Roundabout at Bangalow (27 page)

The front of the house faces towards the future, looking across the wide creek to the bright lights of the town, to Tooth's brewery and the Peters ice-cream factory, both of which at this time work night and day, to the railway gates where the Airacobra crashed in 1943, and the railway line on which so many of the AIF went north. Here life is serene. We sit together on the cool verandahs in the dusk, looking at the lights of the town in the distance and he plays the harmonica; not those songs of longing for this home, this farm, which once floated out on the desert wind, but now the hits of the fifties, the jazz and blues he plays so well. The little children in their beds inside are rocked to sleep on the swell of their father's music, in this time, this place, which they imagine will last forever.

The drowned boat

It is June 1956 when we come to the farm on the peninsula and plant our first crop of potatoes. They are ready to dig when the crop in southern Queensland fails and there are suddenly no potatoes on the Sydney markets. Forget pasta, rice and other substitutes; no Australian family at this time could imagine eating an evening meal without potatoes. A dealer from Sydney comes with a semitrailer and takes the lot, paying a fortune for them and joking about needing an armed guard to get the load back to Sydney. This good fortune adds to our euphoria at being able to buy this farm, this family land, but it's one of the few pieces of luck we have during the eleven years we are there.

In good times this farm is the envy of the district; we look out over acre upon acre of lush green corn, fields of potatoes, and fat cattle grazing along the creek- and river-banks. But during these eleven years we have nine floods, three of them in one year. On each occasion we buy fresh seed, maize and seed-potatoes, and re-plant, only to see the crops washed away yet again and our debt at the produce store increase. One of these, the third in that year, is on Christmas Day 1961 when we are marooned in the farmhouse by the floodwater that almost covers the peninsula. We sit down alone to a Christmas dinner prepared for people who can't reach us. At home in a much-loved place and surrounded by heart-stopping beauty, we are steadily going downhill. First I go back teaching then my husband takes a job off-farm, doing the cultivation in the evenings or at the weekend. The flood of 1963, in which we are cut off by the floodwaters that rise above two feet inside the house, is the last straw.

While floods might seem to outsiders to be absolute chaos, the rescue and relief arrangements are relentlessly efficient; after all, the authorities have had lots of practice. When torrential rain sets in an army of amateur and professional experts takes over, using the local radio station to broadcast river heights and issue instructions. The communal adrenalin rises, for a flood is an exhilarating thing which brings out all the ancient soothsayers and water diviners. They can recite the levels and times of every flood since the 1890s and insist on doing so. They can confidently foretell to an inch, they say, the height of the current flood, taking into account the various levels on all the tributaries, the time taken for the waters to converge and hit the city, and even the effect of high tides which will hold the water back. They bend over maps and models in the council chambers, delivering their verdicts with Olympian authority. They never get their feet wet, but at times like this we need them all.

Meanwhile flood levees are strengthened with sandbags and floodgates into local creeks and gullies are closed to dam up the water, to keep it within the river-banks and off the farmlands. The most terrifying moment is late in the flood when, if the river seems likely to over-top them, the floodgates are opened and the water rushes into the valley, swallowing it within hours. Meanwhile a fleet of trucks with volunteer drivers and lifters evacuates the low-lying streets, house by house, carefully removing furniture to church halls, sheds and barns on high ground. This is so well organised that the furniture is seldom even scratched. Some men don't come home for days and are excused by wives who have no idea where they've been, for the carnival mood is abroad and, with such organisation, there's little risk to life. As the water rises the flood boats come out, rowing around the streets, rescuing people and animals, distributing supplies, persuading stubborn and sometimes drunken residents to evacuate and, in general, having a splashing good time. Once a flood has peaked the real fun begins, the pubs put on free beer (sometimes served from their top balconies), the tall stories circulate, the helicopters descend, the cargo cult for flood relief sets in.

Isolated on the peninsula we are outside all this organisation and must fend for ourselves. Our first step when a flood threatens is to get the children out before the water comes over the narrow Washout, the stem of the peninsula, and leave them with friends on high ground. We then move the cattle, the car, the tractor, and the one horse left over from pre-tractor days, a draught mare called Maiden, to one of the few points of high ground on the peninsula. We then sit tight and watch the water's slow rise which, in the eight floods we've been through so far, has only reached one of the lower steps of the house. The 1963 flood is quite different. It comes with so little warning that, by the time we wake one morning after a night of roaring gales and torrential rain, we are cut off at the Washout. Worse still the boat, which is kept moored to a willow tree at the foot of the bank in front of the house, has been swamped and is far down, deep beneath the raging flood waters, swirling and churning on its rope. This is a desperate situation, as the boat will be our only means of escape if the flood comes into the house. My husband strips to his shorts and dives deep down into and under the dark water, finds the boat and somehow drags it, against the current and full of water, to the surface and then up the bank.

In pouring rain all day the water rises and the boat is pulled higher and higher until it's tied to the back steps of the house. The house itself is on the steep bank above the creek and is set on piles five feet above the ground. The predictions are for a height of twenty-one feet, which will be well below the floorboards. The flood stabilises at this height late in the afternoon and, to our great relief, stays there for about an hour. It seems that, once again, the soothsayers have been right. Then without any warning there is a sudden surge and the water begins to rise, ten inches in the first hour, over the floorboards and up the walls. The house is like a sinking ship on a raging sea, a five-mile-wide torrent roaring through the valley and steadily rising inside the house. We must get out through the flood in our rowing boat with three small children, for if a log hits the house it could be swept off its blocks and we would all drown. We manage to lift the most valuable things: the piano onto four kitchen chairs, the refrigerator onto the top of the kitchen table, the washing machine hoisted up onto the laundry tubs. This is done with the strength of desperation.

