Roundabout at Bangalow by Shirley Walker Read Free Book Online

clover flowers, and try to make a chain long enough to reach to the end of the world, while the green and shadowy rainforest inches closer. What is certain is that such a child sits in no-man’s land, looking anxiously from one parent to the other, hoping desperately for a quiet day or a calm night. Yet I knew, even then, that all houses were not like this; that there were homes where a deep and loving calm enveloped all. I do not know what it is to be lovingly held, and I long for attention. When a child at school tells me of the kindness of the nurses when she had her appendix out, I pray for a long time for that to happen to me, and daydream about the loving words and caresses that might come my way if I were ever lucky enough to have what was spoken of then, with great gravity, as an operation .
    When I am eight years old my father becomes even more restless and discontented. He is earning below the basic wage and takes for granted the fringe benefits — home-ownership, his family so close by and so gregarious, the free meat, fruit and vegetables. Here, though he doesn’t realise it, we are in clover. A message comes from a friend who works in the meatworks at Wallangarra. He has secured a place for Dad, at six pounds a week. This figure — six pounds a week — reverberates through the household, in discussion by day and in torrid night-time arguments. Our mother doesn’t want to go, and she at least has done her sums. Despite her opposition the expulsion is effected with unbelievable speed and we leave our rainforest Eden for a barren landscape of grey and tattered gum trees, rabbit burrows and eroded gullies — all for six pounds a week. Our Uncle Tom, just back from New Guinea, arrives to take over Dad’s job. Dad goes immediately to Wallangarra, full of optimism, and we follow, in a furniture truck with the dogs and chooks in the back and a white tarpaulin over the top. We are now on the road and our wanderings over the next three years take us to meatworks at Wallangarra, Byron Bay and South Grafton in quick succession.

T O ACCOUNT for the shadow that hangs over my childhood I need to go much further back than my own first glimpse of the world. The shadow is almost certainly genetic; something which has come down from the twilight of the Druids and seeks out one or two in each generation of my and other Celtic families. It can emerge in all sorts of ways, from habitual discontent to a sense of cosmic injustice: the feeling that people are just helpless victims of fate. This is what my father means when he says ironically I always was lucky. Thomas Hardy considered this world a blighted star and my father called it, more than once, a barstid of a place. He was convinced that bad luck and injustice dogged every step of his life and he might have been right.
    Whether his troubles were of his own making or whether they were genetic is debatable, but he certainly had his share of what might be called adverse life events. Exploring a genetic link to depression psychiatrists have found that, just as depression runs in families, so do adverse life events:
    Bad luck runs in families because it’s in your genes … You can stop blaming your stars or that mirror you broke. If everything you do is dogged by misfortune you’ve probably inherited a tendency to mess up your life.
    Sydney Morning Herald, 25 January 1998, p.41.
    This suggests that my parents, constituted as they were, had no choice in the disaster that was their marriage. Their story begins when they met over the post office counter in the general store at Billinudgel and fell headlong into love.
    Location is important; all my North Coast places are spectacularly beautiful — the cradle, one would think, of tranquil thoughts and loving deeds. Unfortunately this doesn’t always follow. My parents met at Christmas 1924 in the village of Billinudgel, a typical small stop on the North Coast railway between Casino and