The Education of Young Donald Trilogy: Including Confessions of a New Boy and Portrait of an Optimist

By Julia Horne, Nick Horne and Donald Horne

A compelling insight into the making of one of Australia's foremost public intellectuals. A classic of Australian literature, The Education of Young Donald Trilogy combines Donald Horne's three autobiographies—The Education of Young Donald (1967), Confessions of a New Boy (1985) and Portrait of an Optimist (1988)—in one volume. With a keen intellect, sharp wit, and dry humour, Horne vividly describes his formative years as he moves between different millieux, from an idyllic rural childhood to the excitement of university, experience as a Second World War serviceman, life in post-war England, and the rough and tumble world of old-school journalism. With a foreword by novelist Tracy Sorensen and a new introduction by Julia Horne and Nick Horne, The Education of Young Donald Trilogy is a revealing and instructive tale from the author of The Lucky Country and an absorbing account of Australian social and intellectual life from the 1920s to the 1950s.

• Language: English
• Publisher: NewSouth
• Release date: Oct 22, 2021
• ISBN: 9781742245331

Book preview

PROLOGUE

Making our own fun

In the summer at Muswellbrook, as in other country towns, it was considered not only cooler but healthier and more manly for boys to ‘sleep out’. Since my bed was on a verandah beside the room where my parents played cards, this meant that, although I have more conventional memories of sounds that drifted into sleep – of the church clock striking the hours and the quarters, or of the rushing of water in the weir – my immediate and prevailing memory is of dutifully thinking the Lord’s Prayer and then losing consciousness to the sounds of the card game of bridge. For Thine is the Kingdom. The Power and the Glory. Forever and Ever. Amen. One No Trump. Two Diamonds. Two Hearts. Your lead, partner.

Our house was one of the centres of Muswellbrook’s amusement and triviality. It was said of my mother that ‘Mrs Horne entertains as much as a doctor’s wife’ and while my father took some of his pleasures more seriously my mother’s delight in the diversions of the late 1920s and early 1930s had no limits – bridge, mah-jongg, singsongs, surprise parties, mini-golf, tennis, grand balls, car drives, the talkies, golf tournaments, picnics, afternoon teas and late suppers were all there to be enjoyed as she waited for the next new ‘craze’ to catch up the people we knew in Muswellbrook.

When I came home from school, walking across the big paddock where the horses were kept, I was likely to see the white dresses of my mother and some of her friends as they enjoyed their afternoon tea beside the tennis court. I would take a cup of tea and a slice of sponge cake coated in crushed fruit and whipped cream and walk across the smaller paddock where we ran the cow, then into the backyard and up past the fruit trees to the kitchen, where I would eat the cake and give the plate to the dog to lick. My mother arranged at least three of these tennis parties during the week, mostly for her women friends, although my father usually came home early enough to change into cream trousers and white silk shirt and play a set, and at the weekends there were sometimes all-day tennis parties when a couple of dozen people would gather on one of the verandahs for lunch and we would run a sweepstake on the results. The kind of tennis played at our house created some scandal in Muswellbrook. The puritans who saw tennis as a matter of competitions and tournaments dismissed ours as ‘chatty tennis’; too much fun, not enough nation-building.

Although my mother liked her bridge as chatty as her tennis, my father gave a puritan sense of seriousness to bridge, analysing mistakes in play even if they won a game. He was not a good player, but he had learned some precepts from a book called Teaching Iris to Play Bridge, and since he expected life to yield its rewards only to those who followed the rules, justice demanded that the player who most closely followed the precepts in this book should win. I had learned to play bridge at the age of six or seven, and during the weekends we would often play the three-handed game, or, if a bridge player dropped in for an hour or two, I would make a fourth. In these family games my father would run us through some of his simple bridge player’s beliefs: Through strength into weakness or Lead the third highest of your longest and strongest. At moments of great exasperation (perhaps when he had gone down after being doubled) he would remind us that The game in bridge is to score below the line. My father’s simple rules from Teaching Iris to Play Bridge provided some of the most memorable precepts of my childhood.

At the gala bridge parties the spirit of chattiness prevailed. For these great occasions, bridge tables and chairs were brought in from all over town and there were great doings in the kitchen as my mother prepared cheese straws, sandwiches, savoury eggs, asparagus rolls, lamingtons and sponge cakes and then boiled water and coffee essence in our biggest saucepan, ready for reheating. (Coffee was coming in as a craze.) On the big night there was so much eating and laughing that only the most puritan players worried about their bridge. In our evening family games other than bridge we paid no tribute to conscience. Mah-jongg, for example, which was ‘all the rage’ before bridge, could be played without moral concepts. The hospital matron’s daughter had taught me mah-jongg at the age of five when I was in hospital with congestion of the lungs, and I preferred it to ludo or snakes and ladders, although in our house it was easy enough to get up a game of either.

My mother had issued an invitation to her friends to ‘drop in’ at night when they felt like it. (Scarcely anyone had a telephone: we had abandoned ours when my father had to economise after his salary was cut as a sacrifice to the Depression.) After dinner there might be knocks on the front door. Now who would that be? Merv or Rita? Bill? Irene? If only one or two dropped in they would just chat, or play bridge. If more dropped in, they might have a singsong. On more formal nights there were solo performances by those who ‘had voices’ and ‘had brought their music’. My father was one of those who ‘had a voice’ – my earliest memory of song was of him lying in bed, bouncing me up and down on his bent knees as he sang hit numbers from musical comedies. (Later his songs became melancholy, perhaps reflecting the beginnings of what later became a catastrophic shift in how he saw things.) But the music I most enjoyed were the singsongs, if I was able to be the one pedalling away at the pianola, pressing the pp or ff buttons when the instructions on the roll told me to, surrounded by all these singing grown-ups. When ‘Mick’, my Sydney cousin and greatest friend, stayed with us she and I would sometimes play ‘Tiptoe Through the Tulips’ or ‘Painting the Clouds with Sunshine’ after breakfast, before we settled down to a game of poker.

