Lesson of the Burrum River

She grew up along the banks of the Burrum River.  I don't even know if it was in a real house.  Probably just a shed.

This was in the 1920s.  My mother was the eldest of seven children.  Her mother had married a much older man who, by the time Mum came along, was an invalid pensioner.  So there wasn't much money about.  But all her memories sounded like happy ones, (at least the ones she told me about).  Like walking three miles to the school in Howard each day.  Or eating the pigeon pies her father had made.

This was orange orchard country.  Back in the days before chemical sprays.  At dusk, she and other kids would help out in the orchards, lighting the lamps that hung in the trees.  Bugs and moths would be attracted to them at night and die when they fell into a pot of something or other.  To repay the kids, the farmer would turn up at the school with a large port full of big, fat oranges.

Mum always loved oranges.  I think it was her comfort food.  She'd eat them in bed while she read Agatha Christie novels, leaving the peels amongst the sheets.

She often talked about how beautiful the river was:

"I remember the violets growing along the banks of the Burrum River."

There was a railway weir with steps going down to the water where they swam after school.  Probably unsupervised.  But it felt safe.

By the time pension day came around, there wasn't much food left and the kids went to school without their lunch.  Early in the morning her father would catch the train to Maryborough to pick up his pension and buy supplies.  Then he'd return home and bake bread in the ashes of an outdoor fire, using his home-made potato yeast.

Mum would look out for him bringing his still warm bread up to the school for their lunch.  Probably bread and dripping.  A real treat.

Mum didn't say much about her mother.  Her stories were mainly about her father.  She loved him.  He was a quiet man.  But she did tell me how her mother would cut some shoots off the gum trees when they were flushed with pink new growth and put them in a vase.  These were her "flowers".

School was a happy time for Mum and she was a good student, but her family's situation meant, of course, that she didn't go beyond primary school.  She was not, however, good when it came to singing.  Her teacher would implore her to "Eat some sugar, Carrie Davis, to sweeten your voice."  Still, her strange, droning songs lulled all of us to sleep as babies.

Many years later, when I was grown up and owned my first car, I took Mum back to the banks of the Burrum River.

Gone were the violets

Gone was the railway weir

Sadly, Mum turned to me and said, philosophically: "You can never go back".

-oOo-

Ah, it's now time for breakfast.  I stop writing and put down my pen.  Sitting on the back stairs with my bowl of Weetbix, I look wistfully at the carpet of native violets growing in my small Brisbane garden.