No Time for Make up

2.

A backyard bigger than a sheep paddock

When I think of my childhood I see images of red dirt and spinifex, bulbous boab trunks and termite mounds - red, brown, yellow and black. I hear the whistle of the wind, the sound it made when rushing between the stalks of cane grass that grew next to our house in Kununurra. I spy the silver grey flash of the lizard and the blue spark of its tongue as it disappeared under the wire fence of our backyard. I dream of rows of white cotton, red machines harvesting their virgin buds. I see the swirling waters of the Ord River at my feet, the gentle tap of the billabong water against the tinnie's sides: the yellow eyeballs of the crocodiles that lurked beneath the muddy wake of our boat, winking at me. I hear the buzz of insects outside the mosquito net, draped over my bed where I slept as a kid on the verandah at Argyle Station. I sense cool, grey flagstones beneath my feet. I feel the wind tap my cheek as a friend would.

I was five when our family of four, Dad, Mum and my toddler brother completed a 4000-kilometre road trip from Perth, Western Australia, to Kununurra. In 1965 this was considered epic. Most of the miles we travelled were on dirt highways, Dad placing his closed fist on the inside of our window screen to fend off random stones. Gravel shrapnel shot from passing road trains, reticulated trucks on a time schedule. Dad raised his index finger as they passed and nodded. My brother and I bounced on a mattress covering the floor of our grey custom-fit Land Rover. A cross and 'Anglican Church' in a Gothic-style font was painted on the doors, a canvas water bag swung from the front bull bar, and Dad wound down the windows for air conditioning. Everyone sang, 'ten green bottles hanging on a wall . and if one green bottle should accidently fall there'd be .' as the miles glided by. Dad was the only one who didn't sing off-key.

My father was appointed the first Anglican priest in North West Australia in 1965. When we arrived in Kununurra it was a one petrol stop, general store township of a thousand people, the site of the first diversion dam of the Ord River irrigation scheme, built between 1963 and 1967. After a gruelling journey north through Carnarvon, Onslow and Broome, Dad pulled up to an empty block. Our Kununurra prefab house lay in pieces on the wharf in Fremantle, a port city on the fringe of the Perth metropolitan area. Dad turned around and drove his family of four, my sisters not yet conceived, 112 kilometres down the road to the neighbouring coastal town of Wyndham. We spent our first night on mattresses on the lounge-room floor of a stranger's house. Later, in a reflection piece for 'Over-Ord: People with a past in BCA', my father would write:

Driving the 2500 miles from Perth to Wyndham convinced us of one thing: Australia is a huge, old waterless expanse. Nearly all the river beds we crossed were dry, even though the 'wet' had just finished. Nevertheless, the beauty of the land is breathtaking.

Our time there would also be captured in a double-page article in The Australian Women's Weekly in February 1969, which led with 'His Ord River parish - 20,000 square miles'. The article was illustrated with a picture of our family: Dad rocking an Elvis hairstyle and my mother, incognito under a layer of makeup, with the four of us kids.

My father had a range of religious duties in his new job, including monthly parish visits to remote cattle stations, and to the town of Halls Creek in the East Kimberley, 480 kilometres from Wyndham. He spent nights away from our family, driving solo, off the grid with no radio or satellite phone contact. Sleeping on the roof of his Land Rover at night to stay safe from freshwater crocodiles in the wet, and on one occasion during the dry, waking up to find that he had shared his sleeping bag with a poisonous black or brown snake. He didn't look too closely. My father did many trips to remote outback stations, but the one that impacted him deeply, traumatically and indelibly was a visit he made when he was 28 years old. He drove to a remote station with a coffin.

It was the start of the wet season and the roads were barely passable, but my dad kept driving, even when the roads were flooding and it was not safe to travel, because he knew he had to reach that station to stand alongside two young parents who had lost a child. When he arrived he buried a two-year-old girl, lowering the tiny white painted coffin into the red dirt of the Kimberley, into a hole dug by her father. The child's mother stood crying at the gravesite as her other child lay sleeping in their station house. And in the despair of this moment, there was the unexpected request by the child's mother for my father to return with them to their home to baptise their new baby.

