Down the Dirt Roads by Rachael Treasure

Author:Rachael Treasure
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non-Fiction
ISBN: 9781760143107
Publisher: Penguin Random House Australia

I’ve often said, ‘When I grow up I want to be a cross between American country singer Dolly Parton and Australian poet Les Murray.’ People laugh, but I’m serious. To me, music is poetry and poetry is music, and those two people are amazing in their chosen fields. I’ve often imagined what would happen if I could combine the two. Over the years I’ve written a few poems but I’d always wanted to write songs. Aussie songs. Country songs.

When I was about seven or eight, my friend Luella and I would set the needle on the record player and crank up Slim Dusty’s hit single, ‘I Love to Have a Beer with Duncan’. We’d sit behind her granddad’s bar on stools, chugging empty pewter beer mugs together, singing our guts out to his song over and over, while the adults, who were half-cut on beer, laughed at us. A few short years later, I was shoved into an all-girls school, away from my bestie Luella. I must’ve spoken so much like an Aussie bush pig that the teachers had to give me speech lessons. I blame it on bloody Slim! Or was it those early years of Rolf Harris? Or was it the beer-drinking uncles of mine who called me ‘girt’ or ‘cobber’ or, when I was being cheeky, a ‘rum’un’? There was no denying it, I revelled in country-rough and was shocked that the school and my parents seemed to think I had to somehow ‘improve’ myself.

At recess in the first week I was dragged, perplexed and ashamed, into the drama room with another farm girl from Campania, so they could sandpaper the rough edges from our ocker Tasmanian tongues. Over time, the speech-and-drama teacher, with her ivory clasp in her elegant scrolled hair and her blue eyes that expressed such patience, set about turning my words ‘crick’ into ‘creek’, ‘I seen it’ to ‘I saw it’, ‘we done that’ into ‘we did that’, ‘youse’ into ‘you’ and ‘arks’ into ‘ask’. I had no idea why, of all the girls, we were singled out from the herd of first-year intakes. Despite the teacher’s kindness, it made me feel like a wormy tail-ender in a mob of sheep. It was devastating, but also, in hindsight, thrillingly convenient, because it gave me something to rail and push against. It was this abrasive start to my teenage years that forged me into someone who never wanted to fit into social norms and systems that were on offer for Sandy Bay-schooled children of Hobart professionals or Tasmanian blueblood graziers. As far as I was concerned they could stick that kind of life up their tweed skirts and pleated trousers!

The dedicated school staff certainly had their work cut out for them, trying to get me to bend to the school’s formalities of dress, speech and conduct. To me the building was like an alien mothership, transported straight out of Scotland with grand steps, a bland, austere brick face, rose gardens and the sound of orchestral music flooding its gloomy rooms.

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