Leeward Read online

Where the bulbs died down, the grass was long and rank. We attacked it with a scythe. Scything requires a precise motion, like a ballet dancer’s movements. My sister and I learned from our father how to swing the handle, balanced between two hands, the grass toppling neatly at the light touch of the long, curving blade.

  Our mother took Diana and me on a picnic in the Botanic Gardens. We were walking along a curved path under tall trees when I saw Kurume azaleas for the first time. I was excited. They were like stamps in a child’s stamp album: masses of small neat brilliant flowers. Some were bi-colour, white with pink or mauve edges. Later in the week I went back and took as many cuttings as I dared. I treated them with cutting powder but only one thrived – ‘Hinode-giri’ which had become a large shrub with cerise flowers when my sister and I sold the Gordon house twenty years later.

  When we moved to the Gordon house, our weekend expeditions to places of interest began in earnest. My sister later looked back on this time as the halcyon days of her youth. My father had an unstated plan to swim at every beach in the Sydney region. We would take a picnic lunch packed in a wicker basket, and might buy an ice cream, if we were lucky, before coming home late in the afternoon.

  My father mentally ticked off the beaches one by one. South of the Harbour Bridge we went swimming at Watsons Bay, Bondi (where excrement from the sewer outlet sometimes floated past), Tamarama, Bronte and Maroubra. The narrow surfing beach of Tamarama, surrounded on three sides by cliffs, was treacherous and we sometimes had to struggle through a deep gutter of water to reach a sandbank where surf was breaking normally. We travelled once or twice all the way south to Cronulla by train for a swim.

  We went on bush walks at Kurnell along sandy paths. ‘Here, suck this’ my father used to say, picking the leaf of a sarsaparilla vine, refreshing with a dark, bitter-sweet taste. A leaf from a similar looking vine had no flavour at all. Walking along the cliffface he pointed at dolphins or ‘porpoises’ as he called them – diving and swimming in the brightly lit waves, not far from the shadow of the cliffs.

  We also went on train journeys further south to Thirroul and Austinmer, but never got as far as Wollongong. These southern train journeys, setting out from Central Station, began with a descent into ‘the bottleneck’, where dozens of rail tracks crossed and trains travelling in the opposite direction thundered overhead on tall brick viaducts. Once we were out of this maze of brick arches, as we rushed along, our heads turned at every mile to read the dark blue enamel plate advertising the distance from Sydney and Griffiths Teas in white letters.

  The train took us on through forests of eucalypts with naked cream trunks and angophoras with orange-pink trunks. Tree ferns and cabbage palms, and the red floral head-dresses of Gymea lilies on 3-metre-high green maypoles were scattered like jewels in this primeval landscape. This was the train journey DH Lawrence describes in Kangaroo.

  We also caught trains heading north to Mt Kuring-gai and Mt Colah, for bushwalks. These ‘mounts’, insignificant hills even by Australian standards, only 30 kilometres from Sydney, are now suburbs. We were bought frothy milkshakes at the Mt Kuring-gai general store. Placing the metal containers on the linoleumcovered counter, the fleshy armed proprietress turned to my sister and me: ‘How do you kids like being in the country, eh?’

  On our walks we encountered the tiny white star-like flowers of heaths, held on stiff stems with metallic green leaves. If we were lucky, we saw the small cupped pink flowers of a stand of Boronia serrulata on a sandstone ledge. Or ‘native rose’, as my father called them – ‘common when I was a child’, he explained, and since then pillaged for the cut-flower trade.

  Sometimes our bush walks were close to home. We once saw an echidna burying itself in bush sand at our feet on the walk down to Rocky Creek. The creek became a waterfall with a large green swimming hole at its foot. If we did not swim, we left Iris behind, reading a book. As we continued downstream, the valley widened and became a natural amphitheatre. An old white-bearded dosser camped there under a long shelf of rock. In December thousands of yellow and red Christmas bells flowered on the valley floor. They have vanished along with the dosser.

  The end of our walk was the upper reaches of Middle Harbour, a string of tidal pools that were a refuge for injured, gashed fish. High above us a white sea eagle hovered on thermals.

