Seize the Day. A M (Jack) Harris
in the Clemenza vineyards during the picking season and I was able sometimes to buy Mary a nice present as a form of repayment for her love and guidance. As well I helped Rocky Daniels on his milk run with Clarrie Simpson. I had a few friends about the place but my best mate was Clarrie, whose mother was what they called the common-law wife of a burly man known simply as Plug. Minnie, according to Mary, was the ‘latest mum’ of Clarrie, and that after his natural mother had left him, her violent husband never again bothered to seek the seal of church or state on any of the temporary liaisons he later contracted. He was a wild drunken larrikin given to beating Minnie and Clarrie when he was in a drunken rage. Clarrie would often share a cigarette he had stolen from Plug breaking one in half, lighting his portion and passing the burning match and my half over to me. Together in complete harmony we would inhale with what we took to be a natural talent. We never discussed the violent Plug or his bullying and besides, we were having problems in my own home, for my mother Eileen, when she visited Buronga from Melbourne where she was working as a housekeeper, had taken to drinking heavily. She often sat at the kitchen table drinking wine and quarrelling with Mary and Martin. Once, when I found a part empty methylated spirits bottle secreted under her bed and woke to her ask if she was drinking it, she instantly got up and pushed me so violently in the chest that I crashed all the way back into the kitchen stove. I sat in the dirt crying, until Bonnie came and took me outside.
When I asked Bonnie why our mother was drinking so much, even the spirit which was mainly used for mixing paint, she told me that Eileen deeply loved our father and she could never understand why he had cheated on her. Because she could not accept what he had done to her, she found escape in drinking. I then queried why our father had picked me up and dumped me on that horse carting shit, Bonnie reckoned that it was his desperate attempt to shame me and stop me from becoming what he was, and how something terrible he had done to our mother, had badly changed all of our lives.
Clarrie was several years my senior and I had started working on Rocky’s milk run with him, when I was twelve plus a few months. The year was 1938. We accompanied Rocky on the ridge at Buronga in a horse-drawn cart, delivering milk and cream to those who could afford it. Rocky loved to sing as he drove about the place, warbling ditties which for people living about the place were as much a part of his character as his ragged appearance. They were the kind not usually heard outside the Returned Soldiers get-togethers or rugby after-match beer-ups, but nobody living on or about the ridge ever took offence to them. Clarrie and I loved to sing with him while feeling very grown-up and worldly-wise.
We had to quit the milk run when the grape picking season commenced. We worked on a property owned by an Italian named Enzio Clemenza. He was an Italian who had emigrated from France, not Italy, after the first war, a fact which kept him from being interned then as an enemy alien. Some people wondered what might happen to him if there was another war, for it was known that Mussolini had recently invaded Abyssinia and now he was watching Hitler’s war preparation. It seemed that the Italian leader might join him in some conflict against all of us, which could affect Clemenza. On his arrival in Buronga, he had taken up land along the river and there he had grubbed out a place for his vines, grafting onto the small stems that came from America the centuries-old love of vineyards, all inherited from his native Italy.
The land Clemenza first worked was so poor that some of the locals said he would never make it as a grower. But he did, partly because he was sustained in his work by his wife, Rosa. Even now, after so many years in Australia, and married to one of one of the richest men in the district, she still wore her hair in the plain, severe style of her homeland. She also wore un-ornamented black clothing and drab shoes and stockings, hostages of her days of struggle when she and her husband never stopped working and planting. The way Rosa had often stood so close to her husband, with a black shawl over her head and black peasant stockings to match her ankle-length boots, was ridiculed by some. Only her husband had understood that Rosa’s stern Catholic God had burned into her soul a fear that what He in this good land had given might, in less generous mood, so easily take away in flood or drought.
The pickers came in their droves, and by their nature as well as their numbers disrupted the peaceful, easy-going rhythm of Mildura and the many small country towns about. They were not all bad people, of course. Many were hard working decent folk who followed seasonal work from North Queensland to Tasmania, from cane cutting to apple picking and grape harvesting. Clarrie and I picked with Bonnie and, working as a threesome, we had good yields; but it was hard, hot work and on Saturday we were happy to get away and attend the dance held in the Mildura Town Hall.
We paused just inside the door, absorbing the colourful scene, and it was obvious that nobody, stranger or otherwise, could possibly have lost their way to the Town Hall that evening, for the place glowed with lights, was surrounded with horse-drawn vehicles, and throbbing to the sound a large crowd makes. Sharp at eight o’clock Elsie Dunning small, sober-faced and very determined looking, struck the first chords on the piano set on the high stage and the proceedings were under way. She and her group kept up a monumental beat that should have brought down the lilies and cherubs of the heavy white moulding, while clouds of bright streamers and great balloons shook and swayed above the dancers, the balloons released among general pandemonium during the last dance of the evening.
Clarrie had the first dance with Bonnie but he was then shouldered aside by other young men who wanted to take her in their arms. I could understand why, as I thought she looked tall and lovely, encased in a blue dress she had bought for the evening from her first payment from the grape picking. I did not dance much, nor did Clarrie, as his partner Bonnie was much sought after by older men. But when the musicians had played their last encore we left the place and strolled down Deakin Avenue heading for home, Clarrie with Bonnie and me, all happy together. The air about was warm and musty with a hint of ripe grape aroma from the vineyards all about. Generally though, the place was sleeping, but somewhere a car honked or a motor-bike muttered, while behind us we could hear the tinny sound of a piano as some die-hard reveller tried to manufacture yet another tune on the high stage in the Town Hall. Peaceful though it all was, I knew there was also the danger of war in that surrounding air.
Clarrie and I had learned a lot about the possibility of war from my uncle Luke who believed in Churchill and his fears about Hitler and the Japanese forces. Uncle Luke did not quit Ireland with his parents but he turned up in Buronga several years later, flat broke, and asked if he could move in with his mother. He did not make the request to Martin for it seemed that the old man did not want him about the place. Luke did not move into the shack either, but built himself a bough shed out back. It was a single room, roughly square, with a roof of corrugated iron and walls of matted salt bush, constructed after a local building technique which ensured reasonable privacy, and maximum cool in summer. Its only fault was that it did not keep out the drifting red sand which sifted through it with every breeze.
Having nothing much to do once his accommodation was settled, Luke took over part of Mary’s responsibility as doctor for the ridge where the many quarrels from the growing population often led to cuts and sometimes even to muscle injury and broken bones. Luke once confided to me that he could scarcely remember when or where the rough practice had begun, but he had acquired a skill of sorts and an interest in minor surgery during what he euphemistically called ‘The Troubles’ in Ireland, which I now understood he viewed differently from his father. Mary had also once mentioned that Luke was a Protestant, one thing which naturally distanced him from Martin with his Catholic belief. But Luke also worked as a barber and this may have laid yet another foundation, given the necessity to staunch cuts, a familiarity with razors and scissors, a known knack in paring corns, lancing whitlows, and even tearing out carbuncles.
As a growing boy and later in my early teens, I came to understand that a great part of Luke’s concern for other people stemmed from his natural willingness to help and lend a hand to those in trouble, a trait I tried to copy. I also attempted to adopt and understand what Luke’s crude but practical measures did more for a raving drunk, or a thrown rider, or a terrified bush kid or mother, or a wandering sick Aboriginal, rather than any high-priced doctor’s care. To me, he was a big, smiling generous-hearted man who was always good to me, and over the years I came to love him. Sometimes when Luke had too much to drink, he would hold me close to his large stomach and weep. I knew it had something to do with the difference between him and Martin, but I never queried