Roundabout at Bangalow by Shirley Walker Read Free Book Online Page B

pressed-tin ceilings and walls. It’s the third building on the site, for fires, like floods, are depressingly frequent at Billinudgel. It stocks all manner of groceries, newspapers, farm tools, seeds, patent medicines, dress patterns and materials, riding boots, canvas shoes, children’s toys — whatever you need is likely to be found somewhere on a dusty shelf behind the polished cedar counters. In this it’s typical of many a country store at the time. One corner at the front is portioned off as the Billinudgel post office, with a switchboard for the local party line, and a counter from which a young woman sells stamps, dispenses pensions and accepts parcels and mail. These are dispatched on the railway, the universal highway for the carriage of goods and mail, for family visits and outings, and for the letters and journeyings of young lovers.
    I try to imagine my parents as they are when they first meet. I know they are both Australians of at least five generations’ standing. The ancestry that fans out behind them includes convicts, a soldier of the Empire, a cedar-cutter, a gold-miner, a Scottish poet and lay preacher, several Irish girls come from Tipperary to the colony to find husbands, an Irish rebel transported for insurrection (lucky not to have been hanged), and an upright Orangeman from the north. In a sense the history of the colony, with all its faults and triumphs, runs through their veins.
    They have no crisis of identity, for that’s a term invented much later. They are absolutely sure of what it means to be an Australian. They never, ever, refer to England or Ireland or Scotland as Home, for they are completely at home in Australia, in its farmlands, rainforests and beaches. Although, after nearly a century and a half of settlement the rainforest has been almost completely conquered, it never occurs to them that its timber might be cut out or the forest gone forever. Their reading tastes are typical of their time: they read the Bulletin and its female equivalent the Woman’s Mirror, Smith’s Weekly for fun and the Truth for salacious divorces, which cause them great merriment, and one thing they share to the end is a quirky and ribald sense of humour. But these young people about to converge on the post office counter do proceed from different backgrounds, and where they come from is important.
    Eileen Alannah
    I try to imagine my mother’s childhood from the stories she has told me and from my memories of her personality. She is Eileen Alannah, or this is what her father calls her when he bounces her on his knee or swings her up onto his shoulder and sings the old Irish lament ‘Eileen Alannah, Eileen Asthore’. He tells her that Alannah means sweetheart in Irish, and she is his sweetheart. She is the eldest of four girls (a fifth arrives much later) born to a blacksmith at Ulmarra on the Clarence River and his wife, who has been a pupil teacher at Lower Southgate. This child is small, dark and determined. She oscillates between her mother’s kitchen, heavy with the smells of milk and porridge, busy and crowded with her little sisters, and her father’s world, the smithy across the paddock. Here the father, dark, slight and resentful, plucks the horseshoes from the coals with his long-handled tongs, hammers them on the forge with sparks flying, then plunges them, with a satisfying hiss of steam, into the water barrel. This is the Grandfather who later visits us at The Channon, who works on the roads there for the relief, and teaches us to sing of the old rock candy mountains, Where they never change their socks .
    This is a male world, exciting but treacherous. Here the racehorses, hacks and Clydesdales from the surrounding farms are tethered, waiting to be shod, and the talk is all of horses, gambling and male politics. It’s a closed world, mysterious and stirring, and behind it is the Catholicism which links the blacksmith to the men who bring