On the wave came, and for a moment they found themselves looking into a magnification of the sea floor upraised in front of them – pebbles, pippies, small darting fish. They gathered their picnic basket and beach blanket, and ran to higher ground. The tide foamed around their ankles, up to their knees, until finally it expired, frothing, in the kikuyu grass. An old dinghy, part buried, rose up and floated off.
Before they could even begin to consider what had happened the tide retreated, sucked down a plughole or drained over the edge of the world or piped to the centre of the earth. They heard its rush, its musical trickle, its burp in the mud. The earth gave a shuddering swallow and everything stopped.
‘Holy forfochen,’ said Kyle, an expression that seemed allowable in light of the matter on hand but made Elisabeth blush every time.
Stingrays, sharks, jellyfish and snapper were exposed, beating wetly on the mud, attacked by gulls chased by the barking dog.
Little or nothing of the disturbance was visible in Kyle’s spotty, quaintly tilted Kodaks of the gleaming mudflats. But the three would never forget that day. It bound them within the radiating rings of a shock wave generated deep in the earth. They learned that an earthquake had killed hundreds and destroyed the town of Napier many miles away.
T
HAT BOY
, K
YLE
M
ORRISON
, by the mid-1970s was sixty-five, manager (and former owner) of Inverarity Station, north-western New South Wales. Bounder was long dead and Kyle the principal copyright trustee of the Bounder Morrison Literary Estate.
‘Cornfounded Blight’ was set to music and celebrated as high as Parliament House, Canberra, played by the Combined Services Brass Band at garden parties and national welcomes.
Call it a jingle or a ditty or a joke, ‘Cornfounded Blight’ was bigger than any of those and Kyle could do nothing about it. Australia liked it. Australia was a desolate one-tenth of the planet, a puzzle to its population, and apparently needed an anthem to equal it. Kyle could do without it. Those sixteen lines made people feel good about what they hated. What you loved, you scorned; what you hated, you were. It was the definition of Australia and being Australian as far as Kyle was concerned, but it made him wonder if it would be better being someone else from somewhere else, stepping right out of who he was and living in another country altogether, or even another planet. A man, for example, standing on a timeless beach and looking into the middle of a wave where the sea life swam past in front of his eyes, giving the feeling of there never being any land, only sea over everything, and the best world of all possible worlds was a world of water.
Lately, people had started putting their hats over their shirts when ‘Cornfounded’ was played on public occasions. It was a reflection of the country’s riddle – half this, half that, and three hundredweight of something else, call it bulldust.
When ‘Cornfounded’ came up, that one word in the original, ‘forfochen’, proved a handicap despite freedom to bandy about four-letter words in public being won in the decade now three parts done. ‘Forfochen we arrived on this shore aye forfochen’, meaning exhausted, beaten, stuffed, rooted – as bellowed by schoolboys, drunks and rabble-rousers – meaning just what Bounder grinned when he wrote it, what he reckoned it should mean.
A cleaned-up version was put to Kyle by trustees who wanted to give it a run as an authorised version. In the committee room vote, Kyle said yea to the notion, though it came out as smaller than yea, more a questioning yea – as a yea backing into a nay, with a question mark as a buffer or a gate. Kyle knew Bounder’s character as false to his public reputation but didn’t like, either, the way Bounder was made to look better by taking his lewdness away.
So it wasn’t ‘Cornfounded’ that made the anthem list but ‘The Yellow Haze of Wattle’s Wondrous Golden Lustrous Loveliness’, an old favourite suited to buxom sopranos that was given a fair powdering by Dame Pixie Overland as far back as when Parliament House was opened by the Duke of York in 1927. ‘Cornfounded’, set to fiddle or accordion, played at country dances or accompanied by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, fancy, on big occasions – cunningly bawdy in the one way, righteously melodious in the next – was thereby somewhat restored to the way Kyle felt at the age of nine when he’d heard the words for the first time on an Afghan rug in front of the fire at Meadow Flats. ‘Cornfounded blight, it just ain’t right!’ – and the Bounder coming out from behind the curtains with his buckteeth protruding like a mangelwurzle from a bed of whiskers as Mother banged the piano keys, stamping on, rather than touching on, the pedals, the pair of them shouting ‘forfochen’ back and forth while Kyle looked on rather deliberately blank.