A parent's greatest fear is to have to bury their own child. There are no words for that loss.

When I listened to my father tell of his past, I wondered how he coped with the tragedy he faced as a young priest - in those stories were shades of my life as a doctor. I think it was because he saw the comedic side of life. His stories had a side B.

During a baptism service in the 1960s, on the banks of the Ord River at Kimberley Research Station, 19 kilometres from Kununurra, my father entertained an unexpected visitor. He stood in the river with a man who was to be baptised, when the clacking of tin beer cans interrupted the proceedings. A man walking a serpiginous path on the muddy river bank yelled out to my father, 'I'm ringing the bells. What are you doing?'

'I'm taking a baptism,' my dad said.

'What's that?'

The two and fro conversation continued until the stranger replied, 'I get it, but what's the croc got to do with baptism?'

My father turned to see a crocodile behind him. 'And that's when I learned to walk on water,' he said.

We lived in several houses in Wyndham until our home in Kununurra was built at the end of the first year of my father's challenging outback ministry. My favourite place was our temporary house next to the radio base for the Royal Flying Doctor Service (the RFDS), where distress calls carried hundreds of miles by radio waves from isolated outback stations would be received. My parents spoke about their neighbour with reverence, about the way radio communications saved lives. How vital it was for outback stations and nursing posts, remote communities and mining posts to have access to high-frequency (HF) radio to be able to alert the RFDS base when there was a medical emergency. During the 1960s the radio network from RFDS facilities in Derby, Port Hedland, Carnarvon, Meekatharra and Kalgoorlie also provided children living in isolated areas access to an early education by School of the Air.

I never imagined that in my future life I would be the ears hearing the calls for help from distant desert skies, and how central the RFDS would become.

My mother was thankful for the two-way radio the RFDS in Wyndham gave my father as a lifeline when he travelled alone on dirt roads in the bush: call sign 8WIB: Eight. Whiskey. India. Bravo. No GPS or satellite phone. No smartphones.

One of my father's fortnightly parish visits was nearly a one-way trip, and the reason he was given an HF-radio. He took a wrong turn off the main road, followed a private station track and became stuck in a dry creek bed for 23 hours. 'My vehicle sank into the dirt like a lead balloon - the wheels disappeared,' he said. He described his ordeal of being stranded in the outback in 54°C heat as the worst of his life. If a man from a nearby station hadn't made a snap decision to bring forward his fortnightly trip to check an airstrip for the RFDS, taking the track Dad was on, Dad would have died.

It was during one of my father's scheduled absences that a cyclone hit Wyndham. My mother, brother and I sheltered in our house, the shutters bending to the wind's force, banging like a bell ringing its death knell. I lay on my bed, a glutinous jelly baby, screaming out to my mother but she didn't answer my call. I dragged a cotton sheet away from my face and peered at the doorway, where I saw a woman guarding my exit. A hazy figure in hues of pink, pale blue and grey, standing as if she had stepped out of a Russell Drysdale painting. Her hair was drawn back in a bun, flour on her cheeks, a wooden rolling pin in her hand, apron over her plumped belly. I screamed as I ran through her, across the hallway and into my mother's arms. We waited out the storm, my mum, brother and me, beneath the sheets on my mother's bed.

The vision of the pastel woman hung tattooed onto my brain. I was asked as an adult why she had such an impact on me. My answer was 'fear'. The shadowy ghost-like figure was the first time I recalled being frozen by anxiety, with no adult alongside to bail me out. I had to find the courage to leave my bed and seek the shelter of my mother's arms. That was the moment I started to think of God whenever I felt afraid.

I walked to school the next day on a road strewn with sheets of corrugated iron, ripped by the wind from neighbouring houses. Balls of barbed wire rolled past me the way tumbleweed somersaults down deserted streets of outback mining towns and western movie sets. My pockets bulged with marbles, smoky green and white and blue, red and clear glass. They clicked against my lunch money, a twice a year treat - 20 cents to buy a pie and five cents for a glazed bun with fake cream and a blob of jellied red jam. I clutched the dog-eared cover of my first-grade reader, thinking about the adventures of Dick, Dora and their best mate Nip, a dog.

I...