Rosewood Dreaming 9 Part 1 Mapping

Chapter 22 (1)


Mapping


There were frequently tense undercurrents and surface friction between Jeannie and Anna. Jeannie was chronically overburdened with work and worries, and Anna, it seemed, had nothing better to do than think of new, sometimes provocative questions to ask. Jeannie had little patience with such distractions, and could ill afford the time it took to answer or explain. In her own childhood, children had known better than to ask, as did Anna's siblings, who were more docile and seemingly less avid for information, whereas Anna wanted to know about every subject under the sun…

But there was one point of contact Jeannie could seldom resist. This was Anna's mapping homework, which was assigned on some weekends in upper grades of primary school. Special mapping books and project books had to be bought from the newsagent. Mapping books had thicker paper, with all pages blank. Project books were like exercise books in a larger format, ruled pages alternating with blank ones. The other materials required were ink - blue and red Quink and Indian ink; a mapping pen with a special nib; tracing paper, blotting paper, coloured pencils, ruler, lead pencil and eraser. Then there had to be a model to trace from, so of course an atlas was needed… and a place to work.

Anna naturally had more homework than her younger siblings, and mapping occupied a special status. None of them had graduated to mapping yet. It was accordingly considered a serious business, a matter of some gravity. For mapping purposes, Anna was allowed to occupy the roll-top walnut desk in "the office". There she could escape from the here and now, into other places where time was suspended.

First, the coastline and the borders of the map were traced. Most of the maps were of Australian states. Then the tracing paper was laid on the blank page, and the outline heavily impressed with lead pencil, so that an impression was left on the page beneath. This was then carefully rendered in ink, and where there was coastline, shaded next to the inked line with a blue pencil. Next, geographical features were carefully added, using a ruler to gauge distances and scale, after first carefully studying positions and proportions on the original. A map assigned as homework took Anna a whole day.

Jeannie, teatowel in hand, would shuttle between kitchen and office, which were separated by the living-dining room, to check on progress, offer suggestions, and help with the shading. This was done with small pieces of blotting paper, to which patches of colour were heavily applied with coloured pencils. The coloured surface of the blotting paper was then rubbed on the relevant part of the map, leaving a soft shadow of itself: blue for oceans, green for lowlands, orange for deserts, purple for mountains.

Towns were marked with small red circles; capitals with squares; borders with red pencil; rivers drawn in dark blue. Railway lines were starkly defined in Indian ink, crossed with regular, small lines like caterpillar legs, denoting sleepers, differentiating railways from roads. Faint pencil lines kept the lettering of place names level, and were then erased before the final colour application.

Jeannie took particular interest in the maps of Queensland, variously showing geography, primary industry, secondary industry. She had spent her early childhood in limbo, adrift in a lonely, remote place, on a sheep run in far western Queensland where her parents were employed. Nobody thought to show her maps in those days.

 

The limits of her world had been the galvanised iron bungalow where she lived with her mother, who was employed as a cook at the station homestead - a fresh-faced woman from Sheffield until she had done a stint in the outback - and her father, when he touched base between mustering, droving and other assignments, although he often preferred to share the men's quarters, where, as their manager, he had his own room.

The fresh-faced woman from Sheffield had turned into a woman whose complexion was raddled and wrinkled by the sun, her eyes faded by its excoriating glare, with a haunted, distant expression, as if she had been exposed to the harsh light for too long, or gazed into too many fires.

There was a vegetable garden for the people at the homestead, the domain of a Chinese gardener who wore his long hair in a pigtail. All kinds of green and tender leaves were conjured out of the arid-looking earth, but they were only for the homestead. Fresh produce seldom found its way to the lonely bungalow where little Jeannie lived. She and her mother dined on mutton, breakfasted on bread and dripping. Nor was Jeannie ever allowed to play with the children from the homestead. When she had the courage and the opportunity to sneak away, she would seek out the Indigenous children in their makeshift camp in the gidyea scrub, but they were shy, and afraid of being punished for encouraging the little girl to stray. They, who were so deprived themselves, looked at the strange, fair child with wonder and pity in their eyes. She seemed to have no people of her own; her mother was too busy or too tired to pay attention to her.

Jeannie received rudimentary lessons by correspondence at irregular intervals, but her mother had precious little time to help with them, so the child would often struggle alone in the heat or the cold of their sheet-iron home, trying to make sense of words and numbers. It was only years later, when she was handed over to patient nuns, that the learning she had almost missed out on became possible.

Now she gazed at Anna's maps of Queensland avidly. That's where I was, she'd think. Way out there, in the back of beyond. Just fancy! But now I'm here, where there are other people…

Sometimes the child's voice inside her would add: Now there are too many people, all depending on me. All depending on these hands of mine that never stop. And the adult Jeannie's inner voice would rejoin with: It's different, and there's no time to feel sorry for myself, but I sometimes wonder: am I better off?

Regardless of Jeannie's fluctuating energy levels, which manifested as mood swings, Anna's maps were reassuring, helping to put things in perspective. Some of them were paths to Jeannie's past, while for Anna they were more about the future. Unlike Jeannie in her childhood, Anna already knew of places beyond Rosewood and the small town where she went to school. Maps were thresholds to discovery, and besides, the concentration they required kept her absorbed for hours on end, attending to the detail, mixing shadow-colours on the page, writing the accompanying text.

She never realised what maps meant to Jeannie, but she was glad of her mother's uncritical support, the way Jeannie would colour bits of blotter and transform white space, just the two of them, their heads bent over the desk in the light from the dusty louvres, with the inks and pencils and atlas neatly arranged as a border to the emerging map that both gave pride of place.