The View From Connor's Hill (7 page)

The driver would drop us off at Selby's store, just a five-minute walk from Nan's along a narrow, dusty roadway. They lived in a tiny miner's cottage perched on the side of a hill. Their block was at least two acres, and one side of the property bordered the bush. The bellbirds sang their normal rowdy welcome every time we ran along the narrow dirt track to the wooden front gate. After waving to our grandparents on the veranda, the next thing we would notice would be Uncle Jock's garden. It was huge: there were rows of potatoes, and mounds of pumpkins and melons. He must have spent ages in that garden. After rushing through the creaky front gate, we would tear up the narrow path and jump the front steps two at a time, straight into the warm arms of Nana Roy. Sitting on their veranda, they would have been watching us since we'd got off the bus at the store. We always hoped this greeting would be as brief as possible, as we had another agenda on our tiny little minds — feasting on Nan's cooking.

She was a tireless cook, and she would have all the baking tins full with fresh paddy cakes, butterfly cakes, biscuits, and jam drops. It was wonderful — I suppose partly because our mother was never a cook. Meals at home, while always plentiful, were simple, and rarely would a cake or pudding hit the meal table. At Nan's we would pig out on cakes and the like, with every meal except breakfast. Then would come the final treat — a supper of pancakes with treacle and cream. Is there a better way to satisfy the taste buds? We loved the evening. There we all were, around a warm, open fire after tea. Uncle Jock would start to tell yarns in his broad Scottish accent. One of us sat on his knee, and another at his feet or on the arm of the chair. He'd been a soldier during World War I, and he could tell amazing stories, mostly army tales. They were wonderful recollections about the horses, the trip on the ship, the mischief, and pranks that seemed to follow the soldiers wherever they roamed.

Quietly, Nan would put a subtle stop to these seemingly endless adventures by setting up the card table and producing a crib board. Then we boys became spectators to a ritual that happened every night for as long as we visited Nan's. I had no idea about how the game worked. Nevertheless, I recall a chanting of numbers, and matches being moved along a board full of holes. The highlight of the game was watching Nan shuffle and then deal the cards. They would snap in her fingers and float through the air as she dealt. Uncle Jock reckoned she was lightning fast.

Come bedtime, there would be a warm cocoa, another biscuit, and then bed. We slept in the sleep-out on the veranda, beside the small lounge-room.

Uncle Jock used to work Saturday mornings. He would be home by 1.00 p.m. with a packet of Allens barley sugar in his sports-coat pocket. After making us a scrumptious meal of hearty sandwiches, Nan would don her best apron for the kitchen. Saturday was her cake day, and we would be in the care of Uncle Jock. It was always an adventure of some sort, mostly down at the Yarra River, a quick 20-minute walk away. He wouldn't produce the Allens sweets until we were around the corner and out of sight of the house. It was our secret.

Just getting to the river was an adventure. The swampy, lush bush, the odd snake, the trees with their flaky barks, and the dense canopy made it like a walk through a rainforest. Then we would emerge on a sandy bank near a bend in the river.

That first summer, Uncle Jock taught us how to swim in the muddy Yarra River at Warrandyte. It was great fun, and many kids gathered at the local waterhole for a dip. When we returned to Ringwood after those holidays, we would be full of stories of our adventures about the snakes, the flimsy rafts on the river made from bulrush reeds, and the remarkable amount of wildlife in the bush around Warrandyte, particularly the birds.

DURING MY THIRD YEAR
at school, I joined the Cubs. Most of the boys in my grade were in the local pack. We learnt to ‘dib, dib, dib' and ‘dob, dob, dob' together. I gained my first star, to be worn on the Cubs' cap. The star meant that, as a young wolf cub, I now had one eye open.

At the baths, I gained my Herald swimming certificate, which hung proudly in our bedroom. It seemed I was never home; I have little recollection of our house.

Life was an adventure.

I had a mate around the corner called John Gray. We spent time exploring the nearby pine forest and the Ringwood Lake together. By the age of seven, we had started to go to the Saturday-afternoon movies with my older brother and some mates.

