Memory is not a Camera

Memories are not cameras. A crystal clear brook that gurgled through a meadow dotted with sweet grasses, gurgling past banks of daisies on our farm in Gatton, a farming town in South East Queensland. I played in this sylvan setting with my sister Judith. That was in the halcyon days before we reached the working age of a dairy farmer’s child: six or seven.

The image of that Elysian field of innocence remained with me for decades: an image to which I escaped when things got tough. That meant, frequently.

I visited this shrine after forty years to relish my rustic recollections of rural revels. I knew where the bubbling brook was: below the dairy, on the grassy slope adorned by wildflowers leading down to the marshes where the pigs danced amongst the daisies. I frowned. My crystal brook was nothing but a dirty drain through pigpens in boggy marshland. Filthy. Disgusting. Daisies? Bindis and thistles. I preferred my childlike memory of it. I turned and left the farm, shaken and stirred.

Memory plays tricks in other ways as well. My ex-wife, Noreen, often made reference to this trait, but I know that is question of interpretation. My memory is the one that is sound. I think… Anyway, what is wrong with a little judicious exaggeration? Memory is facts reinterpreted.

Take my cot in my maternal grandparent’s house on their dairy farm in Sherwood, then a rural area of Brisbane; now an inner suburb. The house was built beside the railway line from Corinda to Tennyson. Thundering iron monsters belching smoke and steam roared past at Queensland Rail’s top speed: around fifteen miles per hour. I would stand in my cot staring in wonder as they roared past a few feet from my window.

Then there was the reed organ in the hallway. An Estey. The front door opened onto the railway tracks. It was built before the railway. In those days, it must have made for a grander entrance than the back door through the laundry.

The hall became a storeroom for non-essential things such as organs. And my cot. That old Estey reed organ fascinated me. I inherited it when Nan died. When I left Australia in 1970 I donated it to the Methodist Training College in Brisbane. They threw it out. The age of Hammonds had arrived

Even before I could sit on the organ stool I would try pushing the pedals. The organ shuddered and groaned gasping for the air it needed to live. By the time I was ten I was playing for church. An achievement? Not really. Precious few church organists are brilliant musicians. If making a joyful noise unto the lord is a requirement, ninety percent fail. That is being generous. Nowadays all you need is a rock band. The brilliance comment still applies.

Grandpa (Grampy) would take me with him as he delivered milk. I sat on the bench of his milk cart while he dashed into each house, pouring from his bucket into whatever receptacle his customers put on their front step. The horse knew each turn: when to slow down, when to speed up, when to pause.

After the war, Dad tried to make it teaching music in Brisbane. We stayed with Nan and Gramp. We moved to Kingaroy in 1947. Dad bought a music practice. The practice folded. The woman who sold it to Dad started up her practice again. Her pupils went back to her. Dad lost his first investment.

I started school in Kingaroy. My teacher’s name was Miss Dray. I remember the forest of trees at the back of the school; the railway line that crossed Haly Street — our house was only a few yards away. On stilts: a Queensland house complete with verandah.

Young brother Leonard arrived and we left Kingaroy to share farm with Grampy. Grampy had sold his dairy in Sherwood and bought a mixed dairy and farming property a few miles from Gatton: Rosemount.

Judy, born eighteen months after me, had a couple of years of innocence on the farm — in the pigpen, chasing chickens, looking for carpet snakes in the barn, picking strawberries and apples — till she too was up at dawn to help with the milking. Tasks done, we would go to school. We went with whoever was driving: Dad, Grandpa or Smithie, the neighbouring farmer. They had to get the cream to the station to catch the morning mail train to the milk factory in the next town, Grantham.

After school we walked home: five miles. Once home, we would set to our afternoon chores: feed the chooks, water the pigs, ride the horse to fetch a cow from the dries’ paddock who was ready to be milked again, help bring in the cows for milking: that sort of thing. Then we would hang round the dairy to do odd jobs such as bringing in the cows to the bails one by one. We owned about a hundred cows. They all had names.

‘How can you tell their names?’ our city cousins would ask.

‘You have faces too, you know.’

We often visiting relatives in wonderful old farm houses where one of dozens of Aunties spent their time baking scones and pikelets and making jam. We washed them down with sweet tea or Mynor lime cordial.

Mum came from a large family. My maternal grandmother was one of twelve, one hundred and twenty percent of whom were Methodist clergymen or so close to it that it made no difference. Of course, our rellies loved to retaliate: sorry, return the visits. We we got to know an army of cousins, aunts, uncles and assorted ‘miscellaneouses.’ Comforting, pleasant: why fight it? Why question anything? Even our faith. We accepted all: warm, loving, comfortable and known. Why question it?

One Christmas, the tribes assembled at our Rosemount farm. A massive verandah on three sides. Five huge bedrooms. Two kitchens. Two lounge rooms, a music room. A pantry. Two fireplaces with Metter wood stoves. One bathroom. One toilet.

We had been to church on the Sabbath. We were celebrating Jesus’ birth, filling our bellies and trying to find three-penny pieces in the Christmas pudding.

Replete, our elders decided to walk round the farm. We followed as our they chattered away discussing cows, corn and Christ. Suddenly, Uncle Frank and Grampy yelled. They leaped to one side of the path. Each grabbed a branch.

They dashed around shouting and bashing their branches on to the ground and letting out curses bordering on the un-Methodist. The object of their attack? A snake. It died. They tossed it on an ant bed. Two days later all that was left was the skeleton. Ants are voracious.  

