#bethania

[sinizade]

Wake up, babe, new OCs just came out

Well, basically this is for a project I'm working on with some friends, but nothing too serious for now. I just liked how they looked.

[100apheto]

"Oxum que eu bendigo na boca do dia Oxum que eu adoro Rica de dons, riqueza dos rios Oxum que chamei, que não chamei Adê-okô, senhora das águas"

Louvação À Oxum

Maria Bethânia · Olho D'Água · Song · 1992

[janefuckingcrazy]

As minhas meninas

[testormblog]

The Cruel River

The Logan River also influenced my family’s life, albeit indirectly.   Although our house wasn’t built near the river, we still fervidly feared it.  Even I, when I was older, wasn’t tempted to loiter in its vicinity.

The river was named after its discoverer, Captain Patrick Logan.  This English man was also the first commandant of the Moreton Bay convict settlement.  Eventually, his name would become synonymous with our local area.  This was ironic given that the English didn’t settle it.  In addition, the man and the river shared a reputation for cruelty. 

The Logan River wasn’t picturesque nor its waters fresh.  In fact, it was ugly and they brackish.  Its dirty brown waters flowed between its steep, muddy banks.  They rose and fell with the tide.  Nobody knew its depth; but it was deep.  Its width back then was about forty metres.  People didn’t swim in it.  Most feared they’d drown.  A few local men caught mullet in its shallows with a rifle or a spear.  Others rowed up and down the river with lights at night to encourage these fish to jump into their boats.  Some set rudimentary wire pots in the river to trap mud crabs.  They fished and crabbed to fill their bellies though not for recreation or commercial purposes.  However, livestock generally kept away from its banks, content to drink from surrounding creeks instead.

Nevertheless, it exercised an almost deity like power over the Waterford and Bethania communities in which my people lived.  It both sustained and consumed life.  It also insulated these communities from the outside world by carving the agricultural area into a distinct territory with its own identity.  It flowed in a sweeping loop from the south to the north then east and looping back.  The town of Beenleigh, about eight kilometres distant to the south, set the other boundary.  Two bridges, one for the railway and the other for the road, crossed this stretch of the river. They were about three kilometres apart and approximately a kilometre and a half each from my home.

Most families living in the area, including mine, had descended from the original German free settlers.  They had intermarried and followed the Christian faith of their forebears.  Consequently, everyone knew everybody else well.  They were heavily reliant on each other too.  They largely lived within their isolated and closed communities and mostly didn’t venture across the river until the bridges were built.  They were also wary of people living on its other side and rarely spoke of anything that happened over there.

The river flooded multiple times every summer.  This left the communities completely inaccessible.  Nobody dared to cross its raging torrents.  The annual floods were both a curse and a blessing dependent on when these arrived.  The floods covered the farms on the river flats in their deluge.  The farmers lost crops some years but the river always rewarded them with silt.  Their land was thus very fertile and its soil some of the best in a hundred kilometre radius.  However, the flood rains washed away the higher land’s fertility.  Predecessor farmers, allotted these blocks by government ballot, had ended up with broken hearts and emptied wallets. 

The Great Flood of 1947 came when I was four years old.  I sat beside Pop on his veranda high above the river watching its floodwaters surge.  Usually, these were constrained within the river’s high banks.  This year however, they rose above the banks, spread out across the adjoining plain and consumed everything in its path.  Ants swarming on cow pats floated by amongst the purple flowered hyacinth.  The bloated, drowned livestock brought a grim look to Pop’s face.  Somebody had lost their livelihood or their milking cow.

Many local families suffered badly with their homes flooded and their crops ruined.  The flood washed away the general store where everybody bought their grocery staples.  The wagon width wide concrete bridge at Waterford collapsed into the river’s angry swell.  This was the area’s sole thoroughfare by road.  People on both sides of the river were cut off from each other.  The Waterford and Bethania communities rallied together to overcome the devastation.  The general store was relocated temporarily until a new building could be erected.  The government installed a ferry.  This enabled children to attend school and farmers’ daily milk and cream deliveries to be transported to the butter factory.  Fortunately, the rail bridge survived intact.

The Logan River continued to menace the local population.  A respected, older man with a farm near the crossing, took up running the ferry.  Soon after, he disappeared without reason into the river at the crossing.  His neighbour, a popular young man, took over responsibility for the ferry.  So, nobody saw any reason for foul play to find him either.  However, the river sucked him into its muddy depths too, spitting him out days later.  People began to fear the river and to avoid it at all costs.  Eventually, sufficient political pressure mounted in the communities for another bridge to be built.  A low level concrete structure was constructed.  This had no side barriers only wire cable guardrails running along its length either side.  The premise was that floodwaters would flow over the bridge and carry the flood’s debris away; thus, not threaten the structure as the 1947 flood had.  The communities celebrated the bridge’s opening and the end of their isolation with a grandiose ceremony in 1954, seven years after the Great Flood.

The river, though, wasn’t finished its feud against its human neighbours, who had disrupted its peaceful existence for the preceding millennia.  It still harboured vengeance against its other neighbour, the third family on its north east bank.  This family had two daughters a few years younger than me.  One summer evening, Nola and Marilyn were riding their bicycles across the new bridge to the rebuilt general store when Nola hit the bridge’s low kerb with her bicycle wheel.  She flew over the top of her bicycle and the cable guiderail into the fast moving water below.  Everybody including me searched along the riverbanks for her.  Sadly, Nola nor her body were never found.

