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Salt River Times 1
An old woman is telling a story. She says it happened
long ago, and she has had a cold ever since. Her nose runs
on cold days, so there is a drop on the end of it now. She
leaves it there.
Mel is listening. He has his hands in his pockets. He
has some gum in his mouth. While he listens he blows a
bubble with it like a child. The gum is cold when it gets
back in his mouth. Mrs Anghelidas, who is standing close
by, looks at him like he was a monster, so he blows her
another bubble. The new bubble isn't so good and gets up
his nose. There's the old lady with her drop like water
and there's Mel with a big pink one.
Mel gets it in again and goes on waiting for the tram
with Joe and Kev, going up to the park and play footy,
Kev has the ball. And there's the old woman and Mrs
Anghelidas. The old woman is talking to Mrs Anghelidas.
'This was out of town when I was young,' she says.
'Just a paddock. Where we're standing was just a pad-
dock.'
Mel thinks that can't be true, because there's a Safe-
way one side of the road and McDonald's the other, and
there must always be something there first. And what's a
tram doing in a paddock? But the old woman is saying
something about that.
'Before the trams,' she said. 'Before there were trams
here or in the city.'
No one is older than a tram Mel thinks. He wants to
tell Joe and Kev about it, and they are talking to each
other. Mel thinks the trams are so old you can't believe,
so how about someone older than that? Impossible. No
one is that old. They wouldn't be alive if they were. But
the old woman is, and she's older still.
There wasn't a school in those days,' she says. Mel
knows there is something wrong now. They had schools
before they had Australia. But the old woman puts it
right.
'I had to go to the city each day,' she says. Then she is
talking for a bit on how far it was in those days, and Mel
is wondering how they learnt to talk in those days, that
long ago there weren't any words.
Then he stops thinking about that, and Joe stops talking to Kev and listens too, and Kev even stops bouncing
the ball on the tram track so the noise won't get in the
words.
'I used to pick flowers down by the river,' the old
woman is saying. 'They used to grow there then. I would
take them in to school with me on the steamer. The
steamer went four times a day from the wharf on the Salt
River, down the Salt River and up Hobson's River to the
city.'
The tram comes. Most times Mel and the others would
get on, right, never mind the rest, there's two doors. But
today Mel stands about, and Joe won't shove, and Kev
lines up after them, and they let the old woman on. Like
they'd got manners, Mel thinks. Then they sit near her
and go on listening. If you say it on a tram it's public,
isn't it?
They have never heard of people going to the city in a
steamer, down one river and up the next. Now you can
get a train or a bus, or take a tram to Iramoo and change
there.
Now what's she saying? The tram's rattling along, all
that noise. The old woman speaks like being in a room
with you.
'One day we just go in Hobson's River,' she is saying.
'We had just turned, right out in the middle because the
tide was going out ... '
Then a big semi comes up beside the tram. You can't hear the old woman now, but Mrs Anghelidas goes on
looking like listening. The semi driver sits up with his
elbows on his steering wheel and his engine roars. The
old woman's story gets run down, you can't hear it.
Then the tram stops to let people on, and Mel can just
hear the pump under the floor, and then that stops. The
old woman is still telling her story.
To be continued |
