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.
 
 
Next instalment

AUSTRALIA 1975. 5 Before

I'd spent my teens filling out my Chart of Food and Drink Consumed, seeing how little I could eat without my mother noticing.

    There were lots of reasons why I had anorexia nervosa, the main one perhaps that I didn’t know how to deal with the emotions that flooded my being from the moment my periods started at age thirteen. So I clamped down on myself - tight.
    Then my periods stopped and my mother took me to the doctor.
    ‘Is she eating?’ the doctor asked my mother over me as I lay flat on my back and he felt my stomach.
    ‘Oh, you know, these girls,’ joked my mother.
    I don’t think either of us quite realised what was going on. Anorexia was something new, or at least the name was. As far as I could remember, heroines in novels were always going into decline.
    The doctor put me on pills for three months. ‘These should sort the problem out,’ he said.
    My mother and I studied the packets when we got home.
    ‘I think it’s The Pill,’ whispered my mother, wide-eyed, and we both giggled.
    The contraceptive pill was new too and just as shocking as anorexia.
    My periods came back but the eating problem didn’t go away.
 
I’d never had an emotional education.
    Neither of my parents was capable of it because of their upbringings. Both had lost their mother young. Both were brought up by nannies. Both had been to boarding school. Both had been through a war.
    The nearest we had to it at school were the Religious Knowledge lessons where one teacher regaled us with terrifying stories of hell, until she was summarily removed, and the Sex Education lessons (at least that was what they were but I don’t think that was what they were called) where we were summoned a small group at a time to a secret attic room and shown pictures of rabbit insides.
 
When I left home and went to university I plunged into a hideous world of uncontrolled eating. I dropped out of university after my first year and went to London where I learnt typing and a rudimentary shorthand and started work as a temporary secretary.
    I wanted to be free. I wanted to experience something other than academic work, meet people who were different - which I hadn’t done at university. The people I met there were exactly the same as the sort of people my parents had been pushing me towards all my life. I wanted to rebel. I hadn't managed it in my teens. I'd never dared. I was too frightened of my parents and I’d always been taught to not 'contradict’. Maybe I could rebel now.
 
I ended up at a ‘fringe’ bank as they were known – one of a new crop of suspect organisations that lent money to businesses. I liked it because the offices were white and new and open plan, in a tower block with spectacular views of the sky. I hated the greyness of London. The concrete and the litter. The small dark dusty offices that I’d staggered between. The sad people. The people at the bank on the other hand were in a hurry. They laughed a lot. They were going somewhere.
 
They liked me too and gave me a permanent job working first for and then with P and B. P and B were research analysts - the creatives of the organisation, they said, claiming that because of that they were allowed to leave their desks untidy at the end of the day. They wrote long essays about what the company should be doing, where it should be going. They had a Sex Maniac’s Diary straddling their two desks, which they consulted every morning and tittered over.
 
They were completely unlike anyone I’d met before. Both had come from working class backgrounds through grammar school and the then-free university education. Both were from the north (a foreign country) - P from the Midlands and B from near Newcastle. Both were much older than me, in their late twenties. I started going out with B.
 
Like me, he was interested in art. He read a lot. He wrote poetry. We went together to concerts, plays, exhibitions. He even came to parties with me. He was fascinated by my background and the people I mixed with. He wanted to know all about them.
 
The only trouble was, he was married. It was an open marriage however. They’d had to marry in their teens because there was a baby on the way and, B said, were now making up for lost time. B had several girlfriends other than me and he told me all about them.
 
Still, I knew it was wrong to commit adultery, not that I'd actually done so yet but I shouldn't even having been going out with B. It was my fault. I was guilty.

   I felt guilty at abandoning university.

    I was a failure doing secretarial work when so many of my friends and acquaintances were high-flyers, Oxbridge graduates. 

    I'd discovered by now the truth about the epidemic of building the bank was financing and to realise that they didn't care where they built and what they destroyed - like countryside - in the process. They didn't care about anything but money. I shouldn't be working for them.

    I was hideous because I was fat.

    It was if I had a parrot on my shoulder reciting on an endless loop the list of everything that was wrong with me.

 
‘You’ll never sleep with me, will you,’ said B one night at a new restaurant to which he was taking me as a special treat. We’d now been together about nine months and I’d always refused him. I wasn’t really interested.
    He was challenging me and I fell for it. I might as well, I thought. Get it over with. I’m 21 now. It’s about time.
    He came back with me to my room in the house I shared with several other people, and with Bella before she went to Australia. I was lost without her.
 
Immediately afterwards he got up and started dressing.
    ‘Where are you going?’ I asked, aghast.
    ‘Home of course,’ he snapped.
    A black shutter crashed down on my life. I started to fall down an endless black hole. I sat in the bath and watched my blood seeping into the water. I went back to bed and played again and again a song from a record that Bella had left behind for me. It was by Nina Simone.
 
    Ne me quitte pas
    Ne me quitte pas
    Ne me quitte pas.
 
The music was the only thing that stopped me disappearing forever.

Next instalment

AUSTRALIA 1975. 4 Melbourne, Brisbane and Mackay

In Sydney I’d stayed with Hampo, who was an old schoolfriend of my aunt (‘Hampo’ being her school nickname). She’d helped my mother look after me and my four siblings one summer when we were young and we’d all adored her. She’d emigrated to Australia and lived there with her husband Charles and their three young children.

    I’d rung her from the airport in the middle of the night without any warning. I had intended to meet a cousin in Melbourne but, after what felt like days sitting in an aeroplane and in Bangkok airport while the plane refuelled, I couldn’t face any more travel. She came straight out to fetch me, showing no signs of surprise at my sudden appearance.

    Hampo, the children and I spent the next day at a beach. A city with a beach! That was my sort of place.

    ‘The beaches are netted’, said Hampo, ‘to keep out the sharks.’

    A city with sharks! It was almost exciting.

 

Sydney, a city with beaches (and sharks)

On their verandah Hampo and Charles had a whole fridge devoted to wine. We drank Australian wine from a box with a tap on it. How practical! Whyever didn't we do that in the UK?
    That evening after supper, Charles unfolded a map of Australia on the dining-room table and tapped the top right quadrant with his finger.
    ‘The Great Barrier Reef,’ he said. ‘That’s where you want to go.’
    He was encouraging me. He acted as if the urge to explore was perfectly normal. I wasn’t mad after all, in spite of what almost everyone had said back home.
    I loved this country already.
 
I sounded Helen out and to my astonishment she agreed to come with me. I’d often asked her to come out walking but she’d always groaned and turned away. Perhaps she was recovering too.
    We caught a train that was to travel anti-clockwise round the coast of the continent for several days all the way to Queensland, a place that was spoken of in hushed tones. I wasn’t quite sure why. All that  people would say was, ‘It’s different.’ How could things be any more different? I couldn’t wait.
 
First stop Melbourne, where we stayed with a friend of Daryll’s who was a chef. He cooked us a vat of crispy mixed vegetables drizzled with a strong black sauce. I’d never tasted anything so delicious. Back home we boiled our vegetables till they’d lost most of their colour, texture and taste. This dish was of course stir-fried vegetables with soya sauce, the result of Australia’s proximity to Asia, but something that would take several more decades to reach mainstream UK.
    He shared his flat with a Japanese man who said that I reminded him of Japanese women. He reminded me of English men – polite, reserved – except that he taught me that silence with other people was a compliment in Japan, not an embarrassment as it was to the English.
    I didn’t like Melbourne. It was too cold, too European, too city-like.
 
Helen and I travelled on, spending our nights on the floor of the carriage, rolling into other people as the train went round corners and, after a brief stop in Sydney with some other friends of friends, arrived in Brisbane where we were to drop in on an aunt of Helen’s.
    We climbed broad wooden steps to her little wooden house painted white, hidden in streets of similar little wooden houses. Inside was an exact replica of a suburban British house. Neat and spotless. Lace mats and dainty china.
 
At last we reached Mackay, gateway to the Whitsunday Islands, themselves gateway to the Reef.
     A beautiful soft heat hit me as soon as we left the train and, as we lugged our suitcases along dirt paths between more wooden houses in a beautiful soft sparkling light, I felt as if I was in a dream. I was where I was supposed to be. I had arrived.
    We checked in at the YWCA, a large white clapboard house with lush green grounds, and spent several days washing ourselves and our clothes – arguing over the correct way to use a spin dryer. (Helen was right, I know now.)
    We then presented ourselves at the office of the Whitsunday hotels, where they weren’t at all excited to see us, even though I had a glowing reference from Daryll. Many people wanted to work for them. We just had to wait and hope.

My reference from Daryll. I was proud of it then and I'm proud of it now.

I’d heard of the Great Barrier Reef but I didn’t know anything about it. It was mythical, like Queensland. But now I’d made it this far I was determined to make it further.

Next instalment

AUSTRALIA 1975. 3 Wilpena Pound

As I walked from one cabin to the next with my mop and bucket, looking up at the forested slopes dotted with frost, smelling the pine and feeling the early morning sun on my face, I was happy. This is so much better than London, I thought. Even though I have a lowly job, I’m happy. How strange. It went against everything I’d been taught.

It had been a long bus journey along empty dirt roads to arrive at the Wilpena Pound Motel where I was now working as a housemaid, but hoping soon to move to waitressing. Food and meals were more my thing than cleaning. And the waitressing hours were better too as I’d have the afternoon off and could go exploring. The wildness all around called to me.
 
At first, I'd panicked. I was with strangers for the first time, and with each new location I'd had to cast off more ties to home. I found a bookshelf of crime novels in the motel lounge – where an enormous log fire burnt all day in deference to the onset of autumn – and when not working glued myself to them, blotting out the panic and hoping it would go away before I ran out of reading matter.

 
The guests had neat modern cabins in a row near the main hotel building. The staff had older detached ones dotted through the trees. I shared one with Helen, who was 28 (ancient) and Scottish and had recently split up with a long-term boyfriend. She hardly talked. I think she would have preferred to be on her own.
 
Daryll ran the kitchen and dining-room and when I joined his band of waitresses he seemed to find me funny. He kept encouraging me to get a job as a Jillaroo, which meant working on a farm, or to ‘try one of the ships’. He obviously thought I needed roughing up. Quite probably. I'd found London scary, but here anything went. Most of the male staff were bisexual (which I'd not come across before). One of the men was consistently unfaithful to his lovely girlfriend. Staff had one-night stands with guests. People drank all day. 
 
Daryll organised an outing which meant taking a bus along dirt tracks. Clouds of white parrot-like birds flew out of the trees.
    ‘What are those?’ I asked, astonished
    ‘Galahs,’ he replied.
    I’d never heard of them. I had to ask him to repeat the word and spell it for me.
    The bus stopped at a waterhole and someone stripped off and dived in. What freedom, I thought. You never swam in fresh water back home. Either you’d catch polio or you’d be poisoned by discharges from factories. Or so they said. I wanted to join him but didn't dare. There were too many people around. How was I going to dry myself afterwards?

    We sat on the bare ground to eat our lunch and a band of emus wandered up and stood around watching us grumpily. Daryll looked serious.
    ‘Don’t go near them,’ he said.
 
A guest went out walking and didn’t return. They sent a plane to look for him but found no trace. I too went out, every afternoon, following a track that led to a nearby clearing with a ruined shack. I watched kangaroos chase each other round and round the clearing, and as I walked back in the dusk wallabies leapt out of the woods giving me kittens. I sat on a rock above the cabins, and unfamiliar thoughts wafted through my brain.

One night, at a party in someone’s cabin, a housemaid started to scream. The next day, with her left eye bright red from a burst blood vessel, she was sent home to New Zealand.

 
I knew how she felt. It was dawning on me that, while these people spoke English and even looked English sometimes, they were actually an alien species. The country too fooled you into thinking it was normal – with trees and birds and animals like everywhere else – but all of them were new and weird. It wasn't a different country. It was a different planet. But so long as you knew both those things you were OK.

I became friendly with the son of the motel owner, who was on holiday from school. We decided to climb together to the nearest high point, St Mary’s Peak.

The path to St Mary's Peak. (Sorry about the state of the photograph - it is 51 years old, after all.)

It took us hours and we made several wrong turnings but when we arrived at the top there was a 360-degree view of Australian bush. In spite of my borrowed shoes that pinched and a bout of diarrhoea that had sent me crashing into the undergrowth every half an hour, I was suffused with a feeling I didn't recognise. I think it was joy.

