A Compost of Secrets

Prologue

About that day, this is what I remember: waking up on my mother’s lap wrapped in a grey blanket, her susurrant ‘shh-shhs’ coaxing me back to a fitful sleep.

This is what I don’t remember: Father climbing a shifting rope ladder, one-handed, out of the deep hold of the Inverlass, my limp body cradled upon his shoulder.

And this I don’t have to remember, for it has never left me: it was the day Father disappeared from our lives.

I was six years old then. I am ninety-three now. In recent years, I have been interviewed a few times about my life. There was the one with our local paper, the Messenger, which was to promote an exhibition at the Maritime Museum that featured our family’s life on board the Inverlass in the early 1930s. Another piece with the Port Adelaide Central Mission was to help celebrate its 100th anniversary.

The Mission has been the social arm of the Methodist church for a century. I was just a baby when my mum first carried me into church and I’ve been connected to the Mission ever since. It was so important for us to be part of the Mission — to feel that we were doing something good in the world. Since I was four years old and attended the free kindergarten set up for disadvantaged children, until now when I still knit blankets for young people living in their 24-Hour House, I have endeavoured to contribute to the work.

The church and the local community in the Port have kept my life on track, like two rail lines, providing me with direction and stability. I have been on this track for ninety years and am myself, I suppose, part of the social history of the Port.

‘Ruth,’ people say to me, ‘you’re amazing for your age!’ It is a compliment often given to old people — patronising sometimes. I have to say though that I do retain certain abilities. These are not so much related to my physical mobility — I am prone to falls — nor to the robustness of my overall health — I, too, have my share of medical appointments. No, I am fortunate because I have maintained the ability to carefully listen to others and the detail of what they are saying. Furthermore, I reflect upon what I hear, passing it through the filters of what I have previously known or understood. It is called learning. I am grateful that I have retained this capability because learning can lead to change. And there are so many changes that impose themselves on a nonagenarian, many of them, if not most, unwelcome; the idea that I can still choose to change is very important to me.

For us ‘oldies’, memories are a refuge of sorts against the rising sense of our mortality. And yet, what now requires my attention is to be found in the spaces of my life where neither memory nor explanation exist.

‘Why would you bother doing this at your age?’ you might ask.

And I would reply, ‘It started with a congenial luncheon at my local football club and became an adventure upon which I willingly embarked.’

I would find out that buried family secrets, despite their quiescence, do not die entirely. They merely compost over the decades, becoming part of a soil which produces new consequences for old decisions.

Todd Brown stood looking at the cascade of nasturtiums escaping the retaining wall that bordered the old tennis court. He was in the community garden at the back of the Port Adelaide Church. Caught by the early morning sun, the nasturtiums’ yellow and orange flowers flowed over and down the retaining wall like molten lava. The image pleased Todd. His four-year-old granddaughter knew the word lava and used it to dramatic effect in a game they currently played. Certain parts of the floor were ‘no-go’ areas (lava) and the task was to find a way from one room of the house to another, usually via safe islands of rugs or furniture. She managed this better than he did, aided by her self-nominated authority to announce new safe havens whenever things got tricky.

This large area at the back of the church was originally a place of stables and sheds and then quite a bit later — sometime in the 1960s — a large chunk of it was bituminised and turned into a tennis court. Playing on the old bitumen tennis court in midsummer would, at times, have felt like stepping on lava. Now, in 2020, it was surrounded by green: vegetable plots, raised garden beds, an expanse of lawn and a stand of mature plane trees that provided deep shade in summer. It had become a place of coolness and retreat. Todd wasn’t much of a gardener. Never had been, really. His interest had been sparked a year or so earlier on a Saturday morning at a free public presentation at the Strathalbyn Library. ‘Strath’ is a town about fifty-five kilometres south east of Adelaide. The session which he and his partner Eva attended was to announce a movement called ‘Grow Free’. Andrew, a young man with a luxuriant beard which looked as if it had been grown with the help of a good quality potting mix, talked about the disconnect between food production and people.

There was an alienation, Andrew explained, between production and consumption which meant that many people did not have ready access to fresh and healthy green produce, especially those who were not well-off. He suggested that we each had more capacity to grow vegetables and fruit than we realised. We only needed to support each other more effectively to do so and be willing to be generous with our neighbours and local community in that process. They had started placing carts outside of houses, shops, churches, almost any place really, upon which fresh produce was left and picked up. The words ‘Take what you need and give what you can’ adorned each cart. They were seeking to expand this network of carts and trolleys around the towns and suburbs. A fundamental principle of Grow Free was to ‘give without expecting anything in return’ and the greater aim was to nurture a healthier and more caring community.

After the talk, and upon exiting the building, Todd and his partner Eva looked at each other somewhat telepathically, until one voiced the question: ‘Did we just hear the gospel?’ They agreed they had but not as any kind of religious proclamation. It was simply a proclamation of ‘good’.

Todd and Eva were inspired that day to start a community garden on the vacant land at the back of their church. It had been a good decision. However, what puzzled — no, what troubled Todd was the notion that if he had been so struck by having heard the ‘gospel’ proclaimed that day in Strathalbyn, why did this also evoke a feeling that he had not heard the gospel proclaimed in his church in the previous few years?

As an observation, it was unfair — blatantly so. He knew that. But he had to own it — it was how he felt — and, more importantly, he had to figure out why he felt that way. There were good friends, creative and gifted people, whom he respected and cared for that were part of this place. Nevertheless, he was beginning to understand how the end of a long marriage must feel.

