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RESEARCH B

Cunnamulla 1965 & 1966 - School Days

ROBINA.


Robina saw where the Wagtails nested.

The flit flit of their tails made her laugh, right from the belly.

She did not see the verbs, safe in their sentence structures neatly chalked,

nor know where Brisbane hid on the map.

So she endured the sting of the red cane, and the white giggles.


Robina,

first to hear the muffled squawks

when the Galahs hatched high in the sleeve of the old Gum at the school gate,

did not hear the starters’ whistles to “take positions”…

she was always late.


Robina could not march in a line,

her body swayed to its own time and was punished for being “out of step”.

Robina, whose hair was never quite tidy enough,

would jab her finger to the sky whenever Mares’ Tail clouds broke the blue.

“Maybe rain come soon? Back home? Maybe?”


We were both strangers there, amid the drills and desks,

taught by those who had never trod that outback earth barefoot,

nor puffed “Debil-Debils” from its red-dusted face.


Robina was my friend.

I came to school when I was ten,

and she alone knew the vast Mulga-ed space I’d left behind

held a fenceless freedom for which I pined.


When sixth grade came, my second year away,

I looked around for Robina when they rang the bell for play,

but she was not back at school that year,

her family had moved on.

Robina was in Charleville.

No-one cared that she was gone.


The Galahs nested again in the old Gum,

and the Wagtails came back.

I marched, and raced to whistles,

and marked rivers on the map.

I had less of the red cane than the year before,

when Robina was my friend,

but the sting if her going made up for that.


Then one morning, without warning, 

when it was time to pray,

Sister said a special “Thank-you”, for my friend who’d gone away.

Robina, she’d just heard, was dead.

“Such a beautiful child. She died of a tumour in the head.”


We were told to be happy,

and I was too shocked to cry.

I ran off and hid at lunchtime,

watched clouds drift across the sky.

I puffed “Debil-Debils” from the dust,

…telling Robina “Good-bye”.

‘Mares’ tails' are cirrus clouds found high in the atmosphere, which are pulled into long streamers resembling the tail of a horse.

‘Debil-Debils’ or Devil-Devils is a children’s name for the Lacewing larvae or Ant-lions.

School Days, School Days

Dear old golden rule days

Reading, and writing and ‘rithmetic

Taught to the tune of a hickory stick

~ "School Days" by Will Cobb and Gus Edwards.

In 1965 I was sent in to Cunnamulla to be a weekly boarder at the convent. My youngest sister was born that April, and I remember the excitement of collecting my mother and the new baby from the hospital, and then being given my first cuddle when we got out of the car in front of  the Hotel Cunnamulla. I turned ten that year, and until then I had learnt at home by Correspondence School. I didn’t know any of the schoolyard games or ‘how things were done’, and I found it all very strange and a bit frightening. I made some friends, but two of the first were not of the ‘in crowd’, (of which I had absolutely no understanding.) Georgie was white and his family were quite poor, and Robina was an Aboriginal Australian. I was teased badly for playing with them.

Now, fifty years later, I can still recall a few of the names of my other classmates from Cunnamulla, but my memory has preserved not just names, but vivid images of my friends Georgie and Robina. Georgie was always kind to me, and very polite. Robina was lots of fun and she shared my love of nature. She was clumsy in her gait, and she struggled with her schoolwork, and so she was often in trouble. I was able to manage most of the work, but I was slow in finishing tasks, as speed had not been required in completing my correspondence tasks. I was an excellent reader, but I was often caned on the hand for making spelling and punctuation errors. I was always very scared of being tested on the apparently important ability to write out the  the Apostles' Creed from memory. I had no trouble memorising the ‘gabble’ of words, but I never got all of the stops, semi-colons, commas and spelling right so I would be caned for the errors.

 At the end of our fifth grade year when I said goodbye to Robina for the Christmas holidays, I never imagined that I would not see her again. It was my first experience of losing a friend through death. I returned to school at the start of the following year and Robina was not there. I was told the family had gone to Charleville.  Then one morning it was blithely announced that Robina had died of a brain tumour. Several decades later I wrote this poem about my friend.

Frazer