The Road from Coorain Read Free Page B

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    The city was a place of unaccustomed leisure for people who labored hard seven days a week. For the men there were cheerful drinking occasions before the wool sales or the agricultural shows. For the women there were the shops, the doctors and dentists for the children, and the luxury of restaurants, fresh fruit and vegetables, seafood, flower stands. For the children there were the marvels of electric lights, neon signs, moving pictures, and unlimited candy stores. These were balanced but not outweighed by the ministrations of the dental and medical professions and the ominous crowds. For everyone there were the sore feet and aching legs which came from wearing one’s best shoes on hard pavements, and the unaccustomed feel of city clothes.
    Everyone much preferred the rare occasions of leisure and festivity at home. There were picnic races, a bush festivity which involved horse racing by day, cheerful and alcoholic gambling and dances by night. A district might band together to stage a gymkhana, where the jockeys were not professionals and the horses were local products. Every half-dozen stations would have somewhere a vestigial race track, barely a trace in the soil, with some rickety shelters from the sun and some kind of access to water. Bookmakers throve as people cheerfully gambled away theyear’s profits in big bets, unconsciously recognizing that there were few other really satisfying diversions. Old lumber and battered corrugated iron would be pieced together to make a community hall in the middle of nowhere, and dances would be arranged by the Country Women’s Association, or the Returned Soldiers’ League. Musicians would materialize, and the men would appear in unaccustomed suits accompanied by wives in long dresses. People starved for company danced happily till dawn, reluctant to go home. Supper would be a feast at which every woman’s prowess in the kitchen was assessed, and none of the hardworking revelers needed to worry about dieting.
    Before they set out in the lightening sky, they stood to attention for “God Save the King,” and if the evening had become an occasion for remembering 1914–1918, they sang “Land of Hope and Glory,” evoking the memory, not so much of England, but of her mighty Empire, of which Australia was the proudest part. Anyone who mocked these loyalties learned quickly that he or she did not belong.
    The cars would sweep home over the dusty roads, their lights visible like pillars of fire across the plains. If one arrived home first, one could stand on one’s veranda and watch the other departures, visible for twenty miles or so. On regular nights there were only the stars, the cry of a fox, and the sound of the wind. Then if a car traveled very late at night it meant an emergency. Distant watchers would crane their heads to see where it went, and wonder what had gone wrong.

2.

COORAIN
    E VERY PENNY OF MY father’s savings was invested on taking up his block of land in the Western Division of New South Wales, granted him as a soldier settler in 1929. With them he built a house set foursquare to the points of the compass. The living room and bedrooms looked out to the rising sun, the kitchen saw it sink in a sudden blaze of flaming color. The side verandas received the occasional cooling southerly breeze or the hot winds from the north. My mother’s savings, accumulated during her nursing career, equipped the house with furniture, linen, china, and silver bought at auctions in Sydney in 1930. She had impeccable taste, as well as great thrift and practicality. Her purchases were items of quality discarded by city dwellers in favor of the fashions of the twenties. The ample oak furniture, delicate curtains, and old-fashioned china gave the place the solid comfort of an earlier era, and belied the true nature of the family finances. The cool, airy comfort of the house with its expanses of highly polished linoleum and generously proportioned furniture suggested an easy