Category: Calling Australia Home

Arrival in Australia, all felts and tweeds with the temperature one hundred and eleven degrees Fahrenheit, I wasn’t exactly daunted, just a bit knocked up. The open space I was nominated to was crowded with the biggest trees imaginable. They were beautiful, but I would gladly have exchanged them for the dirty smoky city I had so recently left.

                                                                       The words of my mother, Mary McCaughan (nee Wilson)                                       

We arrived in Fremantle on board the P&O Steam Ship Mooltan in  1949 as part of the first wave of post-war migration. Bands played and locals turned out to welcome us. We sweltered in our best clothes worn for our first day in our new country. They were more suited to January in Scotland than the searing summer heat of Western Australia. People took one look at me, all pockmarks and skinny limbs, and thrust chocolate bars at me. Mum’s youngest sister Helen came up from Manjimup to greet us. Helen, having been without the comfort of any family for over a year, took one look at my mother and dissolved into a flood of tears. She was pregnant and badly suffering both morning and homesickness.  

The next part of the story is hazy to me. My parents were obviously left to their own devices and I remember being told that Uncle Doug had been selected to attend a dairy-farming training course in Harvey. Helen was joining him there. From Fremantle we caught the train to Bunbury being held up on the way by a tree which had fallen across the line. After that we somehow made our own way to the farm.

Meanwhile, a well-meaning woman from a group called Friends to Migrants greeted us and invited us to her home for lunch. Not wanting to offend, Mum and Dad with me in tow, followed the woman’s directions. A short walk through Fremantle to find the bus stop had my parents gasping with thirst so they entered the front bar of a hotel to buy a lemonade. My mother was deeply affronted when told that, as a woman, she was not allowed in the bar. Discrimination of this kind was unheard of in Scotland, and unease set in about what to expect in this new country. 

We caught a bus and tramped up a long hot hill to be greeted by a house full of noisy, greyhound dogs and a greasy roast dinner served on a table covered with newspaper. With the heat and the dogs, Mum said her appetite vanished and she already felt homesick as she thought of her mother’s table spread with a gleaming white tablecloth.

My parents had left behind a materially deprived society, but it was, by all accounts intellectually stimulating and vibrant, as well as rich in intellectual and cultural experiences. My parents met in the highlands where they both enjoyed hiking, exploring the peaks and glens with their friends.

Although much of Glasgow had not recovered from the exploitation and impoverishment caused by the industrial revolution, it was a city of art and architecture and libraries. It was also a city alive with political debate. My parents read Marx and other writers who proposed equality of class, race and gender and belonged to the Young Socialists Society.  Mum’s brother, Peter worked as the secretary for James Maxton, the Scottish Parliamentarian. A socialist and a pacifist, Maxton was a gifted orator who  Churchill labelled as “the greatest parliamentarian of his day”.

        Hiking in the Highlands

Theatre and opera were usually affordable, even to the working class. My father had a fine tenor voice and was passionate about music and opera. He remembered hearing Richard Tauber, whose shows were always fully booked. Tauber, a socialist believed music should be for all people and John felt privileged to be among the working-class crowd when the singer came out into the street after the performance and sang. Another visitor to Glasgow was Paul Robson, who my father loved, not just for his rich bass voice, but because he too was a socialist. Robson was from America where even as a celebrity he was treated as a different sort of animal because of his colour. When invited to sing in Lenin’s Russia he was impressed and delighted to find himself, for the first time in his life, on an equal footing with other men. When Mary and John arrived in Australia they had come from a society that was vital and vibrant with political and cultural ideals

Mary Wilson and John McCaughan Oct 4th, 1944

Mary and John were married during the war in 1944. My mother’s wedding dress was a testament to her creativity with a sewing machine. It was nearly the end of the long, bleak war-years, with everything in short supply. Some of my mother’s friends were Jewish and she said they always seemed to know how to find their way around the shortages. They were able to find a precious zipper and the material for the wedding dress. They then took the leftover

 material and made the hat. Mum sewed a whole trousseau of underwear from a new silk parachute that fell off the back of a truck. Wedding cakes in these times were often made of white cardboard decorated with flowers. They looked good in the photo, but the actual cake underneath was only a tiny cube. Mum and Dad had a real wedding cake made by my father’s uncle who was a baker. Added to this rare treat was whiskey that came via the officer’s mess as well as from a friend whose father owned a pub.     