When there were Sydney relatives staying with us – my grandparents or uncles and aunts – there was always a lot of shouting and laughter over dinner. Sydney people were like that: they shouted at dinner. I became a shouter early. I remember once, when I was aged eight or nine, running off to the lavatory, which was ‘down the back’ at the bottom of the backyard, and sitting there unyieldingly while my grandfather stood outside and tried to persuade me to come back and apologise to my grandmother for shouting at her over dinner. It must have been a matter of some moment; usually I avoided ‘going down the back’ at night because of the spiders, and peed under the quince tree instead.

On the nights when my parents were not entertaining they might go out to night tennis (with the hard-shelled flying beetles bashing against the arc lights) or to mini-golf while it was the rage, or to the ‘picture show’, which was built after the talkies had come to stay. Occasionally we would go to the lending library of 5,000 books at the School of Arts, where my mother would get a ‘good book’, a Warwick Deeping novel, or something like that, while I would borrow a National Geographic Magazine or a Pearsons or a Strand magazine. (The names of the dozen or so books that were added to the library each month were printed as front-page news in the Muswellbrook Chronicle.) If we visited other people I always took a book in case I got bored. On Friday nights, when the shops were open until nine o’clock, we would sometimes walk up and down the main street, lit up with its electric lights, with much of the rest of the town, to look at ourselves. On the hottest summer nights we might go to the swimming baths (which had just been opened). My parents enjoyed themselves down at the deep end; I was left at the shallow end, until I taught myself to swim.

The most formal ways of having a good time were the most traditional – the Anglican Ball, the Masonic Ball and the Golf Ball. For these a band was brought up by train from Sydney, 180 miles away, arriving half an hour before a ball started and leaving on the 3.30 a.m. train, half an hour after the ball was over. When there was a ball I waited around until my mother had pinned a corsage on her long evening gown and my father had adjusted his white tie and put on his tailcoat, then I went off for the night to our neighbours, the Jeeveses. While Gwen and Gordon Jeeves and I were playing bobs (the ‘poor man’s billiards’), a couple of dozen of my parents’ ‘crowd’ would assemble at our house and have a drink – which they called a ‘spot’ – and a singsong. Then they would sort themselves into cars and drive off to the ball, some of them still singing. The next morning I would wake up in a bedroom in the Jeeveses’ house, watched over (as one might expect in a Catholic household) by prints of the Sacred Heart and the Pope. When I got back home my parents would still be in bed, sleeping it off, their finery scattered around them. On the washstand, for me, in a paper napkin, there would be a piece of cake with silver cachous on its white icing, and I would eat it as my second breakfast. In the next issue of the Muswellbrook Chronicle we would read descriptions of all the dresses women wore at the ball.

My father’s most serious diversions were golf and shooting. His interest in golf overwhelmed even our interest in bridge, mah-jongg, mini-golf, tennis and ludo. Golf was more than mere pleasure, and a great deal of our conversation was necessarily concerned with it. Between hands of mah-jongg, for example. Sometimes we would start the day with me sending golf balls back to my father as he practised putting into a glass tumbler on the verandah. He even had a few small clubs made for me, and from the age of six I spent many tedious hours going round the course with him, or with my mother, who was a ‘chatty’ golfer. When he won a cup, his one trophy in seven years of golfing, it was put in the place of honour on top of the pianola, replacing a cut-glass vase. I looked at it every night when I was practising my piano scales. The inscription said: MUSWELLBROOK GOLF CLUB. D. HORNE. ‘B’ GRADE CHAMPION, 1931.

The Muswellbrook golf links was a ‘sporting’ course, with eight creek crossings during a full game. For me, crossing the creek provided the main relief in the tedium, along with watching the crows that circled restlessly above the club house as if they were waiting to pick it clean; sometimes one of them would swoop on a ball lying in the brittle yellow grass of the fairway and carry it off to a nest in a gum tree. A few cows grazed on the course; occasionally a ball would land in a fresh cow pat.

Although most of them took their actual golfing seriously, the four dozen men and two dozen women who made up the Muswellbrook Golf Club allowed some social gaiety, when the golfing itself was over. When my father went off on a golfing expedition to one of the other country towns he would come back very jovial, with a pound of chocolate gingers or a jar of stuffed olives, or a pewter pot souvenired from a hotel. (For years I drank my milk out of a pewter pot on which was inscribed the name of a Singleton hotel.) I was taken on several of these expeditions. Once I sat on someone’s knee in a car on the night ride back from Denman; for a while they sang songs or told jokes about the aviatrix Amy Johnson and the Prince of Wales; then one of them suggested a game of ring-a-ring o’ roses. Beside the road, men in plus-fours and women in sensible shoes pranced round in a circle in the moonlight. I was told to stay in the car.

After golfing in his plus-fours on Saturdays, my father usually got into his grey flannels on Sundays and we went for a picnic, with rabbit shooting before and after lunch. There was the same dry grass as on the golf course, the same cow pats, the same crows with desolate cries, the same dazzling skies, but on shooting picnics the carcasses of dead cattle were to be found, or their bleached bones, whereas on the golf course someone carted the cows away if they died. On the way home the man who acted as our host would ask me to recite poetry. As we drove along in the dark on this Australian country road I would recite from the works of the nineteenth-century English romantics, perhaps six or seven poems. My favourites were ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’, ‘Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean’, ‘I come from haunts of coot and fern’ and ‘Oh, to be in England, now that April’s there’.

