I’m just looking for clues at the scene of the crime

The Sociology of A Place To Call Home Part 10

by Sandshoe (Honshades)

I found a place to live in on my own in Townsville.

Alcohol was the primary issue.

I well empathised by that time with my mother intercepting my father’s account of being drunk on an occasion way back when. My mother looked up from her crochet and scoffed he knew that was not true. My father said it was true. My mother would have no truck with it.

I saw my father affected by alcohol once. His lowered inhibitions revealed he could crack an inappropriate quip not half. I was 16. The occasion was the one work party it was deemed appropriate I attend with my parents and his quip to a half circle of his colleagues…all male…answer to an admiring reference they made to me.

Fortunate my mother did not hear him. I kept it secret from her. His quip

Fragile…Yes

was racist and sexist. I kept secret from him how offensive it was from my viewpoint. He was fragile if he knew I understood it and I perceived his work colleagues were shocked.

Unheard of in any case had I…as I considered…bawled him out in a private location the next day. I have never repeated what he said.

We can choose to change culture.

I drank in my early experience of University although never in my College room, sometimes to excess. My father and I had a drink at a bar at Brisbane airport on one of several occasions he flew to Brisbane to see me.

Residents of Women College were often drunk and disorderly after nights out. My own ultimate indiscretion rests on walking early one morning from College to attend a champagne breakfast at the University.

Flow on champers…

Champagne flowed. Few people turned up. I had never drunk champers before. The effect was a delicious high until I arrived back at College. I had forgotten Open Day. Residents were expected to host visitors who included parents with high hopes their High School age daughters in transition to University would establish residence in these exclusive premises. My vivid recall is of the trouble to maintain myself upright and walk through a throng of people to escape upstairs into my room. No-one intervened. No-one mentioned it.

My companionship was girls from homes of academic professionals, government ministers, graziers, industry and some small business. The WC song was a collegiate binder. We vocalised satirical concept of our ‘propriety’. Our residence lent ‘us grace at every station’.

Residence for a year and a term was nevertheless fearful containment driven by homesickness. I thought it a coop of claustrophobic imprisonment. In contrast to sun dappling through the trellis of a bungalow verandah, brick stolidity and the daunt of panels of glass on a walkway between the buildings allowed me a corridored view of my housing outside and in especially that I felt anxious electric lights illuminated our traipse across the walkway.

My better adjusted college friends who went to boarding school assured me living in the WC was a cinch. Kindness was mark of my experience of day-to-day chat between residents who were my friends. I loved their friendship. When I heard a discrete rumour someone was bullied by

a bully

someone somewhere in the College who I did not know the concept was remote as if they lived in a distant country. I stood against one attempt. I outright rejected the fresher system of extreme pranks.

I never sought the counsel of the Principal of the College. Likely I carried with me from High School a habit of aloof co-existence.

On habit, complicated that evening meals were formal during the week and we wore our university gowns. The Principal’s gown hem dipped at the back where it was torn and she walked with visiting dignitaries down a centre aisle after we had taken our places. The back of her gown had small rents. Its tattered condition I was incredulous was said to be evidence of her status. Someone catching a shoe heel in the dangling loop the hem made and her falling one evening was nothing compared with anxiety she would.

Rostered students at the Principal’s table withdrew with the Principal and visitors to an elegantly furnished room for after-dinner drinks. Alcohol in

This looks rostered to me…

the College was otherwise forbidden. I dreaded a rostered dinner. If the Principal tripped on her gown. I feared I would deal with it without any grace. I felt foolish sat on a stage elevated above a hall of diners.

If we missed a meal, we were on our own. I had an income and fashionable clothes. On weekends I explored restaurants in Brisbane city. Regular remuneration meant I had means even sufficient to send home a swag concerned my parents were paying my residential bill. My father wrote his thanks it came in handy to pay an insurance bill. I do not know if it was as much money as I thought or his insurance bill was a doozy.