The unknown always seems sublime.

Crossing the equator on board the SS Mooltan on the 14^th January 1949 I was initiated as a Daughter of Neptune and given the freedom of the seas. All kippers, haddocks and other denizens of the deep were charged not to molest me in any way should I fall overboard.

Coping with an active two year old on board a rolling ship was not Mary’s idea of fun. The pokey little cabins were in the bowels of the ship and men were segregated from women. No sooner would she would reach the cabin after struggling down steep staircases when I would cry: ‘Mam need the lavvy’, and she had to trudge back to the bathrooms, which were at the other end of the ship. Unlike my father, Mary did not suffer from seasickness. An added blessing on the ship was the food. There were none of the dreary rations that they had been used to since even before the war. Food was good and plentiful, probably for the first time in my parent’s lives.

The ship stopped at Aden. In the crowd and confusion of the dusty souks, I became lost. Both my parents were panic-stricken until I was eventually found safe and sound, surrounded by Arabs exclaiming over my blindingly, blonde hair, which apparently signified good luck.

During the voyage, I contracted chicken pox. This became a mixed blessing for my parents who were moved to the sick bay to be near me. The sickbay facilities were more comfortable with a toilet and bathroom, and the couple was together. The next stop was Colombo. We were confined to the ship because of my chicken pox. Another couple from Glasgow were also staying on board.

‘What’s the use?’ they said. ‘We’ve no’ got a penny between us.’

It was agreed they should look after me while John and Mary escaped for a day, and in return were paid enough to allow them to also see a little of Colombo.

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I often wonder how my parents felt on this journey, which took six long weeks to go half way around the world. On the voyage Mary had plenty of time to dream about what life would be like in Australia. Did she imagine the farm they were going to would be like those in Scotland with rich green pastures and undulating hills? It had been her idea to migrate. During the Second World War, Mum’s youngest sister, Helen had met an airman of the Royal Australian Airforce. Doug was handsome in his uniform with his low sexy voice and his dark skin. Helen begged and borrowed clothes from her friends including one who had several fur coats, in order to look glamorous for this young airman. It was not long until the casual Australian expected to visit her home. Mary remembers Helen rushing into their two-roomed tenement house (a room and a kitchen as opposed to a single end). She picked up dishes, tablecloth and all, and dumped them into the scullery, frantically trying to make the mean little dwelling more presentable. Doug took her to the officer’s mess and fed her small black and white images of wide-open spaces and beautiful beaches that made her hunger for distant shores.

Helen was only eighteen when she shocked her family by migrating to Australia. She landed in Fremantle and was quickly employed by a law firm as a compositor. Mary believed she did not intend to marry, that she wanted to see the world, that in her letters home she hid the fact that she was lonely and homesick and instead talked about Perth in glowing terms. Doug travelled to Perth from South Australia to court Helen, a wide-eyed and beautiful young woman. She supposedly now succumbed to his charms but I suspected this had already happened back in Scotland. And thus sealed her fate as the hard-working wife of a battling dairy farmer in Manjimup, a small timber town, two hundred miles (almost 300 kms) south of Perth. It was a world apart from Glasgow in every way.

Doug had come from a wheat and sheep farm in South Australia. Besides wanting to be independent, I’m not sure what made him start dairy farming in Manjimup, but the heavily timbered land would have been cheap. They bought a farm that had belonged to the Ralstons, pioneers of the district. There was an old house as well as many sheds and a barn. Years of backbreaking work would be needed to make it into a viable dairy farm, but the couple was young and full of energy.

And how did John feel as he and Mary journeyed towards a farm twelve thousand miles from their city home? I know my father was happy in Scotland. His needs were never great. He had friends that were dear to him, and it was a short ferry ride to his beloved Ireland. And he had his music. At a Ceilidh and other gatherings, he and his accordion were popular. And when he hiked in the highlands or roamed around Ireland on his frequent bicycle trips he would have taken his mouth organ. To this day emotion wells up when I hear either of those instruments. The strength of John’s feelings for Ireland was palpable as he described its great beauty, from the green hills of Antrim in the north, with its insanely scenic coastline, to the mystical Ring o’ Kerry in the south. He talked fondly of his family in Bushmills who were carpenters and wheelwrights in the same small village for generations where they had made everything from the altar at the church to coffins and coaches. He was a gentle, quiet man who once told his best friend that what he most wanted from marriage was security. Yet here he was crossing the equator and stepping into the unknown to try to satisfy the woman he had married. John’s needs were few and simple, but there was nothing simple about Mary.

