eldorado

It’s Good Friday eve 1977. I hop in the Kombi after my last drama class for the day at Trafalgar High and drive north. I don’t have an address, just the name of a town. Long after dark I pass the Eldorado town sign, turn up the first side street on a hunch, stop at the first house on the left. I haven’t told my mate Will I’m coming; who doesn’t like a surprise visit?

Doctor Will’ his first job out of medical school is at Wangaratta Base Hospital. He buys a clapped-out weatherboard circled by 138 almond trees at Eldorado. Nothing much happens at Eldorado: it has a general store and a waterhole filled with a humungous rusting dredge.

Through the flywire front door I peer into a darkened room, see a kitchen beyond at the back of the house. A young woman in a loose cheese-cloth shirt, breasts swinging, crosses the lighted doorway. Less than two years later she and I return with our baby boy to live in Will’s house. He’s doctoring at Casey Base in the Antarctic.

I work with unemployed kids in Wang, Marilyn cooks macrobiotic meals and massages Mo. I buy a motorbike so she has the car. I ride to town with frozen hands on bitter winter mornings. In the winter we cut cords of wood to feed the fire, Marilyn and me at the ends of the cross-cut saw, rocking back and forth for hours, sawdust piling under the sawhorse.

We build a chook-house in the orchard, lay tarps under the almond trees and beat them off with sticks. We husk wheelbarrow-loads of our harvest. Johnny the black sheep joins us and Marilyn spins the black wool, knits jumpers for Mo. Every night we cart water to a huge vegie garden on the north side of the house.

We save every penny we can, hoping to buy land in Tasmania when Will returns. Life is simple; simple enough, until Mo starts to walk and my ‘earth goddess’ no longer copes with being a mother. She wants me to quit work to look after our son. There’s more to this than meets the eye; I don’t see it yet, not for a long time. We conceive another child.

On 5 November 1980 we get married in the vegie garden, a celebrant and two witnesses for company, then go inside to watch Doctor Who.

The locals think we’re hippies, but that’s never how I think of myself. I work, play footy, try to be a good father. I am a good father. One morning I become the father of two children. A bat flapping around the bedroom wakes us at five in the morning. Marilyn tells me she feels contractions. This labour is shorter than the first. Gemma is born around midday on a brilliant autumn day.

    

In September Marilyn, kids and Kingswood embark the ferry for Tasmania; she can’t wait till my contract as senior project officer with the unemployment program ends two months later. I already know that it’s unlikely I can live with Marilyn much longer. Before joining her in Tassie I dally with a co-worker. It ends her marriage, and mine, though I don’t know it yet.

Four days after my arrival south of Hobart to join my children and their mother, it’s over.