  Coming from the bright colours and fragrances of the untidy Garden of Eden at McMahons Point, the Australian bush felt alien and drab. But I slowly realised the flowers were not all scentless. Some had an overpowering honey fragrance. I became fascinated by the great mosaic of plants, their subtle variations and ancientness, a Joseph’s coat of species living happily together. They were perfect gardens that cared for themselves.

  I shall not list the dozen or so northern beaches we visited, except to say that Harbord (or Freshwater, its other name) could be as treacherous as Tamarama. We came by public transport and had to change in ‘bathing pavilions’ if we wanted to swim. These ‘pavilions’ were brick buildings with showers and benches. Many had large courtyards open to the sun, where men stretched out on a towel and sunbaked with or without swimming trunks. I was yet to reach puberty and knew nothing about sex, but I thought it odd when a youth of about sixteen walked across the courtyard with an erection. I was glad to be with my father and not by myself in these places.

  Our mother sat on the sand in her straw bonnet and cotton dress, minding the towels and clothes, with a small umbrella open at her back to provide shade, as Diana and I waded into the water with our father. Once a month Iris was joined by my sister, and only my father and I went swimming.

  My father installed a thirty-year-old Maytag washing machine in the cavernous laundry under the Gordon house. The Maytag was a square metal tub on thin metal legs and did little, except rock the clothes back and forth in the suds. We then spun the clothes in a small aluminium spin dryer rotated by water pressure from a laundry hose. Not unlike a steel beer barrel, open at one end, and spinning rapidly above a tub, this was another of my father’s bargains from the Bridge Street auction rooms.

  My mother was afraid of these machines. My father became the impresario of our Sunday washdays, with my mother standing by anxiously. One of my sister’s colour slides is of Leo, like a man in a Diego Rivera painting, with a broad back and an arm reaching across to hang out a sheet.

  When we moved into the Gordon house I made friends with Helen, the ten-year-old girl next door. I was an ignorant, innocent child, and I believe she was too. She would come in from her parents’ house and we would sit on the ground and invent games to play. I was at an all-boys school and she was the first girl of my own age I had as a friend. One evening my mother said: ‘You’re not to play with that girl next door. And I’ve told her mother that too.’

  I was stunned. I could not believe my mother, who was my confidant and supporter, was telling me this. I felt she was being unjust – to me and to my new friend. I never spoke to Helen again – I was an obedient child. At night I used to lean on the railing of our side veranda that overlooked Helen’s house, and whistle improvised tunes, imagining she might hear. My feelings towards my mother began to change.

  About three years later I was lying in bed one night. My mother came into my bedroom and observed my hand move under the bedclothes as I quickly placed it by my side. She regarded me with a look of dismay. She said as she left the room: ‘You’re not the boy I thought you were.’

  BELLA

  In late 1905, a group of relatives gathered on a wharf in Melbourne. They were there to welcome Dr and Mrs Rainer back to Australia. Twelve years earlier, the newly-married couple had set out for England – William to complete his medical studies and Bella, a bride known for her ‘mahogany red hair’, to entertain and keep house for him. Now he was a doctor and they had five children. Looking up from the wharf at the ship’s deck, the relatives were shocked. The pale faces of the five children gazing down over the railing – one of them was my mother – were frightened and bewildered.
/>   The following year my mother, ten years old, found her father dead on a couch in the Queensland mining town of Eidsvold. She (and her mother and siblings) had only just been reunited with her father, who had gone north ten months earlier. Later that day she went in to look at his body for a last time. She thought his teeth were beautiful and opened his mouth for a last look. There was a smell of onions.

  ‘Smile and when you smile another smiles and soon there’s miles and miles of smiles and life’s worthwhile because you smile.’

  Going through my sister’s documents I found she had written this out on a piece of paper, possibly after our mother died in 1983. It was a favourite saying of my mother’s. Diana seems to have treasured these words as a fond memento. I felt a flash of anger – with our mother, not my sister. I hated that saying – its banality, its falsity. I was ashamed I could still feel such anger. I stopped loving my mother when I was ten.