It was all right kept in the family. Expanding outside that was wrong. The gist of it was that something Kyle didn’t quite have was given to others before he could get a grip on it. Kyle didn’t have a name for it, but Elisabeth did – her Prince of the Dryblows, who’d never loved anyone but her, rider of the prancing pony, wearer of the jangling spurs, handsome under the ten-gallon hat, corkscrewing away through the trees with a snakeskin-handled stockwhip looped on the saddle. Whatever it was he felt he lacked, Elisabeth saw in him.
Bounder’s poetry was in every newsagency and on every railway bookstall, and copyright would not expire until 1991, but Kyle was not rich. Royalties brought in only what they did. When barflies reciting ‘Prince of the Dryblows’ waited to be shouted, on grounds of Bounder’s poems being minted gold in a son’s pockets, Kyle obliged as best he could. Drinks flowed in his direction in the name of a man whose shadowed face under a tilted hat was displayed on the nation’s banknotes. It was held that Kyle received a percentage for every note printed, something he never denied.
As manager of Inverarity Station, Kyle was thankfully ‘all found’. That was the point of being manager and not owner of Inverarity anymore. It had passed out of his hands and been returned into to his hands after Bounder’s death by a process of condescension in which the word bankruptcy was avoided. Sir William ‘Billyum’ Wignall, Bounder’s cousin, had performed the rescue and never spoke about the means. It saved complete humiliation but left a few matters unresolved to say the least.
No alcohol was allowed on the company purse, but when it came to getting plonked, Kyle worked strategies with grocery bills and petty cash allowances. Elisabeth, the darling, watched him till Amontillado blurred her eye for subterfuge, his extra splash of ‘the emus’ being got away with.
Those emus were a drinks’ quota inspired by the grooves in a crystal tumbler being black-striped, in certain lights, like an emu chick’s back. Every emu had seven chicks, so make it a rule. Whisky poured to a generous glug, water up to stripe seven.
Twenty dollars cash was all Kyle had left after a week’s stay at the Australia Hotel during the Sydney Sheep Show. Bidding farewell to the trustees of the estate – publishers, professors, journalists, stockbrokers, reciters all – Kyle went to his wine merchant’s rooms in Kent Street and then to Central Station, where he caught the night mail home. Twenties might have been called Bounders, or Troublesomes, or even Killers had two hundred and eleven thousand submissions to the government won the day when decimal currency was introduced. Kyle folded and refolded the note in the depth of his pocket in a tight, nervous habit until it was hardly bigger than a pebble.
Making his way down the platform, he was tapped on the shoulder before getting to his sleeper.
‘Kyle, you’re “homeward bound”, “the future’s sound”.’
It was ‘Smelly’ Richardson – an old boy from Kyle’s school.
‘Of course it is, Smel. Sound as a drum.’
‘A drink?’
Kyle liked springing surprises: ‘Thank you, but no.’
A bottle of Glen Garioch, gift of his wine merchant as it was Bounder’s tipple, lay in the top of his leather grip, also coincidentally his late father’s. Alone in his compartment after sliding the door shut, Kyle uncorked the specially vatted blend and savoured, straight from the bottle, the taste that his father had poured on wet afternoons in their closeness of belonging.
Spirits had the power of bringing back the Bounder, feeling and sensation of where malt was first tasted and what was said. Kyle was born to the taste of it. Wet sacking came to mind, as did heads of barley making an insistent whisper in the Tablelands’ wind, and a felling blow – something close to, or allied with, chloroform.
Kyle allowed himself a few tears, there at the window, sliding through Strathfield and Parramatta, the oiling of jammed feelings. Lumps of dark hills and wheeling stars above were the mode of a night’s travel as he tugged a blanket to his chin and lay, supine, a jangling skeleton in striped silk pyjamas, the engine thumping north-westwards, leaving a trail of diesel fumes.
Fame
,
fame
,
fame
, said the rattling rails. Fame to the next generation being a ghost, a phantom, a will-o’-the-wisp with the power and impact of a steel rivet driven down into the heart.
Kyle had been the son to cherish after the war to end all wars. Too young for that First, too old for the Second, he was left with a feeling of shame in that Bounder put value on him weighed against those who’d fought, and he, for his part, wished Bounder was greater than people said he was.
The bar in the pub at Whistling Corner, a cold wet night, faces stacked to the ceiling as word went round it was Bounder and his boy in there. Ditto, a world away, the deer shoot in Scotland with Lord Tweedsmuir and the old gillie he brought to entertain them in the Gaelic tongue. The salmon stream, the pipers, the Morrisons’ home glen where the old gillie took them, wasted of all but ruins, from where Bounder’s penniless grandparents, with their undershot jaws and moth-eaten plaids, had emigrated. Then came France, the Australian generals deferring to chirpy, puny, punny, bad-back-corseted Bounder on matters of Australian vocabulary and usage while tramping over embankments of bones, during the inauguration of Australian war memorials. Bounder’s reedy, dominating voice rang through the estaminets: ‘Did you hear the one about the nun and the wharfie . . .’ And the wowsers separated themselves off, before they got to the invective that so boiled up in Bounder, when he got started.
Bounder and Mother had desperately wanted a sprog, and when they had one late, Kyle had to be like them – madcap, giggly, word-mad and shameless – but wasn’t.
Kyle was more your standard, awkward, unemotional, stitched-up country bloke, served off the higher shelf of social aspiration. It’s true he’d been spoilt. Crying, Mother thought he was dying; quiet, she thought he was dead. At six he’d stiffened up, at seven was sent away as a boarder. At school on the hill above Rose Bay he’d been one of a bagpipe-playing clique who’d ended up in the same district, living their lives within a radius of a hundred miles of Inverarity.
Startling the number of old boys up Kyle’s way, a circle of duds each with his own tin-roofed homestead and outlying sheds, windmills, turkey’s nest dams, miles of bare dirt and fence lines piled with tumbleweed and burr, galloped over by squads of slave-driven jackaroos. The old boys were hell-bent on giving each other reassurance into their twilight years, using their schoolboy nicknames for each other – ‘Spud’, with balls like potatoes; ‘Cut’, always with an erection; and ‘Smel’, with congenital bowel disease. Kyle was called ‘Kyyyyle’, a name stretched out like a dingo howl.
They held reunions in Tattersall’s pub, in golf clubs and bowling clubs and returned servicemen’s clubs in towns across the north-west plains. They’d all had promise and lived up to it according to the quantity doled out. Their reunions came up faster each year and Kyle, though he hated them, never missed one. Doing something he hated, doing it well and never showing it mattered was close to a definition of Kyle Morrison’s understanding of himself. At the end of each gathering they sang the old school song:
Boom chicka boom, boom chicka boom, boom chicka boom chicka, boom boom boom
.
T
ATTERSALL’S PUB, THE TOP PUB
, had white-painted, crenellated roof towers and engraved glass doors and varnished steps leading up to a spacious foyer with flower arrangements in brass ewers and a wide, sweeping staircase and two upper floors of rooms, some with facilities – washbasin and fireplace.
Petersen’s pub, a mile down the road past the edge of town near the trucking yards, was a former coaching inn, The George, known as a bloodhouse. Henry Lawson had stayed there in the 1890s, as he had in every pub in the state’s north-west, and drunk in them until he passed out in a torrent of babble. Its accommodation was out the back. Communal dunnies. Communal showers. Soapy water running out into an earth drain fringed with green. A rusting roof and a long verandah hanging over the footpath, leaning and twisting like a drunk.
Until the railways declined, Petersen’s was where you drank if you worked the rails, unless you were a station master, an engineer or a railways’ commissioner passing through – a grandee. Then you went up to Tatt’s.
There was, no surprise, a portrait of Marcus Friendly hung over the bar – the one that was everywhere in pubs within shouting distance of shunting yards or sets of points crossing over each other, causing a clattering in the night.
Petersen’s was where you drank if you had any heart for the underdog and where you were taken in if the underdog was who you were. A startling effect of it was that the pub prospered. Young and old pulled in for a beer, the place hummed. This was where the Petersens started. They now had hotels in the Riverina and on the Far South Coast, the Parslow Arms within sound of the surf near Crater Bay.
The Petersens, including Max, were part of – an example of – the economically self-advantaging workingman’s wealth drive, the party’s retention of conscience while fattening its purse after being pushed out by the blue bloods in the election of 1975 and deciding why not piss all over the bastards at their own game.
The district branch of the party met at Petersen’s pub every two months. Ross Devlin kept the key to the meeting rooms, making sure he arrived first to dust off the shelves and open the windows to the night air. Then he ordered a beer and waited. Draining his first, he ordered a second. If nobody turned up, as happened, he settled in for a third.