Roundabout at Bangalow by Shirley Walker Page A

the teacher is a sadistic caner. Some of the children whose frozen palms have been slashed with the cane for nothing more than a spelling mistake bear the purple welts for the whole of the winter and, grim little heroes, show them off along with their chilblains. We have dancing lessons at two shillings a time (three shillings for two) from the teacher’s wife in the school weathershed. The lessons are difficult for the shed is small and its boards rough, but the teacher is ambitious. She teaches National Dancing, Irish and Scottish, and the Sailors’ Hornpipe to land-bound children, most of whom have never seen the sea, let alone a ship or a sailor. There is a collection of conch shells at the school, and children hold a shell carefully to their ear, to listen to the echo of the distant surf breaking on the rocky coast so far away, or perhaps to the ghostly echoes of the great inland sea which once covered much of this land. The dancing mistress also teaches ballet and doesn’t hesitate to demonstrate the steps, twirling and pirouetting on pudgy little feet. Fifty years later I go to a ceilidh in Carrick-on-Shannon and see genuine Irish dancing, the dancers costumed in brilliant green and gold satin appliqued with ancestral symbols from the Book of Kells. Hands by sides and backs straight they spring and twirl in intricate gravity-defying patterns; their control is perfect. I realise then how heavy our feet were as we clumped through the Australian version of Irish reels and jigs in the weathershed at Wallangarra.
    The coming of spring brings a great awakening, and I realise there are other gardens besides those of my mother and Granny, which were full of exotic flowers and fenced off from the weeds and the rainforest. My gardens are now secret and austere places hidden among the rocks where, in spring, the wild clematis sprawls over the sun-warmed boulders, its white and green mixed with purple trails of hardenbergia. Up and down the slopes the wattles bloom in every crevice and the air is heavy with their pollen. Parrots squabble and feast on the gum blossoms, suck the sticky fruit of the mistletoe, and spread the seeds to fresh branches. I creep away here to daydream alone.
    At this time writers such as May Gibbs and Ida Rentoul Outh-waite are rewriting the bush, animating its creatures and giving them English attitudes and speech. Their cosy creations — wattle fairies, gumnut people, Dot’s Kangaroo and Snugglepot and Cuddlepie — are all attempts to see the bush in the same terms as English fairy stories. But The Wind in the Willows, for instance, with its funny cuddly animals, doesn’t transplant to Australia, that land of scraggy gum trees and sharp rocks that trip the feet of white children and skin their knees. It’s possible that there are areas and dimensions, sights, smells, spaces and stories to which the white consciousness has absolutely no access. The real stories of the bush are those of the long-ago Dreamtime, and there are no Aborigines left here to tell them, even if they could be persuaded to do so. My wildflowers too are alien; they belong only to the bush and refuse to be domesticated. The clematis wilts in my hands and the wattle dries up and withers before I get it home to the waiting jam jars.
    The Depression is now biting hard and work is closing down. After little over a year on six pounds a week my father and all the meatworkers are put onto part time, two days a week. On this they have no chance of paying the rent, let alone feeding their families. Meals of rabbit, stewed pigeons or wild duck become more regular. Sometimes there is casual work, when a wheat train pulls into the New South Wales platform and the heavy bags have to be transhipped. One evening at dusk, crossing the railway platform, I catch sight of my father bent over like a hunchback, lumping heavy bags of wheat from one side of the platform to the other. He has been doing this all day, and on many