lrrpublic.cli.det.nsw.edu.aulrrpublic.cli.det.nsw.edu.au/.../Web/cgveenglish/docume… · Web viewShop tactics 105. Life lessons 107 ... The last word was hers: ... I think she

Anthology of texts

Introduction 3

The highwayman 4Part one 4Part two 5

The Devon Times - Redcoats slay highwayman 9Friday, April 30, 1784 9

Medical certificate 12

The man from Snowy River 13

Rewriting Paterson 18The person from Snowy River 18

Banjo’s done his dash 20

Sir Patrick Spens 21

Frankie and Johnny 24

All that matters 27

After twenty years 29

Private eye 32

The best thing 35

The strong one 37

The monkey’s paw 38

The shell 48

Evonne Cawley 55

Aborigines in sport 56Major titles of Evonne Goolagong-Cawley 58

4918AK: Anthology 1 OTEN, 2001/629/005/8/2003 P0027511

Evonne… Her life after tennis 60

I can jump puddles 65

My first love 67

Mumshirl gets an MBE 70

King bantam 72

People look at me and say ‘Wow, a policeman in a wheelchair!’ 79

My god it’s a woman 82

Two Christmas stories 83Santa left in a lurch 83An unforgettable Christmas with the ‘biggest pudding of all time’ 83

Melba 85

Aunts up the Cross 88

An American at Uluru 92

On a roll, in this new role 94

Together in death: Sarajevo’s martyred lovers 97

Made and me 99

Positive thinking simply a state of mind 101

The holey dollar 104

Shop tactics 105

Life lessons 107

2 4918AK: Anthology OTEN, 2001/629/005/8/2003 P0027511

Introduction

This anthology has been specially compiled for you as a student of the CGVE course Reading for Pleasure. It contains a variety of reading material, old and new. There are poems, news items, letters, essays, articles, stories.

Some of them are frivolous, others sad. Some are deliciously nonsensical while others are deeply meaningful. You’ll recognise some of them others will be new. You might love some and hate others.

Whatever they are, we hope you will enjoy reading them, not just while you do your course, but also when you go on to other things.


The highwayman

Part oneThe wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees,

The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas,

The road was a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor,

And the highwayman came riding—

Riding—riding—

The highwayman came riding, up to the old inn-door.

He’d a French cocked-hat on his forehead, a bunch of lace at his chin,

A coat of the claret velvet, and breeches of brown doeskin:

They fitted with never a wrinkle; his boots were up to the thigh!

And he rode with a jewelled twinkle,

His pistol butts a-twinkle,

His rapier hilt a-twinkle, under the jewelled sky.

Over the cobbles he clattered and clashed in the dark inn-yard,

And he tapped with his whip on the shutters, but all was locked and barred:

He whistled a tune to the window; and who should be waiting there

But the landlord’s black-eyed daughter,

Bess, the landlord’s daughter

Plaiting a dark red love-knot into her long black hair.


And dark in the dark old inn-yard a stable-wicket creaked

Where Tim, the ostler, listened; his face was white and peaked,

His eyes were hollows of madness, his hair like mouldy hay;

But he loved the landlord’s daughter,

The landlord’s red-lipped daughter:

Dumb as a dog he listened, and he heard the robber say—

‘One kiss, my bonny sweetheart, I’m after a prize tonight,

But I shall be back with the yellow gold before the morning light.

Yet if they press me sharply, and harry me through the day,

Then look for me by moonlight,

Watch for me by moonlight:

I’ll come to thee by moonlight, though Hell should bar the way.’

He rose upright in the stirrups, he scarce could reach her hand;

But she loosened her hair i’ the casement! His face burnt like a brand

As the black cascade of perfume came tumbling over his breast;

And he kissed its waves in the moonlight,

(Oh, sweet black waves in the moonlight)

Then he tugged at his reins in the moonlight, and galloped away to the West.

Part twoHe did not come in the dawning; he did not come at noon;

And out of the tawny sunset, before the rise o’ the moon,

When the road was a gypsy’s ribbon, looping the purple moor,


A red-coat troop came marching—

Marching—marching—

King George’s men came marching, up to the old inn-door.

They said no word to the landlord, they drank his ale instead;

But they gagged his daughter and bound her to the foot of her narrow bed.

Two of them knelt at her casement, with muskets at the side!

There was death at every window;

And Hell at one dark window;

For Bess could see, through her casement, the road that he would ride.

They had tied her up to attention, with many a sniggering jest:

They had bound a musket beside her, with the barrel beneath her breast!

‘Now keep good watch!’ and they kissed her.

She heard the dead man say—

Look for me by moonlight;

Watch for me by moonlight;

I’ll come to thee by moonlight, though Hell should bar the way!

She twisted her hands behind her; but all the knots held good!

She writhed her hands till her fingers were wet with sweat or blood!

They stretched and strained in the darkness, and the hours crawled by like years;

Till, now, on the stroke of midnight,

Cold, on the stroke of midnight,

The tip of one finger touched it! The trigger at least was hers!


The tip of one finger touched it; she strove no more for the rest!

Up, she stood up to attention, with the barrel beneath her breast,

She would not risk their hearing: she would not strive again;

For the road lay bare in the moonlight,

Blank and bare in the moonlight;

And the blood of her veins in the moonlight throbbed to her Love’s refrain.

Tlot-tlot, tlot-tlot! Had they heard it? The horse-hoofs ringing clear-

Tlot-tlot, tlot-tlot, in the distance? Were they deaf that they did not hear?

Down the ribbon of moonlight, over the brow of the hill,

The highwayman came riding,

Riding, riding!

The red-coats looked to their priming! She stood up straight and still!

Tlot-tlot, in the frosty silence! Tlot-tlot in the echoing night!

Nearer he came and nearer! Her face was like a light!

Her eyes grew wide for a moment; she drew one last deep breath,

Then her finger moved in the moonlight,

Her musket shattered the moonlight,

Shattered her breast in the moonlight and warned him-with her death.

He turned; he spurred him westward; he did not know who stood

Bowed with her head o’er the musket, drenched with her own red blood!

Not till the dawn he heard it, and slowly blanched to hear

How Bess, the landlord’s daughter,

The landlord’s black-eyed daughter,

Had watched for her Love in the moonlight; and died in the darkness there.


Back, he spurred like a madman, shrieking a curse to the sky,

With the white road smoking behind him, and his rapier brandished high!

Blood-red were his spurs i’ the golden noon; wine-red was his velvet coat;

When they shot him down on the highway,

Down like a dog on the highway,

And he lay in his blood on the highway, with the bunch of lace at his throat.

* * * * *

And still of a winter’s night, they say, when the wind is in the trees,

When the moon is a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas,

When the road is a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor,

A highwayman comes riding—

Riding—riding—

A highwayman comes riding, up to the old inn-door.

Over the cobbles he clatters and clangs in the dark inn-yard;

And he taps with his whip on the shutters, but all is locked and barred:

He whistles a tune to the window, and who should be waiting there

But the landlord’s black-eyed daughter,

Bess, the landlord’s daughter,

Plaiting a dark red love-knot into her long black hair.

From Alfred Noyes, Collected poems of Alfred Noyes,

William Blackwood and Sons Ltd, 1909, 1913.


The Devon Times - Redcoats slay highwayman

Friday, April 30, 1784

Noon drama after night’s disaster

Devon

Military Headquarters:

A cheer was heard in the Operations Room of Military HQ yesterday evening when news reached that the notorious highwayman John Dalton had been gunned down. For two years the highwayman had terrorised the countryside, eluding every effort of law officers to capture him. Last October the wife of the Lord mayor of London was robbed at gunpoint on the highway. In the Lower House, the Leader of the Opposition tabled a motion of no confidence in Colonel Johnson, who is in charge of law and order in South England. The motion, in part, read, ‘It appears that the combined skills of 1,400 military officers is less than the skill of one bandit.’

Stung by such criticism, Colonel Johnson set up a special task force, named ‘Operation Moonlight’ to capture highwayman John Dalton.

And, by sheer coincidence, last night was full moon when Dalton was almost ambushed.

The secret of Operation Moonlight’s success was the inside information provided by an informer about the highwayman’s movements. The informer, whose identity is a closely guarded secret, is said to be acquainted with the highwayman’s lover, Elizabeth Thorburn, daughter of the owner of Moorhouse Inn.

On Tuesday night the weather was fitful, and strong winds drove dark clouds across the sky. In the patchy moonlight highwayman John Dalton was seen riding over the highway to the Moorhouse Inn. The informer observed that Dalton, with the proceeds of his robberies, was expensively dressed. He wore the latest style of cocked hat, a lace-necked shirt, an expensive red velvet coat, riding breeches of rare doeskin, and soft leather boots that reached up to his thigh. Most striking of all were his jewel inlaid


pistol butts and sword grip. Even in the moonlight the jewels twinkled like stars.

Elizabeth Thorburn was at an upper window, and the informer heard the highwayman tell her that he was after a load of gold bullion, and that he would be back for her before dawn. But just in case he was delayed, he would come the next night by moonlight.

Fortune favoured the informer for the highwayman did not return that night, and the informer was able to get a message across to Colonel Johnson early on Wednesday morning. Thirty hand-picked militia reached the inn before Wednesday night.

Colonel Johnson had ordered that since Elizabeth Thorburn was the highwayman’s accomplice, she should be punished by being made to observe his death. The soldiers therefore tied her up to her bedpost, gagged her and positioned her so that she could look out of the window at the road leading to the inn.

As an additional safety measure, a musket was placed against Elizabeth Thorburn’s body, pointing to her breast.

The highwayman was to be shot by a volley of muskets as soon as he came close.

But even the best laid plans can go astray. The soldiers were all watching the road intently when they heard the sound of a horse’s hoofs. They cocked their muskets, waiting for the highwayman to come over the crest of the hill, when suddenly a loud gunshot sounded behind them. At once the horse’s hoof beats receded at a gallop.

Questioned later, the soldiers said, ‘Elizabeth Thorburn had managed to wriggle out of the ropes that bound her. She pulled the trigger of the musket against her breast, killing herself instantly.’

Once again the highwayman had escaped!

The whole inn was in an uproar. When the landlord found his daughter dead, he suffered a heart attack, and several inn staff immediately rode off to find a doctor. The news of Elizabeth Thorburn’s suicide, and the circumstances surrounding it, spread like wildfire from village to village.

Around midmorning yesterday, Thursday, the dispirited troopers, dressed in their red coats, were marching back to garrison headquarters. Suddenly, at noon, they saw a figure furiously riding towards them. They could scarcely believe their eyes! It was the highwayman charging, with his sword upraised, shrieking curses. He had no chance against 30 muskets. The gunshots riddled him, and he fell on the highway, dying in a pool of his own blood.


An autopsy is to be conducted on the highwayman John Dalton’s body, and his remains are expected to be buried in the public cemetery next week.

Elizabeth Thorburn will be buried in the village churchyard tomorrow.


Medical certificate


The man from Snowy River

There was movement at the station, for the word had passed around

That the colt from old Regret had got away,

And had joined the wild bush horses- he was worth a thousand pound,

So all the cracks had gathered to the fray.

All the tried and noted riders from the stations near and far

Had mustered at the homestead overnight,

For the bushmen love hard riding where the wild bush horses are,

And the stock-horse snuffs the battle with delight.

There was Harrison, who made his pile when Pardon won the cup,

The old man with his hair as white as snow;

But few could ride beside him when his blood was fairly up-

He would go wherever horse and man could go.

And Clancy of the Overflow came down to lend a hand,

No better horseman ever held the reins;

For never horse could throw him while the saddle-girths would stand-

He learnt to ride while droving on the plains.

And one was there, a stripling on a small and weedy beast;

He was something like a racehorse undersized,

With a touch of Timor pony-three parts thoroughbred at least-

And such as are by mountain horsemen prized.


He was hard and tough and wiry-just the sort that won’t say die-

There was courage in his quick impatient tread;

And he bore the badge of gameness in his bright and fiery eye,

And the proud and lofty carriage of his head.

But still so slight and weedy, one would doubt his power to stay,

And the old man said, ‘That horse will never do

For a long and tiring gallop-lad, you’d better stop away,

Those hills are far too rough for such as you.’

So he waited, sad and wistful-only Clancy stood his friend-

‘I think we ought to let him come,’ he said:

‘I warrant he’ll be with us when he’s wanted at the end,

For both his horse and he are mountain bred.

‘He hails from Snowy River, up by Kosciusko’s side,

Where the hills are twice as steep and twice as rough;

Where a horse’s hoofs strike firelight from the flint stones every stride,

The man that holds his own is good enough.

And the Snowy River riders on the mountains make their home,

Where the river runs those giant hills between;

I have seen full many horsemen since I first commenced to roam,

But nowhere yet such horsemen have I seen.’

So he went; they found the horses by the big mimosa clump,

They raced away towards the mountain’s brow,

And the old man gave his orders, ‘Boys, go at them from the jump,

No use to try for fancy riding now.


And, Clancy, you must wheel them, try and wheel them to the right.

Ride boldly, lad, and never fear the spills,

For never yet was rider that could keep the mob in sight,

If once they gain the shelter of those hills.’

So Clancy rode to wheel them-he was racing on the wing

Where the best and boldest riders take their place,

And he raced his stock-horse past them, and he made the ranges ring

With the stockwhip, as he met them face to face.

Then they halted for a moment, while he swung the dreaded lash,

But they saw their well-loved mountain full in view,

And they charged beneath the stockwhip with a sharp and sudden dash,

And off into the mountain scrub they flew.

Then fast the horsemen followed, where the gorges deep and black

Resounded to the thunder of their tread,

And the stockwhips woke the echoes, and they fiercely answered back

From cliffs and crags that beetled overhead.

And upward, ever upward, the wild horses held their way,

Where mountain ash and kurrajong grew wide;

And the old man muttered fiercely, ‘We may bid the mob good day,

No man can hold them down the other side.’

When they reached the mountain’s summit, even Clancy took a pull-

It well might make the boldest hold their breath;

The wild hop scrub grew thickly, and the hidden ground was full

Of wombat holes, and any slip was death.


But the man from Snowy River let the pony have his head,

And he swung his stockwhip round and gave a cheer,

And he raced him down the mountain like a torrent down its bed,

While the others stood and watched in very fear.

He sent the flint-stones flying, but the pony kept his feet,

He cleared the fallen timber in his stride,

And the man from Snowy River never shifted in his seat-

It was grand to see that mountain horseman ride.

Through the stringy barks and saplings, on the rough and broken ground,

Down the hillside at a racing pace he went;

And he never drew the bridle till he landed safe and sound

At the bottom of that terrible descent.

He was right among the horses as they climbed the farther hill,

And the watchers on the mountain, standing mute,

Saw him ply the stockwhip fiercely; he was right among them still,

As he raced across the clearing in pursuit.

Then they lost him for a moment, where two mountain gullies met

In the ranges-but a final glimpse reveals

On a dim and distant hillside the wild horses racing yet,

With the man from Snowy River at their heels.

And he ran them single-handed till their sides were white with foam;

He followed like a bloodhound on their track,

Till they halted, cowed and beaten; then he turned their heads for home,

And alone and unassisted brought them back.


But his hardy mountain pony he could scarcely raise a trot,

He was blood from hip to shoulder from the spur;

But his pluck was still undaunted, and his courage fiery hot,

For never yet was mountain horse a cur.

And down by Kosciusko, where the pine-clad ridges raise

Their torn and rugged battlements on high,

Where the air is clear as crystal, and the white stars fairly blaze

At midnight in the cold and frosty sky,

And where around the Overflow the reed-beds sweep and sway

To the breezes, and the rolling plains are wide,

The Man from Snowy River is a household word today,

And the stockmen tell the story of his ride.

From A B Paterson, Poems of A B Paterson,

Landsdowne Press, 1980.


Rewriting Paterson

The person from Snowy RiverApart from Waltzing Matilda, there is no ballad that lifts the heart of old Australia more than Andrew Barton Paterson’s The Man From Snowy River. Something deep stirs in those who love the bush with the uttering of those first lines:

There was movement at the station, for the word had passed around

That the colt from old Regret had got away.

The poem tells us about our heritage, a country of battlers and supporters of the underdog. It was the tough and wiry rider on the small and weedy beast who made the epic ride in the high country in pursuit of the prized colt. His courage, horsemanship and never-say-die attitude as he raced down the mountainside while the others stopped and watched in very fear could well have been central to our development as a nation. The Man, like Australia, is the story of achievement against the odds.

It is not just a poem about bravery, beauty and living in the bush, but mateship and help. These values have endured-for some-into an era of mobile phones, fast food, surfing the Internet, pay TV, Super League, interactive gambling, and petty parliamentary abuse. Through the hype and rudeness of the so-called Information Age, those old values-dismissed by many-shine like beacons. As another great Australian rough rider and poet, Adam Lindsay Gordon, once put it:

Two things stand like stone

Kindness in another’s trouble

Courage in your own.

But now the dark forces of political correctness are attempting to destroy this great Australian icon. According to historian and special events promoter Dr Jonathan King, who is promoting the 100th anniversary of the ballad, the event has been boycotted by sponsors, film making companies and TV networks because they say The Man From Snowy River is too sexist.

‘One network said it would consider doing something if we changed to The Person From Snowy River and asked me to put in an application that gave


an equal balance to genders so that women were featured in the story along with other minority, ethnic and gay groups.’

But, as Dr King points out, ‘it’s quite impossible to rewrite history to fit in with what’s politically correct’. If the French displayed the same ridiculous zealotry, there would have to be Jean-Joan of Arc, the British would have Mary (Dick) Turpin, and in America, the sheriff hero of High Noon would be played by Susan Sarandon, instead of Gary Cooper.

As Dr King says, you ‘can’t transform The Man From Snowy River into a gay horse rider who’s having an affair with Clancy of the Overflow and that’s why they spend all their time together in the bush. Neither can I say he was a feminist sympathiser helping to promote the women’s movement because you can’t apply politically-correct values from 1995 to 1895.’

It’s all too silly. But the serious side, as Dr King also points out, is that ‘these type of attitudes could cut the poem out of our heritage’. That would be a disaster.

Editorial, The Sun Herald, 1 October 1995, Fairfax Group Limited.


Banjo’s done his dash

The front page story (The Person from Snowy River S-H 1/10) and your editorial were beat-ups.

I suspect that ‘the sponsors, film-making companies and TV network’ were facetiously using the politically correct criteria to waylay yet another tired rehash of this Holy Writ and the earnest Dr Jonathan King’s obsession.

Sure, ‘Banjo’ is revered but we’ve been thrilled and now we’re full up to the neck with him.

These days, our courage and guts to get on with battling injustices, health problems and crime are inspired more by Fred Hollows, workers for the homeless, underprivileged, Dr Chang and other realistic, worthwhile people, not from jingoism and that interminable poem about a self-serving horseman.

Ray Birch, Lismore, Letter to the Editor, The Sun Herald, 15 October 1995, Fairfax Group Limited.


Sir Patrick Spens

The King sits in Dumferling toune

Drinking the blude-reid wine:

‘O whar will I get guid sailor,

To sail this schip of mine.’

1 knight Up and spake an eldern knicht,1

Sat at the kings richt kne:

‘Sir Patrick Spens is the best sailor,

That sails upon the se.’

2 broad The king has written a braid2 letter,

And signd it wi his hand,

And sent it to Sir Patrick Spens,

Was walking on the sand.

The first line that Sir Patrick red,

3 laugh A loud lauch3 lauchèd he;

The next line that Sir Patrick red,

The teir blinded his ee.

4 who ‘O wha4 is this has don this deid,

This ill deid don to me,


To send me out this time o’ the yeir,

To sail upon the se!

‘Mak hast, mak hast, my mirry men all,

Our guid ship sails the morne:’

5 so ‘O say na sae,5 my master deir,

For I feir a deadlie storme.’

‘Late, late yestreen I saw the new moone,

6 old Wi the auld6 moone in hir arme,

And I feir, I feir, my deir master,

That we will cum to harme.’

7 loath O our Scots nobles wer richt laith7

8 cork-heeled shoes To weet their cork-heild schoone;8

9 all Bot lang owre a’9 the play wer playd,

10 above Thair hats they swam aboone.10

O lang, lang may their ladies sit,

Wi thair fans into their hand,

11 ere Or eir11 they se Sir Patrick Spens

Cum sailing to the land.

O lang, lang may the ladies stand,

12 combs Wi thair gold kems12 in their hair,

13 own Waiting for thair ain13 deir lords,

14 more For they’ll se thame na mair.14


15Aberdeen Haf owre, haf owre to Aberdour,15

It’s fiftie fadom deip,

And thair lies guid Sir Patrick Spens,

Wi the Scots lords at his feit.