I did not consider playing tennis. I played a high standard at 12 years of age. My mother was a champion tennis player and my siblings. My father who was not accompanied me to competition matches, more often regional games my mother as well. He stood at the back wire fence of

It’s love thirty

the court where he groaned and mumbled instruction at me if I missed a shot. I felt I was an impostor. If my parents conceded to protest I may have made that they did not ensure I took my racquet to College, it was an error on all of our parts.

A close friend who became a professional educator told me in the 90s she knew what I should have been. She said a tennis professional. I was astonished the thought had never crossed my mind.

My father wanted to rail my bicyle to College. I was refused it. He was mistaken to not send it. I did not want to incur expense. Freight from North Queensland to Brisbane looked like unimaginable luxury.

I joined the University Filipino club because I enjoyed its family atmosphere and sobriety. A History club offered by contrast a drinks evening and I withdrew from the slops.

I saw the musical Hair in Sydney in 1969 standing in the last place allowed and entranced. I sat that afternoon in the middle of Kings Cross I

Very hirstute

had visited once as a child with my brother and took a mental snap shot of its now eccentricity that my surround seemed a stage itself draped in flags that were each the flag of the United States. American soldiers on R & R from the Vietnam War and their soft accents dominated a soundscape of Elvis singing Blue Hawaii. I felt suspended in sun and isolation from the mainstream politic. I remain impressed how elegant in uniform and sober the soldiers were as they strolled in and out of one business address to the next.

My boyfriend’s conscription into the Army was averted by student deferment. He was a vociferous opponent of the Vietnam War. I was opposed since the beginning of 1968 when a returning soldier invited me to a secret location to view photos he had smuggled out of unimaginable atrocity. I kept secret his identity.

My great enjoyment was the University choir and Church In the Round I attended with my boyfriend on occasion although I was not a believer. I can find no contemporary reference to the meeting. The congregation sat around the pulpit. The minister was a skilled facilitator. The meeting was participatory. I made one naive address people are born good.

Another resident was leaving College to rent with friends. I was offered a place. Our share house looked over the Brisbane River. The address was

River of …

a romantic aspect and its facade. Inside was a sprawled dump of poverty burdened inmates.

Male associates of my flat mates who were close friends met me at the door when I came home one night in the company of my boyfriend, grabbing at and mocking his wearing a collegiate tie, intimidating and drunk. My flatmates apologised. I did not fit in. They exploited visits to a parental home from where they thieved resources and food. The student might well have been owed as was the answer to my conservative reference opposed to it as theft. I experienced depression relieved by exercising initiative to find other housing.

I shared a University admin professional’s rent in a soulless 2-bedroom flat in a multiplex over a set of shops, but did not like in my cosseted naivety her obsessive talk about a married lecturer who she avowed she was in love with, he with her. I justified to myself I was the fault I had not pandered to her tortured heart when she left abruptly. In retrospect I thought it irony she complained when I applied to move in that her flat mates never stayed.

My neighbours were a couple with one talented child who was High School age. His parents gave me permission to take him to live theatre to

Tom Stoppard 1937 – hasn’t fucking died yet

see ‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead’ by Tom Stoppard. I made him cocoa in my flat after the play. His parents were happy he enjoyed the play, but decided on potential led astray by a University student. He was a 15 year old. I did not resent instruction I was to minimise contact with their son. I instead acquired sad embarrassment as add-on to struggle to find a flat mate.

I chose to move into a soulless unfurnished apartment in a modern tenement building with a final year traumatised by her first experience of a Practical as a Social Worker. She believed she would leave Social Work. I yearned to study independent of the restriction imposed on me by the Education Department. The atmosphere was one of unreality, struggle and student penury. A male friend of ours on our way out for an evening balanced a whiskey on a ledge over a living room doorway. He announced it would be there for him when we returned. I felt intimidated and relief my flate mate had to find housing at distance to access employment she was assigned to.

