AWBR

I am seven. I live in a valley in the rainforest. Around us is the remnant of the Big Scrub which once covered the land from north of Murwillumbah to the Richmond River. Beneath the tangle of giant softwoods, cedar, rosewood and teak, the envy of the cabinet makers of the world, is a warm maze of fern and lawyer vine. The smell of cut timber permeates the air as the giant trees are felled and the logs hauled to the mill. The houses which line the single street of the village are for the most part built of raw timber, with tin roofs and tin fireplaces. Verandahs and tankstands are festooned with staghorns, elkhorns, haresfoot ferns and orchids from the scrub.

The valley with its two creeks, Terania and Tuntable, is encircled by the cleared flanks of the mountains, green with paspalum, studded with the stumps of the rainforest trees. Behind are high bluffs, and beyond them the serrated peaks of the Nightcap Range, and then Mount Warning. The great mountain, an extinct volcano, is seen only from the heights yet its presence is always felt, kingfisher blue, looming in the distance (3).

The settlers' acts of deforestation reverberate in Walker's sense-memory; she recalls the flora of the lost Arcadia decorating the raw domesticity built in the 'clearings'. Names evoke an ancient pre-settler past: 'Murwillumbah' means 'good camping ground'. This is the Bundjalung country written of by Ruby Langford Ginibi, and the backdrop, the mountain-scape, has witnessed the cruel past; generational repressed guilt is always within its 'presence' of 'kingfisher blue': under the always 'looming', aptly named Mount Warning.

Sixty-plus years later, Walker writes in the present tense of her seven-year-old landscape sensibility: a 'primal horizon', this place is the 'birth of (her) consciousness.' My own seven-year-old memory is also backgrounded (and foregrounded) with blue: seen through blurring tears (my surrogate grandfather had just died on the Snowy), the pea-like purple flowers of the psoralea swim against its short, soft needles of Brunswick green against the always clear blue sky of the coastal river basin of my steel-town suburban early childhood.

I envy Walker the rich complexity of her 'primal horizon': the varied topography and the majesty of the volcanic terrain; the privilege of growing up in sight of that awe-inspiring mountain; the magic of her memory of the guiding, guarding lighthouse beacon at Byron Bay; the poetry in her landmarks and sacred sites.

Location is important; all my North Coast places are spectacularly beautiful - the cradle, one would think, of tranquil thoughts and loving deeds. Unfortunately this doesn't always follow. My parents met at Christmas 1924 in the village of Billinudgel, a typical small stop on the North Coast railway branch line between Casino and Murwillumbah. The railway runs along the narrow coastal shelf between the mountains and the sea, and is the lifeline for the small communities strung like beads along it. The area is defined by the spectacular semicircle of mountains, ridges and escarpment which forms the volcanic shield of Mount Warning. .... This is a magical landscape even today, but in its primeval state, before Captain Cook ... it would have resembled a scene from Jurassic Park with its groves of bangalow palms, its impenetrable thickets of stinging tree and lawyer vine, and its under-layer of tree-fern and cunjevoi.

The European history of the area goes back to the times when the cedar logs were hauled by bullock teams ... sent spinning down the shoots to the narrow coastal shelf where other bullock teams hauled them out into the surf to be loaded onto schooners waiting in the bay. We are not told how many were crushed by a ricocheting log, or how many drowned in the surf in what seems to have been a desperate enterprise for both men and bullocks. At the time of my story the Big Scrub is still being felled to make way for pastures of paspalum and clover ... This is called clearing, as though it's a virtuous pursuit, a cleansing of riotous and uncontrolled nature...

If the apex of the volcanic shield is Mt Warning, the focal point is Cape Byron, the most easterly point of the Australian mainland. On it stands the lighthouse, solid, dazzling and pure, the eye of this world. The light at Byron Bay presides over my story. It can illuminate and warn, but is powerless to prevent the actions of any, let alone those with whom I'm concerned. A minor and fixed light shines steadfastly out to sea, visible only from certain dangerous shoals. The main light does a complete revolution, flashing intermittently from dusk to dawn. Its arc fingers the distant volcanic folds running down to the sea, the cliffs and waterfalls, the clusters of bangalow palms and the remnant patches of rainforest back to Goonengerry and the Whian Whian State Forest... Its arc takes in villages with historic names such as Eureka and Federal, and more evocative titles such as Jerusalem Creek, Emigrant Creek and Repentance Creek. Others like Tintenbar and Newrybar are derived from Aboriginal names, although the Aboriginal race is at this time banished from both the rainforest and the farms. Billinudgel itself was once the Aboriginal 'place of the king parrots' (36-7).

Walker's prose-painted landscapes evidence all that the ethnologists claim: they are heavy with Myth and with the European transplanted psychological responses to the primeval past of the rainforests, projecting onto them the ancestral preconceptions of beauty and fear of the northern hemisphere woods. The 'clearing' toil of the settlers is depicted as both dangerous and enterprising heroism. The stamp of conquest is carried in place names such as 'Eureka' and 'Federal' and 'Emigrant Creek'. Even 'Repentance Creek' was of course more likely named to reflect some messianic fundamentalism imported from the Old Country rather than the massacres, the poisoned water-holes, the lost languages and the vanished lore of the land.

Yet Tintenbar and Newrybar and Billynudgel remain for their dispossessed surviving Indigenous progeny to return to and stand tall within and share the meanings of in recovering the readings of their landscapes: perhaps, hopefully, all within the fullness of healing time.

But all Edens must be lost, even unto small, white, settler-born girls. The Great Depression uprooted Walker's parents, who, with their two daughters in tow, became itinerants like the Aborigines before them and like many settlers of their generation, moving up and down the outback track of northern NSW and southern Queensland country towns, wherever the breadwinner could find tenuous employment.

The first move made by Walker's family to Wallangarra, 'takes us from the most lush
and beautiful scenery in Australia to a barren little town of rickety weatherboard houses leaning in against the wind'.

Its dusty lanes, which double as stock routes, are lined with pepperina trees. This is a different Australia, the gaunt, pared-down Australia of a Drysdale painting. We explore the countryside at once, wandering far over the paddocks but finding only eroded gullies littered with rusty tins, clumps of blackberries, and the yellow mullock heaps left by disappointed tin-miners. In place of friendly cows there are stupid-eyed sheep. Nothing else moves on the dry ground but a few scavenging goats and a thousand rabbits. Monotonous gum trees are draped with mistletoe and the wide skies stretch to the horizon (67).

This is 'The Wasteland' down-under: by the mid-twentieth century the devastated western slopes and plains of east coast Australia were undeniable evidence of European depredation. Wrought by cloven hooves upon fragile topsoils, erosion was rapid and annihilating. The dislocated first generations of Europeans had sought only to exploit. The resulant landscapes' recent history would be formed by psychologically necessary pseudo-mythologies of a pre-existing, voracious desert, of 'hostile' lands, of martyred explorers who disappeared in the course of 'opening up' the continent. The criminals would become heroes, apotheosised: cattle duffers and bush-rangers would become martyred victims, and 'innocent' settlers murdered by 'savage' blacks would (conveniently) become the sacrificial Judeo-Christian scapegoats despatched to Azazel in the Wilderness, retrospectively providing atonement for the subsequent generations' prosperity.

But other landscapes were also carried, in colonial times, inside the hearts and minds of the immigrants, and memories of the northern hemisphere's formative-mythologies framed their gaze under southern skies. And so the Great Inland Sea was the goal of explorers, seers and madmen. Since the pharoahs of ancient Egypt, through Roman Gaul and into Britannia, a lake (or a sea) of land-locked water was conceived as the Earth's eye through which the Underworld could view Creation; as such it was the repository of both divinity and power. When the Red Centre was found to be but rock and a handful of dust, the collective European gaze turned back to the coastal shores and sought the sun gods of sea-farers. Her heritage being a true microcosm of her settler culture, Shirley Walker found similar spiritual respite.

I hold my map of the Bay in my mind and cherish it. It's the map of memory and desire, its central point the lighthouse on the Cape, dazzling white and pure. Everything radiates from that centre. From dawn to sunrise the lighthouse advances steadily towards the sun and, over the aromatic islands of the Pacific - Fiji, Vanuatu, Tahiti - the sun dances to the meeting and embraces the tower on the Cape.

At night it is different; from dusk to dawn the light moves in its steady arc, blessing everything over which it passes. It sweeps out to sea over the Julian Rocks, over the beach with its two jetties, the old and the new, and between them the inshore wreck of the first Wollongbar, caught in a storm in the early twenties.... It passes over the windy little town behind its row of Norfolk Island Pines, and sweeps the heights of St Helena. As the light passes over the escarpments they dream of their past, of the bullock teams, the great cedar logs, the 'shoots' down to the plain and the waiting sailing-ships in the bay, and back before them the black tribes on the beach and in the rainforest (75).

Walker's motif of the all-embracing arc of the Byron Bay light provides her with a powerful personal icon, a focus for the religiosity with which a sentient being imbues a sacred place, thereby projecting onto it all that pre-lapsarian benificence which offers the potential for security and guidance: a place to return Home.

But Walker weaves this life-story out of both her own and the peregrinations of several generations of progenitors that move in intersecting circles, across far wider tracts of northern New South Wales than the arc of the Byron light could ever reach.

At Grafton the Clarence River is three quarters of a mile wide, spanned by the double-decker road and rail bridge - the trains thunder through on the lower deck, shaking the foot-bridges on either side of it, and vehicles stream across the upper deck.... There is a persistent rumour, but a rumour only, that the body of a murdered child, a thirteen year old boy, has been disposed of in the freshly poured concrete of one of the bridge pylons. His disappearance is quite a mystery. It's said that he whistled 'Ramona' as he strolled away from a friend's house at dusk, slouching along with his hands in his pockets, never to be seen again. As time goes on more and more people are convinced that he is interred deep in the pylon, deeper than the rushing water, under hundreds of tons of wet and dark concrete. People become obsessed with 'Ramona'; it reverberates around the district and refuses to go away. Everyone is humming it. The boy is probably far away, picking fruit in the Riverina or working on a fishing boat off Broome, but the rumour adds a thrill of horror when we walk over the footbridge and look down on the pylon in question, half expecting to see blood seeping out through its porous shell (84).

Here there is threat. The urban myth of the murdered child whose body has been 'disposed of' picks up on the older, underlying fear of settler parents of the child lost in the bush, and is symptomatic of the guilt and anxiety that is frontier history's residual impact: a legacy of repression and denial 'even unto the third generation'. I am reminded of nineteenth century colonial novelist Rosa Praed and her lifelong, haunting dream of a fantasised sharing of her father's eye-witness of the 1857 Hornet Bank massacre ... and of her later morphine use and her hair falling out. I wonder about Walker's mother's growing mental disequilibrium in Grafton in the late 1930s, and the roots of that dis-ease.

Women and children are objects of predatory male lust amid the rigid doctrines of reformist Protestantism in the parlours and the sitting rooms of the fob-bewatched, whale-bone-collared pillars of the community in their tidy houses set on Grafton's deceptively wide and open streets.

The street names - Prince Street, Victoria Street, Queen Street and Fitzroy Street - tell their own story of colonial reverence for the British establishment. There is an Anglican cathedral designed by Horbury Hunt and a Catholic church with a convent and boarding school which spread themselves along the river bank. The Presbyterian Church is a classical white building built on land acquired by John Dunmore Lang. It has the only spire in the city, and in October and November this pure white spire and the roofs of the higher buildings float in a purple haze, for the hundreds of Brazilian jacaranda trees first planted in the streets in the 1880s are in bloom. They float like a lavender mist above the avenues and streets, while the bitumen is inches deep in a purple carpet of jacaranda flowers. Children ride their bikes through it for the satisfying squelch and their tyres leave deep tracks crossing and recrossing the carpet as it decays into slush, for in this climate beauty and decay are closely related (88).

In ironic contrast with the embrace of the Byron Bay light, under the 'pure white spire' of the Presbyterian church of her mother's faith there is no protection for the Walker women, and in Grafton the pubescent Shirley Walker endures and resents an eminent child molester's furtive gropings. I remember my own painful experiences in this guilt-ridden domain, where the innocent female-child-victim becomes somehow responsible for her violation, blamed simply for being there: 'She's ready for it.' was the phrase. And 'she' is unable to accuse or tell the truth without being outcast: scapegoated as a liar or a Lolita. I remember the old man next door behind
the mulberry tree up the backyard in my five-year-old endless moment at Young Road, Lambton; I remember the black-frocked curate at All Saints' rectory of a Saturday morning in my private Confirmation class (my reading of Darwin has caused me to be pulled out of group Catechism), and I still cringe as his long bony fingers edge over my shoulders whilst he chastises me in holier-than-thou modulated tones for calling the story of Adam and Eve myth and metaphor. I am still nauseous when I recall my uncle with his hand perpetually up my skirts from now-we-are-six until well over twenty; the last time was a Christmas lunch at my grandmother's table, to which my father finally bore witness and exploded.

These experiences are not unique; we were white female about-to-be women in a frontier land where, but a generation or two earlier, the wholesale rape of black women was the usual aftermath of a massacre, the blood of their black kin still warm on their violators' white hands. Merv Lilley writes with unparalleled candour of one such respected farmer-husband-father frontier-man's acts of murder and molestation in Gatton Man (1994).

Walker's refuge (and later mine, and that of many other young 'post-colonial' females) was in literature and poetry and educational achievement. Having won a bursary at the Leaving Certificate, in 1944 she fled from Grafton and domestic entrapment to the freedom of Teachers' College in Armidale. And teaching was virtually the only bread-winning, qualification-gaining escape route from the prospect of replicating their mothers' lives for intelligent, young, working-class women. Two generations earlier, Miles Franklin lacked this educational opportunity and so lit out from paid domestic-servitude (which she called 'Mary-Anning') to join in womankind's international fight for suffrage and union solidarity in the USA and the UK. Walker would later add her mite to those gains when she beat the sexism of the NSW Education Department's constraints on married women who returned to the service, and gained both tenure and scholarships which enabled her to complete her PhD whilst rearing three children.

A walk around Armidale at this time gives a glimpse of privilege bought by a succession of booming wool cheques. Scattered throughout the city are the blue-brick mansions, some of them minor copies of Tudor manor houses, of those who wish to live as the English do. The gravel drives, the deciduous trees, the laurel hedges, the herbaceous borders with their unfamiliar lilacs and peonies, speak of a transplanted way of life. In the country too there are drystone walls, hawthorn hedges and blackberry bushes, all attempts to recreate an English landscape. It's quite appropriate that this area should be called New England, and not just for its cold climate. Meanwhile the sharp hooves of hundreds of thousands of sheep are making short work of the delicate native grasses and the introduced rabbits have multiplied into millions. Feral cats and foxes, the latter introduced so that the colonial gentry could ride to hounds, have all but wiped out the smaller bush animals. This is the story of a people who just don't understand the country and are plundering and ruining it. It's only in the lean, clean, austere outlines of the high country against the frosty sky, and the springtime drifts of yellow everlastings along the roadside, that it can still be seen. (131)

This portrait of Armidale in 1944 remains pretty accurate today, although Walker's 'shaping perception' (as she relished her own privileged entry through the training college's Ionic-columned portals) is noticeable in the wonder at, and the exotic horticultural detail of the ruling-class's re-shaping of the bush landscape in order to create from it the deciduous woods and ordered gardens of the Home Counties; a truly land-scaped 'New' England. Walker also recalls (perhaps anachronistically) the 'lean, clean, austere ... high' country of Judith Wright's poetic imagination and ecological concerns. Wright's work would become the subject of Walker's PhD thesis in the late 1970s. Autobiographical memory can be a trickster of a thing that sometimes re-casts the past through the grid of the future.

Teaching was the twentieth century's favoured occupation for intelligent girls, since it could be `gone back to' after child-rearing, and frequently was. For Walker it would become a return due to economic necessity, since the farming ventures she undertook with her ex-AIF husband were risky and flood-prone. In 1950 they took up their soldier-settler's ballot-block on Rita Island in the delta of the Burdekin River just south of Townsville and set about re-enacting the `clearing' of their pioneering progenitors.

Around our tent, pitched in its clearing, lie our 157 acres of future farm. It is broken country and will be hard to clear and hard to irrigate. There is open country with massive Moreton Bay gums, smaller cocky-apple trees in their thousands, and pandanus palms to remind us that we are now in the tropics. These open spaces are shoulder-high with coarse grass which flourished in the last wet season and has matured during the long dry. There are but two seasons here: the two or three months of torrential and often cyclonic rain, and the calm and temperate dry season during which the land recovers. The grass is alive with snakes and the carefully stitched nests of green ants hang from many a low limb, promising a fiery and throbbing few hours to anyone who brushes against them....

The block is intersected with dry water-courses that will fill as the wet season progresses. Along these are patches of jungle with Burdekin plum trees, tall palms, impenetrable undergrowth, and thick vines roping everything together. There could be anything in there, and there is, including tropical pythons, gold and black, sinuous and beautiful. The bulldozers will make short work of these places and their creatures. We are entranced with our new world. We fancy that we will be numbered among the first-footers, those who have taken to the virgin bush with axes, saws and now bulldozers in order to cultivate the wilderness (160-61).

And they are literally shaping landscape, but it is resistant to shaping, and the six year long Burdekin experience is not evoked lovingly. The Walkers depart in March 1956 in the wake of a cyclone. Like Rosa Praed leaving Curtis Island off Gladstone nearly three quarters of a century earlier, Shirley Walker felt she'd been too long marooned in a place where men are men and women are powerless and exploited.

They return to northern New South Wales, to her husband's father's abandoned landscape, buying back the farm on a three mile long peninsula between the Clarence River and the Carrs Creek anabranch.

Seen from the air the peninsula looks like a leaf floating on the river, the point downstream in the current, the single gravel road the central rib and the leaf stem attaching it to the mainland upstream at a place appropriately called the Washout. When the river in flood reaches eighteen feet it pours over this narrow stem and the peninsula then becomes an island as much at the mercy of the water as the flotsam and jetsam on its surface: vast rafts of water hyacinth, drifting logs, the occasional dead dog or cow. In summer the leaf shape is deep green with maize, a chlorophyll factory; in autumn it's clothed in mature corn, gold for the picking, much of it pulled down, smothered and festooned with the most marvellous blue and purple convolvulus. (196)

On their arrival, the house piles and fences are clogged with the debris of the '56 floods, and they collect and burn it all in a cleansing pillar of fire. But in the ensuing eleven years of habitation there they will experience nine devastating floods.

Isolated on the peninsula we ... must fend for ourselves. Our first step when a flood threatens is to get the children out before the water comes over the narrow Washout, the stem of the peninsula, and leave them with friends on high ground. We then move the cattle, the car, the tractor, and the one horse left over from pre-tractor days, a draught mare called Maiden, to one of the few points of high ground on the peninsula. We then sit tight and watch the water's slow rise which, in the eight floods we've been through so far, has only reached one of the lower steps of the house. The 1963 flood is quite different. It comes with so little warning that, by the time we wake one morning after a night of roaring gales and torrential rain, we are cut off at the Washout. Worse still the boat, which is kept moored to a willow tree at the foot of the bank in front of the house, has been swamped and is far down, deep beneath the raging flood waters, swirling and churning on its rope. This is a desperate situation, as the boat will be our only means of escape if the flood comes into the house. My husband strips to his shorts and dives deep down into and under the dark water, finds the boat and somehow drags it, against the current and full of water, to the surface and then up the bank.... This incident, with the father as hero, has become legend in the family: his strength and determination to retrieve the drowned boat and save his family, and the children's certainty that he will deliver them over the dark flood. (203-204)

Walker goes back to teaching and, her love of learning re-ignited, begins to study at night for her degree via distance education from the University of New England in Armidale. It is in order to have the fees paid that she battles the Departmental bureaucracy and gains 'permanent' status - and equal footing with her male colleagues. The farm finally becomes untenable and the family move on.

Once we leave I refuse to revisit ... and the farmhouse there becomes the second of those from which, in my mind, I've been dispossessed. I dream of it constantly and always as it was. But in all my dreams I¹m an intruder, floating disembodied through the rooms, terrified that the real owners will return and cast me out with cruel words about trespass and property. The fact is that the old house is now unrecognisable. (217)

David Malouf's 12 Edmondstone Street (1985) gave testimony to the significance of the first house in the formation of the interior landscape of the creative imagination. This realisation triggered Dorothy Hewett's recall and Wild Card (1990) was conceived. Shirley Walker's dreams of the lost houses of her `second life' as a farmer's wife remind me of the imagery in Chagall's shtetl paintings, of dybbuks, and also of the yearning for places that can never be returned to in much survivor literature from the post-World War Two Jewish diaspora. And I remember that neither my grandmother (nor my mother for that matter) would ever, ever go back to the England she left in 1920. What trauma-filled lost house led to that? And then I remember a Koori friend, an actor damaged by the corruption of too long in Sydney, who did return to Bundjalung country and who found healing in the dwelling places of his ancestors.

I have noticed that many who choose to write their real-life stories as memoir or chronicle tend to elongate the narrative of the first three or four decades and then truncate, minimise or gloss over the decades since, the 'second half' if you like. These include Judith Wright's Half a Lifetime (1999), Hewett's Wild Card, Oriel Gray's Exit Left (1985) and Mona Brand's Enough Blue Sky (1995). Is under fifty years is too close? too raw? too likely to hurt or shatter illusions (especially those of children)? potentially too libellous? Walker skims over the decades of her `third life' in which she gains a doctorate and a lectureship inside the `hallowed' and `dimly lit cloisters' of UNE. She hints at academic politics, intrigue, power-plays and plots enough to grace a medieval monastery.

This half-a-life time memoir ends at its beginning: a journey from seven to seventy, and back to the hinterland behind Byron Bay where:

At the top of Byron Street a large roundabout has been superimposed, like an ugly concrete cap, on an ancient crossroads. From the beginning of time, crossroads have been symbolic places of choice; also, because of the cross, of sacrifice. Suicides were buried at the crossroads and murderers strung up on gibbets there, for both were seen to have made criminal choices.

These particular crossroads are older than the first white settlement, and the roundabout cannot erase their centuries of passing, of criss-crossing, of the pursuit of desire. They were first carved out from the rainforest by the restless journeying of the Bundjalung, the Aboriginal people of this area. Later the bullock tracks of the cedar getters etched them deeper and deeper into the red soil. Then came the drays of the first settlers, then the first cars and buses and, later, the frenetic traffic of the century's end. (227-8)

Walker has returned full circle and, in her retirement, is seeking to settle again within the sweeping arc of the Byron light, `steady as a heartbeat, radiant as Home' (228). She has already confessed her `ability to see relationships, to make connections': she calls these her 'patterning skills' and they have underpinned her successful academic career in literary criticism and textual analysis.

It is these `patterning skills' that have enabled Walker to create this microcosmic narrative of her three-generational formative history (her personal mythopoeia) and, through the metaphorical 'Claude-glass' of her memoir, light has been shed on retrospective horizons, providing insights into that process of our collective, 'shaping perception' which creates out of the 'raw matter' of mere terrain that cultural artefact called 'landscape'.

Once the settler myth-making process has done with idealising the landtakers and has recognised the futility of scapegoating their victims, we may, with Walker, begin to read a different history into (and out of) this shared and sacred place.

Marilla North moved to Queensland from the Blue Mountains a couple of years ago. Following her publication of Yarn Spinners (UQP 2001), she is now completing a biography of Dymphna Cusack, and a Ph.D at the University of Queensland.

not in sepia today: