The Noon Lady of Towitta (5 page)

No one told the true story, it would amount to a confession of ransacking the church. The boy caught in the cruel trap lied to his parents after he hobbled home with his friends, saying he had been caught in a trap laid in a creek bed, not the Lutheran Church. Many such traps were laid about in the countryside for wild dogs and rabbits. Only Mathes and his Uncle Herman knew the truth.

The boys involved stuck to their story of the injury having taken place in a creek bed. The boy's leg had been seriously mutilated and needed emergency treatment from the local doctor. It took months for it to heal and the boy walked with a limp from that time onwards.

This incident was a turning point in Mathes Schippan's life. The church was not vandalised again and other boys kept well away from him, for the real story of how the boy was injured was known among the vandals and their friends. Mathes was eventually once again offered his voluntary job at the church. After the incident, he was given a new kind of respect that he had to live up to. It gave him a sense of being in charge. The boys of the township knew that while he was quiet and kept to himself, he was someone you didn't fool around with. No one took advantage of him again. It was from this time that Mathes' nightmares stopped.

With this new-found confidence, Mathes learned when to throw his weight about and became a bully himself. This period coincided with him suddenly transforming from a puny boy to a big and brutish young man, like many lads who worked the land. With the little spare time he could find, he threw himself into farm work for a local farmer, removing any possibility of meeting other young men his age. He was unconcerned; it was this work that would eventually help him buy his own farm. And wasn't that what every young man working on the land wanted for himself?

When I finished this part of the story Sister Kathleen said, ‘You don't realise how hard it can be for some boys growing up. You hear about boys bullying smaller ones, and after hearing your story I can't help feeling some sympathy for your father.'

‘That may be so. But when you see what he became, you won't have any sympathy left for him.'

‘Oh, Mary. Your father must have had something good about him when your mother married him. Maybe tomorrow or when I have a bit more time you can tell me about them – how they met and what the Towitta house looked like. I have to go now and organise the stripping of the beds in one of the main wards.'

4

When Sister Kathleen left I thought about what I had been told about the time my mother and father married. Johanne was quiet and demure and lived in the same township. She was not known as a beauty, but she was more than a suitable wife for a farmer with prospects. She was of good farming stock, hardworking and had good childbearing hips. There was some muttering in the township because Johanne was more than six years older than Mathes – crueller tongues said it was more like ten. There were those who thought she was well past childbearing age. Mathes married my mother when she was three months short of her thirty-fifth birthday. Like me, she had been a domestic servant. But unlike me, she worked in her position for over ten years for a local doctor in Blumberg. What she may have lacked in looks, she made up for in bearing a brood of seven children.

Some time before Johanne and Mathes were married, he moved down the hill to the drier lands on the Murray River Flats where he bought 150 acres of open flat land on a credit lease. It was 1888, fifteen long years, before he could say the farm was his. I was eleven years old when Father proudly announced he had freehold ownership. Their farm was over a mile from the little township of Towitta, named after the nearby reedy creek. It flowed in winter but its natural springs bubbled just below the surface and could be found in the heat of the summer when the creek was bone dry. The creek was like an oasis in the middle of the bleak red plains. It was full of giant river red gums and mallee trees that were home to flocks of green ring-neck parrots, galahs, magpies and other birds made homeless by the clearing of land to grow wheat and barley.

When Mathes built the farmhouse, he said it was like the thatched house in Germany, only bigger. It couldn't have been much bigger. Even with the extra room tacked onto the kitchen end, the place was still small. Father said he could remember the floor plan and the thick thatch of the house in Germany as though it was yesterday. The first thing he did when he moved onto his land was to knock up a small wooden paling barn while he lived in a tent. He then lived in the barn while building the farmhouse. When he finished the stone structure with its walls more than six inches thick, it was thatched to make a roof a foot thick. Although the house was long and narrow, measuring thirty feet in length when completed, it was barely eleven feet wide. The pantry and storeroom were built onto the house after August was born and when I was about six years old. You could only enter this attached room from outside the house. It was the same length as the kitchen, but narrower. The addition made the entire length of the house forty feet.

