MEMOIRS:
CHAPTER 7 LORD OF THE MANOR
Set in the Southern tablelands, Goulburn was a typical Australian country town of population 20 849 people, of which my parents and I were Numbers 20 847, 20 848 and 20 89. It lay a few hours south west of Sydney on the Hume Highway, halfway to Canberra and a third of the way to the snow. It was for this reason, that Goulburn had a seemingly disproportionate number of “diner” style eateries and Chinese restaurants (“plus Australian meals!” they would proudly declare). Goulburn was perfectly placed for a first food and toilet stop for the numerous cars and coaches that flooded south on their way to the slopes every weekend in winter.
There was a town hall (which showed movies on a Saturday night), an abattoir (which thankfully, did not show movies on a Saturday night), several factories and a big train yard. The enormous park in the middle of town was immaculately manicured and centred around a red-stone monolithic fountain dedicated to the numerous young men of the region who headed overseas during the wars in search of romance and adventure. Most of them never saw Goulburn again and only exist now as gold-embossed letters on a memorial in a park.
Even the smallest country town in Australia has such a park. This is understandable, given that 60 000 young Australian men died in WW1 alone, which was actually the biggest proportion per population of any country in the world.
Like many Australian towns, most of the shops and businesses clustered in a long straight line along the highway which barrelled through the town-centre. Each business was a specialty corner shop run by Ma and Pa operators who knew their customers by name. There were no mega-marts or shopping malls with enormous car-parks. It was all rear-to-the-kerb street parking. On a Saturday morning there was always a chocolate wheel on the back of a trailer outside the butcher shop.
There was a big clothing and supply shop in the middle of town, the precursor to the modern department store. Inside, it was dark and cool and quiet, the only noise being the occasional electrical thunderclap as a giant moth or fat blowie was lured to its death by the hypnotic purple neon bug zapper above the door. In the windows, the mannequins were faded and chipped and their bodies twisted at alarmingly odd angles. A few years ago, I drove through Goulburn. The display was the same.
We lived three miles out of town, past the train yards and over several little bridges, at the end of a tunnel of thick Batcave-style trees at the end of a lone dirt road. It was like any spooky house in an Agatha Christie novel where a quirky group of aristocrats are ironically stranded at a country estate mysteriously shrouded in fog and acres of isolated grassland populated only by stoats, pheasants and an old man with a scar and a limp
The hospital building – Corrinyah (Aboriginal, I guess, for “middle of nowhere”) - was an enormous slate roofed structure, encased in tiled verandahs, creepers and bay windows. There was a large circular driveway around a rose garden. Inside the hospital was a maze of rooms and corridors centred around a Gone-with-the-Wind staircase and spacious foyer. The tiles were the big black and white ones with the texture of a cold mirror.
Outside, there were hundreds of enormous trees, a water tower and a barn with a hay loft accessed only by a shaky ladder. From up there I could look out over my domain – acres of low grass to the horizon, forests of zulu bushes and a hazy view south over miles of farms. I could have stayed up there all day, had it not been for the instantaneous and savage bouts of hayfever I got every time I went up there coupled with the disturbing scratchings of rats in the dark corners.
But I wasn’t alone in my adventure.
There were other actors on the stage of this part of my early childhood.
There were staff.
Sid the gardner and George the kitchenhand were the first friends I ever had. They both wore overalls and flannalette shirts and they lived in spartan single rooms under the hay loft. Single bed with a crotcheted blanket. Alarm clock. Bare bulb dangling on a black umbilical from the painted board ceiling. Sid’s room had the smell of muscle ointment and hair cream. George had a flagon of port on his dressing table.
Sid was a wizened old guy with an enormous hat and perpetually sunburnt hands. His job was to trim the hedges, mow the vast expanse of lawns and break the necks of rabbits caught in any of the numerous traps laid surreptitiously around our immense tract of vegetable garden.
George was a giant of a man, a cross between Frankenstein and, ironically, the George of Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. His job was to peel the mountains of potatoes required for the patients’ daily mash and later, to wash the gravy off their used plates. Every morning, while I was dreaming fitfully about The Cat in the Hat wrecking up my parents’ carpet, he would unlock the fly-screen to the kitchen in the cold Goulburn dark, crank up the wood fire stove and get the porridge going for the morning’s breakfast.
