secondseven

After the tall timber and cattle country of northern NSW, the west is a completely new adventure.

Huge paddocks of ripening wheat ripple in the breeze and if you squint a little bit you can pretend you’re looking at a vast ocean of dusky yellow water. Freshly shorn sheep huddle together for scant protection from the spring rains. Near dusk on hot dry summer evenings, flocks of pink-and-grey galahs rise in a cloud from the half bare gum trees.

Sometimes the winter rains bring floods and the river rises in a wild gushing torrent only yards from the homestead.

But while the seasons change around us, daily life goes on. I share a room with my mother and this remains the one constant in my seven years as ‘the housekeepers daughter’. The first seven years of my life I enjoyed great freedom and with no sense of inferiority even though we were very poor.

Now I enjoy the surroundings of a nice home, electricity, better food, but am also suddenly conscious of my ‘role’ in life and it sits uncomfortably with me. My mother is a valued housekeeper and we live on several different properties over time as she is offered better pay or conditions but somehow I still never get a room of my own. As time goes on I envy my brother who is allowed to board in the town to attend high-school.

At one property I ride a horse to school which is great fun. Nearly everyone does and the small one-room school has improvised stables for the horses. The teacher believes, (very radically for that time), that it’s important to learn things outside of the classroom so sometimes we go on bird-watching walks or to pan for gold in the local creek.

I’m starting to forget my ‘difference’ compared to the station-owners children when a seemingly small thing happens. The three daughters of the property have been away with their parents on holidays. We stayed home of course. On their return their kindly meaning parents have bought each of us girls a new windcheater for riding to school. Three blue ones for their daughters and a brown one for me!

By now the small ‘chip on my shoulder’ has become a great big log. I develop a fierce determination to make something of my life so that no one can look down on me or patronise me again. I fall out with my mother for the first time as I realise she has a genuine belief that everyone has ‘a station in life’ and you mustn’t try to rise above it. She really believed that to the day she died and it caused great grief for me that she could never be proud of any of my ‘worldly’ achievements but could only say “you’re getting above yourself”.

I loved and respected her very much so I could only hope that in this she was wrong. Certainly she didn’t know about the dreams I’d had as a younger child in Northern NSW which made me think that a different world waited for me. And I could never explain them to her.

When my brother had finished high-school and wanted to take on an apprenticeship, I was also approaching high school age so mum moved us to Sydney. Once again she had no choice but to take on work as a housekeeper and once again we shared a room. The people mum worked for were great but for mum it was still 7days work for ten pound a week and keep - with one afternoon off a fortnight.

With the benefit of my previous school results and the advice of my mothers employers I was offered a place at the prestigious Fort Street Girls High School. I turned it down in favour of a Domestic Home Science High School at Hornsby. I still don’t know why - a form of inverse snobbery? - a feeling that I’d be upsetting my mum by trying to ‘rise above my station in life’? I just don’t know.

Regardless, I have no regrets. When you make a decision in life you have to live by it - there’s no way of knowing whether things would have been better or worse if you’d made a different decision. In the words of Ella Wheeler-Wilcox and her philosophy which I adopted years ago - “Whatever is, is best”.

I was only eleven when I commenced high school and proved to be reasonably OK at domestic subjects such as cooking and needlework, good in English and Arts subjects but hopeless at Maths - barely scraping through each year. Being a dreamer, lazy rather than dumb, my mind was never fully in tune with high school and on reflection I think it was three years spent play-acting as ‘the dumb housekeepers daughter’.

Certainly, by the time I passed my third year examinations (known as the ‘Intermediate’ certificate) I welcomed the excuse of my mothers straightened financial circumstances to both leave school and leave home. So that’s how it came about that before my fifteenth birthday, I had my first job working with very early computer technology and was renting - at long last - a room of my own!

Copyright Lynda Cracknell 1999

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