We spent about a fifth of the year in Sydney, holidaying there on each of the school vacations. My mother’s first city sport was hunting down new things to buy in the shops. Apart from foodstuffs and small household requirements, she bought nothing in Muswellbrook, saving the pleasures of purchase for concentrated indulgence in Sydney. (I did not realise the risks she ran in this diversion until one night back in Muswellbrook I sat on the verandah and listened to my parents argue about my mother’s having run up such a big bill at David Jones department store that they had cut off her credit and she had to open an account at Hordern Bros, a store down the scale from David Jones.) To me, the particular delight of the city was to enjoy the latest city crazes – pure orange juice served from green and orange coloured kiosks shaped in the form of huge oranges; then milkshakes, in milk bars of black and white tiles, with a lot of glass and chromium plate (chromium was the latest thing); then, not long before we left Muswellbrook, the hamburger sandwich, the new American delicacy.

What Sydney really meant to us was enjoyment of the natural and the primitive. The demanding bustle of pleasure that occupied my parents in their country town was replaced in the metropolis by the simplicities to be enjoyed in the bushland on the outskirts of Sydney and on Sydney beaches. It was in Sydney that we beheld the delights of nature; in the country (so brown and bare that it seemed unnatural) we enjoyed the pleasures of society. There was a reserve of bush less than a mile’s walk from my grandparents’ house, which was much more pleasant than anything available at Muswellbrook (where the trees were stripped away so that animals could eat dry grass and make money to reduce their owners’ overdrafts). Sometimes my father and I would walk there to eat our sandwiches, drink our thermos tea, sail my model boat and chat about topics such as the Roman conquest of Britain; but the real bushland extension of my grandparents’ house was Yowie Bay, an inlet of Port Hacking, then almost deserted, though now a suburb of Sydney, where my grandfather had his ‘weekender’. To get to the weekender, we would walk along a sandy bush track (keeping an eye out for snakes) and then climb down the steep stone steps my grandfather had built to the little house that jutted into the bay on stone stilts. We would put the stores in the cupboard and get into the dinghy and row out and fish; or scramble over the boulders picking oysters; or dig around in the mud looking for worms for bait; or, if it was high tide, jump off the verandah into the water. There was a lot of shouting over lunch; in the afternoon we might sit on the verandah and look across the quiet bay and talk until afternoon tea. I would then go to sleep to the light of an oil lamp and to the sound of the water lapping around the house; I might listen for a while as my grandfather discussed getting up before dawn to catch the tide. At Yowie we were simple-hearted fisherfolk, taking our milk condensed in cans like true primitives, and ignoring golf handicaps and bridge scores and the other demands of the high-pressure living that was already considered to be one of the great problems of the age.

The motor car, the most fundamental of all new crazes, also aided our communion with the natural. Two or three carloads, with everybody’s children and dogs, would occasionally go for a bush picnic, the men in their cream trousers and blazers and ties and motoring caps, the women in tailored ‘suits’. We would go to the National Park, a large bushland reserve south of Port Hacking, or down the Bulli Pass (where somebody’s radiator usually boiled over on the steep climb back), or up to the Blue Mountains or the Kurrajong Mountains. At any turn in the road, if a particularly beautiful view revealed itself, we might park for a while and admire it. For lunch we would build a fire of dry leaves, twigs and small dry branches, and grill lamb chops over it on a wire frame until they were black outside, the blacker the better: while we ate the burnt chops, holding them in our hands, a billy of tea simmered on the fire. We were true Australians. If we heard a kookaburra laugh during a picnic we felt even more Australian.

The climax of the year’s pleasure was the most traditional. For a week before Christmas Eve my mother would go into the city every day to do her Christmas shopping, while my grandmother prepared for the feasts of the Christmas–New Year festival. She would ice two Christmas cakes, bake dozens of fruit-mince pies, boil three Christmas puddings in the laundry copper, bake two hams, and get ready the dozen or so chickens she had fattened for Christmas: after chopping off their heads, she would pluck their feathers in the garden, draw their entrails in the kitchen, truss them, stuff them with sage and onion, then roast them in the oven, two at a time. On Christmas Eve these delicacies would be packed into boxes and we would go off to the house we had rented that year at Cronulla, then a beach resort isolated from the suburbs by bush, but now, like Yowie, part of them. About ten of us would stay in the house; others would drop in for the day during the four weeks we stayed there. We would decorate the house with balloons and paper streamers, then I would put out an empty pillowcase at the end of the bed, with a note to Father Christmas (I did not believe in him, but kept up the pretence for my mother’s sake). When I awoke at dawn the pillowcase would be crammed with purchases from the department stores. Instead of the usual mid-morning tea and scones in the kitchen we would all enjoy a glass (in my case, a sip) of port and a slice of fruit cake in the garden before we went down to the beach, sunned ourselves and had our first surf for the season. Boasting of our appetites, we would come back to find that the day’s extra guests had arrived, and when we were seated around the tables, we would cram in all we could of our feast, washing it down with beer. When the last nut was cracked and the remains of the last dried fig extricated from the last set of artificial teeth we would rest for a while, then go for another stroll down to the beach, and another surf. In the evening, after eating exactly the same meal, we would take down some of the balloons and form sides across the table to play balloon handball. On Boxing Day and until the day after New Year’s Day we would go on eating Christmas dinner, supplementing it with fish netted near the beach and sold alive. Then it was all gone, and the bones of the exhausted hams were used to make stock for a delicious split-pea soup, which also lasted for several meals.

