Roundabout at Bangalow Read Online Free PDF Page B

a little child — and to say Grace. She is a health fanatic and we gag on her medications: codliver oil to prevent colds, sulphur and treacle every Saturday to cleanse the blood, and a mighty dose of castor oil periodically to clear out our systems.
    Both our grandmothers are very religious, as many women were in those days. I realise now that it was up to them to carry the faith forward against the misbehaviour that was rife in the male population. In an attempt to forestall this, male children were taken to the Temperance Union by their mothers at fourteen to sign the Pledge … never to allow alcohol to pass their lips (I still have my father’s certificate). Women like my Grandma, my mother’s mother, are seekers after eternal truth. They long for some poetry in their lives, for some great and glorious salvation to make up for the sordid reality of this world. She began as a Presbyterian (hence our religion) but eventually found a haven with the Christadelphians, who believe that only one hundred and forty-four thousand, the number given in The Revelation of St John the Divine, will be saved on the last day, and all of them Christadelphians. Apocalyptic movements flourish in the Depression and their tracts, adorned with those terrifying figures, the Beast of Revelation and the Whore of Babylon, supposed to bring war and pestilence to the world in its dying days, are everywhere. Grandma’s certainty of salvation, and her attempts to bring him to his religious crossroads, are the subject of Grandfather’s derision.
    He is an apostate from two faiths, Catholicism and Methodism, and is now a free thinker. His family history has been one of continual religious turmoil. In a sense his family are the equivalent of swinging voters. They turn from one side to another, not in any search for truth but more often through marriages where love or desire has overcome religious conviction. His mother, originally Methodist, has turned to marry a fascinating young Irishman, Michael Browne, to the indignation of her family. When Michael is struck by lightning just before her third child is born, literally blown out of his boots while ploughing the farm, she turns back to the Methodism of her family. Grandfather grows up between the two competing faiths, looking at first eagerly, then cynically, from one to the other. There is the faith of his uncles who own the pub at Ulmarra, who breed fine racehorses and win the Grafton cup more than once, go to mass, drink and gamble. These people are immensely attractive. Then there is the straitlaced faith of his mother, a reclusive martinet who takes in sewing to support her children. Grandfather is small and dark and Irish; he knows who he is. His sardonic commentary on the turn-the-other-cheek goodwill of the brethren is continuous. He drinks when he feels like it, bets on the horses and is almost a stranger in his own family. The atmosphere is tense and they soon depart to run a boarding house at Murwillumbah.
    Our Granny (our father’s mother) is also religious, but she is a passionate Anglican, a whole-hearted supporter of the Establishment. She endows the church with a cedar pulpit, buys an organ so her daughter can learn to play hymns at home, and puts up the Bishop when he comes to preach. She is also very comfortably off. She owns a large farm but lives in a small house on one corner of it and rents out the rest, including the eight-bedroom federation house that her Irish husband had built just before his death. The small house is called The Chalet and the large one, predictably, is Donegal. Both houses, five miles away from us and surrounded by beautiful gardens, are the centre of the family’s social life and gossip. Granny is also a member of one of the old established families of the district. She tells us proudly and often that she is the daughter of Robert Scott Wotherspoon, for many years Mayor of Lismore, and the grand-daughter of an early Australian