were fascinating. They were full of promise and possibilities. They could describe and express, reveal and reflect. Their shape, their look, big words, little words, the way they could mix and match to mean and convey different things – was mesmerising. They were friendly. Above all, they were an escape from the outside world. They connected with me and when I wrote them, they belonged to me.
When given a small, soft, covered diary for my 12th birthday, the little book quickly became my best friend.
Initially, entries were mostly matter-of-fact observations. I went to school at this time and came home at that time. Expressions of emotion—happy or sad—were rare. As our relationship grew, I began to share my heart and soul. Some entries were cryptic due to concern that my mother read my entries while I was at school and for several months, I resorted to writing entries in shorthand, to defy her curiosity.
Reading my diaries, from age 12 to 55, was cathartic and often scary.
I felt I was tumbling back in time, re-living an arduous journey to regain my life and be ‘normal’. I felt I was climbing my mountain all over again.
Almost a year had passed since I developed anorexia when I wrote my first diary entry on January 1,Tuesday, 1963:
Woke up at 5 o’clock. Had breakfast at ¼ past 7. I had 1 round of toast + 3 bits of meat ….
Note: Most names in this book are real. Pseudonyms protect privacy in several instances.
1. SCHOOL DOCTOR VISIT
I loved sleeping in my camp bed on the wooden verandah. Except for the bloody flies. As soon as the summer sun peeped over the hill and into our river valley, the dopey things woke up and started buzzing around my head.
This particular January morning I tried to swat one that landed on my face. The sudden movement caused my narrow bed to wobble on its shaky legs, their rusty hinges creaking loudly. Oh well, the flies were a sign it was time to get up anyway. I had big plans for the day.
School holidays were always fun on our family dairy farm, and the 1962 summer holidays held much promise. My days were full of helping my dad milk the cows, feeding the calves, shifting spray irrigation pipes, playing cricket with my cousins and swimming in the river. At 11 years old, I was a tomboy through and through, and proud of it.
As I stirred in my bed, so did Topsy, my tortoiseshell cat. She burrowed under the covers and kept my feet warm during the chill of the night, but now she knew it was time to rise. I lay still for a moment and listened, beyond the buzz of the flies and Topsy’s purr, to the gentle rumbling of rapids as the clear waters of the Mitchell River trundled over a stretch of rocks, 500 metres down the hill from our farmhouse. The roosters were crowing, Rip the dog was barking, the cows were mooing and the milking machine engine was putt-putting away.
Our farm was nestled at the head of the fertile Lindenow Valley, through which the river wended towards Bass Strait via Bairnsdale and the Gippsland Lakes, about 30 kilometres away.
People entering the valley floor along Findlay-Alexander Road would round a corner and see our Federation-style house a mile straight ahead, its red roof peeping over the hedge of mauve-flowering bougainvillea like a welcoming beacon. Smoke rising from a tall red-brick chimney was a sure sign someone was at home. The narrow gravel lane petered out to a dirt track at our farm’s big entrance gate, and hardly a day went by without someone calling in for a cuppa. A smaller, period-style garden gate led from the house paddock into the house yard where, sheltered by the bougainvillea, a large and colourful cottage garden prospered.
A circular concrete footpath arched uphill through the garden to a grand, leadlight front door on the left. Only strangers knocked on that door—usually peddlers, evangelists or people who had lost their way. Everybody else followed the path to the right, leading to the back door. In constant need of new fly-wire, this door opened into a small porch where we hung our coats and hats. The washhouse was to the right, the kitchen was directly ahead and the passage was to the left. The passage, about as long and wide as a cricket pitch, led straight to the front door. Along the passage, doors on the right opened to the pantry, the bedroom I shared with my sister, Joy, who would soon be 14, and the sitting room; doors on the left opened to the bathroom, my parents’ bedroom and the top room, or guests’ bedroom.
The front door opened onto the L-shaped wooden verandah. From there, views extended over flowerbeds, lawns dotted with cypresses shaped like giant high tin loaves and a garden border of sprawling, mauve-coloured bougainvilleas, to the lush valley beyond. The verandah was the adults’ favourite place to sit and chat—especially in the morning sunshine, and again in the afternoon and evening, when the hot sun had sunk behind the house. They sat on a wooden bench and also on my camp bed—no wonder it was creaking! The verandah was also perfect to spot people ‘coming up the road’.
One of the first things we explained to newcomers was that the toilet—its white weatherboards and pitched, red corrugated iron roof matching our house—was out the back gate in the house paddock. When nobody was around you could leave the toilet door open and gaze over the gully and hills. The view was enough to help the most constipated person relax. Besides the outhouse, the six-acre house paddock was home to the hen house, wood heap, orchard, car shed, tractor shed and stable.
My paternal grandfather, Duncan Alexander, built the house shortly after purchasing what was then a 52.6 hectare property in the early 1900s. A small, spritely man who played golf in his younger days and had a lifetime passion for fishing Gippsland rivers, Duncan grew up in the tiny township of Walpa, near Lindenow, about 13 kilometres from the farm. Walpa had developed during the late 1800s and early 1900s when land was opened up to pastoralists and selectors.
Duncan married Alvina Whitbourne, an accomplished horsewoman who was raised on a property beside the Mitchell River at Wuk Wuk, a settlement between our farm and Lindenow. Alvina was a descendant of the pioneering Scott family who had travelled with a horse and dray across the Great Dividing Range from the Monaro High Plains in New South Wales to settle at Delvine Park, near Bairnsdale, in 1845.
My paternal grandparents had two children—Carlie, born in 1920, and my father, Lindsay, born two years later. Carlie married young and moved to Melbourne while Lindsay insisted on leaving school at 14 to be a farmer. In 1947 he married my mother, Anne Sands, one of eight children born to Neville and Elizabeth Sands. Elizabeth was the daughter of a miner and Neville was a miner too. Early in their marriage, Neville worked in the black coal mine at Wonthaggi, in South Gippsland. Suffering health problems, including the loss of a lung, he and his young family moved east to Bairnsdale, where he worked in orchards before settling a little further east, at Buchan South. My mother was born there, at home, in 1925. My grandfather Neville worked in a nearby quarry, extracting black marble. Some of this marble was used to create 16 Ionic columns for Melbourne’s Shrine of Remembrance, which opened in 1934, and some was shipped to London for inclusion in Australia House.
Around 1940, the Sands family moved 100 kilometres southwest to Woodglen in the Lindenow Valley to work on a dairy farm. My mother, 15 by this time, and her sisters, Margaret and Gladys, worked with their father in the milking shed. My mother couldn’t remember a defining moment when she met my father, but as they lived only four kilometres apart, they possibly met at a dance in the nearby Glenaladale Hall, at a local cricket match or tennis tournament. They wed a few weeks after my mother’s 21st birthday and lived in the same house as my grandparents. My sister, Joy, was born in 1948 and I followed on December 27, 1950.
When I was five years old, my grandparents moved into a house in East Bairnsdale, 28 kilometres away. Joy and I sometimes stayed with them. This experience of ‘town life’ included a playground and milk bar in the same street, friendships with children
