Authors: Keneally Thomas
‘As one might drown a kitten,’ said Rowan. ‘To save you the trouble of it.’
‘Then you anticipated my desires with a murder!’
‘We did not think it murder. It was a mercy, to stop him starving.’
‘Good heavens, then you would anticipate
God
’s desire with a murder!’
‘I don’t know what God’s desire is. To a fellow positioned such as I am, it can sometimes seem twisted.’
Long stepped up to him, the supposed Captain, and pushed his shoulder. Though Rowan took Long by the wrist, I was pleased to see
that Long would not be held. He began chastising the two absconders in the Irish tongue. Their tones began in anger and then ran to a quiet intensity. Long seemed very much on top of them – he evinced their respect or their fear or both. Now they waited by mutely as Long turned to Charlie and me to explain their arrival.
They had seen our campfires and approved, it seemed, our choice of site for a homestead. They were used to building from the timber of the area, and they thought they might come down to offer their temporary labour.
I was bewildered by this idea, but Charlie was soon well-advanced in negotiating a price for the home, a further hut, the habitations of the shepherds, and for other split logs sufficient for the erecting of a serviceable shearing shed. Somehow these men, who had chosen to treat Felix as an unwanted animal, and who were incapable of being rendered contrite about it, knew well enough we were from Van Diemen’s Land and began by proposing a contract fee of £45. Charlie argued them down to £20 and asked them to be kind enough to wait there and – if they chose – have some tea. ‘I shall need to confer with my partner, Mr Bettany.’
Thus, meekly, the absconders went and sat on a log, facing Long and two of the hut-keepers, continuing with seeming jolliness their reminiscences sometimes in the English but also in the Irish tongue.
A little way off I opened a parallel discourse with Charlie.
‘It is dishonour to employ these men,’ I argued. ‘We must send them away.’
‘And thereafter be forever watchful of them?’
‘If that is the price.’
‘Their actions are not without reason, Jonathan. It is you solely who believes this impossible child has a future of any description.’
‘I don’t believe you could talk in such a way.’
‘Dear God, I don’t have to justify myself. I say I would not drown the child, but can see why they might! In the meantime, are we to go hut-less?’
He stepped away, to the place where the vigorous discourse between Long and the absconders was drawing to a close in flurries of dark, sputtering language. I frowned, thoroughly disappointed in myself at the prospect of admitting such men into my equation but wondering what else was to be done.
‘Then enough!’ Charlie cried. Long and the absconders stood up. ‘It is not yet for us to pursue or curtail you gentlemen,’ Charlie told the absconders. ‘But we know of your acts, we know! It is not in our interest to send for police and to find out your habitation. If we suffered
depredations – let me tell you! – it would quickly come to be within our interests indeed. For the moment you are fellow inhabitants of this country and we do not wish to see you unless we call for it, do you understand? While you are here companionably, we are willing to be companionable. An intrusion upon our flocks would create rigour in us, and motivate us to combine with Treloar’s fellows and seek you out.’
‘Do you want huts built then?’
Charlie said of course we did.
‘So the rest is rigmarole,’ said Rowan, ‘but we understand you.’
Thus the contract was quickly concluded.
Charlie came back to me, ‘Jonathan, cheer up. If we chose to capture them and did not achieve it at a gulp, their vengeance would be awful. This is unknown land to us, but not, I think, to them.’
‘But there are still principles, Charlie. Even at such a distance.’
‘Oh yes. Their principle is that they want £10 before they begin work.’ Charlie laughed. ‘It seems they have sometimes been duped by gentlemen in the bush.’
We retired to our tent and organised the appropriate bank notes. Out by the fire again, I watched Charlie hand a note to each of them, and they folded it, their eyes on me, into obscure pockets in their inner jackets. The comfort was that in accepting these notes they were folding into their jackets a potential doom. They could only be spent in towns like Braidwood or Goulburn, and spending them brought peril that a passing detachment of border police might recapture them.
The two lightly nodded to Charlie and me and walked up the rise behind our homestead tent. They were looking as it happened for redbutt and beefwood, which split well. Soon the sound of their axes indicated they had found some.
Later, I took Long aside. ‘What do you and these men talk about?’
‘We talk of experience, Mr Bettany. The usual things transported people speak of.’