For the whole four weeks, unless there was something wrong with the weather, we would go the beach morning and afternoon. On the beach there was always the feeling of being part of a friendly encampment; people would drift off into the surf and, when they came back and dried themselves, describe what had happened to them; then they would sunbake for a while and again drift off to the surf. We would discuss the kind of surf it was that day, what the seaweed, bluebottle or sunburn problems were, how the weather looked. Some days ‘Mick’ and I spent the whole time either on the water’s edge, building sandcastles and then tunnelling water into them so that they fell down, or jumping round in the surf. There were other days when it was the sun more than the surf that attracted us, and we could enjoy more sun. We would lie on the beach, our backs turned up, our cheeks pressed down into the sand, to achieve the mahogany stain that marked the true White Australian. We would go crimson quickly, then so quickly brown that the scorched skin came off in long white strips. We would peel it from each other with delight, enjoying the gentle tickle and congratulating ourselves on getting out of last year’s skin.

It was at Cronulla every summer that we bore witness to a truth that was self-evident to us every day of the year: that the most important part of human destiny was to have a good time.

PART 1

ONE

In the manner of country towns

My grandparents and some of my uncles and aunts would stand outside the carriage window talking to us as we waited for the express to leave. The train would take about three-quarters of an hour before we got beyond the suburbs of Sydney, first passing the slums of little terrace houses whose backyards, with their rusted iron sheds and dunnies, butted against the railway track; then the more ‘suburban’ brick houses, with their vestigial verandahs and red tile roofs. At the outskirts of Sydney an extra engine would be hooked on to carry us up into the forest ranges that led to the Hawkesbury River. In the summer the hills might be smothered in the dirty yellow smoke of bushfires, with charred trees glowing beside the railway track. After crossing the Hawkesbury (looking down on the large yellow jellyfish floating midstream) we would pick up speed, running for miles beside the mangroves and the pale blue water, in a long farewell to the delights of the coast. At Gosford we would buy bottles of oysters. For the rest of the hundred-mile trip up the coast we would see little but trees – some of them citrus orchards, most of them just dreary scrub.

As we approached Newcastle, the steel-making city at the mouth of the Hunter, there were settlements of fibro and weatherboard houses. Then as we skirted Newcastle, passing the stockyards and the coal trucks, we were back in the Hunter Valley. For the remaining eighty miles to Muswellbrook, apart from the two main towns of Maitland and Singleton, it was mostly brown grass paddocks fenced in with roughly dressed timber, rolling off to bluish hills. Sheep scampered away from the train as it clattered past, or rested in the distance, near a waterhole or in the shade of a tree. Sometimes we would stop beside a stock train: filthy with their own dung, the sheep would look at us through the bars of their trucks and bleat. In the drought years patches of clay-coloured earth, bare of grass, added the colouring of fever and the grass itself was drab with death. It would be dark when we arrived at Muswellbrook. The house would still smell of the naphthalene we had spread over the carpets before we went on holidays. We would light the gas lamp in the kitchen and sit down to our supper of oysters and bread and butter. Holidays were over.

The mouth of the Hunter (first named the ‘Coal River’) was found by the whites in 1797 by a party that had rowed up the coast from Sydney in a whaleboat looking for escaped convicts. Several years later someone remembered this ‘discovery’ when 300 Irish convicts, armed with rifles, pikes and cutlasses, rose in revolt near Sydney. The leaders of the revolt were hanged, but it was considered necessary to set up a penal settlement of ‘secondary punishment’, to punish the others and to act as a general reminder. To this purpose, a small and horrible settlement was established at the Coal River. By the time we were living in the Hunter Valley the coal-pit villages had long since coalesced around it to become Newcastle, Australia’s Pittsburgh, centre of heavy industry, producing some of the cheapest iron and steel in the world, and up the valley there were fifty to sixty pits where the miners were establishing one idea for what it might mean to be a worker in Australia.

Because in the upper reaches of the valley sheep and cattle grazing seemed to be the most honourable forms of endeavour available to humankind, to us at Muswellbrook, Newcastle appeared a mean, grim half-city and the pit towns an insubstantial encrustation. Our part of the valley had been ‘opened up’ in the 1820s by settlers, some of whom were such gentlemen that they stayed in Sydney while assigned convicts did their back-breaking for them, while most of the others were direct from England or Scotland, unstained by colonial birth (which usually meant a convict mother) or colonial ways.

Imagine Muswellbrook first as scrub, brush, forest and a river with its tributary creeks, the land of the Aborigines. Then the whites walk into this ‘wilderness’ and begin to clear it for their huge sheep and cattle runs. After ten years someone hammers in a few pegs along the valley and on the side of some hills and lays out a few streets. By 1840 there are forty-one houses and 215 people. There are only two edifices that affirm a connection with a wider civilisation – a post office and a barracks for the mounted police. Then, like cardboard cutouts placed together one by one, affirmations of civilisation appear. An Anglican church goes up, then a Presbyterian church. A courthouse is built. Despite opposition from the gentry, the Wesleyans put up a chapel. Something even more challenging happens: the Irish build a Catholic church. By 1862 an eight-roomed private house is taken over and formed into a school for twenty-five pupils. Someone starts a newspaper in the back room of a shop; it doesn’t last. A few years later the railway reaches Muswellbrook, running right through the centre of the town. By now there are eleven hotels and three wine shops. In 1871 a School of Arts goes up, with a library of 150 books, readings, eisteddfods and debates. Two comfortable inns are built, one for commercial travellers and one for the gentry. In the 1880s the Catholics open a convent school and the Masons build their temple. By now there are several ‘fine residences’ and the green trees that were planted earlier are flourishing in the wide streets. Muswellbrook had become a town. In 1900 they laid down a primitive golf-course; they built the first bunkers in 1926 and replaced the sand greens with grass in 1927, the year we arrived at Muswellbrook. If you looked at Muswellbrook from a distance, sprawling along steep hills, with leafy trees, church spires and green thickets on the banks of the creek that wound through it, it looked like something alien that had been set among the bare, brown paddocks.

