It is notable that our father rarely came with us on these trips. Often, in the early days, he was away flying somewhere, but later he didn’t come because my mother preferred to travel without him. There was a lot of talk on the verandah about Mum’s hasty marriage to the handsome pilot she had met in a bar, and about how, in the intervening years, things had gone so disastrously wrong. I listened to these tales with extra attention. My father had told me so little about himself, and it was rare to hear from people like Jenny and Ranald who had known him since the start, so I took note, my writer’s instincts already awakened, piecing together, guessing, inventing, trying to figure out what it all meant. My brother and sister preferred to be out on the horses with my cousins, but I was a reluctant rider and happier to sit astride a squatter’s chair scoffing teacakes and soaking up the family legends.
I liked Jenny and Ranald. They were kind and funny. Every morning the giant AGA stove in the kitchen was fired up and spitting by daybreak. Ranald was the breakfast cook, frying up huge quantities of lambs fry, bacon, onions, eggs, first for the working men, who had to be away early, and then for us layabouts, who came to the table still sleepy at eight.
‘Geez, did you ever see such a useless bunch?’ he’d say. ‘Have to get you out cutting fence posts for a day or two. Then you’ll know you’re born.’
We did go out with him some days, setting off in the truck to check a dam or repair a pump somewhere. Jenny would load us up with smoko: lumps of fruit cake, tins full of scones, tea for the billy. On the way, Ranald would talk about the weather or the price of beef, and his fears about the state of the nation. He was a fierce conservative, afraid of the communists, the unions, the Catholics, and he was convinced that the Chinese were intent on sweeping down from the north when nobody was looking. But he was not averse to a debate, and when my mother challenged his views he happily sparred with her as if it was a sport. He was also a lover of poetry and would recite Burns and Tennyson as he worked away sawing timber, or mending gates, his mellifluous voice echoing in the emptiness all around him. It made my mother cry to listen, which was why he did it, I was certain.
‘You should never have gone away,’ he told her. ‘You should have married a good solid bloke from round here and been a plain country wife.’
‘And gone mad, just like Ril did,’ said my mother.
Ril was my grandmother. Back on the verandah, Jenny and Mum talked as much about her as they did about my father, often likening one to the other, as if they were part of the same problem, the suggestion being that my mother had married a man who reminded her of her own mother, and had paid the price. The image I formed of my grandmother, as I listened to them talk, was of a beautiful, haughty, irascible woman, incompetent as a mother, unhappy as a wife, beset by an unrelenting restlessness that saw her crack once or twice under the pressure of it all. Most notoriously, I learned, she had suffered a breakdown during the war and had spent some months in a clinic in Brisbane trying to get better. The cause was pretty clear: a son in the navy somewhere in the Pacific, my mother nursing in Townsville at an army hospital, my mother’s other sister Judy already married at seventeen, and Jenny away at boarding school, no men to help out on the property, her husband out working alone from dawn till dusk, with all the attendant risks. He had come home one evening to find her packing her suitcases at random, stuffing everything she owned into them, the rooms turned upside down.
My father’s nervous breakdown had been less dramatic. I was just old enough to remember him taking to his bed and refusing to get up for days and days. Perhaps I took him up a sandwich occasionally, leaving it on the bedside table for him to eat when he woke up. I seem to remember him always asleep, his hair unwashed, his jowls covered in dark stubble, his sheets stale. Jenny, who was visiting us in Sydney at the time, recalled him sending messages to my mother via a piece of string lowered from his bedroom window to the kitchen below.
‘He’d tie a note on the end,’ she told me, ‘requesting a cup of tea and a biscuit.’
My mother laughed bitterly.
‘I made him an appointment to see a psychiatrist,’ she said, ‘but he refused to go.’
I was fascinated by these problem relatives, my grandmother with her restlessness, and my father with his inability to stay in one place, until his nerves frayed so much he couldn’t move. I couldn’t help wondering how much of them might be in me, and whether cracking under pressure might be a family trait. I also wondered at the source of their fragility, whether it was an inborn hypersensitivity to things, or bred of a justifiable rage at the conditions under which they were forced to live. One of my mother’s theories was that they were both people with enormous untapped potential, who had missed out on a proper education and therefore felt they could never catch up.
‘Interesting that neither of them finished school,’ she said, explaining that my grandmother had been expelled from her Toowoomba boarding school in her final year, and that my father had been thrown out of home and school at the age of fifteen.
‘The war saved him,’ she said. ‘He lied his way into the air force and never looked back.’
As for my grandmother, she married at eighteen and had four children in the space of ten years. ‘Out here,’ said Mum, gesturing at the empty landscape beyond the fence, ‘with no one to talk to. No wonder she went nuts.’
At some point during our visit, my mother’s brother Peter and his wife Jan would telephone with an invitation to visit Beaconsfield for the day. In some ways this was the highlight of the trip, because Beaconsfield was the family home, the place where my mother and her brother and sisters had grown up. And yet we never stayed there. We only ever went for lunch.
‘What’s the bet she feeds us in the kitchen,’ said Mum, as we set out on one of these excursions. ‘Off paper plates.’
I gathered there was no love lost between my mother and her sister-in-law. In a plot worthy of Jane Austen, Peter, as the only son, had inherited Beaconsfield outright, thus dispossessing his sisters of any claim to the place, other than a sentimental one. In this, according to Mum, he was enthusiastically aided and abetted by Jan, who had taken the extra step of suggesting that my grandmother was no longer welcome in her own home.
‘That’s why Ril took that round the world cruise,’ said my mother. ‘She had nowhere else to go. And then she came to stay with us in Ceduna.’
I had only the vaguest recollection of Ceduna, on the South Australian coast. We had moved there briefly when I was four, when Dad landed a job with the Royal Flying Doctor Service. But I did remember the miniature tea set my grandmother had brought me from Hong Kong, and the dress with the gathering at the bodice that scratched in the desert heat. And I had seen the photograph of her descending regally from a DC3, her hair tied in a scarf, her eyes hidden behind enormous sunglasses, her sadness wafting around her like a private cloud.
‘Poor Mum,’ said my mother. ‘She spent her days sitting on the sand staring out to sea. I don’t think I’d ever seen anyone so lost.’
Exile, I decided. That must be the explanation for my mother’s grief. First her own exile from home, going way back to childhood, when she was sent to school in faraway Brisbane at the age of eight, but then later the spectacle of her mother’s banishment from the place where she had lived all of her adult life. And if I cared to go even further back, which other women would I find, displaced, banished, abandoned? Ril’s mother for instance, whom I knew only from stories, holed up in a rambling house in Longreach where she waited hand and foot on Ril’s bachelor brother Frank, in an effort, I imagine, to keep him close. Grandma Cory was the one who was old enough, when my mother knew her as a child, to recall spear attacks on the local squatters and the deadly retributions that followed. Perhaps that was the original grief of anyone who came from out there, from those towns; it was the grief for the exterminated, the poisoned, the diseased and dispossessed. Perhaps no amount of forgetting could fully expunge the memory of the original conquest, the primal crime, gone forever unpunished, because there was nobody left to bear witness or tell the tale.