Roundabout at Bangalow by Shirley Walker Page B

other days. I avert my eyes, but this brief glimpse stays in my mind forever. Hard toil, hard yakka is to be his lot for life, and if you add to this an unquiet home, you can see what his life was like. He actually dies of hard work, of an enlarged heart, six weeks before he is eligible for the pension. Eventually the meatworks at Wallangarra close down completely and, after a flurry of telegrams and phone calls, he is offered a place at Anderson’s meatworks at Byron Bay and, before we know it, we are back home, back in that magic circle whose central point is the lighthouse on the Cape.
    The lighthouse
    Because there are no houses to rent, we live in a tent in a paddock close (too close) to the meatworks, on a narrow triangle between the bitumen road and the railway line. This has previously been a camp site for other meatworkers; there is an outside toilet and a blackened tin fireplace with hooks for a kettle and a camp oven. We are on a clean grassy patch, but between us and the works the ground is churned up with suspicious grave-like mounds. We are not allowed to go even a little way in that direction. The tent is large, calico curtains divide it for privacy, and everything, even my mother’s prized Singer sewing machine, is fitted in somehow. It’s always neat and clean; it has to be for four of us to fit into so small a space. My sister and I sleep on a three-quarter size stretcher with all our toys, books and clothes in boxes underneath, and I am allocated the space hard up against the tent wall.
    On fine days the flaps are lifted out and the breezes blow through, but on wet days the wind and rain howl around and our parents hurry out to loosen the ropes and drive the tent pegs in further. I lie snug in bed with the sodden side of the tent flapping close to my face, tracing with a finger the pattern of mildew on the calico. Often the storm roars outside and huge breakers smash down on the shingle, for the bay faces north-east and is unprotected from that direction; only the sandhills stand between us and the storms. But worse still are the tempests within the tent walls. Voices are raised; the kerosene lamp throws grotesque shadows on the canvas and I lie with my fingers in my ears. At such times the tent seems to pulsate with its own inner life, as if unable to contain the anger which fills its space. Despite the atmospherics, these are some of the happiest days of my childhood.
    The gramophone has come with us and is wound up on the pine kitchen table in the tent. Our mother’s taste has shifted along to the blues, to the big bands with their trombones and saxophones, and to sentimental lyrics such as
    Hands across the table
Meet so Tenderly
Though you close your lips, your fingertips
Tell me all I want to know .
    The music floats out over the lantana and the sandhills to the sea, startling both passers-by and seagulls as we play one record after another until they are almost worn out. If others look down on us for living in a tent, we are unaware of it, for these months are like an idyllic holiday. We swim, fish, play with the dog on the beach, watch the steamers arrive at the jetty or, on long Sunday afternoons, walk miles along the beach to those secluded valleys which are now Wattegoes Beach and Palm Valley, and then climb the steep hill to the lighthouse.
    I spend the night in the lighthouse keeper’s cottage with my school friend, the daughter of the Head Keeper. I wake to the dazzling wash of sunlight reflected from the sea, and watch the breakers far, far down a giddy slope, dotted with the figures of the lighthouse goats. This is a world apart, a neat and nautical world with its own strict conventions. Everything is whitewashed and shipshape; everything is in its place. The lighthouse children go to school in a cart pulled by a strong little pony. The same vehicle collects them each afternoon, together with supplies and mail, and the pony pulls the cart back up the steep and winding road