The train stopped at Kingston, Lumsden, Winton and a few little places I don’t recall, and when we arrived at Invercargill, my Aunty April was waiting at the station with her brand new Morris Minor station wagon. The little car had a luggage rack on the roof, and my dad tied down our bags. Rachel and I were jammed in the back seat with my mother; Skipper rode in the back, and my dad grumbled, ‘Why did we have to bring the dog?’
I was very impressed to see that Invercargill had traffic lights like Christchurch. When we arrived at the house, Gabby gave Rachel and I her usual bear hugs, and Aunty April seemed as though she wanted to outdo Gabby’s squeezing and kissing.
We stayed for a week in Invercargill while Charlie Owens and his wife, from a neighbouring farm, took care of our milking and fed our animals along with our farmhand; we did the same for them on occasions when they were away.
I noticed my mother having long discussions with Gabby and Aunty April, and once I saw Gabby wiping her eyes as though she had been crying. It wasn’t until we arrived back to our farm that my mum and dad sat me down and quietly explained that my mother had cancer, and her doctor had given her six months to live. This was the second time in my life that I became numb with fear, but this time there could be no happy ending.
And so the new school year was a good thing – a new teacher and a few new classmates to keep my focus away from my mother’s sickness. There seemed to be an element of sympathy, which, whilst appreciated, did nothing to alleviate my sadness.
I hadn’t read any more of The Voyage of the Beagle since Christmas as events had rather overtaken me, so I took the book from the bottom drawer of my bedside cabinet and resumed where I had left off. I was becoming quite absorbed in Charles Darwin’s writings as he travelled further throughout South America. He wrote about the Gauchos, the fearless horsemen of Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay, who became legendary and were much admired in traditional literature and folklore.
He spoke of their cooperation and kindness whilst at the same time disclosing their readiness to slit your throat and take your possessions if the opportunity arose. Still, much of his exploration on horseback was accompanied by Gauchos.
Much of the Beagle’s voyage of discovery was absorbed in peoples, particularly the many tribes of South American Indians and Spanish settlements – these locations I found on the map of Argentina. Charles Darwin’s recordings of plant life and geology, although interesting, did not take my imagination as much as birds and animal life.
My teacher now was Mr Blair, a tall thin man with longish grey hair, a big moustache and glasses with little round lenses. He wore a tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows, and he always wore a tie. He went to the same church as my parents, so I thought I should be careful with the ‘evolution’ word. Mr Blair’s teaching and his personal interests were very different to Mrs Baxter. He liked cycling and sailing but didn’t ever express interests in birds, animals or nature. He had a small sailboat and lived at Frankton near the lake.
I would often catch up with Mrs Baxter after school to report on the latest chapter of The Voyage of the Beagle and ask her questions, always lots of questions. She was always ready to help although it was often very brief. After dinner, I would quickly do my homework and go to my room and read on.
They arrived at Buenos Aires, a city with a population of 60, 000 inhabitants at the time, and the Beagle sailed again from the Rio Plata after almost four months in the region. Later, the Beagle anchored in the Bay of Valparaiso, Chile’s chief seaport in sight of the Andes, the incredible mountain range continuing virtually through the entire length of South America from Southern Chile to Venezuela. Charles Darwin spent many months in Chile, mostly on land, meeting up with the Beagle at coastal ports from time to time, traveling on to Peru and finally reaching the Galapagos Archipelago on the fifteenth of September 1935.
Charles Darwin wrote: ‘We are led to believe that within a period geologically recent the unbroken ocean was here spread out. Hence both in space and time, we seem to be brought somewhat near to that great fact—that mystery of mysteries—the first appearance of new beings on earth.’
This part of the book had me spell-bound as I read through the incredible numbers of birds, animals, reptiles, fishes and insects nearly all unique to the Galapagos Islands and all recorded in great detail. Birds in particular were interesting in that they were almost completely tame, in spite of the fact that the local inhabitants caught them by hand for food, and so ‘the birds had not yet learnt that a man is a more dangerous animal than the tortoise’. I considered this for a long time, and it made me feel really sad that mankind had lost the respectful relationship with its co-inhabitants of the earth.
Chapter Eight
My mother passed away early in the morning on the twentieth of August 1952 at Queenstown Hospital. She was buried four days later at a cemetery amongst the loveliest countryside Otago had to offer, overlooking Lake Hayes, amidst deciduous trees displaying a myriad of splendid autumn colour. It was only then that I fully realised the depth of my sister’s love, the depth of my father’s compassion, the wonderful support of our relatives from afar and my family’s church community, for which I had no previous empathy. The church service had been nice. Charlie Owens did the eulogy, and Reverent Sinclair spoke about life after death. We sang hymns and heard about the joyful resurrection.
My view of death as an end of existence was hard to come to terms with. My grief was overwhelming. The memory of my mother, the years she was with us, the many happy experiences, her love, her caring, and her understanding of things precious to me.
I felt isolated as I didn’t have the religious peace of my father and Rachel. My problem was I was questioning their beliefs, which were different to those I had developed, and I felt guilty. But how could their trust in teachings of creation, occurring just a few thousand years ago, be true? I was reading about geologic events that occurred many millions of years ago, which not only cast doubts in my mind about the source of their peace but left me with a view of death as a permanent departure from the living.
I was coming to terms with the fact that my mother was no longer there and everything about her had gone: her warm body, her voice, her smell, her hugs, her visual appearance, never again to exist. And yet, I did believe in a person’s intelligent soul, and Rachel and I had come out of her body, so our souls must be connected. That was something I could grasp. It was like a beautiful painting of our family, of our animals and Skipper on our farm, with the vivid colours of autumn in the background, but with only an outline where my mother stood, and nothing but a white void in her place. Somehow, I had to put her vision back in the painting.
My mother always understood why I felt sad, unhappy or fearful, while my dad didn’t notice, or at least never showed that he did. He had his church and his Bible, and that seemed as though it was the answer to all anguish – his rock, his place to go when events of his life were against him. Even now, he and Rachel had a certain comfort which was not available to me, and I suppose they may have felt my depth of grieving to be a little unnecessary. At certain times, I even wished I was religious as it seemed to take away a lot of the pain of their loss.
Chapter Nine
Dunedin
1957
I was very fortunate to get a place at the University of Otago. The matriculation exams in my final year provided me with a very good result, and Mrs Baxter’s relationship with the University’s Dean of Admissions had helped; so here I was in Dunedin.
My course was to be Sociology, so my first subject was anthropology, the study of human culture and the many forms it takes in different societies, both past and present. It traces the evolution of culture beyond its primate origins, through over two million years of prehistory, to historical and contemporary societies. There were three broad areas of anthropology at Otago University: archaeology, biological anthropology and social anthropology.
This was the first time I had been permanently away from the farm, so the goodbyes