When we move to the bush in 1976, our dining room table is made of oregon. The top is three huge slabs of the sweet-smelling softwood. It’s a mortice and tenon construction, not a nail or a screw or a bolt. Instead, hand-crafted tongues of wood were slipped into hand-cut holes and glued in with PVA wood glue, held tight by pegs made from smaller pieces, hammered in with a leather mallet so as not to bruise the wood.
Dad made the whole thing himself, including the chairs, the backs and seats of which were strung with ropes. Starting with the huge slabs that formed the table top, he cut them to size, sanded them and attached the legs and cross bracing. He sanded it, shaped the tenons and jigsawed out the mortices.
When it came time to finish it, he warmed the wood with a hand-held gas torch and rubbed beeswax into the table top. The wax soaked into the wood then he cooled it and did it agan. There’s a category of smells that make you think of home and comfort and safety and peace. Baking bread and fresh coffee are two of them. Warm oregon wood and beeswax also belong. But if I smelt them now I don’t know what they would bring up for me.
He made things, my father. Trained as an electrical engineer, he started his career in mines and paper mills. I remember clearly that he was away a lot for work, travelling to the Pilbara, Mount Parabadoo, Bouganville. I don’t know much about the work he did, other than it involved ore and mining machinery. He talked about bauxite and copper and iron ore. In between those trips he worked at the top end of Collins Street in the offices of a huge mining company. He was senior, responsible, hands-on and highly respected. Mum took us in to meet him at lunchtime a few times, and we would eat at a restaurant called Via Veneto that I think was where Collins Place is now, between 35 and 55 Collins Street, right up at the Paris End. At Via Veneto, the staff welcomed him and bantered with him and possibly in his own dialect. He had come from the Veneto region of Italy, after all. And he had a way with people. It is from him I got my own variety of banter and transparency. And my love, I suspect, of the top end of Collins Street. I would live there if I could.
Where we lived, though, was a typical 1970s house, on a corner in Heidelberg, a suburb in Melbourne. With 3 bedrooms, a sunroom, and a huge apricot tree in the back yard. Mum and Dad had renovated it, in the seventies style with a feature window of yellow glass next to the dining room table, a chocolate coloured modular sofa, mission brown trim and seagrass flooring. We were up with the times. It was a place of dinner parties and gatherings. People sitting on the floor and eating cheese and fresh bread out of our oven, drinking wine poured into stoneware beakers from casks or chianti bottles.
Meanwhile, Dad was making jewellery for Mum out of copper wire and stones he’d found while working away at the mines. One of his rings featured a piece of native copper. Over time he worked this jewellery hobby up to fine pieces made of silver and gold and semi-precious stones, exhibiting at galleries in Melbourne and, after we went bush, staging exhibitions of his work in Gippsland, Melbourne and Canberra alongside Mum’s pewtersmithing. I loved the names of the semi-precious stones he favoured in his work, the green peridot, yellow citrene, the blues and greens of aquamarine. He loved working with crystals, designing unique pieces that highlighted the stones, with rings and pendants designed to let light in around and through the coloured gems. I remember a huge tourmaline crystal, green at one end and the colour of an aubergine at the other. Though I can’t remember what he made with it.
He had renovated our suburban home in Heidelberg on his own, with the help of my mother, my brother and me, and once we’d made the shift he worked in wood and stone, built our hut and sheds and our house and the fences. We learned from him and with him. He invented a water pump that harnessed the power of falling water to pump water up the hill to the house without interruption. He had a creative side that his corporate working life and his time as a lecturer at RMIT had never quite satisfied. Building a home for his family from scratch fed something deep in him and made him whole like he had never been before. Until he broke. The cracks were showing before we moved, but we didn’t see them. The pieces had to break and fall away before we realised that something irreversible had gone wrong.
Before the move, we lived walking distance from my Nonna in the neighbouring suburb of Rosanna. My father’s mother, my Nonna (grandma) migrated to Australia in 1948 from Italy, with my father and his older sister my Zia (aunty) Lia. My Nonna’s name was Isabella and we called her Nonna Bella. We moved to the bush in late 1976. I was 12 and in was in my first year at Banyule High School. Mum taught there too, but not in the classes I took. She had a reputation as a great teacher. The kids she taught loved her. Some came around to the house and my brother and I had a few of them as babysitters when we were little.
And back to the house.
In this renovated suburban home, my brother Joe and I had a bedroom each. Mine decorated in pink and orange and his in yellow and brown. Wallpaper, shag rugs, paisley, swirls and oversized flowers. Yep, it was the 70s.
And one night, when in the darkness of the corridor that lay between the bedrooms and the lounge room, the two of us kids sat beside the door we had opened just a crack, and listened in secret to the decision that would change the course of our lives.
“We need to do this,” said Dad. “We need to get ourselves and the kids out of this madness. The whole place is going mad.”
