From India with Love, page 3
The weather was a big part of life on the farm. Even on the coldest winter days in Sydney, the mercury tends to reach the teens. But we were on the other side of the Great Dividing Range from the coast, and snow was common in winter. Often we would wake up to find a massive drift had come in the night, making the land look like a huge cake someone had iced. We kids would bundle into coats and beanies and gumboots and trek off together squealing at the trick of nature that had made the places we knew unrecognisable. Mounds of gravel left by the side of the road by council workers would be transformed into snow dunes. We’d file back into the house red-cheeked and frosty to find Mum waiting, ladle in hand, with a giant pot filled with steaming porridge, which we topped with plenty of brown sugar, milk and cream.
At age five I lost my status as baby of the family when Mum fell pregnant with Dominic. By now it was 1989, treatments were improving, and Mum and Dad were ready to risk the possibility of another CF diagnosis for the opportunity to have another child. After the effort it had taken to get me, they knew there was no hope of another adoption. Dominic was born free of CF in September and his birth took us to six kids. Melissa, the eldest, was approaching the end of high school when he was born. She was focused on Roxette video clips on Rage and getting her first perm. She wasn’t very interested in playing games with little kids, but I had Damian for that!
Mostly, if we wanted entertainment we made it ourselves. We hardly watched TV at all, but when we did it was one of the few things we all did together, given our age range. Young Talent Time was an early favourite of both mine and Melissa’s. She would encourage me to perform my own routines, knowing it would drive everyone bonkers. Sure enough, before long I was banned from watching the show as a way of stopping the maddening impromptu concerts to which I would subject the rest of the family at every opportunity. Mum had put her foot down, but occasionally we’d sneakily watch an episode. Melissa now likes to raise these childhood embarrassments at large family gatherings whenever she wants a laugh, mainly at my expense.
Rani, Damian and I formed a sub-group, not because we’d all been adopted but because we were close in age. When Melissa and Catherine were growing up, the three of us were still primary schoolers, happy to spend hours racing billy carts, doing handstands and cartwheels and riding our bikes. Well, really Rani and Damian hung out together while I desperately tried to tag along. Rani was six years older than me, and Damian two. They could do cool older-kid things that I could only dream of, including barrel-walking—keeping their balance atop an old barrel turned on its side. I barely spent a second on the thing before I hit the ground, but they could keep going with what looked to me like the balance and coordination of circus performers. They were naturally coordinated and I was, let’s say, better at reading, so their backyard accomplishments were the source of much envy to my young self.
Of course, like any older siblings they took full advantage of my desperate wish to be part of the posse. The pair of them had great fun with my endless gullibility, crafting elaborate tricks that I would fall for every time. One classic was their promise that I could have a prime spot on one of our favourite climbing trees for my very own if I just tugged on the rope dangling from a branch. A bucket filled with beautiful flowers would fall down, they assured me. I should have known, given that the tree was right next to a massive compost heap, that it wouldn’t end well. Blinded by visions of being part of their club, I eagerly tugged the cord, and orange peel, apple cores and other decomposing delights thudded down onto my head.
Another memorable trick was made possible by the fact that we were a very Catholic family—we said grace every night at dinner and attended Mass every weekend. I knew exactly what taking communion looked like, but I had to wait until I took First Communion in year three to enter that grown-up club. Until then I had to wait in the pew and look on while the others went up to the front of the church, where the priest would administer what Catholics believe is the ‘body and blood’ of Jesus.
Lollies, like TV, were a rarity in our house this early on. Every so often our parents would come back from a shopping trip to Bathurst with a little treat for us. One day it was individual boxes of Smarties. Damian and Rani saw their chance. Ever eager to join in, I happily agreed when they proposed a new game, ‘Communion’. Not only would they let me play, they would even give me the honour of being the priest. They, mere churchgoers, formed a continuous two-person loop in front of me as I dispensed Smarties. All mine, of course. I reckon it took about six of these occasions when I ended up with nothing but an empty box before I worked it out. Our early life was incredibly wholesome, so much so that even our mischief-making was more Anne of Green Gables than Degrassi Junior High.
