Marriage as an institution of family and state requires permission from parents, from missionaries, from the government. Sometimes it is not the obstacles to marriage but the pressure to wed that ruins romances. On Dulcie Costello’s wedding day she had second thoughts: she hid under the bed-covers and the community policeman came several times to fetch her to church. Dulcie didn’t feel she had any choice but to marry: ‘signed the paper, I don’t know what I’m going to do’.[69]
Reluctance to marry was not an exceptional experience for young men (and women) on the Cape. In his youth George Musgrave preferred solitude and independence. After ‘running away’ from an Islander girl on Thursday Island he was finally convinced to marry by the Laura police.
Police ask ‘George, you like to get married?’
I said ‘No way!’ …
He said ‘Why not?’
I said ‘No, I like to be by myself, can please myself, you can go any way, anywhere you wanted to go’ … ‘If you married’, I said, ‘Soon as you get married, you gonna get a lot of order about, ‘do this and do this’. When you by yourself you just roll your swag, pack up and you’re gone.[70]
George describes being married as tying one to a place. The Laura police wanted George to stay in the district rather than be sent back to Coen to work on the stations. George’s marriage worked not just as an administrative ploy, as through marrying the right woman George had a claim to stay in Laura. His relationship to the land changed from stranger/foreigner to one of belonging: ‘Yeah that’s why I stop here then … I was bad up with police. They say “If you get married you’ll be tracker … Then you’ll be policeman here”. I had mind different way. Police job is really bad.’[71]
George was reluctant both at the prospect of marriage and at being coerced into the police force, which he described as dangerous work.
Although Willie Lawrence had doubts, everyone in the community was pleased when he finally wed. They even held a big dance in the Coen hall, usually reserved for white people’s functions:
I reckon everybody happy that I got married, they seen me walking around single for the rest of my life …
Oh dear, made me sorry that time when I got married hey [laugh].
I like single life, you know, good.
Well you can get about hey, you can get lots about.
You can go anywhere you want to go.
But when you get married, well you never know where you are.
You get a rope around your neck, and you never move …
They tell you ‘Oh you can’t go over there!’[72]
Solitude has its own romance: the colourful image of the cowboy, the masculine superiority of the lone bushman, the self-sufficiency of the sailor. The Australian ideal of masculinity, and the images of American westerns value the solitary individualist. Women were not insignificant but they were often absent from the day-to-day working and social lives of men.
Willie and the other men were deeply influenced by Westerns and images of cowboys in books and magazines that reached the remote cattle properties. Movies seen in the towns were also powerful purveyors of modern culture. Most elusive of all in a predominately oral culture was popular song, passed on over campfires and along the road: ‘Just give me land, lots of land and the starry skies above — Don’t fence me in.’
Being a flash dresser and admired by the women wasn’t so bad either. As one man said: ‘I was a young man at that time, good rider, and well dressed’.[73] Men made careful note of their clothing: ‘Them white moleskins, them kind we used to wear, and old tweed you know, tight ones you know, look nice too’.[74]
Going one’s own way, not being tied down, is such an appealing prospect that even some who married chose this course. Peter Fischer got married because his mother wanted to protect him from jealous husbands and fathers.
Too many women were chasing me. And my mother think world of me, he didn’t want ’is son to get in any trouble like … I had married women all chasing me, I was a beautiful looking young man. My mother growled [at] me then, ‘You have to get married’. So she picked me out one there …
I should have picked one out for meself … I reckon I’d have been much happier you know.[75]
Peter and his wife raised a large family, seven boys and seven girls, but his wife left him in later life: ‘But it was sad, she walked out on me’. Peter Fischer may have been the object of sexual jealousy but he eschews the sentiment: ‘I’m not a jealous man, I’m not a woman fighter’. Peter believes it is better to allow people their freedom, even if it means losing them: ‘I think maybe better life for her, that she go the way she want to go and I go my way. And that’s how we come parted.’[76]
Expressions of a ‘lost love’, and jokes about finding another husband or wife, acknowledge that one’s choices are determined by circumstances as much as by individual will. But merely raising the possibilities inherent in these regrets is an act of ‘rewriting’, an act of permanent resistance, intimating not just the possibility of different choices but a different world in which to make them. This questioning of past actions and experiences examines not only individual moral and personal choices but also the definition of those choices by society and community. The modern cultural emphasis on individual freedom has opened up possibilities of multiple partners and non-sanctioned liaisons, but it should be recognised that — as in the romantic epics — these freedoms have also contributed to social and individual turmoil and uncertainty.