This matter of the autobiography settled with satisfaction, I regained my chronic distaste for the kind of life into which it had pleased God to stuff me. The entertainment of fashioning my characters and acting their parts gave me the idea of being an actress. Acting appeared to be the only avocation open to a girl who was not a musical genius nor trained in anything but domesticity. Heaven knows why I had such a notion, for I loathed hypocrisy, and in my circle, acting was another name for this. I had never seen a play nor a mummer, nor even read one—a play I mean—except Shakespeare’s. It must have been the delirium of day-dreaming. Fantasy.

My delirium escaped me one day and really startled poor Ma. We had a State child called Eustace to help about the place, or hinder, Ma said. He had once been an elephant’s leg in a school play in Goulburn and considered it a great lark. I concocted a scene, in which I was to accidentally fight a duel with him. He refused to fight unless I wore trousers. I put on Pa’s, but Eusty said Odds Fish, no dashing blade would fight with such a spectacle. So I tried a pair of Eusty’s in which I showed a bit of knee like a fat boy. Eusty called me Greedy Guts. We staged the drama in the hay shed. Pa was concerned that we might have set alight to the straw. Ma said never, never let her hear of me again putting on trousers; showing my person, failing in self-respect before a State School boy!

My defence was that to act Shakespeare (whom everyone respects next to the bible), I should have to don doublet and hose. Me acting SHAKESPEARE! Ma was shocked to discover such foolishness in me. I must really be mad. This put me in a fantod so that Ma reported me to Pa and threatened to enlist the clergyman to exorcise the devil in me.

“Now,” said Pa, when left to rebuke me, “you must be careful not to upset your mother. The game is not worth the candle.” The only thing wrong in the affair was that I had upset Ma: I must never upset Ma: she was a wonderful woman.

“She is not always right just because she is my mother,” I grumbled.

“The law is that the Queen can do no wrong,” said Pa.

“Yes, but a Queen is a being raised to false majesty.”

“Have you forgotten that a woman’s kingdom is the home?”

Pa had a twinkle in his eyes, but I refused to melt. EXPERIENCE was certainly teaching me that a sense of humour is too often an advantage to the one who hasn’t it. A lack of a sense of humour, like a lack of good-temper, can be used as a waddy.

Later Ma upbraided Pa because he had not severely trounced me. Pa said, “I see nothing wrong with the child’s intellect except that it is too bright for its uses”.

“If she comes to harm, you must take the consequences,” said Ma. “I find her with a boy—swept up from the gutter or somewhere—in a pair of trousers exposing her flesh.”

“Eustace is a fine boy. He only needs a chance.”

“A chance to get into mischief and laziness. Dear me, where would a child of mine get notions of the stage—the lowest...”

Pa began to rub his hair gently on end and remarked, “I suppose a sea bird reared in the middle of a desert would retain aquatic tendencies.”

“She does not take after my side of the house,” said Ma.

She was too perturbed about my aberration, as she called it, to leave me to Pa. She “took me in hand”. I resented the evil she discerned in me, felt that she was unfair, but there was no appeal against Ma. She disabused my mind of any notion that I could go upon the stage. She ridiculed my every feature and every contour. Ma believes in finishing things. She says it is a sign of a weak mind to begin things and leave them half done. Ma has no weakness of mind. She always finishes the hardest task. She finished me to squashation like a sucked gooseberry. I often longed for death or a nunnery as an escape from my depressing lack of desirable attributes.

But I was freed from notions. Never again would I have the conceit and delusions to think of the stage. Never would I have the effrontery to seek any but the humblest jobs. Should anyone flatter me I would know them for what they were at the first soft word. Ma had ensured me against making a fool of myself by attempting flights, but she had not helped me towards contentment. The native wombat role for me henceforth. Those who are low need fear no fall. I had always jeered at the Blackshaws, our neighbours, by saying they would never make fools of themselves and by adding that those who had not enough stuffing to make fools of themselves at times would never make anything else of themselves.

The finishing stroke in Ma’s finishing school was the threat to report me to the nice little clergyman. I loved him dearly. Like Old Harris he was an outlet. I was so worked up that I warned Ma that I’d listen to what she told him. Ma said it was a grave pass to be dictated to in her own house by a creature she had brought into the world. She demanded an apology. I refused. If I expressed contrition to Pa all was washed out, but with Ma it was different. She said penitent gush was useless without reform in deeds. Ma was what she called consistent.

The clergyman came next day, and after dinner, when Pa was at the stables feeding his horses, I loitered in the passage to hear what Ma was saying. Sure enough, she was reporting me as an abnormal specimen. I was infuriated, but the clergyman’s voice, in the tone of the Collects—perhaps it was the Twentieth Sunday after the Melbourne Cup—said, “But my dear Mrs. Melvyn, I cannot see anything wrong at all. That child has such glorious eyes that when they are fixed upon me I always find I can preach a better sermon.”