On St Mary's Peak

I'd been in Australia for four months now and was starting to catch up with myself. I felt better, stronger, ready to move on again.

Next instalment

AUSTRALIA 1975. 2 The Murray River, Streaky Bay and Adelaide

In this instalment, I’ve found myself filling gaps in the original piece and making the story much longer - it's amazing what surfaces when you start digging into memories. It's all still true, but the shape and direction of the account are changing. I hope you will bear with me. You are my guinea pigs.

Heartfelt thanks to Carol and Trish for their encouragement. All comments and commentators welcome.

Bella, my faithful friend, arrived at last - in a pickup truck – and drove us to a shack in the woods where I was greeted by a man with long blond curly hair, wearing nothing but a turquoise-flowered sarong around his waist. I gulped. I’d never seen a man wearing a sarong before. Come to think of it, I’d never seen a sarong either in real life.

    ‘He and his girlfriend were caught in The Darwin Cyclone,’ whispered Bella as she showed me around. ‘They’re very Traumatised. This is the bathroom.’
    She turned on the shower which produced a trickle of rusty water and pointed to the lavatory. ‘Best avoided if you can.’
    ‘I think I’ll go for a walk,’ I said.
    I was finding it hard to keep up. A few days ago I’d been in filthy, grey, strike-ridden London, working in an office. Now I was . . . what?
    ‘Watch out for snakes,’ said Bella, ever thoughtful.

    She was three years older than me and had supported me through the miseries of the last two years.
    Five minutes away I found a river. It was caramel coloured and warm to my hand. Sandy beaches and unfamiliar trees lined its banks. Large black birds, like pterodactyls, swooped and squawked above my head. I felt that I was somewhere very old, somewhere before humans, from another era of Earth’s history.
    I’d completely forgotten about Bella’s warning.

The river

We rose before dawn the next morning and drove to the vineyard in the pickup truck, where I was paired with a middle-aged Italian woman. We worked together down a row, one each side. She was expert and I found it hard to keep up.

 

Arriving at work

On Bella’s advice, I’d brought a scarf from England and she’d shown me how to tie it round my head before we’d left that morning. I needed it. The sun was merciless and we ate our packed lunches in the shade of the vines.

Lunchtime

On our day off, we all swam across the river – the Murray, I now knew – and sunbathed on one of the beaches. The Australians wore nothing. Bella and I wore our bikini bottoms.


Two weeks later, sunburnt, scratched and stained with red grape juice, I headed west with Bella to Streaky Bay to stay with Tom whom she’d met on a bus in South East Asia. He lived in a shed roofed with corrugated iron. He was a gentleman, lonely, bewildered and in love with Bella. Bella and I slept in his bed while he slept on the floor.
    He took us to a nearby beach. It was deserted, thunderous with breakers and stretched as far as the eye could see. We shared the sand with seals and dived into the water to get away from biting flies. I think we might have seen dolphins too.

Seals on the beach near Streaky Bay

Then we went to Adelaide and stayed with some more friends of Bella’s. She’d travelled much of the way to Australia by land and made friends everywhere. These friends were arty and cagey and reminded me of English people.
    ‘What on earth do you want to go to Australia for?’ people had asked me back in England. ‘There’s nothing there.’
    Exactly, I thought. I was sick of it all – culture, class, rules, money.
    I didn’t want to be anywhere or do anything in Australia that reminded me of home.
    Another friend of Bella’s took us lobster fishing on his boat. That was more like it.

 

Lobster fishing with one of Bella's friends

Bella had an offer to fly over Ayers Rock*.
    ‘You could come too,’ she said excitedly.
    ‘Thanks but no,’ I said. ‘I need to get another job.’
    My father had been against me going to Australia but had still given me the money for the plane ticket (£600 – a fortune - even though I’d bought it from a ‘bucket shop’). I'd decided to assuage my guilt at going by saving enough money to pay him back.

    Now, I also wanted to set out on my own, away from Bella’s protection. As for leaving her alone to meet up with D, her lover – that didn’t occur to me.

I caught another bus. This time I was heading for mountains – South Australia’s Flinders Ranges.

Next instalment

* Many Australian place names have been changed back to their Aboriginal versions. I've left them as they were known in 1975 when I was there.