An Autobiography
By Helen Broinowski Caldicott
When I was nineteen, I read a book that changed my life. It was a novel, barely read these days, called On the Beach, by the 
Australian writer Nevil Shute (later made into a popular film). It tells the story of the final months in the lives of five people living in a world doomed to be destroyed by radiation after a nuclear war that had begun by accident in the Northern Hemisphere.
“Couldn’t anyone have stopped it?”
“I don’t know…. Some kinds of silliness you just can’t stop,” he said. “I mean, if a couple of hundred million people all decide that their national honour requires them to drop cobalt bombs upon their neighbour, well, there’s not much that you or I can do about it. The only possible hope would have been to educate them out of their silliness.”
“But how could you have done that, Peter? I mean, they’d all left school.”
“Newspapers,” he said. “You could have done something with newspapers. We didn’t do it, no nation did because we were all too silly. We liked our newspapers with pictures of beach girls and headlines of indecent assault, and no Government was wise enough to stop us having them that way. But something might have been done with newspapers, if we’d been wise enough.”
Something might have been done with newspapers, if we’d been wise enough.
Shute’s story haunted me. Millions of words have since been written about nuclear war and its consequences, and much of the literature is more horrific and emotive than anything Nevil Shute wrote or perhaps even imagined. But his novel was set in Melbourne, the city where I had grown up. It described places I knew, devastated by nuclear catastrophe. Nowhere was safe. I felt so alone, so unprotected by the adults, who seemed to be unaware of the danger.
She passed the grammar school away on the left and came to shabby, industrial Corio, and so to Geelong, dominated by its cathedral. In the great tower the bells were ringing for some service. She slowed a little to pass through the city, but there was nothing on the road except deserted cars at the roadside. She saw only three people, all of them men…. At the end she turned left away from the golf links and the little house where so many happy hours of childhood had been spent, knowing now she would never see it again.
I had already decided to be a doctor, and I came from a family who encouraged me to believe that if I worked hard, I could do anything. But after reading On the Beach, I knew I wouldn’t just go through medical school and settle into a nice, cosy, well-paid niche somewhere, as doctors in Australia were apt to do. I wanted a husband and a family, certainly, but somewhere in me was a conviction that I had other work to do as well.
When I read On the Beach, I started to realise what that work might be.
Nobody with Polish and Irish ancestry–as I have–has any right to expect a quiet, easy life. If I hadn’t found that out for myself, I could have learned it by considering the lives of my forebears.
Gracius Jacob Broinowski, my great-grandfather on my father’s side, was a Polish baron, born in 1837, who began his career by avoiding conscription in the Russian army. After escaping from his upstairs bedroom window in the Polish town of Weilun by the time-honoured method of tying sheets together to make a rope, he travelled to Germany and then to England. In about 1857 he came to Australia, where he eked out a living by painting landscapes and scenes of various towns as he travelled around the eastern side of the continent. He married a pretty girl named Jane Smith who smiled at him from her Melbourne window, and after some years they settled in Sydney with their six sons and daughter. Gracius taught painting to private pupils and at colleges, lectured on art, and exhibited at the Royal Art Society.
His greatest claim to fame, however, was as an artist of Australian native fauna. In the 1880s he supplied the school classrooms of New South Wales with pictures of Australian birds and mammals, and between 1887 and 1891 prepared a series of six volumes called The Birds of Australia, which have since become collector’s items. His bird prints hang on the walls of my house to this day.
One of my great-grandmothers on my father’s side, Mary Sanger Creed, was a forthright woman and an early feminist. The first woman to matriculate in Australia, she applied to enter medical school in Melbourne. In the 1870s the idea of a woman wanting to be a doctor was considered ridiculous enough to be featured on the front cover of the English satirical magazine Punch; the drawing shows the chancellor of the University of Melbourne holding up a grave, dismissive hand as my great-grandmother attempts to enter the sacred portals. (The first Australian woman to train in medicine didn’t receive her degree until 1893, and even then it was from Edinburgh University.)
Mary married a progressive Anglican minister, the Reverend Jonathan Evans, and had four children. She hated being a minister’s wife and living in the small Tasmanian town of Deloraine, and she turned to writing. Soon she became known as an excellent journalist, whose articles on a variety of topics appeared in local and national newspapers. When her children were still young, she end Jonathan Evans agreed to part, and he moved to the Riverina district of southwestern New South Wales. Obviously harbouring his own ambitions, he left Australia for England, where he became an actor, while the four children remained with their mother.
In the 1890s the irrepressible Mary and her children moved to a seventy-acre property near Wyong, north of Sydney, where she started a cooperative silk farm for other single women and their dependent children. All the families worked together, growing mulberry trees to feed the silkworms, spinning the silk and selling it. The silk farm was successful for a number of years.
My grandmother, Grace Creed Evans (whom for some reason we called Dais, short for Daisy), was the oldest of Mary’s four children. A talented musician who played the violin and piano, she helped support the family by performing music on the ships that plied the cities on the eastern seaboard of Australia. Later she became a music teacher. Her youngest sister, Win, was an early Montessori governess who taught the children of Ethel Turner, author of Seven Little Australians and one of Australia’s most famous early writers.
Grace married Gracius’ son Robert Broinowski in Melbourne in 1905, where Robert was Usher of the Black Rod in federal Parliament for some years. It was not a happy marriage, as Bob was known to go on bushwalks with various women. He was a prickly, talented man, an amateur poet. Many of his own verses reflect his dalliances and affairs. Others, such as this one, highly descriptive of the Australia bush and its ubiquitous flies, show his irreverent sense of humour.
The road comes winding down the range Each moment bringing to my eyes some point of beauty new and strange– Oh damn the flies . . Ten thousand furies blight the stinking swine Bright parrots flash with eerie cries; The lyrebird sings his chorus divine– Oh, flaming bastards . . . the flies.
Tickets for our 16 September Berry Conversation with Kerry O’Brien and Helen Caldicott are on sale Sunday through The Berry Music Centre or online here.
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