office and cellar in Perth and had to bring his books home every night and worked late on them.

So Stow was right; indeed, the vineyard that I had always felt slightly bitter about on my mother's behalf – she was the eldest and yet had inherited not a single acre – might have been lost altogether.

Just as the light was fading and rain threatened, Carey and I took a photo of ourselves in the Houghton gardens, behind us the faint arc of rainbow. On the way out I bought half a dozen of the C.W. Ferguson Cabernet Malbec, intending to cellar at least two bottles to hand on to my children.