Accommodation on my own in the furnished downstairs flat of a quaint two story home, a kind landlady living above, provided me haven.

Frocked up in a ballgown, I met the second boyfriend of my life other than early childhood and innocent loves, he tall and handsome dressed in an Airmen’s Club formal dress uniform. The occasion was a society

Nancy boys or girls

event. We introduced ourselves as a waiter offered a drink tray. ‘Never when I’m flying’, he said charming. He flew a plane. We danced a waltz.

My boyfriend had excused himself from me concerned to rescue wallflowers. He was however beginning to look neither handsome or gallant soaked in alcohol at the end of social evenings.

The next time my new friend and I coincided was in the University library, I dressed in a blue sweatshirt with the identifier University of Queensland, white jeans and desert boots, my hair in two plaits. Classic.

He asked would I coffee with him in the refectory basement. A song starting up on the juke box sounded in the stair well as we walked down the stairs together. I heard for the first time George Harrison’s ‘While My

Good man

Guitar Gently Weeps’. I engaged with the exquisite sound and song, swept into the words. I look at you all/See the love there that’s sleeping/While my guitar gently weeps.

I ended my relationship with my then former boyfriend. His grieving I had not factored in. Guilt tortured me. I feared he would fail his year that he was repeating.

The two men attended the same High School.

My new boyfriend called hinself the product of a working class family. He told me in an unguarded moment he had seen me with his former schoolfriend the night we met and decided to steal me off him as one-upmanship. He baldly told me he had resented at school his schoolfriend’s background. He had thought his schoolfriend returned higher grades because of his privilege.

The two men have been successful. The son of a worker has achieved even perhaps his then ambition to be a man of greater privilege.

Meanwhile, either way I felt indescribably uncomfortable being told frequently of his tortured feelings for a former girlfriend. I was single

I’m single mate, trust me, I’m a nurse

again.

In Townsville then the summer holidays ending and my aboritve attempt to find employment behind me, committed to lying to my parents I was happy to go to TTC, I had lived in five different addresses in the two previous years of 1968 and 1969.

I was looking for my sixth home away from home. I discovered the hard way the special disadvantage of the Townsville TTC. The College was in an isolated location. Getting there without private transport was not easy. There was some limitation on bus service to it or was it no bus service that went direct.

I viewed part-furnished rental accommodation with a real estate agent. I felt shocked and confused it was shown to me, a window opening vacant, window frames leaning against an internal wall, broken furniture. It seemed worth being condemned for demolition.

The premises I rented was a securely lockable half-house.

My travel time was near an hour and a half each way.

to be continued…

Christina Binning Wilson

I lie around the lounge like this all the time, don’t you?

The Sociology of A Place To Call Home Part 9

by Sandshoe (Honshades)

My father kept his own secret from me in the year I went to Townsville and from my ill mother.

My mother was crippled with polymyalgia rheumatica that was sudden onset. I was sitting at the kitchen table arranging postage stamps in an album, in 1966 still at High School, summer and my mother at the other end of our long kitchen sitting as was her wont on the kitchen linoleum floor in a breezeway, crocheting with her back lent up against the kitchen sink cupboard. She drew to my attention she had tried to stand up and could not. She was wincing and half up holding onto the sink behind her as I went to help her. By the time I got to her she was sobbing. She tried to walk and screamed and sobbed alternately in pain. I left her where she was, leaning against the sink and recalled my father from work. I asked him to first phone our family doctor.

By evening my gracious and gentle mother was sedated and bedridden.

My mother found some relief. We moved to live in a property out of town. I regret I was keen we move and gave my voice as invited to

discussing whether we would accept housing in a sugar experiment

station property that came available and was offered to my father.

When two years and a little more later she attempted suicide in a fit of demented hysteria, her face scarlet, anguished, I was alone with her. I was talking with her where we had been seated at the dining table.What happened was extreme that her mood went from confidential to hysterical and she was on her feet in the second. A tray of her medications was near where we were sitting.

