From then on the landlady, her monosyllabic husband and their three children kept away from him. When she took him through the dark house to his room, he encountered a makeshift enclosure on the veranda with just a bed in it – nothing else. The timber cottage where he expected to live for the next two years was in bad repair, and the ‘welcome’ he received from his landlady was abrupt. … a tumbledown group of tin huts on the right, a shabby weatherboard house to the left… a largish, falling apart tin shed that might once have been a hall and, opposite, a tennis court behind sagging chicken wire. Arriving in the mail car with the local postman after a circuitous drive through the high tablelands of New South Wales, mostly along gravel roads where ‘traffic was spare, almost non-existent’, they skirted the unfortunately named Swamp Oak Creek, and Peter saw: Peter’s first sight of the tiny, remote village of Weabonga was not encouraging. After completing his training as a teacher, he had spent two years teaching in a busy inner-city school, but ‘because of bonding arrangements that young teachers signed to receive financial support in training’, he now had to complete at least two years teaching in a country school. Peter O’Brien was a 20-year-old city boy with a rich social life. Modes of transport, too, were very different and often unreliable. They are very different books but both are fascinating, and both recall a time when there was no internet, no mobile phones, when landlines if they existed were party lines, and long-distance phone calls were expensive. Bush School and The Last Lighthouse Keeper are memoirs and each records the experience of living and working in an isolated place away from family and friends. These may sound like familiar accounts of being in a coronavirus lockdown, but in fact they are both memories of things that happened more than 50 years ago. I came to realise over the years that life is like this, too, and can’t be cheated. It’s too complex to know if your intervention was for better or worse. I played a lot of patience on that island. These two memoirs of life in remote parts of Australia reveal the challenges of isolation.īy the time Easter approached… I was feeling quite desperate: I had no company of my own age, I had an improper diet, I spoke with other adults only on Sunday afternoons for a few hours at most, and I lived in a tar-paper cubby.
Tags: Australian memoirs/ Bush School/ isolation/ John Bauer/ John Cook/ lighthouse keeping/ memoirs/ one-teacher schools/ Peter O'Brien/ The Last Lighthouse Keeper PETER O’BRIEN Bush School and JOHN COOK with JON BAUER The Last Lighthouse Keeper.
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