Anonymous


Frankie and Johnny

Frankie and Johnny were lovers, great God how they could love!

Swore to be true to each other, true as the stars up above.

He was her man, but he done her wrong.

Frankie she was his woman, everybody knows.

She spent her forty dollars for Johnny a suit of clothes.


Frankie and Johnny went walking, Johnny in his brand new suit.

‘O good Lawd,’ said Frankie ‘but don’t my Johnny look cute?’


Frankie went down to the corner, just for a bucket of beer.

Frankie said, ‘Mr. Bartender, has my loving Johnny been here?

He is my man, he wouldn’t do me wrong.’

‘I don’t want to tell you no story, I don’t want to tell you no lie

But your Johnny left here an hour ago with that lousy Nellie Blye.

He is your man, but he’s doing you wrong.’

Frankie went back to the hotel, she didn’t go there for fun,

For under her red kimono she toted a forty-four gun.



Frankie went down to the hotel and looked in the window so high,

And there was her loving Johnny a-loving up Nellie Blye.

He was her man, but he was doing her wrong.

Frankie threw back her kimono, took out that old forty-four.

Root-a-toot-toot, three times she shot, right through the hardwood door.

He was her man, but he was doing her wrong.

Johnny grabbed off his Stetson, crying, ‘O, Frankie don’t shoot!’

Frankie pulled that forty-four, went root-a-toot-toot-toot-toot.


‘Roll me over gently, roll me over slow,

Roll me on my right side, for my left side hurts me so,

I was her man, but I done her wrong.’

With the first shot Johnny staggered, with the second shot he fell;

When the last bullet got him, there was a new man’s face in hell.


‘O bring out your rubber-tired hearses, bring out your rubber-tired hacks;

Gonna take Johnny to the graveyard and ain’t gonna bring him back.

He was my man, but he done me wrong.’

‘O, put me in that dungeon, put me in that cell,


Put me where the northeast wind blows from the southeast corner of hell.

I shot my man, cause he done me wrong!’

Anonymous


All that matters

The twins yelled out from their vantage point at the kitchen window, ‘He’s coming!’

This visitor was special, so very special to her, and she’d unwittingly passed on these emotions to her adorable little daughters. Lovingly she smiled as they rushed to open the door.

The letter had arrived only two days ago and instantly she’d recognised the bold flowing hand. Her hands had trembled as she ripped open the envelope. The letter was brief and to the point. Patrick wanted to call.

She had met Patrick when she was barely 20, long before she’d met Andrew-long before the twins brought such joy into her life. She thought of the Oriana on the crisp April morning when it had docked in Sydney’s beautiful harbour. Jill was travelling with Carol, her best friend, and it was the first time either of them had been out of New Zealand. The pang of homesickness was assuaged by the fact that Carol had a young man meeting them.

‘There he is!’

Jill’s eyes followed Carol’s pointing finger and noticed the tall attractive man standing alongside Alan.

‘Hey,’ her friend said, turning her eyes to Alan’s companion. ‘He’s all right! I didn’t know Alan would bring someone for you.’

‘For me?’ she squeaked.

‘We’ll soon find out,’ Carol said, pushing her way down the gangplank. ‘What have you to complain about? He’s gorgeous!’

During the introductions Jill had blushed furiously when Patrick swept his warm brown eyes over her and smiled.

From that very first meeting they’d been friends and he’d appointed himself her constant companion. Together they went walking, swimming, shopping and dining. It hadn’t taken long to fall in love…


Why did it all go wrong? She would never forget the evening on Coogee beach when her hopes crumbled. They were strolling on the sands and he had been unusually sombre.

She waited for him to talk to her.

When he stopped and turned to face her, she caught her breath. She could see some dark secret lurking in his flashing brown eyes.

She would never forget that moment, when Patrick took her hand and spoke softly. ‘Jill, if I’ve given you the wrong impression, forgive me. I should never have let you believe we had a future together.’

She wondered if an explanation mattered. All that mattered was that Patrick had rejected her.

It was like a dream, only it was no dream. It was cold, hard reality…

Now she could almost feel, once again, the angry wind that whipped around her that night so long ago, as Patrick told why they had no future together. He wanted this career, he’d said. There was no question of her being part of his life.

He wanted to explain further, but she knew all she needed to know-he didn’t want her. And that was all that really mattered.

Six years later she had met Andrew. She was ready to love again, but so that there would be no misunderstandings, she told him of her love for Patrick.

She told him also that she kept in touch with Patrick’s elderly mother and, although she never asked, his mother always mentioned her son, that he was well and enjoying life.

Then the letter had arrived and she felt the old heartache-but she had learned to live without Patrick. Without hesitation she told her husband that Patrick would be calling, and he took the news calmly-just as she knew he would.

After all these years, she was about to see her first love again. Her eyes sought her husband’s, and he gave a little smile. Andrew, her lovable Andrew, father of her beautiful twins, so sure of himself, so sure of her.

Then he was by her side, holding her hand, as the twins threw open the door. She took a calming breath and strode forward to hug the tall, handsome man who stood on her doorstep.

‘Patrick, please come in. I’d like you to meet Andrew and the girls.’ Her smile encompassed all her loved ones. ‘This is Father O’Donnell. This is Patrick.’

Judith Otto, Woman’s Day, 18 September 1995


After twenty years

The policeman on the beat moved up the avenue impressively. The impressiveness was habitual and not for show, for spectators were few. The time was barely 10 o’clock at night, but chilly gusts of wind with a taste of rain in them had well nigh depeopled the streets.

Trying doors as he went, twirling his club with many intricate and artful movements, turning now and then to cast his watchful eye adown the pacific thoroughfare, the officer, with his stalwart form and slight swagger, made a fine picture of a guardian of the peace. The vicinity was one that kept early hours. Now and then you might see the lights of a cigar store or of an all-night lunch counter; but the majority of the doors belonged to business places that had long since been closed.

When about midway of a certain block the policeman suddenly slowed his walk. In the doorway of a darkened hardware store a man leaned, with an unlighted cigar in his mouth. As the policeman walked up to him the man spoke up quickly.

‘It’s all right, officer,’ he said, reassuringly. ‘I’m just waiting for a friend. It’s an appointment made twenty years ago. Sounds a little funny to you, doesn’t it? Well, I’ll explain if you’d like to make certain it’s all right. About that long ago there used to be a restaurant where this store stands-’Big Joe’ Brady’s restaurant.’

‘Until five years ago,’ said the policeman. ‘It was torn down then.’

The man in the doorway struck a match and lit his cigar. The light showed a pale, square-jawed face with keen eyes, and a little white scar near his right eyebrow. His scarfpin was a large diamond, oddly set.

‘Twenty years ago to-night,’ said the man. ‘I dined here at ‘Big Joe’ Brady’s with Jimmy Wells, my best chum, and the finest chap in the world. He and I were raised here in New York, just like two brothers, together. I was eighteen and Jimmy was twenty. The next morning I was to start for the West to make my fortune. You couldn’t have dragged Jimmy out of New York; he thought it was the only place on earth. Well, we agreed that night that we would meet here again exactly twenty years from that date and time, no matter what our conditions might be or from what distance we might have to come. We figured that in twenty years each of us ought to have our destiny worked out and our fortunes made, whatever they were going to be.’


‘It sounds pretty interesting,’ said the policeman. ‘Rather a long time between meets, though, it seems to me. Haven’t you heard from your friend since you left?’

‘Well, yes, for a time we corresponded,’ said the other. ‘But after a year or two we lost track of each other. You see, the West is a pretty big proposition, and I kept hustling around over it pretty lively. But I know Jimmy will meet me here if he’s alive, for he always was the truest, stanchest old chap in the world. He’ll never forget. I came a thousand miles to stand in this door tonight, and it’s worth it if my old partner turns up.’

The waiting man pulled out a handsome watch, the lids of it set with small diamonds.

‘Three minutes to ten,’ he announced. ‘It was exactly ten o’clock when we parted here at the restaurant door.’

‘Did pretty well out West, didn’t you?’ asked the policeman.

‘You bet! I hope Jimmy has done half as well. He was a kind of plodder, though, good fellow as he was. I’ve had to compete with some of the sharpest wits going to get my pile. A man gets in a groove in New York. It takes the West to put a razor-edge on him.’

The policeman twirled his club and took a step or two.

‘I’ll be on my way. Hope your friend comes around all right. Going to call time on him sharp?’

‘I should say not!’ said the other. ‘I’ll give him half an hour at least. If Jimmy is alive on earth he’ll be here by that time. So long, officer.’

‘Good-night, sir,’ said the policeman, passing on along his beat, trying doors as he went.

There was now a fine, cold drizzle falling, and the wind had risen from its uncertain puffs into a steady blow. The few foot passengers astir in that quarter hurried dismally and silently along with coat collars turned high and pocketed hands. And in the door of the hardware store the man who had come a thousand miles to fill an appointment, uncertain almost to absurdity, with the friend of his youth, smoked his cigar and waited.

About twenty minutes he waited, and then a tall man in a long overcoat, with collar turned up to his ears, hurried across from the opposite side of the street. He went directly to the waiting man.

‘Is that you, Bob?’ he asked, doubtfully.

‘Is that you, Jimmy Wells?’ cried the man in the door.

‘Bless my heart!’ exclaimed the new arrival, grasping both the other’s hands with his own. ‘It’s Bob, sure as fate. I was certain I’d find you here if you


were still in existence. Well, well, well!-twenty years is a long time. The old restaurant’s gone, Bob; I wish it had lasted, so we could have had another dinner there. How has the West treated you, old man?’

‘Bully; it has given me everything I asked it for. You’ve changed lots, Jimmy. I never thought you were so tall by two or three inches.’

‘Oh, I grew a bit after I was twenty.’

‘Doing well in New York, Jimmy?’

‘Moderately. I have a position in one of the city departments. Come on, Bob; we’ll go around to a place I know of, and have a good long talk about old times.’

The two men started up the street, arm in arm. The man from the West, his egotism enlarged by success, was beginning to outline the history of his career. The other, submerged in his overcoat, listened with interest.

At the corner stood a drug store, brilliant with electric lights. When they came into this glare each of them turned simultaneously to gaze upon the other’s face.

The man from the West stopped suddenly and released his arm.

‘You’re not Jimmy Wells,’ he snapped. ‘Twenty years is a long time, but not long enough to change a man’s nose from a Roman to a pug.’

‘It sometimes changes a good man into a bad one,’ said the tall man. ‘You’ve been under arrest for ten minutes, ‘Silky’ Bob. Chicago thinks you may have dropped over our way and wires us she wants to have a chat with you. Going quietly, are you? That’s sensible. Now, before we go on to the station here’s a note I was asked to hand you. You may read it here at the window. It’s from Patrolman Wells.’

The man from the West unfolded the little piece of paper handed him. His hand was steady when he began to read, but it trembled a little by the time he had finished. The note was rather short.

Bob: I was at the appointed place on time. When you struck the match to light your cigar I saw it was the face of the man wanted in Chicago. Somehow I couldn’t do it myself, so I went around and got a plain-clothes man to do the job.

‘JIMMY.’

From O. Henry, The four million, Doubleday and Company, Inc.


Private eye

(Illustration: Robert Boesch)

My name’s Malone. I’m a cop. Most people call me Pat because they know I prefer to be alone. So my secretary knew she was taking a chance when she said: ‘Excuse me, but there’s a woman here to see you.’

‘Tell her to take a number like all the others,’ I almost said. But something made me stop. Whether it was the look on my secretary’s face or the sweet fragrance of roses that tickled at my nostrils, I don’t know. But something told me I should see this woman.

‘Send her in, Ingrid,’ I said and leaned back in my chair. When the door swung open, I nearly overbalanced. This girl had more curves than a road through the Swiss Alps. Her tanned legs disappeared under a skirt the colour of a good burgundy and it hugged her hips like a child hugs its


mother on the first day of school. Dark hair cascaded to her shoulders in a mass of soft, silky curls.

As she sat brazenly on the corner of my desk, the scent of roses descended, and I thought of my youth. This dame was pretty special, staring at me with her baby seal eyes. I tried to play it cool and reached for a smoke, but picked up a pen instead.

‘I hear you’re a good detective.’ The voice was like honey flowing over ice-cream: soft, sweet and seductive.

‘Depends on with whom you speak, sweetheart.’ I kept playing it cool despite the lack of a cigarette.

‘I need a good detective.’

‘I’m a cop, lady, not a private investigator. Is there a crime involved?’

‘Well, no. But there’s a reward involved.’

‘Oh?’ I said. ‘And what might that reward be?’

Slowly she rose, the disturbance in the air sending the fragrance of rose petals falling once more, and stood directly in front of me so my attention couldn’t possibly focus on anything except her superb figure.

‘The reward…’ she said, placing her hands on the desk and leaning close to whisper, ‘… is me.’

She dropped something on the desk, then turned to leave. I sat, mesmerised by her every step, until the door closed. I picked up the book of matches she’d left on the desk: Sam’s…

After work I walked through the door into the seedy gloom of Sam’s Gin Joint. There was no sign of her, so I called to the barman. ‘Hey pal, you seen a broad lookin’ like heaven on earth come in here?’

He looked me up and down, then jerked his head towards a rear booth. It was empty, so I slid on to its padded vinyl to wait. It was only a second or two before I saw the note written on the coaster: Supermarket¾ aisle 4, bottom shelf. Buy one. There are many, but you only need the first.

I had no choice but to follow the trail. I went to the supermarket and bought the required item¾a packet of dates¾went home and threw them on the kitchen table. I was tired, hungry and confused. Did I really need this? But she had me hooked, and I needed a shower.

‘There are many, but you only need the first.’ The words drummed forcefully in my brain like the water drummed on the top of my skull. What did it mean?


Back in the kitchen, I stared at the packet and finally opened it. I picked up the first shiny dark date. And then it hit me. I smiled at the simplicity of the puzzle.

At the Sheraton Hotel, I walked into the restaurant. The maitre d’ smiled at me. ‘Good evening, sir. May I help you?’

‘I’m looking for…’

‘You are Mr Malone?’

When I nodded, he explained that there was a message at reception for me and that I was then to return here. At reception I was given the key to a suite and a note: Well done, Detective.

Upon my return to the restaurant, she was watching the door from a secluded corner, looking even more beautiful than she had in my office earlier that day.

‘Good evening, Mr Malone,’ she purred. ‘I see my faith in your detective skills was not unfounded.’

‘Thank you. ‘There are many, but you only need the first.’

It didn’t take me long to realise you meant the first date, Mrs Malone.’

‘I thought you just might have forgotten.’

‘Impossible. I must hand it to you, dear. Your birthday surprises are unsurpassed.’

‘Thank you. It seemed appropriate for a Humphrey Bogart fan like you.’

Kieran Miles, Woman’s Day, 16 October 1995


The best thing

… This conversation takes place at the fruit and vegetable market, Mum checking over every cauliflower.

‘You never act really upset about all this separation business, Mum.’

‘‘Act’ upset?’ She finally chooses the perfect cauliflower and starts pulling a plastic bag around it.

‘You know, floods of tears, screaming. Breaking things.’

‘You’d like that, would you?’ She raises an eyebrow.

‘No, but I sort of… I think I keep waiting for it to happen and

it doesn’t. It’s like you had a game plan for if you and Dad split up all along, and now you’re just going from step to step. Almost enjoying it.

She gives me a smile that’s not a smile. ‘Don’t worry, I’ve been doing my tears-and-screaming routine, just not when you’re around. And as for breaking things, enough’s already been broken, if you ask me. I’m more interested in trying to build things up.’ She crosses the aisle to check through the herbs.

‘I’ve seen a few people split up, and I know the damage it can do. I’m not about to let it ruin my life, or yours.’

‘How could it ruin my life? It’s your relationship.’ I know that’s not what I want to say, but I want to reassure her somehow.

She puts a thick bunch of rosemary sprigs into a bag. ‘Don’t be daft. he’s your father. We had a family. Now it’s-it’s not gone, it’s just… rearranged, fragmented? No, let’s not fool ourselves. It is gone. What it was is gone. Nobody’s quite the same person now.’ Her hand comes to rest among the celery stalks.

I stand there with the trolley, not moving, hearing her speak

my thoughts, my fear.

‘You seem the same,’ I say, ‘only happier. More lively.’

‘Well, those are big differences, I guess.’ She smiles at me, then picks up a bunch of celery, weighing and turning it in her hands. ‘I mean, not that I


was unhappy before, but I certainly feel better about myself after all this than I did before. I just don’t want you to think you can’t trust anyone, or any relationship. No, it’s any man, I’m thinking about. Your dad’s your dad; he’s just one person.

‘That sounds like a contradiction to me.’ I nudge the trolley forward and we move along the aisle. ‘Fathers can’t ever be just one person-like, any old person-like, well, having it off with your mum’s best friend, it’s… it’s so insulting, like somehow they’ve just forgotten they’re your father. Fathers don’t do that kind of thing, if they’re doing their job properly.’

Mum smiles sadly. ‘Nor do husbands, you’d have thought. But it’s not just him.’

‘No, it’s Ricky, parading around our house in skimpy clothes and no bra-’

‘I was going to say…’ She waits for me to cool down. ‘Maybe I wasn’t working all that hard on my relationship with your dad. Maybe with that, and with you getting to the age where of course you’d look beyond the family for stimulation, he felt that our family hardly existed anyway.’

‘Well, he should have told us, then, if he wanted us to lift our game.’

‘And we would’ve said, ‘Sure, Dad, no worries’, without taking offence?’

We look at each other. Our guilty laughter brims and spills over.

‘See?’ says Mum. ‘You look at it one way and he’s the devil incarnate. Another, and the poor guy didn’t have a chance, living with two stubborn cows like us. Oh, I don’t know.’ She starts picking over the green capsicums. ‘We all got a bit smug, I think. Tried to ignore the big changes. In you, him, all of us. We just sat there while the ol’ lemonade went flat, doing nothing. Who wouldn’t want out?’

‘I still think he should’ve tried.’

‘Maybe he did. Maybe we didn’t notice.’

I’m disconcerted. ‘You reckon we’re that bad?’

‘It’s not a question of good or bad.’ She puts the bag of capsicums in the trolley. ‘It’s just, I don’t know. Life, human nature- those big things nobody understands. Now go and get in the queue at the deli section. I’ll be with you as soon as I’ve got the cucumbers.’…

From Margo Lanagan, The best thing, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1995.


The strong one

… ‘What’ll I do?’ Jerra asked. ‘If you study.’

‘Look after Sam.’

His eyes narrowed and she saw him let go of Sam. It was only a moment.

‘Me? I can’t.’

‘You what?’

‘I… mean I’m not-’

‘A woman?’ She got his eyes at last. He looked trapped.

‘No, that’s not what I said.’

‘Hell, Jerra.’

He looked away.

She saw him look away.

‘Isn’t it good enough for you, looking after a baby? All that talk!’

He turned back. There was heat in his face. Rachel stood and laughed. And then for a moment she thought he might actually begin to cry.

‘Well, what then?’

‘Can’t you see? I’m scared, that’s all. That I won’t be able to do it properly.’

She pounced on him and drove her teeth into his shoulder. He yelped and Sam fell back onto the bed.

‘How do you think I felt? Eh?’

She lay across him and watched him lie there with his eyes darting. She felt she could burst with anger and tenderness at any moment. A neat moon of welts darkened on his skin.

From Minimum of Two, by Tim Winton, McPhee Gribble, Melbourne, 1987.


The monkey’s paw

Without, the night was cold and wet, but in the small parlour of Lakesnam Villa the blinds were drawn and the fire burned brightly. Father and son were at chess, the former, who possessed ideas about the game involving radical changes, putting his king into such sharp and unnecessary perils that it even provoked comment from the white-haired old lady knitting placidly by the fire.

‘Hark at the wind,’ said Mr. White, who, having seen a fatal mistake after it was too late, was amiably desirous of preventing his son from seeing it.

‘I’m listening,’ said the latter, grimly surveying the board as he stretched out his hand. ‘Check.’

‘I should hardly think that he’d come tonight,’ said his father, with his hand poised over the board.

‘Mate,’ replied the son.

‘That’s the worst of living so far out,’ bawled Mr White, with sudden and unlooked-for violence; ‘of all the beastly, slushy, out-of-the-way places to live in, this is the worst. Pathway’s a bog, and the road’s a torrent. I don’t know what people are thinking about. I suppose because only two houses on the road are let, they think it doesn’t matter.’

‘Never mind, dear,’ said his wife soothingly; ‘perhaps you’ll win the next one.’