“She can be nice when she wants to.”

“Adolescence is a difficult time. You might let her come with me around the parish and to stay with my wife and daughters till I come next month. During our progress I could find time to talk to her on spiritual things: and I get so tired of driving, and she is such a clever whip.”

That was one in the eye of Ma. I was as gay as a lark, and a willy-wagtail or two thrown in, when serving supper. I awaited breathlessly to hear the results of the clergyman’s championship. Disillusion awaited me.

There was only a thin partition between my bed and Ma’s, and I could always hear Ma’s final injunctions to Pa. Tonight Pa opened the discourse. “Mr. David wants to take Sybylla with him.”

“So he said.” Ma’s voice was a drought of common sense.

“Are you letting her go?”

“I am not.”

“Can’t you spare her?”

“Not to Mr. David.”

“Why?”

“Why should I let her run around with that silly old man?”

“He’s not so silly.”

“All men are silly where there is a young girl.”

“I think you carry suspicion too far,” murmured Pa.

“His cloth doesn’t protect a man from being blind to faults in a girl, though he would be dull to the problems of older women.”

Pa gave a loud grunt. In a little while Ma complained, “I wish you wouldn’t snore so”. Pa hadn’t begun yet, so Ma was taking time by the forelock, as she often adjured me to do.

I lay awake pondering her words. Surely a clergyman, and such a nice lean helpless-looking little one as Mr. David, would not be guilty of flattery or trying to make a fool of me; and he wasn’t a bit like the pretentious Canon, who had once taken Mr. David’s place. Now, if it had been the Canon! I remember chortling when I read the table of consanguinity beginning, “A man may not marry his grandmother,” but Pa had said that human nature was such that...well, such daunting things are attributed to human nature that one would prefer to be one of the higher animals and have decent instincts.

I had a good yarn with Mr. David on his next visit. I had him alone because a neighbour who was ill sent for Ma, and Pa had driven her over. I confessed one thing that prejudiced me against God was that He had to be fed on everlasting praise. I had to grow strong in disapprobation, but God had to be praised unceasingly by measley creatures which He Himself had made. The Psalms were ridiculous with fulsome praise. Egotism in me had to be stemmed and denied, but God seemed to be a sticky mess of it. Another reason I could not respect God was that it seemed so despicable to continually spy upon distressed little girls for the purpose of condemnation.

Mr. David chuckled and said, “Poor God: He has need of young minds like yours to think their way to Him, not to rebel against Him. He needs your help to free Him from all the stupid misrepresentation. Sybylla, m’dear, God is aching for your loving help.”

The problem was thrown on me in a way that had never even been hinted in ‘Possum Gully by anyone except Pa, and his theories were discredited by Little Jimmy Dripping’s common sense.

This devastating idea haunted me day and night. The God made by disagreeable and selfish old men in their own image and erected as a bogey to control women and children retreated before it. Was there no God, only as He was made manifest by nobility and truth in ourselves? This idea, at first releasing, grew to be terrifying. It left one lost and alone. The European God with all His masculine bullying unfairness was at least something to be sure of, however unsatisfactory. No God except as we demonstrate Him! Whew! There was a burden too difficult and demanding to be borne. No wonder people evaded such a vast responsibility by hypocrisy, or sought less exacting conceptions of God in josses which could be placated by praise and candles and incense and other material bribes. It was a sobering revelation.

However, LIFE went on.

I loathed ‘Possum Gully more and more. The horses were dog-poor. To ride them at the beginning of a bleak and droughty winter would have been wanton cruelty plus extravagance. March was crisp and cool, with a hint of frost which makes one feel as strong as a young colt, and I rebelled against the continual shining of pot lids, the unnecessary whitening of the hearth, just because Ma insisted upon being the top-notcher.

I took to the piano. Ma said that hard work and worry had driven piano-playing out of her. I said why not turn it the other way about, and drive out dullness with the piano, but Ma preferred to excel in spotless floors and windows. My thumping on the piano irritated her as a love of idleness, and I had to desist.

I hated every bit of the life but the sunsets and moonlight and the wild flowers. The watch-dog’s bark was often the only incident of the day with its promise of a caller to break monotony. Sometimes this would be a tea agent or a stock inspector. The regular visitors were Mrs. Olliver, Mrs. Blackshaw, or Mrs. Crispin come to spend the afternoon. I resented their inadequacy as society. It was not their fault. I loved them warmly, much more than they loved me, I am sure, and did more for them than they did for me, because I was something for them to criticise and cackle about. “That Sybylla does this and that.” Someone was always reporting what the other said, and that annoyed Ma. Pa said rubbish, if criticism was sifted out of conversation people would be silent from Goulburn to Bourke and Broken Hill and beyond.

