When I was six or seven years old we lived in Seymour, a flat, nondescript railway town 98 kms north of Melbourne. Dad was senior master at the high school and captain of the army cadets. Mum did some relief teaching too at the primary school I attended. We lived in a very ordinary weatherboard house owned by the education department not far from a bend in the Goulburn River, a forbidden place of inexorable delight for us kids.
Marj wasn't happy with the house and did her best to fru-fru it up. I have no real memory of the rooms except for my brother's sleep out, which had a hose pipe with plastic funnel ends shoved through a hole in the wall to the kitchen so we could use it like a pretend telephone. I do recall staring out the windows of the lounge room through dust scented, white voile curtains, noticing dead flies lying along the window ledge, and wondering if they thought they had arrived in heaven. Chassa-boy, bare chested in his baggy army shorts, got busy in the yard, sliding kikuyu cuttings into hard clay slits, watering them thoroughly until the back yard desert was transformed into a bouncy green. Proudly, he did this everywhere we lived, and even though we only ever stayed three years or four in each town, he would plant lemon and plum trees too, leaving a veritable Garden of Eden for the next tenant.
Every so often Chassa-boy would take his cadet squad off on week-long camps where he and other officers would instruct their fledgings in the art of war and masculinity. On such occasions with the weekend to ourselves, Marj would take my brother and I on picnics to our favorite rock landscape in the Trawool valley, a few miles east of Seymour. Marj would park the black FJ Holden beside the road and we would clamber through the barbed wire fence and race off on our rock hopping adventure.
Large round grey rock forms lay scattered about the green hillsides, standing alone, or in family configurations. It felt so comforting to scramble up their fronts, traverse their rear ends, hide in all their nooks and crannies, to stretch out on their warmth and let their pale green lichen beards tickle our tummies. My brother would choose a rock flat enough for a tea party but big enough and tall enough to all sit on and look out at the view. Marj would lay a cloth and present all the special treats she'd made for us, like pikelets and fairy bread and lemon cordial, which we drank thirstily from coloured metal cups unzipped ceremoniously from their swanky leather pouch.
Somehow in our childhood brains we knew this time was special. Our father's dominance was absent and while we sensed Marj's fragility and often took advantage of it (I think she was pregnant with our younger sister at the time), we understood the special attention she was giving us as she passed on her most precious gift - the love of nature, and the knowledge that whatever was to come, guardian rocks like these could care for us too.
Trawool Rocks, pastel drawings by Linda Robinson
Marj wasn't happy with the house and did her best to fru-fru it up. I have no real memory of the rooms except for my brother's sleep out, which had a hose pipe with plastic funnel ends shoved through a hole in the wall to the kitchen so we could use it like a pretend telephone. I do recall staring out the windows of the lounge room through dust scented, white voile curtains, noticing dead flies lying along the window ledge, and wondering if they thought they had arrived in heaven. Chassa-boy, bare chested in his baggy army shorts, got busy in the yard, sliding kikuyu cuttings into hard clay slits, watering them thoroughly until the back yard desert was transformed into a bouncy green. Proudly, he did this everywhere we lived, and even though we only ever stayed three years or four in each town, he would plant lemon and plum trees too, leaving a veritable Garden of Eden for the next tenant.
Every so often Chassa-boy would take his cadet squad off on week-long camps where he and other officers would instruct their fledgings in the art of war and masculinity. On such occasions with the weekend to ourselves, Marj would take my brother and I on picnics to our favorite rock landscape in the Trawool valley, a few miles east of Seymour. Marj would park the black FJ Holden beside the road and we would clamber through the barbed wire fence and race off on our rock hopping adventure.
Large round grey rock forms lay scattered about the green hillsides, standing alone, or in family configurations. It felt so comforting to scramble up their fronts, traverse their rear ends, hide in all their nooks and crannies, to stretch out on their warmth and let their pale green lichen beards tickle our tummies. My brother would choose a rock flat enough for a tea party but big enough and tall enough to all sit on and look out at the view. Marj would lay a cloth and present all the special treats she'd made for us, like pikelets and fairy bread and lemon cordial, which we drank thirstily from coloured metal cups unzipped ceremoniously from their swanky leather pouch.
Somehow in our childhood brains we knew this time was special. Our father's dominance was absent and while we sensed Marj's fragility and often took advantage of it (I think she was pregnant with our younger sister at the time), we understood the special attention she was giving us as she passed on her most precious gift - the love of nature, and the knowledge that whatever was to come, guardian rocks like these could care for us too.
Trawool Rocks, pastel drawings by Linda Robinson
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