The Australia Stories - Short Story

Literary Review, Spring, 2001 by Todd James Pierce

During these years, my grandmother wrote her now-famous essays. In them, she talks about the happiness she found alone in the mountains. "There are many things I did not know," she wrote. "I was brought up to believe a good English woman found contentment in marriage and in family, but here I am, in my own cottage, perfectly content. I have never felt so at peace as I do now. I miss my husband, I miss a family house, but I wouldn't trade what I have for any of those things." (Bush School, page 23)

No one knows how my grandmother met her death: two weeks after my grandfather passed away, she simply left her house for a private bushwalk--no tourists this time, just a solo walkabout. The last person to see her, Mrs. Judith O'Neal, watched her descend The Giant Stairway then make her way east, moving slowly through the underbrush. Four days later, servicemen searched the area, discovering only her scarf and, three kilometers later, her hat. The police report officially listed her as missing, not dead. People later claimed to see lights in her old cottage, but that was never confirmed. After her disappearance, my mother moved back to Australia and lived in my grandmother's cottage for eight years.

3 - The Cottage

My grandmother's cottage was a small two-bedroom house, centered on a nice plot of land. It was made from wood, roofed with corrugated metal, a beautiful verandah across its front, windows opening to the east and west in such a way to catch the sun. Inside, she had a potbelly stove as well as a stone fireplace similar in style to the ones my grandfather once built, but not as well crafted. During her final years, she painted her cottage Federation Colors, that is, green and gold, as a way of showing pride in her native land. The colors, as strange as they sound, were popular for a time, blending well with the surrounding gum trees and wattle.

Following my grandmother's death, my mother made numerous trips to Australia--summer trips, Christmas trips, a few weeks squeezed into March, trips to see my uncle and old friends, but trips mainly to visit the cottage which held the mysteries of my grandmother's life. As best she could, my mother assembled my grandmother's writings, collecting some essays into one published book: The Bush School and Other Early Experiences. The collection was favorably reviewed in The Sydney Morning Herald, earning a coveted Phillips Award for Historical Memoir, and sent back to press eight times by its publisher, MacMillan Australia, in its first year alone. Later, it was published in England, in Canada, and finally, a small paperback edition in America, its title changed, of course, to Outback Australia: One Woman's Tale.

In Australia, her book was scripted into a six-part radio drama, broadcast over the ABC--that is, the Australian Broadcasting Company--which proved to be one of its most popular shows that year. In it, she is depicted as an early feminist, a woman who, once her children were grown, left her husband and lived by herself. In many ways, she turned her back on tradition: she made enough money to buy a cottage, she became the first female tour guide in the Mountains, and she solicited the friendship of many aborigines, mostly women. Around Sydney, she became known as "the woman who walked off into the valley and did not return." People speculated that she joined a group of aborigines. She fell in love with Australia, they said, then with its original inhabitants, stripping off her Western adornments--her scarf, her hat--and following them out past the mighty Murray River, perhaps beyond. Shortly after the initial broadcast, an anonymous person posted a sign atop The Giant Stairway, stating that my grandmother was last seen "at this spot, before she willingly traveled east with unknown aborigines."