I was home on holiday from University although I did not always fly home between terms. More often I went interstate with other choristers to Intervarsity Festivals and other meets.

My father who was my primary care giver volunteered to me to not come home every term holiday. He wanted me to enjoy my youth. I appreciate his intentions. He communicated a viewpoint that included concern about the impact on me of my mother’s continuing poor health.

So I took opportunity to go on holidays that cost little and were spent in company as much fun in the evenings as our soujourns singing for meals and milkshakes, hitchhiking as we were legally able then, billeted where we could find, a NSW outback lock up when we knocked on the door of the police station and guard dogs we were told to ignore but barking enraged in cages at its door if we as much as moved, in a remote location in Tasmania finding an abandoned settlers home that rose bushes in scattered bloom occupied grown through the roof and its windows, all the same white delicacies set in an encroaching surround of native forest and we drank ice cold water from its cottage stream, a bare dirt floor in barracks without furniture, squashed in a utility sharing talking night long on his instruction to an oil industry trouble shooter to keep him awake on his drive Brisbane to Adelaide, on the Adelaide outskirt a mound of sleeping bags except waking visible to Monday morning workers’ traffic in the central wide strip of a four lane highway whereas in the pitch dark of a starless night and no traffic we thought we had been dropped off at a rest reserve, on a New South Wales roadside in the night and the stars above in quintillion thousands agreeing to catch the next road freighter heading anywhere to escape the cold, my highlight three of us lying asleep on the bare ground flat on our backs in brilliant sunshine spaced like soldiers with the soles of our shoes upright a considered distance from highway bitumen and my opening my eyes on nothing but blue cloudless sky, not a single sound of civilisation to be heard, feeling my heart leap this is Australia, the very expression, fallen in love.

Skool

I am a better socialised human being than I would have been without the explicit freedom to holiday in University breaks. I was never allowed in Primary and High Schooling the social freedoms of my peers and no siblings at home. I feel no part that is manipulative my father volunteered to me I not go home from University. I never complained to him during my High School days I was restricted. When I was a small child and whinged I was not permitted a freedom another girl was, he taught me a sharp lesson. He retorted she’s not my daughter and I thought it was clear instruction.

Once only when I was young I was thrashed which was by my mother for getting home late from the library via a friend’s place, My regret remains my father did not intervene. Once more only in my late teenage years I and my friends pushed a broken down hire vehicle for a very long way to find assistance, but were treated with so little respect by both of my parents I was late home I was incredulous.

I reserve judgement of that part that was my father’s influence in effect on my mother she did not see me and not either my siblings by virtue of their distance for times that were so long they could not have been good for her mental health.

Could I do it again I would fly on long week-ends and mid-term holidays to tend to my mother and my father’s better care. Air fares were half price for students virtue an arrangement of the Students’ Union. In

The Student Union

emergencies my responses were almost always unerring. I would know however the mental health first aid skills I have acquired and avoided the error that distressed my mother.

I had voiced in a kindly way on this occasion of her attempt to end her life, but refusal of her insistence I support her in attempt to convince my visiting brother to return with his wife and children to Sydney and leave them to live with my parents in North Queensland. My brother had taken my sister-in-law who I loved dearly and their children for a drive. I jumped to my feet and with care to support her head because of the pain of her arthritis caused her to gag, extending my hand and extracting in the same move a quantity of pills she had thrown into her mouth screaming she would end her life.

Her decrepit and extreme physical and mental ill health was diagnosed as consequence of the sudden withdrawal of prednisone from its successful treatment of her arthritic symptoms. She was severely ill again without advantage of diagnosis.

The reasons for her catastrophic reaction to my protection of my brother on whom she obsessed and his wife I feared would soon return from their drive with their small children will be complex. My viewpoint is isolation and suffering a chronic medical condition with only my father’s care and companionship crippled her as much as arthritis had wrought its damage.