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I’m not sure if I remember trudging along the narrow bush tracks, hushed except for the buzzing of bush flies in the summer heat, or whether these weekly Sunday walks were etched into my mind by the memories of my mother. It was the early 1950’s and we walked for miles, or so it seemed. I followed my mother’s desperation over the tangled roots and up every hill to try to see above the trees. We never did. Sometimes she sat and wept with frustration, wishing we could to go home.

Again and again my father patiently pointed out that we hadn’t the money to repay the fare and remind her that this was what she wanted. She wanted follow her sister to Australia. What, in God’s name, did she expect?

‘Not this,’ my mother would cry. ‘No electricity, no water, no civilization, bloody nothing.’

We were living with my aunt and uncle on a dairy farm in the southwest of Western Australia. Where Mary had imagined open space, grew towering trees and thick undergrowth. Perth, the nearest civilization, to Mary’s mind was an insurmountable distance away for the couple who owned a bicycle between them. Terror must have clawed at her heart as she realised the recklessness of their decision to migrate to this alien place but who could blame her for seeking greener pastures? In 1948, straight after the end of the Second World War, Glasgow was a grim place to live. The city, whose name ironically means dear green place, was the target of 400 German bombers that dropped more than 500 tons of high-explosive bombs and 2,400 incendiaries on Clydebank. The once vibrant port was devastated. Only eight of 12,000 houses along the Clyde escaped damage. More than 1,000 people were killed. Fires raged and the city, already blacked by years of heavy industry, was now even blacker with piles of rubble everywhere.

Mary yearned for a better life. Her sister was off to a life of adventure in Australia and she was still on a dreary treadmill. With 35,000 people left homeless by the bombing, finding a place to live was a nightmare. Many young couples in their situation moved in with their parents, but living with either of my sets of grandparents would not have been a bag of laughs. Worn down by years of poverty and hardship, they would have watched the young couple’s every move with controlling, over-anxious eyes.

My parents eventually found lodgings in Gourock, a small village at the mouth of the Clyde, near Greenock where John grew up. It was a small, dank room with a bed and a gas burner and little else, but neither of them was used to luxury. They were on their own. That was luxury enough. Mary became pregnant with me, and the landlady who said she couldn’t abide the thought of a noisy bairn swiftly evicted them

Dad said he knew of a place – a disused air force base in the grounds of Castle Levan. The castle stood on the hill above the Cloche Lighthouse, which guarded the mouth of the Clyde. Miss Curry whose family ran the  Cunard shipping line owned the estate. They peered through the window of one of the Nissan huts and Mary could see that they were cosy with curtains, beds and stoves.

Mary had misgiving about moving in. Who did the huts belong to? Dad explained the air force had left them after the war and they were lying empty, which he called a bloody disgrace. He was enraged to think that these perfectly good dwellings were going to waste while ex-servicemen and their families, who had been promised houses after the war, were homeless.

‘What about the people in the castle?’ Mary wanted to know.

‘Just one old biddy,’ replied my father, and he said, surely she could put up with a few more people on so much land.

The padlocks were cut off and thrown into the gorse and the young squatters, with some of their friends, moved in. Mary, fearless in most situations, hated openly flouting the law. She became more and more frightened as she spent long days alone while the others were at work. She didn’t dare leave the camp. The air force had posted a man on the gate. The moment the squatters vacated they could be locked out. Mary, heavily pregnant, at one stage, was stressed and having nightmares. Her only company was their dog, Molly. One day Molly was shot and killed by the farmer who rented the land. He claimed Molly was chasing the sheep, but Mary knew that he hated the presence of the squatters.

By this time, they had come to know Miss Curry, the owner of the estate, who turned out to be a very nice lady rather than an old biddy. Upset by the shooting of Molly, she spoke to the authorities. There was public sympathy for my parents’ and plight, and after a court case, they were told they could stay.

The squatting story has always filled me with pride for my adventurous and rather non-conformist parents, but life did not hold a glowing vision for the future. They had applied for a council flat in Greenock. Anyone who visits Greenock today can still see some of the great, grey, concrete towers that were the modern post-war council flats, and marvel at the contrast to our lives in Australia. If our mother hadn’t hankered after following her sister to Australia, a trip that was free for ex-servicemen, what would our lives have been like?