‘And what was their crime?’
‘Same as O’Dallow’s. They cut the hocks of cattle,’ he told me levelly. ‘Then they had a hard ship coming to New South Wales and a tyrannous master on the Hunter River.’ His eyes were full on mine, and deep enough to suggest that with similar hardships he might have become something like them.
Just then, the two absconders came across the rise, hauling a log on their shoulders, and I was distracted into a sudden joy. It was now
apparent in a new way that here on my hill amongst inhuman granite marbles a European habitation would for the first time be raised, and if by questionable hands, then by the sole hands to be had.
In nights that crackled with cold we had our first lambing. Charlie and Clancy worked with the shepherds and hut-keepers of the eastern flocks, Long and myself with the Leicesters and Merinos of the western. Generally, the ewes gave birth with a biblical simplicity – except in some cases when in frosty midnight, Long and I must wrench the lambs into the world with our hands. The men deftly plied their knives, castrating the males of the flock and sealing the wounds with a dab of tar. There was tenderness from these harsh fellows when they brought a quick end to the occasional sickly ewe, or carried lambs into the warmth of the hut fire.
At the end of a mere few days, our flocks had doubled! Mr Finlay’s share of the increase were marked with a simple tar stroke – I felt he might delight to be identified as number 1 – mine were marked with a cross, and Charlie’s with a C. Reflecting that this Arcadian place seemed anxious to reward us for our early gestures of faith and enthusiasm, I took a note of all the lambs of each flock in my stock book.
Then Charlie mounted up on his barrel-chested mare and was bent on going. On the way through Goulburn, he would employ more felon shepherds, and advance them ten shillings to make their way to me. He rode off, very happy, and by the end of the winter four more men bearing convict travel passports arrived, having walked and taken rides on wagons for part of the way from Goulburn. They seemed in high, wary fettle, and were very welcome, since they allowed me to separate out sections of the stock into their care. O’Dallow, whom Long had retained as his lieutenant, knew two of them, and there were reunions in the Gaelic tongue which were close to enthusiastic on O’Dallow’s part.
In all our pastoral energy and hut-building and lambing, we had not yet encountered the local savages. But at dawn one morning Clancy came into our hut, the one shared for the moment by Long and myself, and told us there was a party of natives on the hill to the south-west, the one from which the absconders had taken their redbutt and beefwood timber amongst whose split uprights we now lived. As I gathered myself for this encounter I asked Clancy what he read of them.
‘Jesus, Mr Bettany,’ he said. ‘They walk down here like the relatives coming to Christmas breakfast.’
At this moment one set of our shepherds and their two separate flocks were located still at the homestead area, where the pasture remained good. The hut-keeper of this party, the scholarly convict Shegog, at night slept in a little portable box, a coffin-like structure with handles protruding at either end and a door in the side, all designed to permit him to rest between the flocks for which at the onset of darkness he became nightwatchman. His job was to forestall the depredations of the mad, fierce, skilful native dogs, which lived, like the absconders, in the ridges and descended to rip out fifty throats in a few minutes, reducing with lightning savagery the cries of their victims to a sigh and stupefying the rest of the flock. So Shegog was for his colleagues cook and housekeeper by day, flock-tender and light sleeper in his little hutch by night, an existence which I would not have chosen for myself, and which appealed largely to eccentric men.
Shegog came up to me now and addressed me in that strange way, one eye on the sky, one off to the side. ‘These creatures here,’ he told me, ‘might be related to the ones I knew and learnt to converse with in the County of Murray. Would you choose me to talk to them now?’
I was dubious of Shegog’s linguistics but authorised him anyhow. What could be the harm?
I could now see a little way up the hill to the south-west a scene I was familiar with from my experiences with Felix. The leading screen of native men, dressed in their possum cloaks for a season which still retained a trace of cold, and bearing lances as casually as walking sticks, were descending into the socket of earth where our homestead buildings stood. They were talking amongst each other, but only sometimes now and then did their conversation take on a heightened quality, an urgency. I could smell the sharp, particular redolence of these warriors and elders, and see again, higher up the hill behind them, children flitting, and women of all ages swathed in skin coats above thin, bare legs. I could hear too the more distant, sharp, speculative chatter of the women. Were these the same group who had rejected Felix? I had no way of telling.
