Flooded Memories
Dad, Me and the Wheat Board Inspector at Brookstead c.1962 :This picture appeared in the "Grain Grower" newspaper with an article about the change from delivering wheat in bags to bulk handling.
Over the past two decades I have learnt a lot about Australia's first peoples, around the campfire, listening to stories, watching inma and travelling over country. Like so many "Europeans" it's a curiosity I have had since growing up on the farm in South East Queensland. We lived near the Condamine River and when it flooded, which it did more more then than it does now, the Grasstree Creek would flood and cut the road for the school bus at Yandilla. Canal Creek and the Condamine would cut the road to Pittsworth and flooding on Dog Trap Creek cut us off from Warwick. No school. Now normally it would be welcomed as providential, a bonus holiday. But not so one year, one of the few times I felt I was missing out on something by being kept home from school.
This was the middleish 60's, we'd only had the electric wireless for a couple of years and our telephone was an army surplus field set that dad and his two brothers installed connecting our three houses. Television had not yet come. We went to the cinema twice, once to see Pollyanna and again to see Hatari. It was very rare to see a movie at school, in fact I only remember one occasion. It was going to be quite a thing. A highlight of a day was setting up. The older boys would construct a makeshift cinema. I missed out, stuck at home because of the floods. The non-floodbound boys got to make a dark room in the large space under the school which was built on high posts in the Queenslander style. The design provided a wet weather play area, air flow under the classrooms for cooling in summer, and very occasionally, a place to hang heavily oiled canvas tarpaulins to create a cinema. It was a bit tricky getting a good seat because of the avenues of tall stumps supporting the building above obstructed the line of sight to the screen.
As I recall, we thirty or so kids from Tummaville missed out on the main screening but with enough respectful nagging got to see it the following week. There were two images I recall from that screening. The first was of men and boys riding bark canoes on the river. The second was of a Pintupi boy from the western desert. He was clearly in his element, already an accomplished bushman and as inquisitive about us as I was about him, only he knew how to do stuff. I needed more learning before I could do anything really interesting like hunting kangaroo, or finding water in the desert. I could light a fire and was still enjoying the 'pyromania' that afflicts all boys at a certain age after they learn how to play with matches. But firesticks, that was taking it to another level.
In the the 60's we had little knowledge of the world beyond our local community. Mum would take us kids into to Pittsworth on Saturdays for piano lessons and the weekly shopping at the coop and butchers. The postman brought our bread from Milmerran a couple of times a week. We had a house-cow for fresh milk daily. In summer, after Pittsworth got a pool, we would have a swimming lesson as well. Each month or so we would go to Toowoomba for a family or church event and visit Grandma and Grandad. A couple of times a year we would meet up with cousins, eventually I had 65, at the Bunya mountains, Kumbia, Brisbane or Maryborough.
The world was changing and we were totally unaware of how quickly it was happening. Our vision of the future was hopelessly out of sync with the changing times. The public discourse was dominated by fear of the Yellow Peril and Reds Under the Bed. The scare that this country could be taken by people from over the seas was very real. Our being here attested to that. Atom bomb tests had taken place at Maralinga, the Woomera rocket range was testing rockets for ... was it space travel or missiles with war heads? I don't know, but rockets, yeah! Yet our actual contact with the outside world followed a well trodden path with xenophobic guardrails. The two opposing synods of our church were in discussions towards amalgamation, an event which did take place, but true to form, agreement was not unanimous and the newly formed body generated three offshoots. While the first transistor radios had been built and we still had a mantle radio that you had to switch on five minutes before the broadcast giving the valves time to warm up. We listened to the news, weather, community hymn singing on Sunday nights and the midday radio serial, "Blue Hills" by Gwen Meredith. The real changes hadn't reached us yet but like the thin edge of a wedge that splits a great old tree, they would.
In preparation for rocket testing the flight path was to be cleared of inhabitants. One of the rangers given this task was a keen movie photographer and even though the last people would not come in from the desert until 1984 he recorded a quickly disappearing way of life. When I saw his images of a young Pintupi boy from the western desert of my country I was shocked and mystified. He was about my age, standing there with lizards in his hair belt and on his head. He clearly had a connection to country that I yearned for. In a different life he could have been me, I, he. That image called to me for over 30 years. The feeling never left me. Years later, while the rest of the world was celebrating the Sydney olympics, I visited his country, and like so many of life's journeys, reaching what was thought to be your destination, turns out to be a call to a greater adventure.
We had a great sense of history, if not of our own. What we didn't know about how great-grandfather brought the family from Germany in search for a better life, perhaps even to join a religious utopia. We didn't know about Australia's flourishing German speaking culture before the wars. We didn't know about prejudice my father experienced as a German speaking boy in an English speaking country. What we didn't know we reconstructed through the eyes of the Bible, recent pains replaced and moulded by a deep affinity to New and Old Testaments.
There was no one to meet me when the bush pilot dropped me off. It was school holidays. I walked past kids playing. It had been a wet season and the country around the community was waist high with bush tomatoes. Boys on bikes raced between the bushes while others played 'chasey' as they do in playgrounds the world over. I was surprised when a kid pulled a fruit from a random bush took a bite and threw the rest away. Another did the same. A couple of girls were drawing pictures in the sand playing a marriage game, reciting the skin names of eligible future partners. They asked me, "What's your name, mister?", in primary school English. I was puzzled why they kept asking after I had answered many times. It was only later that I discover that they were asking for a skin name that would immediately put me in relation to them, their family, their country, their stories. Having no sensible answer to give them, they soon lost interest and I became invisible once again. As it happened, my name was close to that of a person who had recently passed away and so way replaced with a generic term for "someone who has a similar name to someone who has recently passed away".
