Roundabout at Bangalow Read Online Free PDF

usually black from our sweaty hands and stiff with spit from the number of times we lick it to thread the needle. Everything we take home has to be boiled up in the copper to make it useable. I am eventually allowed to make a proper doll’s dress, with finished off seams, with buttons and button-holes, but it isn’t nearly as exciting as the glamorous, botched together creations I make at home. I am at this time sewing for my doll, from a scrap of sequined apricot silk stolen from an uncle’s suitcase (probably a souvenir of some romantic conquest), a replica of the wedding dress worn by Princess Marina of Greece for her marriage to Prince George of Kent.
    We are intensely interested in royalty. This is fostered by an article in the School Magazine on the royal family — King George V, Queen Mary and their numerous children from the Princess Royal and the Prince of Wales down to the Dukes of Kent and Gloucester (later to be governor-general of Australia). There are also reverent articles in the magazines that come into the house — the Woman’s Mirror, the Home Journal, and later the new and exciting Women’s Weekly with its comic strip featuring Mandrake the Magician, his Nubian slave Lothar, and his girlfriend Princess Narda. Meanwhile we particularly love the little princesses, Lilibet and Margaret Rose, and send away for a cardboard cutout of their miniature thatched cottage in Kensington Gardens and carefully assemble it. These are not faraway strangers; though we children are sixth generation Australians they are our personal King, Queen and Princesses. When the Northern Star announces that King George V is dying, and suggests that his subjects pray for him, I am profoundly affected. I go out to the side of the house among the daisies where the dogs, Barney and Caesar, usually bed down. I kneel on the hard ground and pray to God, deeply and passionately, for my King’s recovery, and I am personally affronted when he dies in spite of all my efforts.
    The Depression has hardly touched this village, mainly because food is so plentiful — fresh milk and eggs, vegetables and fruit, homemade butter. There are people who are very well off, including the owner of the butcher’s shop where my father works. He owns a saloon car with velour upholstery and velvet tassels at the side for the passengers to hold onto, quite a contrast to the Model T Fords and old lorries which usually rattle around the roads. The owner of the general store is also well off. He owns the only wireless, so the men go there to hear the test cricket broadcast from England. Economy is a way of life for everyone, not just the poor. There is no soap powder; rough soap is cut up into flakes to boil up with the clothes in the copper, and the copper stand is a forty-four-gallon drum with a hole cut in the side for the fire to be laid. Sugar bags are boiled until soft and hemmed to make bath mats. Flour bags are boiled in attempts to remove the brand, opened out and used to make bloomers. Many a little girl is branded across the backside with Fielders Flour. Gibson’s Gift Tea labels are collected and traded for crockery, and bush furniture is constructed from kerosene cases. These cases are built of the finest white pine to contain two four-gallon tins of kerosene. The empty cases are stacked upon each other to the desired height, fastened together, then covered with cretonne. They are functional, look good, and cost next to nothing.
    We do have some people from the outside world to remind us of the Depression. Our mother’s parents, hard-hit, come to stay. Grandfather has been a blacksmith at Goolmangar and Bangalow. Now over fifty, he breaks stones on the road for the relief, the equivalent of work-for-dole today. He works in the vegetable garden and teaches us to sing: In the Old Rock-Candy Mountains, Where they never change their socks. Grandma teaches us our prayers — Gentle Jesus, meek and mild, Look upon