What I Did in the Holidays

As the child of  workaholic parents, I had no experience of the classic Australian ‘family holiday’, that utopian dream of camping, fishing and boating that my classmates wrote about at the start of term under the title, ‘What I did in my Holidays’. I read about their adventures with envy, so when my parents announced that we were going on a driving holiday to visit my uncle in Kalgoorlie, my sister and I were delirious with anticipation. Dad was full of tales of C Y O’Connor’s pipeline, Paddy Hannan and gold nuggets as big as your hand. We would have four cousins to play with, we would try prospecting and go down a mineshaft!

I don’t know what possessed my normally rational parents. It was the height of summer and our car was a tiny black Morris Minor. Air-conditioning was unheard of, and we would have to cram in two large rigid cases and a tank of water, along with us two kids and our toys. We set off in high spirits for a return trip of 750 miles. Blin and I sang advertising jingles and themes from TV shows – The Flintstones, Gilligan’s Island, The Beverley Hillbillies. We had a giant bag of lollies – cobbers, sherbies, milk bottles – that we planned to ration out carefully to last the trip. Driving over the Darling Range an hour later, our repertoire of songs and our lolly bag were exhausted. Blin felt sick. My mother had gone quiet and my father was pointing out the sights (jarrah, marri and wandoo trees) with increasing desperation. We started a half-hearted argument to pass the time, then I poked Blin and she bawled herself to sleep. A mob of kangaroos enlivened things a little before I dozed off too.

When we woke up, hot, sticky and cranky, we had arrived at Great Aunt Ida’s house in Kellerberrin, a farming town in the outer Wheat Belt that would be our overnight stay. Blin and I were quite put out when we learned that Great Aunt Ida was not in fact great; she was just our mother’s aunt. Aunt Ida was of the opinion that our trendy Bermuda shorts were unladylike, that greyish mutton stew was a fine dinner for a hot summer night, and that little girls who didn’t clean their plates were not entitled to watermelon. Next day we escaped as quickly as possible after a breakfast of congealed oatmeal and sundry observations about my ugly freckles and my sister’s prominent ears. While Blin and I bickered in a desultory fashion, mum sat in grim silence while dad held forth frantically on the effects of superphosphate on wheat production in marginal farmland. Aeons later, our little car was puttering through a post-apocalyptic landscape of slagheaps and scaffolding. We were there.

The ten days in Kalgoorlie passed in a blur. We slept in bunks in our cousin Alison’s room, taking her side against her three wild, boisterous brothers. We went prospecting and found beautiful chunks of rose quartz, some with tiny flecks of gold. We did a scary descent down a mine and looked at all the artefacts from the 1860s in the museum. Our oldest cousin even took us on a bike ride to stare at all the ‘bad ladies’ in the red light district. It was all quite an education for a couple of nice girls from the northern suburbs.

Then, sadly, it was back into the little black Morrie for the long drive back. Miles and miles of featureless scrub, my sister whining beside me and dad lecturing cheerfully about termite mounds, we crawled westwards. A dusty motel and fish fingers were infinitely preferable to Great Aunt Ida, and we got to stay up late and scare ourselves witless watching ‘The Twilight Zone’. Back at school on Monday, I grinned contentedly as I took up my pen…