Rebellious Daughters Read Online Free

Teachers’ College. She hated it, and her group didn’t manage to contrive that weird single-minded acquiescence that ours did. She ditched it, and followed her boyfriend to Brisbane. What a horror that was. In those days, if you’d had a teachers’ college scholarship, you had a bond to repay. (I had a bond too, I got out of mine by getting pregnant; apparently it was considered impolitic, given Australia’s keen immigration program, to dissuade the native born from having children by insisting on the paying out of bonds. Mine was 1,000 pounds; our house cost 7,000 pounds.) By leaving, this daughter defaulted. My father was beside himself, especially as an uncle was joint guarantor. The principal hauled them in. He suggested that Rosie was expecting. (This was the same principal who in my time called an assemblyand announced that four girls had got pregnant in the last year and he held himself personally responsible for every one of them.) Remember it is the sixties, probably hard to conceive how shocking a pregnancy was out of wedlock. My father was enraged. And worried. Rosie was indignant, she wasn’t.
    The bond got paid back, Rosie went to Brisbane, lived with Athol who had a job at the University of Queensland; he was an economist. Rosie got work at UQP, and thus began her career as one of the Press’s most beloved editors. She didn’t admit she was living with Athol, and when my parents went on their Women’s Weekly cruise, and the boat called in at Brisbane, Rosie rushed round the flat removing all evidence of him. She thought she deceived her father, wasn’t so sure about her mother. My mother didn’t say much but she was sharp. After a while they got married, and Rosie had the most beautiful twins, who grew to be tall goddessy girls with PhDs, who got married, separately, in Collette Dinnigan dresses. Then she had a son. Brenda, who’d been thinking of not having any children, fell in love with Rosie’s and went ahead.
    I’ve remarked that I was a good dutiful daughter, virtuous, dependable, hardly gave my parents a moment’s worry. I’ve often regretted it. But Rosie, now, they were very much afeard at various moments that she was going to come to a bad end. So when she didn’tbut transmogrified into a respectable and married young mother they were mightily relieved. In the early 70’s she and her husband went on sabbatical to England, and while they were away Athol’s father was killed, when his motor-cycle collided with a truck. Athol rushed home to look after his mother, and Rosie followed more slowly and with great difficulty, travelling with twin toddlers not being very much fun. Their house in Brisbane was rented out and anyway they wanted to be in Newcastle with Athol’s mother, so Rosie lived with my parents. Athol finished his sabbatical in that city.
    My father had not long retired and had lots of leisure, he had a lovely time with the little girls. They were at that brilliant age of beginning to talk and see the world. They sat on his lap, he played with them, read them stories, took them to the beach. He had never known my children or Brenda’s quite so well, or his own, for that matter, he was at work and preoccupied. We did go and stay quite often, but that was often a bit hectic, everybody so looked forward to the visit but the invasion of four people could be hard work. But with Rosie and her girls everything was easy-going and comfortable, and I think it was one of the happiest times of his life. I often teased him about Rosie as the prodigal daughter; I was the good one who had never bothered them but Rosie, the troubled one, the lost one, got the fatted calf and the grateful welcome. My father, who understoodexactly the biblical reference, didn’t like it much but agreed. So did Rosie, although she tended to disclaim it.
    A few years later Rosie again spent quite a lot of time there, when father was ill, in