Mr. White looked up sharply, just in time to intercept a knowing glance between mother and son. The words died away on his lips, and he hid a guilty grin in his thin grey beard.

‘There he is,’ said Herbert White, as the gate banged to loudly and heavy footsteps came toward the door.

The old man rose with hospitable haste, and opening the door, was heard condoling with the new arrival. The new arrival also condoled with himself, so that Mrs. White said, ‘Tut, tut!’ and coughed gently as her husband entered the room, followed by a tall burly man, beady of eye and rubicund of visage.

‘Sergeant-Major Morris,’ he said, introducing him.


The sergeant-major shook hands, and taking the proffered seat by the fire, watched contentedly while his host got out whisky and tumblers and stood a small copper kettle on the fire.

At the third glass his eyes got brighter, and he began to talk, the little family circle regarding with eager interest this visitor from distant parts, as he squared his broad shoulders in the chair and spoke of strange scenes and doughty deeds, of wars and plagues and strange peoples.

‘Twenty-one years of it,’ said Mr. White, nodding at his wife and son. ‘When he went away he was a slip of a youth in the warehouse. Now look at him.’

‘He don’t look to have taken much harm,’ said Mrs. White politely.

‘I’d like to go to India myself,’ said the old man, ‘just to look round a bit, you know.’

‘Better where you are,’ said the sergeant-major, shaking his head. He put down the empty glass and, sighing softly, shook it again.

‘I should like to see those old temples and fakirs and jugglers,’ said the old man. ‘What was that you started telling me the other day about a monkey’s paw or something, Morris?’

‘Nothing,’ said the soldier hastily. ‘Leastways, nothing worth hearing.’

‘Monkey’s paw?’ said Mrs. White curiously.

‘Well, it’s just a bit of what you might call magic, perhaps,’ said the sergeant-major off-handedly.

His three listeners leaned forward eagerly. The visitor absent-mindedly put his empty glass to his lips and then set it down again. His host filled it for him.

‘To look at,’ said the sergeant-major, fumbling in his pocket, ‘it’s just an ordinary little paw, dried to a mummy.’

He took something out of his pocket and proffered it. Mrs. White drew back with a grimace, but her son, taking it, examined it curiously.

‘And what is there special about it?’ inquired Mr White, as he took it from his son and, having examined it, placed it upon the table.

‘It had a spell put on it by an old fakir,’ said the sergeant-major, ‘a very holy man. He wanted to show that fate ruled people’s lives, and that those who interfered with it did so to their sorrow. He put a spell on it so that three separate men could each have three wishes from it.’

His manner was so impressive that his hearers were conscious that their light laughter jarred somewhat.


‘Well, why don’t you have three, sir?’ said Herbert White cleverly.

The soldier regarded him in the way that middle age is wont to regard presumptuous youth. ‘I have,’ he said quietly, and his blotchy face whitened.

‘And did you really have the three wishes granted?’ asked Mrs. White.

‘I did,’ said the sergeant-major, and his glass tapped against his strong teeth.

‘And has anybody else wished?’ inquired the old lady.

‘The first man had his three wishes, yes,’ was the reply.

‘I don’t know what the first two were, but the third was for death. That’s how I got the paw.’

His tones were so grave that a hush fell upon the group.

‘If you’ve had your three wishes, it’s no good to you now, then, Morris,’ said the old man at last. ‘What do you keep if for?’

The soldier shook his head. ‘Fancy, I suppose,’ he said slowly. ‘I did have some idea of selling it, but I don’t think I will. It has caused enough mischief already. Besides, people won’t buy. They think it’s a fairy tale, some of them, and those who do think anything of it want to try it first and pay me afterward.’

‘If you could have another three wishes,’ said the old man, eyeing him keenly, ‘would you have them?’

‘I don’t know,’ said the other. ‘I don’t know.’

He took the paw, and dangling it between his front finger and thumb, suddenly threw it upon the fire. White, with a slight cry, stooped down and snatched it off.

‘Better let it burn,’ said the soldier solemnly.

‘If you don’t want it, Morris,’ said the old man, ‘give it to me.’

‘I won’t,’ said his friend doggedly. ‘I threw it on the fire. If you keep it, don’t blame me for what happens. Pitch it on the fire again, like a sensible man.’

The other shook his head and examined his new possession closely. ‘How do you do it?’ he inquired.

‘Hold it up in your right hand and wish aloud,’ said the sergeant-major, ‘but I warn you of the consequences.’


‘Sounds like the Arabian Nights,’ said Mrs. White, as she rose and began to set the supper. ‘Don’t you think you might wish for four pairs of hands for me?’

Her husband drew the talisman from his pocket and then all three burst into laughter as the sergeant-major, with a look of alarm on his face, caught him by the arm.

‘If you must wish,’ he said gruffly, ‘wish for something sensible.’

Mr. White dropped it back into his pocket, and placing chairs, motioned his friend to the table. In the business of supper the talisman was partly forgotten, and afterward the three sat listening in an enthralled fashion to a second instalment of the soldier’s adventures in India.

‘If the tale about the monkey paw is not more truthful than those he has been telling us,’ said Herbert, as the door closed behind their guest, just in time for him to catch the last train, ‘we shan’t make much out of it.’

‘Did you give him anything for it, father?’ inquired Mrs. White, regarding her husband closely.

‘A trifle,’ said he, colouring slightly. ‘He didn’t want it, but I make him take it. And he pressed me again to throw it away.’

‘Likely,’ said Herbert, with pretended horror. ‘Why, we’re going to be rich, and famous, and happy. Wish to be an emperor, father, to begin with; then you can’t be henpecked.’

He darted round the table, pursued by the maligned Mrs. White armed with an antimacassar.

Mr. White took the paw from his pocket and eyed it dubiously. ‘I don’t know what to wish for, and that’s a fact,’ he said slowly. ‘It seems to me I’ve got all I want.’

‘If you only cleared the house, you’d be quite happy, wouldn’t you?’ said Herbert, with his hand on his shoulder. ‘Well, wish for two hundred pounds, then; that’ll just do it.’

His father, smiling shamefacedly at his own credulity, held up the talisman, as his son, with a solemn face somewhat marred by a wink at his mother, sat down at the piano and struck a few impressive chords.

‘I wish for two hundred pounds,’ said the old man distinctly.

A fine crash from the piano greeted the words, interrupted by a shuddering cry from the old man. His wife and son ran toward him.

‘It moved,’ he cried, with a glance of disgust at the object as it lay on the floor. ‘As I wished it twisted in my hands like a snake.’


‘Well, I don’t see the money,’ said his son, as he picked it up and placed it on the table, ‘and I bet I never shall.’

‘It must have been your fancy, father,’ said his wife, regarding him anxiously.

He shook his head. ‘Never mind, though; there’s no harm done, but it gave me a shock all the same.’

They sat down by the fire again while the two men finished their pipes. Outside, the wind was higher than ever, and the old man started nervously at the sound of a door banging upstairs. A silence unusual and depressing settled upon all three, which lasted until the old couple rose to retire for the night.

‘I expect you’ll find the cash tied up in a big bag in the middle of your bed,’ said Herbert, as he bade them good night, ‘and something horrible squatting up on top of the wardrobe watching you as you pocket your ill-gotten gains.’

II

In the brightness of the wintry sun next morning as it streamed over the breakfast table Herbert laughed at his fears. There was an air of prosaic wholesomeness about the room which it had lacked on the previous night, and the dirty, shrivelled little paw was pitched on the sideboard with a carelessness which betokened no great belief in its virtues.

‘I suppose all old soldiers are the same,’ said Mrs. White. ‘The idea of our listening to such nonsense! How could wishes be granted in these days? And if they could, how could two hundred pounds hurt you, father?’

‘Might drop on his head from the sky,’ said the frivolous Herbert.

‘Morris said the things happened so naturally,’ said his father, ‘that you might if you so wished attribute it to coincidence.’

‘Well, don’t break into the money before I come back,’ said Herbert, as he rose from the table. ‘I’m afraid it’ll turn you into a mean, avaricious man, and we shall have to disown you.’

His mother laughed, and following him to the door, watched him down the road, and returning to the breakfast table, was very happy at the expense of her husband’s credulity. All of which did not prevent her from scurrying to the door at the postman’s knock, nor prevent her from referring somewhat shortly to retired sergeant-majors of bibulous habits when she found that the post brought a tailor’s bill.

‘Herbert will have some more of his funny remarks, I expect, when he comes home,’ she said, as they sat at dinner.


‘I dare say,’ said Mr. White, pouring himself out some beer; ‘but for all that, the thing moved in my hand; that I’ll swear to.’

‘You thought it did,’ said the old lady soothingly.

‘I say it did,’ replied the other. ‘There was no thought about it; I had just-What’s the matter?’

His wife made no reply. She was watching the mysterious movements of a man outside, who, peering in an undecided fashion at the house, appeared to be trying to make up his mind to enter. In mental connection with the two hundred pounds, she noticed that the stranger was well dressed and wore a silk hat of glossy newness. Three times he paused at the gate, and then walked on again. The fourth time he stood with his hand upon it, and then with sudden resolution flung it open and walked up the path. Mrs. White at the same moment placed her hands behind her, and hurriedly unfastening the strings of her apron, put that useful article of apparel beneath the cushion of her chair.

She brought the stranger, who seemed ill at ease, into the room. He gazed furtively at Mrs. White, and listened in a preoccupied fashion as the old lady apologised for the appearance of the room, and her husband’s coat, a garment which he usually reserved for the garden. She then waited as patiently as her sex would permit for him to broach his business, but he was at first strangely silent.

‘I-was asked to call,’ he said at last, and stooped and picked a piece of cotton from his trousers. ‘I come from Maw and Meggins.’

The old lady started. ‘Is anything the matter?’ she asked breathlessly. ‘Has anything happened to Herbert? What is it? What is it?’

Her husband interposed. ‘There, there, mother,’ he said hastily. ‘Sit down, and don’t jump to conclusions. You’ve not brought bad news, I’m sure, sir,’ and he eyed the other wistfully.

‘I’m sorry-’ began the visitor.

‘Is he hurt?’ demanded the mother.

The visitor bowed in assent. ‘Badly hurt,’ he said quietly, ‘but he is not in any pain.’

‘Oh, thank God!’ said the old woman, clasping her hands. ‘Thank God for that! Thank-.’

She broke off suddenly as the sinister meaning of the assurance dawned upon her and she saw the awful confirmation of her fears in the other’s averted face. She caught her breath, and turning to her slower-witted husband, laid her trembling old hand upon his. There was a long silence.


‘He was caught in the machinery,’ said the visitor at length, in a low voice.

‘Caught in the machinery,’ repeated Mr. White, in a dazed fashion, ‘yes.’

He sat staring blankly out at the window, and taking his wife’s hand between his own, pressed it as he had been wont to do in their old courting days nearly forty years before.

‘He was the only one left to us,’ he said, turning gently to the visitor. ‘It is hard.’

The other coughed, and rising, walked slowly to the window. ‘The firm wished me to convey their sincere sympathy with you in your great loss,’ he said, without looking round. ‘I beg that you will understand I am only their servant and merely obeying orders.’

There was no reply; the old woman’s face was white, her eyes staring, and her breath inaudible; on the husband’s face was a look such as his friend the sergeant might have carried into his first action.

‘I was to say that Maw and Meggins disclaim all responsibility,’ continued the other. ‘They admit no liability at all, but in consideration of your son’s services they wish to present you with a certain sum as compensation.’

Mr. White dropped his wife’s hand, and rising to his feet, gazed with a look of horror at his visitor. His dry lips shaped the words, ‘How much?’

‘Two hundred pounds,’ was the answer.

Unconscious of his wife’s shriek, the old man smiled faintly, put out his hands like a sightless man, and dropped, a senseless heap, to the floor.

III

In the huge new cemetery, some two miles distant, the old people buried their dead, and came back to a house steeped in shadow and silence. It was all over so quickly that at first they could hardly realise it, and remained in a state of expectation as though of something else to happen-something else which was to lighten this load, too heavy for old hearts to bear. But the days passed, and expectation gave place to resignation-the hopeless resignation of the old, sometimes miscalled apathy. Sometimes they hardly exchange a word, for now they had nothing to talk about, and their days were long to weariness.

It was about a week after that the old man, waking suddenly in the night, stretched out his hand and found himself alone. The room was in darkness, and the sound of subdued weeping came from the window. He raised himself in bed and listened.

‘Come back,’ he said tenderly. ‘You will be cold.’

‘It is colder for my son,’ said the old woman, and wept afresh.


The sound of her sobs died away on his ears. The bed was warm, and his eyes heavy with sleep. He dozed fitfully, and then slept until a sudden wild cry from his wife awoke him with a start.

‘The monkey’s paw!’ she cried wildly. ‘The monkey’s paw!’

He started up in alarm. ‘Where? Where is it? What’s the matter?’

She came stumbling across the room toward him. ‘I want it,’ she said quietly. ‘You’ve not destroyed it?’

‘It’s in the parlour, on the bracket,’ he replied, marvelling. ‘Why?’

She cried and laughed together, and bending over, kissed his cheek.

‘I only just thought of it,’ she said hysterically. ‘Why didn’t I think of it before? Why didn’t you think of it?’

‘Think of what?’ he questioned.

‘The other two wishes,’ she replied rapidly. ‘We’ve only had one.’

‘Was not that enough?’ he demanded fiercely.

‘No,’ she cried triumphantly; ‘we’ll have one more. Go down and get it quickly, and wish our boy alive again.’

The man sat up in bed and flung the bedclothes from his quaking limbs. ‘You are mad!’ he cried, aghast.

‘Get it,’ she panted; ‘get it quickly, and wish-Oh, my boy, my boy!’

Her husband struck a match and lit the candle. ‘Get back to bed,’ he said unsteadily. ‘You don’t know what you are saying.’

‘We had the first wish granted,’ said the old woman feverishly; ‘why not the second?’

‘A coincidence,’ stammered the old man.

‘Go and get it and wish,’ cried the old woman, and dragged him toward the door.

He went down in the darkness, and felt his way to the parlour, and then to the mantelpiece. The talisman was in its place, and a horrible fear that the unspoken wish might bring his mutilated son before him ere he could escape from the room seized upon him, and he caught his breath as he found that he had lost the direction of the door. His brow cold with sweat, he felt his way round the table, and groped along the wall until he found himself in the small passage with the unwholesome thing in his hand.

Even his wife’s face seemed changed as he entered the room.


It was white and expectant, and to his fears seemed to have

an unnatural look upon it. He was afraid of her.

‘Wish!’ she cried, in a strong voice.

‘It is foolish and wicked,’ he faltered.

‘Wish!’ repeated his wife.

He raised his hand. ‘I wish my son alive again.’

The talisman fell to the floor, and he regarded it shudderingly. Then he sank trembling into a chair as the old woman, with burning eyes, walked to the window and raised the blind.

He sat until he was chilled with the cold, glancing occasionally at the figure of the old woman peering through the window. The candle end, which had burnt below the rim of the china candlestick, was throwing pulsating shadows on the ceiling and walls, until, with a flicker larger than the rest, it expired. The old man, with an unspeakable sense of relief at the failure of the talisman, crept back to his bed, and a minute or two afterward the old woman came silently and apathetically beside him.

Neither spoke, but both lay silently listening to the ticking of the clock. A stair creaked, and a squeaky mouse scurried noisily through the wall. The darkness was oppressive, and after lying for some time screwing up his courage, the husband took the box of matches, and striking one, went downstairs for a candle.

At the foot of the stairs the match went out, and he paused to strike another, and at the same moment a knock, so quiet and stealthy as to be scarcely audible, sounded on the front door.

The matches fell from his hand. He stood motionless, his breath suspended until the knock was repeated. Then he turned and fled swiftly to his room, and closed the door behind him. A third knock sounded through the house.

‘What’s that?’ cried the old woman, starting up.

‘A rat,’ said the old man, in shaking tones-a rat. It passed me on the stairs.’

His wife sat up in bed listening. A loud knock resounded through the house.

‘It’s Herbert!’ she screamed. ‘It’s Herbert!’

She ran to the door, but her husband was before her, and catching her by the arm, held her tightly.

‘What are you going to do?’ he whispered hoarsely.


‘It’s my boy; it’s Herbert!’ she cried, struggling mechanically. ‘I forgot it was two miles away. What are you holding me for? Let go. I must open the door.’

‘For God’s sake don’t let it in,’ cried the old man, trembling.

‘You’re afraid of your own son,’ she cried, struggling.

‘Let me go. I’m coming, Herbert; I’m coming!’

There was another knock, and another. The old woman with a sudden wrench broke free and ran from the room. Her husband followed to the landing, and called after her appealingly as she hurried downstairs. He heard the chain rattle back and the bottom bolt drawn slowly and stiffly from the socket. Then the old woman’s voice, strained and panting.

‘The bolt,’ she cried loudly. ‘Come down. I can’t reach it.’

But her husband was on his hands and knees groping wildly on the floor in search of the paw. If he could only find it before the thing outside got in. A perfect fusillade of knocks reverberated through the house, and he heard the scraping of a chair as his wife put it down in the passage against the door. He heard the creaking of the bolt as it came slowly back, and at the same moment he found the monkey’s paw, and frantically breathed his third and last wish.

The knocking ceased suddenly, although the echoes of it were still in the house. He heard the chair drawn back and the door opened. A cold wind rushed up the staircase, and a long loud wail of disappointment and misery from his wife gave him courage to run down to her side, and then to the gate beyond. The street lamp flickering opposite shone on a quiet and deserted road.

From Lady of the barge by W. W. Jacobs, Dodd, Mead & Company.


The shell

The green sea swept into the shallows and seethed there like slaking quicklime. It surged over the rocks, tossing up spangles of water like a juggler and catching them deftly again behind. It raced knee-deep through the clefts and crevices, twisted and tortured in a thousand ways, till it swept nuzzling and sucking into the holes at the base of the cliff. The whole reef was a shambles of foam, but it was bright in the sun, bright as a shattered mirror, exuberant and leaping with light.

No wonder the woman on the tiny white beach in the tuck of the cliffs pressed her sunglasses close and puckered the corners of her eyes into creases. Before her, the last wave flung itself forward up the slope of the beach, straining and stretched to the utmost, and then, just failing, slid back slowly like a boy on his stomach slipping backwards down the steep face of a gable roof.

The shell lay in a saucer of rock. It was a green cowrie clean and new, its pink undersides as delicate as human flesh. All round it the rock dropped away sheer or leaned out in an overhang streaked with dripping strands of slime like wet hair. The waves spumed over it, hissing and curling, but the shell tumbled the water off its back or just rocked gently like a bead in the palm of the hand. Its clean gleam caught the woman’s eye as she squinted seawards, and her heart stirred acquisitively. It was something she could wade out for when the tide went back; a way of bringing the sea right into the living room. Just one shell to give artistic balance to her specimen shelf for parties or bridge afternoons with her friends.

Another sea stood up, way out, green and sloping like a railway embankment. It moved forward silently-an immense, mile-long glissade of water coming on inexorably like a sentient thing. The slope steepened, straightened, rose up sheer. And then, almost without warning it suddenly arched, curled over, and pitched down with a thunder that shook the cliffs and set the shallows leaping and seething again. The rocks seemed to shrug and rise, smothered and streaming; and again the outstretched hurl of the last ripples mouthed the sand at her feet.

She drew back the edges of the rug and straightened the gay canvas umbrella. The hamper-case was folded cleverly into a low table, and for the things inside there was shade enough on the rug: thermos and plastic cups, cold meat, and the green and red of lettuce-wrapped tomatoes. Good food and drink, a hot day, and the elemental companionship of the sea. She stood up and waved: ‘Oohoo! Harold! David!’


The sounds were gripped, bruised, swept away by the sea-tumult, but the two figures high on the cliff caught her movement and waved back. They pulled in their fishing lines and came slowly down the steep path, wicker-baskets dangling and bumping from their shoulders as they walked. Nearer, round the cliff buttress, they emerged more clearly. The man was tall and thin, with a moustache and skin too white for a place like this. But the fish scales on his coat shone like sequins, and he walked proudly. The boy was the son of his father-twelve or thirteen years old and as thin as a stick. But he swaggered with his basket, trying to look like a veteran.

‘Any luck?’ The woman held up her hand and crooked its fingertips in the man’s as he sat down.

‘Two nice sweep. Five-pounders, I’d say. And David nearly got a beauty; had him half-way up, but he dropped off.’

The boy made excuses. ‘It’s these hooks! They wouldn’t hold an earthworm if it kicked!’

His father flung back the wicker lid and the blue gleam of the fish suddenly caught the sun. ‘Look!’

