Bettany's Book

by Thomas Keneally

  He smiled at me, and looked the most humane man in all this wild scene. ‘Actors employed by certain wool brokers, Mr Bettany,’ he called to me. ‘In the hope of talking the sellers down. This is the great Australian drama. Ah, but did great fortune, as distinct from a pound here and there, ever derive from low stratagems?’

  ‘Perhaps more than we would like to think,’ I told him.

  ‘I do not presume you have come to see me on business, Mr Bettany, but it is requisite that brokers buy the pints. Could I pay for a pint or dram of your pleasure?’

  I accepted and we entered the interior of the hotel, moving across a sawdusted floor in a dark press of excited men. Barley greeted a number of settlers by name. This one from Yass, another from the Liverpool Plains, whose respect he obviously had earned in dealings earlier that morning or in previous years. He was exactly the sort of good fellow who would be a clever clerk in England, but the maker of a fortune in New South Wales. As I knew and hoped, colonies exist to exalt the humble. And here at least no one resented a northern English accent if it came with the right price. He returned his attention to me as the pints he had ordered were delivered to the counter by a florid, no doubt ticket-of-leave, barmaid. Barley held his glass upright.

  ‘Mr Bettany,’ he urged me. ‘I ask you to imagine Garroway’s famed coffee house in Change Alley, Cornhill, London. Renowned, my friend, renowned. Dim lit. Dimmer than this. For it’s late in English winter. London merchants sit around before their coffee ready to bid on Australian fleece. They have already bought what they want of Irish and Saxon wool, but they know that it is no longer height of quality, and they await this robust fleece from ends of earth. Auctioneer mounts his stand and promises them something of the best.’

  ‘Have you been there?’ I asked.

  ‘With my master from Salford, when I was young,’ he nodded. ‘I was raised in wool trade. And I can see a future – not perhaps coming European winter but succeeding one – when Nugan Ganway wool has repute it deserves. A reputation as a staple. And so on this day sixteen months hence, a bale with your markings is placed on table and opened. Auctioneer says, “It is Nugan Ganway wool, such as we first saw last year.” Dealers, hard men, believe me, Mr Bettany, hard men, wealthy men, canny, now lean forward in respect. A mark is made on candle on auctioneer’s bench. Bids must be made before candle burns down as low as that mark. Nugan Ganway, shipped by Robert Barley, Sydney, New South Wales. Hard and avaricious fellows lean forward, Bettany. That is a moment! And so year by year that wool goes to Garraway’s, and candle is marked, and bids are uttered in a husky tremble, and are no sooner uttered than topped, sir, topped. When I bid for your wool, Mr Bettany, I bid for a lifetime of wool, year after year until we are old men. Old men blessed by fortune.’ And then he raised his pint and drank with me. ‘So,’ he concluded, ‘I would be honoured to match your best bid.’

  So there, at the close of his Yorkshire eloquence, I sold him my first wool shipment. We were so compatible as we talked that he asked me to join his family for a Sydney Christmas. He said that was the squatters’ time, when men came from remote stations and stayed with prosperous relatives and friends and waited through the warmth of January for the Squatters’ Ball. There they met their future wives. He could see no reason I should not leave Nugan Ganway with my overseer and spend two happy summer months with him, with Christmas dinner at his house at Darling Point – chicken, turkey, pork pies, puddings, sherry, wine and ales, and then a cooling of the person in the waters of Port Jackson, ‘weather-eyeing it’, to use Barley’s phrase, for sharks. He repeated the verdict of an American whaling captain on the beauty of Sydney women, namely that even the lowest in society, the ticket-of-leave man’s daughter, fed on colonial doughboys, was unparalleled. “Boston or New Bedford could not hold a candle, sir.”

  As I drank, I tested this daydream against the reality of my life. I found that the rawness of the conditions at Nugan Ganway, my own rawness over Mr Finlay’s attitude, and the revival in my mind of Phoebe, who by her rash letter had somehow managed to create her own space there, all made me unwilling to waste time walking into a room full of Sydney women. And I also found, deep into my fourth pint, that I wanted no misunderstanding between Barley and myself.