Just before the roof was thatched, Mathes married Johanne in Eden Valley and took her back to live in the unroofed farmhouse. Their plans to start married life in the house were ruined when the heavens opened up on the first night and came down in a deluge. Johanne used to say that was an ill omen. Instead of living in the unroofed farmhouse, they had to be content to spend their first few weeks together camping in the barn while the thatching was undertaken between the rain showers by a German thatcher from Sedan.

The farmhouse had no ceilings. It remained open to the rafters and the straw thatch. The rafters, cut from the native pine forest in the foothills, were, as Mathes kept reminding them, ‘of the finest native pine and perfectly straight'. Johanne often muttered how a house was not completed until its ceilings were installed. She never raised enough money from her meagre housekeeping allowance to make the temporary ceilings from calico that she hoped. Most people used calico or hessian cloth to catch the many insects and other creatures that flopped down from the rafters when you least expected it.

The lack of a calico or hessian ceiling caused my sister, Pauline, and me many a fright in the middle of the night. With us already tense after a frightening story, the fall of a large insect, mouse, possum, bat – or even a rat – onto to us in bed periodically caused us to scream in fright.

The front door into the kitchen, that rattled and banged when it was windy, was fastened at night by a large iron bolt but was rarely locked, even though most of us were worried to death at what could come in. When it rattled it took all of mine or Pauline's bravado to climb out of bed and stuff old rags in the gaps to muffle the sounds. This was not before we argued as to whose turn it was to climb out of bed and do it.

The house was white-washed by the brothers. They did this task each spring as soon as the eldest one was old enough to hold a paintbrush. Although the outside walls were built of stone, Mathes had built the house as one big room, adding the internal wattle and daub walls afterwards. The front door opened into the main room that was a third of the size of the main house and combined the kitchen and living room. Off it was mine and Pauline's bedroom, which you had to walk through to reach our parents' room. So there were three rooms in a row, and a small separate room alongside the kitchen that, as I said, was entered from outside and not part of the living area.

Dominating the main room was the oversized whitewashed fireplace and chimney breast made from large stones collected from the paddocks and the nearby creek beds. Big, black iron pots hung down from chains and hooks that were attached inside the chimney. The floors were simply of rock-solid dirt that was buffed up to shine like glass from the continual spillage of animal fats and the blood and tallow that was deliberately poured onto the surface.

Each room had the tiniest of windows. Only three feet high by about eighteen inches wide, each one made up of two panes of glass, one over the other. The windows were hinged at the frame halfway down, dividing the two panes which could revolve on a windy day like a windmill if not properly fastened.

According to Mother, when building, our father had given no thought to the size the house should have been. It seemed to shrink with the arrival of each new baby and as we seven Schippan children grew up and crowded the place. He intended adding another bedroom to the house and buying Mother new pieces of furniture but our growing family and our poor financial state put paid to any good intentions. We shared the same poor state as most of our neighbours.

A shortage of money due to ongoing drought conditions and a new baby every other year or so, meant there were only a few sticks of furniture. For a few years we four older children were crammed into the middle room, while Mother and Father slept in the kitchen-living-room area and the three smallest children, August, Will and Bertha, slept in the furthest room from the kitchen.

The house heated up quickly and was a hot box in the summer but snug and warm in the winter. On the hottest summer nights the family moved outside to sleep under the stars despite being at the mercy of the buzzing, biting mosquitoes. It was after one hot summer night that ended in a sudden downpour, that the brothers took shelter in the small barn. From that night all four brothers slept there. For the rest of the family, it was a blessed relief. Mother and Father with Bertha claimed the farthest room as their bedroom while Pauline and I slept in the middle room.

Towitta was a windy, bleak township with its howling, moaning and sighs that constantly brought to my mind old Wendish witches slinking about, clawing their way through the gaps between door and window crevices, bringing with them red dust. So deep was it at times that the women spent hours shovelling it outdoors. The contents of drawers and cupboards were often taken outside and shaken free of the curse of the red dust. Even in those rare periods when there wasn't a breath of wind for weeks at a time, the dust still crept in.

The dogged determination of local farmers around Towitta to clear the land of anything that didn't resemble a wheat or barley stalk saw much of the dense mallee landscape vanish. I believed this was why there was so much dust. Local farmers were stubborn and refused to believe this, defiantly continuing to clear the land for crops. The mallee roots from the piles of dead trees were the perfect fuel during the winter. And Father built several stock paddocks with walls made entirely of mallee roots. So the wood had its uses, but the chronic dust problem made me realise how more pleasant it might have been had more of the old mallee scrub been left growing to anchor the soil, as windbreaks and for shade for the grazing stock.

The years of living in such a lonely place sharpened my nose to the changing scents of the breezes throughout the year. In the summer the hint of eucalyptus would reach me as the wind blew down from the hilly wooded areas around Mount Pleasant. Towards the end of winter the scent of the canary yellow wattles wafted in. After I met Gustave, a waft of heady wattles took me back to our private times together. The smells of winter included farmyard smells of pigs and sheep, and sometimes wet ripe manure after a rare rain. On even rarer occasions the eerie fog that settled over the River Murray miles away, reached us cold and dank. The river swamps, our grandparents recalled, smelled like the bottom of a German village pond.

At Towitta you could smell rain twenty minutes before it arrived for the air would have a strong spicy fragrance of damp earth mixed with flower smells. This always gave me time to run and pull clothes from the clothes line made of barbed wire stretched between two native pine poles. Father made it this way because he thought the strongest winds could not blow away clothes secured to the barbs. However, if the wind hadn't managed to blow all the clothes off the line they were often ruined by the barbarous spikes. When they were blown away countless hours were spent searching the paddocks for the missing clothes that we could not afford to lose. Sometimes after a big blow they were never seen again.

Sometimes when I was hanging out the washing or feeding poultry, a whiff of some far-off scent such as sandalwood would fill the air as the wind blew. I often wondered where some of the scents had blown from, and closed my eyes and wished I could be there, anywhere as long as it was as far away from Towitta and Father as possible.

After the remains of our family moved to Light's Pass I often sat in a field of waving grass or corn, remembering the times I saw the sea when I lived in Adelaide. Even now in the bleak confines of the Consumptive Home I often dream of seeing the sparkle on the sea in the way that I first saw it one early spring morning. It glinted like silver paper and the salty smell was strong on that Sunday morning when Rebekah, the friend I worked with, and I took the train to Semaphore. In the spring when the meadow grass is at its longest, I would sit on a small hill at Light's Pass and watch it waving in the wind until it became the waves on the sea. That's how I travelled in my mind to the edge of the world and escaped my life.

5

Just after our midday meal the next day, Sister Kathleen rushed in to say she could spend half an hour with me as she was between chores and the matron had gone home early feeling unwell. She took my arm and walked me out to the verandah where we found a sheltered spot away from the breeze that was making sitting outside unpleasant.

‘Sit here, Mary,' she said, patting a cushioned chair. ‘I'll sit over here so I can see what's going on. I may have to suddenly leave you when someone discovers I'm missing. Yesterday you were going to tell me about living in a Wendish home in that lonely place and what made it different from mine.'

You'd have noticed the difference the moment you stepped inside the kitchen of our house. From Aunt Giscelia and Mother, Pauline and I learned about our ancestors – including our adopted grandparents – who came from Upper Saxony in the Fatherland. My father preferred his mother tongue of Wendish, which he spoke at home or when he was in company with his sister, Giscelia, and my grandparents. When Pauline and I stayed with Aunt Giscelia and her family, especially when we were young girls, we would talk solely in this strange language. Like Father, we also told Wendish folktales and sang the songs we knew. Aunt Giscelia had a voice like a songbird and sang solo in church, or at home when they had spinning evenings. We were constantly reminded of our grandfather's loss at sea, because he had been a troubadour with a fine voice before he settled down to a forester's life.