‘Oh, lovely, dear! We’ll have one for tea.’

‘Wait and see what we get this afternoon. They’ll be fresher; I’m going down on the bottom ledge.’

‘Do be careful, darling.’

‘I’ve watched it all the morning. Not a wave within six feet of it. And it’s better fishing-you don’t lose so many.’

He sprawled out lazily and took the cup from her hand. ‘Lovely spot! I used to come here when I was a lad.’

The boy chortled. ‘However did you get here then?’ He laughed. A thin, reedy laugh, pale and watery like his eyes.

‘The roads haven’t changed much. But we walked or rode horses down here in those days, instead of trying to use cars.’ He smiled at the memory, even while he kept on munching his lunch.

Two gulls launched themselves from the cliffs and swung above them idly, legs thrust back and wings motionless, cupped and cushioned on air. Then they came in to land, running, and stopped two yards short of them, with a benign expression of unconcern. The boy threw a crust. It fell short, but the gull shuffled in towards him sideways, whipped it up at a thrust, and walked back sedately to safety.

The boy scuffed the sand impatiently with his feet, but his mother sighed and leaned back on her arms. ‘Even the gulls are dignified.’


‘I can’t understand why more people don’t come here,’ the boy said.

‘I’m glad they don’t.’

The man laughed mirthlessly. ‘They will! Port Lincoln’s only twenty miles away.’

‘Painters and poets should come first,’ his wife said with sudden feeling; ‘to see all this before the vandals come, with rifles and bottles.’

The man looked out across the leaping foam, puckering his eyes. ‘There are no seascapes like this east of the Bight. Cape Carnot, Redbanks, Wanna. Giddying cliffs for the climber, and big fish for the liar.’

But the boy was kicking moodily at the sand. I’ve finished, Mum. Can I go for a walk on the headland?’

‘David, dear, can’t you sit still for a second while we finish our lunch?’

‘Can I?’

‘There are some very high cliffs along there. They drop sheer into the sea.’

‘Can I? Please?’

‘No, it’s too dangerous.’

‘Arh-h gosh! Look where we’ve been fishing all the morning… on a little ledge.’

‘But your father was with you then.’

The boy turned to the man, wheedling. ‘Ah-h, can’t I, Dad?’ The man pushed uncomfortably at the sand with the sole of his sandal. ‘Well… just to the top of the headland.’

She felt she’d been let down. ‘Harold!’

‘Let him go, Ethel, if it makes him happy. It’ll only take five minutes, and we’ll be able to watch him all the way.’

The boy dashed off around the curve of the beach, his hair brushed up by the wind. The man and the woman lay idle and silent, looking across the bay to the line of cliffs beyond, where the coast curved round from cape to cape, southwards towards Sleaford and Thistle Island and Cape Catastrophe. Everywhere great columns of white spray rose as if in slow motion, like bunches of lace thrust up in fistfuls from below.

‘It’s never still,’ she said slowly.

‘Looks for all the world like exploding depth-charges. Like some coot rolling them off the cliffs for fun.’


She sniffed. ‘What a comparison! You men!’

‘They make nearly as much noise too. Shake the cliffs. Up on the ledge you can feel them vibrating.’

‘They must bring in some beautiful shells. There’s one in that rock just there, see. I’m going to get it later.’

‘Vanity! Native races use them for money.’

‘What if they do. This is a gift to me from the sea.’

He smiled weakly. ‘I read somewhere that we take too much from the sea and give nothing back.’

‘It always seems to have plenty to spare.’

He laughed. ‘Yes, it can take as well as give. It’s old enough to look after itself.’

She gazed at the great line of breakers, unsmiling. ‘One shipwreck would be worth a million shells.’

‘Perhaps when it feels that the ledger is getting out of balance it just helps itself again.’

She folded the cloth, flicking off the crumbs. He brushed the sand from his arms and stood up. ‘Well, back to the fish!’

‘Don’t be too long, dear,’ she said. ‘We have to leave by four.’

‘Whatever for?’

‘Mrs Harvery’s asked us out to bridge tonight. Remember?’

‘What, again?’ His voice carried his irritation. ‘Fancy having to play bridge in a room with walls… after this.’ He strode off up the path. The boy, who was on his way back from the headland, ran to catch him up.

Back on the clifftops again, he took up his bait box and lines. Then, guiding the boy, he climbed down very carefully to the lowest shelf. ‘Easy now, son! Watch your step here.’ The boy was afraid, but he would never have admitted it to his father. ‘Gosh, it’s steep. You feel as if you’re hanging out over the water.’

‘You are in some places. Don’t look down until we reach the ledge.’

When they got there the boy was surprised to see how big it was- a wide, flat slab of rock jutting out like a balcony, warm as an ovenplate in the afternoon sun. ‘It’s beaut, Dad!’

‘Good spot! I’ve often fished here.’


‘Catch much?’

‘Lovely sweep. Rock cod, of course. Even snapper sometimes.’ They sat down with their backs to the cliff and took out their lines. The boy felt as if he was suspended on a platform over a maelstrom, but his father was an old hand at rock fishing and scarcely raised his head. They baited and threw out, far out. The seething foam hissed round their lines with the speed of a shark’s rush, and they felt the churn and thud of the water in their hands. They were in touch with turmoil, the shock and fear of it surging up to the boy. But for all that, the tug of a big fish was a stronger pull, firm and evenly sustained. It was on the man’s line. He brought it clear of the water, a dark blue sweep dangling perilously above the abyss with the line going straight down into its mouth.

From the beach the woman saw it going up, like a spider devouring its own thread. She waved and shouted, but their senses were numbed by the crash of the surf. The man hauled the fish on to the ledge, twisted it free, and dropped it into the basket. There it flapped for a while under the lid like a spatter of rain on a roof, until it faltered and weakened and slowly died.

He flung his line back into the water in a wide downward arc where a wave caught it and gulped it under again. This time there were no bites. He leaned back against the cliff behind him, loose but quaintly unbending-a young man not yet stiffly old, an old man still vaguely and youthfully supple. The boy fidgeted with his line for a long time, but at last he leaned back too. The shock and thud of the water against the cliff was almost peaceful-a sort of incessant clubbing that numbed and drowsed him by its sheer weight and ceaselessness. He looked up at the cliff edge above him where the tussocky clumps hissed and flickered in the sea-wind, and swivelled his head upwards and around at the noiseless sweep of a kestrel passing over. The man looked up too, gazing beyond the bird into the blue dome of distance beyond. The two of them, man and boy, were peering skywards.

And then, quite suddenly, the sea came and took them. It stood up and plucked them off the ledge swiftly and decisively, like a hand coming up over a shelf for a rag doll. They barely had time to bring their eyes down to it before it stood six feet high on the ledge, clasped them both, and then fell away, sucking and sobbing as it plunged backward the way it had come.

Some strange and elemental cohesion, a momentary coalescing of might forces, suddenly pitched that great wave up beyond its fellows- twenty, thirty feet up out of a regular sea. A few moments later another, and then a third, towered up and roared high against the rock wall, shooting flares of spray over the top-most edge and drenching the bitter salt-white herbage of the cliff top. Then, as if satisfied with its random muscle-flexing, the sea sank back into its rhythms again like a tigress dozing in the sunshine.

Down in the bay the woman sprang back with a vexed cry as the first big wave seethed in low about her, nosing the sand as if sensing prey. It pummelled her feet, tumbled the gay umbrella in its side, and floated her


rug back down the slope of the beach like loot. She ran forward quickly, checked it with her foot, and dragged it to safety, sodden and sand streaked. Then, on an impulse, she turned and looked up at the ledge on the cliff. It was bare. Water was streaming from it in rivulets, in thick sinewy ropes, in feathery wisps-all falling downwards, and slowly dying away.

‘Harold! David!’

Her scream caught a momentary lull between waves and shrilled out over the little bay. She ran up the steep path in a frenzy, stumbling over rocks and hollows.

‘Harold! Harold! David… Oh, David-d-d!’

She reached the cliff top, sobbing and gulping for breath, and rushed forward to stare down on to the ledge. But the last of the huge waves had just come and receded, and the ledge was a slab of clean, dark rock, gleaming like a new tombstone of black marble. It was empty. Only over one corner a single fishing line still ran, bellying out a little and thrumming intermittently in the wind. Two or three glistening drops, shaken clear of it, fell back into the sea like beads.

‘Harold! David-d-d! Oh, my God!’

Two gulls, alarmed by her cries, rose effortlessly and hung above her, above the ledge, above the abyss in ironic dumb-show, their legs thrust back and their pink eyes looking down at her, coldly disinterested. Yet perhaps, in their relentless way, they saw more than she.

‘They always come in threes, them big fellows,’ said the old fisherman from Port Lincoln. ‘And clean out of the blue. You’d have though Harold would have know that, bein’ born here and all.’

The police sergeant walked briskly along the cliffs, saying nothing. It was three hours since a woman, hysterical and incoherent, had collapsed on his doorstep with her story.

‘Here it is,’ said the old man. ‘This’ll be the ledge all right.’ The sergeant looked over cautiously. ‘No hope of recovering the bodies down there.’

‘Not a hope in the world. Not even if we knew where they were. Poor devils.’

‘Horrible way to die.’

The sergeant turned to the two uniformed men with him. ‘Better search along the little beach-just in case.’ The constables turned and walked off down the slope, but the old man spat expressively. ‘Nuh, never find ‘em there, Serg. They’re down below here- if the sharks haven’t got ‘em.’


Down on the beach the two men searched carefully and fruitlessly. Suddenly one of them stopped and pointed. ‘Better gather up that picnic gear, Geoff… umbrella, rug, hamper, books…’

‘Better scout around a bit; it’s probably scattered all over the place.’

The first man searched down along the shore and stopped near a rock exposed by the ebb. ‘Look at this shell,’ he called. ‘It’s a beauty. A green cowrie.’

‘Never mind about shells. Get the rug.’

‘I’m taking it home to my wife. These shells are currency in some countries, you know.’

‘Blood-money! The sea’s buying you off!’ he watched distastefully as the first man reached down and closed his fingers beneath the smooth pink underside of the shell, as delicate as human flesh. And the sea came gurgling gently round his shoes, like a cat rubbing its back against his legs.

From Storm Boy and other stories by Colin Thiele, Rigby, Weldon Publishing.


Evonne Cawley

CAWLEY, Evonne Fay (1951-), tennis player, was born Evonne Goolagong in Barellan, NSW, on 31 July 1951. She was educated at Barellan Public School, Willoughby Girls’ High School and the Metropolitan Business College in Sydney. She started playing tennis when she was seven years old and when she was nine she was discovered by tennis coach Vic Edwards, who took her to Sydney when she was eleven years of age. As her coach, Edwards developed her style and encouraged that dedication to her game that brought her 43 junior titles, at state and interstate levels. She was the first Aboriginal tennis player to represent Australia at international competitions.

In 1970 she made her first overseas tour and won eight Open tournaments. She received world acclaim by winning the Wimbledon singles in 1971 as an unseeded player at the age of 19, the second youngest player in history. Her opponent, Margaret Court, had won the Grand Slam in the previous year. This was the only all Australian final in women’s singles at Wimbledon. Cawley also won the French singles title in 1971 and was runner-up in the Australian. Nine years later, in 1980, Cawley again won the Wimbledon singles title, defeating Chris Evert Lloyd, having previously retired from competitions following the birth of her first child. As well, she won the Australian singles title 1974(6 and 1978, and the Australian doubles title in 1971, 1974(5.

Evonne Cawley has always been one of the most popular tennis players on the international circuit, with her graceful style and considerable charm and calmness on the court. She now lives, with her husband and two children, in South Carolina in the United States. In 1972 she was appointed MBE for her services to sport and an AO in 1982.

From The Australian encyclopaedia, 5th edn, p. 652.


Aborigines in sport

… At the end of the 1960s a young athlete emerged from dusty Barellan, about 85 km from her birthplace, Griffith. Evonne Goolagong is the outstanding ‘dream’ story, the most successful, most revered and most acclaimed Aboriginal sporting figure. Several explanations come to mind. Daughter of a sheep-shearer, she was one of eight children in the only Aboriginal family in Barellan. Evonne did not remember overt discrimination as a child: her family was well respected and considered the ‘model’ Aboriginal family. Her story is literally the rags-to-riches one, with her first tennis dresses fashioned by her mother out of sheets. Early in life she was ‘adopted’ by coach Vic Edwards, who exerted a very powerful influence on her tennis and personal life. Evonne was and is a very handsome person and personality. She came into the limelight at a time when there was a feeling of atonement about Aborigines, and paradoxically, her abstinence from Aboriginal affairs and politics assisted her. There was a good marriage, and she conserved her substantial winnings. Added to this, of course, was a quite magical talent, several unforgettable victories, and a quiet determination to win everything, to overcome that vexed ‘walkabout’ in concentration label-a term she gave the press. Finally, there was the joy she gave the tennis world.

Some consider her record ‘light’ for her talent, but as the results (below) show, she did it all, with the exception of the US singles. World champion at 19-on grass at Wimbledon, on clay in Paris-she was at the top again nine years later, defying injuries, Chris Evert Lloyd, and the critics who couldn’t see a mother winning again after so long a gap.

Evonne was accorded national and worldwide acclaim.

‘$1.5 million in prize money, and a place in the heart of every Australian sports lover’ is the Australian press verdict. Rex Bellamy of The Times wrote: ‘wonderfully gifted… with a swift grace of balanced movement, an instinctive tactical brain, a flexible repertoire of strokes, and an equable temperament’; ‘inspired, imaginative’, her tennis ‘was so beautiful that at times it chilled the blood’. In their book on Wimbledon women, Little and Tingay entitle their Evonne chapter ‘The Joy Maker’: ‘she radiated fun, reminded one of the real values of lawn tennis’; a ‘genius’, ‘she almost gave the impression that she was too nice to win’.

So popular yet so unspoilt, wrote Max Robertson of this ‘happy grace, as instinctive and natural as a gazelle’. There was generous praise from Virginia Wade: ‘Evonne played with a kind of giddy pleasure… she had no


drive for money or power or stardom. She played because she loved it’. ‘She’s still in people’s minds’, ‘memorable’, someone you always wanted to win: ‘there was not a single false thing about her… people just loved her’.

The Americans were somewhat tougher. They probed for comments on her visits to South Africa when that country refused a visa to Arthur Ashe, and on Charles Perkins’s strongly worded jibe that she did not use her prestige on behalf of Aborigines. Other Aboriginal activists felt she was ashamed of her race because she failed to speak out on land rights and racial issues. She told the New York Times there were two reasons for not talking out: busyness with tennis and the fact that she had endured only isolated racist incidents in her life. Thirteen years later she offered this explanation: ‘If I shut out certain things that others saw as obvious, then perhaps it was because in the grand plan of my life, tennis was only a stepping stone. If I hadn’t become a champion, who would listen to me now?’

An insult was a turning point. When she was 16, one of her beaten opponents in a doubles match in Sydney referred to her as a ‘nigger’. Much later, while researching her Aboriginal history, she found that the discrimination against her family had been far greater than she had been told. The second episode was in 1980: an Australian Premier said he hoped that in the Wimbledon final she ‘wouldn’t go walkabout like some old boong’. The last word was hers: ‘all tennis players lose concentration, but since I’m an Aborigine it’s brought up constantly-except when I’m winning!’

She promoted a book on Aboriginal oral history ‘because I’m just sort of proud that I am Aboriginal, and this is the first book I’ve seen that has Aborigines speaking out for themselves…’ Evonne’s first ‘as-told-to’ book is not significant, but in 1993 she published Home!, co-authored with Phil Jarrett. She documents her tennis life, traces her family history, and attempts a portrayal of the Aboriginal experience. As the title of the book suggests, her recent voyage has been a return to the Aboriginality she knew so little about in her youth and in her heyday, as well as a physical return to Australia.


Major titles of Evonne Goolagong-Cawley

1. State Singles

New South Wales 1971-72, 1974, 1975, 1977

Victoria 1971, 1974, 1975, 1976, 1978

Queensland 1970, 1971, 1972, 1974

South Australia 1971-72, 1972-73

West Australia 1972, 1974

2. Australian Hard court Championships

Singles winner 1970, 1971, 1972

3. Australian Championships

Singles runner-up: 1971, 1972, 1973

Singles winner: 1974 bt Chris Evert 7/6, 4/6, 6/0;

1975 bt Martina Navratilova 6/3, 6/2;

1976 bt R Tomanova 6/2, 6/2;

1978 bt Helen Cawley 6/3, 6/0

Women’s doubles: 1974, 1975 won with P Michel;

1976 won with H Gourlay


4. Wimbledon Championships

Singles runner up: 1972 & 1975 to Billie Jean King;

1976 to Chris Evert

Singles winner: 1971 bt Margaret Court 6/4, 6/1;

1980 bt Chris Lloyd 6/1, 7/6

Women’s doubles: 1971 runner-up;

1974 won with M. Michel

5.French Championships

Singles runner-up: 1972 to Billie Jean King

Singles winner: 1971 bt Helen Gourlay 6/3, 7/5

6. U.S. Championships

Singles runner-up: 1973 to Margaret Court;

1974 to Billie Jean King;

1975 & 1976 to Chris Evert

7. Australian Federation Cup Member

In 24 ties, Evonne won 33 of 38 rubbers played.

8. Other Major Titles

Italian Championships: singles winner 1973

South African Championships: singles winner 1977; doubles winner 1971, 1972

Virginia Slims: singles winner 1973, 1974, 1976

From Obstacle race¾Aborigines in sport by Colin Tatz, University of New South Wales Press.


Evonne… Her life after tennis

Long after the last applause, Evonne Cawley is content with her family, her fishing and her roots-and excited about the search for an emerging young tennis star. Gary Lester reports.

Walk into Evonne Goolagong-Cawley’s house and you instantly wonder… where are the tennis trophies? Not a reminder of Wimbledon; not a memento of distant glories; not even an Australian Open trophy.

No pretensions, no big deal. Then again, this is Evonne. Priorities have truly been put into place over the past three or four years. You sense immediately there is new meaning to life for Evonne and her family. And yet it’s not that she doesn’t have a spoil or two lying around, like the medal she received last year from her soccer club, the Noosa Blues. It’s inscribed: Best injured 1994.

Evonne played in the same team as he daughter, Kelly. She was the goalie. ‘Fierce, too,’ she claimed. But she kept injuring her calf muscles. ‘Old age,’ she added. ‘But I love the medal. It’s my pride and joy.’

The other treasure is an Olympic torch she carried for a kilometre or so in Spain on its way to the Barcelona Olympics in 1992. The bearers were allowed to keep the torch they carried, each a replica of the real thing. ‘This stays here because I felt this was such an honour. I wish we had been allowed to run further. I just wanted to keep going,’ she said.

The ‘big’ trophies, the four Australian Open Cups, the two Wimbledon, the French, the other major singles victories, and the runner’s-up trophies, and the doubles trophies… weelllll… ‘they’re in a box downstairs’. Where else?

It’s not that she underplays the significance of her tennis past, and one day the trophies might all be there in a cabinet for all to see. But for Evonne Cawley—wife, mother, proud Aborigine—there is far more to life these days.

Since returning to Australia three years ago, she has been on a long journey, searching for her identity, for her Aboriginality—so distant from the life she and husband Roger staked out in the US.

Her quest for truth had lain dormant through years of travelling the tennis circuit and living in America. I remember her early days in tennis, protected by her guardian and tennis coach, the late Vic Edwards, who shielded her


from media questioning of her Aboriginality. He was a big, gruff man, who ensured Evonne remained single-minded.

It produced a tennis champion, but her silence was seen by some of her people as ‘walking out’. She was the highest profile Aborigine in the world. They wanted her to push the cause, to stand up for the rights of Aborigines.

Evonne acceded to just about every command of Edwards in the quest for tennis glory-he the former army major; she the talented, happy-go-lucky teenager.

She had been taken in by Edwards and his family from age 11 and accepted the plan he had mapped out for her. She was still the Aboriginal girl who loved nothing more than going home to Barellan, back to the favourite fishing spots and relaxing with her family, her spiritual family.

The spirituality of the Aborigine is in-born-Roger understood that and, as time went by, so did her children.

At no time did Evonne put aside the feelings that one day she would need to come back to Australia. Sadly, it was the death of her mother, Melinda ‘Linda’ Goolagong, in 1991 that jolted her into realising the time had come. ‘At the cemetery, I looked at all the faces… all the sad, grieving people who had come to pay their respects, and it hit me I knew so few of them. Many of them were Mum’s friends and family… hundreds were our people-the Wiradjuri. I knew from that moment that I had to come home, I had to know more.’