The typical Muswellbrook house was a four-roomed weatherboard cottage painted battleship grey, with wide verandahs and a reddish-brown corrugated-iron roof, but here and there was a more ambitious old house, with a traditional formal garden and a gravel drive; there were other old houses, made of little bricks, with steeply pitched slate roofs, and a few two-storeyed stone houses with cast iron railings on their balconies. On the fringes of paddocks, or at the back of other people’s gardens, there was an occasional shack, the paint blistered off its woodwork, and even some of the boards falling off, flapping down on one nail, with poultry scratching the dirt round it; and there were beginning to appear houses in the Sydney suburban manner, usually in fibro, with a few feet of verandah tacked in front of the main bedroom.

If you walked to the top of our hill you found the doctors’ houses, then you rushed down the other side of the hill to the cemetery. There was an even steeper fall in another part of town – I once tumbled down it, head over heels – from a stately home down to the gasworks. In the river flats, between the creek and the railway track, there was a sleepy part – old houses with nothing behind them but paddocks of maize, separated by empty roads wide enough to take six lanes of traffic, shimmering with heat and in summer drumming with insect noises. The blacksmith (who was also the undertaker and for a while the mayor) had his shed alongside the Catholic church; the railway shunting yards were just across the creek from the golf links; when you walked down the main street past Eaton’s Hotel and turned the corner you found yourself right out of town, back in the country.

Some of the town’s shops were isolated failures, with holes in their flyproof doors and the colour faded out of the flyblown window displays. Across the railway line, in the new part of town, there was a cluster of brick shops which looked as up-to-date as one of the minor shop agglomerations built ten years before in a remote part of a Sydney suburb. At one end of town, near the river, there were some confident shops of old colonial style, wide-verandahed and leisurely, cleanly kept and freshly painted. At the other end of town, near the railway station, there were a dozen or so down-at-heel wooden shops with stilted wooden verandahs, the paint peeling off them, looking like a set from a Western movie. (It did not occur to me that Australian country towns had begun their histories looking like sets from Western movies.) However, it was to the main part of the town that we gave our respect. Here there was a department store, which we spoke of as an ‘octopus’ as, taking over some of the smaller stores, it spread slowly down its side of the street; there were small shops that sometimes broke into the brief bad temper of price-cutting wars, bringing prices down a penny at a time throughout the day, proclaiming each change with a freshly scribbled placard; the Greek’s café was here, with its marble soda fountain, marble-topped tables, home-made chocolates and steak and eggs; it was also here that the banks had their buildings and the doctors, lawyers, stock and station agents and so forth had their offices; and here one could respect the plain stone of the courthouse, the late-colonial floridity of the post office, the barracks style of the Strand picture show and the indescribable style of the School of Arts.

IT WAS OUTSIDE THE GREEK’S CAFÉ THAT I REMEMBER SEEING THE daughter of one of Muswellbrook’s landed families sitting back in the seat of her father’s car in Muswellbrook’s main street waiting for a café waitress to bring her out an ice-cream. One of my eight-year-old friends started to give cheek; then he stopped in mid-sentence and ran off. She had not even heard him, but it was against his very nature to give cheek to a member of an old family. This was one of the few occasions when I saw a bearer of one of our famous names. Like my mother, they did their important shopping in Sydney, and if they wanted people from the town they sent for them.

It is hard to convey the sense of special consideration with which an Australian living in a country town could then regard the large landholder whose property was developed before the town itself began to form. Muswellbrook was particularly concerned with its old families, because we saw it as ‘landlocked’. The large pastoral estates on which the old families lived their remote and unimaginable lives ran right up to the town, cramming it in, and engulfing it with a feeling of mysterious presence.

The special consideration we gave them was different from the city attitudes toward wealth: it was partly a recognition of priority (they got there first) and of the sheer importance and bigness of their holdings. There was something of the Norman about them: in the original land seizures from ‘the natives’, and in the massive indifference of some of them to the townspeople: even in the self confident territorial identification, as when one gentleman named his son ‘Hunter’ after the river and its valley, as if claiming for his family a title that covered an area as wide as the English North Country.

Even those members of old families who played some part in the town’s affairs (perhaps a round of golf, a church attendance or some charity work) still confounded us because we knew they could enjoy luxuries and indulge in eccentricities. Trips to Europe, for example. Or even trips to Tasmania. They belonged to the social life of Sydney, where they stayed at the Australia Hotel or their clubs, and sometimes raced horses at the Easter and Spring meetings. In Muswellbrook Eaton’s Hotel was reserved for their purposes. When Ruth White, the daughter of one of the old families engaged in social work in the town her coolness and self-assurance made our mothers feel self-conscious and inadequate.

To cut the old families down to size we invented stories about how they got there. Even though most of these families were established in the early ‘gentry’ period of land settlement, we would decide that one family was founded by a tramp who walked into the district carrying his swag, or that the founder of another family won his estate at cards. We tried to destroy their aristocratic look (one gave his son the Christian name of ‘Squire’); we tried to imagine that these grand seigneurs were immediately descended from Texan horse thieves.

IN ITS TURN, MUSWELLBROOK, IN THE MANNER OF COUNTRY towns, had produced from its 4,000 people its own internal structure of social differences, perhaps not significant to the old families, who scarcely observed the anthill, but with plenty of meaning to those who lived inside it. Since enjoying leisure was so important, it was access to the sources of pleasure in Muswellbrook that became one of the significant ways in which those of its citizens who were eating well were able to distinguish between themselves. Anyone could play tennis, cricket or football who was good enough for the district competitions, but there were some forms of enjoyment that were not available except as privileges or affirmations of where you stood in the world. From this point of view the most serious events of the year were the two-day Picnic Race Meeting and the Picnic Races Ball because almost all of Muswellbrook was excluded from them. It was an invitation to the Picnic Races Ball that settled who was on top. Most of those who went to the ball were the local landholders and their friends from Sydney and from other country districts. To these were added the members of the merchant family that controlled the department store, who gave the town’s social structure a peculiar shape; and by right, or by grace, or by power of overdraft, there also came the town’s professional men and those, such as the bank managers and the stock and station agents, who most closely served the interests of the landholders. There were distinctions within lesser gentry: for instance, the leading stock and station agent (who wore an eyeglass) outranked even the doctors. Whatever most touched the landholders was most esteemed. Since my father was only a teacher at the government school my parents were not invited to the Picnic Races Ball. ‘In the West’ my mother would say, as if to suggest that the human race was not altogether without hope, ‘the schoolies are invited to the Picnic Races’.