The nearest dry land is the neighbour's house about five hundred yards downriver and it seems, as we load the children into the boat and make sure they are hanging on tightly, that this will be easy. My husband is a very strong rower and we're both strong swimmers, but we're unprepared for what happens as we push away from the back steps and into the pitch darkness of the flood. The current seizes the boat and swings it around three times. We hit the top of the rotary clothes line, then the macadamia tree, then we're swept away into the raging torrent, just like a cork. He rows desperately across the current, avoiding logs and tree branches, until at last he manages to angle the boat into a stretch of quiet water, then along the lee of a fence and through the tops of the neighbours' corn to the verandah of their house. Here the children are put to bed inside while we camp on a couch on the verandah, eaten by mosquitos and waiting for the dawn, not knowing whether our house will still be there. All this takes place with a rush of adrenalin and we don't quite realise until it is over what a dangerous escape it's been.

This incident, with the father as hero, has become a legend in the family: his strength and determination to retrieve the drowned boat and save his family, and the childrens' certainty that he will deliver them over the dark flood. Years later our daughter recalls it in a story she's writing. She remembers, she says:

…
wonderful gold light on the ripples of a fast black current. We are all sitting on the floor of the boat with my father at the oars. The crowns of trees break from the surface of the water, snagging drowned cattle and corrugated iron. Perhaps there is a bright moon, perhaps my mother is shining a powerful torch out over the water. We skim and pause and skim again. The doors of the house have all been left open, my mother's piano has been raised out of the reach of the water which will soon pour down the hallway and through all the rooms. The water is at the very lip of the door when we step into the boat and settle, for stability, on the floor.

Earlier that night the river rose so quickly that the boat was drowned. My father dived from what was left of the bank, found the prow of the tethered boat and followed the rope down to where it could be released. I think of him, alone and blind in the pull of the black water, dragging himself further down, fist over fist along a rope which would bring us all to shore.

In my memory my father is diving for the drowned boat and I am waiting with the others on my mother's polished floor … We are waiting for the sound of the dipping oars; for the father to prevail against the black current and steady the boat at the lip of the kitchen and reach for us, one by one, as we are confident that he will. He comes at last to settle us in the floor of the boat and he rows calmly across the bright surface of the water and we need not concern ourselves with whatever lies beneath
.

It's the next day and all day long LF shovels mud out of our house, discarding the floor coverings as he goes, while I sluice the floors with buckets of water dipped out of the receding flood and the children flirt with the helicopter hovering above taking photos. They climb on the back fence and wave and wave, then fall in the mud; the little girl splashes through the muddy water dirtying one set of clothes after another. By the time the water gets down to ground level we have the floors clean and drying out but, as this is an autumn flood, it will take a long time. Maiden, the old draught horse, has also been caught by the flood, marooned with the water up to her belly. For two days we watch her standing there, unable to help her, for she's too heavy to tow away using the rowing boat. We hope she'll survive and make her way out as soon as the water drops, but on the third day she's gone, swept away in the dark water. She was the last link with the old ways when a farm like this would need the labour of a team of draught horses as well as a whole family.

Rainforest rules

Although the city of Grafton has been here for more than a hundred years and civilised pasture has in most places supplanted the rainforest, the rules of the forest still prevail. Tall trees like monumental figs will always crowd out the rest. It's obvious in the forest, more subtle in society. The people in this town live in a series of fenced pastures, grazing in apparent contentment, their eyes mostly down, for the pasture is rich. Who wouldn't be content? Yet most people are confined. My father, for instance, can run the AMIEU, the meatworkers union, and sharpen his wits on Sir Earle Page at political meetings in the market square near the clock tower when election time comes around, but he will always retain his
working-class
label, for the class system is rigid. I soon find that I too am confined, contented if I don't think too closely about it, but nevertheless confined.

For a long time, immersed in the life of the farm, in giving birth to a third child and looking after three of them, I don't look over the fence. Later I persuade myself that, but for the floods, I would have been a contented farmer's wife forever, making jams and preserving fruit, sewing at my machine on the wide verandah. In many ways my life is good. I wear stylish clothes made from Vogue patterns, my makeup is carefully applied according to the Helena Rubinstein demonstration organised by the Young Wives Club at the church, and my well-behaved children go to church and Sunday school and do well at school (they'll rebel later). I'm almost a parody of a fifties wife and mother. We are all rebuilding our world after the war and want nothing old in our houses or our lives. Everything is to be new and smart. Many send their cedar furniture to the mart and buy the latest laminex and stainless steel. We paint a
feature wall
in each room of our house and some of us arrange a flight of ceramic wild ducks on it, ascending of course. Most of us go on the pill, but that isn't reported in the church paper. This is an ordered world so long as everyone knows where they belong, yet soon I will begin to look beyond my allotted place.

The hierarchical structures in the city are frozen, or atrophied might be a better word, but the impression is that they're
natural
, ordained by God. A committee of matrons keeps as keen an eye on the blood-lines as do the horse breeders preparing for the July race meeting. The big occasion of the year is the Race Ball, held the evening before the Grafton Cup and organised by a committee of ladies who ensure that only blue-bloods take the floor. In the winter of 1960 we go to all the other balls, as we still love to dance, and the churches and charitable organisations stage large and elaborate balls — the St Andrew's Ball, the Cathedral Ball, the Masonic Ball, the Hospital Ball. We go with a group of friends, some of whom are Main Roads engineers. These are newcomers, unaccustomed to the city's hierarchies, and so are likely to make naive mistakes. When one of these couples receives an invitation to the Race Ball for themselves and two of their guests, they quite naturally invite us. We have a fine time, that is until the next week when our hosts receive a reprimand from the committee.
Guests,
it seems, means
house guests
in town for the races, it doesn't mean locals who haven't been scrutinised by the committee.