It was a time for reminiscing about ‘the carefree days swimming in the irrigation canal at the Three Ways, the Aboriginal mission outside Griffith, or in a billabong by the Lachlan [River] at The Murie the camp favoured by the Condobolin Wiradjuri clans.

‘I remembered stories and signs, like the appearance of the little bird, the Willie wagtail, which meant someone had died; and the bogey man, who was not a figment of our imaginations but a real fear of our parents, sent from the Welfare to take Aboriginal children away from their families.

‘I had always been proud of my Aboriginal heritage but not until Mum died did I realise how little I new about my own family, my own parents.

Out of the search came a book, Home! The Evonne Goolagong Story, written with Australian author Phil Jarratt (published by Simon and Schuster).

She wanted to go back 40,000 years. As she explained in her book: ‘I wanted to picture that crowd at Mum’s funeral and be able to place every face in the grand scheme of my life.’

And so began the greatest venture in Evonne Goolagong’s life-to trace her tribe, the Wiradjuri, a spiritual return to nature and to the old people who


were her family, to sacred places, and, in the initial trips, to tribes she had not even heard of.

‘Before I went off to Wiradjuri country, I had to start with my children. They were born in South Carolina and had no idea of what it was to be Aboriginal,’ she said. ‘We decided it would be practical to take them to far North Queensland first because the Aboriginal communities there were remote and contained more significant cultural sites that we would experience in the Wiradjuri country where traditional life had long ceased to exist.

‘While it wasn’t easy for them at first, I was relieved and excited that the trip had such an impact on them, particularly Kelly. She was 14 and I knew well that Aboriginal children of my generation rarely had the opportunity to come to terms with their own history. There were well-meaning parents who actually kept if from them because of some feeling of shame.’

Kelly wrote about her ‘voyage of discovery’ in a school project: ‘This may seem strange, but when I was there, my instinct told me this is where I belong. Coming to Australia was probably the best thing my family has ever done.

‘From having my first taste of Aboriginal life, I’ve become more excited about my heritage… learning about my people is one of the greatest feelings.’

Evonne read it—and cried with relief.

She made many trips-into Wiradjuri country around the NSW countryside, from towns such as Condobolin, Griffith, along the Murray River, Cummera, Darlington Point, to Moulamein where her parents, Melinda and Ken, were married, and Menindee, Brewarrina and into the forbidding Outback.

Some of the trips were made alone; the early ones were with her family, another with her sister Barbara when they resolved to follow sacred paths their mother took at varying times, a trek often to ‘nowhere’. Evonne called them ‘Linda Lines’.

It meant easing back into camp-fire life, sometimes alone, with just a sleeping bag, a tent, a camp oven and basic food supplies… boiling a billy, fishing for yellowbelly.

‘I had a loose plan after Cummeragunga,’ said Evonne. ‘It seemed a spiritual place. I tried to find a waterhole camp-fire each night and I went to places where I guessed Linda might have roamed. Mum would have followed the rivers, especially in the parched western country.’

First stop was Moulamein, hardly Aboriginal sounding, but, for Evonne, a piece of the jigsaw. It appeared to have fallen into a deep slumber, unlike the towns on the Murray which had prospered.


Beyond the towns lay a great waste of land, the Outback. ‘[It was] the most starkly Australian landscape I had seen,’ she said. ‘There was something compelling about the more forbidding parts of the country, and I always related my imaginings of such places back to my Aboriginal studies. What would it have been like for Aborigines living here? Would water have been easy to find? Would they have needed to wear animal skins as protection against the chill of the desert night?’

Part of this stark landscape was Lake Mungo, its bed dry and cracked, ringed by tiny sandhills on which have been found stone artefacts that predate the Ice Age.

This was harsh, barren, remote country, a landscape belonging to the Dreamtime. And this was Evonne, the Aboriginal woman, finding herself.

Here she was reconciling the sacredness of the earth, its relationship with her and her people, searching for answers.

As we sat in her Sunshine Beach home, there was a sense of achievement and peace in her; that what was needed to be done was being done.

She explained that she had not stopped searching, that ‘there is so much more to know; spending time with the elders and learning of the legends and sacred sites… so many wonderful stories.’

But she is also searching for a tennis champion, through a scheme called Search for a Star, in which she is looking for girls from ages eight to eleven who are athletic, though not necessarily tennis players. Roger and Evonne believe the tennis champion of the future may not be winning all the young age tournaments; but the youngster who may never have held a racquet, but shows the athleticism, reflexes and agility that 10-year-old Evonne showed in Barellan at a tennis clinic all those years ago.

‘We will know when we see her. It’s not that we haven’t found some special young players already. Who knows?’ Evonne said. ‘But when that special athlete comes along I’m sure we’ll know.

‘We’re not necessarily looking for the best player in each age group. The emphasis is on finding the girl with the most potential. And they are out there.’

Australia’s fall as a powerful tennis nation has been a source of continuing concern. Why has it fallen? Evonne senses that going back into the towns may produce another Evonne Goolagong.

She hasn’t been totally forgotten by the tennis world. Although she has played no tennis-nor practised-since she returned to Australia, she was invited this year to play in the Virginia Slims Legends of Tennis, a six-event series that includes Martina Navratilova, Virginia Wade, Billie-Jean King, Rosie Casals, Hana Mandlikova, Wendy Turnbull and so on.


She surprised herself by agreeing. ‘I hadn’t played since my last tournament, an over-35s event four years ago. I told them

I was rusty-and I was. I didn’t win too much, but I had fun. And we made it fun for the spectators. We were all out to win, don’t get me wrong.’

The Cawley family is breaking up. Kelly has moved to Brisbane and is majoring in drama at university. She has appeared in her first play, Capricornia, based on Xavier Herbert’s novel that looks searchingly at positive solutions to reshape Australia’s cultural identity. Despite her slight American accent, Kelly played an Aborigine.

Evonne’s book is a legacy to her children. As she said: ‘One day they will thank me.’

It explains deeply and honestly her inner feelings, all without anger, as this excerpt shows: ‘There is much about Aborigines-particularly old ones!-that the western world finds difficult to comprehend, but one thing I have learned in writing this book is that the old people (alive and dead) have

no legacy of hate. There is no lasting place for bitterness in our culture, the core of which is acceptance of people, things, even fate.

‘Mum used to tell us that the worst word in the language-any language-was ‘hate’. This word, she said, was worse than any swear word. ‘People who use it are just igorant,’ Linda would say, and we kids would laugh behind her back. But Linda had the sentiment right, if not the pronunciation.’

In her glorious tennis career, Evonne won 92 professional tournaments, was a finalist in 18 grand slam events, won Wimbledon twice, The Australian Open four times and the French Open once.

They were important events of another time. The extension of that life is where she is now, maybe another world. For Evonne, the search will go on.

By Gary Lester, The Sun-Herald, 10 December 1995.


I can jump puddles

Fights were always held after school. On those days when a fight was to take place an air of excitement and tension seized each child and the girls kept threatening to ‘tell’ and the school’s known tell-tale-tits were subjected to a tirade of abuse that resulted in offended girls switching their pigtails and marching off with their noses in the air while those pupils who despised the tell-tale watched them balefully.

But it took courage to tell when almost the entire school were in favour of the fight and those girls with reputations as betrayers made a few bluffing marches to the school door where they stopped in indecision and exchanged slanderous remarks about the pigs of boys watching them.

The girls did not attend the fights, it being considered too brutal an exhibition for their genteel minds but they watched from a distance and swore excitedly among themselves, so Maggie Mulligan told me.

She always came to the fights. She walked with the group that surrounded me on our march to Jackson’s paddock and took the opportunity to convey her allegiance to me in a hurried whisper, ‘If he licks you, I’ll lick his sister.’ No remark could have established her loyalty more.

‘I’ll belt hell out of him,’ I told her confidently.

I had no doubts as to the outcome. I was an interested observer rather than the central figure of the preparations made by the boys on my side. The division in loyalties was quite plain. Each boy had been asked whose side he was on and the school was about equally divided.

Steve McIntyre had, at first, scorned to fight with sticks but the suggestion had been so enthusiastically received by all the boys who heard me make it that he couldn’t very well refuse especially after I had denounced him as yellow and given him the ‘Coward’s Blows’ by tapping him three times on the shoulder while I chanted, ‘One-two-three you can’t fight me.’

So sticks it was, and Freddie Hawk cut me a beauty. The wattle from which it had been cut had no grubs in it, so Freddie told me in the manner of an authority. It was three feet long and thick at one end.

‘Hold it by the thin end,’ Freddie ordered. ‘Swing it like you’re going to hit a cow. Get him behind the ear, then swipe him another on the nose.’


I listened with respect to Freddie. I was sure there was nothing he did not know.

‘Behind the ear is a good place,’ I agreed.

Spies brought information from one camp to another and it was said Steve was going to hit straight down ‘like he was chopping wood!’

‘There’s only going to be two hits,’ he boasted. ‘I’ll hit him and he’ll hit the ground.’

‘Like hell!’ Freddie greeted this information from a reliable informer with contempt. ‘What’s Alan doing while he’s chopping him!’

Freddie and Joe Carmichael who were back-stopping for me had measured the sticks, one against the other, so that neither of us would have an advantage.

Steve’s supporters surrounded him in a compact group when we were all gathered behind the big stump in Jackson’s paddock. Maggie Mulligan reckoned Steve was showing signs he’d like to quit. But Freddie didn’t.

‘He fights best when he’s howlin’, he told me, ‘and he ain’t howlin’ yet.’

Before Steve and I sat down opposite each other, Steve took off his coat, rolled up his shirt sleeves and spat on his hands. This impressed everybody except Maggie Mulligan who reckoned he was showing off.

I didn’t take off my coat because my shirt had a lot of holes in it and I didn’t want Maggie Mulligan to see them. But I spat on my hands just to show I knew it was the right thing…

From I can jump puddles by Alan Marshall, Cheshire, 1955.


My first love

My first love, or so I’ve been told, for I don’t remember him exactly, was an egg-shaped boy, Ah Wai, aged three-and-a-half to my three years. He was shaven-headed and toothy-smiled, so my mother says, dressed in a daily uniform of singlet and baggy shorts, with spectacles like the bottoms of coke bottles crushing his nose. His curious shape was caused by the top half of his body being squashed for too long in his mother’s uterus, by his stubbornness, not wanting to be born. At three-and-a-half Ah Wai’s will, like the thick glass of his spectacles, was legendary among our households, inflexible, impenetrable; second only to mine. His voice in a tantrum set the window panes rattling. He was the apple of his mother’s eye.

Every afternoon my mother and Mrs Liang, both heavily pregnant, stood on the cool cement steps of their respective doorways, doggedly stirring the soupy afternoon air with their scented handkerchiefs into a semblance of breeze. English Tea Rose wafted over my head as I stood beside my mother, Axe Oil Menthol came in lazy gusts from over the fence. The afternoon straggle of estate workers drifted sloshing like milk in uncovered pails. Their voices rising and falling like my mother’s and Mrs Liang’s, a murmurous sea. The alleys of the rubber estate opposite looked cool and dark.

‘How are you today, Missus?’

‘I am fine, how are you, Mrs Liang?’

‘Your girl is getting so big now, talking so much.’

‘Same as your boy, Mrs Liang.’

‘Aiya, he should learn to be more quiet.’

Ah Wai stood with his arms pushed through the mesh of the wire fence between our houses, eyes blinking behind his glasses, the pockets of his shorts bulging with who knows what. His hands curled as secretive as buds.

It was 1967. That year our fathers were away for long weeks on business, while our mothers ploughed through the houses in circuitous routes from kitchen to laundry to dining room as slow-moving and stately as ships. In Australia, white people voted to count Aboriginals as citizens, thousands marched in protest against the Vietnam war. Elvis married Priscilla in Las Vegas, and a Soviet cosmonaut fell blazing out of the sky. In Athens the mini skirt was banned. Closer to home, Malay became the national language


in Malaysia, while President Sukarno handed power over to Suharto in Djakarta, but for Ah Wai and me the wide world seemed to be only as cavernous and dimly illumined as the space under my parents’ bed.

This was our hideout. From it we could see my mother’s feet padding softly past the doorway, we could hear my older sister’s bronchial coughs from the back room where she was quarantined. ‘Ah Wai! Ah Wai!’ came his mother’s calls, echoing through the plaster, while we lay as still as mice and just as shivery, our feet propped side by side against the wall behind the headboard, the bed-slats sagging above us like the bones of some prehistoric beast. A hairy mammoth, perhaps, once fleshed as it was in my favourite zoo set, or a whale like the one lashing its tail on the page just visible in a faint band of light. Its jaws stretched to their full capacity, a robed figure grazed head and feet by its snarl of teeth. One gigantic eye swivelled towards us quizzically. ‘Ah Wai, dinnertime!’

But Ah Wai couldn’t hear. The ear pointed in his mother’s direction was stoppered with a grubby finger, the one facing me was filled with an idiosyncratic version of Jonah and the Whale. Or the Raksaksas of Gold Mountain, if he asked nicely, or the Clam Princess if I felt like it, or the Three Little Pigs. Ah Wai blinked behind his glasses, but in the dim light under the bed, the glasses worked on magic. He craned forward. His eyelashes were short and bristly, his eyes two glittering slits. He smelt of Axe Oil Menthol and the mud pies we had been making earlier, as I did, of damp earth and sweat, and a powdery smell of cobwebs.

‘My mother says if you’re bad girl or boy, the big fish will come to eat you, like the picture,’ I said, pointing.

‘Where?’ Ah Wai cried, for indeed in this light the fine etchings of the children’s illustrated bible we’d ‘borrowed’ from my sister seemed little more than a mesh of blurry lines. The words neither of us could decipher marched across the pages like an army of ants.

‘Can’t you see? Open your eyes, Ah Wai! Your eyes so small. Open bigger, then you can see!’

Ah Wai peered into the page, fingers propping his eyelids open, a recently acquired habit which alarmed both his mother and mine. ‘Girl or boy?’ he puzzled. ‘If girl, why so hairy face?’

‘You want to hear this story, or what?’

He was always a stickler for detail. For stopping the headlong flow of a story to establish the importance of some barely noticeable rocks in the picture, or to ascertain the colour of someone’s hair. Outside the ribbed cave of our hideout Ah Wai moved with caution and expertise, glasses pushed as close to his eyes as he could get them, head turning to scan every direction for possible danger, as his mother taught him; or surveillance, as I did. In the same way, he wanted to negotiate the stories I wove through the nether regions of my parents’ bed, to chart them for future reference. To


separate wonder from danger. We were often at odds. Our heads passed together in exasperation, one arm slung over the other’s shoulder as I rushed through my versions of the stories my mother told my sister and me every evening, and Ah Wai stared and stared at their pictorial representations, trying to net every aspect of them. Too absorbed in the ebb and flow of why and what-for and ‘Ah Wai, just listen!’ to notice my mother’s feet pausing in the doorway, her shadow creeping towards us, and the edge of the coverlet lifting.

‘Aiya, what are you two doing under there!’

My first love, remembered in parts like the scattered pieces of a once favourite jigsaw, has for years now consisted only of random images. A pair of buddha eyes widened in vain with grubby fingers, a head sometimes smooth as an egg, sometimes prickly. The humpty dumpty silhouette at the gate, outlined in the arrows of light prickling their way through the leaves of the rubber estate opposite. Rattling the lock to be let in. My mother standing in the doorway, reciting the usual dinnertime litany at our house, that year we lived in the house my father was so often away from, which my sister racked with her coughs and wheezes and her tearful sighs, ‘Ah Wai, where are you? Your mother’s calling. Ah Wai, time to go home!’

From ‘My first love’ by Beth Yahp in My first love and other turning points edited by Graham Reilly, Tower Books, 1995.


Mumshirl gets an MBE

This was the sort of life I was living when, one day, a letter arrived in the mail, saying that I had been recommended for an MBE. I never did find out who recommended me, and I didn’t know whether I ought to take it, or really what it would mean to me, but I asked around and the people I spoke to all urged me to take it.

I had just taken out a loan, guaranteed by one of my sister’s sons, to buy a house in Stanmore, but at the same time, I was still living in my little room at the presbytery. I had with me a couple of my nieces and their children. They were going to live with me and, instead of paying rent somewhere else, help me to pay off the house.

I could feel that I was getting on in my years, and I felt that if I was ever going to have a little place to call my own, it would have to be now. I was able to borrow the money for the small deposit which was required by Aboriginal Housing Loans, and pay it back out of my A.M.S. wages.

Because of the pressures of my work, I wasn’t able to do much about getting ready to go on the day to collect my medal and citation. The mother of one of the nuns offered me a dress, and I went out to Maroubra and had a fitting. On the night before, I was driven out there once more; this time to pick it up.

In the morning I was trying to get dressed, and there were the usual problems with the alcoholics, some of whom were sick. We were worrying about where to get food for the day and the other daily problems of clean clothes for all that many people who had been arrested the night before. The telephone never stopped ringing and I was running back and forwards, trying to listen to people’s problems over the phone and still get dressed on time and do up my hair. The dress was lovely, but I only owned one petticoat and one bra, and at the last minute, I couldn’t find my bra.

Sister Germaine and Brother Tom were going through that tiny room at a furious rate, trying to locate that bra, running out to look on the washing line and wondering if one of the alcoholics might have taken it by accident. At last, I looked in the big handbag and found it. I could get ready; I could go.

Colin Davis, who is my sister Olga’s son, and his wife Rita, were to take me. It was such a mad rush getting there. At the ceremony, there were a couple of hundred people. It was held on the lawns of Government House,


not inside as had been the Queen’s lunch, and the drinks and food were spread out on tables in the open air. There was wine, sandwiches, cakes, and not anything like stiff or formal.

Sir Roden Cutler, and his wife, Lady Cutler, who I had met quite a number of times by now, were there, and they came over and spoke to us. Ossie Cruse was also there, getting his citation. The press were there, lots of them, and they were buzzing around and taking photos. I received my citation and felt very strange. As it was getting close to my turn, it was flashing into my mind the numbers of places where I couldn’t get served; how I had had to sit on the ground at the front of the picture theatre as a child in the roped-off section that Blacks had to sit in, white kids in Cowra running after us yelling, ‘Nigger, nigger, pull the trigger’, the camps and shacks that Blacks were having to live in all over this country that was, after all, our-and here I was, standing up here with all these well-dressed and fashionable people, waiting in turn to collect this medal which would make me a Member of the British Empire.

Through my mind flashed my Grandfather, buried now in a pauper’s grave nobody could find, and my brothers and sisters, old and broken before their time. I had to pinch my hand hard to bring me back into the present day.

It was a very nice day. Colin and Rita and I moved around, eating the food, drinking the drinks, and speaking to people, and everybody had nice clothes and nice voices.

Then they drove me back to the house at Stanmore. As I walked in, it hit me. The electricity company was threatening to turn off the power because we hadn’t got the money to pay their last bill at the other house. The telephone company was owed so much money that I would be paying if off at a few dollars every payday from now until the end of the century. The house was bare; we had not yet been able to get any money for furniture and beds. The kids and myself, we were sleeping either on mattresses on the floor, and some were sleeping on just blankets on the floor.

In the big bag that I had carried with me to the ceremony was my toothbrush, paste, spare dress and underclothes, which was just one pair of bloomers. This was how I lived, in a big bag. I had to sleep wherever I could find a bed. I had nothing and my family had nothing… and they gave me a medal for that!

It was supposed to be a happy occasion, so I sat on the floor in the lounge and we talked about things for hours, and then I went to bed and cried. I didn’t want my family to know I was crying; they were all so proud of me, so I put the little girl who was on the blanket in the next room, so that I could cry without upsetting anybody.

From ‘Mumshirl: an autobiography’ by Bobbi Sykes and Mumshirl in Lives and observations: a century of Australian non-fiction, edited by Deb MacPherson, Oxford University Press, 1990.


King bantam

… A bantam rooster. I knew where there were plenty of them, but it would take some planning to get my hands on one.

The back fence of the South Perth Zoo, a mile or so from our home, abutted a quiet, well-bred street of substantial private houses in what we called ‘the other end’-the posh part of the suburb.

I was hampered and annoyed by the presence of my sisters, Peggie and Alice. They had insisted on accompanying me when-inadvisedly in their presence, after lunch-I had asked my mother’s permission to go to the Zoo. I had protested vigorously, particularly in view of my plan, but as always the last word had stayed with my mother. She could see no reason, she said, why just for once I couldn’t bear to have the company of my sisters. And that was that.

