Nurses of the Outback by Annabelle Brayley

Author:Annabelle Brayley
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781742536835
Publisher: Penguin Random House Australia
Published: 2015-10-27T00:00:00+00:00

Aggie was born in the Kununurra Hospital in 1981. Her parents managed Carlton Hill Station north of Kununurra for LJ Hooker. She has no true recollections of station life back then, other than the memory of a story about a king brown snake wrapped around the rails of her cot and the terror of those charged with getting her out of it. She has another anecdotal memory of when the bishop was flown in to officiate her bush christening. However, her first tangible reminiscences centre on and around Leichhardt Street in Kununurra.

Carlton Hill was sold when Aggie was still very young and her family moved into town, to Leichhardt Street. She recalls most readily the huge electrical storms. ‘The power would go out and we’d sit on the verandah watching these huge storms lash across the sky,’ she says.

She remembers swimming in the Ord River, watching the catfish from a boat and a seaplane landing on the water. It is a montage of snapshots that revolve around her memory of Nancy Ogilvie, a big, comfortable Aboriginal woman who babysat her and her younger sister, Sarah.

When she was six, her parents’ marriage broke down irrevoc­ably. Her mother packed the two girls up and moved to Toogoolawah in Queensland’s Brisbane Valley, to be nearer to her own family. Her father eventually returned to his homeland, England. Aggie remembers begging to know when the family was going back to Kununurra, but despite her pleading, the move was permanent and her mother later remarried. Aggie talked about the Kimberleys and tried to hang on to the images but gradually they faded. She clung to her memories of her father, who she saw once in Grade Three and once in Grade Nine. He wrote for their birthdays and Christmas, but otherwise Aggie didn’t see him again until she was aged twenty-two.

Around the time she turned fifteen, her mother’s second marriage folded and things started falling apart at home after the departure of her stepfather. As the oldest child, Aggie found herself on an emotional seesaw trying to balance her life as a boarder at school in Toowoomba with the need to support her mother and help hold things together at home.

Having already tasted her first alcohol at the end of Grade Nine, by the following year Aggie and her friends were plotting how to get booze for their next binge-drinking session on their boarders’ weekends or during the holidays. For Aggie, it was a form of escaping the horrors at home and an attempt to fit in and feel like a normal teenager. She also loved getting away to the bush with other boarder friends going home for the holidays and soon discovered that social culture out there revolved around alcohol. At the end of the day, and certainly at parties, most people seemed to be drinking something, usually rum.

On those visits Aggie was delighted to rediscover smells and images from her childhood that resonated with her. Some of her best memories are of long

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