When Then Was Now

When Then Was Now

Denise A Nisbet

Our family’s baby looks at the world with big blue eyes. Fingers in mouth, she focuses on something we can’t see. Then she looks into my eyes and laughs uproariously. I laugh back at her and wonder what her world will become? Because no-one, fifty-odd years ago, could have dreamed of the world we live in now.

When I was a bit older than our baby, my family moved to Toongabbie. The name comes from the Toogalal band of the Dharug peoples who lived there. It had good water and food for them, so of course early settlers wanted to live there too. The Dharug didn’t like it much. A Bidjigal hero named Pemulwuy[1] was the first to show the British settlers that the Aboriginal peoples were going to resist colonisation. In one battle, he got seven pieces of buckshot in his head; five others were killed. Despite the buckshot and wearing a leg-iron, Pemulwuy escaped from the hospital. That is because he was a carradhy, a man with magical powers. Although it was now our small farm, I felt the Toogalal still there. I knew them in the gentle wind in those olive-green trees, in the grass paddock beside the house, their soft presence …chattering and singing, whispering. It was their place, their country. They loved it and lived it. We only farmed it.

Sacred to all Australian Aboriginal peoples is their obligation to care for their country. This resonates through art, music, folklore and religious beliefs. In Singing Saltwater Country John Bradley[2] describes the importance of song and ritual as keys to maintaining the energy flows that run through country. And now, with climate change, we see just how far short we fall as custodians of the land. The Aboriginal peoples of Australia were truly the first environmentalists and I am a proud supporter of ‘Country Needs People’[3]; Nowadays Aboriginal people are employed as rangers to care for their own country areas. They are busy preserving rare species, showing scientists new ones, and eliminating feral animals that prey on native species. It is a brilliant and perfect blend of the country’s environmental needs and the people who love it and know how to care for it.

When I lived in America a friend confronted me about our Stolen Generations. I hotly denied that such a thing ever happened. I told him he was projecting onto Australia his own guilt over their mistreatment of American Indians. The first National Sorry Day was held on 26 May 1998. Could I have been wrong? Then on the 13th of February 2008, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, tabled a motion in parliament apologising to Australia's Indigenous peoples. 'Indigenous children have been forcibly separated from their families and communities since the very first days of the European occupation of Australia by governments and missionaries’. I am appropriately embarrassed, appropriately sorry and hang my head in shame.[4]

What hubris! To think we came here and settled a country we called Terra Nullius, which was already owned by over 300,000 (some estimates are as high as 1 million) Aboriginal people. Then we followed up with the so-called ‘White Australia Policy’![5] The Whitlam Government repealed this in 1975 and Australia's Migration Program allows people from any country to apply to migrate to Australia, regardless of ethnicity, culture, religion or language.

Our early immigrants though, had a horrible time of it! When we lived in Toongabbie the Camilleri family from Malta had a market garden next door. I felt so sorry for my mother. Mrs Camilleri would send us over lovely cream cheeses and my mother burst into tears. She didn’t know what to do with them! Imagine that! Nowadays, we’d be lining up for Mrs Camilleri’s cream cheeses.

I blame the government of that time. Oh, not for the cream cheeses or Mrs Camilleri but for their failure to teach us about our immigrants, and what we could do to help them. Some talks on radio (no television back then!) would have helped everyone enormously. How were we to know how lonely and hard it was for those early immigrants? From our side, there was a lot of talk about ‘them’ taking ‘our’ jobs, ‘our’ this and ‘our’ that. How could we go from being a largely homogeneous group of people, excluding even our indigenous folk, proud of calling England ‘home’ as my mother still did, to being open and accepting and helpful to the new migrants coming to our country? My loving mother would have helped Mrs Camilleri if only she had understood. I know this sounds stupid and naïve now, if not downright racist, but how powerful our ignorance was. You don’t know what you don’t know.

At least we have changed over the years! Although my friend believes there is still a lot of backlash over multiculturalism, I do think that many of us are now proud of our multi-cultural country, embracing not just a Mrs Camilleri and cream cheese, but people and foods and customs from all over the world. Just think of all the wonderful foods that have come to us from Asia, Africa, and Southern Europe, as well as new ideas, new understanding, new tolerance, new vistas of the world. We used to be so insular and now we are on our way to becoming a broad-minded, outward looking country. How lucky we are; I credit our migrants with giving us that.

I saw the most wonderful play about 50 years ago called Under Australian Skies[6]. It was brilliant; told in mime with background narration, of Aborigines, immigrants, old Australians using simple props and masks for each character. It captured my heart; the aboriginal woman with her love of country trying to show us how little we understood that relationship; the fear and trepidation of a Greek migrant woman coming here ‘for the children’; and a typical Aussie bloke in thongs and shorts mowing the lawn, up and down, nose in the air, caught in his own little white world. This play was an education in itself about our past.

