Grace Beside Me Read online

  SUE MCPHERSON

  First published by Magabala Books Aboriginal Corporation, Broome, Western Australia in 2012 Website: www.magabala.com Email: [email protected]

  Copyright © Sue McPherson

  All rights reserved. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this publication may be reproduced by any process whatsoever without the written permission of the author, the illustrator and the publisher.

  Magabala Books receives financial assistance from the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts advisory body.The State of Western Australia has made an investment in this project through the Department of Culture and the Arts in association with Lotterywest.

  This manuscript was developed through the support of the State Library of Queenlands’s 2011 kuril dhagun Indigenous Writing Fellowship, which is part of the State Library’s balck&write! Indigenous Writing and Editing Project.

  CAL’s Cultural Fund is a proud supporter of the black&write! Indigenous Writing and Editing Project at the State Library of Queensland.

  Designed by Kerry Klinner

  Cover photograph delphoto

  Feather artwork Fern Martins

  Printed in China at Everbest Printing Company

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

  McPherson, Sue, 1967-

  Grace beside me / Sue McPherson.

  9781921248498 (pbk.)

  A823.4

  To grandparents everywhere

  Fuzzy Mac

  My name is Fuzzy Mac and I live with my Nan and Pop. It’s the year 2008 and this story is my story. Nan and Pop have had their two bob’s worth, don’t you worry, but this collection of words one way or another connects back to me.

  Friends and Nan call me Fuzzy, Dad calls me Mac and Pop calls me Missy. The Mac part is from my surname, McCardell, and the name Fuzzy is from my fuzzy hair. My hippie mum gave me another name, Ocean Skye, but it didn’t fit, so through pure people-power I became Fuzzy Mac.

  I don’t have a boyfriend, not yet anyway, but I do like boys. I never enjoyed playing with dolls as a child so I wasn’t into Barbie, and Ken of course is a total wanker. I have a bunch of girlfriends and we are all close … as friends that is. We enjoy the usual stuff, clothes, art, music, sport, and boys. I have male friends also but it’s all platonic. This is a word my friend Tui uses, when she wants you to know how intelligent she is. I reckon I am just as clever so I’m going to use it too. When you have a friend like Tui the internet becomes very helpful.

  Obviously my name isn’t that normal, especially for a girl. Now I reckon I know what you’re thinking. This Fuzzy girl must be a tomboy and most probably when she leaves school she’ll find another willing female partner. They’ll fiddle around a bit then fall into some love affair. Sorry to burst your bubble but I’m not like that at all. I find the whole gay thing totally out of the question. Cuddling up to someone like Keith Urban is far more appealing than cuddling up to Ellen DeGeneres.

  Nothing against Ellen, I just prefer the full package, if you know what I mean.

  Pop, Nan and me, we all love stories, especially good ones.

  Nan says, ‘All good stories need a storm or a climax.’ I agree with Nan. It’s the guts of the storm that enriches the story, gives it strength and substance.

  Like Nan and Pop I’m also a guardian of stories. Without a keeper of words, stories tumble and fall, eventually melting into the ether, never to be heard of again. Stories link us to our mob, doesn’t matter if you are Koorie, Irish, Kiwi, Welsh or Indian.

  It’s the listening and telling of these stories that bring our people close, both young and old. Stories keep our culture strong and our faith alive.

  Nan, Pop, Puss and me all live in a little country town called Laurel Dale or Laurie as us locals call it. It’s in New South Wales, halfway between Batlow, Adelong and Tumbarumba. Many people reckon Laurel Dale is one of those towns, neither here nor there. Blink and you miss it. Compared to towns on the flat, these settlements all share healthy mountain living with clean air, cool mountain water and rich productive soil. Throughout the year we compete against each other in rugby league, hockey, netball, basketball, softball, bowls, golf and now soccer. In Laurie we have hockey, soccer and football fields. At the school we have two netball courts and one indoor basketball court.There is a golf club out on Tumba Road and the bowls club stands across the creek, opposite the RSL.

  An hour’s drive away is Blowering Dam, built on a grand scale to support the Snowy Mountains Hydro-electric Scheme. We can waterski, fish, camp, windsail, kite surf, kayak and swim.

  The Snowy Hydro Scheme is the largest of its kind in Australia. It took more than 100,000 people twenty-five years to build this and people from about thirty countries were brought here to do it. Not only does it hold water to provide power, it also diverts water down to the Murray and Murrumbidgee for irrigation. As you can probably appreciate, the Snowy Hydro Scheme causes mixed emotions. Towns were flooded and rivers were messed with. The Tumut River today does not reflect the beautiful river of days past. It’s a money game now. Get as much water as you can down the river as fast as it can travel. Sell it off to landowners downstream for a big profit.

  Our little town attracts a lot of visitors. Tourists on their way up to the mountains, the dams or the snowfields in particular like to detour through Laurie. Willows and gum trees stand proud and satisfied in parks and along streets throughout the town. The southern end of Yaven Creek meanders parallel to the RSL, down behind the hospital and out past the slaughter yards. Regardless of it being part of suburbia, the creek is healthy with critters like yabbies, tadpoles and frogs.

  A steep hill twenty minutes southwest of Laurie is named Kendall’s Lookout. Pop said Jimmy Kendall was a good bloke and a bit of a larrikin. His job was to camp up at the lookout throughout the fire season. Even though he was alone much of the time, the twoway radio was alive with talk from other fire spotters and forestry men. Thunderstorms were his only dislike. Where there’s thunder, lightning is generally close by. I reckon dodging lightning bolts while up in a fire tower on one of the highest hills in the district would give anyone the heebie-jeebies.

  Anyway, once you wind up to the top, the views are incredible. You can even see The Rock near Uranquinty, a town not far from Wagga Wagga.

  Our school is aptly named Laurel Dale Public School, with classes from lower primary right through to secondary. Each department has its own classrooms and play area. The school hall is used by students from all classes; it’s just a matter of who books it first. Heaters and fans are mandatory. In summer it gets hot and in winter you definitely need heat. We have an agriculture block where we raise cattle and sheep, and we have a couple of pigs, a few goats and chooks that supply eggs to the canteen. Throughout the year Ag students train calves for showing at local shows and the Sydney Royal Easter Show. So far we’ve done real well, with ribbons to prove it. The senior school canteen is built right beside the home economics rooms. Food in the canteen is best when single mum Mrs Swan is volunteering. She’s happy, a bit naughty and a great cook. Last week she gave our unmarried history teacher a few words of advice.

  ‘Mr King, you need a good woman.’

  ‘I, I don’t know about that,’ he said sheepishly.

  ‘I do … I can hear you yelling at those kids from the school car park. Only a good woman is capable of calming those pretty nerves of yours. I tell you what, I’ll leave my number in your pigeon hole. Give me a ring and I’ll show you a good time.’

  She works fast that one.

  Eighty or more years ago Laurie was what you would call a ‘timber town’. Red gum, yellow box
and stringy bark all grew around Laurie. Gracious old trees, some with girths two and a half metres across.

  Many old people living here have had a connection with either logging or Tagget’s Mill, which is located at the south end of town, down Mill Road. When Laurie was booming, so was Tagget’s Mill. Actually what I should say is, when Tagget’s Mill was booming so was Laurie. It was during this time, statistics showed, that the timber industry employed seventy-eight percent of men living in and around the town. I know this because I had to do a historical view of the town in an assignment last year in history. During this boom, the men were making decent money for a good day’s work. Their devoted wives were seen to be equally blessed as they could fill up their kitchen cupboards and buy material to sew new clothes for the kids. And if they were lucky and had a few dollars left over, go and buy a lipstick or a pretty little bottle of perfume to make them feel a bit special. This was all in the realms of possibility only if these tired, loyal ladies found the pay packet before their good men went and pissed it up the walls of any of the three pubs standing along the main street, the Imperial, the Royal and the Woodcutters. When the men had money, so did the pubs. Many families went without the bare essentials when Laurie had a boom.

  Whenever I am with Nan or Pop down at the ‘Golden Oldie’, a club that meets every second Thursday at the senior citizens hall, I look at the same tired and loyal ladies who are now many years older with lines running like gutters on their sun-hardened faces. Believe it or not, they still make clothes for their grandchildren or great grandchildren. They still put those plastic curlers in their now-pinkish-grey hair and they still sit at the kitchen table waiting for their Jim, Bill or Ted to come home from the pub for dinner. I reckon bugger that, I won’t be waiting around for any bloke, especially if he’s at the pub, wasting the family budget and banging on about sweet nothing. I know Nan feels the same way and is grateful Pop was never inclined to go down this wasteful road.

  Today the Imperial is the only pub in Laurie. ‘One pub too many,’ Nan always says. Mind you, in summer, the relentless dry heat can suck the last breath out of an exhausted budgerigar. Yep, it gets so hot here in summer, birds actually fall dead out of the trees. When we happen to find a fatality, especially a budgie, Nan puts on her day hat with the blueberry pin, grabs her black beaded handbag with the metal clasp and walks, hand-in-hand with Pop, two blocks down Faye Street to the Impi for a cool shandy. They have one shandy each and a yarn or two with the locals then walk back up home again. The whole ritual takes about four hours. Sometimes I go along as well and we sit out the back in the beer garden. For the record, we don’t find dead budgies every year, but I reckon I’ve seen Nan complete this ritual about five times that I can remember. And mind you, if we do find a dead bird it doesn’t necessarily mean it died of heat stroke.

  ‘Nan, if you feel hot, why don’t you just go to the pub for a shandy? Why do you wait for the dead bird thing to happen?’

  ‘Fuzzy, all of us have a totem, and you and I are part of the budgerie family. You also have a connection to all the other birds you see flyin’ around. Budgerie is your immediate family but the other birds are like your cousins. This is very important. Your totem is part of you Fuzzy, whatever your totem feels that is what you feel too. The only time it’s hot enough for a shandy is when any poor bloody bird keels over of heat exhaustion and falls to the ground. Obviously, I’m not hot until this happens. Sometimes, girl, I reckon you’re a few pennies short when you start askin’ me stupid questions like that. If the bird’s buggered, I’m buggered and I need a shandy, end of story.’

  ‘Yeah, Nan,’ I say, eager to get away and help Pop in the shed.

  One summer the mill became part of the town’s written history when Tommy Roberts decided to light a fire under the mill office floor. The mill burned to the ground. Tommy made it through the flames unharmed until his dad found him down in their back shed hiding under an old copper. This was in the eighties, three years after the last logging boom. Not a building, a bucket of sawdust or a whisper from ghosts past can tell you where the Taggets had built and made their fortune. Now the mill site is home to the Lions Park. It is full of green grass in winter and sad, dry tufts of short sticks in summer.

  With the big timber gone and the mill gone, together with many of the people who worked it, Laurie is just a little country town that continues to look after its people. Apple and pear orchards sprawl for miles around its outskirts and within the last ten years grapes have made the migration as well. Surnames such as Smith, Williams and McIntyre have been slowly taken over by Vanamossi, Catrionie and Trevask. Mostly friendly and hardworking families with ancestors all the way from Greece, Poland, Italy and Spain now call our little valley home.

  Nan, she is like an old stockman’s boot, as tough as Pop’s Blundstones. I am not allowed to swear and I don’t, not around Nan anyway. Nan on the other hand, as you have probably noticed, is more than capable. When she was younger she worked as a housemaid for wealthy station owners, as a nurse at the hospital and as a drovers’ cook up in Queensland. So Nan, she knows how to speak proper, is a fantastic cook, can diagnose sickness and fix you up when you feel like hell, and she can throw bad language around better than a miner in a thunder box. And I know all about that because my uncle Teddy is a miner and one day he was out in the back toilet and there was no toilet paper. He was going on and on, calling for Nan to bring him some. Nan just took her time in between icing the cake, washing the floor and cutting her toenails. Her brother Teddy was totally pissed off, swearing, hitting the walls with his fists and going on but Nan, well, he had nothing on Nan. I reckon Nan could make even Chopper Read sit up and listen once she got cranked up.

  My Nan has a name but like mine, it didn’t fit, so she is known to all as Nan Tilly or just plain Nan. I live with Nan, she looks after me, she is everything. Nan is also a Koorie which means she is Aboriginal. Her mum was one of the old people. Nan’s grandad, well, he was a stockman and came straight off the boat from Ireland.

  The older Nan gets the more prominent she looks, with her distinguished wavy grey hair, glowing coffee-coloured skin, her confident gestures and all. She always turns heads because she walks so proud even though she has a slight limp. Everyone knows Nan and when she goes out shopping a simple task like buying milk can take half a day, depending on who she meets along the way.

  Apart from Pop, Dad and me, Puss is also an important family member. Puss is a girl tabby cat, and her and Nan are besties. She’s a big cat. Not fat but she’s physically larger than many cats around town. She has an orange smudge the shape of an unsteady heart on her right shoulder. Nan of course saw this as a good sign. We don’t know why, but when Nan found her she had no tail. It had been cut off, with only a two-centimetre stub left in its place. It makes her look exotic and totally cool. Nan found Puss in the bush when she was only a kitten. Someone had tried to get rid of her and her brothers and sisters. They’d put them in a bag but somehow Puss got free. Nan said she couldn’t save the others, even though she tried. Puss has been living with us for seven years.

  Life has not been easy for Nan. She reckons if we don’t learn from our mistakes we’re buggered, so that’s what she encourages us to do. We listen and we learn and if we keep doing that we usually continue to move forward. That’s the whole idea, see, you have to keep moving forward.

  Generation Gap

  Regarding the age gap, well, that’s a challenge all on its own. Heaps of things happen in my world that probably wouldn’t in a ‘normal’ family.

  Nan and the aunts especially say things that you have to think twice about. Half the time I don’t know if they are fair dinkum or just being funny, for example: ‘It knocked the bejesus out of im.’ How this is possible I don’t know. Or ‘It’s all arse about face, Missy, start again.’ I always have a funny picture in my head for this one. And my favourite is, ‘Missy, put a jumper on you’ll catch your death.’

  To be honest, I don’t have a problem with l
anguage in our house, it’s when I take it to school, that’s when we all notice the difference. Like for instance, I have grown up using the word bloomers for undies. Of course girlfriends had a field day with that one. I even tried to change over to using the word undies instead but in the end it didn’t fit, so bloomers it is. Now I’m not that dumb, I know what a radio is. The problem is I don’t call it a radio. At home we all call it the wireless. I said something one day about turning the wireless on and Mrs Clarence laughed loudly; she thought it was a great joke. The rest of the class had no idea what I was talking about.

  I said to James Wankarina – yeah, that’s his name all right, poor bugger – anyway I said to James one day when he was going to the hairdressers, ‘You goin’ for a short-back-and-sides?’ He also had no idea what I was on about. We say that all the time in our house.

  We get Panadol if we have a headache but we don’t call it that; Nan will say, ‘Fuzzy, grab me a Bex. I’ve got a headache that could take out Muhammad Ali and Lionel Rose.’ If she said the word Panadol I reckon I’d fall over with shock. It’s funny when you think about it because there isn’t a B, an E or an X to be seen in the word Panadol.

  The other thing is some kids might know of Muhammad Ali but fewer recognise Lionel Rose. Me, I know heaps about both of them, especially Lionel Rose. He was a great Koorie boxer, real deadly. Lionel was born on Jacksons Track and there are plenty good stories there, let me tell you. And the reason I know is because Nan and Pop tell me. These things are all from their generation.

  I reckon progress is difficult for the oldies. They continue with the status quo because it is safe. It’s all about communication and being understood.

  Don’t go thinking Fuzzy is little Miss Goody Two Shoes because I’m not. I’ve been in trouble for so many things it’s hard to remember them all.The most well-known include: cutting all the flowers off Nan’s rose bushes, all of them; having a go at moving Pop’s car and running into the back fence; age nine my cousin taught me how to hypnotise a chook and Nan’s chickens didn’t lay for two weeks. Age eleven I got into Nan’s jewellery box and accidentally broke an earring Pop gave her when they were married. I tried to make hot chocolate in the electric kettle. And at age thirteen while Nan and Pop were visiting next door my cousin and I thought it would be a good idea to have a couple of glasses of Nan’s sweet sherry.