his reputation as the best fighter of fires in the Snowy Mountains district and the last, but by no means least, because he drank like a fish but could hold his grog and be relied on to be good company in the pub. All of this served to give him a respectability independent of his reprobate son.
Mr Baloney lived on a run-down small farm at Wooragee, a dot on the map which served as postbox number for the locals, many of whom had come to farming via the Soldier Settlement Scheme.
During the gold rushes, Wooragee had been a Cobb & Co. stop when it had boasted a stone store, a tin pub and half a dozen wattle and daub shacks. In the twenties a primary school was built to dish out a fundamental education to the farm children thereabouts. It boasted a solitary teacher, responsible for all six classes. Today only the school FOUR FIRES 69
remains, the rest has long since gone, eroded by the wind or plundered for building material. The school served as the postal address and
- letters were marked R.M.B. Wooragee, VIC. The teacher sorted out the mail into family names and had the kids bring it home or drop it in for their neighbours.
Mr Baloney was seventy-four when I was seven years old, the year he passed away. At the age of twenty-five and already married with two sons, he'd fought in the Boer War with the Colonial Detachment and received a bullet in the knee from a Boer Mauser at Potchefstroom in the Western Transvaal and ever after walked with a slight limp.
Page 60
The second son, James, died at Gallipoli in 1915 and Francis, the oldest, at Pozires in France in 1918. Their mother Caroline was one of the twelve thousand Australians who died in the great flu epidemic in 1919 thought to have been brought back from Europe by the troops returning in 1918. My grandpa would say he'd lost two sons and a wife in the Great War and that, after five generations in Australia, the Maloneys still hadn't escaped the scoaarge of the bloody English.
Tommy was born in 1920, the youngest of his three sons and the only child to Mr Baloney's second marriage to Charlotte McKinley, a spinster who was over forty herself. She was said to possess a small inheritance, which proved to be correct. For once a Maloney had lucked in. But, as usual, there was a price to pay. His wife would spend the remainder of her years bemoaning her marriage to him and telling anyone who would listen that it was her money that kept them alive during the Great Depression. She'd add that, while other men searched desperately for ways to put food on the table for their suffering families, her husband's entire Boer War veteran's pension was poured down his useless Maloney throat and, what's more, if she hadn't kept a good grip on her dowry that's where it would have gone as well.
'Nursing me sorrows for marrying you, me dear,' my grandpa would say if he happened to be present at one of these perpetual whinges.
As a seven-year-old I was often enough farmed out to my
grandparents. Tommy was probably on the hill at the time and Nancy, who was expecting Colleen, was too busy making ends meet to take care of me. Sarah would have had her hands full with Mike and Bozo and was too young to assume the responsibility for me while still going to school each day.
My grandma was always referred to in our family in the over formal English manner as 'Grandmother Charlotte'. This was because, although Australian-born, she came from 'decent British stock', a distinction she felt compelled to make if, in a conversation, she was connected in any way with a Maloney.
She was an English Catholic, which seemed to mean that she was at the less bitter end of the bitter divide, English Catholics being mysteriously superior to all other Catholics, in particular those originally from Ireland.
Unlike us, who were collapsed Catholics, Grandmother Charlotte was devout. She'd walk the three miles into town and back twice a week, Thursday nights to do the Stations of the Cross, then waking up at
Mr Baloney lived on a run-down small farm at Wooragee, a dot on the map which served as postbox number for the locals, many of whom had come to farming via the Soldier Settlement Scheme.
During the gold rushes, Wooragee had been a Cobb & Co. stop when it had boasted a stone store, a tin pub and half a dozen wattle and daub shacks. In the twenties a primary school was built to dish out a fundamental education to the farm children thereabouts. It boasted a solitary teacher, responsible for all six classes. Today only the school FOUR FIRES 69
remains, the rest has long since gone, eroded by the wind or plundered for building material. The school served as the postal address and
- letters were marked R.M.B. Wooragee, VIC. The teacher sorted out the mail into family names and had the kids bring it home or drop it in for their neighbours.
Mr Baloney was seventy-four when I was seven years old, the year he passed away. At the age of twenty-five and already married with two sons, he'd fought in the Boer War with the Colonial Detachment and received a bullet in the knee from a Boer Mauser at Potchefstroom in the Western Transvaal and ever after walked with a slight limp.
Page 60
The second son, James, died at Gallipoli in 1915 and Francis, the oldest, at Pozires in France in 1918. Their mother Caroline was one of the twelve thousand Australians who died in the great flu epidemic in 1919 thought to have been brought back from Europe by the troops returning in 1918. My grandpa would say he'd lost two sons and a wife in the Great War and that, after five generations in Australia, the Maloneys still hadn't escaped the scoaarge of the bloody English.
Tommy was born in 1920, the youngest of his three sons and the only child to Mr Baloney's second marriage to Charlotte McKinley, a spinster who was over forty herself. She was said to possess a small inheritance, which proved to be correct. For once a Maloney had lucked in. But, as usual, there was a price to pay. His wife would spend the remainder of her years bemoaning her marriage to him and telling anyone who would listen that it was her money that kept them alive during the Great Depression. She'd add that, while other men searched desperately for ways to put food on the table for their suffering families, her husband's entire Boer War veteran's pension was poured down his useless Maloney throat and, what's more, if she hadn't kept a good grip on her dowry that's where it would have gone as well.
'Nursing me sorrows for marrying you, me dear,' my grandpa would say if he happened to be present at one of these perpetual whinges.
As a seven-year-old I was often enough farmed out to my
grandparents. Tommy was probably on the hill at the time and Nancy, who was expecting Colleen, was too busy making ends meet to take care of me. Sarah would have had her hands full with Mike and Bozo and was too young to assume the responsibility for me while still going to school each day.
My grandma was always referred to in our family in the over formal English manner as 'Grandmother Charlotte'. This was because, although Australian-born, she came from 'decent British stock', a distinction she felt compelled to make if, in a conversation, she was connected in any way with a Maloney.
She was an English Catholic, which seemed to mean that she was at the less bitter end of the bitter divide, English Catholics being mysteriously superior to all other Catholics, in particular those originally from Ireland.
Unlike us, who were collapsed Catholics, Grandmother Charlotte was devout. She'd walk the three miles into town and back twice a week, Thursday nights to do the Stations of the Cross, then waking up at
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