Schoolteachers had to content themselves with membership of the golf club, where they might join the townspeople who were invited to the Picnic Races Ball, along with other claimants to position such as the bank clerks, the mine manager’s daughter, a well-to-do grocer, the managers of the two main hotels, the daughter of a wealthy butcher, the oil company ‘reps’, and the wife of the assistant stationmaster. The bridge players were much the same ‘crowd’ as the golf players, along with those who could have joined the golf club if they had wanted to play golf. Bridge playing was itself a mark of status, superior to euchre and five hundred. (My mother described euchre as ‘a very funny little game’.) There were also implications of where one stood in the world among the lesser balls, notably that the Golf Club Ball was more ‘exclusive’ than the Masonic and Anglican balls, although the Anglican Ball was ‘exclusive’ enough to exclude the rector’s wife, who was considered a ‘bluestocking’ and ‘a bit of a red flagger’.

Beneath the golf club set another line was drawn, again with overlapping. (My parents lapped both above and below it.) My mother wasn’t invited to some of the golfing houses, and most of the people who came to her tennis parties and afternoon teas did not belong to the golf club. Her tennis parties were a kind of cooperative in which her tennis ‘crowd’ put in l/6d a week each to buy tennis balls and pay for the marking of our court and brought their individual contributions to afternoon tea. The people she entertained at home at afternoon teas were schoolteachers, schoolteachers’ wives, the wives of some of the salaried railway officers, the postmaster’s wife, wives of oil company reps, a hairdresser, a piano teacher, and other odds and ends. The way my mother explained this was that ‘the moving population kept together’, that those who were stationed in the town for only a limited time preferred to make their own fun among themselves. Finally she resigned from the golf club because she considered some of the other women members had insulted her. It had something to do with a committee meeting of the women ‘associates’ when she and the wife of an oil company rep were left to put away the chairs and clear the ashtrays, as if they were housemaids. My mother decided that the golf crowd were cheap snobs who did not recognise that schoolteachers’ wives were as good as the wives of pharmacists.

OUR HOUSE WAS ON A HILL AND FROM ONE SIDE OF IT YOU COULD see, in the river flats, the steeple of St Alban’s Church of England; from the front, on the side of a hill, you could see the steeple of St John’s Presbyterian church; from the back on the side of another hill, you could see the steeple of St James’ Catholic church; and if you looked down into the town’s main street you could see the tin roof of the Methodist chapel. A quick walk round our verandahs provided a reminder of the religious history of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales. Just glancing at these four churches one might think that the religious tolerance that had evaded the old world was at last flowering in Muswellbrook. In fact the town’s tone was set by the Anglicans, with some help from the Presbyterians, and its affairs were very largely in the hands of the Masons. It was church adherence that lay behind some of our most significant social divisions, even if most of those who took pride in their Anglicanism might attend church only on Anzac Day, the national day. To be Anglican was not necessarily to go to St Alban’s. It was to see oneself among the ascendancy.

The Presbyterians were accepted as collaborators but it was hard for Anglicans like us to understand why Presbyterians didn’t just change churches: there didn’t seem much point in remaining a Presbyterian. (My father, born a Presbyterian, had been converted to Anglicanism by marriage.) The Methodists were unimportant – not quite as unimportant as the Salvation Army (which mustered a small following among the miners) – but unimportant. Their notorious Bible-banging and wowseristic opposition to card playing, dancing and enjoying oneself represented an underground threat to those who found part of the meaning of life in having a good time. But it was by our difference from the Catholics (who made up about a fifth of the town) that we members of the ascendancy most clearly distinguished ourselves. In the Masonic families it is doubtful if we considered ‘the Micks’ to be fully human. My schoolfriends and I believed that the 250-or-so boys and girls who went to the convent were different physically from us; their faces were coarser than ours – more like apes. I can still see my childhood image of a Catholic boy: flat-nosed, freckled, scowling, barefooted, tough and as white-skinned as a grub (a white skin was an evil in a sun-worshipping society); he is about to throw a stone. That the Catholic church occupied the most commanding of the Muswellbrook hills was seen by the Masonic families to be evidence of the Catholics’ ‘pull’. Trust them to get the best positions in town, our parents would say. There’s no doubt about Catholics they stick together. This belief was held despite the fact that there was only one Catholic family of any significant wealth or position in the whole district. I believed that Catholics had some special words of their own. Through the paling fence that separated our house I heard Mr Jeeves cursing his lawnmower. I misunderstood ‘bastard’ – a word I had not heard before – for ‘custard’ and deduced that for Catholics ‘custard’ was a swear word.

Our intolerance had no necessary relation to special cases. One of the priests visited us on some charity work, and we were inclined to consider him a fine, sincere man. When I was sitting in the sun at home recovering from bronchitis (with brown paper soaked in camphorated oil sewn to my singlet to make me better) some nuns called, and these black figures of superstition spoke quite pleasantly. Much more important: Miss Irene Morley, my teacher for four years at school, was a Catholic, yet, after my parents and grandparents, I considered her the most admirable person living. And Gordon and Gwen Jeeves next door were great friends, even if they went to bed in a room decorated with pictures of the Sacred Heart and the Pope; and even though, for a while, Gordon dressed in red and lace robes at his church and gabbled words I did not understand, reciting his altar boy’s Latin as we played in the cowshed. And Mr Jeeves, who was a railway fireman, seemed splendid when I thought of him striding the plates and shovelling coal into the furnace as the train rumbled across the valley through the night, up through the hills and out into the world that lay to the north.