‘You go on down to the gate’, I told them, as we walked along the quiet street. ‘I’m going to climb the fence.’ I turned to Peggie my older sister, who held the money our mother had given us-three threepences to get into the Zoo and three pennies to spend. ‘You give me my fourpence, Peggie.’

‘We’re going to climb the fence too,’ she said, as she handed it over, ‘you can give us a bunk.’

‘You can’t! You’re a girl!’

‘Don’t be stupid. I can climb better than you. I beat you up the lilac tree.’

‘That’s different.’ I didn’t like to be reminded of the defeat.

‘This is a fence, and high. And people’ll see you.’

‘Pooh’, she said. She glanced up and down the street. ‘There’s nobody. Anyway, they don’t know us down this end.’ She started across the road. ‘Come on, Lal.’

I glanced up and down the street, as my sister had done. It was still, as if everyone south of the river had been sleeping off a heavy lunch. The hot afternoon air was heavy with the throbbing of doves and the scent of the gumtrees shading the road. There was nobody, as Peggie had said.

I crossed the road and stood with my sisters at the base of the Zoo fence. It was six feet high with a single strand of barbed wire along the top. I felt


uneasy, although not because of the climb. I had done it often enough before, and by myself I would have been up and over like a rat; I could see no point in parting with a hard-to-come-by thrippence when you could get in for nothing. It was the girls. You never knew what they would do. What if they got stuck on the wire?

‘Oh, Gawd!’ I stooped and locked my arms about Peggie’s knees. As she drew herself up, her sandshoes giving her some purchase on the rough wood of the pickets, I straightened my knees and heaved. When I had raised her as far as I could I slipped my grasp down to her calves and repeated the lifting manoeuvre. That put her hands on a level with the top of the pickets, and from there she could raise herself and drop over to the other side. I looked up to see how she was going. Directly above my head I could see her white bloomers, held by elastic just above the knees. If she had not been my sister I would have chanted the ritual: I see a poppy-show all made of calico! And if I had not been her brother she would have returned me, pertly, the ritual: All clean and well paid for! As it was I merely grunted: ‘Hurry up, Peggie! And mind the wire!’

Before she had negotiated her way down the other side of the fence I had bunked Alice to the top. I was already on the ground, inside the Zoo, when she dropped beside me. It was a spot where I had climbed the fence on other occasions, but I stood and looked about me cautiously. We were separated from the formal area of the Zoo by a surviving narrow belt of natural bush. I knew from past experience the free-roving peacocks nested there: even as we watched, breathless, one of the great birds minced primly past us, its coroneted head bobbing backward and forward in time to its fastidious strut, the folded fan of its splendid tail swaying heavily an inch or so from the ground behind it. The nearest animal yards-some camel paddocks, the elephant’s stockade and the lions enclosure- were quite some distance down a sandy slope, but you never knew when some nosey keeper might take it into his head to have a look around. The first thing, I assured myself, was to shake off my sisters.

‘I’m going somewhere. You two go somewhere else.’

‘We can’t’, Peggie said. ‘We’ve all got to go home together. Mum said.’

‘Just tell Mum we got separated, or something. I’m not hanging around all the time with you.’

‘I’ll tell Mum you ran off and left us’, Alice threatened. She was always the first to resort to tattling.

I took off down the slope. I knew I had her blocked. ‘You do, and I’ll tell Mum you climbed the fence!’ You had to fight fire with fire.

I detoured to visit the big tree where the peacocks roosted after dark, and picked up a fistful of orange-coloured wing feathers, and one or two long, lovely tail feathers, which the birds had dropped overnight. The nearby elephant’s stockade was empty, its occupant most likely down by the main


gate giving rides to earn its keep. In the lions’ enclosure the biggest lion was crouched on the cement floor worrying a huge hunk of purple meat stuck with gobs of bright yellow fat. I knew horses were killed to feed the lions. Once I had heard the sound of a rifle shot from the yard behind the pens, and sometimes there was bloody water running in the gutter under the gate. I hurried past, revolted by the stench of death and lions’ dirt which clouded the whole place.

I knew exactly where I was going. I could have got there in a few minutes except that for my purpose there were still far too many people wandering the gravel paths among the enclosures.

I stood for perhaps fifteen minutes watching the crowds of tennis players on the grass courts, the girls all in white pleated skirts and most of the men in cream silk shirts and long cream pants: the few who wore shorts got whistled at and had fun poked at them by the onlookers.

In front of the bandstand at the edge of the tennis courts I spent another fifteen minutes listening to the music of the RSL band, and watching four children who sat in the front row of wooden benches sucking lemons. All children I knew believed that it would make the bandsmen blow spit into their trumpets and I stared hopefully at the uniformed men on the stage, waiting for it to happen. I had tried it myself, and although I had never seen it work, I kept an open mind on it.

At the kiosk I spent a penny on four of the lolly-balls that changed colour as you sucked them. I watched the main storehouse for the animals’ food until I saw a keeper wheel out a barrow of carrots and lettuces, and disappear among the yards: then I ducked in and filled my pockets hastily with the monkeys’ shrivelled little windfall apples. They always tasted better than any other fruit I’d ever eaten. When I came out again there were no adults about-only a few children looking at the monkeys. I jumped the guard fence around the cages and, under their scandalised gaze, helped myself to whatever peanuts had bounced back off the bars.

I visited the snake-house just to drop one of my monkey-apples onto the head of the crocodile, I knew he would be lying asleep in his sunken pool. He blinked and yawned and went back to sleep. Better entertainment promised at the python’s pit, where a stupid white hen, obviously unaware of its danger, strutted and pecked at the sand not six feet from those dreadful rainbow coils. My nose pressed against the glass, I stood entranced for ten minutes, hardly daring even to suck my lolly-ball. Momentarily I expected the snake to lunge forward, as they did in the books I read, and engulf its prey. It did nothing of the kind. It lay on the sand, its horrible spade head motionless only inches above that shimmering hawser of flesh, its yellow stone eyes glaring malevolently at nothing. Finally, I gave up and walked out into the avenue. It was getting late, and I decided it was time for me to do what I had to do.

‘Now or never!’ I muttered grimly to myself. It was the sort


of thing said by the masterful schoolboys in the comics I read every week: I wasn’t allowed to have them at home, but I borrowed them at school.

I stood with my chin on the middle wire of the fence around the buffaloes’ yard, considering the situation. Grey and bald, like huge baby mice in a nest, the animals crowded in the farthest corner of the yard: only one, seeming asleep, stood beside the feedboxes alongside the shed under a spreading peppercorn tree. To get to the shed I would have to pass perilously close to it, but… I had watched the keeper walking among the animals, and they had never taken the slightest notice of him. Still, as I prepared to climb between the wires, I was not going to deny myself the pleasure of a spine-tingling thrill of terror over something I was absolutely certain would not happen.

The door of the feedshed was open, which was practically necessary to the success of my plan. As I had anticipated, crowds of bantams were wandering in and out of it, scratching under the feed boxes and even between the legs of the dreaming buffalo. The most beautiful bantams in the world! I thought, covetously- bossy hens like my own banty, whole flea-packs of cottonreel chickens darting around, unbelievable roosters dripping with gold and amber and ivory. During so many visits to the Zoo I had mourned the seeming impossibility of my ever acquiring such a rooster-but I was to achieve my ambition so simply and so swiftly I would hardly have time to think about the risk attached to the kidnap.

To put off the moment of decision as long as I could I took out my lolly-ball and examined it. I’d reached the purple. I put it back, and with a last glance up and down the avenue, I stowed my fistful of peacock feathers on the ground at the base of the fence. Then I eased myself between the wires into the yard.

As I pelted across it the buffalo in the corner took absolutely no notice of me-if they even saw me at all, dreamily chewing their cuds under the burden of their wide, murderous horns, they gave no indication of it. The one by the feed-boxes watched me, but made no movement. Only the bantams, when I was halfway toward the shed, took off in panic, flying like pigeons. Those nearest the shed darted inside, as I had hoped they would. I hurled myself after them and saw in an instant that a knot of them had crowded into a corner behind a leaning bag of chaff.

Almost automatically my hands fastened around a splendid rooster of black and gold lacquer, with an ivory cowl and arching tail of iridescent green. Oh, I thought, staring at it in the dusty gloom. You must be the king of them all!

It struggled for a moment and then lay quite still in my grasp, its heart pounding against my palms. Straining it against my chest with one hand, I whipped a piece of string out of my pocket and tied its legs together. Then I unbuttoned my jacket and shirt, shoved the rooster in against my skin, and buttoned up.


My heart was pounding as hard as the rooster’s when I turned to squat at the doorway. The buffalo in the corner, and the single one by the feed-boxes, were still there and, it seemed, still completely uninterested in me. The avenue was still empty of people, and-more importantly-of keepers. Within seconds I was through the fence again, and had picked up my feathers. Within minutes, delightfully goose-pimpled to think of the dangers I had faced and overcome, and congratulating myself heartily on having got away with it completely, I was well on my way to the back fence of the Zoo.

I had a shock coming to me. As I was padding along beside the high paling fence of one of the camel-yards, with the back fence in sight, a gate opened about thirty feet ahead of me. A keeper wheeled an empty barrow out. He closed the gate behind him, and began to walk toward me. Oh, gawd! Bugger-bugger-bugger! For a moment I thought desperately of turning around and walking away along the way I’d come, but realised that would only arouse the keeper’s suspicions. I kept plodding forward, my premonition of impending disaster heightened by a sudden wriggling against my ribs. Luckily my jacket was a hand-me-down from Mickey, still too big for me, and the movement wouldn’t be too easy to detect. Nevertheless I kept my hand in my pocket and pressed my arm against the rooster to keep it as quiet as possible.

As I drew alongside the barrow the keeper said: ‘A bit late for you to be leaving the Zoo, sonny!’

‘I’m just going home.’

‘You’re taking a funny way to the gate, then!’

‘I wanted to see if I could find some more of these.’ With my free hand I raised my fistful of feathers, and the rooster squirmed more imperatively against my side. I froze. ‘I was going by the peacock tree.’

‘The peacock tree?’

‘That big gumtree up the elephant’s yard. The peacocks go up it at night, I reckon. You always find some feathers there.’

‘Let me see those, sonny!’ The keeper held out his hand for the feathers. ‘Did you know boys have been catching peacocks and pulling the feathers out of their tails?’ He had been examining the ends of the feathers closely as he spoke, but suddenly he looked up into my face. ‘You don’t do that, do you?’

‘Oh no!’ I was really shocked, and I think it might have shown in my voice. ‘I only pick them up, like at the peacock tree!’

‘All right then.’ The keeper handed back my feathers. ‘Off you go-no, wait a minute!’ My arm against the wriggling rooster,


I froze again. ‘When you go out the gate you can do something for me. You know Miss Le Soeuf? Good. Then tell her Keeper Hope said one of the camels in the top yard looks a bit down on it. She better tell the Colonel. Remember that?’

‘One-of-the-camels-in-the-top-yard-looks-a-bit-down-on-it-and-she’d-better-tell-the-Colonel!’ I gabbled. I could hardly contain my longing to be outside the Zoo fence and on my way home safely, with my rooster. It would be dreadful to get so far and then be tripped up by some little thing. ‘I’ll tell Miss Le Soeuf, Mr Hope.’

‘Good lad. Here’s something for your trouble.’

The keeper took a thrippenny bit out of his pocket and handed it to me. Half of next Saturday night’s picture money already, and here it was, only Sunday! But what could you do with one hand full of feathers and the other jammed in your pocket to keep the rooster from jumping around?

‘Thank you, Mr Hope-but I couldn’t take it.’ I tried to make it sound as if I didn’t care very much for money at all. ‘Mum and Dad don’t let us.’

‘Well, then-you’re a good boy to do as you’re told’, the keeper said. ‘Off you go.’

I hadn’t gone ten yards from the Zoo gates before I’d opened my jacket and my shirt to let the rooster look out. He seemed quite comfortable, although very watchful. The warmth of him nestled against my side made the long walk home seem shorter. Also I was buoyed up by a feeling of virtue at having refused the keeper’s thrippence: by the time I reached our own back gate I’d almost convinced myself that only obedience to my parents’ wishes had stopped me from pocketing it.

As I turned into our backyard the river at the bottom of the road was already getting dark, and chips of yellow were beginning to wink here and there along the flat grey shape of the city on the other side. Light spilled from our back door, and I knew that my mother would be at the stove inside, cooking something for our tea. I could hear one of my sisters doing her practice at the piano: Peg because Alice could only play one piece, over and over, and it wasn’t the one I could hear. I knew Alice would be in their bedroom devouring one of the comics for which she traded part of her lunch, or her lunch money, at school. My father would be sitting in his chair reading the Sunday Times, and Mickey would be sprawled on the floor varnishing his model yacht again, or fiddling with his egg collection, or making a shanghai: he was always doing something by himself. It was nice to stand outside for a moment and think that none of them knew what I had done, or that I was going to give them the surprise of their lives.

At the same time there were problems, and I had to do some planning. I would be in for it, for sure, for being late, and perhaps also for having gone off and left Peg and Alice at the Zoo-although I hoped my own threat to them might have blocked their usual treachery. And there was the matter of


the cow’s grass and the morning’s wood, but I reckoned Mickey could have cut the cow’s grass and brought in the wood. In any case it wouldn’t hurt fat Biddy to make do on her chaff-and-bran, for once-and Mickey would have fixed that too, by now. Boil it all down and there was really only the rooster to explain, and straight away I thought of a good way to do it. I would just tell them the plain truth. It was brilliant!

I saw him in one of the yards, and I just climbed over the fence and caught him, Mum, I would say. I tried it out aloud, but softly, for effect. It sounded good. The rooster, disturbed by my voice, shifted against my side. It cocked its head and looked up at me, questioningly. Nobody saw me, and the Zoo’s got simply thousands of them, Dad, I would say, and they would look at the new bantam and be overcome by its beauty. As I had been. And for good measure bring in my brother, who seemed never to be able to do anything wrong. Mickey said we had to have a rooster for the banty to get chickens, Mum! I considered it, and it sounded wonderful. Even watertight.

They’d hardly send me back with the rooster tonight, I thought. And I couldn’t see my father harnessing up old Ginger and driving right down to the Zoo himself. And by tomorrow night they’d have forgotten they’d ever been without the rooster. He’d have settled in, and become one of the family like the banty. And even if I get a hiding for being late home, and not getting the wood in, and not cutting Biddy’s grass, and for stealing, it’ll be worth it!

I pulled the rooster from inside my shirt, gently, so as not to make him squawk and spoil the surprise. I held him up only inches from my nose, and stared at him rapturously. He stared at me as if he knew me already. His comb was like coral and his eyes were like painted glass, and the fading light flowed like coloured water over his glorious plumage.

‘Oh, you’re the king!’ I whsipered to him, and he blinked at me. ‘That’s what I’m going to call you. King!’

I tucked him securely under my arm, unlatched the gate, closed it behind me, and trotted across the yard toward our back door.

From Stories from suburban road by T. A. G. Hungerford, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1983.


People look at me and say ‘Wow, a policeman in a wheelchair!’

Name: Andrew Rogers

Age: 25

Home town: Brisbane

Occupation: Senior Constable, Queensland Police Force

Senior Constable Andrew Rogers, who works in the training section at Logan Police Station near Brisbane, is determined to get ahead and make a career for himself.

‘I’m the sort of person who has to get up and do things. I don’t particularly want to stay a Senior Constable all my life. I’m ambitious and I want promotion. But it’s very hard to find the right position.

‘The fact is, nobody really knows where to put a disabled officer in the police service. And it’s hard for me to get a clear career path for myself because I don’t know exactly what functions different positions require, and if I am capable of performing them.’

Andrew had only been in the police service for 10 months when he had a sporting accident in July 1988 which left him with quadriplegia.

‘I was in hospital for five and a half months. I was lying in bed and I knew that my job was in jeopardy. The service has the power to terminate your employment if you don’t pass your first year of training.

‘I can remember saying I’d be back at work within three months. Of course, after three months I hadn’t recovered, but

I asked if I could return to work once a week, to show them I wanted to keep my job. I was stationed at traffic branch, and returned each week for four hours, entering traffic tickets on the computer system while I was in hospital.

‘On the 6th of January I left hospital. Two weeks later I was back at work full-time, studying part-time and living independently in modified accommodation.


‘It was a big adjustment and I think I’m paying for it now.

I don’t know if I brainwashed myself, but I had a conviction—I knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to return to work as a police officer.

‘I was very happy to be back at work-being employed and doing something positive. It certainly was a major accomplishment after almost six months of being in hospital.

‘It was so new. For the first six months I continued entering traffic tickets into the computer and doing ‘show cause’ interviews. ‘Show cause’ interviews are when people accumulate nine points or more on their driver’s licence in two years and they have to come in for an interview and show cause why their licence shouldn’t be cancelled.

‘But that wasn’t getting me where I wanted to be. I still didn’t feel like a ‘real’ police officer. All the information I had learned at the academy was fading.’

Andrew said that he’d applied for numerous positions within the police service. He has worked in prosecutions and the domestic violence unit, and is currently working in one of the training offices.

‘I like training, but I’m really behind the eight ball because of my limited operational experience.

‘Everywhere I work they have to make modifications. That makes me feel guilty. I put them to so much expense.

‘It gets frustrating-I find I’m spending all my time trying to get things modified, rather than doing the work I’m supposed to be doing. I feel like a bit of a burden.’

Andrew said that he is still learning to adjust to his new lifestyle.

‘I’m still trying to live the lifestyle I had before the accident.

I suppose I’ve been trying to be the macho person who does everything for himself. I did all my own ironing and cooking and cleaning-I did everything myself. Time management is the biggest factor because I was always doing half a million things at once. Now I can’t do half as much work in the same timeframe.’

Andrew said that he is getting used to people’s surprise at seeing a policeman in a wheelchair.

‘You get used to the stares and the glares and the comments. If I’m in uniform and I go out in public, someone will inevitably ask ‘are you a real policeman?’ I get that sort of thing all the time.

‘The police service has been very good to me. I’m not the first disabled police officer in Queensland, but most others have resigned within the first


6-12 months of their return. I’ve been here five years now. Just by being here I’m making a statement.’

From The working lives of people with disabilities by The Women’s Policy, Income Support and Participation Branch, Economic and Policy Analysis Division, DEET, Canberra, 1993.


My god it’s a woman

In 1935 I began to wonder what I could do about my future. Pilots were continually proving records could be broken, and a few woman were up there with the best of the record breakers. I had used up all my money; I now had a licence to ‘fly for hire and reward’ but what could I do? There were no jobs for women in aviation. The idea of overnight fame and fortune through record breaking was very attractive and I began studying maps and planning a flight to Japan. It was all a daydream! I had neither the money nor the sponsorship for such an undertaking. Flying had arrived; but I hadn’t. Who would want to sponsor a very unimportant 20-year-old-girl?

During my training I often spoke with Mr McGillycuddy, the editor of Country Life newspaper who was a regular passenger on the Manly ferry. On gaining my licence, the women’s editor, Hope Phelps, wrote an article about me and gave me a copy. That paper changed my life. In it was a list of forthcoming country shows and race meetings. I decided that I would go out into the country and try to attract some fare-paying passengers. Others had done it-Kingsford Smith, Arthur Butler, Nigel Love-many pilots seemed to have been barnstorming at some time. Why couldn’t I? If only I had an aeroplane!

By now, my father had changed his mind and become quite enthusiastic about my flying. He offered to buy me an aircraft. So, with the kind gesture of my great-aunt Annie Thomas, who gave me £200 instead of leaving it to me in her will, and help from my father, who gave me the same amount, I was finally in the market.

Reg Annabel, the first person with whom I had flown, had recently been killed in his beautiful blue and yellow Moth. His father was tidying up the estate and had a very cheap Moth available for £400. It had been bought by Reg as a wreck and needed rebuilding. I bought it from the estate, and many years later, learned just how historic this aeroplane was.

From My god it’s a woman by Nancy Bird, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1990.


Two Christmas stories

Santa left in a lurchI like to think back to my Christmas of 1981. I was seven and my family was living in India. As it was a sweltering summer, nobody expected anything traditional, but we did get Santa-on an elephant. But the elephant bolted, much to my parents’ horror and their offspring’s amusement, leaving a more-than-usually-red-faced Santa destitute. It was definitely a memorable Christmas. Next year Santa arrived on a yak.

Elizabeth Neil, A.C.T. From New Idea, 30 December 1995.

An unforgettable Christmas with the ‘biggest pudding of all time’I am reminded of my first Christmas in 1934 as a new bride, when we decided to look after a friend’s dairy farm while he went overseas for six months. Our bits of furniture were packed away and off we went to the beautiful NSW town of Bellingen. It was to be a quiet Christmas on our own, but our neighbours insisted that we join them for lunch.

