Caneknives and the cringe
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| Red menace . . . a gigantic dust
storm prepares to dump tonnes of choking dirt at
Moombidary Station, 54km west of Hungerford, in this
extraordinary picture taken by station managers Helen
and Doug Clifford. |
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THE dust hung in the air like a khaki veil,
the exhaust note of the car which had stirred it fading over
the rise at the end of our street. On the cracked, bakelite
radio in the kitchen, massed voices hymned that "Life is great
in the Sunshine State", the refrain drifting through the front
door to mingle with the dust and be swallowed by the heat of
the afternoon sun.
Summertime 1959, the 100th anniversary of our statehood and
my first inkling that Queensland occupied a unique place in
the Australian firmament.
In my child's mind we lived in a fortress state. Somewhere,
I knew, in a land far, far away was a city called Sydney, for
I'd heard that Mum and Dad had honeymooned there in the late
Forties at a place called the Blue Mountains. To get there it
was necessary to cross The Border, a delineation which I
imagined to be marked by a high wall through the gates of
which you passed when leaving Queensland. We had distant
relatives "down south", the collective term for all points
between Coolangatta and the Antarctic Circle, but they may as
well have lived in the Congo. They were spoken of in hushed
tones, members of a fallen tribe who lived in a city of sin in
a state of depravity. Nice people did not live "down south".
Nice people lived in Queensland.
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| American sailor boys meet Aussie
girls when a US naval squadron visits Brisbane in
March 1941. |
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I didn't realise then that we wrapped our "niceness" around
us as a shield, back in those now distant days, against the
inferiority that threatened to overwhelm us. I didn't feel it
then. That would come later. For the moment, I was at one with
the voices on the radio as they declared again, in a song
written to celebrate our centenary, that life was great in the
Sunshine State. Elsewhere, I knew, lay another land called
North Queensland. My grandfather, an Irish immigrant, had
worked there as a canecutter. On a rusty nail driven into a
stump beneath his rambling weatherboard house at Red Hill,
Brisbane, there hung the caneknife, its edge long dulled, that
he'd once swung as a canecutter up around Ayr. Years later, in
the Seventies, a mate and I piled our gear in the back of a
Holden ute and headed up Highway One. There for the first time
I experienced the tar-melting heat of North Queensland and
thought: "They must have done it tough in the canefields."
When I would rail at life's irritations, I would be told
by old voices with sharp memories: 'Just thank God you
didn't go through The Depression'.
As a child I'd heard the tales of grandparents and distant
aunts (in an age when children were seen and not heard, you
did a lot of listening).
I heard stories of hard yakka in far-flung west Queensland
towns, of long hours spent working as hotel housemaids in
two-storey weatherboard pubs, of flood and fire and stoically
borne death. They'd talk of The Depression, of once proud men
begging odd jobs at back doors. Years later, when I would rail
at life's irritations, I would be told by old voices with
sharp memories: "Just thank God you didn't go through The
Depression".
I was born into a Queensland that was still recovering from
the trauma of World War II and the knowledge that the rest of
the country was prepared to sacrifice us to an invading
Japanese force. It was years later that I heard of The
Brisbane Line, that line drawn on military maps between us and
the southern states, above which everything – including the
state of Queensland – would be abandoned in the case of an
invasion. Our forces would essentially retreat to the NSW
border, there to make their stand. Queensland was expendable.
I can't help but wonder if this knowledge imbued in
Queenslanders a fierce sense of self-sufficiency and identity.
Our climate and geography stood us apart, and to that was now
added the sense that, ultimately, we were on our own.
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| Down but not out . . .
Brisbaneites gather at an unemployment meeting at
Woolloongabba in 1939. |
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As my mother hauled me by the hand up the steep footpaths
of Red Hill, we walked through an urban scene that was a
portent of the future course of our state.
The tidal waves of post-war immigration were now breaking
on our shores, bearing many families into inner-city suburbs
like Red Hill. Barely five years had passed since the war and
the arrival of these "Eye-ties" was too much for Dad who'd
spent his war in the jungles of New Guinea. Queensland then
was not the racial alloy it is now. The Italians had fought on
the wrong side and that, as far as Dad and his fellow
ex-servicemen were concerned, was that.
We packed up and left our Queenslander with its red
corrugated iron roof and towering stumps and headed out to the
fledgling southern suburbs, there to escape the "Eye-ties and
wogs" that were seen, in the eyes of the time, to be invading
our city and state.
Continued >>
E-mail
Mike O'Connor
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