Poverty can make pioneering a sorry job. In any case it has always been heavier on women than on men. ‘Possum Gully was a generation or two removed from frontier pioneering, though Australia never had a frontier. She had an outback which became back paddocks with familiarity. But all the trying part and none of the adventure of pioneering remained at ‘Possum Gully. The inconvenient houses depending on the main strength of drudgery, the absence of comfort or beauty or any cultural possibilities or opportunities for self-development were still enough to induce Back Blocks lunacy in any one above a cow in ability.

Those good ladies all had large families, and their conversations were about recipes for cakes and puddings and little Tommies’ tummyaches, and then boasting bees as to who skinned her hands the most in washing her husband’s trousers of moleskin. They and their daughters, following in their tracks, were held up to me as admirable. Horrors! Broken down drudges talking of uterine troubles and the weariness of child-bearing! I could not accept that as the fullness of life from any God worthy of worship or gratitude. These martyrs to stupidity were extolled in sententious tones as “mothers of families”. They were populating Australia. I said that instead of Ned Crispin and others I should prefer Australia to remain populated by kangaroos and the dear little bears and kangaroo rats that were as thick about us as sheep. This was the sort of thing that made me entertaining to the ‘Possum Gullyites, and troubled Ma.

Another winter wore away and a bit of a spring deluded the land. We had saved a few hundred sheep, and wool would be scarce because so many sheep had died. Just as shearing was coming on Pa had a call from an old colleague to help fight a by-election in Junee. This was a key electorate on Pa’s side, and he said he could not let the country down. The shearing would take only a few days, and Mr. Blackshaw offered to oversee it. He too saw the importance of Junee being saved for the right side.

This infuriated poor Ma. She said Pa might as well have been a drunkard who went on the booze at critical times. To leave our sole income to the superintendence of an outsider was not merely undignified, it was lunacy. Ma said I could now see why she tried to save me from my father’s tendencies. She held that a man should first save his home and family, and the country could come second. Pa said if the country was not saved for the homes and liberty Australia might as well be under the Russian Czars.

At any rate Pa went, ran away in a crisis, Ma said, just because he loved to hear himself spouting on a platform. Ma said I would never understand what she had suffered, that life was a bitter thing with a useless husband. I ventured to say that Pa didn’t have such a slashing life either. Ma maintained it was much harder for her, but that I could not understand that.

I was piqued by this accusation of lack in understanding. I said I could understand it was easier for Pa because he was so proud of her and thought her so wonderful. He at least had the satisfaction of thinking what a stroke he had done to choose and win such a wife, while she must always be ashamed of herself for marrying so much beneath her; but that did not appease Ma. Quite the opposite. Quite, quite the opposite! I gathered that Ma had the added affliction of me as a daughter, which couldn’t matter so much to Pa because I took after him.

Then Mr. Blackshaw’s back was smitten and he could not rise from bed. All the men at one time or another had a bad back. It was Mr. Blackshaw’s turn. Ma was a deserted heroine.

“It is my turn to save the ship,” said I. “You always say that I’ll have to help Pa. I know how to pick up and roll a fleece, and Eusty can be tar boy and rouse-about.”

This did not dispose of the pressing. We had a hand-worked press of Pa’s construction which Ma said showed what a helpless botcher Pa was, but all the neighbours used to borrow it, which further shows the standard of the neighbourhood, or that Pa wasn’t so bad.

We turned the hayshed into a floor for two men with blades, who wanted to learn so that they could go down the Riverina next year. The skilled shearers had not yet returned to their little homes in the wallaby scrubs around us. These lads had to do their own work and come a distance each morning and they were very slow. All this prolonged the festival.

Ma vetoed the idea of my working in the shed. It would have been fun and a relief from the pot lids and d’oyleys. (It sometimes took half an hour to iron one of the prevalent d’oyleys.)

“You would be talked about,” said Ma, “and the boys would be giggle-gaggling with you instead of attending to their work.”

She decided to attend to the shearing herself and let me do the cooking. This was a disappointment, as to press one’s face into a nice fat sheep all white from the shears is a delight. The two shearers were selectors’ sons in their teens. We knew each other minutely, but did not “associate”. We were a grade higher socially, but had we shown it they would not have shorn for us, and would have slanged us throughout the neighbourhood. Ma and I managed to be too busy to sit down to meals with them, and thus was a gradation of the caste system preserved.

The shearing was saved but the country was lost in so far as Pa’s man was rejected by the electors, and Pa did not have his election expenses paid.