It might sound odd coming from someone who now spends so much of her time online, but with every year that passes I’m more and more grateful to have had that upbringing. There was an innocence about it that simply isn’t possible for children who have the internet and TV constantly at hand. Later on my parents bought a computer, but we kids weren’t allowed to touch it. I didn’t see a real video game until a friend got one, and when we eventually got Game Boys we had to share two between six kids and thought ourselves lucky to have them. If we wanted to re-listen to favourite songs we had to keep a blank cassette tape ready and hope they came on the radio.
But we didn’t miss out. We used our imaginations. Dominic and I were especially close when he was little, and we’d take over the lounge room, building sheet tents that we’d sleep in for as many nights as Mum’s patience would permit. I had a tea-party set and would invite one or other of my siblings for ‘tea’. Mum would usually stump up some treats for my miniature plates.
We holidayed every year on the New South Wales south coast at Mollymook. These were some of the few occasions when I would succeed in roping the entire family into my favourite version of quality family time—games. I loved all board and card games. A particular achievement was beating everyone in Cluedo. Mum’s proper English version of Monopoly, with its ancient crumpled pound notes, was put to good use as well, and we were all fans of Euchre. That was one of the few games Mum and Dad would play, giving me a treasured seat at the adults’ table. Funnily enough, these are the things I still love to do now when I get the time and can rope someone into playing me. (Competitive, me? C’mon!)
At home, we spent most of our waking hours outdoors, running, climbing and exploring. We played backyard cricket and built huge bonfires then invited friends over to sit around them and roast marshmallows. These days it’s not uncommon for me to spend an entire working week transiting from home to car to office and back via underground car parks without ever stepping outside. I wouldn’t care to live on a farm again, I’m too much of a city girl now. But it was a great childhood: authentic and so Australian.
Melissa appointed herself my second mother. It’s something I’ve noticed in other big families where the eldest is a girl and there’s a big age spread. I adored being the one she doted on. Come shearing time on the farm, when Mum and Dad were safely occupied for long stretches down at the shed, she would whip up pans of thick gooey caramel. One of us was always posted as a lookout, and it was a furious, frantic exercise trying to hide all the baking trays full of cooling caramel on those occasions when the lookout spotted Mum heading back up earlier than expected.
My first two years of school were spent, with Rani and Damian, at a tiny one-classroom public school in the nearby village of Newbridge. The job of teacher came with accommodation on the grounds. The very kind and patient Mr Fisher taught about twenty of us, including his son and a number of other sibling groups like ours, ranging in age from kindy to year six. That funny little school was a fantastic introduction to education. There was rarely trouble. In fact, I can’t remember any major arguments between us students, and on the best days the entire student body, from pre-teens to tiny newbies, would play together at lunchtime.
We would make up games over the underground water tanks and dare each other to go down to the back of the yard, where the most fearsome swooping magpies nested. We armoured ourselves by wearing the rubbish-bin lids on our heads—the old-style ribbed metal ones, which must have been well cleaned because fortunately they didn’t smell. They made for surprisingly effective magpie deterrents! Fridays were the best. Everyone came to school with lunch money. We didn’t need a school canteen; instead we all ordered meat pies from the local pub up the road, owned by the family of one of our classmates. I loved my time at Newbridge school.
But their workload was taking its toll on Mum and Dad, and eventually it became too much. When I was seven, our parents sat us down and told us they were selling the farm. Dad had just taken up a new job as deputy principal of a Catholic primary school in Bathurst. We were going to move closer to town, and Rani, Damian and I would switch to his new school.
Bathurst wasn’t exactly a metropolis, but even so Mum preferred country life. So our new place was on an acre or so of land in Forest Grove, a hamlet of about thirty houses just past the Bathurst Sheep and Cattle Drome, fifteen minutes’ drive into the town itself. Later on, as a teenager, I would detest living so far out (complete with dramatic eye roll), but when we first moved there, and for a good four or five years afterwards, I loved the continuation of the freedom we’d had on the farm.
At this stage Damian hadn’t quite progressed to being too cool for his little sister, so he spent a lot of time as my buddy. Dominic was growing up too and becoming a fun little playmate. The new house came with a pool. I’d had some swimming lessons through Newbridge school but I still couldn’t swim properly. Even though he rarely swam himself, Damian sat by the pool for a whole summer and verbally taught me how to swim, and several years later he and Rani finally taught me how to dive (instead of belly flop!).
The backyard, which looked out at the Great Dividing Range, was enormous. Damian enjoyed practising his bowling and kicking a footy, but my favoured pursuits were becoming more bookish. Mum, who had taught me to read, collected first-edition Enid Blytons. I read them. And reread them. And re-re-reread them. I still do. I lived in my imagination. Back then, the worst thing that could happen was to be caught reading under my doona by the light of a torch after bedtime. Mum or Dad would confiscate the book, and it was excruciating punishment: I’d be dying to know how the Famous Five’s latest adventure had transpired and would be forced to wait for up to a week before I found out. I’m pretty sure Mum and Dad were right—I ruined my eyesight reading in dim light like that. But when I was ten, finding out the end of an mystery adventure novel was an urgent priority compared to the glasses, contacts and eventual laser surgery I would fork out thousands of dollars for in my twenties. Dad kept the lawns mown beautifully, and I spent many days curled up in a grassy spot under the cherry tree out front, lost inside other worlds.
We still kept chooks, and Mum and Dad built a couple of aviaries for Catherine, who loved parrots, birds, rabbits and guinea pigs. In fact, she and Mum shared a love for all sorts of animals. One dog, Chuck, had died at Hobbys, but our beloved Tammy made the journey with us to Forest Grove. Spot, Daisy and Shadow all joined the canine contingent over time. Such big gardens also required a lot of looking after, of course, which meant there were plenty of chores to do, and some of these became my duties as I grew older—I hope I never have to weed again in my life!
As soon as we could walk, Dad taught each of us to scan the ground with every step. At the farm, we had been looking for tiger snakes, which are as venomous as they are aggressive.
In our new house the danger was eastern brown snakes. Tiger snakes are scary enough, ranking in the ten most venomous snakes in the world, but eastern browns leave them in the dust: they’re second only to the taipan in the strength of their venom. And, boy, can they be aggressive.
Brown snakes were a perennial hazard at Forest Grove. Many a king brown fell victim to the next-door neighbour’s ‘snake gun’ (a specially designed gun that uses shell ammunition and allows single close range shots) and to Dad’s spade—even, on one memorable occasion, to the blades of his ride-on mower. Every year there would be at least one close encounter for someone in the family. Three times it was me. The first incident was scary but over quickly. We had just moved to Forest Grove so I was only seven or eight years old. I was playing along the pool fence in the backyard that looked on to paddocks and paddocks, against the backdrop of the mountains. Slithering along my feet was a snake. I looked down and started screaming. Mum and Dad knew exactly what was going on the moment I started screaming but yelled out that the snake would move on and that it would be okay. They were right. In the end no harm was done, and it was such a brief encounter that I soon stopped thinking about it.
But the second incident, when I was twelve, was unforgettable. By now we were a family of seven children: two years after we’d moved, Mum had given birth to another daughter, Gabriela. (The final member of the family, Joseph, would be making his appearance soon.) I was playing in the pool while keeping a big-sisterly eye on Dominic, then seven, and Gabriela, three, and two of their friends from up the road. I had been designated supervisor, an important job. We often looked after the younger kids while Dad was still at work and Mum was helping make ends meet by tutoring after school, and we took our responsibilities seriously. If anything happened on your watch there would be big trouble.
On this particular day, Mum and Dad were at home and just inside but being the oldest of the kids swimming it was my responsibility to make sure there were no silly antics. I was keeping the younger kids entertained by throwing in coins for them to try to find the fastest. So that I could join in the fun, I closed my eyes and chucked the coins as far as I could, then dived in too. When I opened my eyes underwater in search of a metal gleam, I spotted a dark hose in the water. There had been a few barneys of late about us kids leaving goggles and other assorted items in the pool, only for them to be sucked into the pool filter. ‘Oh, those silly kids chucking a hose in the pool,’ I thought. ‘Dad will be so mad if it goes into the filter.’
Kicking my legs strongly, I dived down to grab it, at which point I realised it wasn’t floating in a straight line but was undulating through the water. A slitted eye met mine. It was no hose. My reaction still surprises me. I can remember it clearly even today. I didn’t scream, panic or flail. Instead, in one of the strangest moments of my life, I seemed to be looking down at myself from an angle as, swiftly but calmly, I swam to the other side of the pool, then firmly ordered the little ones out of the water. ‘Everyone out, there’s a snake in the pool.’
‘Where?’ one of them asked. Then, spotting it just a metre or so away, they all got out and ran towards the house.
I took off after them, but I was still more calm than I could have believed possible when I said, ‘Mum, Dad, there’s a snake in the pool.’ I’ve never seen my parents move so quickly, before or since. At first, Dad tried to drown it, using the skimmer net to hold it under the water. Soon the net was sporting great rips where the increasingly angry creature had lunged with its fangs.
Mum must have called our neighbour, because he showed up and somehow he and Dad managed to get the snake into a big sturdy bag of the kind used to transport manure. It was swung into the outdoor freezer, and there it stayed, cooling off, until a trained volunteer from the wildlife rescue organisation WIRES arrived to take Mr King Brown Swimmer away to a safer location. It shook us up to think that a snake would come so close to us. They were supposed to be more afraid of us than we were of them! From then on, before every swim we checked the filter and pool for any curled-up slitherers. Fortunately, we never found another swimmer.
Two years later I was a romantically inclined fourteen-year-old. My girlfriends and I all sat together in French class, and we had decided that we all had crushes on frogs (in between our more serious obsessions with Hanson, The Backstreet Boys and for me—Jonathan Taylor Thomas), which we insisted on calling by their French name, grenouilles. One day I was on weeding duty in the strawberry patch at home. On my knees and singing away to myself while pulling weeds and searching for a stray berry, I heard something hit a leaf. Excited about the chance to hold a wee grenouille in my hand, I reached over to move back some foliage and found myself just millimetres away from a brown snake. Time seemed to stop. It felt as though I was frozen for way too long, but fortunately the snake didn’t move until I had come to my senses, jumped up and started running. There was no calm, out-of-body detachment this time: I was shaking, screaming and crying as I flew into the arms of my mother. Once she and Dad had calmed me down enough to explain what had happened, Dad bravely ventured back to the scene of the crime, where he found nothing. He asked if I could possibly have mistaken the small thin black irrigation hose for a serpent, but I knew what I’d seen. I’m still not sure they entirely believed me, but either way I didn’t have to do any more gardening that day!
Snakes aside, the things that troubled me as I was growing up were all about being number five in a big family: not enough new toys; no PlayStation or CD player like my friends had; having to wear uncool hand-me-down clothes. Being adopted or looking different from some of my siblings just didn’t rate a thought.
I don’t remember ever being told that I was adopted and Rani and Damian were too, I just always knew. Once or twice as I got older I let myself have a bit of a joke with people who earnestly enquired, ‘So, how old were you when you found out you were adopted?’ ‘Well,’ I answered, ‘pretty hard to hide, given my parents are white.’ I’d follow up with a ‘gotcha’ grin.
I know that for some people being adopted is a source of great angst. Not for me. By going to such lengths to bring me into their lives, my parents gave me so much—health, nourishment, education, opportunity and love. Like everyone else who’s adopted, I was chosen. There’s no such thing as an unplanned adoption. Even later, in my door-slamming teenage years, when many people dream of discovering they’re adopted, my feelings didn’t change. Even then, I was glad to be a Bourke and grateful to my parents for making me one.
