Authors: Keneally Thomas
‘It is not for me to tempt you,’ I told him.
‘My brother,’ he said. ‘Could you and I, Mr Bettany, drink a health to his good rest?’
And so we did.
Shegog has been speared! One of his shepherds appeared at my door in the middle of a hot night and screamed the news. ‘We told you we need bloody carbines!’ he howled. Leaving Long to organise Clancy and O’Dallow into a homestead guard, I rode out on Hobbes, carrying the shepherd behind me on my saddle.
The second shepherd had carried Shegog from the place he took his wound by the door and into the hut. Now that same shepherd was with some timidity waiting for us, carrying a hardwood cudgel which looked like something a native had once made and given him as a present. I saw in the mutton-fat lamplight that Shegog looked pitiable, laid on one of the rough cots and seeming almost luminously white-grey, with a froth of blood on his lips, and a broken spear stuck in deep below his heart. The shepherd with the cudgel explained the severity of the wound. ‘Them sables use a fluked bone to gash a fellow open!’ he whispered in my ear. I could feel the hot breath of his terror against my neck.
Shegog complained in a thin voice, ‘Oh it won’t come out, Mr Bettany. Save me if you can.’
‘Don’t speak,’ I said as consolingly as I could.
‘I feel well enough you know, Mr Bettany, more of coldness than ache.’
He coughed some more blood, and again I said, ‘Don’t speak, dear fellow.’
But he was a speaker, a rare Australian orator. As if, having lived a more self-examined life than some felons, it was his duty now to die a self-examined death. ‘I am a Presbyterian, sir. Despite my fallen state …’ A paroxysm came but could not stop him. We all wished he would be quiet and die. ‘… God is not pleased to see his Christian children impaled. Go out now, Mr Bettany. Go out and fire your carbine in the dark, so they know there’s a vengeance coming.’
I wondered whether the sound of my carbine would dissuade the natives from further attack, or merely make pursuing them all the more difficult. I could not refuse a man though whose darkest blood was bubbling at his lip. Outside, in the bright, silken deep night I discharged the weapon, and the noise went bumping round the boulders and recoiled from hills. Only the sheep in the fold Shegog had been guarding responded by scurrying. The cudgel-owning shepherd had followed me out. He said, ‘They were angry because poor old Shegog had poxed their women. He’s an awful ladies’ man for an ugly fellow. He thought he was jake and clean when we first come here, but the pox has come back in full flower for poor old Goggy.’
We went inside and recited in ragged unison the Lord’s Prayer, and I uttered two psalms from memory. Shegog looked more studious than in pain, and expired with a whimper around first light, the shaft still inextricable in him, as the natives intended it should be. I felt acutely that his was the first blood spilt on Nugan Ganway, and diseased as it might
have been, there was no question it altered the complexion of the landscape. I felt an irrational reluctance to bury him at once, as if the fact of his murder would be thereby erased. So I wrapped him in wet burlap for a day.
I had during that time returned to my hut–homestead and opened the lock on a chest which contained some seven carbines and ball cartridges. Like many other cases of recourse to arms, this one had less than meritorious origins, but the men must not only behave – they must also have means to defend themselves and their flocks. So the firearm entered Nugan Ganway’s history, and I felt dispirited that it had. Not everyone would use such a potent implement with wisdom.
The memory of a stratagem first attempted in Van Diemen’s Land cheered me up, and I fetched some pages and ink and began to draw cautionary pictures.
In the first image, arduously but definitely depicted in ink, I showed two black men projecting a spear into a white man’s chest, and then a response: two white men firing long-barrel carbines and felling a black man.
The second set of images was of two white men shooting down a native and then, with black and white for witness, of the two culprits hung from a tree for murder.
Next, a sketch of native men spearing a sheep, and being pursued by white men for it. Last, a group of black men spearing a kangaroo, and being offered the hand of fraternity by a settler who bore some resemblance to me.
The secret was to find an elder and give him these unambiguous pictographs. Another Van Diemen’s Land device that might be useful was to choose an appropriate elder, to observe the one the natives most respected, and proclaim him king, giving him an appropriate chain of office, making him responsible for the behaviour of his people.
