Jan Smith - Confessions of a Homegrown Alien: An Australian Memoir

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NSW 2012

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ISBN 978-1-925416-28-2

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In memory of my parents

Dorothy & Randolph Smith

Although my parents would have been young adults at the time, neither ever mentioned what they were doing around 8pm Australian Eastern Standard Time on 28 June, 1914, when Gavrilo Princip, in Sarajevo, fired the shot which was heard around the world, taking out Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie with a Belgian-made Browning FN Model 1910 semi- automatic, from a distance of about 1.5 metres, outside Morry Schillers deli.

All things come to he who waits, theyd probably have said, or too many cooks spoil the broth, had either of them known the back story which led to Gavrilo standing mournfully on the sidewalk, thinking another day another disaster, at the critical moment when the royal vehicle, a Graf & Stift double phaeton, having taken a wrong turn, needed to reverse six feet in front of him. [1]

Nor did my parents know something rather more crucial, which the Archduke didnt know either. That 28 June, along with being St Vituss Day, was the anniversary of the First Battle of Kosovo in 1389 when Serbia was defeated by the Ottomans, a most inauspicious day for flaunting Austro-Hungarian imperialism. But 28 June is also the Archdukes wedding anniversary, and only in Bosnia, an annexed territory, can his beloved not-royal-enough wife be seated at his side on official occasions.

Carpe diem, he probably said. A window of opportunity.

***

My mother occasionally mentioned Vienna, being fond of Strauss waltzes and tenors on our old wind-up gramophone the records with the pink label and the mystified white fox terrier, which I did not yet know was originally called Nipper, like my own. But when Richard Tauber wasnt disagreeing that Girls were made to love and kiss, or Joseph Schmidt was declaring it was the happiest day in his life, ich bin verliebt, I knew it was bad sign, that my mother, perhaps already clutching a handkerchief, might retreat to the bedroom, and yet that it was not wholly bad, because I too could retreat to a world of imagination.

The front spare bedroom, which opened onto the porch, had a wardrobe full of clothes to dress up in, and a dressing-table with side mirrors and little drawers still bearing the scent of visiting aunts cologne and containing my absent step-sisters discarded lipsticks and boxes of Paul du Val face powder. But the porch, which had the same white railings with slender tulip cut-outs as the more-frequented side veranda, contained an ottoman, wherein lay my fathers ancient ceremonial regalia four or five small velvet football caps in wine dark colours, edged with gold braid, from his celebrity years when he played fullback for Queensland.

Union, hed stress, not League which was for scrubbers.

My mother had explained that ottomans were what Turkish people lay around on, and I knew a few things about Turkey, indeed the entire world, from the coloured pictures which came inside the fourpenny bars of chocolate, to be pasted in the book with the maps of the seven continents, each facing a page with ten already-captioned blank rectangles.

Ireland, the green teddy bear with the red head, wasnt entirely foreign. It was where my mothers paternal grandfather had come from, in tragic circumstances because hed lived in the green bit which was full of Roman Catholics, which we were not most emphatically not. Or rather, wed ceased to be, which I did not yet understand was a different thing entirely.

My apostate great-grandfather Joseph, whod been cut off without a penny for marrying the Protestant, was part of the foundation myth, that my mothers family was descended from Raymond le Gros, who around 1163 had been allowed to marry Strongbows sister Basilia as a reward for successfully invading Wexford. So already I knew Papists couldnt all have been the same. In Wales, where Raymond came from, they were better, and whichever Irish he and his lads had conquered were worse than the ones whod invited them.

My father too had been born in a foreign land, New South Wales, south of the rabbit-proof fence, where houses had fireplaces and carpets and attics, and railway lines were four foot eight inches apart instead of three foot six. So when Christmas holidays included a visit to Grandma Smith in Tenterfield, thered be a change of trains which accentuated my fathers foreignness, and the enormity of his unexplained apostasy. Conversation with my father was difficult at the best of times, and my mother knew little of football, besides it had all been when she was still at New England Girls Grammar School with his sisters, achieving her own distinction as the first new girl whod ever asked, during the grub-eating initiation ceremony, if she could cook it first. (She was allowed to skewer it with a hatpin and toast it over a candle.)

The velvet football caps therefore trailed the same high cloudy romance and excitement as sultans turbans, Egyptian fezzes and the yet-to-be-discovered kaffiyehs and yamulkes, as in our part of the world men wore battered broad-brimmed khaki felt hats. Maybe they had more respectable ones for weddings, funerals and christenings, but we never went to any, because everyone my parents invited for sherry and bridge was well past childbearing and thoughts of matrimony, yet well short of death, barring the usual unforseen things like being fatally kicked by horses, gored by bulls, or pinned under tractors.

And even if they were ill, Im pretty sure none of them would have broken what for people like us was the first commandment; Thou shalt not bother Me, or Jesus who is already bothered enough. They considered us capable of sorting out problems unaided or, ideally, avoiding them in the first place though forward planning, which meant observing the next two commandments; Thou shalt build fences to contain thy flocks and herds, and Thou shalt remember to shut gates.

In Eumundi, about two miles away down the range in a wide green valley in the Sunshine Coast hinterland, where the train line ran, there were three churches, two white weatherboard, and one brown and red, all needing a coat of paint the RCs opposite the butter factory and the sawmill, the Methodists up near the Post Office (shared with the Presbyterians) and St Georges C of E, up the road from the blacksmiths, where we never set foot except in November, when my mother and I arranged eggs and cobs of yellow and white corn around the altar rails for harvest festival.

God also didnt seem to mind that we also drank alcohol, a word Id never heard until I went with my town friend Joanie to the Methodist Sunday school. So I never went again, and continued to look forward to our chaste Chekhovian soires, circulating winsomely with bowls of devilled Queensland nuts (not yet called macadamias) among the above-mentioned landowners, and such professionals as Eumundi could offer, namely the two bank managers and their wives. (The dentist was a Dr Connell and my mother and I saw quite enough of him anyway.)