  ‘You realise my father was a Van Diemen’s Land convict?’ I suddenly asked Barley. I did not do my usual trick of saying what a minor, almost admirable crime he had committed.

  ‘By God,’ said Barley, ‘At least one-fourth of all fine wool settlers, I would say, have been in chains in their day …’

  ‘Yes, but don’t say people fail to remark on it. You have just remarked yourself, Mr Barley. If, say, I were charming, which I very much doubt, wouldn’t they say, “Charming for a convict’s son”, and if I did not behave well, would they not say, “Well, what could you expect?”’

  ‘Oh my friend, I am not in a position to say such things. Who was my father? He was a servant came in Governor Darling’s party. Like a felon he had his hidden virtue and like a felon needed to crush his cleverness down into a hidden place within. There be high Tories of Sydney who speak in way you mention, as if they ride high above the mass, which is unlikely – many are former officers of low station, and some have convict mothers too! I tell you so you see me correctly – I am a Whig. Though people in wool generally tend towards Tory-dom, a result of their long acquaintance with sheep! But I am a Whig of my own kind. Most want transport system ended. I want it kept going because it redeems convict shepherds and it serves all wool, sir, all fine Merino fleece.’ He broke into laughter. ‘If you be convict’s son, Bettany, you are a sign that clever lads can’t be kept down.’

  The wool clip weighed, Clancy drove it into Sydney, to Barley’s warehouse. With the gentleman himself, I rode into Sydney too for a brief visit and met his wife at their white-limed sandstone house. She was a Northumbrian, thickly accented, but seemed as merry a soul as Barley himself. As for the projected Squatters’ Ball, the Tory wool merchants of Sydney would need to wait another year before I was established enough to allow them to run the risk of meeting me.

  We went sailing on a skiff of Barley’s in the harbour, thumping along over waves kicked up by a sou-easter. As we pulled the skiff ashore, Barley straightened and said to me, ‘Would you accept some money of mine, on the normal thirds basis, into the operation at Nugan Ganway? It is simply that I know a competent man when I see him. There is, sir, an outrageous incompetence amongst some pastoral gents.’

  Intoxicated as I was by the sun and that resonant thump of water in my head, I said I was delighted to consider it. After dinner I told him I would write to my friend, Charlie Batchelor, and if it was satisfactory to him, then we would welcome Mr Barley as a partner.

  He seemed too to pick up on my thoughts. I reflected that I would have the joy of banking my wool money, and within a quarter of an hour, as if in answer to my thoughts, he said, ‘My advice, by which I mean advice from other reliable men, is to bank in part with Bank of Australia and in part with Savings Bank. Savings Bank, freed convict as it may be, has great underpinning resources from a Mr Samuel Terry, a tobacco thief in England, who made a fortune in this town as a merchant. Bank of Australia is certainly bank of supposed respectable men, but is, I hear, based on property prices and not as immune to vagaries of markets.’

  I thought of Mr Finlay, who had occasionally carolled the Bank of Australia as the only worthwhile institution. Now, due to a word from Barley, I would divide my funds, putting half with one, half with the other. I concluded there was a considerable beneficial amount to be learned from Mr Barley, who could not afford definite articles but could afford generosity.

  One of my duties returning through Goulburn was to call in on young Felix at Mr Loosely’s Universal Academy. I found that esteemed pedagogue in splendid spirits, and he sent out to the yard for Felix to be fetched into the parlour. For some reason, while I waited I felt uneasy. Had I done the right thing by this small pilgrim? But as he entered in breeches, shirt and
boots without socks, I noticed that in the months since I had seen him, he had become a boy. Under a kindly regime, his facial constriction had nearly disappeared. He had not quite reached a hand-shaking age and so I was reduced to the patriarchal business of head-patting.

  Mr Loosely turned to me and in a lowered voice murmured, ‘He has extraordinary facility, sir.’ He took down a book from the shelves – A Child’s Life of Isaac Newton. It had large and majestic print. He handed it to the boy. ‘Read, would you, Felix?’