The lesson from that Christmas? Love all of God’s creatures, unless they are snakes. Oh! And those creatures that we can kill and eat, of course. Grampy was violent when it came to snakes, especially in the outlying paddocks where we kept the dries. If we joined them, they made sure we sat on the dray whilst they collected wood.

Inevitably, as they pulled up a dried stump or lifted a log, snakes — disturbed by the activity — would slither off. Grampy and Dad would do the snake dance again, shouts and whacks echoing through the bush. Snakes make no noise as they are smashed to pieces.

In all that time on the farm, none of us were bitten and rarely threatened. Snakes avoid humans. Maybe they knew what humans were really like

‘Did God make snakes?’ I asked.

Grandpa frowned.

‘He made lots of dangerous creatures,’ he relied. ‘We must protect ourselves.’

‘So if he sees a little sparrow fall, as it says in the hymn, he cries?’

Grandpa frowned again.

‘Does he cry when you kill a snake?’

He patted my knee and smiled. ‘One day you will understand.’

‘What about when we kill a calf or a pig, or even a chicken?’ I continued.

He patted my knee again and his smile widened ‘One day you will understand.’

I still don’t. Maybe I have not grown up?

Not all snakes fled. I was helping Dad erect an electric fence round a new paddock — to keep the cows out. I turned around. A black snake, his head raised, was watching dad. I shouted. We always kept a forked stick handy. Dad’s was big enough to double as a weapon.

He struck at him, but thick grass thwarted the blows. His stick broke in two. Grasping the shortest end, Dad stood his ground, shouting at me to stand in the clear area where the grass was short. I needed no second bidding. He joined me.

The snake charged out of the grass straight at Dad. Dad whacked and whacked, jumping backwards all the while, shouting at me to run. Eventually, the snake turned and slithered away. Death-adders and red bellies were the ones we needed to watch. Grampy taught us how to recognise them.

He made us carry a stick. If they were small, he showed me how to dispatch them by whip cracking them. That would snap their heads. That was the theory.

If they were a little larger, I knew how to pin their heads with my forked stick and dispatch them with whatever I had at hand. I never applied that skill, till decades later behind a jail in East Timor.

Most snakes on our farm ended up in several pieces. Such a shame. They seemed more frightened than we were. Why not let them go? After all, not all were bad. We kept carpet snakes in the barn. We would creep round the barn looking for them. Their job was to keep the rats cleared from the grain. It worked.

So, as with humanity, whether you were acceptable or not depended on your colour: carpet snake: good. Black or brown snake: bad. Protestant: good and so on. Such important lessons: Say nothing. Ask nothing. Just follow. And kill snakes.

I was on the way to becoming a magnanimous Methodist.

station had more luck, but when I yelled as he ripped out what John had missed, he told me to be a man and shut up.

At school, I could not sit down for a week. School teachers in those days accepted no excuses.

‘And exactly what else are you going to do?’ asked Mr Thistlethwaite as he furrowed his beetle eyebrows, twitched his nosegay of nose hairs and wiggled his ear-hair forests (two).

‘I can stand up at the back,’ I suggested.

He yelled at me. I sat. I told Mum and Dad. Their response?

‘He’s the teacher. Grin and bear it. Now sit down and have your dinner.’

In those days, one sat when told. A pen may be mightier than a sword but a pencil can also make its point.

The Gatton choir was one of my introductions to music. On Thursday afternoon, instead of walking home, we walked up the hill to the Congregational Church for choir practice. Then we walked home. Five miles.

I loved Thursdays.

However, my dealing with choral disappointment one afternoon led me to do something I still have nightmares about.

I had turned up for choir practice along with a handful of others. I was ready. Come Sunday, dozens of children crowded into the vestry. Mrs Porter counted us in. I was at the end of the line.

We rejects were shuffled outside and told to sit with our parents. It appalled me. I had bene to practice! Seventy percent of the choristers had not. How dare they ban me. I decided not to join my parents. I sat in the car and sulked.

Bored with sulking, I tip toed up the steps to the entrance of the church. I heard the usual noises inside. I was still seething.

I looked at the table at the vestibule. Aha! Along with a few fliers and hymn books was a saucer with a sign: please donate to our fund for poor children. Inside the saucer were a few coins. I looked around. Poor children? I fitted that category, particularly after being ousted from the choir. I look furtively around. I reached in and stole sixpence. I thrust it into my pocket and ran back to the car.

When Mum and Dad came out, I mingled with the post worship worthies.

Mum turned to me.

‘I didn’t see you in the choir?’ she said.

‘I was feeling sick. I sat in the car.’

‘What a shame. You missed a lovely service.’

The sixpence felt like a rock in my pocket. I dreamed about it for weeks. I still do, occasionally. This is what happens: I arrive at Pearly Gate street. You have a choice. I see myself being directed to the left: to the gate St Peter does not look after. The worthy is always nice and always smiling. I see him look at his book.

‘Ah, so you stole sixpence from God, eh?’ he asks, and pats me approvingly on the head.

I nod glumly thinking about fires and pitchforks. Then one of two things happen. In version one, the gatekeeper breaks into an even wider smile.

‘Good on you! Come in. Meet some friends.’

At that point I usually wake up yelling.

Version two? You don’t want to know.

That sixpence: how I wish I’d never touched it.