I gave one carbine each to my most trusted men, saying, ‘We are not at war with these people. We seek to enforce the peace, that is all. No wild shots!’
Clancy and O’Dallow said nothing. Their eyes took on a distance and so I warned them again, and showed them my pictographs. ‘Persuasion,’ I said. ‘Persuasion.’
I guessed that after Shegog’s death the Moth people would have wisely taken to the wooded heights. I rode off that afternoon south-west with a carbine at my saddle, one at O’Dallow’s, and Shegog’s two shepherds, unarmed (we had simply left that outpost’s sheep in their folds). A second
party led by Long and equipped with a copy of my treaty-in-pictures, went more northerly, towards Treloar’s run. We looked in our progress for the usual threads of smoke which would betray the location of these people. I saw none, and my party had to wait until the next morning before we encountered anyone at all, a lean old woman wrapped in a kangaroo skin rug. She talked to us quite companionably as we passed. One of Shegog’s shepherds called to her, ‘Yes, rave on, you old bitch.’ Perhaps she had been left there to die, as was rumoured to be the economic custom of all natives.
Finding nothing else, we came to tall hills which flanked the pass marking the southern end of my land licence. We normally called this, if we called it anything, the Gap. From here one could see the line of snowy alps stretched diagonally across our front. Shegog’s murderers had not taken this route.
Returning, we found Long still gone, but the men left behind at my station had by now built a coffin of rough slabs and put Shegog within, and we buried him with the point of the lance still within him. Convict scholar, lecher, and in part, maker of his own murder.
It was late afternoon before Long’s party arrived back at Nugan Ganway main station. Long carried a small boy, smaller than Felix when I had first met him, folded within his arms as he held the reins. He dismounted, drew down the child and walked across the yard to report to me. The child was not passive as Felix had been. It yowled and writhed, and Long did not look very pleased with himself. I asked him inside, and he seemed bewildered about where to place the infant and sat with the squirming child in his arms.
‘Where does he come from?’ I asked, expecting to hear an unhappy account.
‘Sir,’ Long explained, ‘so along we go and encounter a party of men, women and children, with me trying to talk to an old man. But the young men began to make warlike sounds – you know what they’re like! I saw the women and children running off. I tried to show your pictures to the old man but the young fellows made spear-throwing gestures and screamed something – Wallah! Wallah! – something like that. Whatever it was, they were not telling us to enter their habitation and make ourselves welcome.’ He turned to the little wrestling bundle in his arms and made soothing noises. ‘Do settle, small heathen!’ he said, and the child did a little and he returned to the tale. ‘Young Presscart was sure they were about to send me off on the same path as Shegog and impale
me. He was hugging his firearm and of course it went off. This child’s mother, a little beyond us and higher up the rise was killed, and his relatives, thinking him dead too, left the place in an utter rush, the young men turning back to tell me this was not a finished business.’
I put my head in my hands. ‘Oh dear God!’ I said. So there had now been, within little more than a day, parallel murders on Nugan Ganway.
‘Why did you not leave the child there?’ I asked.
‘We meant to, but he howled worse when left, and so, thought I, I should take him and return him later to his people.’
I told Long to take out the child for the moment and bring in Presscart, loom-breaker, horseman, and now killer of natives. I questioned the young man and told him I had put considerable trust in him by placing a carbine in his care.
‘Maybe I wasn’t ripe for such trust,’ he replied. ‘I have rarely had a firearm in my hands and it went off without my meaning it.’
There was no doubting how close to tears he was, how horrified by the blood he had let. I would have liked to call it murder, but could not.
Long came back with the child. It did not weep any more, and Long went on quite tenderly soothing him with tea. This, it struck me, was a full-blood infant. What a noble experiment, I thought for a while, to take such a child to Mr Loosely. If Felix could read the life of Isaac Newton, would a full-blood child read it better? But this, I realised, was a Satanic impulse. We must return him, as much as progressive Mr Loosely would welcome him.
And as we watched the child, calm now, totter about my house, opening boxes, inquiring into things, with a genial content, Long was still worried I, at whatever inconvenience of time, might inflexibly hand the young man Presscart over to a magistrate for punishment. Presscart was a good fellow, he insisted, who got teased for crying for his own lost babies, and would not knowingly harm other infants, even sable ones.
‘After all,’ I reminded Long, ‘I have drawn pictures of a white man punished for killing a black one. It is part of the contract.’
‘But we haven’t managed to get the natives to take to the contract yet, sir.’
I had a sense I think even then that my convenient hesitation on this matter might return to savage us all.
I nicknamed the native child Long had brought home Hector, for though he had not been killed by Achilles in the form of Presscart’s carbine, his
mother had been. When in time the Moth people presented themselves to Long and myself during our ride in search of them, there seemed to be no rancour – in fact I wondered if they had seasons of peace, unknown to us, like the sixteen days of peace which had always accompanied the old games at Olympia. We returned the child by putting him down from my horse once within sight of his people, and, unlike what had happened when I had tried the same plan with Felix, the native women came down, dilly bags hanging from their wrists and elbows, and picked him up with whoops of delight. Hector had shown himself an affectionate and jolly child who had none of the wariness of Felix, and I think Long may have been a little sad to see him reclaimed.
Over the coming years Hector would prove to be a frequent visitor to Nugan Ganway. He always approached without fear, and Presscart and Long would teach him riding and roping a steer and other tricks not native to his people.
But in the year of his mother’s murder, I still needed to conclude a peace with the Moth people. On a day when Long and I encountered a staring band of men, with Long watchful in his saddle, I dismounted and offered a thin-legged old man at the head of this party some of my tea from my saddlebag. Then I made a fire and Long and I sat with this fellow and his brethren drinking it. It was possible to believe Shegog had not died, and nor had Hector’s mother. I began with the matter of names and by the normal clumsy gestures convinced the old man to call me Bepp’ny. With probably equal inaccuracy, I discovered his name to be Durra or Dhurra. I took out my pictographs and pointed out the contracts in each frame. I was pleased young warriors and even some women crowded up to inspect them too. I could hear their warm gasps and smell the bodies, chief olfactory component of which seemed to be stale animal fats they rubbed on their skin. I could not have proved the exculpatory, extenuating aspects of Presscart’s crime with my basic pictures. But I believed I had expiated the native woman’s blood by taking care of and returning the child, rather than indulging in the improving vanity of sending him to Loosely.
Durra was delighted with my pictographs and thrust them into the air, waving them, as his people hooted all around him. I put the pictographs in a leather pouch he could wear about his neck – his copy, the Moth people’s copy, of the compact between us.
‘What a genial people,’ I exclaimed as we rode away.
I had Clancy fashion a little breastplate of metal which could be
suspended on a chain from the neck. On one of our future meetings I awarded it to Durra. I knew from a notice in a
Goulburn Herald
Finnerty brought me that a more formal chain of chieftainship could be ordered from a jeweller and engraver in Goulburn. I ordered one with ‘Durra, King of the Nugan Ganway Natives’ etched in the breastplate. The following year I drank tea with him again and presented him with the chain. He seemed to comprehend the contract inherent in this act, and I thought again what an understanding set of men and women these people could be. But always dreaming of the day when I could send Felix to come to them like an apparition, and make all clear.
Those first three years of my possession of Nugan Ganway happened, as I and the world would soon discover, to be the finest three years ever for putting livestock in such country. The great levellers of weather and prices and the rest, which would eventually and for a time make a very poor town indeed of Sydney, later hung over us, and would in the end make dust of many. But we were not aware of such dull restrictions in my first three years in New South Wales, and in that time some provident tendency in me equipped me to make use of this age of plenty, for I lived carefully and restocked – as it turned out – wisely.
Here are some figures from my stockbook for the time just before lambing as my fourth year of occupation of Nugan Ganway began.
‘The sheep stand thus, after deducting losses amongst the beasts at the rate of 5 per cent, and the sale of 1800 old ewes, and adding in the 80 per cent increase of the flocks: