From as long as I can remember my mother had a fractured relationship with her mother-in-law. I have mentioned in a previous post that my father grew up in a small country town with his widowed mother and her brother. The weatherboard house in which they lived was the remnant of the Moora Hotel, a local drinking hole and stopover from the late 19th century which reportedly was a favourite haunt of one of Australia’s most notorious bushrangers, Ned Kelly. The loungeroom of nan’s house had an old black and white photo of the original hotel during its heyday.
It was never clear to me why my mother seemed to dislike nan so much. My mother is a house proud woman who obsessively maintained a clean house. Nan’s house in Rushworth, the residual building from the old hotel, was very basic in nature. The property was heated by an open wood fire in the main living room and a wood fired oven with light green enamel in the kitchen. Water was collected from rainwater into a corrugated iron tank at the back door. The near constant state of drought in the area ensured that this resource was always precious and to be conserved at all cost. Running water was not a thing. Bathing for us kids was arranged by boiling the large black kettles on the stove top, or by dropping an electric heating coil in to the bathwater. There was no cooling. On a summer day, the temperature in this area of Victoria can easily get to mid-high 30 degrees Celsius. It was dusty inside and out, although it seemed clean inside if not very basic in its furnishings. An old time pianola stood against the entrance way wall. The television was black and white with three channels, although we could usually only get one with manual tuning of the knob. The black telephone was a fixed line with a rotating handle that would charge the solenoid to allow connection to the local Rushworth exchange, where the actual required phone number could be connected by a real human. Yet nan and ‘uncle Bill’ were happy there. It was where they had lived all their adult lives, it was a relatively hard and basic existence, but it was their home.
As an aside, the town of Rushworth was named in response to a gold rush in the area during the mid to late 1800’s which also included other regions of rural Victoria, including Bendigo, Ballarat etc.
My mum hated it there. She hated everything about it. She hated the lack of modern utilities and she could never manage to stay there longer than a couple of nights in a row. As kids, it was always a bit of an adventure. Nan would not infrequently find snakes near the building, with tiger and brown snakes being most common. Both are venomous. Usually, somewhere in the house or outhouses we would come across enormous huntsman spiders, that although nonvenomous, always gave a fright when seen. In fairness to mum, she was always overprotective of her kids. It felt to me that this applied most to me. I’m not sure if that was because I was the eldest, but I suspect there were a few reasons. Out the back of the main homestead building were several farmsheds. Underneath a huge eucalypt stood the dilapidated remnant of a horse drawn cart used for transporting hay bales during the years prior. This was an excellent piece of climbing equipment. Further back in the property were the chicken pens and another old horse drawn water cart rusting in the dirt and dry grass.
I remember one trip to Rushworth, dad was preparing the Valiant by packing the boot. The three of us kids were young. Something happened. There was a blow up from mum’s point of view and she refused to come. Dad packed the three of us up in the back seat and we set off to the country. At the junction of St.Kilda and Dandenong Road, dad turned around to us in the back and said ‘hey, maybe we’ll go see nan another time. Let’s go home to mum’. Another vivid memory that I can see like it was yesterday. I don’t know what happened when we got home. I don’t even know why this particular event is so imprinted in my memory.
I never really knew what the cause of animosity between mum and nan was about. My mother, most often in the midst of arguments with dad, used to say that dad would rather defend and protect his mother than her. That his relationship with his mother was toxic. That his mother had a bizarre ‘control’ over him that prevented him from providing properly as a husband. I never heard mum and nan have an ‘actual’ argument, but frequently mum and dad would have an argument ‘after the event’. If it was a telephone call from nan, mum would hang up the phone and more often than not initiate some form of criticism or nasty statement that would set off an argument. On the times it did not happen, I found myself anxiously wondering as the phone call progressed and ended, whether this would be the catalyst for another bust up.
The same anxiety occurred when time came to leave nan’s place to make the three hour drive back to Melbourne. We often left after an early dinner and drove in the dark. The high beam of the brown Valiant’s headlights illuminating the tall roadside Eucalypts like a horror movie scene. If there was going to be comment made about what nan or Bill had said or done or how they had upset her, or spoken to us kids incorrectly, it was going to happen within a few hundred metres of leaving the front door. Then we were confined. For three hours. With no escape but for sleep on occasion under the crocheted blankets knitted by her mother for each of us. Sometimes the cinders of the post Rushworth argument would re-ignite for days afterwards.
Come back and read this after reading ‘The Biscuit Tin and The Blue Document’ and reconsider the possible implications for my mother and grandmother’s relationship. I have my own thoughts on this.
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