lighting plant batteries. So each night after tea our family, plus any visitors, proceeded from the kitchen to the sitting room, sat in front of the television set and switched on to the world outside our valley.
At first I was excited, but to watch television I had to sit down. I tried but could not sit still and was pleased when Mum said: ‘You should be outside helping your father. You know how tired he is.’ She was always telling me how tired Dad was. So I pleased her by staying outside, helping Dad, often until after dark. This was preferable to doing sissy indoor jobs, like cleaning the bath with White Lily, polishing the cutlery with Brasso or shining brass doorknobs.
I continued to feed the calves before and after school and the chooks looked forward to their late-afternoon feed of wheat, pellets, and maize. On weekends I helped Dad feed our cows with small, rectangular bales of grass, oats or lucerne; also freshly cut saccaline, which looked like sugar cane, and sometimes silage, a compressed grass that was dark green and smelly but that the cows loved. I sat on top of the loaded trailer and, while Dad drove the tractor around the paddocks on both the flats and the hills, I tossed the fodder to the cows. I always felt happy, working with Dad.
With spring coming, I helped to herd the cows about to calve down from the hills to the lush house paddock, which doubled as a nursery. From there the cows would proceed to the dairy. Separating the newly born calves or poddies from their mothers at about one week, Dad gave them a few lessons at drinking milk from a bucket. I learnt to do this too, putting my fingers in a poddy’s mouth so it would suck, and dipping its nose in the bucket. The paddies soon caught on. I looked after them until they were about three months old and ready to be weaned on to solids like grass and hay. Most of the boy ‘bobby’ calves were sent to the calf sale at one or two weeks of age. The girl calves were lucky—they could look forward to growing into heifers and joining the dairy herd.
Each May and September school holidays, for as long as I could remember, I set traps to catch rabbits, which were a pest. In the past year, Dad had shown me how to set snares on boundary fences for kangaroos and wombats as well.
My latest rabbit catch became a stew. Mum knew I loved the tender, fresh meat, more so because I’d hunted and gathered it myself, but now I refused to eat it.
She was angry. ‘Why won’t you eat, who do you think you are?’ Then, with Dad in the washhouse, scrubbing his hands and combing his wavy hair as he always did before coming to the table, she said, ‘If you don’t eat, I’ll tell your father, and you know he has enough worries already.’
Besides telling me that Dad was tired, Mum was forever providing updates on his worries. We had too much rain, not enough rain; too much wind, not enough wind; butterfat prices were falling, superphosphate prices were rising; in autumn the cows’ milk was drying off too early, in spring the cows were blowing up with milk fever; all year round, machinery was breaking down. I felt the burden of my parents’ worries, but couldn’t eat the rabbit. The guilt caused me to run for miles along the rocky river track, and eat only a dry crust of bread and half a tomato the next day.
At the end of September I began my final term at primary school and was exercising three hours a day. With my thinness more apparent, my mother tried to persuade me to swallow a vitamin mixture. I refused. I hated the smell and feared the calories.
Sometimes she became very upset.
One afternoon after school she insisted I accompany her to visit an old friend, Mrs Banks, a widow, several kilometres around the corner of our valley. Anyone who lived just outside our valley was referred to as being ‘around the corner’. I didn’t want to go, my thoughts were screaming at me not to go, but Mum promised, ‘We’ll take a bunch of flowers and stay only a few minutes’. In the car on our way there, she revealed we were invited for afternoon tea. Dismayed, I said, ‘But I need to be home to do my jobs.’
‘Don’t be impatient, and don’t be rude,’ she warned as she pulled up beside Mrs Banks’ wooden picket fence. Mrs Banks was waiting at her front gate to greet us. The flowers were presented and admired, and we wandered as slow as snails around Mrs Banks’ pretty garden on our way into her cottage. I tried to suppress the urge to run.
Then came the dreaded, ‘Come inside and have a cup of tea.’ In we went, and I sat on a chair beside Mum at the small kitchen table, struggling to keep still while the two women chatted. Wood was fetched, and the fire stoked, to help the kettle boil. It took forever.
I politely declined the offer of a glass of milk or a glass of sugared cordial. Mum glared.
‘I’d like a glass of water, please.’ Things deteriorated fast. Mrs Banks offered a plate of homemade biscuits and cake. I wanted to escape. I could feel my cheeks going beetroot red under my snowy hair as I said, ‘No thank you, Mrs Banks.’
Seething at my poor manners, Mum accepted a biscuit with her cup of tea. The chat continued. ‘Mum’s angry but I can’t stay here,’ I thought. She was about to get angrier because suddenly my hands, on which I’d been sitting, broke loose and I began squirming on my chair, swinging my legs and folding and unfolding my arms. I nudged Mum while Mrs Banks refilled the kettle.
‘I want to go home,’ my eyes begged.
‘Sit still,’ she flashed back. Mrs Banks returned and conversation continued.
Suddenly my anorexic thoughts took over. I stood and blurted, ‘I want to go home to help Dad in the dairy.’
‘Just a few more minutes,’ Mum smiled sweetly. Veiling her annoyance, she said the biscuits were so crisp and crunchy she would eat another one. Pleased with the praise, Mrs Banks offered to write out the recipe. Mum and her neighbours were always swapping recipes.
‘Thank you, Alice, I’m sure Lindsay will like them,’ Mum said.
‘You stay for your recipe and I’ll walk home,’ I chipped in, thinking this was a good time to make a break and the four kilometre walk would compensate for the time I was seated. But Mum stood too, smiled and said to Mrs Banks: ‘I’ll get the recipe another time. We’d better go home now.’
The truth was, Mum couldn’t bear the thought of me walking home along the road. She’d worry a neighbour might drive by and see me not walking, but running. I was an embarrassment.
I raced out of the house to the car. I stood beside the passenger door and hopped from one foot to the other while Mum and Mrs Banks dawdled, with Mum choosing a few plant cuttings to strike for her garden. The farewell at the front gate took an eternity. At last Mum opened the car door and sat behind the wheel of our black FJ Holden.
She was angry. ‘How dare you?’ she raved as she drove us home. ‘You can’t sit still for half an hour. What’s got into you?’
She didn’t know I had anorexia. She didn’t wait for an answer before continuing, ‘You were good. Now you are rude. Everyone will be talking about you and your bad manners. You always want your own way. Why don’t you think of others?’
On and on she went. I said nothing. She would not believe I did not want to be difficult, that my mind was being overtaken by thoughts that were not really me. I wanted to get home and run, run, run to make up for all that horrid sitting down.
One Sunday, a few weeks later, I was invited to play with a school friend, Louise, at one of the grandest farmhouses around the corner. The invitation included Sunday dinner. I didn’t want to go and said I preferred to wander in the bush and look for wombats sunning themselves on their mounds, or watch lyrebirds doing their dance.
‘You
