Memoir of a Meeting
By Sam Dawes
PICTURE a small town in central western Queensland, home to approximately 350 to 400 souls.
One day in mid-June 1963, news came that two newly graduated nurses had started work at our small local country hospital. Soon after they arrived, some of the local yokels played a joke on them by placing a dead snake along a pathway where they were walking. It gave them one heck of a fright. It was something to which they were not accustomed in their homeland.
Then a few days later, what else could an unattached twenty-six-year-old local male do, but gather some of his friends and descend on these nurses in a surprise ‘meet and greet’?
It is a Saturday night. There is a light cool breeze blowing as my Volkswagon stops outside the Carrangarra Hotel where our small group intends to purchase some alcohol to take to our ‘meet and greet’. Not knowing whether or not the new nurses consume alcohol, we decide to take along some ‘top shelf’ liquids. The cardboard carton containing these liquids is placed on the rear seat between the two passengers sitting in the back.
So off we set, heading in the direction of the local hospital. Those young ladies may be working for all we know. The bottles in the carton on the back seat rattle together as we pass over the cattle grid as the entry gate to the hospital grounds. Is such rattling meant to be warning bells? One will never know.
We progress into the hospital grounds, passing the now unused maternity ward in which the car owner and his four older siblings were born. Then we stop outside a small pedestrian gate. Local knowledge helps here as there on the other side of the gate, is an unformed pathway which leads to the nurses’ quarters.
We fumble with the gate lock in the dim light in an endeavour to unlock it.
Someone says, “Hurry up, this box is heavy.”
The gate lock obeys and allows us entry.
Onward to the three or four steps attached to the narrow veranda with a closed French-style door directly across from the stairs. A light glowing in the opaque glass of the door indicates that someone is inside. Who is going to knock on the door?
One of us knocks.
The door is opened by someone. This is not the night before Christmas. It is the night when two individuals, two separate islands floating in separate streams, are about to meet for the very first time at the confluence of those two streams.
Unknowingly to me, it is the night of the turning point in my life.