Bettany's Book

by Thomas Keneally

  As for the Ngarigo coming north, though they might descend to the plain to spear sheep at night or loan one of their syphilis-infected women to a hut-keeper for tea and baccy, on Mount Bulwa, because of past confrontations, they travelled high up the slopes, and out of sight. They would need to be hunted by Treloar’s men. A solid party of shepherds, stockmen and wagon-drivers, including Morpeth, set off to go to war against the Moth people and found a party of them here, amongst these natural high stones. There had been much drinking on the way to the site, Morpeth said, and bets were taken on particular shots as the people were chased and surrounded.

  Shaking my head, I approached Howie. ‘I shall get some of my men up here to bury this.’

  ‘If you don’t mind,’ murmured Reverend Howie, ‘not until I have shown the police magistrate.’

  I nodded, for the sight of the bones was his authority. He was the Protector.

  I managed to tell Phoebe the tale of the massacre the day before we received a week-old copy of the Goulburn Herald, reporting it. Even with this horror weighing on it, my wayward mind was gravid with Bernard. My fascination with her was outbalanced by my disbelief that it should be so. She seemed – for no reason I could define – the most august of beings. Even though I asked myself what had Bernard done to match the deeds and gallantries of my wife, the convict woman sat undeservedly at the centre of my brain.

  Thus, half-distracted, half-resentful of Bernard, I was contemplating taking out some men to perform a burial when the newspaper reported that six of Treloar’s men had been arrested. Goldspink was not one of them. Before the coroner, Mr Treloar had been vocal in defending Goldspink’s probity, had made an affidavit to that effect; and though there was a sense that the overseer had incited the men, he had not participated in the massacre of thirty men, women and children – all connected by kinship to Felix.

  With a student demeanour which could not have been bettered anywhere on earth, and despite the news of the massacre, which must have reached him, Felix came to the house, sometimes to read with Bernard, but increasingly to read in silence from my library of books and English illustrated papers. I felt that I must let him know that I had seen the bones of his people and was outraged by what I saw. So I sat him on our sofa by the bookcase. As I spoke, his eyes strayed to the book, and I had the sense this was not utter selfishness, but an instinct that in those pages was redemption. Almost to reassure him, I asked, ‘What is the capital city of Scotland?’

  ‘Edinburgh,’ he told me.

  ‘Well done,’ I said. ‘But then what does the Latin noun drapeta mean? Eh? Do you know?’

  ‘It means a runaway slave.’

  ‘And so would you use such a term for the father of Horace the great poet?’

  ‘Oh no,’ he said, ‘there is a world of difference. Horace’s father had undergone manumissio, the legal process of freeing.’

  We were safely back in Horace’s world, his Sabine farm, the Roman pole to Nugan Ganway, and this conversation was a delight to me.

  Not quite as delightful was a letter from Treloar, full of rage, saying amongst other things,

  I urge you, Mr Bettany, to raise your objections at the treatment of my men with His supposed Excellency the Governor. Tell him that a war exists between us and all the Ngarigo, that their ideas and ours cannot live together and that they are the blight on our landscape. How many fine Englishmen or Scotsmen have had their lives taken by such as these – for whose eradication my men are now required to undergo the travesty of public trial? But oh no, His Excellency does not count their raids and injuries against us, only ours against them, as if they were his children.

  Now do write, my good fellow, for my men did only what you yourself might have done. I cannot believe the effrontery of this blinking idiot Howie who has been so praised by some elements of this town, and now he has been rewarded in that the government has given him charge of a coastal region beyond the Tinderies where the vermin of the land can be attracted by flour, sugar and tobacco, with him as virtual bishop! Yes, in the region of Bombala, Howie will have his black parish and fiefdom! And I tell you that if ever any of my men are damaged by natives in the future, I shall bring in magistrates and border police and demand of them and of His futile Excellency that the sable miscreant be punished to the limit, to the full length of the rope, to the gate of hell! Do, do write. There can be sheep or there can be natives!

  I replied to the effect that perhaps Mr Treloar, during our brief meetings, had misread my disposition. I was for humanity for the native and equal justice. Yes, the natives could be distressful but not to the point where I could condone their slaughter. I was very pleased Reverend Howie had been rewarded with a reservation to which he could attract the pitiable blacks. One of Treloar’s men, I said, had argued that he was pleased to shoot these natives since many of the women were poxed, and one had given the disease to him. But I knew the pox began not with natives but with white men, and the men themselves were the ultimate polluters, yet had murdered native women and children as if they were the source of the disease. I told him I was willing to meet him in Nugan Ganway, Goulburn, Sydney, depending on the pastoral season, to discuss matters of shared interest as graziers, amongst which I was willing to place the issue of some shared and humane policy towards the sable brethren.

  Since I knew Treloar would not send a party to bury the bones, and since whenever I looked to the north-west I saw that horrific thicket of boulders all over again with my inner eye, I took a party of my own men and dug a pit into which went Durra and his brethren.

  I was amazed to read that at the trial of his men, Mr Treloar declared on oath that he did not know where Goldspink was! No one challenged the assertion. At the time of the executions, I happened to be in Goulburn with my bullock driver Clancy. This was the town to which the condemned men were returned, and the execution, to which the tribes of the County of Argyle were invited, occurred in front of a new stone courthouse. Perhaps as many as one hundred Aboriginal men and women were present to see justice done, though one felt they had been conscripted from around Goulburn. One did not feel that justice was exactly what was happening as the string of hapless condemned shepherds and hut-keepers were paraded before us that day, moving under the care of priests of two or three faiths, and in a mass, up to the long platform of the scaffold. When the trap was opened and that horrendous thud assaulted the air, the men fell mercifully from sight, but the natives wailed, as if it were their relatives who had fallen. There was a lot of Treloar-like muttering amongst the whites who had seen the event.

  Clancy himself was very sullen about it. ‘Not bloody right,’ he managed to tell me eventually. ‘Governor’s a bloody madman, Mr Bettany.’

  ‘No, no, that’s not the message,’ I told him. ‘The message is: “Be warned.”’

  I discussed the feelings of the crowd with Phoebe, who somewhat abashed me by entering the men’s huts during meals, the delightful George in her arms and accompanied by Sarah Bernard as by her chamberlain, and saying, in the light of the judgement, ‘Mr Bettany and I do not see that these men were unlucky. They have deserved their sentence. Whatever happens here, Mr Bettany and I do not propose to make our fortunes by wiping away the sables.’ I did not witness this, but I heard men talking about it, and when I asked her, I found Phoebe was not ashamed to admit it.

  After the horrifying execution, at the time of lambing, Long said to me with casual frankness as we rode, ‘Mr Treloar was easy with the truth, would you say?’

  ‘Or he may have been misquoted by the press.’

  ‘Seven men were hanged,’ he told me. ‘Awful for them and for onlookers. And they were obeying Goldspink, who eats damper beyond the mountains. Over there.’

  He seemed to want me to do something to bring Goldspink to appropriate punishment, but what could I do? I was busy enough as it was, and though there had not been an exact equivalence of blood between that awful bone-strewn hill and the Goulburn hanging, surely it was all close enough in horror
to satisfy the scales.

  ‘I have much to talk about with that Goldspink,’ Long further said. ‘He seems to be a good man at getting others to do the dying for him. It has happened before.’

  ‘What do you mean, before?’

  ‘Oh but he’s sly,’ was all Long would tell me, and I was aware yet again that Long knew more than I did.

  His power was increased in my mind too by the question of what manner of friend he was to Bernard, and that itched away in me even more actively than the knowledge that Mr Treloar had lied under oath.

  For two more years wool prices were low and Barley showed me how deep his pockets were by continuing to buy and warehouse my wool on the expectation of sweeter times. Later in the year of the hangings, Phoebe and I attended a good dinner he held in his house at Darling Point – the guests being an interesting combination of colonial landowners and city merchants, many of the latter being Whigs rather than colonial Tories of the Mr Finlay stamp. All very jovial, all very brotherly. When it was over, however, and he and I were alone, watching a southerly breeze create ripples on the harbour, Barley said, ‘My dear friend, if you trust me, and you say you do, then I have some counsel for you.’

  I said that of course I trusted him.

  ‘Well then, I have it on good report that Bank of Australia – yes, that bank used by New South Wales’s better people – is in vast trouble, with many bad loans, a portion of them to your father-in-law, who has borrowed excessively on inflated value of his land holdings. For one thing, his view is that since his son is now his sole heir – I hope it is not painful to mention this matter – he has set boy up like a lord at Oxford. He thinks that is way for a young man to place himself at very centre of British society. Of course, this is only one item in Mr Finlay’s large expenditure. All depends for him on wool reaching no less than 8 pence per pound, and so he has been bleeding money for past three years. The purchase of a large property at Yass at height of market is one of his less advised ventures, and he, and other grandees like him, are too proud to take a loss, and too fixed in proposition of wool and pasture to believe what is presently befalling them. Bank of Australia has indulged them to its own and their disadvantage.’

  ‘And the Savings?’

  ‘Savings’s underwritten by sundry merchants, is brass-bottomed. Sometimes convicts and democrats are more worldly than Tories. My friends at Bank of Australia privately tipped me nod that two or three major depositors are very worried about ratio between loans and deposits, and if they withdraw their money as threatened, this will create a rush on those esteemed premises and – hard as it is to believe – demise.’