There were cooks and other kitchen-hands too. I can’t recall any of their names but I can remember their faces along with the smell of scones and huge pots filled with mince and the laughter around the old wooden table as each day the ladies in aprons peeled a mountain of string beans and carrots.
I was “in love” with the laundry woman. Don’t ask me why I developed a crush on such an enormous expanse of femaleness in a white apron and a bad dress. My daily routine involved a visit to the laundry with its wet and cold concrete floor to tell the laundry woman that I had a secret for her.
When she bent down, I whispered in her ear, “I love you” and then ran out as fast as I could, thundering down the path in my leather sandals into the garden where I squatted heavy-breathing amongst the spinach, waiting for my pre-erotic embarrassment to go away. I don’t think I ever even heard the laundry woman mutter a single word. But once a day for years, it seems, she tolerated a daily visit from her knee-high Lothario. I don’t know, maybe she even looked forward to it.
And, then, there were the patients… about thirty of them in total, each a relic of a bygone age, as distant and foreign to me as the dinosaurs. They all smelled of ointment and wool-wash. Some of them were born around the time of the first centenary of Cook’s landing in Australia and they were already adults with children by the time the phrase “the 1900s” even came into being.
The corridors in the hospital were long and the lino floors had runners of dark blue carpet right down the middle. Each corridor featured a series of heavy dark wooden doors each with a fat gold doorknob and a little business card in a frame announcing the patient’s name.
Mr Tournier lived in the room nearest the kitchen. He had a record player and some warped classical and big-band records that he played day after day after day. No-one ever visited him.
Next to him was Mrs Grigg. Once a week she escaped and walked three miles into town. We would get a call from the chemist or RSL club where she had set up a temporary base, to come and get her.
Mr Robb was at the top of the stairs. He was a Scot with long skinny arms and a fawn cardigan whose sole purpose in life was to teach me how to do the “hop-skip-n-jump”.
Mr Campbell lived in a double room at the end of the upstairs hall. But I was never allowed to spend any time there because of his inappropriate stock of personal war stories centred around dismemberment, bones sticking through skin, the Japanese scourge and flesh-eating maggots.
There was Miss Chisholm, direct descendant of the Caroline and high ranking member of the NSW country aristocracy, who was so fussy and slow with her food that her daughter had to turn up every day to feed her.
Mr Toparis was a Greek chap in a black zorba-style hat, who after an entire life spent on the Meditteranean, found himself exported to a cold country town in a distant land by his daughter. After years of vine leaves and lamb kebabs, he must have winced every time the floral plastic dinner tray arrived with its watery peas, mashed potatoes, bleached carrots and chicken wings. Sometimes, they even got rabbit.
Mr Hooper had stained yellow fingers on account of the endless supply of Ardath cigarettes that dangled from his hand. Patients weren’t allowed to smoke in their rooms, but the heady odour and burn marks on his blankets indicated otherwise.
There was a lady upstairs. I don’t remember her name. Her shape and size was hardly identifiable under an assortment of crocheted rugs. The skin of her clawed hands was brown and colourfully blotchy like old trees and it had the wrinkled texture of burnt alfoil. It hung off her like old tissue paper and if she bumped anything, it would tear and weep. She would often come into the kitchen to try to help prepare food but she was strictly banned by the staff from touching anything. But they allowed her to sit in a corner and have a cup of tea.
It was amongst this curious menagerie of the elderly that I spent my earliest years.
Sometimes Corrinyah would be shrouded in thick black rain and I would dart from room to room and jump on their beds or listen to their stories. There was always a game of Monopoly or cards in the glassed-in verandah. If was really lucky in an unguarded moment I would encounter one of Mr Campbell’s narratives about Japanese prisoner-of-war camps.
On sunny days the patients were wheeled out to sit under their crocheted rugs in rows on the front lawn and stare out over the majestic plains to the east.
And it was there that I found my first captive audience. I couldn’t have asked for a better one.
All I had to do was simply appear to be instantaneously greeted with peals of applause and murmurs of encouragement… I soon developed elaborate concerts involving a repetoir of songs, gymnastics routines and fascinating quiz questions.
I could stand stock still with feet together and hands by my side and do the entire soundtrack from Camelot, each song performed melodramatically with earnest facial expressions. A favourite was These Boots are made for Walking, the climax of which I would sing while stomping in a circle.
My quiz questions, of the likes of “Where is the sun?” and “What’s my name?” could last all afternoon.
I don’t know if I was genuinely entertaining. Perhaps it was because I was the only thing moving in the landscape. However, I like to think that my somersaults, cart-wheels and hopping on one leg were actually genuinely entertaining.
It was a great place to grow up.
I was their special boy. And I could get away with anything.
In short, I was Lord of the Manor.
There was a town hall (which showed movies on a Saturday night), an abattoir (which thankfully, did not show movies on a Saturday night), several factories and a big train yard. The enormous park in the middle of town was immaculately manicured and centred around a red-stone monolithic fountain dedicated to the numerous young men of the region who headed overseas during the wars in search of romance and adventure. Most of them never saw Goulburn again and only exist now as gold-embossed letters on a memorial in a park.
Even the smallest country town in Australia has such a park. This is understandable, given that 60 000 young Australian men died in WW1 alone, which was actually the biggest proportion per population of any country in the world.
Like many Australian towns, most of the shops and businesses clustered in a long straight line along the highway which barrelled through the town-centre. Each business was a specialty corner shop run by Ma and Pa operators who knew their customers by name. There were no mega-marts or shopping malls with enormous car-parks. It was all rear-to-the-kerb street parking. On a Saturday morning there was always a chocolate wheel on the back of a trailer outside the butcher shop.
There was a big clothing and supply shop in the middle of town, the precursor to the modern department store. Inside, it was dark and cool and quiet, the only noise being the occasional electrical thunderclap as a giant moth or fat blowie was lured to its death by the hypnotic purple neon bug zapper above the door. In the windows, the mannequins were faded and chipped and their bodies twisted at alarmingly odd angles. A few years ago, I drove through Goulburn. The display was the same.
We lived three miles out of town, past the train yards and over several little bridges, at the end of a tunnel of thick Batcave-style trees at the end of a lone dirt road. It was like any spooky house in an Agatha Christie novel where a quirky group of aristocrats are ironically stranded at a country estate mysteriously shrouded in fog and acres of isolated grassland populated only by stoats, pheasants and an old man with a scar and a limp
The hospital building – Corrinyah (Aboriginal, I guess, for “middle of nowhere”) - was an enormous slate roofed structure, encased in tiled verandahs, creepers and bay windows. There was a large circular driveway around a rose garden. Inside the hospital was a maze of rooms and corridors centred around a Gone-with-the-Wind staircase and spacious foyer. The tiles were the big black and white ones with the texture of a cold mirror.
Outside, there were hundreds of enormous trees, a water tower and a barn with a hay loft accessed only by a shaky ladder. From up there I could look out over my domain – acres of low grass to the horizon, forests of zulu bushes and a hazy view south over miles of farms. I could have stayed up there all day, had it not been for the instantaneous and savage bouts of hayfever I got every time I went up there coupled with the disturbing scratchings of rats in the dark corners.
But I wasn’t alone in my adventure.
There were other actors on the stage of this part of my early childhood.
There were staff.
Sid the gardner and George the kitchenhand were the first friends I ever had. They both wore overalls and flannalette shirts and they lived in spartan single rooms under the hay loft. Single bed with a crotcheted blanket. Alarm clock. Bare bulb dangling on a black umbilical from the painted board ceiling. Sid’s room had the smell of muscle ointment and hair cream. George had a flagon of port on his dressing table.
Sid was a wizened old guy with an enormous hat and perpetually sunburnt hands. His job was to trim the hedges, mow the vast expanse of lawns and break the necks of rabbits caught in any of the numerous traps laid surreptitiously around our immense tract of vegetable garden.
George was a giant of a man, a cross between Frankenstein and, ironically, the George of Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. His job was to peel the mountains of potatoes required for the patients’ daily mash and later, to wash the gravy off their used plates. Every morning, while I was dreaming fitfully about The Cat in the Hat wrecking up my parents’ carpet, he would unlock the fly-screen to the kitchen in the cold Goulburn dark, crank up the wood fire stove and get the porridge going for the morning’s breakfast.
There were cooks and other kitchen-hands too. I can’t recall any of their names but I can remember their faces along with the smell of scones and huge pots filled with mince and the laughter around the old wooden table as each day the ladies in aprons peeled a mountain of string beans and carrots.
I was “in love” with the laundry woman. Don’t ask me why I developed a crush on such an enormous expanse of femaleness in a white apron and a bad dress. My daily routine involved a visit to the laundry with its wet and cold concrete floor to tell the laundry woman that I had a secret for her.
