In late 2019, I was asked by the Museum of Brisbane to contribute a story to an exhibition they were planning called The Storytellers, in which they proposed to feature short pieces of writing by local authors corresponding with various inner-city suburbs of Brisbane. I believe that sense of place is integral to stories and was drawn to the opportunity to dig deeper into a location that I’d known for decades, to see whether I could find a story hidden there. AT HOME ON THE RIVER BEND is the story of a place told through the life of a woman who calls it home, a tale of history, mystery, memory and a long-kept secret.

If you prefer to listen, rather than to read, you can do so here:

 

At Home on the River Bend

Sometimes, in my dreams, I can remember crossing the sea. Really, I know it is my mother’s voice that put those strong, bold pictures there. So often did she sit at the table in our Stanley Street kitchen mending garments for the shop downstairs. Her hands moved fast, making small, tidy stitches, every bit as practised as the tales she told and retold of the life they’d left behind, the horrors of the Great War, the treacherous ocean journey that brought them here from there.

I was born two years after my parents arrived on this peninsula in South East Queensland and have lived my entire life within the same snaking bend of the wide, brown river. My earliest real memories are the smell of fat, subtropical raindrops simmering on sunburned roads; morning magpies singing to one another beneath a cut glass sky; rows of weatherboard houses perched like crabs upon their skinny wooden legs… I remember rats, too, as big as cats. Every May they would sense the winter coming and slip inside our house to take up residence in the cavity above the VJ ceiling. “Kurilpa,” my father told us, “that’s what this piece of land is called—place of rats.”

I dreamed of my father and his shop last night. We used to help out after school, straightening the hats on the shelves, neatening the rolls of ribbons, polishing the wooden display cabinets to the point of gleaming. On rare occasions, when Dad considered we’d distinguished ourselves, we were allowed to slip behind the counter to serve—I can still remember the thrill of writing up transactions in his leather-bound ledger, wrapping each item carefully, the cheerful chime of the new register, with its mahogany case and shiny round brass buttons.

*

Memories surround me today. It is my one hundredth birthday, and my family have arranged lunch at a fancy new restaurant with a view across the river towards Gardens Point. (There are so many fine restaurants now and people willing to fill them. When I was young, 4d milk bars, oyster saloons and Greek cafés like Mr Comino’s next door, with its Art Deco mirrors and soda fountain, were as fancy as it got.) My granddaughter, Rosie, has been conscripted to pick me up at midday and drive me the short distance to Southbank. I am going to ask her to park at the cinema, even though it’s further away, so that we can walk together beneath the bougainvillea-spine, all the way from the Conservatorium of Music to where the coal wharves used to be.

I will think of my brothers as we walk. We loved the river as children. For us it was alive: a churning, breathing secret keeper, carrying news from upriver as it passed us on its way to meet the sea. We liked to stand against the steel rails of the Victoria Bridge and lean as far as we could, looking up towards the Cremorne Theatre, the fish markets and the new bridge being built at the end of Grey Street. Dad was so proud of that bridge—everybody was. “Sand islands,” he’d exclaim, shaking his head at the ingenuity of it all; “Air-locked chambers under the water!” Those were the darkest years of the Depression and we were all made glad by progress.

Downriver, we used to watch the ships come and go at the dry dock, guessing at the places they’d seen. We would lower our voices and remember the Pearl steamer that had set across the river in early 1896 only to be driven by a strong flood surge into the anchor chains of the government yacht Lucinda. “Sliced right down the middle,” one of my brothers would say, and we would fall silent for a time, imagining what it must have been like to be amongst the ill-fated passengers, swirling in the angry waters, before sinking, exhausted, into the depths of the river.

Old Ned Baxter, who used to spend his mornings drinking strong, sweet coffee at Mr Comino’s café, had been in the Plough Inn at the time and could always be relied upon to tell us what he saw. “An almighty crash—” he would begin—“and then I ran down to see what was happening. I’ll never forget the first body, that poor woman being pulled by her feet from the dredge. Hundreds of people gathered—men anxious to help, women wringing their hands, children running in every direction as they waited to see if their parents would emerge. Before too long, though, there was nothing left to see but a cluster of hats, bobbing on the surface.”

It seemed to us that the river was rich with ghosts. We were convinced that on foggy afternoons we caught glimpses of Hector Vasyli, the eleven-year-old newspaper boy who’d been run over in 1918 during a parade to welcome the soldiers home. There was a memorial plaque in his name on the south side of the bridge: In his veins ran the heroic blood of Greece and in the breast of a child he carried the heart of a man, it proclaimed. Whenever our dad was displeased with us, he used to shake his head, draw his brows together and say, “You wouldn’t have found young Hector Vasyli behaving in such a way.”

*

When I dressed this morning, I took my time, turning over the brooches in my jewellery box before selecting three. Excessive, perhaps, but one does not reach a hundred every day. The little diamond and sapphire butterfly I chose because it reminds me of my husband. I wore it on my wedding day in 1947; years before that, to my very first dance at the Trocadero. It was June the sixth, 1938—I was only sixteen and my dad was very strict about where I went in the evenings (and with whom), but my friend Dulcie Barnett was mad about sports and had invited me to the annual Hockey Ball. Her father—a prominent doctor—had promised to serve as chaperone and thus reluctant permission had been granted.

My mother helped me to put the finishing touches to my dress: midnight blue taffeta with a seed-pearl trim. We worked together in the evenings, stitching beads and lining the hem, as muffled conversations from the café next door drifted through the windows on the scent of tobacco. The noise would quieten as the hours went by, until the final stragglers called “good night” in the street outside, and we could hear instead Mr Comino whistling as he swept the pavement and locked the doors, the late-night tram rattling over a distant hill.

On the day of the ball, Mum helped me into my dress and set my hair in finger waves to my shoulders. I stood in her bedroom, where the cedar wardrobe had a full-length mirror, turning from side to side so that my skirt swished back and forwards, feeling as glamorous as if I’d stepped out of one of the Hollywood films playing at the Cremorne. Even my brothers—never usually short of a tease—could do no better than to chide me that Shirley Temple wanted her curls back. I was leaving when Mum held up her finger and told me to wait. She returned with a brown velvet box, snapping it open to retrieve a small fabric parcel.

“This was my mother’s,” she said, carefully releasing the wrapping to reveal a delicate butterfly. “She gave it to me the day we left for Australia. I haven’t worn it since we got here, but tonight—” she fastened it to my dress—“well, I just wish she were here to see you.”

My photograph was in the newspaper the following day and Mum bought a second copy, cutting neatly around the article so she could send it overseas. In the photo, I am standing beside Dulcie and a few other girls, in front of a dance hall alcove decorated with seaweed, shells and swathes of fabric to look just like Neptune’s Cave. My hair has begun to lose its polish and although the image is black and white I can tell that our cheeks are flushed. Dr Barnett had been called away to attend the birth of a baby and thus proved a less vigilant chaperone than my father might have hoped, so Dulcie and I danced all night with members of the University Men’s Hockey Club and the Signals Men’s Club and the only other person at our table who knew less about hockey than I did was a good-natured fellow named Jamie Stedman, whose sister played on Dulcie’s team.

There is a framed copy of the Hockey Ball photograph standing on my writing desk, a birthday gift from my family several years ago. I can never look at the image without thinking how young we were that night, and how carefree. But history is sly like that. Eighteen months after the ball, most of those boys, who’d laughed and joked and boasted of their plans to become teachers, clerks and builders, were boarding boats and heading to war. My brothers, too, were amongst the first to go. We saw them off at the South Brisbane Railway Station—if I close my eyes now, I can still hear the cheering. There’d been marches during the day, starting in the city and pouring across the bridge, and people were running excitedly about the platform waving flags and ribbons. My father, though, was serious. He’d dressed in his best shirt and drawn comb lines through his hair. He was disconcertingly short of words as he shook my brothers’ hands. My mother wept behind her smile—she, too, had seen war up close—and reached now and then to brush invisible blemishes from their smart new uniforms.