  Also in among my sister’s documents were Bella’s – my mother’s mother’s – three scrapbooks. One was filled with newspaper photographs and cuttings about kings and queens and the British nobility. She prided herself as an expert on the lives of the aristocracy, checking their genealogy in her blue covered Whitaker’s Peerage. She spent thirty years cutting out newspaper stories about the rich and famous, and pasting them into this scrapbook. Keeping track of the goings-on of these strangers was her full-time profession. Apart from briefly working as a governess before her marriage, Bella never worked again. After her husband’s early death, she expected her children to support her for the rest of her life – children she sent out to work after the minimum years of schooling. I threw this scrapbook away.

  The other two scrapbooks had material that was more personal and I kept them. I was hoping to glean confirmation of family stories. Both were tall books covered in ultramarine blue cloth. The less interesting scrapbook had been volume II of Geography and Atlas of Protestant Missions. A bookshop stamp indicates Bella bought it cheaply at a sale, after she moved to Sydney. She then filled it with the overflow of newspaper cuttings, collected over decades.

  Pasted on the Atlas’s inside cover is a newspaper account of the wedding of my mother’s younger sister Eva just after World War I:

  An interesting wedding took place at Holy Trinity Church, Balaclava … The bride wore white crepe de chene [sic] and georgette with a satin train lined with shell-pink … Miss Iris Rainer, sister of the bride, was bridesmaid, wearing pale pink crepe de chene and georgette draperies, with a white georgette hat… After the ceremony the bride’s mother held a reception at ‘Wickliffe House,’ St. Kilda … Both bridegroom and best man were in uniform.

  I was amused by the euphemistic ‘the bride’s mother held a reception…’ Her children, not Bella, would have paid for this. She sent Iris out to work as a seamstress in a factory at the age of thirteen.

  There was an unspoken rivalry between Iris and Eva. Bella had accepted the offer of distant female relatives to take Eva as a ‘free’ boarder at their young ladies’ college in Sydney. Bella was keen on how things ‘looked’. Eva would get a private school education. Eva saw it quite differently. She was being expelled from her family. Only once a year at Christmas was she allowed back to Melbourne to be with them. Her ‘private school education’ was demeaning; she was treated as a domestic drudge, waiting at meals on the other young ladies seated around a long table.

  When Eva’s school years were over, she came back to Melbourne from her exile in Sydney. Slightly shorter than my mother, she was now a buxom, fair-headed young woman, a fresh-faced practical girl. During her courting days she was ‘too keen’ on her future husband, my mother used to say. It is not clear what this excessive keenness was. But it made my mother uncomfortable.

  Eva and Jack soon had four children. My mother was envious. It was almost another twenty years before the bridesmaid escaped from Bella and became a bride.

  In her Melbourne years after World War I, Bella was active in charities. A cutting records her attendance at a ‘linen tea’, where guests donated sheets, pillow slips and towels for a hospital. Another cutting, headed ‘Mrs. Moss Entertained’, lists Bella as a member of an ‘entertainment committee’ of the National Council of Women of Victoria. They held a farewell lunch after raising money for Mrs Moss to attend a women’s conference in Geneva.

  Several pages later, Bella pasted a newspaper photograph of a handsome woman, with pearl drop earrings and necklace: ‘Mrs I. H. Moss, who has been appointed Australia’s substitute delegate to the Assembly of the League of Nations’.

  Bella left no explanation as to why she kept these two mementoes of Mrs Moss, whose life was such a brilliant success, compared with her own. When my mother inherited the scrapbooks she wrote ‘Father could have married she was in love with him’ beside the article headed ‘Mrs. Moss Entertained’, and underneath the newspaper photograph she wrote: ‘Father could have married but she was Jewish. She loved our father. I. I. L.’ My mother’s surmise that Mrs Moss was Jewish is wrong. She married a Jewish man, but she was ‘cremated with Presbyterian forms’.

