Raglan

Raised in the middle of slight, significant—no neighbours that the eye could see, Fiery Creek full of tadpoles and so many hills to roll down. On a mild Summer’s day I could streak laps of the house with the air whipping my arse, a lark to make my sister laugh. Spear thistles on the lawn around the Hills Hoist, my soles too soft, too sensitive. Rustling of grass: caution—or, just a blue-tongue. Southwesterly through tussocks. White frost. Huntsman in my father’s palm. He built us hay-bale cubby huts in Spring with separate rooms, caught mice in his boot for us to inspect. Puss puss puss. Stray cats on the back porch. Stray cats under the house. Chooks in the tin shed, scratching in the dirt. Barbed-wire fences and the thwack of a scaled gate. Saddle Rock/Elephant: what’s in a name? Smell of gums after rain. There are trucks, heavy with logs, that hurtle along the bitumen, composing potholes, tornados of earth. Tumbling sky, thunderstorms. And the explosive cry of a sulfur-crested cockatoo leads a pack off to roost. Come evening, the roof tick-tick-tick-tick and cows in the paddock, can you hear them?

Collective voices singing the alphabet or counting aloud or Yes, Mrs. Thomson, drill into memory and sit there, echoing uncanny, into adulthood. There were two rooms only at No. 523—little and big. We learn to spell, we learn to read, we do our sums. We behave, salute the flag. Days, months and seasons are taught using paper wheels, each rotated on a split pin. (This means that Sunday & Monday are always touching, so too are December & January, and the seasons have clear boundaries, like a pie sliced into quarters.) History was a goldmine: specks of dust, colonial paintings and the sun beating down. The land, pocked and knotted still with traces of rush and shove. Memory dislodged from history, is it possible? We were children of farmers, weather-contingent and woven from yarn. We lie on the grass, squint in the sun, head resting on difficult soil. An ant storm, swirling round the tongue. I love it, still.

Like a dream that pulls you back somewhere you have been, have never been before. Recall the middle, deep in the chest. To the north, Mount Cole in a eucalyptus haze; Nanna’s playing euchre with her friends. South-east to the township—grainy footage of my father as a boy, skipping electric, Dec. 1961. And then, me, in the school yard, singing silly songs with my friend; Hopscotch; Rounders; 44; séances in the cleaner’s closet until the teachers found out. Christmas concerts at the Hall across the road, so many blinking eyes, generators of past, of present. Bearable memory, crossed over. The place remains, does not remain, is never the same. Tumbling sky, tornados of earth. Huntsman in my father’s palm.

Major Thomas Mitchell, explorer, spends a night beneath Saddle Rock in 1836. Within twenty years, a gold rush along the creek, Hello, mate! What luck? and fifteen fights in a day.
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Lord FitzRoy Somerset, 1st Baron Raglan, demanded his right arm be returned to him—post-amputation —at the Battle of Waterloo; there was a ring on it! He died of dysentery and depression and was played by Sir John Gielgud in The Charge of the Light Brigade (the 1968 version, not the earlier version with Errol Flynn).
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December 3, 1855 and Raglan saw the longest bare-knuckle fight on record (6 hours and 15 minutes). James Kelly was triumphant over Jonathan Smith, who gave in after 17 rounds. The site is known as ‘FightingFlat’.
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The rush subsides; men turned to farming, wood cutting. Messmate from Mount Cole. In the 1860s there were two sawmills, two hotels, and a school. Belmont, “bush architect-ure”, erected in 1858. Still standing.
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In 1996, Raglan Primary School No. 523 closed down.
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Major Mitchell, explorer, surprises two women and their children of the Utoul balug.