  Felix read in a melodious and well-paced voice. ‘The infant Isaac Newton did not utter a word until the age of two, and his grandparents wondered aloud if the child would grow up mute. But his mother always reassured them with the words, “Isaac is not slow to speak. It is simply that he has not chosen what to say. When he does speak, the world will not easily be returned to the way it previously existed.”’

  I was of course gratified. I laid aside some pocket money for the boy and prepared to leave with that feeling of comfort a man has when his semi-accidental arrangements yield sublime results.

  ‘You must return, sir,’ said Mr Loosely at his gate. ‘This boy bears watching.’

  The day of Dimp Bettany’s wedding was clear, hot, humid, beneath a massive, sharp-edged Sydney sky. Out of a casual respect for the fact that Bren had been to the altar previously, and from a natural reticence about fashion, Dimp dressed like a second wife, in a cream sheath. On her head she wore a simple construction of flowers. After photographs and felicitations outside the church, she and Bren were flown down harbour to the wedding feast at a beachside restaurant in a helicopter belonging to a mining corporation associated with Bren.

  Dimp’s side of the party was outnumbered by Bren’s aunts, uncles and cousins, let alone by his friends. She lacked an attendant sister, but then Bren lacked both his parents too. His father was ten years dead; his mother – who had borne Bren in her mid thirties – had recently died of a stroke.

  Most of Dimp’s old crew from Enzo Kangaroo came, even the lonely-looking star Colin Maberley, who had played Enzo and arrived from location-shooting in New Zealand. For the wives of lawyers, miners and venture capitalists on Bren’s side, Maberley’s magical and wistful presence outweighed that of any other personage, perhaps even that of the bride and groom.

  Dimp had always suspected Prim would not come, and understood why. Her absence left a margin of dark but inert vacancy on an otherwise sharp, exultant day. ‘The poor girl’s had malaria,’ Dimp explained when asked about her sister. The naming of a tropical disease seemed to satisfy the curious and validate Dimp as a splendid waif and dazzling orphan, worthy of the respect of all witnesses to the wedding.

  Prim’s absence counted in, Dimp’s experience of her wedding day was seamless. It was to her that simplest of images. It expanded like a flower to the sun, petal by petal, joyful quarter-hour by joyful quarter-hour. She had no doubts. In her view, the essential nature of the separate histories she and Bren had lived was that they would coincide on this crystalline Sydney day, in a city so designed for marriage that most photographs of weddings were outdoor ones.

  One of the quieter presences on Bren’s side of the wedding party was Frank Benedetto, the lawyer who had given Dimp the gift of the Bettany papers and the stray letters of Sarah Bernard. To an observer he resembled any other wedding guest, though he was not as raucous as Bren’s boyhood friends, who took the fact they had known Bren since adolescence as their mandate to get fraternally drunk, to sing songs which meant little to anyone but them. Benedetto was not a party to the jokes of Bren’s boyhood. He had attended a Marist Brothers school in the far west of Sydney. His childhood had been spent some crucial miles from Bren’s, and under less promising auguries.

  ULTIMATELY SHERIF’S VISIT TO THE SOUTH with his team, including Erwit, would produce ‘A Random Sample Survey of Families with Young Children in Aweil, Bahr el Ghazal Province, Republic of Sudan’. It would be published, to the great excitement and considerable kudos of Austfam in Canberra, in the British journal Public Health Abstracts.

  It first stated that between July and August 1988, Dr Sherif Taha’s survey team, including Ms Primrose Bettany, Acting Administrator, Austfam, Khartoum, had discovered that Aweil’s population had increased by some 25 000 people now living east of the town, on the edge of the extensive cattle market, and also on the road southwards from the town, in shelters of mud and brush and with only the most rudimentary water supply and sanitation. The new arrivals were displaced Dinkas, whose villages had been overrun by the parties to the conflict in the South, and whose livestock had been confiscated by either the Sudanese army or the forces of the SPLA.

  The Dinkas had come to town chiefly to escape the battle zone of the open countryside, and the Sudanese garrison considered them potential sympathisers with and members, albeit extremely depleted and malnourished ones, of the SPLA, the rebel army.