  A favourite story of my mother’s was about my grandfather’s romantic assignation with Alice Wilson shortly before she married. My mother was vague about the details. My grandfather would then have been a twenty-two-year-old medical student. He was yet to inherit a fortune from his uncle, and was too young to marry the seventeen-year-old Alice Wilson, who was about to become Mrs Moss. Alice may have made something of my grandfather if they had married. It is more likely she had a lucky escape.

  Bella’s earlier scrapbook is labelled ‘Album’ in large gold lettering and decorated with gold-leaf flowers, a butterfly and birds. It was a genuine scrapbook and not a Protestant Atlas converted to this purpose. There is an inscription in a large flowing hand on the inside cover:

  Bella. Dora. Mooney.

  Park Street

  South Melbourne

  May 25th 1888

  Most of the pages are a hodgepodge of newspaper cuttings. One page is carefully arranged like a small garden of remembrance. In its centre Bella pasted a checkerboard cross of cut-up black and grey squares, placed above a small mound of similar squares. Beside it is a newspaper death notice which she dated ‘July 11th 1887’. The man who died was William Norman Matheson ‘in his twenty-eighth year’.

  Centred directly under the black and grey cross, is a small neatly handwritten card on which is written:

  Je vous aime

  &

  you know

  it – (I love you)

  Blow you

  W. N. M.

  1885

  My grandmother tried, not very effectively, to scratch out the ‘Blow you’.

  On the opposite page is an account of the death of William Matheson’s mother, two months after her son. The son ‘died very suddenly after a short illness’. A notice of letters of administration pasted onto this page states William Matheson died intestate leaving an estate of £47 122 – an amount that could have purchased seventy average-priced houses in that era.

  If William Rainer had married Alice Wilson, and Bella had married William Matheson (and he had not died young), my grandparents may have been saved from a love match which was a disaster for both of them.

  Pages inserted at the front of Bella’s family bible record her marriage in Melbourne to William George Rainer, the birth dates of their five children and the places in the United Kingdom where they were born. Every address is different. Bella’s medical practitioner husband and his family did not stay for long anywhere.

  In about 1936, when she was in her early seventies, Bella prepared eighteen pages of ‘Recollections’ which she sent off for publication under the alternative noms-de-plume of ‘Another Mother’ or ‘Dora Gettings’, the name of her grandmother. The names of her husband and father are mentioned nowhere. The recollections were sent back to her, probably unread. She had not taken the trouble to write them out in an easily decipherable hand.

  A side note on the f
irst page states her mother ‘when a little girl had often seen the blacks in their corroborees opposite the Village Belle Hotel St Kilda … among the tea tree’. Bella’s mother, also named Isabella, died in 1923.

  Bella’s ‘Recollections’ begin:

  I was the second of five daughters, my father being a pioneer of Victoria, owner and proprietor of ‘Cobbs Coaches’ for the Victoria section travelling to St Kilda … He accumulated a considerable fortune … My father’s name will not bear repetition as it is so well-known, his having been one of the first councillors … but is still remembered as the originator of the ‘Poets’ Corner’ St Kilda.

  Fortune was cruel to him; his trust in a friend and backing of the friend’s bills, led to what the papers called ‘A Wholesale Robbery’. His signature was forged … He had a fall from his horse resulting in two broken ribs and a head and leg wound. All of this culminated in his valuable property being sacrificed in a big auction sale … and the forger getting six years imprisonment in Darlinghurst Gaol – he having absconded dressed as a woman to Sydney.

  Her ‘dear father’ died the day before his case against the bill holders was listed so, as his solicitor told the court, ‘he would show cause before a mightier judge than Mr Justice Molesworth’. Bella then has an account of her time as a governess – the only time in her life when she was employed:

  I always had a wish to visit a sheep station – now was my chance. I looked out for a position and secured one, as nursery governess, on one of the biggest stations in New South Wales, carrying 120,000 sheep, two out-stations, and two towns on the run. My husband later on when we were in England loved to tell the people whom we met, about the 120,000 sheep – much to their astonishment, they thought it unbelievable.

  Bella mentions calling ‘at many lovely stations’ on the Murrumbidgee and Lachlan Rivers, passing through places such as Hay and One Tree Plain. She reported: