Childhood at Brindabella

My First Ten Years

Miles Franklin

• Publisher: ETT Imprint
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780648096320
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

For a long time I have been intending to write down earliest memories to discover how many I retain clear-cut before my memory is too moth-eaten. I meant to do this as a diary for myself alone, as sailors in the doldrums erect full-rigged ships in bottles just because the mind is an instrument that sanity cannot leave idle. I must find some kind of exercise for a mind unused except on chores or with the triffle-traffle of housewives. ' Miles Franklin wrote this delightful autobiography in 1952-1953. She was unable to arrange for publication before her death in 1954 and the MS. came to Angus and Robertson Ltd from her executors, the Permanent Trustee Co. Ltd of New South Wales. It was first published in 1963.

Chapter 1

FIRST RECOLLECTION

No other spot has ever replaced the hold on my affections or imagination of my birthplace, nor are any other incidents so clearly and tenderly etched in my memory as those connected with it. These jottings therefore concern life as I found it before my tenth year, near the completion of which my family moved to another part of the country.

Recollection began early and remains indelibly, partly no doubt because my mind and affections are tenacious, and also those early years were remote, isolated, a unit without disruptions or upheavals of any kind, a period before I had developed sufficiently for aspirations, fears, desires and rending discontents.

My earliest captured memory was at the age of ten months. It nagged me in a casual way, as flickering thoughts return at intervals over a lifetime until they can be used or else fade completely.

So one night I said to my parents, “I remember I had a red flannel nightdress the time I slept with Father in the end room at Bobilla.”

Mother dismissed this as a notion. Father had no skill as a nursemaid. “You never slept with your father in your life.”

“Yes, I did. I remember Father carrying me along the veranda. The wind blew the candle flame to one side, and it was cold, and I did not like it.”

“A nice pair you and your father would be in the end room!”

The end room in those early bush homes was reached by traversing the veranda, and was firmly set apart as the guest chamber. The timber was all hand-cut, the houses designed to meet the requirements and resources of the moment and the skill of the builders. There was nothing Gothic or Tudor in their size or shaping. There would arise a row of rooms, three or four at most to begin. These would be dining-drawingroom combined, with the main or parents’ bedroom opening out of it, and the extra room at the end. On each side of an entrance passage from the kitchen, we had a skillion, one room for the nursemaid and the other for the child above the nursling after he was weaned and thrust out by his successor.

But this is ahead of the design. The home where men first went to work up to their marriage would be a two-roomed hut comprising kitchen-livingroom and bedroom-storeroom. Callers camped in their own nap on the veranda in summer or beside the kitchen fire in winter. There was attached to this room another, a little smaller in depth and width, which was the fireplace. It would be constructed of stones and plaster, sometimes of bark or slabs with a lining of stones and mud. Beams across it carried the hams and sides of bacon or spiced beef and bullocks’ tongues preserved by slow smoking, and protected from the weather by a hooped sheet of bark. Lower beams would support the kettles and camp ovens and three-legged pots for cooking. The roof would be of stringybark on ridge poles with a good steep pitch and held on by riders, snug and weather-proof if the trees from which the bark was stripped were carefully selected. The sheets of bark were often much larger than those of galvanized iron which succeeded them. Under this was a loft for flour, rice, sugar and other commodities brought by bullock team once or twice a year.

In the tall-timbered country these homes were of slabs split and adzed from the imperial mountain-ash or stringybark trees and set in wall- and ground-plates that would remain sound for generations. Such homesteads increased like bulbs, in clusters. Often the bride would come to live in the hut to await a grander house, or would never expect any other.

In more pretentious cases the man would not bring his bride till the new house was up. This was the case with my father. The first erection had earthen floors, and its general room remained as a kitchen with the room off it turned into a storeroom-pantry, and others in the original row becoming the storeroom-greater where lurked the beef cask, bags of salt, the “washing-machine”, the side-saddle and other odds and ends. This, as well as the room on its end, contained a bunk with blue blankets for working men and their callers. The kitchen was always set at a distance from the main house in case of fire. The house proper would grow in the same way, and when the end room fell to the bigger girls, another was added for the boys, and yet another for visitors. The veranda would stretch in accordance to be blocked at the ends by tiny rooms. Later these would serve as the station post office or office.

The main homestead at Bobilla was so elongated that a visiting uncle exclaimed, “Gosh! it will soon reach the river.” The river was several hundred yards distant.

Other homesteads would consist of huts that sprang up all over the place – commodious places with wide hearths for grand fires in winter. Magnificent hardwoods stood all about, and the energy of young men who desired a room to themselves was boundless. There were no radios to sap time. They enjoyed their own company where they could tell smokingroom tales without risk of waking the babies or shocking the ladies – ho, by the way, could not be shocked, and knew all the stories, which seeped out through husbands.

On her marriage my mother came to a new house roofed with shingles of mountain-ash – as durable as English oak – capably split and sawn in uniform length, left to weather and put on with such craftsmanship that a leak was unknown. Its end room of my earliest memory was on our small unexpanded house. It was dedicated to guests, and knew mostly old gentlemen with grey beards in tweed suits, who cleared their throats with a note of authority; but occasionally there were beautiful young women in tight riding-habits, sometimes bowler hats, sometimes billycocks, with white or black veils to protect fair skins from sun or flies. It was the extraordinariness of a night in this special room and the unpleasant reason for such procedure that stuck in my memory.

The red nightgown and the candle flame in the wind plus something disagreeable in the experience clung, for usually an excursion with my father was the joy of my life.

“Father did take me to the end room. I can see the red nightgown. I didn’t want to go with him. I cried, but Mother wouldn’t come.”

“I know!” said my father. “She’s right! I took her there when she was weaned.”

My father’s memory was capacious and irrefutable till he took it with him to the grave in his eighty-fourth year.

“Nonsense!” repeated Mother. “She was weaned at ten months. She couldn’t possibly remember it.”

“Why not? I’m sure I can remember from my first year. There have been instances, why shouldn’t this be another?”

“She has heard us talking about it and thinks she remembers.”

Father became the persistent one. “She would hardly have heard us talking about her red nightgown and the candle flame. I don’t remember ever mentioning her weaning to anyone since it happened.”

Father tested my assertion. I remembered little more, but to this day usually retain a clearcut sense of place and direction. Forty or fifty years later I have astonished old hands by indicating “as good as a surveyor” where there had been trees, gates, tracks or other objects long ago. In one case I stated that, when in my third year, I had crossed a river at a certain spot after a night at W.’s and had turned to the left to continue on our homeward way. My surviving elders said the crossing had always been in another place. A man with a memory equalling my father’s came: he thought a while and said, “By Jove! she’s right. I recall it clearly now.”

The end rooms were usually furnished with a double bed and a single to meet varying requirements; and I recalled, “We were in the big bed with the head of it to the wall beside the door.”

“The double bed was along the far wall opposite the door,” said Mother.

“But don’t you remember the day we had to change their positions because you said you could get to the window easier past the single bed?”

That memory would seem to be a fact. Others of the time are not so precisely placed by such an incisive experience as weaning.

Chapter 2

BEING NAUGHTY

THE first memory of an uninhibited ego must have been little after the weaning for I cannot recall talking, and I talked and walked at twelve or thirteen months.

We were at Sunday mid-day dinner, with Father carving copiously from a big meat dish. Mother sat around the corner serving the vegetables. I was tied in my high chair near the corner between them. I could never be banished from adult company. The table was full, as usual at weekends. There was an old remittance gentleman; and, prominent in my recollection, my grown-up cousin Joe, son of Father’s eldest sister. He lived in loneliness many miles away in the scrub where he was clearing land secured under the Free Selection Act, which compelled residence.

I must have been below the age when Mother allowed her offspring to eat meat. An egg was my meal. I remember the egg and the spoon. Egg-spoons had rather long handles and were the shape of mustard-spoons. I must have clamoured for beef. Mother admonished, Father proffered bribes, but I disrupted the occasion. I would not eat that egg upon either persuasion or order. No egg, then no pudding, which was a treat. Finally Mother said if I did not eat the egg I should not be allowed to play with Joe after dinner, a real deprivation. Mother called on Joe to back her in this. The gentle Joe, shy to self-obliteration, thus cornered said, “Eat the egg, like a good girl, then we will go to see the chickens as soon as dinner is over.”

My undeveloped subconsciousness must have resented the pusillanimity of Joe, thus to forsake me in public when in private he was an unresisting slave. I up with the laden spoon and flung it at him across the spotless Sunday napery – the only time I have ever been capable of so rousing a prima donna demonstration. Mother was aroused to extreme measures.

“Hoity-toity! She must be whipped – yes, whipped!”

Father’s placations, Joe’s supplications were swept aside.

“She must be taught self-control!” I never knew my mother to lose hers. “She must be corrected for her own good and the safety of society.”

Mother had me on her hands. Father had Mother and me. He was driven to act, for there was never any divided authority between them.

“She must be switched.”

This was mother’s version of the honoured “correction by birching”. She believed in a sharp switch stripped of leaves and applied round the calves of the legs where it could sting without risk of injury. Boxing of ears or any hitting about the body of a child was not to be thought of, nor vulgar threats such as some parents hurl at their young.

The switch, in this instance a twig from the table decorations, was laid across the back of my hand and wrist. It was a first experience in an outrage on my person which no monarch could have more furiously resented. I have no recollection of pain from the switch, but have a clear picture of its marks pink across my wrist and fist, and noted for the first time the crease as if a string were tied in dough that separated the fat infant hand from the arm. The sight so affected me that I “reared up and broke the bridle” in the idiom of the time and place. I stiffened my spine, yelled and thrust myself into space regardless of consequences, the normal act of spirited infants. The chair was grabbed, its cargo unpinned.

Mother must have been embarrassed and helpless before company. The distressed and forgiving Joe’s arms must have been ready, for I remember, “Take her away, Joe! Give her to the men. We don’t want her here.”

I remember being with Joe in one of the bunks at the end of the hayshed which were kept for working men or other callers who might be crowded out of the household rooms. I remember Joe cutting my fingernails to hold my attention . . . as the early navigator Flinders on one historic occasion lathered and shaved the Aborigines to divert them till his gunpowder dried.

I fell asleep and later was restored to society without any disturbing recollections, any realization of ignominy wiped away by the unselfish Joe. And that was the only corporal punishment I underwent from that day to this. I loathe all beatings, canings, beltings, blows and such violence, not so much for the pain that may be inflicted on the culprit as for the degradation of thus violating the separate private person of a fellow being, which involves the one who lays on the birch or cat in an experience as coarsening of his fibre as it is brutalizing to the receiver.

Chapter 3

LATE HOURS AND BALDNESS

I WOULD never close an eye before midnight. The nursemaids available were little more than children, healthy creatures used to going to bed at dark, and could not be kept awake to “mind” me. The burden was little short of a scourge to people who bedded early after ceaseless and often violent physical activity, to whom ten o’clock was a late hour except when there was special company. I was a problem; but no problem except old age ever vanquished my mother.

Among first impressions are winter evenings with the room, as it appeared to me, brilliantly lighted by the grand log fire in the snowy hearth, the kerosene lamp on the round table in the corner with an unfurled peacock tail behind it like a wall panel of fabulous brocade, and my mother at the piano with two sperm candles in their wrought brass holders. These as I grew older seemed to me of pure gold such as the angels would have in their harps. I too sat at the piano. No lap, no pair of arms could lure from that position, when my mother began to play the instrument. This also must have been early, as I could not talk then – and I could say nearly any word in the dictionary at two. Also by eighteen months I would have been amenable to discipline and forbidden such rakish hours. Mother was firm in plan, particular in habits. Times of bedding and rising, meals, week-end routine were adhered to with precision. Mother was too well-regulated and capable for unpunctuality.

I was in my long robes – whether the infant robes, from which we were “short-coated” at three months, were resuscitated as evening wear, there is no one left to ask; but I would be correctly and daintily dressed. My mother enforced and ingrained a fastidiousness in me, so that later the frowsy habits of others caused me acute discomfort.

Mother was not musical, but she had been stiffly governessed, and played the piano correctly and was a prodigy in her situation. As part of her wedding paraphernalia she brought to the wild gullies the novelty of a sewing-machine and the social glory of a piano. The (pre-fire) Broadwood in a beautiful rosewood case had to come in by bullock dray, in some places down wriggling creek beds instead of tracks. Its survival with no scratch on it in such a passage was due to the resourcefulness, tough muscles, experienced bush-craft and tireless enthusiasm of young men serving a divinity.

My mother was the wonder of her region. She was beautiful and accomplished, clever as a hostess and in all departments of home-making. My father’s pride in her was as a poem and a triumph combined, and sustained him to the end of his days. There was open expression of surprise as to how he could have carried off such a prize, but he too must have been irresistible with his slim straight height, his equestrian fame, his blue eyes, dark hair and sharp classical profile, his exuberant and witty though unbarbed humour, his boundless generosity. He was prized by all his contemporaries as “white throughout”.

Young women were worshipped on the remote stations when men were many and women a rarity. Any normal woman with health and youth, whether in kitchen or drawingroom, was a magnet.

In the drawingroom on Saturday nights Mother would go through her “pieces” culminating in “The Maiden’s Prayer”, which was the gem of any genteel finishing school’s repertory. Half-a-dozen men, and frequently more, formed an appreciative audience. Old songs would be sung, while in kitchen or hut men without women and without accompaniment would sing songs from song books interspersed by solos on concertina, jews’ harp or mouth organ. Among the guests sometimes would be a player, and that would be a treat indeed.

A guest I remember from later, after a mine broke out a few miles away, was a once-distinguished musician by the name of Hopkins, whose uncle appeared in the book of Hymns Ancient and Modern as a composer. The poor little nephew, a victim of drink, had thought to repair his fortunes by picking up gol...

Table of contents

• CHILDHOODAT BRINDABELLA
• Publisher’s note to the 1963 edition
• Contents
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Chapter 8
• Chapter 9
• Chapter 10
• Chapter 11
• Chapter 12
• Chapter 13
• Chapter 14
• Chapter 15
• Chapter 16
• Chapter 17
• Chapter 18
• Chapter 19
• Chapter 20
• Chapter 21
• Chapter 22
• Chapter 23
• Chapter 24
• Chapter 25
• Chapter 26
• Chapter 27
• Appendix