‘Do the heathens expect to spear our livestock?’ Long, jealous of his promised increase, asked at his side.
Shegog reassured him, ‘They would not have brought mother and all the kiddies if they did.’
Closer now to the men, Shegog took up an extraordinary posture. He spread his arms wide, so that he looked like a thin-legged bird, and approached them with an exaggerated, high-stepping gait. It seemed he
knew what he was doing, for there were immediate explosions of laughter from the old men who stood at the centre of the line, as from the women, old and young, further up the hill. Abruptly he abandoned the peculiar stance and took up something more normal, though I think the man was eccentric and nothing was quite normal with him. Long and several of the other men were laughing nearly as much as the natives.
Shegog began greeting them, a few words at a time, and the old men nodded at last and began to speak back, again, one or two words at a time, like say a Spaniard talking to an Italian, testing the shared features of this or that word.
‘He’s a thorough wizard, that little fellow, isn’t he?’ asked Long in a murmur.
The hut-keeper made an inclusive gesture, indicating the hill we stood on, the entire plateau, all its solitary stones, all its rugged forest, all its broad pasture. The discourse went on, the sentences got longer. Then Shegog turned back to us. ‘The old men keep saying ‘bogong-bogong’. Thus, many bogong moths.’ He lifted one hand, and adopted a pedagogic pose. ‘They produce the plural by repetition of the word.’
‘These are those great thumping moths,’ said Long, ‘which plague us.’
Indeed, since the weather had turned a little warmer, huge muscular moths had begun invading the huts, crazy for treacle and the flame of our mutton-fat lamps. When one such moth in its frenzy had collided with my forehead, it had felt like a punch from a small child. At the tail end of the tribal crowd facing us I saw women idly peeling moths off the outer layers of the congregations which had settled on a tree trunk and feeding them to the children, who munched them with apparent relish, while not for a second taking their eyes off their elders’ encounter with the strangers.
‘So they are the Moth people,’ I said.
‘In previous employment,’ Shegog the hut-keeper told me, ‘I dined off the moths myself, for variety. But don’t concern yourself, sir. At the close of summer, when the cold weather returns, both moths and sable brethren shall disappear. One good frost and these visitors will be on their way to lower ground, down beyond Treloar’s Bulwa Mountain station. Then the new moths and our seasonal visitors will reappear when spring is well advanced. I saw it on my former station!’
Things the great Macaulay and Carlyle, splendid figures of the literary world, contributors to the journals Shegog cherished, had not dreamed of, their furthest disciple had seen!
Behind us, just a stroll backwards, a pint pot of tea hung over our outdoor fire and permanently brewed. I walked back, the native males pressing forward all the more to watch me, poured some tea into a pannikin, mixed in sugar, and had Long take it to the line of elders. I did not choose to do this myself. I felt reluctant to establish some sort of trade between peers; that is, I, the occupier and owner-at-heart of this country, was unwilling to greet those gnarled old men as some sort of native equivalent to myself. As they were occupying themselves with the tea, I had Clancy pour some pounds of wheaten flour and pass them in a bag to the elders. We handed over as well a few twists of tobacco. It was clear that, as I surmised, they knew from their winters in neighbouring country about the uses of tobacco, for they held it up and mimed chewing it. We laughed, and a thin old man of authority cried, ‘Baccy, baccy!’ which caused a bright smile from all his fellows.
Communication having succeeded to this point, the serious-minded Long took over negotiations from Shegog and pointed to the nearby flocks. ‘Woolly fellows,’ he cried. ‘You don’t bloody spear ’em, you understand?’ He made lancing movements and then raised an imaginary rifle to his shoulder and pointed it at our visitors. ‘You understand that?’
This threat caused so much jollity amongst the visitors that under his lean and weathered features Long reddened, as if caught out in his most secret desires – to enjoy this country without interference. The black men went on chatting as if we were not there, and the women further up the hill were occupied in their own business, part of which was to keep their children from us and distract them. Only two or three older women who sat on the ground resting and whose dragging dugs showed beneath their cloaks of kangaroo, seemed to watch us at all intently. As if at a signal none of us were aware of, the men casually turned away from us and strolled up the hill, collecting as they went the sundry other elements of their group, and disappearing in the verticals of forest very quickly.