CHAPTER ONE

Port Adelaide 1935 — The First Secret

Every Saturday night we had to have a bath. After mine, Mum would braid my hair into tiny plaits all over. In the morning, untied and set free, each one would be squiggly and I would have glorious curls. They were ready for Sunday which was a day spent going to church. We went to worship more than once. Father was superintendent of the Sunday school and sang in the choir. We kids also attended Sunday school. We weren’t allowed to do much else on a Sunday. We were quite a religious family. Even though we lived on a ship, it was a sin to swim on Sunday.

One Saturday night, Mum was doing my hair and we heard a commotion on the deck above us. Father was out. He was usually out because he was in the Lodge. He joined the Lodge because he thought that Lodge people were supposed to help each other with jobs and that sort of thing. It didn’t really happen. It was the time of the Great Depression. Most people were living hand-to-mouth.

As Mum worked on my hair, the ruckus continued. She stopped, hands and fingers suspended above my head, and we listened. We were petrified. The hatches were latched of course but they weren’t lockable. A ship’s best security in Port was to pull up the gangway but ours rarely was. We often had at least one, sometimes two, other boats sharing the same mooring, and our neighbours had to cross our vessel to get to their own from the wharf. But this noise was different to the usual footfall of neighbours.

The screeching of our pet galah on the deck above us suddenly ceased. That was ominous. Aunt Josie was staying with us, and she herded my sister and two brothers to the dining room. Mum hustled me off the stool and brought me there, too, as though it was a designated place of last refuge. In the subdued light of a lantern, we stood together, hushed and with wondering eyes, as if we were part of a nativity scene. Except for Mum. She took Father’s revolver and stood by the latched cabin door. Having lived some years on the farm she had some familiarity with the use of guns. But that was with sick or injured farm animals or with wildlife, not with humans.

Thankfully, it didn’t get to the point of her having to point the gun at anyone. The commotion above stopped as suddenly as it had begun and, in the dining room, conversation began to bubble between us, at first cautiously and then frenetically, like a cooking pot that is just coming to the boil.

We don’t know what caused the burglars to leave. We had no phone or radio on board. Someone must have seen them rummaging through gear and equipment on deck and called the police. The perpetrators, two sailors from a foreign vessel due to leave port the following day, were apprehended and taken into custody. They had been drinking at one of the nearby hotels and hatched their plan under the influence, as they say. Some of Father’s tools were in their possession.

Mum was mortified by the summons issued afterwards by the police. She would have to go to court and make public statements about what took place that evening. Reluctantly she went. She survived the experience of being a witness in an open court, but from what we could tell, it was no less an ordeal for her than the robbery itself. That was Mum: so strong and courageous on the one hand and so self-doubting on the other. Our pet galah, who had been the lone sentry on deck that evening, did not survive the affair.

While in many respects, we Fewsters were an average family living in Port Adelaide in the early 1930s, where we lived was not average at all. Our house was a coal hulk. A coal hulk was a ship that was, essentially, a floating storage bin. Steam had long supplanted sail in commercial maritime shipping and steam engines required coal. A small number of ships regarded as too old or uneconomical for further service on the open ocean maintained at least part of their previous identity and became coal suppliers to other ships in port.

Bert and Mabel Fewster had four kids; two boys and two girls. From oldest to youngest, they were Evelyn, Reg, Trevor and me, Ruth. The Inverlass was the name of the ship we lived on. It was an old windjammer that once plied the ocean routes between Europe and Australia with, depending on the winds, fifteen sails billowing on three masts. Now it sailed no more. Instead, it was towed like a barge up and down the Port River to retrieve or deliver its cargo. Given its description as a coal hulk, the Inverlass was even more unique as our cargo was grain and not coal.

The Inverlass was owned by the Barley Board of South Australia, and in 1930, our father was appointed as its caretaker. The Barley Board installed a grain grading plant on the Inverlass which employed twenty-four men when it was operating at full capacity. The price of barley was very low during the Great Depression. The company would purchase low-grade grain and, by passing it through the machinery installed on board, they would extract the higher quality grain from the rest and store it in the hold of the ship. It was a sort of gleaning process. The grain was mostly barley which was then bagged, stored in the hold, and ultimately sold on at profit. When they had an order, a ship would tie up alongside the Inverlass and the grain was off-loaded from one vessel to the other, either onto the Inverlass for milling or off it for export. At other times, the Inverlass was towed by barge or tug to the receiving ship for unloading which meant that our home would be temporarily moored some distance from our usual berth down near the Jervois Bridge in the inner harbour.

The Jervois Bridge was a swing bridge which joined Port Adelaide to Glanville, Semaphore and the Peninsula. It opened for the benefit of the ketches and barques wanting to tie up in the Portland Canal further south. To create passage, the span swung outwards over the water rather than being lifted above it. This was not without problems. If the weather got too hot, the metal would expand. Then the bridge wouldn’t close properly, leaving traffic, especially cars, trains and buses, stranded. Some intrepid pedestrians and cyclists were able to successfully make the jump between the proximal parts of the bridge. The rest would have to wait for a fire engine to spray the metal spans with cold water to shrink them. Sometimes a tug boat would then have to pull — coax was a better word — the spans closed again. It could take up to two hours to get across the river.

One time after school, Evelyn, Reg and Trev arrived at our Jervois Bridge berth only to find home was no longer there. After