Roundabout at Bangalow by Shirley Walker

links with a darker Australian legend, unknown to me at the time. It is the home of Major Thomas, the country solicitor who defended Breaker Morant at his court martial in South Africa. Thomas had his moment of fame, but returned to Tenterfield shattered by his defeat, with dark memories of the firing squad that executed his client. Now completely disillusioned with Lord Kitchener and the Empire, he sulks the remainder of his life away as the town’s most famous recluse.
    We live in a rented house, a rickety weatherboard Queenslander, high on stilts so the cold westerlies blow through beneath it where the dogs have their kennel. Its backyard is bare save for the wood heap, an enormous pile of gnarled and twisted roots and stumps, a sign of what the winter will be like. The kitchen is the centre of this house, as it is of all Australian homes at this time, and the fuel stove, burnished each week with Zebra polish, is its central shrine; but we don’t get too close for the black rubs off on everything. The kitchen chairs are ranged in front of it in strict order, the favourite ones directly in front of the open firebox and oven, where feet can rest on the hob. There is a fair bit of jostling as we try to share the blast of heat while our backs freeze. Toast is made; the bread speared on the prongs of a wire toasting fork and propped in front of the firebox. No toast made in an electric toaster ever tastes as good as these smoky slices dripping with butter. The wire toasting fork has been bought from an itinerant hawker, one of those sad travellers who attempt to earn a few bob by making such things over their campfires, or by chopping wood for the housewife. They are seldom turned away empty-handed from our house or others.
    On the hob is the brown pottery teapot with its knitted tea-cosy and on the mantelpiece the tea caddy with a picture of the newly completed Sydney Harbour Bridge on the side. Black tea is the opiate of the Australian working classes. It is bitter and sweet and, in my mother’s case, often accompanied by a Bex APC powder for her interminable headaches. We loll in our chairs in front of the fire, or play cards on the kitchen table with its oilcloth covering. This is patterned with koala bears, as is the matching cover on the mantelpiece, for national motifs — koalas, laughing kookaburras and above all the new Harbour Bridge — are in fashion at this time. Before we go to bed, to snuggle beneath our new satin eiderdowns, we mix up Bourneville cocoa, or Nestle’s coffee and milk, a sickly brew that has little to do with real coffee. Here in this kitchen and in these beds our lives are centred, we are safe.
    Our hitherto gentle Alsatian dog, Caesar, has disgraced himself by tearing the throats out of several of the neighbour’s sheep. His days are numbered, but in the meantime he is tethered to the clothes line by a long chain which gives him the freedom of most of the backyard. A poisoned bait thrown over the fence for Caesar is eaten by Barney, our little terrier, and a rough bush remedy is applied by the local animal expert, hurriedly dragged out of the pub. A wad of tobacco is shoved hard down the dog’s throat and he is whirled round by the back legs until he brings up the bait. This grim dance of dog and dog-doctor takes place by lantern light and is watched by the horrified children who have reared the dog from a tiny pup. This is indeed a rough place.
    The house fronts onto a stock route where mobs of sheep and cattle are driven by in a flurry of drovers on horseback, dogs, cracking stockwhips and dust, to the meatworks and their killing floors. Across the lane is the paddock where the sheep wait their turn. It is waterless and eaten down to bare dirt; their plaintive cries trouble us, night and day. The drovers and meatworkers are desensitised but we children are not. We mourn for the lowing cattle and the stupid sheep.
    Meanwhile we go to the New South Wales school where