He partly meant the petrol prices. There was a petrol crisis in and people were talking about electric cars and solar power, but these things were not yet part of the general conversation. The technology for solar panels was still in its infancy compared to what wa hev no
He meant taxes too. He had come home from RMIT one day waved his payslip at Mum. “I got that payrise, love,” he said, his voice rising into that sing-song delivery that I came to refer to as a litany (though never out loud. There would have been consequences.)
He had poured their regular after work whiskies into their favourite glasses, then took Mum’s over to where she sat smoking, with her legs tucked under her, on her favourite chair. Dinner was cooking in the kitchen, Joe and I were setting the table. “But I only get half of it. The other half gets taken by the bloody tax man. It makes me wonder why I bother.”
He meant the education system, too. “The schools are teaching our kids to be stupid. Put ’em in a barrel and fed them through a bung hole, and they’d learn more than they do now. Honestly, they’d be better off if we didn’t let them go to school at all.”
“Schools,” he said, “teach our kids to be normal, and mediocre.” Mediocre was bad enough. Normal was anathema.
Mum was a teacher, and she nodded along at his accusations. I don’t remember her speaking up in defence of the education system. Maybe she agreed. What I do remember though, was a twinge of guilt for enjoying school so much. I’d just moved into high school and I loved the model. In primary school I’d been in the same class, with the same teacher, and I loved my teachers and loved learning. But the high school model of moving from class to class and learning from different experts was something I had taken to.
He also meant the Omega communications station being built in Woodside in Gippsland. We’d seen the news about it and we didn’t really know what it was but we knew it meant nuclear war. People were talking about mushroom clouds and radiation sickness. It was one of 8 installations worldwide, in a project led by the US Government. The Omega Navigation System was a pre GPS (Global Positioning System) method of global navigation, was used by ships and planes and made us – according to many protestors – a target for ‘the bomb’. Before firming up the site at Woodside, the Omega station had been rejected by more than one community, because people believed it would put a target in their town. The cold war was fresh and real. Ban the Bomb was seen regularly on placards, along with Save the Whale. That’s what we cared about then. Or the grownups did. I was 12.
“We’ve got madmen with their fingers on the button, love,” said Dad. “We could all be blown sky high, and in a post-holocaust world we want to be able to defend ourselves and the family. We can’t do that here. We need a bolthole.”
“Don’t you agree, love?” said Dad. “Don’t you agree, we’ve just got to leave and make a life that makes sense, give ourselves and the kids a fighting chance when the shit finally hits the fan. What happened,” he asked nobody in particular. “What happened to self-determination?” It was becoming a big question, and would be repeated so often that it would lose its meaning as a call to action and become one of the accusations we’d hear from Dad in the years to come. Accusations of how we’d failed him, and ourselves. What happened to self-determination? Hard to answer when any skerrick of it has been beaten and harrassed out of you.
In the corridor, I looked across at my brother Joe and even in the dim light of our hiding spot, I could see he was happy. My brother has always had an infectious grin that lights up his whole face. He had that going on. He liked what was happening. I wasn’t so sure. It was news to me, this sudden desire to live a different life. Why couldn’t we just keep camping in the holidays and leave things the way there were the rest of the year. It sounded real, and not just a pipe dream; not just Dad’s usual daydream ranting.
There was something new in his voice, too. This was the first time I remember paranoia. He used to have a go at whingers. There was a running joke, in our family borrowed from a book that was popular at the time ‘Let’s Talk Strine’, about the aorta, a mis-heard ‘they ought to’. “Aorta this, aorta that”, he’d say. Why don’t they just get off their arses and do something about it.
The next evening, he’s pulled out a topographical map of Victoria, one of the ones we used for camping and bushwalking, with all the lines around the curve of hills. With the blue rivers and creeks, the green State Forest, the tiny brown trees.
He lays it on the oregon table, which is half set for dinner. He tells us kids to pull the chairs away and gather around. He has something to show us. He unfurls the map, uses glasses, salt and pepper shakers, the salad bowl, to hold down the corners. He runs his hand across the map to smooth it out and points to where the Omega station will be built. He explains that we need to factor in the blast radius, the nuclear fallout, the prevailing winds and the distance from civilisation. I know what he means, because I have read The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham. I have read On the Beach by Nevil Shute. I know what happens to the survivors when society breaks down. They turn on each other. They betray and kill each other. I know what happens in a nuclear blast. The world as we know it is destroyed. He shows us where on the map we will be safe. It’s in the top right hand corner of Victoria. We need a bolthole and that’s where we’ll find one. Dargo. Tallangatta. Cann River. Omeo. He’s going to keep us safe. Dinner might have been chops and salad. Or osso bucco with polenta. Or something else. I don’t remember that. I do remember Dad’s excitement, and the urgency that we all felt about the need to find our safe place. I remember Mum’s nodding and smiling, and when she sat in her chair after dinner, the way she held her cigarette and circled her thumb around the tip of her second finger. And something in me that felt quietly unsettled. I did not want this, but I did not know why. And wanting or not wanting was irrelevant anyway. It was happening.
Writers need encouragement and I’m no exception! If you read this far and enjoyed this excerpt, please let me know.