Education for me was Westmead Primary School. I wasn’t taught our own history except for the well-known explorers. But I can tell you lots about English monarchs and their wars. Waiting for the school bus, a bit bored, I’d shuffle my feet through a bull-ant nest. The ants would go crazy and I thought it was huge fun. We’d trundle down the HUGE hill of Binalong Road in the rickety bus (that hill is a lot smaller than it used to be). I went to my Aunty Mary’s house after school, and she would put me on a bus for home. The people next door to Aunty Mary had a sulphur-crested cockatoo in a cage. The phone would ring, and the cockatoo would call out ‘Mrs. G, you’re wanted on the phone.’ Aunty Mary would run out to get her phone call… And laugh, we really did! Not everyone had a phone in those days. You can’t imagine that now can you? Australia has the largest number of mobile phones per capita in the world. I’m not much of a phoning person, but we can’t deny how useful they are.

After school, my cousin Errol and I would shoot down the hill outside Aunty Mary’s in his home-made billycart. ‘Police, who have received numerous reports of robberies from garages in the western suburbs, have been surprised to find that numbers of thefts have been committed by boys who wished to assemble billy carts … On Tuesday … police arrested three boys whose ages range from 10 to 14 years. …’[7] And this: ‘Billycart Furore. The serenity of Elizabeth Bay has been seriously disturbed by the heavy holiday traffic of billycarts and many of its unnerved householders have enthusiastically welcomed the reopening of school … we may yet hear of Parliament solemnly debating the question of whether billycarts should be banished from the streets.’[8] Heavens above! What a fuss! Whoever heard such nonsense? I’d love to see more kids out in billycarts instead of seeing babies on iPads.

I went back to my aunt’s house recently. The hill we billycarted down has grown much smaller. Otherwise the house looks the same with the old verandah we used to sleep on, winter and summer, in saggy old beds. On a frosty morning, hearing the milkman come, his horse clip-clopping along the road, he’d fill our billycan with milk for the day.

This ‘billy’ has nothing to do with billy carts; this is a small bucket with a handle. It was part of the kit for the army and was carried by swagmen to make their tea. A swagman was a man who travelled around the countryside carrying his ‘swag’, his bedroll and billycan, selling his labour sheep shearing or cattle-herding. He’s become famous in the song ‘Once a jolly swagman…’ At Pa’s place there was a swaggie who visited about once a year. Pa would feed him and give him tea and sugar. He’d make his tea in his billy and swing it around and around to draw the tea and dissolve the sugar. He had a hard and lonely life did the swaggie, travelling from station[9] to station for work, often walking great distances as our stations tend to be huge runs of land. I’m sure it’s a lot easier these days. Not the work, that is still really hard yakka, but the travel would be easier with trucks and cars and four-wheel drives.

Back in the 1940s we used trains and buses and trams to get around, very few people had cars. A trip to the dentist (whose name by the way was Dr Teeful, I thought it hilarious) was bus to Toongabbie station, steam train to Granville – leave the window open so I can smell the smoke and steam and the cinders flying by. Change at Granville for an electric train to Central and cross Sydney Harbour over the bridge in a double-decker bus. Sitting on the top in front I could see everything; a sleek grey transport ship owning the water, a little sailboat bobbing nearby like a puppy begging for attention, the green and yellow ferries ploughing purposefully between North and South shores, Fort Denison standing guard right in the middle of that glorious harbour. I don't suppose that would be much of a thrill for a child today, but it was high adventure for a little girl from Toongabbie.

So, a trip to the dentist... A drill that sounded like those pneumatic drill-things that dig up the road: grrrr-rrrr-rrrr it ground away. My teeth ached, my head rattled, my eyes watered and I felt battered. Now there is something I have no nostalgia for. Just think about the modern dental equipment. I suppose it makes a trip to the dentist a bit less traumatic.

Then we went back across the Harbour Bridge to have a special lunch at David Jones.

‘What will you have dear?’ from my mother. A meat pie and peas of course. What else would an Aussie kid have?

‘Are you sure you wouldn't like something else this time?’ My mother would ask hopefully. No. Of course I wouldn't. When else would I get a meat pie? Lovely and round and sloppy with gravy inside and heaps of tomato sauce on it. Heaven!

At Christmas time David Jones’ windows were dressed with wonderful scenes; dolls and teddy bears, little toy trains, a model of Santa on his sleigh with his elves, the winter scenes so unfamiliar to us here in high summer. We’d line up, dressed in our summer dresses and sandals, to sit on Santa’s knee and to tell him that yes, we had been good, and ask for what we would like for Christmas. I lost charity with Santa when I got a bike instead of ballet toe shoes. I guess that, just as we did, our little baby will be lining up to see Santa. How lovely that not all the old traditions die out.

Well, back to that travel. How it has changed! The Australian Maritime Museum[10] has a replica of one of the ships early migrants came to Australia in. About ten square feet for a family! My family, travelling on the Parsee, was mother, father and five little girls and (I’m sure with great jubilation) my great-grandfather was born on board on the way out. I have a picture in my mind of that sailing ship whipping up the coast from Hobart to Sydney. It might have been rough and windy, with that wonderful sea smell. Seeing land must have been so exciting after a long sea voyage but what a land? Those dull olive-green trees can’t have looked inviting to people used to the brilliant greens of Great Britain.

Nowadays we CROOOOSE. The things that strike you on boarding one of these lovely cruise ships is the sense of space and light and luxury. Cheerful smiling staff, white linen and silverware on the tables in the dining rooms, lovely ballrooms, the big theatre, beautiful decks by the swimming pool or sauna, comfortable cabins (even the small ones) with a towel sculpture made each evening by the cabin attendants. Oh, it is lovely. We had the greatest fun on Chocolate Night! ‘Yummy beyond expectation a delight to the eyes and the stomach’ said the baby’s grandmother. The deck was lit with fairy lights, the sky a gentle dark blue, the sea swished quietly in the background, there was lovely quiet music, we were all beautifully dressed and very glamorous. And there was a display of the most marvellous creations! Ice sculptures of birds and animals, chocolate monuments of the Eiffel Tower and the Sydney Harbour Bridge, bread twisted into decorative plaits or honeyed loaves and cakes and cakes and cakes. Sponges with jam and cream, chocolate cakes, profiterole towers covered in caramel, in chocolate, in syrup. The staff made Bananas Foster, Cherries Jubilee, Crepe Suzette… There were jellies and pastries … it was all too beautiful to eat. Almost.

We sailed into Sydney at dawn at the end of that trip. The sun was rising behind us, lighting up the Harbour Bridge ahead as we sailed under it, ducking our heads – it looked such a tight squeeze. Every time I came home from my many, many journeys abroad, I felt so moved by my country. I cried flying over the harbour, I cried sailing into the harbour, I hugged trees when I got home, I adored that Qantas advertisement with the song ‘I still call Australia, still call Australia, still call Australia… home.’[11]

    Now there are no more swagmen, no more billycans or billycarts, no more milkmen, no horse-and-cart. But these times are the very best of times. See the stunning changes in these last years! I learned to type on a manual typewriter, and now I sit in front of my Mac, using that same skill to write this story. I read a book on a Kindle or an iPad at the flick of a button. I travelled in steam trains, then, as a young woman I watched a man land on the moon, and I now see pictures from Saturn on a television. We had to go to the GPO in Sydney to book a telephone call to The Netherlands to let my Dutch family know when I became engaged. Now I write a note to my friends in England or America or Holland and they respond a few seconds later! And now we Zoom our friends and family. We walk around on titanium hips and knees; we have stem cells to reverse the effects of age or accident. No, we can be nostalgic, even peer a little sadly into the past, but we can’t regret the changes. And, like all of us now, in the future our little blue-eyed baby will see miracles that we can’t even dream of.

The End.

[1] Kohen JL (2005): Pemulwuy (1750-1802): Australian Dictionary of Biography. National Centre of Biography, Australian National University.

[2] Bradley J (2010): Singing saltwater country: Allen and Unwin

[3] The Country Needs People campaign is fighting for the growth and security of opportunities for land and sea country management by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. www.countryneedspeople.com

[4] Based on materials that constitute copyright of the Commonwealth of Australia and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Australia license- external site

[5] On 23 December 1901, the Immigration Restriction Act came into law. The legislation was specifically designed to limit non-British migration to Australia and allowed for the deportation of ‘undesirable’ people who had settled in any Australian colony prior to federation. www.nma.gov.au

[6] I couldn’t find any record of the playwright or the play.

[7] Boys’ Thefts: Parts to make a billycart. The The Women’s Weekly, February 1934

[8] Sydney Morning Herald, May 1932

[9] ‘Station’ is our word for the huge ranches we have.

[10] Located in Darling Harbour, Sydney. Many and varied exhibits relating to our Maritime history.

[11]    Allen, P (1980): I still call Australia home. On the album Bi-Coastal.