Seize the Day. A M (Jack) Harris
river, land and water to grow vegetables, plenty of shade to keep your chickens and ducks at peace and productive. There are lots of rabbits near and about while the large town of Mildura is just across the Murray Bridge for shopping and, according to my grandparents, an abundance of good cheap wine, both white and red, can be had from many of the surrounding vineyards.
My grandfather had been a blacksmith and after emigrating from Ireland in 1925, he had first set up at Menindee. Driven out because of lack of work he now set up again at Buronga. I never knew what he had been doing while he lived in Mildura but now with the re-built forge he soon had enough work to keep his family fed. There were plenty of draught horses used on the many vineyards all about and he was a skilled tradesman, gentle with animals, and he prospered, in a relative sense.
The others coming after the Roach family to Buronga slapped up their shanties, following the standard method of building: rough-shaped bush posts for uprights, hessian sides, later calcimined white, scrounged or stolen corrugated sheeting for the roof. And if it could be had, metal guttering that led to water tanks set beside the shacks where most women kept small gardens of hardy shrubs like oleander or fuchsia. Many also trailed climbing geraniums to blossom like hard-won trophies against the white of their bag walls.
I began working with Martin as soon as I was strong enough to wield a hammer properly. We were great friends and sometimes when the day’s work was done the old man would hug me close to his heart, then pretend to wrestle with me, and hold me near to his whiskered chin. Before I grew too big to be carried, he would take me up on his shoulders and carry me all the way back to our shack, the thick flannel stuff of his shirt smelling wonderfully to me of sweat and smoke and the sweet dung of the horses. I also came to know some of Martin’s history; it did not come to me all at once but sometimes from talking with him at the forge, at other times chatting with Mary after our evening prayers, and often listening to our neighbours talk when Martin held his court at the board table in the kitchen where his own home-brewed beer was served. It was actually brewed in Mary’s huge clothes washing cauldron and it was very potent, the full bottles often exploding, much to Martin’s chagrin, before it could be consumed. But what was drunk made people very excited and given to making long, red-faced speeches.
I came to understand that Martin had fought in what became the hopeless Easter Uprising of 1916, when a provisional Republican government was proclaimed. Only about one thousand men were available to fight against British rule in Ireland, and Martin was one of the ill-equipped Irishman who went against thousands of British soldiers. The Irish troops occupied the General Post Office and parts of Dublin; savage street fighting went on for several days and until the Republicans were forced to surrender. When Martin yielded he had been shot in the shoulder and had taken a bayonet thrust in the thigh, and a rifle butt in the face had broken his nose. The defeated Irishmen had tried to huddle together, seeking warmth, but the British soldiers jabbed viciously at them with their bayonets, keeping them apart. If a man fell he was brutally kicked and sometimes run through with steel; but after a short time the British troops were relieved by Australian soldiers who had served on the Western Front. Many were of Irish ancestry, some whose forebears had been deported to Australia for life simply because they had sworn a secret oath as members of Trade Unions, and soon overcoats materialised to cover many of them, and particularly the wounded and hurt.
Hot mugs of tea were also provided and the instant kindness of the Australians, so at variance with the brutality of the British soldiers, caused many of the Irishmen who had borne that British maltreatment in black silence to break down and weep. One good point of the whole mess Martin was often to declare, was that he was able to convince Mary that the family, including Eileen who was to become my mother, should emigrate to Australia. He had never forgotten the kindness of the soldiers who had saved his life, and he thought their country would be a fine place to settle, away from the troubles of Ireland, which had split into two self-governing areas, Northern and Southern Ireland. And so they moved on.
As time passed the sensitive relationship between Martin and me never faltered in the strength of its friendship, but the pact I knew with Mary was much more complex, for it was a thing of the soul, something set in the heavens she often spoke about. She was a willowy woman who carried a quiet but unquestioned authority in her bearing. Like Martin, she was a Catholic but broad-minded and clear- thinking, and not a devotee, as I was later to understand, of that part of the church which remained under Roman obedience after the Reformation. She believed in heaven and hell, in angels and devils, but she was practical about life and the manner in which it should be lived. Life and the happiness that sometimes went along with it, as she explained to me, was like fluid in a cup. There was a problem, though, in that there was not enough happiness to go around to satisfy everyone and to keep all cups full. As this was the case, I must understand that the time would come when my cup would not hold much happiness but I must believe, knowing that if I persevered, then our God, who had the power and control over nature and human fortunes, would fill my cup to the full once again. Of an evening she would kneel with me and Bonnie and we would say our prayers together, where over our beds hung a crayon drawing of Christ exhibiting his heart in red and gold and blue, the colours, she often told us, of love and pride and suffering.
With the passing of the years other families came to be scattered all about the saffron hump of land above the river, and all close to our place which had become the hub of many people’s tattered wheel. Being that sort of woman who had accumulated the sort of wisdom which books and learning do not impart Mary became, almost naturally, spokeswoman and arbiter for the ridge dwellers. Her authority was undisputed, and so she was able to fend off the authorities when they came looking for drunks, vagrants or petty criminals. She was able also to manipulate and pacify local council members when they turned up demanding payment of the crown rent on the land. Bonnie and I were often at Mary’s side, patient listeners to her well-constructed pleas for mercy, observers to her diplomacy. Given her experience as a nurse in Ireland, Mary was also medic to the ridge dwellers, administering to the sick, most of whom could not afford medicine let alone the luxury of a doctor, and calling on a lifetime of experience she gave succour and hope to many of the ill and lost in spirit. With Mary on the ridge it became home for a community, not simply a resting place for derelicts.
As the depression years lingered on, more and more shacks came to sprawl about our place and in the wind-patterned hollows beyond. The new comers were different to the earlier settlers, many being accountants, factory workers, along with drovers, sheep men and farmers. Elderly swagmen were frequent passers-by with corks to ward off the flies swinging from the broad bush hats and all their possessions wrapped in a bag or a blanket called their swag draped across their shoulders. A blackened billycan dangled from a hip and many were accompanied by an old cattle dog, normally a kelpie, often simply called Bluey. The swaggies were men of a low status, somewhere I heard it declared between the indigenous Aborigine and the immigrant Irish. Derided by many as thieves or vagabonds, most somehow understood if they called into the shack of Martin and Mary requesting hot water to make tea in their billycans and some hot tucker, hopefully beef stew for which they offered to cut wood or clean up about the place, Mary would provide whatever was needed. They invariably fed their dog from a spare bowl carried for that purpose, and would later head for the river bank to set up a camp, but Sergeant Murphy of the Mildura police would appear almost on cue and herd them on.
Murphy seldom exercised his authority on the ridge, though, and he never allowed his constables to go anywhere near the place unless he accompanied them. He knew well enough that whenever the ridge dwellers got enough cash for any work they might find in the vineyards or for labouring on the roads, they would drink and brawl, even run crazy. He knew that on Saturday nights in particular, the ridge would often be littered with male and female debris of fearsome fights and monumental drinking bouts. But having so much respect for Mary’s ability to sort things out with wisdom and tact, and being Irish himself, he never interfered with what might happen on the ridge knowing that when the Sunday morning sun aroused them, the fighters would generally shake hands and make up. They would probably have another beer, possibly having forgotten what it was they had fought about.
Bonnie, older and wiser, was a second mother to me, among other things helping me with my school work as my attendance was patchy, for I often helped Shoofty Vetch when he went out getting in his cross lines for fish that he would sell at Wentworth, paying me for