Lunch was served at a 7 m plank table with plank seats on either side, set under a huge tree with its branches decorated with coloured paper-chains, balloons and baubles. Soon the family came out to greet us… grandma, mum and 17 young people ranging in age from 22 years to the 18-month-old bubbie. We soon had large plates of pork, poultry and assorted vegetables before us. Next came the piece de resistance… the biggest Christmas pudding of all time, cooked in the dairy boiler. The monster was heaved onto the table, where the father cut the top half into watermelon-sized slices which were accompanied by large jugs of cream and custard.

When I asked about the huge pudding, I was told it had only four dozen eggs, 5.5 kilos of fruit and a large bottle of whisky, plus the other ingredients. Six roosters, five large drakes and a goodly young porker took care of the meats for lunch with plenty left over for the evening meal, while the bottom half of the pudding, wrapped up and hung in the cool cream-room, would be eaten on New Year’s Day. After a long and interesting day,


we thanked our neighbors for their hospitality and staggered home laden with a plate of sliced pork and chook legs for sandwiches for supper. Luckily, the cows were all waiting in their yards in readiness, but the milking was slow and tedious. We spoke of our first bush Christmas for years afterwards, and every one since brings fond memories as we recall that lovely, awesome and funny, caring and sharing get-together.

O. Tewkesbury, NSW. From New Idea, 30 December 1995.


Melba

Melba never cheapened her professional standing by singing for her supper; she would sing to guests in her own house, or at a party given by some intimate friend such as Lady de Grey or Mrs Hwfa Williams or Alfred de Rothschild, but never at some party to which the host or hostess had invited her, thinking it would be nice to have a song or two from dear Nellie Melba. She knew the value of the notes that came from her throat, and her commercial instinct would not let her give them away for nothing except to suit her own pleasure. Ivor Newton, the accompanist, who often worked with Melba, tells of an episode in an English country house. After dinner the hostess whispered to him, ‘Do you think we could get Melba to sing?’ Newton hesitantly said, ‘Well, that possibly depends on who asks her.’ Another guest, Lord Hewart, then Lord Chief Justice, agreed to try to persuade her. He sat with Melba and chatted, taking a circuitous route to the point. Newton, watching, saw Melba’s mouth grow firm and her eyes become steely, and presently Lord Hewart left her and came back, shaking his head. ‘I have been unsuccessful,’ he said, crestfallen. ‘I think I can put that down as my greatest failure.’

Melba revelled in being on first-name terms, as she was, with the aristocratic and titled, but she knew she had a genius which set her apart from and somewhat above all but the very greatest of them. A duchess, genuinely curious, once asked her if she would rather be a duchess or Melba. ‘Melba!’ she replied. ‘There are lots of duchesses but there’s only one Melba.’

She was in the habit of saying, ‘I’m a damned snob!’, and most of those who knew her well endorse that finding. But her snobbishness had something childlike about it; she never hid her pleasure in knowing and being known by peers and their ladies, by kings and queens. She delighted in dropping august names, such as those of Lady Warwick, the Duchess of Devonshire, the Duchess of Sutherland, Lady Cynthia Graham, Lady Helen Vincent, and in telling the story of how the Princess of Wales (later Queen Alexandra), having admired ‘my poor little pearls, which were not worth more than a few hundred pounds, said softly, ‘What lovely pearls!’ I felt like saying to her, ‘You darling.’’

She could condone the worst kind of vulgarities so long as the perpetrators were socially irreproachable, and even find justification for an act of gross rudeness if the rank of the offender were high enough. A story she often told concerned


a supper party in the 1890s, at which the then Prince of Wales was a guest. All the time that Melba and an American baritone, Eugene Oudin, were singing a duet from Romeo et Juliette, the Prince sat on a sofa talking. Both singers were disconcerted, but Melba forgave all when she was told that the future king had been discussing affairs of state. His lack of interest in music was notorious, but it was too much to expect Melba to admit, even to herself, that he was talking simply because he was warm with wine and brandy and bored at having to listen to what was, to him, the caterwauling of a pair of fugitives from Covent Garden.

It was while she was making that 1909 tour that her Australianism took fire. From then onward she always kept one foot in her own country, even though she spent perhaps half of her remaining twenty-two years living and singing and travelling abroad. Although she never failed to start pining for London and Paris and the sophistication of Europe after a few months in Australia, she always like coming home. At times when she was abroad an almost overwhelming hunger for the sights and sounds and smells of the Australian countryside would attack her. One of the things she liked to do in Australia was to go out alone into a quiet place in the hills near Lilydale and sit, listening to the golden notes of the bellbirds chiming through the bush. Perhaps she listened to the bellbirds with a singer’s ear and heard in them a perfection of sound no human singer could ever attain, but it is more likely that she listened to them just with the ear of an Australian going back to her beginnings.

It was in 1909 too, that she showed a practical interest for the first time not only in singing to Australians but also in creating a school of Australian singers trained in what she believed to be the only correct method of singing-in effect, Mathilde Marchesi’s method with some modifications of Melba’s own. As a first step she formed her own singing classes at the University of Melbourne’s Conservatorium of Music; her aim was to give any specially talented young singer the benefit of her knowledge, but above all to train aspiring singing teachers in what was later to become known as the Melba method. She was successful; some able singing teachers, who in the years ahead moulded the singing voices of scores of young Australians, came from those classes. Melba thought she would be hailed as a national benefactress for doing this, but the applause was not unanimous. Cynics said that it was just another piece of self-advertising; she was interested less in producing singers, they scoffed, than in producing limelight for herself. They also said that any girl with a voice resembling Melba’s could hope for nothing-Melba wanted no rivals and would go to any lengths to discourage a potential competitor. This campaign of detraction depressed her, and one day she told one of her students, Beryl Fanning, stressing the words with some bitterness, ‘I do wish I could find a really high soprano, because they are saying I am too jealous to teach any but contraltos. I am really a good-hearted woman.’ It was probably then that Melba began toying with the idea of finding a successor to herself. She never did find one; perhaps, subconsciously, she never wanted to, and knew in her heart she never would. The odds against the world ever producing a facsimile of her voice were, and are, heavy, while any possibility that the world will ever again


produce such a voice in the body of a woman having the personality to use it as Melba did are astronomic. It is like expecting another Michelangelo, another Shakespeare or another Beethoven to appear.

From Melba: a biography by John Hetherington, Penguin Australia, 1967.


Aunts up the Cross

My great-aunt Juliet was knocked over and killed by a bus when she was eighty-five. The bus was travelling very slowly in the right direction and could hardly have been missed by anyone except Aunt Juliet, who must have been travelling fairly fast in the wrong direction. It was Aunt Juliet’s habit, in addition to confusing the simpler rules of road safety, to wear dark glasses outdoors, winter and summer. This, being winter, probably contributed to the surprise advent of the bus. I think she wore the spectacles for the same reason that she often wore my mother’s black osprey and jet hat and old silver fox jacket in bed. This was an alarming sight for visitors who, not finding other evidence of eccentricity in Aunt Juliet, felt the strain of accepting her get-up as normal. The hat and the foxes and the spectacles were all part of a behaviour pattern which I can only attribute to a strongly developed magpie instinct. Aunt Juliet was both rich and foolishly generous, but she was untiring in her efforts to gather and hold fast to her person crumbs from poorer tables. She bullied my mother for years for the hat and the cape, and, although my mother was attached to both, Aunt Juliet wore her out in the end. The dark glasses she had found in the street. She was also particularly attached to her diseased and removed appendix, which reposed in a nest of gall-stones in a small spirit bottle on the second shelf of the china cabinet in my grandmother’s drawing room. Until the appendix joined the Crown Derby and Wedgwood and Chelsea, I loved, as a child, to play with the china farm-yard animals on the bottom shelf, but I could never go happily to the cabinet after Aunt Juliet’s operation.

Aunt Juliet never seemed unusual to me: she fitted perfectly into the framework of the family. Her untimely end might have been dramatic in a family more given over to quieter leave takings. But, in ours, it just seemed natural. My mother always told me that we virtually killed Uncle Harry, Aunt Juliet’s husband. He was visiting us from the country, where he and Aunt Juliet lived, when he fell through our dining room floor and broke his neck. The dining room was on the ground floor, but the foundations of the house allowed for a good six-foot drop and when we discovered white ant in the floor and the builders took it up nobody thought to tell Uncle Harry not to go into the dining room. Great-Uncle Spot fell off a ladder when changing a light bulb, and Great-Uncle Luke tipped over backwards in his office chair. I don’t know what their injuries were, but to my childish mind I remember that effect pretty soon followed cause and they died. There had been ten girls in my grandmother’s family, of whom she was the eldest-but-one. One, named Eva, died as a child from eating green applies, and an older sister, Jan, from blowing up a balloon. These were the tales told me by my grandmother and I accepted them.


Life in her family was richly and robustly lived: so it always seemed to my fascinated ears-and I would reflect with envy on those twelve busy lives humming away under a communal roof.

* * * * *

Everyone, of course, knew my father. His vast practice embraced all of the Cross and its inhabitants on the fringes of the underworld: the docks of Woolloomooloo; the slums of Surry Hills: and beyond them into the fashionable purlieus of the Eastern Suburbs. The traffic policeman on duty held up even the trams for him, and he was friend and counsellor to all the prostitutes of the Dirty Half Mile. Sometimes he brought home stories which had particularly amused him, and he loved the colourful vernacular of his slum patients-such as the usual East Sydney way of expressing righteous surprise at an unmarried pregnancy-’I was only out with ‘im once and ‘e nicked it orf me.’ Sometimes stories of his own rejoinders reached us, such as his encounter at the fashionable and respectable ladies club, the Queen’s Club. At this stronghold of virtuous matrons a notice, redundant one would have thought, was posted on the board to the effect that males were not permitted above the first floor.

One morning at 7.30 am my father was walking downstairs following an emergency visit to a patient on the second floor when he was greeted with horrified surprise by a member in dressing-gown and curlers.

‘Why, Doctor Eakin! Whatever are you doing here at this hour?’

‘Sssh,’ said my father. ‘I overslept!’

His red doctor’s light burned above our front-door all night and the doorbell rang through the nights almost as often as the telephone. One particularly busy night-a baby having been delivered, the wounds of a gang fight stitched up, and the usual drunk dispatched home-my father fell into bed about 3 am saying he would not be disturbed again for any emergency. Within ten minutes the doorbell rang. He cursed and snorted and turned over: nobody answered it and it went on pealing shrilly into the night. Whoever was ringing it was more determined than my father: eventually he was goaded out from under the bedclothes. He stuck his head out of his window directly over the front door and bellowed a string of curses at his tormentor. It was Joe, the Hot Dog man from the mobile all-night stand on the corner. Joe was a small, timid man, but he stood his ground and when my father’s invective had ceased, he blurted apologetically.

‘I’m awful sorry, doctor, but your house is on fire.’

Actually it was the chimney of the house next-door but the sparks were sufficient to get us all from our beds and my mother up on to the roof with the firemen who were then called. Joe came in for a cup of tea and it all ended as a hilarious tea-party.


It is the laughter I remember and miss most poignantly. The rows and the laughter were daily doses on which we thrived: frequently the laughter arose out of the rows, or out of the tears which followed them. I remember seeing my mother in tears one day following an outburst of my father’s and, puzzled by this constant drama in our lives, I asked her why she stood it.

It seemed to me a one-sided persecution, as he never cried, and the kitchen drawer full of bills and the house full of interfering old ladies would never have occurred to me as a provocation.

‘Well,’ she sobbed, ‘I couldn’t live with the bastard if he didn’t make me laugh so much.’

I think it was the clash and mingling of the Irish and Jewish temperaments which produced this climate of high dramatic comedy. The fact that the doors were open and everybody joined in was pure Australian.

* * * * *

Although my father appeared in the role of resigned provider to a household of permanent guests, I think his enjoyment of their continual company equalled, in his much quieter way, my mother’s. At least he could escape, and frequently did-not far, to be sure, for to reach his bed he had to undress in one room and make his way in striped pyjamas through the crowded sitting room to the verandah where he slept. But he had no inhibitions about doing this and the evening’s conversation continued to the accompaniment of his ferocious snores. He became, at this time, quite an established ‘club man’ and keen billiards player. His championship status ended on the day he shot himself; ever after, he found it painful and difficult to bend the affected knee into the prescribed position.

Actually his first two adventures with firearms weren’t too serious: only on the third occasion was any bodily damage done. The pistol was of very small, very smart Spanish manufacture-just large enough to lie in the palm of his hand, and affording a more comforting and solid feel than the thin jingle of key rings or the like with which some men fidget. He first came to carry one of these on the advice of the police, who were concerned over his lone night calls into the underworld areas of dock and slum land. Sydney had during the thirties a crime wave of serious proportions, terrorised by a gang of slashers known as the Razor Gang, and it was against the possibility of attack by these assailants that the gun was bought. On his first day home with his new toy, my father indulged in a little quiet target practice in the surgery, but beyond a ricocheting bullet which gouged some plaster out of the surgery wall, splintered a glass case full of instruments and bounced harmlessly out into the light area, no untoward incidents occurred. Secure in the assumption that he now knew when it was liable to go off, and when it was not, he took the gun out with him at night for as long as the situation lasted, and occasionally fondled it by day as it lay in his desk drawer. When war broke out, all licences to own firearms were reviewed: my father took


his pistol up to No. 3 Police Station where, over a cup of tea with the Station boys, he missed the sergeant’s leg by inches.

On the afternoon he finally shot himself, my mother was upstairs and as usual entertaining some friends to tea. It was a humid, somnolent day, enervating; and the patient who was sitting by my father’s desk cataloguing her woes was one of his regular and more boring hypochondriacs, whose long list of ailments needed no further response than an occasional murmur of sympathy. Whilst making these reassuring noises, he idly fingered the pistol in the middle drawer of his desk, lying in its accustomed nest of old papers, tobacco pouches, and pipe cleaners. As usual it was loaded, and, as usual, my father hadn’t quite got the hang of it.

‘I get these terrifying palpitations, Doctor-sometimes when I lie down I think I’m going to choke. And then, suddenly, I’ll get a feeling of something awful about to happen-it’s my nerves,

I suppose. Don’t you think I should have something to calm my nerves?’

‘Mmmm,’ said my father, and pulled the trigger.

The bullet made a deafening report, in the doubly-confined space of the drawer, and of the consulting room. The initial impact of the drawer-bottom probably lightened the blow, which nevertheless neatly blew off part of my father’s kneecap. The patient swooned-my father cursed and bellowed-the nurse ran in, first to mop up the blood and call an ambulance into which she assisted my father; then, to revive the patient and put her in a taxi. Upstairs my mother’s guests exclaimed at the noise, but my mother assured them, ‘Don’t worry. The doctor’s probably shot himself.’

It was not until some hours later that she learnt that her husband was in hospital, where he stayed for two weeks, the central figure of a good deal of amused attention.

Later that night, I opened the door to two plainclothes policemen.

‘Miss Eakin,’ they said, ‘you can tell that father of yours that if he doesn’t learn to use that gun properly soon, we’re going to take it away from him.’

While he was in hospital, the patient who had witnessed the accident recovered sufficiently to ring him for further professional advice. In fact, the hospital switchboard operators were pestered by the wretched woman, and finally agreed to ask the doctor for his opinion. The Sister on duty came one day, ‘Mrs So-and-so is on the telephone. She says to tell you she has that sinking feeling again, and please, what should she do?’

‘Tell her,’ said my father, ‘to strike out for the shore.

From Aunts up the Cross by Robin Eakin, Sun Books, 1967.


An American at Uluru

‘It’s big, it’s red-how could you miss it?’ That’s what the ad read over a picture of Ayers Rock in the countless tourists books I had accumulated. A stunning piece of propaganda, really. I couldn’t help thinking ‘but it’s just a rock.’ So I had to see what the big deal was. I mean, I’ll never, never know, if I never, never go, right? I had been in Australia for three months studying, yet I still felt like a tourist, America being so far away and much of my preconceptions so damn… American.

Flying into Alice Springs, I got my first glimpse of the vast expanse of… well, nothingness. In every direction, just miles and miles of scorched red land looking up and closing its eyes to the relentless sun. Not quite like the rows of cornfields I was used to back in the heartland of America.

Upon arriving, I could swear that every day was Sunday. That quiet, slow type of feeling that Sunday always evokes was exactly what the Alice was like. I suppose the heat makes it difficult for people to move and the flies make it difficult for people to talk for fear that one could slip in between the words and down your throat.

I met the group I was to travel with and we spent the long haul out to the rock asking questions about each others’ countries. We ploughed through the stereotypes of each culture, and when asked if I carried a gun everywhere in America, I said of course-just like the Australians always have a knife strapped to their ankle.

That afternoon, we reached the Olgas, or Kata Tjuta. We began our hike, the dead heat attacking us. There was no shade and no guide and the only sounds to be heard were the wind and the buzzing of the flies. I could have sworn vultures were circling above and I was waiting for a tumble weed to pass me by. As my hands became swollen from the heat and my canteen of water was feeling light, I walked on, each step a physical, as well as mental, challenge. Panting through the hike, I was embarrassed, realising that people actually live here, whereas I fantasised about the air conditioning in the van at the end of the lighted tunnel. You can take the person out of the 20th century, but you can’t take the 20th century out of the person.

Oh how all the stereotypes I had scoffed at applied to me and my swollen feet. As much as I wished desperately for a Slurpee, I felt bare-boned as if layers of myself, my culture and my ideals were falling off. Stripped to my essence perhaps. Delirious maybe, but I felt as if I was melting into the land, blending into it, despite the jaunty safari wear I was sweating in.


Towards the end of the hike, I think the heat finally did get to me because I could have sworn the warm water in my canteen tasted just like Jim Beam.

That evening we slept under the stars. Nothing I have ever seen before or since could equal the humbleness I experienced. At four that morning, the rock was calling us as we rose and made the journey out to the base. I had seen enough pictures to know that yes, indeed, it was big and it was red, but nothing could have prepared me for the moment I stood in front and looked up at the inconceivable massiveness of it. It stunned me. Dorothy wasn’t in Kansas anymore, she was at the centre of Oz.

We were the first ones there, the sunrise waiting for us to get to the top. Up we went, grabbing at the chain railing that shimmied up a third of the way. I was glad it was dark out so I couldn’t see how far I had come or how much farther I had to go. I could just climb, humming ‘Happy Trails’ quietly to myself.

With blisters forming on my feet and my legs threatening to give out, I puffed on: I think I can, I think I can. Onward ho. I felt oddly like one of the Von Trapp Family members and ‘The Sound of Music’ threatened to burst out of my mouth. A guy with a guitar strapped to his back passed me. I stopped at the absurdity of it. Where was the rest of the band and would they play ‘Freebird’ once they got to the top? I was having visions of some guy next to a Coke machine selling T-shirts with ‘I Climbed Ayers Rock’ printed on them in neon waiting for me at the top.

I hoisted myself up to the final destination and sat on what could have been the moon as the rock was covered with cracks and craters. I had seen sunrises before, but this was surreal. A guy sitting next to me whipped out a joint-the poetry of it all was beautiful. The sun came up over the horizon and I could see how the earth turned and I could feel the waters part as Moses walked through it and the mountains grew out of the sea, and I knew why it always felt like Sunday here. In that one sunrise, the six days had come and gone and the earth was made, starting with the rock I was sitting on. So it was now the seventh day and we rested in awe.

What I wouldn’t have done at that moment for some platforms and sequins and a little ABBA music. As the rock started to get crowded with tourists looking for the little guy with the T-shirt stand, I started the descent. Looking over my shoulder at the sun as it crept higher in the sky, I felt the insignificance of all my bitching and moaning over my blisters, the flies in my mouth-and how much that damn T-shirt was going to cost.

By Becky Sample, Simply Living, No. 80, February 1995.


On a roll, in this new role

As an educational method, according to Jocasta, you really can’t go past public ridicule. Which is why, right now, she is standing in front of a group of our friends, displaying our toilet roll holder.

It certainly is an odd sight. The holder contains an exhausted roll, a cardboard tube. But sitting atop the empty tube-like a big wheel balanced on a small one-is a brand new roll of toilet paper.

‘What we have,’ says Jocasta, holding the object triumphant, ‘is an important artefact-a symbol of late-’90s man.

‘Why,’ asks Jocasta, ‘can men never quite put the roll on the holder? I mean, they come close-they’ve fetched it, unwrapped it, used it, and then left it resting here, right on top of the old tube.