For that matter, our Anglicanism also lacked application in special cases. The rector was not an Anglican at all, really. You would often see him sitting on the floorboards of the verandah of an old wooden house in the main street chatting to the workless men who sat there most of the day; or you might see him leaning against one of the verandah posts of a shop talking to men who didn’t play golf or bridge or get invited to the Anglican Ball. In his T-model Ford he visited some of the cockies who lived in shanties squeezed between the big estates, but he was not invited to the houses of the old families. And because of her reputation as a radical and an intellectual – she wrote letters to the Muswellbrook Chronicle about the town’s unemployed – the rector’s wife was not invited to play any part in the church’s social affairs. The respectability of Anglicanism was maintained despite this democracy in the rectory.

OUR CLASS ROLE AS ANGLICANS AND GOLF AND BRIDGE PLAYERS had its hazards. As I was getting onto the merry-go-round at the Muswellbrook Show it was hard to believe that I had in fact heard a woman say: ‘There’s that stuck-up, fish-faced Mrs Horne.’ Stuck-up! This was my mother, not one of the cheap snobs who married pharmacists or doctors. In the manner of a young child I said nothing about this: but I continued to turn it over in my mind for several years. As a family we remained ignorant of the lives of the shop assistants, railway workers (apart from ‘salaried railway officers’), miners, and the other people who made up most of the town. Mr Jeeves was the exception. He lived next door and he was a friend. He was a good tennis player, and he sometimes had a family game with us, when the tennis ‘crowd’ were not around.

Although the two small coal-pits at Muswellbrook were closed for most of our stay there, and although most of our stay coincided with the Depression, I did not know much about what was happening to the unemployed in Muswellbrook. The heads of about a hundred households, something like one in ten, were out of work. Some drifted into the half world of odd jobs – a bit of work on one of the estates, some rabbit shooting and the like; a few obtained government sponsored ‘relief work’; most simply filled in the day as best they could and drew food relief from the police station. It was not until 1933, and then largely on the initiative of the rector’s wife, that any attempt at community relief was made. There were appeals for old blankets and old boots, and the Boy Scouts ran a drive for old clothes. A concert for relief funds brought £20, and an empty shop was taken over for regular sales of goods; enough money was raised to open a lunchtime soup kitchen and to give milk to the children of the unemployed. As a family, we did not seem to take much of this into our comprehension. My father had taken a twenty per cent cut in salary. That was our contribution to the Depression.

Despite its two mines and the railway workers, Muswellbrook was presented as a pastoral market town, and the unemployed didn’t exist as a group. It was different on the big mine fields farther down the Hunter Valley, nearer the coast. It was here that for years most of the men in whole townships were out of work – in one town, Greta, ninety-five per cent of the men were workless – and where, in the Rothbury disturbances of 1929, a miner had been shot dead. Altogether in Australia at the depths of the Depression, nearly a third of the work force was unemployed. I have one memory of a number of men marching down Muswellbrook’s main street behind a red flag, but I think they may have been the railway men going to their annual picnic. Plenty of swaggies who had hit the track passed through town, sleeping under the bridge or in the pig pens at the showground, where they had a galvanised-iron roof over their heads and a concrete floor under their backs. If they knocked at our tradesmen’s door asking for food, since vitamins had become a craze, my mother would give them oranges. When my grandfather was staying with us on one occasion he walked into the hall to find that a swaggie had come through the front door and was walking towards him. My grandfather shouted: ‘Go to buggery!’ The swaggie ran out of the house, and possibly out of town.

More within our comprehension than the unemployed were the drifters and scroungers, then a normal feature of country towns and an essential part of some Australian short stories and some movies, in which they were represented as the people who alone saw the falsity of the gentility that surrounded them. One of my best girlfriends at school, one of the smartest kids in the class, had a father who was one of the town’s most notorious scroungers, and a notable chook thief. The family lived in a rickety shack with hardly any furniture; when the head of the household got drunk he would sometimes beat his wife and kids, until the boys got big enough to hit him back.

IN 1931 A PHOTOGRAPH WAS TAKEN OF THE FOURTH CLASS OF Muswellbrook District Rural School. There we all were – forty of us – posed in front of the pepper tree, the two smallest boys sitting cross-legged on the ground, and to the right of us a German heavy machine-gun, shipped from some battlefield in France to be set up as a trophy of war beside the school tennis court. The photograph showed how the clothes our parents put us into could seem to divide us – but it was not a real division. About half the boys did not wear shoes, but being barefoot, if a distinction, was a distinction of worthiness. Barefooted boys were tough; you didn’t look down on them. None of the others present in the photograph was the child of a golf player. In fact, the only time I remember playing with the child of a golf player at Muswellbrook was at a golf function. He was the son of a bank manager. He became so objectionable that one of the other golfers gave me a penny to punch him on the nose.

Usually we would walk home from school down the main street chattering about the town with the high scepticism of children and sometimes giving cheek to the shopkeepers (until one of them, the manager of a Cash ’n’ Carry store, told on me to my father, who gave me a belting). But sometimes we would sneak home from school along the railway line, preferring the grass and the weeds of its ditch to the tar pavements of the main street, and discuss a favourite plan of ours, that one weekend we would run away to Denman. Even when I got out of the railway ditch I could avoid the town, by scrambling along an old drain that ran under its main street and into the paddock, behind our tennis court, where the horses were kept.

