At first Mum would worry. However, she soon got used to it as she became far too busy with the other children or being pregnant to wonder where her eldest daughter had got to this time. In any case – and a blessing for my poor mother – Rocky was for families. So many children everywhere. I didn’t have to ask my mum’s permission. I just climbed over a few fences to check if anyone was home and invariably stayed for dinner, as one or two extra mouths to feed was nothing in large families.
Mum couldn’t always cope. She just did the best she could to carry on. Grandma Bridie would have loved to come up and help, but grumpy Grandpa Tom wanted her to stay home and look after him instead. So after Matt’s birth, when I was three and Mum was at her wits’ end, she decided to put me on a plane for the first of my stays with Grandma Bridie in Brisbane – hoping that some of Bridie’s refinement would rub off on me. I remember walking onto the tarmac and up the stairs of the plane by myself and waving goodbye to Mum.
Grandma Bridie was smart, charming and intelligent. She was the fourth of five children. Her father, a dairy farmer in northern New South Wales, drowned in a flood when she was a teenager, which changed the family’s fortunes. Her two elder sisters went to Sydney University, but her family couldn’t afford for Bridie to go. She had a love of literature and music and read a lot of books; she always gave me books to read.
Bridie was beautiful-looking, had a gorgeous figure and she was a lot of fun. I adored her from the moment we met, and loved my annual week-long visits. She always planned those visits carefully and would often make special trips to the movies with me, or together we would walk around the neighbourhood, looking at houses and people.
Back at home I had so much energy that I rarely wanted to go to sleep. ‘Mary, you’re impossible!’ Mum would rail at me when it was past bedtime and I was still racing around. Once, she decided to take me to a doctor to find some relief. The doctor prescribed something, but Mum gave up on the idea after one night. She thought better not to rely on medication to dampen my rambunctious spirit.
It was a chaotic life and we needed home help. Jocey, the sixteen-year-old sister of a woman from Dad’s office, came to live with us after Patrick was born. By then we had moved into the big house Dad designed for us in Little Kellow Street. Jocey and the accident-prone Patrick, who we called Paddy, were joined at the hip until she left to get married when he was about six. We all adored her and missed her like crazy. Next came Faye, but that didn’t work out as she was disco mad and determined to have a baby, which was a great worry to Mum. Then we had Joy, who was quite large and couldn’t bend down easily; when Joy got hot and sweaty, Coralie would make her a cup of tea and finish the work herself. Joy loved us, though, and she particularly loved ironing. She would stand at the ironing board for hours, even though we didn’t think the job should take that long. She was slow, but Mum never had the heart to let her go.
Meanwhile, Dad, our brilliant Dad, was unstoppable. He reckoned he could do things better if he did them himself, and decided to leave his employer to start his own firm. Together with Peter Cheney, a fellow architecture student from uni, he set up McKendry and Cheney Architects, which was pretty amazing for a 28-year-old from Allora. The firm’s name quickly became synonymous with many of the significant buildings erected in Central Queensland, including the Pilbeam Theatre and the Rockhampton Art Gallery. Their large office on the south side of the river had glass walls and you could see all the drawing boards laid out with draftsman’s drawings in progress – everything was done by hand back then. In time Peter went on to what is now the Queensland University of Technology to be one of its principal lecturers, and Neil George then formed a new partnership with his senior architect, Robert Buckley.
As a successful architect, Neil George was always in demand, and it was hard for Mum when the long hours and the statewide travel to places like Longreach or Emerald and new coalmining towns such as Blackwater kept him away from home. He also devoted a lot of time to supporting the Liberal Party in Central Queensland. In 1966 Neil George ran as the federal Liberal candidate for the historically safe Labor seat of Capricornia. On one occasion the whole family went to the airport, scrubbed clean and hair combed, and stood in line, in order of age, to meet Prime Minister Harold Holt and his wife, Zara, when they came to campaign in Rocky.
We kids stood in the back of Mum’s blue Hillman to go delivering how-to-vote leaflets for Dad. The first thing Dad did when he bought the Hillman was to remove the rear seat so that five of us could stand in the back. It was the only way we could all fit! There were no seatbelts either so it was bad luck if you couldn’t hold on. We’d hang on for dear life to the front seat with every bump and dip in the road.
Gerry would be sitting in the front seat holding one of the babies. Mum was hugely pregnant with Dom. She couldn’t have done the leaflet delivery without us as she could hardly get in and out of the car. Instead, Mum drove from letterbox to letterbox and we would hop off from the back and run out to drop off leaflets to as many houses in Rocky as we could manage. Mr Gray, the Labor nominee, eventually won with an increased majority, but Dad never gave up his political beliefs, especially about the power of the individual. ‘The Lung’ was a common term for the government bureaucracy – a play on the saying ‘Wouldn’t work in an iron lung’. Dad would often talk about ‘Lungers’. ‘Listen, kids,’ he used to say, ‘the Lung sucks everything out of you, the Lung does the breathing for you and there are no returns for the people.’ We’d laugh and roll our eyes, but today we all have similarly cynical views about politics and government bureaucracy.
Despite all of his outside commitments, Neil George was the most wonderful father and always found ways to make life better for us. Innovation should have been his middle name. The amazing house he designed and built for us was our saviour. He bought a steep sloping piece of land at 42 Little Kellow Street, in the centre of Rocky, close to the hospital and the grammar school. Half of the block was rock face, which looked like a cliff to us kids. ‘What a very ordinary piece of land,’ stated Coralie when she first saw it. She had yearned for a big Queenslander home with sweeping verandahs, floral wallpaper and pretty things, but Neil George was just too practical, and it was all they could afford at the time. With his usual foresight Dad could see that being in the centre of town would be important for eight children growing up.
The elevated house had to be built into the rock face. I was eight when we moved in – such an exciting day for us all. However, it was a work in progress, with alterations done as Dad made more money and the babies kept coming. It was a fibro construction, built in two sections, with separate buildings linked by a walkway. The section at the top of the block was two-storey. Upstairs was a huge open-plan living space, very modern for the time – with floor-to-ceiling glass doors that opened to a balcony with views of the town centre. In time, the space included a lounge room with a fireplace, where Mum would read and play piano, and an elegant dining area for special occasions. Downstairs were the kitchen, laundry, carport and greenery, although the latter didn’t last long as we kids soon managed to wreck it. You accessed the house via a long, steep driveway. Only one car at a time could drive up, and it was best not to reverse down. A family friend did at one time and accidentally ran over baby Paddy, who was playing by the clothes line. Coralie heard the screams, and scooped him up and immediately headed to the hospital. Luckily he was only badly bruised but the tyre marks stayed for months, we were told.