The locals remained wary of and respected the river.  However, outsiders weren’t so cautious.  Later when I was a young man ready to begin my life in the bigger world, a similar young man from Beenleigh had his car break down at the crossing.  He had been dancing with the local lasses at the Waterford Hall.  In the darkness, he pushed the vehicle off the road to the riverbank and attempted to fix it.  Afterwards, when he stooped to wash his hands, the river sucked him into its swirling depths too.

I am no longer superstitious of the Logan River.  However, I realise the superstitions I was raised with, kept my people alive.  Few of us could swim to save ourselves.

[transviada-1996]

[brasilbrasilbrasil]

Maria Bethânia

[testormblog]

Dirty and Poor

I had little to amuse my inquisitive mind, a few homemade, wooden toys and the hammer I’d confiscated from Dad. Some children like to bang pots and pans; I loved to bang the hammer, mostly on the nails popping up from the old house’s floorboards. The noise let Mother know where I was playing. At first, I bruised my small fingers. With practice, my aim with the hammer became proficient unlike Dad’s.

There weren’t other children to play with. The yard dog, Woolie, black with curly fur, kept me company instead. The dog was so large that I could sit on its back. Together, we observed the comings and goings in our surroundings, in particular the trains passing the house. The rail motor travelled back and forth from Bethania to Beaudesert twice daily. Steam engines hauled regular goods trains. The most exciting, noisy and smelly were the long cattle and horse trains, headed with two steam engines, going to the abattoir. I’d tell my dog everything. He always seemed interested until one day, Woolie became bored and wandered off. The dog was likely bitten by a snake. Time moved slowly with the same daily routine. Except one day, I heard a steam engine’s brakes.

I excitedly watched it stop on the line beside my house. Whilst I wasn’t allowed outside to investigate the unusual event, this was the best day in my life to date! Men offloaded wooden planks from the train’s freight wagons. This second hand timber had come from Camp Cable, the wartime American Army camp, several miles up the line, near Logan Village. Life became interesting. My family were building a house nearby and closer to Bethania Railway Station. My great uncle had transferred to my father a patch of land considered too small for dairy cows or commercial cropping. This triangle of land had been part of the farm established by my forebears before the railway line and the road had separated it. The military had occupied the land and its surrounds with a transit camp. Bethania had been the intersection point for trains transporting troops to the Canungra Jungle Training Camp and Camp Cable.

Pop, an uncle and a neighbour built the cottage where the military’s tents and mess huts had been. Dad wasn’t skilled in carpentry. The simple home had one bedroom, a sitting room, a kitchen, a front veranda and a bathroom with an open wash house and a thunderbox outside. I slept in a cot tucked behind the bedroom cupboard.

As it was in a rural area, the cottage received no rubbish collection, sewerage or water supply services. Rubbish and effluent weren’t an issue. These were buried when Dad showed the inclination. Maintaining sufficient water in the two small tanks for household use and the vegetable garden was an issue. We were dependent on rainfall. Even then, the high tank had to be over half full for enough water pressure to exist for the bathroom and kitchen taps to flow. Mostly, water was dispensed by bucket. I was bathed once a week, and only if I looked sufficiently dirty, in no more than an inch of water in the bath tub. As I didn’t own a toy boat, I didn’t mind.

The cottage did have electricity for lights and three power points for the fridge and sewing machine in the kitchen and the small radio in the sitting room. Dad installed the power pole near the cottage. He purchased a milled log from the sawmiller. Then, he and his mates met, because that was the only labour available, to dig by shovel a large hole in which to stand the pole. At one metre deep, the men hit hard rock. Whilst they didn’t think the hole to be deep enough, they still positioned and raised the pole. For years after, Dad prayed the pole wouldn’t topple on the house in vicious wind. It held until the electricity company replaced it.

A wood stove sat in the kitchen. Finding wood was a chore and a cost most families struggled with. My father fed the stove with used railway sleepers his maintenance gang shared amongst themselves.

Outside, Dad constructed a fowl house from old tanks, sleepers and wire and dug a garden to support the family with eggs, meat and vegetables.

The primitive house met my biggest wish. The rail track ran along the backyard’s fence line! I loved waving at the passengers and guards. Sometimes, I watched Dad banging the spikes along the track.

I was far happier outside, away from Mother’s sight. In addition to the ambience her temperament created, inside the cottage was a horrid place to be. Mother hated housework. We lived in the continual squalor of dirty dishes, clothes, floors and fireplace. The beds weren’t made. The ‘night water’ wasn’t always taken outside early in the morning.

Mother presented a different face outside the cottage however. She was immaculately dressed as a walking advertisement for her dressmaking skills. She was a seamstress and a busy one. Initially, she received her clients in the sitting room but soon a small room was added to the veranda to keep clients away from the squalor. At one point, she started a dressmaking shop with a friend in Beenleigh. Their venture failed quickly as neither understood how to manage a business’ finances.

Money regularly created tension between my parents. There was father’s, mother’s and the housekeeping. Dad handed over the agreed housekeeping from his wage to pay the bills. There never seemed to be enough though. Appliances had been purchased on high interest hire purchase plans. Whatever Mother earnt from sewing appeared to be hers to spend how she wished, usually on more clothes for herself. Dad wasted what remained of his wage on race horses and alcohol. Their financial struggle was a circular form of hell that they couldn’t escape from, precipitated by their inability to work together. Whilst they didn’t physically abuse each other, verbally they did.

[ynbne]

Retail & Childcare Centre - John Collins Drive, Logan

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