As the town’s community of children we had a public life, in which the grown-ups could see what we were doing. But there was also a private town we had of our own. Some of it consisted of hiding places: there were river banks in which we could lie in the grass and gossip; old sheds and stables where we could pass on secrets and look at each other. Some of us had made cubby houses. Even climbing a tree and gossiping was to create part of the children’s private world. Around our house there were several old sheds and a number of trees available for various negotiations but the two special places were a large clump of cannas into which one could creep with a friend and remain altogether hidden – and the children’s realm of ‘under the house’, an extensive cavern, since the back of the house was propped up on piers on the side of a hill, and provided a whole range of the pleasures of privacy. But we carried around with us our private world even when they could see us. One could stand for hours in the water at the shallow end of the swimming pool with a girl and they didn’t know what we were talking about. At children’s parties we could giggle and whisper behind our hands. And in the school playground there could be a private web of subversion as enormous as that of a prison yard. If nothing else was available, there were always private looks, secret signs, riddles, double meanings.

It was with the more intelligent of the girls that I could do the most pleasant talking (in our class none of the boys matched, in wits, the brightest of the girls) – in the classroom, in the playground (until we reached the age of segregation), at children’s parties, at the movies, sometimes in the backyard, and best of all, when we were organising an act for a classroom play. But except for the girls in our street (who became honorary boys) it was with boys that I was supposed to spend most of my time out of school, except at children’s parties. As boys we could swing on the weeping willows on the banks of Muscle Creek, making Tarzan cries, or compete in throwing stones so that they skimmed along the water; or scoop up frog spawn in a bottle and take it home to watch it grow into tadpoles; or lie on the sand and watch the dragonflies; or sit under an old tree and have a yarn, chewing dried stalks of grass. If we were in a paddock we could kick dried cow turds at each other or chuck stones, or we might try to put burrs in each other’s hair or push each other into clumps of nettles; then we could run around like mad and practise flying tackles, or see who could pee highest against the fence, or catch a grasshopper, hold it in his fist and let it fly into someone’s face when he wasn’t looking, or pull its legs off and watch it wriggle. When one of the town’s bitches was on heat several dozen of the several hundred dogs (there were more dogs than Methodists) sometimes formed into a pack and followed her; a pack of boys might follow them, roaming all over town, yelping with the dogs, until they got bored and ran over to the Common to try their hands as bullfighters with the cows.

When we were old enough to be segregated into boys’ and girls’ playgrounds, in the boys’ playground, by sheer force, toughness was the strongest code, not only as a test of adventurousness (climbing to the top of the tree) or of bravery (fighting on although your nose was bleeding), but as an assertion of contempt for all other standards. A ‘real boy’ was a bully: he went barefooted; he had warts on his knuckles and scabs on his knees; he defied classroom instruction and carried a lump of resin in his pocket to rub on his hands before a caning; he asserted his toughness with his whole body, lurching and pushing, scorning even to speak, except to mangle the language in a jargon of his own. In this sense I was not a real boy: I wore shoes, I didn’t have warts, I welcomed classroom instruction, and I chattered all day, priding myself on my command of language and collecting new words with more enthusiasm than I collected stamps and, on the whole, unlike a ‘real boy’, I preferred conversation with some of the girls. Fortunately there were only two real boys in the class and the rest of us tried to keep clear of them, not only because we didn’t want to have to explain to our mothers why we had come home with a thick ear, but also because their surliness and taciturnity prevented them from even entering into our games. The rest of us could not parallel their standards of masculinity, and usually we left them to fight it out with each other to see which of them was the most male.

What sometimes made me feel ill at ease as a young male was an occasional physical timidity: I could pull the wings off grasshoppers with the best of them, and I enjoyed pushing boys into nettles or being pushed into them myself, but when it came to bullfighting in the Common I was a bit frightened of the cows, and when it came to climbing a difficult tree I tried not to go first, preferring to leave some other boy to grapple with the perils at the top. I tried to conceal this hesitance about risking my neck, partly by adopting the vocabulary of toughness and partly by forcing myself to perform deeds of derring-do if there was no way out, but I wished that it were not so. To be a real boy one had to conceal part of oneself and pretend to be something one was not. I was terrified that I might lose my nerve if in the next war I had to go over the top at the front into the murderous crossfire of the enemy’s machine guns, although I consoled myself that if I could get into the cavalry like my father and fight in the desert against the Turk rather than in France against the Hun, war would seem less frightening because I would be riding a horse. Yet I had not yet learned how to ride a horse.

IN THE FASHION OF THE TIME, I HATED THOSE PARTS OF Muswellbrook that were old. The verandah posts on the shops, the cast-iron balconies, the stone courthouse, the gravel drives, the old houses, the marble soda fountain at the Greek’s – I would have liked to have seen all these pulled down. I had the Sydney suburban belief that this should all be replaced with the modern. It would then be substantiated and real. We had no sense of Muswellbrook’s past: no one told us anything about the history of the Hunter Valley. Apart from some false legends about the landed families we knew nothing about how or why or when Muswellbrook had been founded and how it had grown to be what it was. I knew more about the Roman settlement of Britain than about the settlement of Muswellbrook.

But I respected the Hunter River. I had a sense of its little streams rising in the bush-covered hills and growing into rivers that freshened thousands of square miles of grazing country, and of how the Hunter ceased to be ours once it left Maitland, where it had to strain itself through mosquito-infested mangrove country to reach the wide, shallow, sandy outlet where the filth of Newcastle was cast into it before it reached the Pacific. Part of the significance of this river in our imagination was that it was the Hunter that made us a ‘flood town’. In fact Muswellbrook township was hardly ever inundated by the Hunter – this was more often the lot of Maitland, where,