*

I see the youthful faces of my brothers clearly in my mind and yet I cannot fix upon my own. One’s own life is led in a state of constant transition that makes clarity impossible. My picture of myself at any given time is blurred by overlays of all that happened after. And so, it was a shock that day to unwrap the framed photograph and see my young face smiling up at me from a night so many decades before.

I was still unpeeling the gift-wrapping when one of my grandchildren said eagerly, “It’s the Hockey Ball, Nan—the night you met Grandpa.” As if I might not recognise the scene and characters myself.

I laughed and said, “Why, so it is. Wherever did you find it?”

But as they took their turns to explain, I wasn’t really listening. I was thinking about the way stories told to the young turn into lore. The night of the Hockey Ball has become part of our family mythology. For them, it is an origin story, like my mother’s tales of ‘home’ were for me. With time and repetition, the account of an evening spent at a dance has evolved a fable-like quality and they regard the photograph with the same awe they might reserve for Cinderella’s slipper, should it appear, or the spinning wheel from Sleeping Beauty.

My husband, Jamie, was the storyteller of the family. He had a wonderful voice and a lively face, and a gift for making people want to listen. On family occasions they would all lean forward to hear the well-loved lines—the chance meeting (“neither of us knew anything about hockey”), the key moment (“and so I asked her to dance”), the requisite fateful ending. “I went away to war,” he would say, conveniently eliding five years of strife in five short words; “And when I came back, she was waiting for me, like the princess in a fairy-tale, as if no time had passed at all.”

It is a true story, to a point. We met at the Hockey Ball and we danced together. What we don’t say, is that neither of us made enough of an impression on the other that night to bother staying in touch. Nor do we mention any of the other people with whom we laughed and chatted and flirted. The story is better without such details and the end result—our enduring marriage, this family of ours—justifies revisions. Instead, we pick up the tale a year after the war ended when I answered a ‘help wanted’ ad and found him sitting on the other side of the interview desk, only vaguely familiar until he said, “And tell me—how’s the hockey? Any further along with the rules?”, and I knew exactly who he was.

But behind every story, no matter how settled its narrative, sit shadow versions. The sentences that weren’t written, the characters and sub-plots cut for reasons of pace or clarity or pathos; the almost-weres and might-have-beens.

Jamie had his shadow stories—the years of war he kept to himself throughout our marriage; and I, of course, had mine.

*

I know why I am thinking along such lines today. A Guy Named Joe was on the television last night. I sleep odd hours these days and caught its tail when I was flicking through the channels in the dark. I watched for a while, Spencer Tracy in uniform as an American pilot, and it put me in mind of wartime here at home.

It was eerily quiet after my brothers and the other local lads left town, but then the Americans arrived, with their smart uniforms and bulging pay packets, and everywhere, it seemed, got noisy all at once. I had a part-time job at the Cremorne by then, selling tickets to the shows. My father hadn’t been happy when news reached his ears about some of the more risqué acts onstage, but Mum convinced him that the influx of soldiers in the audience meant I was doing my bit for the war effort.

The Americans seemed very sophisticated to us: their accents and bravado, their not-from-around-hereness. They were confident and loud and I was equal parts shy and awed by them. Mostly I observed them from afar, but there was one—younger and less brash than the others—who used to sit at my counter while the others watched the show, drawing in a wire-rimmed sketchbook.

“Quiet,” was Dulcie’s assessment. She’d dropped by the Cremorne one night to show me the latest pair of nylons she’d been given: “A bit dull if you ask me. Imagine choosing to scribble in a book instead of watching a show or going dancing!”

“I think he’s interesting.” He was going to be an illustrator, he’d told me, when the war was over.

“Picture books,” he’d said, “for kids. I’ve written lots of stories already and sent them off to publishers. I’m just finishing one now.”

Dulcie squinted a little as she eyed me through her cigarette smoke. “Quiet people always seem interesting… until you get to know them.”

She was right that we hadn’t known one another for long, but wartime is different.

I knew that he was tall, left-handed and serious-eyed; his hair was blond like his father’s Dutch family; he liked baseball and films. He thought roses were predictable but sunflowers were cheery. Jazz was his favourite type of music and he played clarinet passably well. His best friend in the first grade had died from tetanus after standing on a rusty nail; his eyes misted over when he talked about his home; he didn’t think there was any sight more beautiful than the bright yellow cornfields on his family’s farm in Idaho. And for as long as he could remember he’d been able to sketch the things he saw quickly and accurately.

I knew, too, that I found it almost impossible not to watch when he was drawing—the slight frown line between his eyes, the determined set of his jaw, the way he tapped his pencil against his lips when he was thinking. I knew that when he wasn’t there, the hours dragged interminably.

The night before his unit deployed, we went to see A Guy Named Joe at the Metro. I’d have preferred Casablanca, which was playing at the Rialto, but figured there was less chance that one of my father’s friends would see us in the City. He said that he didn’t mind what we saw, so long as we saw it together.

He was quiet all night, distracted. I put it down to the ensuing deployment, but on the walk back to South Brisbane, halfway across the Victoria Bridge, he stopped. The moon was full and a spill of silver fell across his face as he asked if I would marry him when he returned.

I loved that boy. Wartime is different, youth is different, and that night, as the river swirled and slapped against the pylons beneath us, as I told him yes, that I would wait for him, I loved him as much as I have loved anyone or anything since.

He exclaimed and spun me around and we laughed together as he lowered me back to the ground. We stood with our foreheads pressed together until his blue eyes became serious and he said, “I don’t have a ring. But I’m going to save every cent between now and then and buy you something beautiful when the war is over.”

I told him that it didn’t matter to me one bit, but he was insistent, taking from his pocket a small circular pendant attached to a pin, glass with a purple flower pressed within it, and a line of tiny stones set around the rim.

“They’re rhinestones,” he said quickly, “not diamonds, but it’s the most precious thing I have.”

He told me that the flower was a syringa (“also known as lilac”), the official flower of Idaho. “My mother gave it to me when I left.”

“A good-luck charm?”

“A reminder of where I’m from.”

“And of where she’s eagerly awaiting your return.”

He laughed then, and agreed. “I can’t argue with that,” he said, “They miss me back home—and they’re going to love you to bits.”

*

My bones are old now, and tired, and my mind filled-up with memories, but I can still glimpse the girl I was back then. The care I took in writing to him, sitting in my narrow bed long after the household had gone to sleep, eyes straining in the dim lamplight; the excitement that I felt when his letters and sketches arrived for me at work. I smuggled them home and hid them, tied together with a red velvet ribbon and tucked within the pretty Schrafft’schocolate tin he’d given me for my birthday. (“Candies”, he’d called them, “all the way from New York City.”)

I remember, too, precisely where I was when my last letter came back to me, a cover note from his commanding officer attached. Walking home from a shift at the Cremorne, tearing the envelope open as I went, I’d stopped short on the corner of Melbourne Street. I still sit there sometimes, on one of the benches beneath the trees by QPAC.

What is there to say now about a young man’s death so many years ago? I grieved for him, but I did so alone. He was my secret. No one else knew what we’d promised and there seemed little point in telling them. At night I re-read his letters, clutching his lilac pendant in my hand and crying into my pillow. During the day I got on with things. Alone, but not unique, for there was death all around. Like everyone, I just smiled brighter, laughed louder, worked harder.

The years passed, the war finally ended, my boss at the Cremorne told me I would have to step aside for the returned soldier who’d held the job before me. And then one day I answered a newspaper advertisement and walked through a doorway into my future—an interview with a man who seemed only vaguely familiar until he said, “And tell me—how’s the hockey? Any further along with the rules?”

*

Jamie and I built a wonderful life—four children, nine grandchildren and seven greats (so far). Countless trips to the doctor, post office and supermarket; meetings in school offices, community centres and churches; a carousel of birthday parties, weddings and graduations. We laughed together, held each other up through tragedies, fought, forgave and forgot.

When he died in 1987, three months shy of our fortieth anniversary, it was as if I’d lost a piece of myself. We’d been a pair for so long, I wasn’t sure who I was without him. Suddenly, there was a whole section of my life—decades—about which I could turn to no one and say, “Remember when?”. The loneliness was like a coat I couldn’t take off.

It was my granddaughter, Rosie, who saw the article in the Courier Mail calling for volunteers. She’d taken to dropping in on her way home from school, raiding my fridge and then setting up with the newspaper and a nonchalant attitude designed to hide her concern for her old grandma. “You’d be great at this, Nan,” she said, stabbing the paper with a sugary finger. “Just think of it—a whole new group of people who’ve never heard your stories.”

She always had a cheek, my Rosie. Wise, too, for one so young.

And she was right. For while Expo ushered in a new era for this city, it also heralded a new chapter for me. I realised how big the world was and how varied, how many people there were to meet and places to see, and I knew with a determination much like panic that I hadn’t a moment to lose. Afterwards, I joined a local conversation group, signed up for French lessons at Alliance Française, enrolled in a History and Classics degree. I made new friends, drove myself around Australia, and travelled twice to Europe. I have seen the fjords of Norway and Alaska, retraced the steps of my ancestors, and toured numerous times by bus across the United States.

On one such trip, the route to Yellowstone took us through Idaho, and I sat captivated, watching the shimmering fields of corn that seemed to go on indefinitely. They were exactly as he had described and I experienced a strange, gnawing ache in my stomach, almost like homesickness—as if for a home and a family that I’d never had a chance to know.

“Are you all right?” The woman across the bus aisle was staring at me, eyes wide with concern.

I told her I was fine.

“You’re crying,” she said, doubtfully.

“Just a little homesick,” I said, which was easier than trying to explain that I was weeping for a boy I knew only briefly; a war that took too many; the passage of time and the randomness of life. Its fragility, unfairness and incredible beauty.

*

Listen! The doorbell rings.

Rosie calls out, “Nan, I’m here!”

And so am I. I’m here and I am ready. I will walk out through the door and into the tapestry of my life, a hundred years’ worth of moments, threads both light and dark, that form my story. I will sit at our table by the river and remember my brothers as boys, scrambling down to the dry docks; my mother in her kitchen and my father in his shop; my friend Dulcie twirling around the dance floor of the Trocadero. Someone will tell the story of the Hockey Ball, someone else will add that if not for that night none of them would exist.

And while they follow the familiar lines, my thoughts will wander to the river. I will remember how later on the night that I accepted Jamie’s proposal, I slid the wooden storage crate from beneath my bed and withdrew the pretty chocolate tin; how I read my soldier’s letters one more time and then slipped out of my parents’ house; how, from the middle of the bridge, I dropped the tin over the side and watched as it disappeared beneath the surface and the river gained another ghost.

“Hello there, Nan,” says Rosie, with a smile that is at once my mother’s and her very own. “Don’t you look beautiful—you’ve always suited that deep blue. And you’re wearing the butterfly, I see, and your Expo badge.” She leans forward to straighten the familiar items and a slight furrow pulls at her brows. “That’s a lovely one, too. Blossom, is it?”

“Lilac,” I say.

“New?”

I consider telling her the truth. Of all my grandchildren it is Rosie to whom I’ve always felt the closest. But I hesitate and the moment passes, time flowing away from us towards the deep, dark sea; and, “Better get moving,” she says, checking her watch. “I’ve got the cake in the car—I don’t want to leave it in the sun too long.”

Perhaps I will tell her later.

Then again, perhaps I won’t.

She takes my arm and together we step outside. The sun is bright; I hear magpies on the corrugated rooftops, the CityCat on the river, cars stopping and starting on Grey Street. The sounds of my life surround me and I know, as I hear them, that I am home.

Kate Morton, London, 2020