One Life - Kate Grenville

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where women had the vote. Free universal education stopped at primary school. Very few women worked outside the home. Only a handful of working-class children went to high school. Even fewer went to university or had professional training. Of those, hardly any were women. Even when they did work for wages, women were paid half a man’s salary. There was no organised child care. The only reliable form of contraception was abstinence.

      By the time my mother’s children were growing up, all that had changed. Two world wars, an economic depression, and a series of social revolutions had changed the lives of hundreds of millions all over the world. Many families would know stories like my mother’s about their parents and grandparents. Her story is unusual in some ways, but in other ways it’s the archetypal twentieth-century story of the coming of a new world of choices and self-determination.

      When Nance talked about her life, she often started five generations before she was born. The point of her story was that it was part of a bigger one.

      Solomon Wiseman, her great-great-grandfather, arrived in Australia in 1806. An illiterate lighterman on the Thames, he’d been caught stealing timber and, along with his wife and young son, was transported to New South Wales for the term of his natural life. He quickly got his freedom and ‘took up land’, as the euphemism goes, on the Hawkesbury River. There’s nothing in the record about exactly how he ‘took up’ that land from the Darug people, but the chances are that he was part of the wave of settler violence against the original Australians.

      The stories that have come down about him are unflattering. He was brutal to his convict servants and crooked in business. He’s said to have killed his first wife by pushing her over the balcony. When one of his daughters became pregnant to the riding master he’s said to have thrown her and the baby out of the house to die. Although he became wealthy, he refused to have his children educated, on the grounds that if he sent them to school they’d be humiliated because of their convict taint.

      His daughter Sarah Wiseman married an Irishman, John Martin Davis from Cork. Davis was a free settler, but not a wealthy one. He acquired land in the Hunter Valley and the Liverpool Plains, lost most of it in the depression of the 1840s, and retreated with his wife and children to a small holding at Currabubula Creek, in northern New South Wales, not far from Tamworth, where he started a pub. Paddy Davis’s Freemason’s Arms, later the Davis Hotel, became a landmark on the stock route to Queensland. The Davises prospered and, as the village of Currabubula grew, they came to own most of it.

      Their daughter, another Sarah, married an illiterate Cockney, Thomas Maunder. As a seventeen-year-old he’d been brought out with his family to work on Goonoo Goonoo Station near Currabubula. Goonoo Goonoo was the biggest pastoral estate in the country, run by the Kings, who were descended from one of the early governors. In the family stories Mr King was a hard man to his underlings. Maunder was hardly off the boat, a boy from London who’d probably never seen a sheep, when King made him take three rams—notoriously hard to handle—from Goonoo Goonoo to Quirindi, by himself and without a sheepdog. When Maunder’s sister died, Mr King made him dig her grave. Worse than these were the humiliations. If Mr King had to speak to Maunder, he’d say: Stand back, my man, at least two yards. You harbour the flies so!

      Thomas Maunder worked hard and made enough money to buy his own small farm near Currabubula. One of his brothers did even better, and made sure his children got the best education the area could offer, at the Tamworth convent. Maunder didn’t send his children to school. He kept them home to work as shepherds—children were cheaper than fences. The exception was his youngest, Dolly, born in 1881. As she was reaching school age, one of their neighbours was prosecuted under the new laws for failing to let his children go to school. Maunder didn’t wait to be next and sent Dolly along to Currabubula Public School. Apart from her grandfather Davis, who probably had at least some education, Dolly was the first of her family to know how to read and write.

      Currabubula Public School only went up to Grade Six, the end of primary school. Like all the other pupils, Dolly sat in Grade Six doing the same work over and over until she was fourteen, the legal school-leaving age. High school was out of the question. There were only six government high schools in the state and the nearest was two hundred miles away.

      When she left school, Dolly wanted to train to be a schoolteacher. Maunder said no. He had enough money to support his daughters until they married. A daughter going to work would shame him. Over his dead body she’d be a teacher!

      Dolly fell in love with a local boy, Jim Daly, and would have married him, but he was Catholic and the Maunders were nominal C of E. For a Protestant to marry a Catholic was unthinkable. In any case, Dolly’s parents had their eye on someone else.

      Albert Russell was born in Currabubula in 1882. He was the illegitimate son of Mary Russell, his father unknown. Like Dolly, he went to Currabubula Public School. When he left at fourteen, he went to work for Dolly’s father. He was a big strong man who became a champion shearer. Dolly’s mother fancied him as a son-in-law because, she said, no one could cure and slice the bacon the way she liked it except Bert.

      Dolly put off marriage for years. Several times she went north to Dorrigo to stay for months on end with a friend from school. Eventually, in 1910, when she was twenty-nine—nearly on the shelf—she had to give in. She and Bert married and set up house on a farm near Gunnedah that Maunder owned, called Rothsay. They worked it as sharecroppers, mostly growing wheat. Bert continued to go away shearing for ready money. A year after they were married, Frank was born.

      Frank was nine months old and Bert was away when Dolly found a locked trunk in the shed. She broke it open. Inside were papers about child-support payments that Bert had been making. She recognised the name of the recipient straight away—it was a girl who’d worked for her mother. While Dolly was off at Dorrigo, Bert had been busy with this girl. It was Dolly’s mother who’d arranged for the girl and the baby to go away. She’d organised the payments and made Bert keep it a secret. For Dolly that was the worst part, that her mother had tricked her.

      When Bert came back there was a tremendous row and he went off again, this time for good. But what could Dolly do, alone on a farm with a baby? She sent word for him to come back. Nine months later, in August 1912, my mother Nance was born.

      ONE

      THE FIRST memory was of crying too much and being put under her father’s arm like a log of wood. He took her outside into the night, the cold struck chill against her face, there was the horse-trough full of water glittering in small moonlight, and her father pushing her head under. The terror of it, the cold black water up her nose, in her throat, choking her. It was only the once, but it was never forgotten.

      At Rothsay the heart of the house was a big kitchen with an enormous wooden table and a stove always warm. Her father would leave his boots, heavy with black mud, at the door and pad into the house in his socks. He’d ruffle her hair with a big hard farmer’s hand, take her on his knee. Her mother seemed always to be scolding. Always her voice high and angry, a piece of wire cutting through the room. The child’s own name came to be an accusation. Nance! Nance!

      Outside it was the paddocks, sky everywhere you looked, and a lovely long flowing of days. Sheep in one paddock, cows in another, and the rest ploughed ground with wheat coming up green and tender. Down the hill was the river, the still pool with trees hanging over the bank where a platypus rippled along the surface at dusk, and the place at the end of the pool where the water mumbled over the rocks.

      Frank was eighteen months older, like another self, but stronger, faster, cleverer. He killed a snake that would have bitten her, made up stories about pirates, built a cubby for them where they could get away from Dolly. The sounds were different when you were in there, the sun different when it came through the holes and lay along the dirt in bright bars. The peaceful feeling, in there with Frank, safe and quiet. Max appeared after a few years, a new brother. He was only a bundle of clothes with a red-cheeked face, of no interest.

      And always the weather like another person, leaning over the household. Rain so thick you couldn’t see the shed from the house, and the river turning from a quiet creature lying between its banks to something dimpled and dangerous, rising over the paddocks,

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