The movies, called ‘the matinees', were held in the town hall in the centre of Ringwood. They were a treasure, featuring characters like Superman, Hopalong Cassidy, Roy Rogers, the Lone Ranger, and many others. Every week, there was a serial. If we missed an episode, the kids at the school kept us up to date.

The move to Ringwood was great. My enjoyable memories of Smith Street, Collingwood, soon faded now that we had more freedom, choices of entertainment, good grandparents, bigger meals, and then, of course, school. It all seemed to agree with us three boys.

Then, suddenly, our family changed again. First it had been a new father; now I had no older brother. I often asked my mother, many years later, what happened to him. To me, he just seemed to completely disappear. Mum was reluctant to talk about him — I guess it was too painful for her. In years to come, other extended family members spoke about him in glowing terms. They said he was very energetic, had a paper run before school, and other errands as well. However, the one thing they all emphasised was his role as the older brother. Apparently, he devoted a lot of time to being a good eldest brother, and Robbie and I adored him.

Ian was born in 1942. In July 1952, he was killed in a hit-and-run accident one afternoon. He was riding his pushbike home, having just finished his weekend job. It was his pocket money that he would use to take us to the matinees. All I recall about what happened is a phone call that my parents received at a friend's house, telling them the sad news. My Uncle Cliff said there was a very moving funeral down Whitehorse Road in Ringwood. The Boy Scouts and Cubs apparently formed a guard of honour along the road in his memory, yet I remember nothing of it.

For me, something changed. I can't describe exactly what, but even at that young age I sensed that a difference had come over our family. We must have coped somehow by not mentioning his name, or the accident, but I just didn't understand. Perhaps the only way Mum managed was to never talk about him at all. As for me, I remember nothing of my lost brother.

About fourteen months after his death, we left Ringwood, and Melbourne suburbia, for the wilderness. It was just before Christmas 1954 — the year that Queen Elizabeth II visited Victoria. I caught a glimpse of her at the rear of a special train as it moved slowly through Ringwood.

It was another move for us. At first, I thought we were going on a holiday or the like, as Mum said nothing about a move — just about us going on a ‘big trip'. Having travelled little in a motorcar, I thought Warrandyte was a really big trip, but this turned out to be a seven-hour drive from Melbourne. It was a very long day. Robbie and I were in the back of the Chevy ute, so we couldn't ask, ‘Are we there yet?'

The final stretch of the trip from Bairnsdale to Tongio was mainly gravel — dusty, and heavily corrugated. It was dreadful. It was a winding, rumbling trip that, even a decade later, I never mastered. I got carsick every time I went on that road until I finally got my driver's licence.

chapter three

Entering the wilderness

NO MATTER HOW I TRY TO DEPICT IT, I ALWAYS RETURN TO THIS
description: our move to the bush in late 1954 was a shock. Overnight, my world changed to a district 20 times bigger in size than the entire Ringwood area, and 10,000 times bigger than Wilana Street.

We moved to a shire — not a town, a street, or a road, and not really a home, but a district. Every house had a name. For instance, we'd say, ‘That's the Giltrap's joint', or ‘That's the Harding's joint'. Families were ‘bloody Micks', ‘Methos', or ‘Pressies'. Every man of the house had a label: ‘bloody good footballer', ‘top shearer', ‘lazy bugger', ‘womaniser', ‘likes his hops', ‘tight as a fish's arse', and so on.

Compared to the city, where I'd had my family and a couple of schoolmates for company, at Tongio we were completely on our own. Standing on the front veranda of our new house, the only indication that other humans inhabited this open, wide area was a chimney in the distance. Yet, quickly, I realised that the local people all knew one another. It was very different from Ringwood, where even my schoolteacher was a stranger outside the classroom. Who knew where she lived, whether she was a Catholic, or what sport, if any, she played? We may have known our neighbours and a few families who lived in Wilana Street but, outside that small world, I knew no one much. Very quickly, I discovered that in the country it was the complete opposite.

Tongio was in the Omeo Shire, in East Gippsland, Victoria. It was an isolated farming district commonly called ‘the high country'. It turned out that my mother had grown up there as a young child. Swifts Creek was the nearest town from our place, four miles down the road.

This tiny, timber town had a pub, a post office, and a number of shops. The nearest school, in the opposite direction, was at Tongio. It was an hour's walk for Robbie and me. In fact, it was more than a walk; it was like travelling through a war zone. Plovers — very mean-looking birds that, at first, we thought were seagulls — would screech and charge at us when they were breeding. The kids at our new school said these birds had poisonous barbs on their wings, and were capable of slaying us. To avoid them swooping, we would cut across paddocks that contained cattle, sheep, and big bulls. That was really scary.

Being the eldest and expected to lead this expedition, I was petrified. I believed that every bull was a candidate for the ring, and I would try to put a fence between the animals and us whenever possible.

The Tongio school was tiny, like a shed. The country kids viewed us warily — all thirteen of them. They were a tight-knit bunch. One became very inquisitive about my one and only jumper, a Cub jumper with badges that indicated I could swim and had been invested. They had never heard of, or seen, a Cub before. Straight off, the kids viewed us with suspicion.

The teacher was a young man with thick glasses who continually pushed them against the bridge of his nose. More importantly, he used the strap freely. This was different from Ringwood, where no one got the cuts — or no one that I saw. However, after a couple of days attending this tiny, one-roomed school, I could see why the teacher wielded his strap. Two of the boys were a handful, and continually disobeyed his instructions. Their entire time at school seemed to be an endless adventure involving ways to distract the teacher. Their most common prank was to find, and then hide, his strap. Their best effort was a gem.

It was lunchtime. The teacher rang the hand bell and let us out into the playground, or paddock. Raucous laughter replaced giggles when the two boys pointed to the strap, high up, dangling from the top of the flagpole. It had replaced the Australian flag. The teacher's reaction was amazing. Quickly, he rounded us up and marched us back into class. With the large blackboard ruler tapping his open palm, he grilled us collectively. Obviously, he hoped to find the guilty party, but he had no such luck. He then disappeared into the storeroom at the rear of the school for a while. Quickly, he lined us up and, one at a time, we had to march into a narrow passage, where he asked for a confession. Again, he got nothing from us. After another grilling, he disappeared back into the storeroom, fiddled with something for a while, and re-appeared with a most bizarre request. Yet again, we formed a single file. One at a time, he called us into the small room. Once inside, we had to place the palm of our left hand into a bowl that contained a white, milky fluid and had two wires coming from it. The teacher said it was a lie-detector device. Cripes, it took a lot of courage to put my hand in there, I can assure you. However, our schoolmaster must have rigged the thing up the wrong way, as he could detect no culprits.

The whole school went quiet for the remainder of the day. That interrogation method certainly put the wind up us kids. I must admit I admired the fact that none of us owned up. We all knew who had hoisted that damn strap in place of our holy Australian flag.

I've often wondered afterwards what our parents would have thought if we'd told them about the interrogation — I assumed it was a school secret.

Unfortunately for the teacher, the pranks didn't stop. About halfway through my first year at the Tongio school, he bought a new car, a grey Ford Prefect sedan. I guess it was his first car, and he proudly announced his purchase to the school one morning just before the first bell. Lined up outside, we were marched down the steep driveway to admire the vehicle.

Admittedly, a new car was something very special at the time; the only people who drove cars, or new cars, were farmers. We circled it, looking inside as he explained the whiz-bang extras that came with the vehicle. Finally, he showed us the inside.

Back in the classroom, he announced that he would have to go to the township of Swifts Creek at lunchtime, and we would be on our own.

Come recess, I didn't notice anything unusual happen. However, after the lunch bell, the two larrikin boys said we all had to gather around the teacher's car, real quick — to wave him off, or something, they said. The teacher, quite chuffed, started the car up and headed down the road. Admittedly, it was making a sound that I had never heard a car make before — a sort of loud, hissing squeak. Most vehicles I knew made a rumbling sort of noise. About 100 yards down the road, the hiss changed to a loud blurt and then a huge bang. Hell — we all looked at one another. The two boys with the reputation for mischief were giggling. The teacher stopped, got out, scratched his head, pushed his glasses against his nose, looked back at us kids, and then drove off to Swifts Creek. The car sounded like a Harley Davidson motorbike. When he disappeared around the first bend, the story came out.