AUSTRALIA 1975. 10 I'll Be Back

My father worked as a commodity broker in the City of London in a family company started by his great-uncle Leo. Leo was a Jewish immigrant at the start of the twentieth century who went out to the South Seas, visiting all the islands and arranging to buy their ‘copra’ (part of the inside of the coconut) which he then sold to soap manufacturers for its oil.

    My father continued the practice, travelling round the Pacific every few years to renew friendships and contracts, sometimes with my mother who loved sun and heat like me. The islanders called him Mr John and still spoke of Mr Leo and Mr Roy (my grandfather). Australia was part of the itinerary.
 
The letter was from my mother.
    ‘We’re coming out to Australia,’ she wrote. ‘Your father’s doing one of his tours. Can we meet up in Sydney?’
 
What? This was the first I’d heard of the trip even though my mother and I had been corresponding regularly on thin blue ‘aerogrammes’ ever since I’d left the UK. My father’s trips took months to organise and were usually planned years in advance.
    They were coming out to get me back, I knew it.
    But how could I refuse to see them?
    I couldn’t.
 
All my friends came up to the airstrip to see me off and I hugged them all good bye.
    ‘I’ll be back,’ I called as I climbed into the waiting plane.
    Of course I would, one way or another. This was just a fleeting visit down south.
 
I watched out of the plane window as the moss-like archipelago faded from view, and steeled myself for the return to civilisation.

AUSTRALIA 1975. 9 The Letter

Christmas was approaching and each day the weather became hotter. Then the wind grew. And grew. A cyclone was on its way, due to hit us directly. The boats were moved round to the other side of the island and we were advised to go to bed with our clothes on. I took my notebook with me too, clutched to my chest. I wasn’t having anyone else getting their hands on that.

    The next day we woke to the world as normal. The cyclone had changed direction at the last minute and missed us.

    Having heard all about The Darwin Cyclone (which was presumably a particularly ferocious one as it was talked about so much), I was astonished at how calmly the whole incident had passed. Stalwart people, these Aussies.

 
A single cannabis plant grew outside the cabin I shared with Di. I had no idea how it got there as cannabis was not widespread. Alcohol was the drug of choice. Alan however usually had a stash in the caravan where he and Jayne lived and sometimes he shared it.
    One evening he and I lay outside looking up at the stars and had a cosmic conversation. I was thrilled. I’d been wanting cosmic conversations all my life. Ever since I was six in fact when I became terrified of eternity and wondered if God would make an exception in my case and allow me to be extinguished completely. Goodness knows what was going on there.
 
As the heat grew so did the guest numbers, and I fell ill, waking with dripping sheets every morning. On my third day in bed, Jayne came up to see me and said, ‘I’ve never known anyone spend so long in bed.’ I did feel bad about deserting the other waitresses just when they were at their busiest, but there was nothing I could do.
    When I recovered I’d lost half a stone and was now over a stone lighter than I'd been in London. My weight was almost normal. With no conscious effort on my part, it had been dropping slowly throughout my time at Lindeman. This was partly because there was no opportunity to binge-eat and partly because I didn’t want to. And the diet was healthy and simple. Australian beef – there was a whole room filled with carcasses tenderising, fish caught daily from around the island, and salads which we waitresses made every morning before breakfast.
 
For Christmas Day, I spent a chunk of my savings and booked a call home. On the day, I stood in line waiting for my turn at the island’s one telephone. The call woke my parents in the middle of the night but I thought they were pleased to hear from me even though my father passed me over to my mother as soon as possible, as he always did, and my mother spent the whole time crying.
 
After Christmas the rains began. Tiny yellow-green parakeets lay around on their backs, made drunk by the rotting fruit. A landslide deposited several inches of mud at the doors of the staff cabins. Guest numbers started to fall. Staff started to leave.
    I’d been in Australia ten months now. My working-holiday visa would expire in two but that didn’t matter. Many people were working in the country illegally (and a little later the government was to extend an amnesty to them all so that it could bring records up to date). I began to have vague dreams of a little house in the bush. Me writing.
    I had plenty of money now – more than enough to pay my father back for the plane ticket. Probably enough in fact to live for a year without working. So that part of my Australian adventure was done.
 
Then I received a letter.

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AUSTRALIA 1975. 8 The Great Barrier Reef

I enjoyed my waitressing work on Lindeman Island. We had no boss. We simply organised ourselves, with the waitresses who’d been there longer teaching those who were newer.

