It was a 1974 summer at South Golden Beach in the Northern Rivers. All of us kids were in the kidney-shaped pool, me in my undies. Brother Doug had just taken a flying leap from the roof of our apartment and bombed the buggery out of us. I was sprinting through the kitchen to dob on him when Nana caught me. She grabbed my arm and swung me into her stomach with her claw fingers of fury. Only she could snatch us in mid-air so fast, it stopped all the fun dead, ‘Mary! You should be ashamed of yourself! For God's sake, woman. Where's her bra? She's ten years old!’
"Look at the state of this kid. Her hair's a mess, in her knickers, and not a bit of meat on her bones. Bloody Dingo Kids, the lot of them. Where's her bra?' After wresting me from Nana's grip, Mum pulled a t-shirt over my head so roughly the sleeves stuck on my wet fingers. 'She doesn't have a bra, Kath. I haven't got one on either.' Mum and I grinned at each other, but Nana was ropeable. The next day I had a trainer bra forced on me after a trip into Mullumbimby. The straps have been annoying me for fifty years.
Nana and Pop Campbell rarely visited. There were many reasons, and Nana would rattle them off every time she did come. The coast was too humid, too green. There wasn’t enough meat, way too much salad. Hippies stunk, so did us kids. Mum was insane and incapable of raising a family, everyone was on drugs. 
Pop Campbell had a lovely time at South Golden Beach. His white curly hair shiny under Brylcreem, ironed white shirt over a white singlet, thigh-length shorts with a jaunty crease and brown leather sandals. He would cross his legs in a shady chair and watch us kids swim. Encouraging our acrobatics in his high, soft voice. 'Very clever Dougie. I saw it Fee, perfect handstand.'
On release from Nana, I sloped up to his chair and crouched beside him, hand on his forearm. I cherished the faded blue outline of a kangaroo, an old army tattoo. Petted it in safety. Pop never grabbed me.
We followed them back to Broken Hill that summer, an interminable two-day car ride. I was jammed in the backseat of a Mazda Coupe, sick from cigarette smoke. Knowing we’d overnight at Gilgandra pub, then next day on into eternity. On day one the fly-screened Queenslanders and small green paddocks bolting past my passenger seat window. Day two, just highway. Hours into days, the Mazda’s odometer clicking over as we sped ever closer to the desert. I could have been riding my pony on the beach with Jo instead.
On arrival, Mum stayed with her side of the family, leaving me with Dad at Nana and Pops. Nana Campbell and Mum had an Irish rift with each other for life. Nana was a staunch Belfast Protestant, and Mum a gentle, fun-loving Kerry Catholic. The fact Dad went and married a Catholic stuck in Nana’s craw. Pop Campbell was uninterested in God and either woman. He liked birds, being alone, eating delicious things, and playing with his grandkids.
Dad’s worship was reserved for Scotland. Bagpipes made him teary; anything Scottish made him weep. Just a big Scottish sook in his underpants on the velvet lounge, snivelling over Brigadoon on TV. No clean white singlet, no Old Spice smell for Dad. He was a loyal Scotsman of Clan Campbell, the next Chief after Pop. Inveraray Castle in Argyle belonged to him. All us kids knew Scotland the Brave. He’d line us up to sing it and cry. Sook.
Broken Hill was the birthplace of Mum and Dad. With the most significant silver, lead, and zinc ore bodies ever discovered, it was a town to make a lot of money from, but a shocking place to settle in. Water was piped in from Menindee and measured out for survival. There was no firewood, no wooden houses. The suburbs were endless boxes of corrugated iron. Roofs, walls, and fences.
Pop and Nana’s house had painted roses patterned on the kitchen lino and brown carpet. No one in their right mind would have light coloured carpet. Even though the outskirts of Broken Hill had been replanted with natives in the 1930s to buffer the dust storms. There was not enough water to green the suburbs. All the yards were red dirt, from the bull-nosed verandah to the street, from the back door to the corrugated iron fence. Red dirt constantly tracked into brown carpets and kitchen roses. The city glinted silver hot from the rooftops. Evaporative air conditioners at full throttle, caterwauling all night long, our shrill lullaby.
In 1930, when Nana and Pop were soon to marry, The Barrier Industrial Council introduced a prohibition on married women working. The law stayed in place until 1981. For fifty years, married women could not work in Broken Hill. The reasoning was a hopeful attempt to attract single women to settle there and increase the population. Both Nana Campbell and Mum were married during this law. It would have been lovely if their husbands had been on a miner's wage, but neither Dad nor Pop Campbell were miners.
Dad survived a mine cave-in that killed his mate Tiger when he was a teenager and never went down again. Being a miner was tough, almost a mile underground, forty hours a week. They went straight to the pub after knock-off, then home at teatime. Miners were the town's heroes, the filthy gods. Pop wasn’t cut out for underground. He did some stints as an army chef at the Lavarack Barracks in Townsville, only coming home when on leave. Dad found work as a prospector; his other life that had nothing to do with us.
