Yeoval’s sole claim to fame is as the place where Andrew Barton Paterson, better known as Banjo, spent his first five years in the late 1860s. He grew up on Buckinbah Station, a sprawling property that named the original township. In 1882, when Buckinbah was renamed as Yeoval, the young Paterson was working as an articled clerk for a Sydney law firm as a recent graduate of the prestigious Sydney Grammar School. It was another three years before poems under the name ‘Banjo’ began appearing in the Bulletin, which first published his best-known work, ‘The Man from Snowy River’, in 1890.
Adopted soon after his birth in 1934, my father grew up on a small wheat farm amid plagues and drought, with loving parents who pinched every penny. He made his pocket money by skinning rabbits. At times, he said, so many rabbits covered the ground that ‘it looked like the earth had got up and walked’. Eventually his family left the farm and moved into a single-storey dwelling in Yeoval proper, where his father George Lloyd took over a stock and station agency selling everything from farming machinery to fresh eggs.
From the back seat of my father’s car I stared at the forlorn weatherboard house, for which modest was too modest a word. In summer they must have baked like bread inside it. The house looked both authentic and makeshift, like a forgotten display in a museum of disappointment. I could hardly conceive of anyone, let alone my father, living in it—or turning up on its drab doorstep for a piano lesson with my terrifying grandmother. It wasn’t much, but to Alice I suppose it hadn’t been much for more than thirty years.
Between my mother’s general impatience with my father’s trip down memory lane and my ongoing sibling skirmish in the back seat, we did not dwell long on the sorry sight. Owing to the heat, the dust, the sense of desolation, and my horror at Dad’s stories of rabbits and locusts, it was on that rural tour that I came to associate living in the country with the Old Testament.
A few years ago I found myself once again travelling with my parents to visit an elderly woman on the outskirts of Sydney. This time it was my aunt Charlotte, my father’s sister, who lived on the city’s rural fringe. Over three decades, undulating fields where sheep and cattle had safely grazed had become purpose-built enclaves of identical single-level houses on quarter-acre blocks. We sat down before the pot of tea that remained as essential at family gatherings as the cup of wine at Communion. We had just returned from a visit to the house next door, where my sixty-year-old cousin Bronwyn, Charlotte’s daughter, lived alone. In an architectural echo of the notion that women grow up to look like their mothers, the two houses were exactly the same on the outside, though their interiors differed in layout. The collective glassy stare of my cousin’s porcelain dolls, which sat in rows on her living room wall, gave me the creeps. They looked like something out of a horror movie—the replication of a notion of beauty from an era when an intact hymen and the ability to play the piano, rather than a trust fund and an MBA from Harvard, represented ultimate social value. Rosy-cheeked maidens sat shoulder to shoulder in long silk dresses of block pink, lemon, mauve and the inevitable white. All dressed up and nowhere to go, they gazed into a future that would never materialise.
Sipping my tea at Charlotte’s, I couldn’t decide which was more distressing: the size of Bronwyn’s doll collection, or the fact that she lived next door to her parents.
Toward the end of the first cup, Charlotte leaned on wobbly knees and slowly stood up from the table. ‘I’ve got something to show you,’ she said as she ambled in the direction of her sewing room. In years gone by this sort of threat announced the imminent bestowing of a homemade tapestry to hide in a drawer when I got home. Now in her late eighties, my aunt had discovered the internet and enthused ad taedium about branches of the family tree she had collected during her genealogical research. The room that had once been dedicated to sewing and painting-by-numbers was now the headquarters of Charlotte’s investigations.
To my surprise, my aunt returned clutching a bundle of documents relating to her mother’s musicianship. In April 1912, at the age of sixteen, Alice May Morrison Taylor attained her Elementary Certificate by passing examinations in Musical Memory, in Time, in Tune and in Sight Singing, then the Intermediate level just five months later. In florid script the Intermediate Certificate announces that Alice has fulfilled the Tonic Sol-Fa College of Glasgow’s requirements for Reading Music at First Sight, and Writing it from Ear, and of eligibility for an advanced Choir. In between these achievements, she passed her First Grade examinations in Staff Notation (the ability to write music) in May 1912, and claimed her Elementary Certificate in Theory of Music the following January. There were references to her public appearances and letters of recommendation for her employment as a choir mistress. ‘She is a very painstaking and enthusiastic musician and I have great pleasure in recommending her for any important appointment she may seek,’ wrote her teacher, the esteemed local musician Frederick Hervey, less than two years later. Alice had been a late bloomer but a fast learner.
I found it difficult to believe that the subject of these certificates and glowing recommendations was the same woman who, one decade on, battled rabbit plagues and endless dust on a wheat farm in the middle of Nowhere, New South Wales. It was impossible to reconcile the evidence of a very musical girl with the family story of a humourless woman with a matching chip on each shoulder. With the wife who recorded local marriages on her kitchen calendar so she could determine, by the birthdate of the couple’s
