Nice Girls

How Do I Tell You About That World: Part 3

There is a crazy juxtaposition to my childhood.

I was raised in remote farming communities where women and girls had to be fierce, resilient and strong, even though those same traits were (and still are) derided in Truth 2x2 women.

Truth women were expected to be docile, quiet, compliant. Women were expected to performatively smile and move through the world with grace in their conservative dresses and elaborate long hairstyles.

Truth girls were expected to be ‘nice girls’.

Ours was a working-class family when a lot of 2x2 followers are far wealthier.

My family wanted to have money, wanted to be like other Truth families, but the reality was we had to live quite differently behind closed doors.

We played a complex game of make-believe to fit into Truth 2x2 culture.

For Convention or Special Meetings my mother would spend weeks making new dresses and saving for new white sandals for all of us.

She wanted us to always look ‘nice’ and ‘presentable’.

We’d tease her endlessly about her use of the words.

‘We promise we’re all going to behave and look ‘presentable’ and be ‘nice’ mum’ we’d mimic. Then roll our eyes and repeat ‘niccccce’ at her condescendingly.

‘We’re all going to be ‘nicccccce’ mum’ we’d declare, disingenuously with our c’s drawn out for maximum impact.

She was mortified the year a bunch of us cousins got caught jumping on the beds and making a racket in the women’s tents at Mudgee convention.

Convention was a time for the best of behaviour, and one year in the mid 1980’s, a bunch of McConnell kids failed that challenge spectacularly.

We were hauled into the dining shed by several Sister Workers, told off to the embarrassment of our parents, for shrieking, laughing too loudly and jumping on beds between Meetings when everyone was meant to be ‘resting’.

I never was very good at ‘nice girl game’.

The Game

Part of this game was having the kids work on the farms, which is definitely not behaviour for a nice Truth girl.

We had to be careful not to let it slip to the Truth leadership ­– the Elders and Workers – just how wild life was out there in McConnell-land.

There were never enough men to do the farm work, and unfortunately (for the men) girls were prolifically born in our family, so my dad and grandad had little choice but to have the girls help.

I worked beside them every chance I got. I’d be fencing on freezing cold winter days, chasing wild goats when the prices got high enough to bother, sitting on combine harvesters and tractors, and listening to bad language and wild stories in the shearing sheds.

None of these were activities for a nice Truth girl.

We had to be ‘nice girls’, and we also had to work hard, to do things that were NOT ladylike.

We had to be useful, practical and pragmatic.

Ours was a family where grandad had a bunch of good Truth girls, in dresses, chasing feral goats through scrub on foot one day and then expected to sit nicely in a Sunday Meeting with perfect hair and stockings the next.

Having spent the days before chasing goats was definitely not something we mentioned to Elders or Workers.

Such was our juxtaposed life – one thing behind closed doors to make a buck to survive, another in Truth Meetings.

The Nice Girl Act

No one helped the situation – when did I have time to perfect the nice girl act?

I was riding motorbikes, sitting in shearing sheds and chasing goats. I wasn’t sitting around looking wistfully combing my hair and practising putting on stockings.

I certainly wasn’t reading the Bible as much as I should have been, by 2x2 standards.

When we’d visit other Truth 2x2 families, I’d see how much their family read the bible and I’d feel a bit guilty.

Our family was always busy - farm work never ended. Other families read bibles together in the evening after dinner. My parents and grandparents read the bible morning and night, quietly beside their beds. They didn’t make us read though, they left us to round up the chickens, play games, fall exhausted into our beds.

Come Sunday morning, we were all expected to do the nice Truth girl act.

I had to wear the right dress, braid my hair, zip my notorious smart mouth, smile politely. Get out of the car without flashing my knickers, say the right things to the Elder, shake hands with the Elder’s wife. Remember not to mention that Dad let us listen to a Willie Nelson tape in his shearing car, because that’s ‘Worldly’.

Fire Lighters

Every winter school holidays, nan and grandad would take a dozen or so of us grandkids to a far-flung paddock with a jerry can and a packet of matches each.

Our family were clearing scrubby land for cropping (probably illegally) and they’d bulldoze all the scrub into big piles and send the kids around with jerry cans and matches to set it alight. We ranged in age from toddlers through to mid-teens.

They’d leave us there, to entertain ourselves and set fire to piles of scrub.

Nan would come back at lunchtime with cans of cold spaghetti and loaves of white bread. We’d make the most delicious, canned spaghetti sandwiches and sit in the red dirt together in a circle to say grace before we ate.

Even in the dirt eating cold spagetti, thanking god for our salvation was a top priority.

Nan and grandad took us everywhere in two little cars. At any time there was between six and ten grandkids hanging around. Nan would jam all the littlies (smaller girls) into the back of her little green Datsun 125, and grandad would take all the bigger kids in a stock crate in the tray of his ute, with a tarp over the top.

Then he’d throw in four sheep dogs for good measure, as if it wasn’t crowded and chaotic enough.

One of the sheepdogs, a mutt from the Dubbo pound named Niko, had form for biting us if we got too close, or looked at him the wrong way.

It wasn’t ever a comfortable ride in the back of that ute.

Even in the wild 1980s, none of this was anywhere near legal.

Grandad and the Goats

Another of my family’s pastimes was trapping feral goats. Grandad lived for school holidays when he could assemble a large contingent of grandkids to go ‘goat chasing’.

He’d drop us all off at the front gate of paddock and send us off on foot through the scrub, then follow us about half an hour later, on his little postie motorbike.

Feral goats abounded, especially in the dry years. To hustlers like us - it was basically free money.

Grandad’s idea was that the kids could move faster and easier in the scrub on foot, than he could on his motorbike. He’d send us in on foot (in dresses) to push the feral goats into the corner of a paddock, where he’d then sail in with a few rolls of netting and trap the wild goats in a corner.

Then he’d fly off into the scrub again on his motorbike to find nan, and together they’d bring in an old truck.

He’d yell at us for not keeping the big billy goats inside the flimsy netting he’d constructed, and then we’d all try to load them up to sell for extra cash.

We were all terrified of the billy goats and their horns – but also terrified of grandad’s temper.

It was a constant anxiety – did you stand up to a big billygoat while grandad was gone getting the truck, or did you stand up to grandad when he returned and realised a billy (worth a few hundred dollars) had escaped over the netting.

Despite the fear of billygoat’s and grandad’s temper, it was a life I loved.

I loved my family. I loved that landscape.

I did think this whole life would be easier if we’d been allowed to wear trousers rather than the stupid long floral dresses, but I didn’t let that stop me. I just tucked my dress up into my knickers, got on with life.

All I ever wanted was to grow up and live like them. The dreams I had were shaped by that place - the sheds, the work, the landscape. I thought my whole life would be there with them in that red sand.

Look at those horns. Terrifying