    Lach (pronounced 'Lock') the quiet Scotsman who ran and once owned the hotel never emerged from his office. I only saw him once. The whole place seemed to run itself.

    Lunch was a barbecue and to start with – until Bob lent me some green flip-flops (‘thongs’ in Australian and ‘jandals’ in New Zealandish) - I worked in bare feet. I couldn't imagine that happening in England.
    We washed and dried the cutlery by hand and sometimes Jayne and I would dance round the kitchen, waving the tea towels like veils. Even Jon, the miserable chef, would laugh.

    From the dining-room in the evenings I could watch the flying foxes swarming in to roost in the trees. After supper while I cleared my tables I could hear Alan at the organ or the band which came over from Mackay once a week and played covers of current pop songs. Later in  the evening, we staff did silly dances to the music and cooled off in the pool while the guests looked on enviously.

     Even though many of the guests were illustrious - diplomats, actors, musicians - or just plain rich, we mixed with them and enjoyed the same facilities. We weren't a sub-species as we would have been back in the UK. I loved that. It was how things should be.

    Sometimes however the mixing went further than I could have imagined. I arrived back from a day of mystical daydreaming on Plantation Beach to find the hotel in an uproar. The famous - or infamous - Bay City Rollers had dropped in and one of the housemaids had gone to a beach with one of them and Had Sex. I was shocked. She was so quiet normally. 

  

When I first arrived we wore our own clothes for work but, as the place smartened up and a new dining-room was opened, uniforms were made in a tropically patterned material, with shirts for the men and dresses for the women – short blue ones in the day and long red ones at night.

We waitresses in our new evening dresses. I'm in the middle at the back. Jayne is far right.

 

The barmen in their new shirts. George is on the left with his hand on Helen's shoulder.

 
This was a relief as I only had one summer dress and I was fed up with washing it every night.

Me in my one summer dress and a borrowed cap, shortly after I first realised that I was happy on Lindeman

One day Jane and I hitched a lift in the plane and went to Mackay to buy some clothes. Doobie came with us and tried to squeeze through a small round ventilation hole in the window. Jane grabbed her rear end just in time.

    There was one clothes shop in Lindeman and Jayne and I almost cleaned it out. We bought a bikini - tiny white-and-blue-striped triangles - in two different sizes and swapped over the bits as Jane was bigger on her top than her bottom and I was the other way round. It worked well.

    I'd never spent so much on clothes all at once, but with the heat I needed frequent changes and my savings were building up nicely. Wages were good and my only expenses were in the bar.

    

Jayne and Doobie

Alan borrowed a boat and Jayne, Alan, Doobie and I zoomed over to the uninhabited island. Doobie stood in the prow, her long hair flying in the wind. She looked like a film star and she knew it.

    As we explored the wild terrain Jane said sniffily, ‘If this was Greece there’d be a nice taverna round the corner.’

   Jayne had travelled all over before landing up in Australia and had reached unexplored places like Greece which was not visited by tourists because of ‘The Colonels’ and their military dictatorship. I didn't know what a 'taverna' was, although I could guess.
    The tide went out and to get back we had first to pull the boat through half a mile of shallow water across sharp coral. I cut one of my feet, it became infected and I had to bathe it every night for a week in salt water.

    We were pioneers. We looked after ourselves.
 
At last it was my turn to see the Barrier Reef itself. We travelled by night, with staff sleeping on the deck and guests down below. I didn’t sleep much. It was all too beautiful. The next day we were offloaded on to a plateau covered with water a few inches deep. Again, we had strict instructions not to touch anything, not only because it was protected but also because everything was poisonous, if not deadly.
    I wandered around in borrowed plimsolls, not knowing quite what to do. I looked over the edge of the plateau and the reef fell away to bottomless blue. I thought I saw a shark cruising way down and stepped back hurriedly.
    Some people were snorkelling, but I didn't know how to.
 
Jayne and I wrote and distributed a satirical newsletter which we called ‘Lindeman Stinks’. Bob thought it was funny but Lach was apparently upset. I was upset that he was upset. He was a nice man. Didn’t he realise that ribbing was the way Australians showed affection? The more they liked you, the more they teased you.   
    There was a song doing the rounds. George was the ringleader.
 
    My sister Belinda
    She pissed out the winda . . .
 
Luckily, I can’t remember the rest. I was pleased to be famous.
    I was teased for using words over two syllables which of course with my bookish leanings I often did. Everything was abbreviated in Australian – cozzie (bathing costume), mozzie (mosquito), smoko (work break), arvo (afternoon). It took me a while to understand the lingo.

A rather sad member of staff (the person who lent me the cassette of Scarlatti), a gay barman who didn’t last long on the island, said that I was ‘bubbling over with happiness’. I was. I walked into the laundry room one day with my sweaty sheets and as I bunged them into a machine I thought, it doesn’t matter what I’m doing. Every moment is alive.

 
For some reason Helen and I decided one night to climb to the top of the island.
 

Helen, en route to the top of the island. I think she's down to her underwear. It was very hot by now, even at night.

 
We arrived as dawn was breaking. Green cone-shaped islands, steaming gently in the early morning sun, dotted the ocean all around. It was like the birth of the planet.

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AUSTRALIA 1975. 7 Lindeman Island

Again, sorry about the awful colour of the pictures. Most of these photographs were given to me and they are mostly of people. Sadly I don't have much record of the scenery except in my head. Perhaps I took it for granted.

Most of the staff lived in two rows of cabins behind the hotel buildings with views straight across the top of them to the sea and the uninhabited island opposite.

 

The view from my cabin, with staff dining-room below and uninhabited island opposite.

Dinner-plate-sized toads lined the path up to the cabins and you had to tread round them like stepping-stones in reverse. There were also black beetles the size of golf-balls that inhabited the kitchen and the staff shower-room (at the ends of the rows of cabins). They liked to cling to your big toe with their scratchy feelers.
 
A Norwegian arrived to stay at the hotel and wanted to buy the uninhabited island but was told he couldn’t because the whole area was protected. We staff had all been warned not to pick anything up and take it home. It was the first time I’d come across anything like that.
 
A small reef enclosed the hotel beach, making the water shallow and slightly murky. Not murky enough though to miss the stingrays flittering along the sand underneath. There weren't as many as at Plantation Beach however and it was OK to swim so long as you were very careful. Occasionally there was a hullabaloo when a shark managed to get through the reef and prowl.
 
Steve the boatman stepped on a stingray when pulling a boat in. Bob, the island electrician, kept him drunk for two days so that he could cope with the pain of the sting. I went to see them. Steve was sitting on a chair, his face bright red and swollen. He was wearing a big smile. I didn’t know if he was being brave for my benefit or if it was the alcohol. I worried about his hangover later. Bob had his hand on Steve’s shoulder.
 
 

Steve (left) and Bob in the bar

I had a new room-mate, Di. She was a housemaid, so worked different hours from me which was lucky because she spent most of her time off lying on her bunk, smoking. She read a lot too and lent me some new-thinking books, especially ones about Australia. I didn’t know it then but the country was in a ferment, enjoying its first Labour government for 23 years. It was an exciting place. I copied passages from the books into my shorthand notebook.
 
Di also had a cassette player and a Deep Purple tape. I had a tape of the Messiah, and I borrowed the Carpenters and Scarlatti. I slept in the top bunk and when resting would lie there listening to the cassettes in turn, realising that I’d never really heard music properly before. It was divine. I would scrub the wooden floor of the room singing along to the Carpenters, every word of the songs written especially for me.
 
    Why do stars fall down from the sky
    Every time you walk by?
    Just like me
    They long to be
    Close to you.
 
Yes, I was in love. With two people. Bob and George. Bob was usually to be found greasing things in the generator room or climbing poles to fix wires. He was prone to practical jokes like putting poor frogs in people's beds.

 

Bob up a pole. Note the stubbies.

 
George worked as a barman. His parents were Russian and to me he was a free spirit. Jayne called him a waster. Often I would find him in the morning sleeping in the laundry room because he hadn’t made it back to his bed. He joined us for meals outside, except that he perched in a tree next to the steps. Light sparked off him and dazzled me when I looked up.
 

George (left)

 
One night I went back with him to his caravan. He was sweet and considerate and I woke up the next morning with a Beatles song in my head.
 
    There were bells all around
    But I never heard them ringing
    No I never heard them at all
    Till there was you.
 
I splashed around in the hotel pool with Jayne in the couple of hours we had off between breakfast and lunch.
    ‘I’m free!’ I declared to Jayne. ‘I’ve exorcised B.’ Jayne knew a little about my time in London. ‘Everything’s going to be wonderful from now onwards.’
    Jayne looked sceptical. I think she was finding it hard being monogamous when everyone else was having such fun.
    George stopped me frequently over the next few days to check that I was all right. My inexperience must have showed. One day he accompanied me to Plantation Beach.
    ‘Isn’t it wonderful,’ I said, flinging my arm out and introducing him to my special place. ‘Sometimes I run up and down screaming.’
    Which I did.
    George looked horrified. Who is this mad woman? He turned tail and hurried back up the beach and on to the hotel path.
    I watched his long legs churning up the slope and wrote in my notebook, ‘Sometimes she longed for someone to share it all with. A soul mate.’
 
 
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AUSTRALIA 1975. 6 A Whitsunday Island

Apologies for the colour of the photographs. Most of my Lindeman photographs have turned a nasty shade of orange which unfortunately gives you no idea of what the place really looked like.

A few days later Helen and I returned to the YWCA to find a message waiting for us from the office of the Whitsunday Islands. Lindeman Island had two vacancies, one for a housemaid and one for a waitress. Their plane was coming over to Mackay the next day and could fetch us.
    It was perfect. It was the news we’d been waiting for. I’d been losing heart, but now my dream was coming true.
 
Before I left London, Bella’s younger brother Charlie who lived in the same house as Bella and me, said to me ‘Don’t go to Australia with any intentions. Just go.’
    That was the best advice that anyone had given me, and up until then I’d followed it to the letter. I'd run from London, my only intention to get as far away as possible, and since I'd arrived in Australia, I'd taken each day as it came.
    Now, I had high expectations and of course they were not fulfilled.
    There was nothing on the island but the hotel and its airstrip. The hotel itself was slightly crummy and old-fashioned with a foul brown carpet in the lounge and no concession to its fabulous position right on a beach – no doors or terraces, just windows. It wasn’t the Mediterranean.

Lindeman - a small green sub-tropical island with a hotel, an airstrip and a jetty

Up until then it had been family owned but it had recently been taken over by P&O who were refurbishing it. The place swarmed with loud builders in stubbies and boots. We had to stagger over planks to get from the kitchen to the dining-room with our trays.
    The weather, far from being tropical, was like an English summer’s day. A light breeze. Sun and cloud. Warm without being hot.
    It was low season and I only had to work 4 days a week so I took to exploring the island on foot. I found Coconut Beach with its backing of palm trees about half an hour away from the hotel and began to work on my tan. One of the workmen took me by boat to deserted Plantation Beach the other side of the island and I fell in love – with the beach.
    I started to traipse there whenever I could, through groves of trees festooned with snakes like creepers, past mangrove swamps. I lay on the beach all day with my bikini top off, soaking up the sun and the heat that was increasing. After three and a half years in London, I couldn't get enough of them. The water was  turning such a glorious deep jewel-like turquoise that I wanted to be the sea, but I couldn't go in it because the shallows were thick with stingrays.

    Each time I said goodbye to the beach and climbed the path back to the hotel I grieved.
    A party of advertising people arrived to film and I made some friends. I cried when they departed. Who was there left for me on the island?
    I was pleased to be crying however. I wasn’t used to letting my feelings out. Except for the occasional panic, I been more or less numb since I’d arrived in Australia. I was proud of the way I’d let myself cry. It was new to me to feel and yet be separate.
    Jayne arrived to join the small band of waitresses. Since she was English, I took her under my wing and, while I showed her how to make the breakfast fruit juice by sprinkling orange powder into a bucket of water and stirring, we got chatting.
    Like Helen, she was old – 28. She came from Birmingham. She was married to an Australian, Alan, and they were saving to build themselves a house. Alan was a musician and was to play the electric organ in the bar every night. Jayne and Alan were living in a caravan near the airfield and would travel down to the hotel and back by motorbike every day. They had a Yorkshire terrier called Doobie after Alan’s favourite band, the Doobie Brothers.

Jayne and Alan (at a later 1920s-themed party)

Doobie

I decided to take the law into my own hands and have my meals sitting on some steps that led from the staff dining-room to the beach. Why fester inside? Jayne joined me, and then Alan, and then Steve the boatman whom Alan had teamed up with. I had some friends! (Helen had by now disappeared into the ranks of the housemaids where she was comfortable. Anyway, I think she found me rather annoying.)

    ‘Are you happy here?’ one of the guests asked me.
    ‘It’s OK,’ I answered, and then I had a revelation.
    I was happy. I just hadn’t realised it.

    At Wilpena I'd had moments of happiness, but here it seemed as if something fundamental had suddenly changed inside me. Parts had slotted into place. I was a new person.
    It was my turn to go out in the boat for the day and look after the guests. I’d not done that before. As I walked across the beach to the jetty, the world had come alive. It had turned from black and white to colour, from two dimensions to three. It was paradise.
 
 
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