  Prim, Sherif, Erwit and the five Khartoum nurses who made up the team, walked from one brush hovel to another asking families if they would answer questions. Given that she was a stranger and so was Erwit, and given the uncertainty of the refugees’ situation, Prim was surprised at how willing they were to tell their stories, to answer Sherif’s questionnaire about dispossession, child mortality, and livestock ownership previous and present.

  The article in Public Health Abstracts concentrated on infant health. It spoke of such indicators of child health as Height for Weight, and MUAC (mid-upper arm circumference), and of Z, the wastage factor.

  Most of the children less than five years old, 62 per cent, said the article, had a wastage score of Z–2. This meant severe hunger, and the number was all the more alarming to Prim since, as Sherif pointed out to her, these children were the survivors of a crisis which had already killed many of their brothers and sisters.

  The death rate of children below five years was 25.88 per 10 000 children per day or 724.64 per four-week month. The children were buried in improvised graveyards, small stone enclosures, near the town. The very high infant mortality rate was explained in part by a measles epidemic which was in progress when the Austfam team arrived in Aweil, before health teams had been able to initiate their vaccination programs. There was evidence, wrote the survey team, that the efficacy of measles vaccinations could be vitiated by the high temperatures of the region and the lack of refrigeration for vaccine storage.

  In sweltering Aweil, the survey team had stayed at and worked from the beige and blue Boz Hotel in the centre of town, near the two-storey barracks, in a main street with a souk from which Sudanese policemen armed with long canes excluded the refugee children. Prim had two jobs: supporting the efforts of Anwar and Julio, and participating in the survey.

  As the survey would be published, whether for pity’s sake or for the sake of truth-telling, fear of joint authorship made Prim, in the thundery, super-heated August of Aweil, uneasy with Sherif. In irrational hours it seemed to her a genuine risk that Auger or an Auger colleague would write to Public Health Abstracts and detail the impropriety of her ever being credited with any authorship. With the constant dismal news emerging from Sherif’s measurements of children and questionnaire for mothers, and the general equatorial sweatiness of the place, Prim was pleased towards the end of the month to have to return with Sherif and the team to the less dense air of Khartoum and facilitate a further food drop for Anwar and Julio.

  There, working in her still office, she heard on the BBC African news one afternoon the exact, clear voice of Helene Codderby reporting that hostilities had broken out again in the Aweil region. Sudanese Army regulars, it was claimed, were pushing the SPLA south towards Malek. There was no mention of Anwar and Julio, but the next day Stoner called Prim and told her in his most melancholy, hesitant way that they were in his office. They had come close to dying in crossfire as the rebels and the army fought for their depot. The rebels, said a shaken Anwar, thought the depot was being used to give credit to the army, and the army thought it had been used to succour r
ebels. Its existence had become a casus belli, and while the program they had instituted at Aweil still operated, the army had insisted that they, thank you very much, would run it from now on. In what spirit it might be run, whether it would be used to feed government troops, Anwar and Julio would not know, for they were out of the place. They were under suspicion of sustaining rebel peoples.

  ‘I’m going to protest to the government and the SPLA,’ said an outraged Prim. ‘There’s Australian rice and wheat down there. Austfam paid for some of the aircraft charter!’

  ‘Good thing,’ said Stoner in the same dismal tone. ‘But, I mean, Operation Safety’s not going to end. It’s just that Julio and Anwar are out.’

  Prim was still outraged. She was particularly angered that Stoner seemed so resigned. ‘This is a scandal. And what aid worker is safe, if they fight over food dumps?’

  ‘Yeah, well,’ he said. ‘Look, the food itself … let’s not be too over-dramatic. It’s only agricultural excess, isn’t it? It’s not as if it’s costing the poor of Australia anything. There’s a tougher issue. Our Ilyushins were seized this morning by the military.’

  ‘Seized?’

  ‘Yeah, the charter’s been taken over by the army. They have the authority under the Emergency Laws, see. The planes’ll be used to supply the new big push.’

  ‘You mean, with the UN’s logo on the side?’

  ‘Oh, yeah, holy moley,’ said Stoner. ‘I hadn’t thought of that.’

  Prim said, ‘I bet they want to keep the UN markings for protective colouring. The rebels don’t fire on UN planes. But when they see them disgorging men and cannons – that’ll change their minds.’