The Council had a dream that those Broken Hill wives would selflessly volunteer their free time to help the needy and run charities. Their stoicism and compassion enriching the town's image as civilized and comfortable. Not Nana Campbell, not my mum… Why drag six kids under ten around town in forty-plus-degree heat to offer help? There were cards to be played, hair to get done, a liquor cabinet with Three Roses Cream Sherry crowning the McWilliams Port flagons below.
The miner’s wives were Cinzano and Lemonade fancy and loved Nana's hairdo parties. They also didn’t want to help. Benson and Hedges smoke blew out of their lipsticked mouths, while ice cracked in warm liquor and bagged heads permed and dyed. That is the Broken Hill of my holidays. A little kid staring up at the breasts and chins around the kitchen table shrieking at each other's bad jokes… 'Ok, I've got one; why was Elizabeth Ardened? Because Max Factor,’ Another blast of laughter. It was pointless asking for anything from the kitchen. I would never get a drink of water from that lot.
Pop had a sleepout with a screen door off the lounge room. If I slid along the wall loud enough, he would turn off his radio and take me to gobble at the turkeys in the backyard. Every turkey would simultaneously leap up from their sprawl in the dirt when they spotted us. Snoods were sucked up beaks, ready to let rip a crowd effort gobble that sounded much like Nana and the broads in the kitchen. I finally got that drink of water from the tank handed to me and a paper bag full of scorched almonds. So many scorched almonds, ‘I’ll tell you the trick to eating scorched almonds Tanny, always eat the lot in one go. That way, you never get fat, and nobody can ask you for one.’ Pop wisdom, I hung on his every word.
Pop had lovely soft eyes and a squashy nose. Pop smelt of Old Spice and baby powder. His backyard was long enough to fit both cars, a turkey run, water tanks, and a shed for the big chest freezer. Broken Hill families ordered half a cow from the butcher’s when the freezer ran out of meat. They spent half a day chopping and bagging meat on the kitchen table and re-stacking the freezer. On top of the meat sat four-litre buckets of ice cream and red-netted bags of oranges. Fruit was a rare event there. When fruit did arrive by truck, nobody had the taste buds to stomach it.
No stupendously healthy fruit spilled out of baskets and across kitchen counters in Broken Hill. That was the potato and onion bowl’s job in the cupboard under the sink. Desert people liked oranges and onions. They sliced oranges into circles and topped them with raw white onion rings. Oranges quartered on ice cream for dessert. Pop and I watched the ice cream bucket defrost enough to pry it free without bending the spoon. ‘The trick with ice cream, Tanny,’ he explained as we watched the defrosting, ‘is to use the spoon to scrape the bowl when you’re finished. That’s the best part when the ice cream is creamy. Then get another bowl of ice cream because it’s already melted, and before somebody gutses it.’
Pop and I both jumped when Dad sang out to us. He knew we were out in the yard somewhere, doing strange Pop and Tanny rituals he could never catch us at. Dad looked nothing like Pop; Dad was broad-shouldered, bony nosed, constantly squinting through slits for eyes. ‘Chief!” he roared from the backdoor; Pop put his hand over his mouth and mimed the Indian war cry from an American Western… ‘Have you seen Tanny? Is she with you or buggered off somewhere like the rest of them.' Running Dad joke… When we emerged from the shed my heart sank because Dad had pants on. That meant we were going, and Pop time was a rare treat.
We were indeed leaving, back to South Golden Beach, back to Sunny the Pony and my fellow Dingo siblings. I would return fortified with Pop's wisdom. Eat the lot, hide the treats, and tell no one where the stash is. Hunt the fridge at night when everyone is sleeping. Even as a grown person, I don't answer the phone in case it gutses my time. I won’t have to work my guts out if no one can find me. My room is always the smallest, off the lounge room, and my granddaughter slides along the wall if she can’t find me. She knows I’m in there.
Fifty years later, the adult children of my siblings buy DNA tests from Ancestry.com. ‘We are hardly Scottish at all, Aunty! Like only four percent!’ My son and his wife give me the same DNA test as a Christmas present. The results take months of waiting. I spend them researching DNA ratios between relatives. My results are eighty-four percent Irish… with a smidge of Scot, a dash of Norway, and a sprinkle of Levant.
My mother couldn’t speak when close to death, so she wrote notes on a pad. I was at the hospice a month before her end when she wrote ‘Beauty Case, Great Grandfather Paddy.’ I found a tiny, framed picture of a man with a massive moustache for a mouth. John Patrick O’Shea had fourteen children, he died in Broken Hill, and I had never met any of them. Mum’s lineage shined the way home if I followed the joined boxes of my real family tree. Dad’s line stretched back forever on Nana’s side only.
I don’t need to spit in a tube to know how much I adored my Pop. He married an Irish girl that got sandblasted by desert life. By the time I arrived, they had learned to live at a distance, be it the sunroom or the army. I can hide a paper bag of Scorched Scottish in my pocket. He wasn’t my biological Pop. He was always my Dingo Pop.