Roundabout at Bangalow by Shirley Walker

their horses here. Their names — Carlton, Doherty, McMahon, O’Connell — are like a roll-call at mass. There is a close bond between this father and his eldest daughter but, at the same time, a streak of resentment which causes him to cast her off from time to time, to send her howling back across the paddock beneath the jacaranda trees, hopping from one foot to the other between the cowpats and scotch thistles, back from the mysteries of fire and iron to the milk-and-water world of the mother. She is a wayward girl, obstinate, dark and closed-in, her only confidante her sister who is one year younger.
    The world of her mother is quite different. This is the Grandma who later taught us our prayers and dosed us with sulphur and treacle at The Channon. Her world is one of evangelical Christianity, of the Temperance Union, of no-smoking-or-drinking, of save-your-money. She and her non-conformist friends hold their meetings in bare little country halls with tin roofs where the Moody and Sankey hymns are beaten out on untuned pianos. There are occasional visits from an evangelist, smooth-shaven and eloquent, but bloodless in comparison with the real men at home. These women, and they are almost invariably women, are searching for something spiritual above and beyond their poverty-stricken lives, something that will make them feel special. This is why they reject the Church of England for, as the official and universal religion in Australia, it is often only a label, or a social obligation.
    In a later era non-conformists would find what they sought in Buddhism, Hare Krishna, psychoanalysis, re-birthing or a commune at Nimbin, but for now the sects are the only choice apart from the established churches. So they are dipped as adults, wound in sheets and immersed in the nearest creek, and thus set apart, their status that of the chosen of the Lord. At home this is a world of poverty and making-do. My grandmother, with four small children, runs up on her pedal sewing machine a dozen pairs of men’s pyjamas a week for a store in Lismore (they supply the material). For this she is paid three shillings and sixpence. Her world is loving and she suffers long, but I am never able to enter into it, possibly because I’ve not yet accepted the Lord or, when I begin to have a career, because I am guilty of what she sees as worldly ambition.
    Each family has its legends, and two of this family’s are tragic. The blacksmith, my grandfather, is the son of a young Catholic farmer, Michael Browne, who is struck by lightning while ploughing the river flats with his two horses; horses, it is said, attract the lightning. All I have of this event are two newspaper clippings from the Clarence & Richmond Examiner and memories of a childhood where every thunder storm is treated as an imminent disaster, where women and children hurry to hide the knives and scissors and cover the mirrors (for all of these were said to attract lightning). There are also stories of fireballs which have passed right through certain houses, sometimes hovering a while to increase the terror. Because of this the doors and windows are always carefully locked during a storm. Curtains are drawn and the family cowers anxiously in the semi-darkness until the storm passes. The clippings read as follows, but it is impossible to reproduce in typeface the impact of the original yellowed slips of paper, hoarded for a hundred and twenty years.
    The Clarence & Richmond Examiner
    Tuesday 30 November 1880
ULMARRA, Monday, 7 p.m.
    KILLED BY LIGHTNING — We regret to learn that during the thunderstorm which passed over the town to the eastward yesterday afternoon, the lightning struck Mr Michael Browne, farmer (son of Mr Thomas Browne, of the Exchange Hotel, Ulmarra), killing him on the spot. The sad and brief particulars will be found in our telegraphic columns.
    The Clarence & Richmond Examiner
    Saturday 4 December 1880
    CORONER’S INQUIRY — On Tuesday