‘What’s wrong with going that extra mile, guys?’

‘Well, extra inch, really. What’s the problem with actually putting it onto the holder? ‘And, more to the point, how do you think it finally arrives on the holder? I mean, by what agency, human or otherwise?’

As she finishes, I am troubled to report, a raucous cheering breaks out from the women at the BBQ. Many begin digging their partners in the ribs, and a most regrettable and undignified mood takes hold.

Between themselves, the women begin to produce what amounts to a social history of the toilet roll. It is not a history in which their menfolk are wrapped in glory.

Twenty years ago, they claim, men would merely leave the new roll sitting there on the floor, occasionally slinging it atop the window sill. And only after a decade of angry feminist activism did they finally agree instead to place it on top of the toilet itself. (A moment best described as the transformation of the patriarchal cistern.)

‘It took 10 years,’ says one women, ‘to move that roll one metre. And to think that now we’ve got them to actually rest it on top of the holder. Oh glory! Oh progress!’

Jocasta by now is standing on the table, as the women thump their cutlery in noisy protest, some of them making quite obscene gestures towards us blokes with the salad tongs.


My mind becomes troubled with countless questions. Among them: will the outdoor setting survive the night?

‘What causes this tragic inability in the male?’ Jocasta asks. ‘Why can they never actually insert the roll? Is it some sort of strange sexual taboo, some Freudian problem? And, moreover, on this occasion, which particular male is to blame?’

As she asks the question, six sets of questioning female eyes swivel the room. And, following Jocasta’s example, settle on me.

Naturally, Jocasta already knows the answer. In the matter of toilet rolls, I’m a recidivist, a repeat offender.

I hang my head, and go for the sheepish apology.

‘I’m sorry,’ I say, ‘I was in a hurry and I needed a new roll.’

‘Mate, what you need,’ answers Jocasta, with a flourish that indicates prior rehearsal, ‘is a brand new role.’

The women laugh, gutturally, and begin to lean together, while we blokes slink back towards the BBQ. They are developing the Theory of the Transitional Male.

According to the theory-which takes many hours, and several bottles of shiraz to develop-we are some distance ahead of our fathers. But also some distance from the fully developed man.

Our fathers, for example, might have left their laundry spread all over the bedroom floor.

We, instead, collect it up, carry it carefully into the laundry and then place it on top of the machine.

Our fathers, again, might hang a wet towel on the bedroom door, while we walk them up the hallway and sling them on the bathroom door.

‘What sort of evolutionary leap will it take,’ the women chorus, ‘to enable these few final steps-the laundry, actually into the machine; the wet towel over the towel rack; the toilet roll onto the holder…?

Small steps for mankind… but physical impossibilities for Transitional Man.

We blokes, nervously sipping on beers, the glow of the Heat Beads lighting the fear on our faces, defensively respond with examples of meals cooked, of shopping purchased, of ironing done, of children embraced and loved.

And the women, by now all perched upon the sagging outdoor setting, say they love us for our efforts.


‘Inch by inch, metre by metre,’ says one. ‘The pace of evolution is slow. With each generation the wet towel moves closer to its ultimate goal. With each generation, the toilet roll hovers ever closer to its holder.’

And one day, who knows when, it will happen-that first toilet roll will be placed on the first holder. For us blokes, it seems a sentiment sufficiently optimistic to toast with another beer.

By Richard Glover, Sydney Morning Herald, 27 April 1996.


Together in death: Sarajevo’s martyred lovers

Hardly anyone calls them by their real names-they are simply Romeo and Juliet, ever since their love and death became a symbol of Sarajevo’s tragedy in 1993. This week, they finally came home in coffins and were buried together.

Bosko Brkic, a Serb, and his girlfriend, Admira Ismic, a Muslim, died in sniper fire on Sarajevo’s main bridge in May 1993. Their bodies lay in a last embrace for a week before being recovered and buried in a Serb suburb.

With the war over, Admira’s father wanted his daughter and her lover to rest in the city where they met, and on Wednesday, the two were lowered into a joint grave in Lion Cemetery alongside thousands of other victims of Sarajevo’s siege.

Side-by-side wooden grave markers engraved with their names mark the spot.

‘This is where they were killed and this is where they should be buried,’ said Mr Zijad Ismic, as his wife, Nermina, sobbed beside the grave.

Mr Ismic said he tried in vain to find Bosko’s family to get permission for the reburial. Bosko’s mother came from Belgrade, the Yugoslav capital, for the couple’s first funeral in 1993.

The story of the couple’s love and death outgrew their personal tragedy to become a symbol of Sarajevo’s plight.

Both were 25, and they had been together for nine years when they were killed. Asked by Bosko’s mother at the start of the Bosnian war if politics would separate them, Admira replied that only a bullet could do that.

The bullets came in 1993, remembered by many as the worst year of Sarajevo’s siege, with hunger, cold, shelling and sniping daily occurrences.

The two had decided to seek a better life somewhere-anywhere-else. They made a deal with friends in the Muslim-led army to escape over the Vrbanja Bridge across the Miljacka River. But Muslim troops on the north bank and Serbs on the south kept the bridge under fierce sniper fire, making it a deadly no man’s land.


The couple went in daylight and were almost across when a sniper’s bullet killed Bosko, and another wounded Admira. She crawled to Bosko’s body, put her arm round him and died without trying to go on.

As both sides blamed each other for the killings, no-one dared retrieve the bodies. Pictures of the dead couple filled newspapers and touched hearts worldwide.

Finally, the Serbs retrieved the couple’s bodies and buried them in the Serb-held suburb of Lukavica, from where they were taken on Wednesday.

At Lion’s Cemetery yesterday, two friends spoke briefly, their voices trembling, before the coffins were lowered.

‘Back then, we thought you would make it and be happy together, but you didn’t,’ said Bosko’s friend, Dino.

‘It’s as if every great love must end like this.’

Mourners watched as grave-diggers covered the coffins with earth. Soon, the earth was heaped with flowers. Head held high, Admira’s father left, and the others followed.

By Aida Cerkez (AAP Information Services Pty Ltd), Sydney Morning Herald, 1 March 1994.


Made and me

I grew up wanting to be Stephen Cooney. To a gamelan score, I wanted to wear a sarong and a woven palm-frond hat and stroll down to surf low-tide Racetrack at Uluwatu without a leash. I believed in The Morning of the Earth. But by the time I got to Bali-mystical island of my dreams-it was already 1984 and the magic was all used up. Or so they told me.

It was my fourth trip to Bali, and for the second time, I had gone by myself. On my first trip, I made so many friends of the folk who worked Uluwatu that I didn’t feel the need to surround myself with a crew from home. Lazy days were spent out in the warungs at Ulu or up at the temple, standing against the ancient parapets, gazing down on passing turtles and dreaming of past eras. I spent most of my time with Made Lukarni. Made was 15 when I first met her and hired her as my board carrier during my first trip to Bali. She was such a spunk my brother Matt and I used to fight over who would hire her each day-and Made just ate it up. She was so precocious, and in total control despite the sometimes awkward master/slave aspects of our relationship. After that first visit, I did away with the anxiety over Made carrying boards for other men by hiring her for my entire stay up front. Made was my girl. Of course nothing physical ever passed between us, despite my crush. That wasn’t my style, or hers. We were actually good friends, and we’d talk long and deep about topics of all sorts: religion, music, love, food, faith. But by the time Made was 20, and still faithfully carrying my boards, my thoughts and feelings became a little… unsound.

One low-tide afternoon I was hanging on the beach by the cave with Made and a cousin of hers, when I finally broke down.

‘Made, why don’t you just marry me,’ I said. ‘You don’t have to leave Bali. I’ll send you money each month so that you can have your own house and won’t have to work. You’ll have the status of a married woman, but without a pesky husband around. I’ll come to visit for a couple of months each year and we’ll get someone else to carry the boards.’

‘Sam,’ Made said patiently. ‘Don’t be a fool. Go home and find yourself a nice blonde girl. Then bring her back and we’ll all be friends.’

That this made so much sense didn’t ease the pain of rejection.

I sat up and looked out at the surf, uncrowded and pounding on the reef. Well, I might as well go out there and die I figured; Made obviously didn’t care for me outside our financial agreement. ‘I am a self-absorbed fool,’ I


thought. I picked up my board and headed for the reef. As I went to go, Made stood up and followed me out onto the low-tide coral, walking quietly next to me. Sweeps of whitewater rolled down from the Temple of Doom, and as I tensely waited in knee-deep water for a lull, she reached out and put her hand lightly on my arm-the first physical gesture Made had ever shared with me.

‘Be careful out there,’ she said.

And right then I realised I didn’t give a shit about G-Land or Sumatra or Lombok or Sumbawa or anywhere else in Indo, for that matter, regardless of how much better their waves may have seemed. Because for me Bali has something none of those places have, nor ever will; it has the Balinese.

By Sam George, Surfing Life, Vol. 87, December 1995.


Positive thinking simply a state of mind

Some people seem to have that wonderful ability to always see the positive side of life. They pursue what matters to them and don’t waste their time complaining or worrying about things that are beyond their control. While they value themselves and others, they also have the ability to laugh at themselves and life. Their good humour and enthusiasm attract admirers-they are the positive thinkers of this world.

Just as you can learn to be more assertive, to reduce your stress levels, to be a better communicator or to manage your time better, so too you can learn the skill of positive thinking, learn to develop more positive ways of perceiving life. Thinking positively is an essential ingredient of success in achieving business and personal goals. Here are some ways to develop more positive attitudes in our own lives.

1. Stop ‘awfulising’

‘Awfulising’-the term coined by Dr Albert Ellis for that uniquely human tendency to make mountains out of hassles and catastrophes of minor problems. We all do it at times, some of us constantly.

Ironically, when confronted with a genuine human tragedy, we often see life in a more rational perspective. You might reflect to yourself how trivial and unimportant are those issues you had previously regarded as problems. Most of them aren’t awful at all. The simple lesson in this is that most of the things we worry about don’t really matter all that much-we just think they do at the time.

Time also helps put apparent problems into a more rational view. Think back to an event in your past that caused you pain and distress. With the benefit of hindsight, you may realise now that it really wasn’t so terrible after all. Perhaps now you can even laugh at some of those situations because, however sad the memory, you survived and life has gone on, relatively unaffected by past dramas. If we could learn the lessons of hindsight, instead of waiting for the passage of time, we could save a lot of unnecessary suffering.

The best way to release an ‘awfulising’ habit is to catch yourself in the act. As soon as you start getting upset, shout ‘Stop!’ either mentally or out aloud. This will help to break the grip of those thoughts. (You may need to shout ‘Stop’ several times-negative thoughts tend to sneak back when


you’re not looking.) Then challenge negative self-talk with rational statements such as:

This is a hassle but it’s not a disaster.

Compared to the really awful things that could happen, how bad is this?

This is inconvenient. That’s OK. I can handle it.

Will this matter in five years time? In one year? Next month?

Write down a number of positive statements which dispute your negative self-talk and read over them several times a day. Practice makes perfect-frequent repetition of the positive is the secret.

2. Don’t take yourself too seriously

Some people can laugh at themselves and life’s little dramas-they have a natural ability to see humour in seemingly serious situations.

Most of us, however, take the most serious perspective, forgetting it is not the only view: you can for instance, take an amused, light-hearted point of view. You can learn to take life a little less seriously, to see the ridiculous and make light of issues normally regarded as serious.

This is the art of the comedian. Look for the funny, the absurd, the preposterous and let yourself laugh-life doesn’t have to be so very serious all the time. One of my favourite sayings is: Don’t sweat the small stuff, it’s all small stuff.

Once you can truly accept this in your heart, it becomes much easier to laugh.

3. Take action to improve things you can control

Being a positive thinker doesn’t mean being indifferent to all of life’s problems. A pervasive attitude of ‘it doesn’t matter’ is not positive thinking, it’s apathy! Being positive means being willing to take action to deal with those situations you can do something about.

When problems arise, begin with the question: ‘What is the best action I can take to deal with this?’ With more complex problems you may need to brainstorm a whole list of possible solutions and then work out a plan of action. It’s important to explore all the possibilities.

If there is something you can do, take action. If there’s absolutely nothing you can do, your best strategy is to accept that some problems are unresolvable and make a conscious decision to let it go.

Worrying about a situation you can do nothing about only upsets you and does absolutely nothing towards solving the problem. An excellent rule is: Never worry about things beyond your control.


‘Victims’ spend their time pointing to the problems and are quick to tell you why things don’t work. On the other hand ‘winners’ look for solutions-their attitude is ‘I’ll make it happen’.

Becoming a winner is all about recognising that you have the ability to take control over your life. It involves examining all of your options and being prepared to take whatever action is necessary in order to achieve positive change.

By Sarah Edelman, Natural Health, February/March 1994.


The holey dollar

Governor Lachlan Macquarie (1762(1824) was instrumental in the establishment of Australia’s first bank and was also responsible for introducing Australia’s first coinage, the holey dollar.

His energy and far-sightedness helped turn the penal settlement into a developing economy. The Governor actively promoted and encouraged the development of commerce and agriculture.

In the very early nineteenth century the colony faced an acute shortage of coin. This led to a brisk trade in promissory notes and a barter economy evolved, with rum as the main currency.

In an effort to resolve the currency problem, Macquarie imported Spanish dollars and adapted them by punching out the centre of each coin to leave a ringed coin. This became known as the holey dollar.

The original surface of this ring was overstruck with the words ‘New South Wales’ and the date, 1813. The value, five shillings, was stamped on the reverse side of the coin.

The centre, known as the dump, was polished down and stamped with the date on the one side and the value, 15 pence, on the other side.

Governor Macquarie’s creation of the holey dollar was an inspired solution to a difficult problem and for this reason it was chosen as our symbol.

From Macquarie Cash Management Trust, Prospectus No. 25, 5 August 1994.


Shop tactics

I’ll let the dictionary have the first word. Haggle, it says, is a verb which means to bargain or wrangle over a price; to barter. It’s the only six-letter word I can think of which fills me with trembling terror all the way from sun-hat to sandals, via my shopping bag and wallet.

In constant travels around the globe, this mild-mannered buyer is frequently caught as the novelty in the cultural cracker, and never more revealingly than when I am forced to haggle in a foreign bazaar.

On such occasions, the bargaining fandango goes something like this: Susan strolls through the spice-laden souks of, say, Marrakech, where there are at least as many Aladdin’s Cave-style shops as there are wily camel drivers in the Sahara. Shopkeepers sense the presence of a timid haggler from many miles off: some of these fellows have periscope vision which enables them to spy on me around corners.

Stupidly, I pause to admire a richly patterned rug in the window of a glittering cavern. With a manoeuvre which resembles a producer deftly removing a faltering performer off-stage with a shepherd’s crook, a shopkeeper scoops me indoors faster than you can say abracadabra.

In a finger’s snap, I am seated on a couch piled with a pasha’s-parlour assortment of cushions and tea is being poured into a tiny cup from a dizzy height. As I sip the minty and sugary brew, I realise I am surrounded by flying carpets. These aerial rugs are not bound for distant parts but for my feet.

The shopkeeper’s helpers, seemingly with six pairs of hands apiece, throw the rugs with the ease of Italian chefs flipping pizzas. Every texture, colour, pattern and composition of wool and silk that madam has ever dared dream of. Not exactly to your taste, beautiful Madam Susan from the land of kangaroos? (By now the shopkeeper and Madam Susan are not only first-name friendly but, if it assists him seal a deal, practically betrothed.)

If the carpet of my dreams is not available, one will be ordered. Berber grandmothers will go blind in the making, herds of mountain sheep will wear no winter coats, but the rug will be mine by six tomorrow. No worries.

Bargaining is a time-honoured practice in many lands and in complicated places such as Morocco, shop-keepers go into sorrowful spirals if tourists pay the first price asked. Transactions should be carried out over copious


amounts of tea and talk. Not to play the game it to miss out on a major social occasion.

The casual shopper, be it in Cairo or Calcutta, can find such play exhausting. I have bargained furiously for a camera in Hong Kong, only to find the agreed price (at half the original ask, a small triumph for me, the dysfunctional haggler) did not include the lens.

In Delhi, in a similar adventure, this time for a pair of sandals, resulted in me agreeing to a price for only one shoe. In Cairo, a negotiated camel ride past the Pyramids and across the tawny sands results in me being stranded like a wayward explorer. My mistake? I had arranged a one-way fare.

There are those travellers who relish such performance, who approach each transaction with seasoned guile. These are the souls who hold their booty aloft as if it were a precious trophy.

They scoff pityingly upon me when I reveal I paid a whole $10 for a Balinese wood carving (of a coyote in a checked jacket performing the lambada under a banana tree; yes, I’m short-sighted too). Their superior bargaining powers have got it for half the price. But I have seen these haggle addicts score useless and empty-handed victories, too. Such as walking away in high dudgeon from a shop because the shopkeeper would not budge on a final price.

I sometimes wonder if they ever sit alone with their calculators in their hotel room (which will be half the price of yours and always with a fruit bowl and sea view thrown in) and work out that all those thousands of rupiah, yen and lira they refused to pay actually amounted to less than the price of a cup of coffee.

The last time I ventured alone to an Ali Baba’s den, I passed out from too much sugary tea and theatricality. The 40 thieves fought over who’d be the first to make me a temporary bed on a pile of flokatis. (See how comfortable, beautiful madam! So soft! We pack in special bag! We ship anywhere!)

I happily dreamt I was safely home in Sydney, sans calculator and foreign phrase books of useful everyday expressions (Too expensive! It was cheaper in the last village! I will give you a quarter of the price and not a dirham more!) fondling proper price tags and demanding gift-wrapping and home delivery.

By Susan Kurosawa, DJ, Autumn/Winter 1996.


Life lessons

A brilliant Babe wasn’t the expectation of many commentators when they first heard George Miller and Chris Noonan were making a film about a talking pig. But they should have had more faith in a pairing that gave us The Cowra breakout (mini-series, 1985), Vietnam (mini-series, 1987) and The riddle of the Stinson (tele-feature, 1988), let alone their many achievements as individuals.

Babe is a wondrously rich and nuanced film that works on so many levels a review could well end up a long list of themes cleverly raised and resolved. It is devilishly entertaining and deeply profound at the same time.

Scott Murray interviewed producer and co-writer Miller by phone in Los Angeles, where he is preparing Contact from the Carl Sagan novel. Director and co-writer Noonan was interviewed in Sydney, where he is sorting through a mass of offers. The two conversations were then intercut. Miller begins with how he first comes across Dick King-Smith’s The sheep-pig, on which Babe is based.

Miller: In 1985, I was flying to London-my third trip in a matter of months-to record the score of Mad Max beyond Thunderdome with the London Philharmonic. By sheer luck, I awoke bolt upright in the middle of the night, somewhere over India. I surfed the audio and came across the Children’s Programme. A woman was reviewing children’s books and when she came to one called The sheep-pig, she laughed uncontrollably. There was something in the way she laughed that made me wonder, ‘What is it about this book that really got to her?’

The moment I arrived in London, I walked into a shop and there was the book, staring at me. I read it and had the same response as the woman.

The book is about a lot of things. Not only is it a wonderful little allegory about prejudice, it also deals with that moment when we come to adulthood by finding out the real truth about the world, how harsh it can be, and how you deal with that.

The book also has a spirit and charm which is really great. I really liked its sensibilities, and I like the way it is understated.

But, from the start, I felt very strongly that it shouldn’t be made as a conventional animation. I didn’t think it was something that would lend itself to the flamboyant character animation that Disney is able to do so


well. I remember thinking, ‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could really make it feel as if real animals were talking?’

I then discussed it with [joint producer] Doug Mitchell. We started trying to find the rights to the book, and then the pig jokes began. Even the lawyers included them in their telexes. And the jokes haven’t stopped to this day, right down to the puns people are using in their reviews.

Noonan: After George had purchased the option on the book, he approached me. I read it and was immediately and strongly taken with the story. It has a classic feel. At its heart, it is very close to the universal hero story that Joseph Campbell talks about in his writings on myth.

The concerns of the story, as I read them, had great resonance with me. One concern is a major issue facing societies today-the issue of prejudice-while another is a major philosophical challenge facing individuals-the coming to terms with their mortality. And all of this is contained within a plot which is very whimsical and fun.

Does your interest in Campbell come from working with Kennedy Miller?

Noonan: I discovered Campbell through the enthusiasm of both George and Terry Hayes. Campbell is almost a religion with George, and deservedly so, because he is one of the greatest thinkers about the function that drama plays in the lives of people throughout history, and today….

From ‘Life lessons’ by Scott Murray, Cinema Papers, No. 107, December 1995.


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