The Woman on the Mountain Read Free Page A

to stop by the pub so the new baby could be passed round the bar, along with the Commonwealth Bank tin money box—a miniature bank building—for the equivalent of the traditional donation of a sovereign ‘to give the nipper a start in life’.
    I would push the big cane pram, a family heirloom that I’d desecrated by painting bright orange, over the bumpy dirt road for a walk, or to fetch the mail from the post office—there was no mail delivery. As I passed, people would appear at their gates or fences to ask how the baby was doing. Was he over the croup that so-and-so had told them about? And proceed to give me the benefit of their experience with croup or wind or babies in general.
    Here I feel obliged also to confess that I painted a beautiful, borrowed, antique cane bassinet and stand with gloss enamel ‘Aquarius Green’, a rather acidic lime. It was the era of the musical Hair, ‘the dawning of the age of Aquarius’, plus that’s my star sign—but neither seems a worthy excuse in retrospect.
    Once I’d become a stay-at-home village mum, I started a local playgroup. The large courthouse room was perfect: chipboard panels from the tip attached to the walls for pinning up blank newsprint paper for painting; overflowing boxes of dress-ups from StVinnies; ice cream containers of violently pink, green or yellow home-made playdough, sparkling with the coarse salt we added on the mistaken theory that then the kids wouldn’t eat it; old carpet to protect tender baby knees from the wooden floor, and that didn’t object to having the above paint and playdough trodden into it; wooden fruit crates, covered with paper, as tables; an old couch or two for the weary mothers from which to referee the toddlers or feed the latest infant.
    It was fun and games interspersed with tiffs and tears. I introduced excursions, which were welcome on the proviso that we were always back in time for some of the mothers’ daily hit of the TV soapie Days of Our Lives. In the long summer holidays, to give the older kids in the village some activities and stimulation—and the mums a break—I ran craft workshops in the courthouse.
    All this interaction meant that from babyhood my children never lacked for playmates, even though we didn’t have near neighbours. Their birthday party photos show the wide age range of local children, mainly girls, who liked to visit. They came partly to experience the novelty of differences—of this impressively large and solid house compared to the small, flimsy, and mostly askew miners’ cottages in which they lived; and of our lifestyle, with so many books, and original paintings and pottery, a strange world where television did not rule.
    Hence when we moved to ‘the mountain’, my kids swapped a busy social life for each other and the wallabies, just as we did. At least living somewhere without even a corner shop had partly prepared me for bush life, since I’d got into the rhythm of keeping a vegetable garden producing, which is harder than it sounds, and I’d become used to shopping only once a week.
    My decade in the old jail was relived over and over again recently as I wrote my first novel, A Taste for Old, set in a similar ex-mining village in 1972, when, like Australia’s government, it was on the cusp of big changes. ‘It’s time’ ran Labor’s winning slogan, but unlike the nation, my village didn’t think it was.
    In researching its history, I came across a National Trust website for the renovated jail complex when it was last for sale. Much extended, it had become a function and reception centre and restaurant. The playgroup room had become a billiards room—not so different in purpose. As one of its past uses, what I assume was my playgroup was incorrectly described as a crèche, hardly the word to describe our rough DIY set-up. The old place now looks very posh, more redolent of renovation than of history, and has clearly had much more capital sunk into it than we ever could