My father’s secret was angina. He described to me many years on he lay at work across the seat of his utility to stay out of view agonised by gripping chest pains. He had especial reason to attempt secrecy apart from his compromised position as primary care giver for an ill wife. He feared for his employment and he had been offered an opportunity he did not want to forego.

It’s all about love

Due to retire in a few short years he had been an attendee at his first international conference. Despite he described to me like a child as I had never seen him before anxiety he would not measure up on the world stage, he enjoyed academic success and social popularity. The conference was in Taiwan. He had never travelled other than to conferences in Queensland. He was invited to chair a session at the next scheduled conference in Louisiana in America. He would meet up with his new friends.

The only friendships my father had in the scientific community he enjoyed through professional letters to his position and the respect of visiting scientists. Two scientists in Canberra were his only friends he visited once. I was sent to stay in Canberra for a holiday with one of the families.

Being a scientist in the sugar industry in North Queensland and remote from his Head Office in Brisbane was an often thankless position without glamour. I commented to him once he was not so well paid. He said that was not right, startled that did I know he was paid at the same level as a Senior Lecturer at the University when he retired.

I reflected on the years it took to get there and how poor that sounded to me for the days staking field trials, at nights setting and collecting rat traps, away from home writing papers, driving cane farms around in North Queensland’s tropical heat without air conditioning, dealing with chemicals in inadequate research facilities that may have contributed to the poor condition of his heart, exposed to crop dusting trials, a colleague of his who died a shocking death from a motor neurone condition and was refused compensation, his skill delivering public address through radio interview, staff responsibilities and his classic story he had never told anybody but I quietly that I had never told as a child on his instruction of his attempting protest being threatened he would lose his job if he revealed he had discovered using a chemical the rat’s babies were malformed, the sniggering he had to put up with regards his compromised position distributing cane toads when they were released, his tears running down his face when he threw the newspaper down in front of me with the headline DDT was blanket banned and he announced the deaths that would follow from mosquito infestations nothing else would combat…and he was right.

He was flattered by the invitation to Louisiana he had admitted to me when he told me of it, so shy and radiant.

I have a tape recording of excited Taiwanese school children cheering my father and his colleagues in 1968 as they alight from a bus at a village school and among segments of my parent methodically describing in his Scottish accent local sugar industry technology as he

Say no to undies

views it, of delegates taking turns to sing songs, the winding mountain road, the reverberation of the bus engine their backing track, my father’s melodic baritone hitting the sweetest high notes in his solo performance of ‘My Little Grey Home in the West’ … there are hands that will welcome me in/there are lips I am burning to kiss/there are two eyes that shine just because they are mine…

to be continued…

Christina Binning Wilson

Lets get an, an, AN education, yeah…

The Sociology of A Place To Call Home Part 8

by Sandshoe (Honshades)

I accepted a lucrative Fellowship as a student trainee under contract for eight years to the Queensland Education Department. I was to complete a Bachelor of Arts and Diploma of Education within four years and teach for four. My father begged me to accept a Commonwealth Scholarship of lesser value. He would fund the balance if I still wanted to be an Anthropologist. I had talked Anthropology for a year.

My father previously communicated financial worry to me that he was retiring. I lied again without a qualm I wanted to accept the Fellowship.

I was required to attend the new James Cook University in Townsville that was ‘zone’.

My work in the last two years of High School was dedicated to getting to the University and that was always in my imagination where my father, brother and sister had attended. If a subject was not available at the JCU I could go where it was available. Anthropology I considered met that criteria. I was allowed by the Department of Education to enrol at the University of Queensland.

After I moved into my residence at the College, I received a directive letter from the Department of Education anthropology was deemed ‘not a teaching subject’. My incredulity I was required to withdrew the enrolment was impulse to rebel. I enrolled in Political Science.

I expected to receive another letter directing me to withdraw enrolment from it, which never arrived. My intention had been to take the letter rejecting Political Science to a seething campus in the form of Students for Democratic Action (SDA). I entrapped myself. That one of the Majors of my eventual graduation is Politics was founded on nothing more than rage at the grounds on which my enrolment in Anthropology was rejected.

I recognised, belated, if it was not my enrolment in Pol Sci slipped past the notice of scrutineers, the enrolment was a literal red flag and my likely next move anticipated.

Where to go for counsel I had no notion other than to the Department. The small print terms of my contract suggested it was available to me if I had any concerns. I said nothing to my parents to fly under their radar likely to detect disappointment.

The uni looked something like this

When I was at University long enough to get my feet on the ground, I made confident appointment with the offices of the Education Department for career advice. I had read a newspaper report that proposed the potential placement of psychologists in schools in Queensland. Independent of influence of any complexion I had been considering it was an imperative.

My transition to University was the incentive that I was wracked with homesickness. The size of the University was traumatic. I was in an academic stream class of nine students in my final year of High School. The University on the other hand was the biggest in the Southern Hemisphere and only emergent from being the one University in Queensland.

No, said the person I was allotted to speak with. He looked confused, diminished me, there was nothing like that and there never will be. I was stunned. He fell silent. I was dismissed. I had no idea how to persist to make conversation and negotiate with an institution I presupposed would accommodate my enquiry with interest.

I had as well a type of chronic fatigue, not that it occurred to me for many years I suffered those symptoms. I fell asleep at 8pm and slept until 8am like clockwork through an alarm and missed my College breakfast hour. I walked a short distance to University from College for a 9am lecture. I sat down in the lecture theatre and fell asleep. The mechanism of sleep felt like an applied anaesthetic.

I was never woken and never rebuked. English I class as an example was somewhere like 950 students, which seems an unimaginable recall. The class was divided into two sittings. Numbers dwindled at the end of the year as I remember it to a handful of students at the front of the auditorium and I asleep in a seat in the back top tier. Falling asleep in class and struggling into consciousness at its end to leave I experienced as a sense of eventual and devastating failure.

Off ta bed children

No one was more surprised I was awarded a pass for my four First Year subjects of English, History, Political Science and a Pass (Minus) for a compulsory foreign language, Japanese. Pass (Minus) meant I would not be allowed to enrol in further Japanese language studies.

How deficient it was I had no counselling what subjects I chose. I had studied French for five years of High School. I was competent to translate letters for my father related to his work in the sugar industry. I spoke French at our dinner table with a visiting scientist. I did not foresee the use of French. Two of the applicant students as it was had sat at the beginning of that year through being bombasted by the Professor of the Department we had failed an aptitude test, yet persisted with application to enrol.

The brilliance of the intellectual content of Professor Akroyd’s ire that she would have to allow our entry was rivetting. I credit it one of the finest lectures of the privilege that has been mine. The professor covered the status of the culture of Japan and the mindset of Australian young people who were ignorant of Asia and the waste of resources deployed to cater to their whims. I was moved to read her obituaries include a reference she could be ‘prickly’. Not at all. She was enraged.

In my second year of University I attended at the Education Department after requesting an appointment. I felt no option and reflected I must have been unlucky in the previous year. I could not be rebuffed a second time surely if I reported I foresaw I would not pass my exams. I thought my decision to present intelligent. The interviewer reached into a drawer of his desk and took out a folder he opened, He announced let’s have a look. He scoffed. A student like you with the results you turned in. He made it clear I was misrepresenting the case. I was dismissed.

I afraid that’s out

Recognising I had returned only Pass marks in my First year subjects and of the four I was not permitted to enrol again in Japanese ought to have alarmed him. I was asked nothing. My memory of presenting looks little more than attending an empty room. I wonder now as I write if it was anybody’s office at all I was so rapidly moved on out of there.

No one was more astounded at the end of that year I was awarded a Credit in second year English. Yet I only returned one essay of three I was asked by the exam paper to write. I wrote on William Faulkner’s

William Faulkner 1897-1962

Light in August. I reckoned only I would go ahead and enjoy myself as I was going to fail.

