The Australia Stories - Short Story

Literary Review, Spring, 2001 by Todd James Pierce

After my grandfather could no longer find work as a stone mason, he took government work, building the bridge. My grandmother raised produce in her garden: mandarins, kumquats, tomatoes, and cauliflower. By now, her two children had been born, William and Sarah, their hands attached to the hem of her skirt as she stood at the farmers market each Wednesday, selling fresh fruits and vegetables. Each week, they were lucky to leave with enough money to buy fish or a small chicken.

It was during this period, everyone figures, that my grandmother developed her interest in horticulture. The lawn, which my grandfather cut every Sunday, was gradually replaced by rose bushes, petunias, snap dragons, and when the depression was over, a sandstone birdbath and patio table. Spanish roses corkscrewed up through the trellis; tulips emerged each Spring; alyssum blossomed white as snowcover along the ground. It was all terribly English, everyone said. A rose garden. A tea garden. A place fit for the Queen.

It was as though she were preparing herself for her life overseas--that English life, a Welsh cottage, perhaps a Cornish country home. That life, however, never emerged. There was the depression, the children, the Second World War. In photographs, my grandmother appears hopeful, then distanced, and finally removed. The plants in her backyard gradually changed from roses to wattle, from watercress to warratars, from an English to an Australian sensibility, the ground filling itself with plants locals called "natives," until my grandparents, late one May, lost their house to the bank, the two of them retreating to a two-bedroom unit.

The rest is not difficult to understand. My grandmother had a growing fondness for Sydney, for The Blue Mountains, for the state of New South Wales itself. At night, she no longer read Dickens or Austen, instead works of local history: Australia, Our Home and The Founding of a Southern Nation. My grandfather continued to drink, selecting a pub where other men like himself gathered, men who left England only to find a disappointment too great to carry home. At this time my grandmother began to write: essays on her experience at the bush school, a memoir of The Blue Mountains, one chapter beginning "As the granddaughter of a convict, I have the burden of isolation, the longing to be reunited to England, but only now, as an aged woman, can I see the foolishness of such desire." She was not able to publish her work, many original pages remain missing. After giving an account of her life in writing, she decided to leave my grandfather and return to the Mountains, where she purchased a small cottage not far from where she met him, his two stone chimneys still standing, finely crafted monuments to his earlier life, though they would soon be torn down.

She spent her final years leading public bushwalks into the valley of her childhood--down The Giant Stairway, past the stony Three Sisters, past Sublime Point, on toward Wentworth Falls. She showed visitors how to make bush-devils; she pointed out wallaby dens, rosella nests, places where the aborigines once walked. At night, she made campfires: she grilled snaggers and onions; she made billy tea in a large metal pot; she bedded down beneath a canopy of gum trees, the electricity of stars her only light, her dreams of merry old England a distant memory, nothing more than a silly girlhood desire.