When she bent down, I whispered in her ear, “I love you” and then ran out as fast as I could, thundering down the path in my leather sandals into the garden where I squatted heavy-breathing amongst the spinach, waiting for my pre-erotic embarrassment to go away. I don’t think I ever even heard the laundry woman mutter a single word. But once a day for years, it seems, she tolerated a daily visit from her knee-high Lothario. I don’t know, maybe she even looked forward to it.
And, then, there were the patients… about thirty of them in total, each a relic of a bygone age, as distant and foreign to me as the dinosaurs. They all smelled of ointment and wool-wash. Some of them were born around the time of the first centenary of Cook’s landing in Australia and they were already adults with children by the time the phrase “the 1900s” even came into being.
The corridors in the hospital were long and the lino floors had runners of dark blue carpet right down the middle. Each corridor featured a series of heavy dark wooden doors each with a fat gold doorknob and a little business card in a frame announcing the patient’s name.
Mr Tournier lived in the room nearest the kitchen. He had a record player and some warped classical and big-band records that he played day after day after day. No-one ever visited him.
Next to him was Mrs Grigg. Once a week she escaped and walked three miles into town. We would get a call from the chemist or RSL club where she had set up a temporary base, to come and get her.
Mr Robb was at the top of the stairs. He was a Scot with long skinny arms and a fawn cardigan whose sole purpose in life was to teach me how to do the “hop-skip-n-jump”.
Mr Campbell lived in a double room at the end of the upstairs hall. But I was never allowed to spend any time there because of his inappropriate stock of personal war stories centred around dismemberment, bones sticking through skin, the Japanese scourge and flesh-eating maggots.
There was Miss Chisholm, direct descendant of the Caroline and high ranking member of the NSW country aristocracy, who was so fussy and slow with her food that her daughter had to turn up every day to feed her.
Mr Toparis was a Greek chap in a black zorba-style hat, who after an entire life spent on the Meditteranean, found himself exported to a cold country town in a distant land by his daughter. After years of vine leaves and lamb kebabs, he must have winced every time the floral plastic dinner tray arrived with its watery peas, mashed potatoes, bleached carrots and chicken wings. Sometimes, they even got rabbit.
Mr Hooper had stained yellow fingers on account of the endless supply of Ardath cigarettes that dangled from his hand. Patients weren’t allowed to smoke in their rooms, but the heady odour and burn marks on his blankets indicated otherwise.
There was a lady upstairs. I don’t remember her name. Her shape and size was hardly identifiable under an assortment of crocheted rugs. The skin of her clawed hands was brown and colourfully blotchy like old trees and it had the wrinkled texture of burnt alfoil. It hung off her like old tissue paper and if she bumped anything, it would tear and weep. She would often come into the kitchen to try to help prepare food but she was strictly banned by the staff from touching anything. But they allowed her to sit in a corner and have a cup of tea.
It was amongst this curious menagerie of the elderly that I spent my earliest years.
Sometimes Corrinyah would be shrouded in thick black rain and I would dart from room to room and jump on their beds or listen to their stories. There was always a game of Monopoly or cards in the glassed-in verandah. If was really lucky in an unguarded moment I would encounter one of Mr Campbell’s narratives about Japanese prisoner-of-war camps.
On sunny days the patients were wheeled out to sit under their crocheted rugs in rows on the front lawn and stare out over the majestic plains to the east.
And it was there that I found my first captive audience. I couldn’t have asked for a better one.
All I had to do was simply appear to be instantaneously greeted with peals of applause and murmurs of encouragement… I soon developed elaborate concerts involving a repetoir of songs, gymnastics routines and fascinating quiz questions.
I could stand stock still with feet together and hands by my side and do the entire soundtrack from Camelot, each song performed melodramatically with earnest facial expressions. A favourite was These Boots are made for Walking, the climax of which I would sing while stomping in a circle.
My quiz questions, of the likes of “Where is the sun?” and “What’s my name?” could last all afternoon.
I don’t know if I was genuinely entertaining. Perhaps it was because I was the only thing moving in the landscape. However, I like to think that my somersaults, cart-wheels and hopping on one leg were actually genuinely entertaining.
It was a great place to grow up.
I was their special boy. And I could get away with anything.
In short, I was Lord of the Manor.