I was well equipped for studies in English from my home background. My advantage was as well that when I was a High School student, I was selected with two others of the students from my school to attend an intensive three-day course in Australian Language and Literature studies for High School students newly instituted by the Foundation for Australian Studies under the auspices of Colin Roderick at the James Cook Campus in Townsville.

I further note it was said by an incoming English lecturer in 1969 he was surprised by the high standard of the work of incoming Queensland undergraduates. Unavoidably I consider the likely politics underlying reaction to the Committe reccommendation soon to be released to remove University lecturers from setting examination papers. The examiner who marked the work I passed in for assessment of my First Year University English assessment might have been inspired to scrutinise the contents more closely than to fail me.

I failed however the second year History exam by reason of ‘Did Not Sit’.

Time to get up

I slept through it not responding to the alarm to get out of bed and attend. I failed my second year Political Science exam that was multiple choice.

The Education Department deemed I had failed second year by not turning in pass results for at least two subjects of three. I was advised by letter from the Department to repeat the year at my own expense or attend the Teachers Training College in Townsville under the terms of the original contract inclusive continuing remuneration.

I applied for permission to attend the TTC in Brisbane. If I was going through with this I needed to remain in Brisbane for that stability. My application was rejected.

Some choir girls

I lost active membership of the University choir for which I had been appointed to Promotions Officer. I lost contacts with friends relatively easy to lose in the days before social media and mobile phones. I lost association with their parents where I had been a guest in my friends’ homes. I lost my city. Brisbane I truly identified with at the end of two years. I lost my proximity to my aunt who had recently retired out of her teaching position. She was now after the death of her remaining bachelor brother living alone in her Brisbane home she lived in her life long since immigration in 1922, my father’s family home and his children’s for succour had I utilised the potential of my aunt and uncle to advise me as my brother had when he was at University. My father was the only one of his four siblings who had children.

I acknowledge my paternal younger uncle who moved away to live elsewhere accepted Legacy children who became his responsibility and that they cared for him in his later years. I hold great affection for them and their loving care.

My potential to access counsel was cruelled by my taking on a degree of alienation from my brother, but as well my aunt because I rejected the offer extended me to go to boarding school where she taught. My brother grieved I did not I would realise later.

The Education Department meanwhile had no motive deeper than to stock its new TTC in Townsville. Who would demand that move of me. I was naive of the crisis Australia faced that was a plummeting shortage of teachers in the 1960s. Murmur, too of a significant gender imbalance was turning some educators’ tables. Married women could not teach as permanent teachers and were not encouraged to try to retain their employment until the mid-70s. In 1966 women in the workforce constituted less than 24%. The number of female teachers at one dip represented well less than 40% of active teachers.

The result I foresaw of accepting going to the TTC was I would be teaching in one year’s time with one full year of University qualification and one at TTC only and I would be 20 instead of 22. We were to finish our degrees externally by contractual obligation. The future looked arduous. I was already anxious a teacher was to undertake one year teaching in a city school and one by transfer to rural or remote Queensland. I saw myself isolated if I needed the assistance of the Education Department in a remote location.

Eight years contracted to the Education Department looked intolerable.

I never considered appeal to my parents. To return to University for one year full-time would have been at my parents’ expense, but as well I would still be contracted to the Education Department at the end of it.

Hanging over my head was the real rub of contractual expectation I repay the Queensland Government two full-time years of University tuition and remuneration paid me.

I forewarned my parents I would fail my second year.

Why they paid no heed is a mystery. I had consistently predicted the status of a result before I was advised other than in my First year University result I did not discuss with them beforehand. My father when I was a small child asked me what I thought I got for my first Theory of Music exam. I said 100%. He told me I could choose whatever I wanted him to buy me if I was awarded 100%. I checked with him on that. Anything. Ought to have struck while that iron was hot.

I said a fountain pen.

When the result came in the mail from the Music Examinations Board, he ordered me to get into the car. I got to pick out a fountain pen at the newsagency. He announced to the newsagent he had not believed me. I could wear that. I understood he reacted and unwisely when I said 100%.

He hurt me when I responded to his asking me what I thought I got for my Senior examination. I listed the subjects and points with accuracy except unsure about one. He drew a sharp intake of breath to smother what he was about to say and released it. I recognised anger. He was so rarely angry with me I felt confused. He struggled to modify himself that sometimes people do not like it when our heads get too big.

Never in my life had he before accused me of being conceited.

When the Senior exam results were phoned to us by a teacher who was a family friend, I even reflected without saying anything abrasive to my father he would have been wiser had he remembered the fountain pen. His reaction when I naively had told him my anticipated matriculation results and points hurt me to my very core.

My father cried when the results of my second year at University became official. I was at home on summer holidays because especially I went home to tell my parents I expected to fail. I feared what effect my failing would have on them.

My mother especially was not well. I did not anticipate seeing my father cry. The shock was seering. I did not understand how very far my parents and I were growing apart that long periods elapsed between our seeing each other.

When my father ordered me not to go out in a short sun dress I was ironing to do exactly that, I was more than out of my depth how to cope. I had no acculturation in being told what I could wear. My adolescence was conservative to the extreme. I had been away from home for two years and 19 year old. I packed the dress into a handbag and dressed in jeans, changed into it when I was well clear of home.

My father had no experience of parenting a teenager through to adulthood. He was out of depth.

The further pressure was the politics of the era. The corruption of the Queensland Government as an issue in the wider political backdrop of my experience at University had caused me a growing sense of alienation from my parents’ political viewpoint. Jo Bjelke-Petersen was their man. When my father indicated some years later to a rose bush he planted in the front garden of their retirement home in commemoration of Jo’s wife, dear old Flo…knock me over with a feather. He eventually changed his mind of his own behest, but those long years of aloof care we not refer to my being a dissident were a loss.

I had decided to look for work before I went to Townsville to go to the TTC. I desperately did not want to go the closer it got. I would find a way to go back to University and finish my degree. I would undertake external studies. I would aim to do anthropology and psychology units. My mind ran riot.

Riotous Minds

I was chastised by the owner/manager of a Cairns bookshop local to my parents in North Queensland that I applied for a position she advertised for a sales person. The bookshop was a stand out. My heart was set on that employment. I had thought the owner was of immeasurable worth to our district. She was a High School schoolteacher who retired early to establish her excellent bookshop she saw was needed.

I was alienated from seeking position with her ever again.

Go back to University, a smart girl like you, even thinking of it for a poorly paid position like this, what about all the money your parents have spent on your education.

Never mind I had failed two subjects. She might have framed I think in retrospect a creative response. I wonder if she knew about the shortage of teachers or agonised over the gender gap.

Yet even when I lived in College in Brisbane with a mixed lot of University under-grad and post-grad women, socialised with other Varsity colleges I heard not a whisper. Among my friends in College our female conversation was homesickness and for entertainment boys or poetry or with those inclined their love for girls and poetry. The balance was the Vietnam War and conscription.

Aside, I did learn from a Medical student the names of bones of the human body I selected out of a skeleton box and held out to her for instruction. A cartoon glued to the top featured Snoopy lying on his back on the roof of his kennel dreaming of bones, the caption how apt that happiness is having a few bones stashed away.

I applied cold call to the Cairns city library. The Manager librarian attempted a case to its administrators to employ me, although no position was designated, she warm, empathetic, admiring and expressing later the strength of her regret she failed, how strongly she was drawn to my working with her. I would have been happy in a childhood habitat and working with her.

I had run out of time. I farewelled my parents at the airport insisting my father not pay for me to repeat my University year and that I was happy to go to Townsville TTC.

I had to first find housing in a city I had no knowledge of and booked myself into a room at the People’s Palace.

to be continued…

Christina Binning Wilson

Did she say bones…