To Be Young

It Was Fun To Be Young In Australia

Although it may not neces sarily be fun to be poor in Aus tralia, it’s obvious that being poor doesn’t necessarily stop you from having fun. Both Patsy Adam Smith (in Hear the Train

Blow) and Arthur Staples (in

Paddo), prove it conclusively.

TN essence, says Staples, Paddo is true - He was born in Paddington, an inner Sydney suburb, 39 years ago, and it’s likely that many of the things that happened to Mick Ryan the boy that the book is about, happened to Arthur (“Mick”) Staples also.

Mick grew up in the 1930’5, when a large proportion of Paddington adults were on the dole. Mick’s father was among them and until Mick went to school, he was his father’s mate.

Together they collected the weekly government handout of rations and on other days enjoyed the benefits of those with unlimited leisure— including strolling on the lawns of Centennial Park and enjoying the sunshine and flowers.

Bath-Heaters The Ryans lived in one of a long double-storeyed terrace of houses.

They seemed to exist precariously on the proceeds of Frank, the upstairs boarder, Jack the downstairs boarder, and Uncle Charlie, who boarded in the front room, in an environment of exploding bath-heaters, the pictures on Saturday night, the local pub and school feuds between the junior Ryans and Campbells. Mick eventually became apprenticed to the printing trade but was just old enough to graduate into the 2nd AIF when the Pacific War came.

Staples mixes a wide streak of satire with his humour and the episodes in Mick’s life have a shaggy dog quality that is peculiarly Aus tralian. But perhaps you have to be a Sydneysider, with a memory that goes back to 1942 and the barbed-wire entanglements and machine-gun posts on our suburban surfing beaches (while most of the rest of Australia’s 12,000 mile coast line was unguarded) to appreciate some of it fully.

They fortified Bondi, and Bronte and Tamarama, then decided that

Mackenzie Beach should have the treatment as well.

“We tried to tell him that Mackenzie was a seasonal beach,” said Mick. “Some seasons it was there and some seasons it wasn’t. It was liable to be washed away in a storm and washed back in another.

It was only about 30 or 40 feet long.”

But the brasshats would have none of it, and Mackenzie was fortified for a month. Then came a southerly, followed by a nor’-easter and Mackenzie was gone, barbed wire and all. Tamarama had gone at one end, also.

The Army, bulldozers and rolls of barbed wire refortified Tamarama and put new entanglements around the base of the rocks where Mackenzie had been. But, by this time, winter had come and brought Mackenzie back with such vengeance that the sand was level with the top of the tank-trap.

The Army brought more bulldozers and dug it out and restrung the barbed wire and then the sand started to go out by itself and eventually the tank-trap stood 30 feet above the sand without any help from the Army at all.

“But this time we knew the unit doing the fortifications well,” says Mick, “and had adopted them into the surf club.

“ ‘We’re going north next week,’ the officer said. ‘God, I’ll be glad.

They’re winning the war up there but we’re doing no bloody good here!’ ” ☆ ☆ ☆ PATSY Adam Smith lived with her dad, mum and sister Mickle beside the railway-line in a succession of Victorian whistle-stops until it was time for her to enlist as a VAD attached to the 2nd AIF. Hear the Train Blow is a story of that Aus tralian childhood.

At first the book seems to be little more than a naive account of a country child’s life in the late 1920’s and 1930’s but, in fact, it has an insidious charm that soon has the reader pretty firmly hooked.

One reason for this is that anyone w'hose memory extends beyond the present state of over-affluence will find that Patricia, called Jeanie, had

a background not unsimilar to their’s or someone close to them.

Jeanie’s dad was a railway fettler and her mum was station-mistress in the little Victorian towns that warranted nothing more pretentious.

Mum and dad both had itchy feet and their favourite reading was the Railway Gazette which advertised the vacancies that suited their dual role. In this way the family shifted all over the State, from the lushness of wet Gippsland to the semi-desert of the Mallee, The girls grew up sleeping in bedrooms not 12 feet from the rails, attended one-teacher school-houses and because they were usually the only “Pats” in the area, were dragged many miles to Mass each Sunday to satisfy the strict religious principles of mum. (Dad was a non-Pat).

Although the combined wages of the breadwinners was no more than £4 per week, the family was rich in its security in comparison with others in these Depression years.

Still On “Historians,” remarks the author, “say that the Depression ended before the war broke out but for the men who needed work the Depression was still on, even if it had ended for the financiers. ... It is said that Australia’s Sixth Division was made up of men who had been on the dole. That’s the way Bob [her brother-in-law] and the boys like him got their first really permanent job.”

However much effort and denial it involved from mum and dad, the family was always the best fed in the district, the girls the best kept and neatest dressed at school. There was always enough for a handout of food for the swaggie and the in creasing number of men of all stations of life who, in the 1930’5, were forced to wander all over the countryside seeking work, frequently by the device of jumping the rattler if not with the connivance of the railway people, usually with their acquiescence.

The thing that shines out of this story is simple goodness, the kind brought about by the discipline of having too little money.

But this isn’t a snivelling book, a Depression book or a regretful one.

Jeanie had a secret in her life, something that the psychiatrists of this generation would have blown up into something big. There was no room for psychiatrists beside the railway track, so Jeanie’s secret added temperament and determination to the character that mum moulded, sometimes with a stick.

Patsy Adam Smith has had an interesting career. At the time she

ote her book she worked for ; Adult Education Board in Hobart, e’s written children’s radio plays the ABC, made documentaries d written hundreds of articles for istralian and overseas magazines, tween 1953 and 1959 she signed on a 300 tonner working around ; islands of Bass Strait.

No doubt we’ll be hearing more her adventures. The present book published with the assistance of 5 Commonwealth Literary Fund.—

Paddo And Hear The Train Blow

th published by Ure Smith. 19/6 and respectively.)