  ‘Are you saying that I should place all my reserves with the Savings Bank?’

  ‘I think it should be done unobtrusively, over a number of days. I can ensure that it is done for you, if you give me a power of attorney.’

  I did authorise him, and raised the question of whether I should tell my estranged father-in-law anything.

  ‘I wouldn’t,’ said Mr Barley. ‘Let him live a little longer in fool’s paradise. You see, he has little to withdraw from Bank of Australia except his debts.’

  It was to Mr Barley then that I would owe my survival when, two months later, the Bank of Australia collapsed, having absorbed the fortunes of many of its depositors. The credit arrangements under which Mr Finlay had been operating were at an end, though the bank’s liquidators would require him to repay at least some of his borrowings. He was thus not obliterated as thoroughly as those who had life savings, rather than debts, with the bank, but he would be forced to sell most of what he owned.

  Without telling Phoebe, who seemed to have heard nothing of their plight from her parents and who probably thought her father’s wealth immutable, I took some mixed feelings (including perhaps vanity) in writing to Mr Finlay offering any assistance, including a loan of £4000 pounds free of interest, until he had realised his assets, and until those which he chose to retain had achieved their former value. He did not answer. I realised that he could not.

  I wrote to George Finlay in Oxford, who had some of his father’s and Phoebe’s capacity to see things in absolute terms. He accepted my offer of a money order for £250, said that he regretted he could not thank me man-to-man, but that the collapse of his father’s affairs had been a lesson to him. Through the influence of the Master of his Oxford College, he would proceed with his studies under a sizarship, take holy orders and seek a curacy in the English countryside, in Canada or in the Australian colonies. He asked only that God’s blessings should be poured out on my head, and that of his beloved sister and namesake nephew, like ointment.

  THE AIRSTRIP IN LOKICHOKIO TO WHICH Connie Everdale, the baroness, the professor and Prim delivered their rescued children was an extensive region of cracked cement. The Americans had built it, said Connie, as a base of possible operations into Uganda at the time of Idi Amin.

  The bush around the hangar and workshops was sparse, and the earth stony. Four aircraft of varying size and function, decorated in Connie’s livery, stood about the apron of the strip. Others gleamed in the dimness of the hangar, where her mechanics worked. The one resemblance to their last landing place was a rakubah near Connie’s hangar, where Turkana women dressed in brilliant fabrics – emeralds, scarlets, electric blues – sat offering bright bead necklaces and wood carvings for sale.

  No sooner had they descended from the plane than three four-wheel drive trucks came racing across the tarmac. Halting, they disgorged an angular, elderly white couple, Caleb and Dorothy Wagon – whose hewn appearance fitted more Prim’s idea of a Montana ranching couple than of missionaries – and two young men who might have been Dinkas, possessing the facial scarring for it. Prim and the professor were cursorily introduced to the Wagons, but the liberated children were loaded with such dispatch into the vehicles before being driven off that it seemed almost as if they had been recaptured. The airstrip was left in stillness, with only the thin howl of a metal grinder remotely burring inside the hangar, the murmur of the women in bright cloth, and the languid noise of insects to fill the vacated air.

  ‘Alleluia,’ the baroness said. ‘Take us home, Constance.’

  Connie’s place, on the northern edge of the scattered market town of Lokichokio, proved to be not unlike the bungalows of remoter Australia. Here Connie, the baroness and Prim drank tumblers of iced fruit juice brought out by Connie’s Masai cook. In the dusty garden, by a date palm, the professor spread his little prayer mat and knelt compactly on it, his back to a blood-red evening sky.

  In the morning, the baroness took Prim to the Wagons’ Jesus True Saviour Mission, a considerable compound made up of one-storey dormitories and classrooms and a large white steepled chapel.

  ‘Sorry we rushed off last night,’ said Mrs Wagon in an accent from the southern United States. ‘We had dinner waiting for the boys!’

  The Wagons were energetic, devoted, evangelical, all according to the robust American tradition from which they came. They had accommodated the liberated children in dormitories in which a number of other southern Sudanese, and some Ugandan and Kenyan orphans, also slept.

  That first day, Dorothy Wagon and one of the Dinka men who had met them at the airport gave English alphabet classes to the boys while Caleb Wagon, the baroness and the other Dinka, working as a committee, interviewed each child and made a record of his testimony of enslavement. Prim sat in on much of this, and made notes.

  Over hours, the stories of the young, with names like Deng, Alier, Bol, Lagu, Garang, Along and Harika, blended. Most of the tales began with a Rizeighat militia raid on a village. In some cases, the militia visited second, after the regular army had already confiscated the village livestock. When that occurred parents would cry and protest that the army had taken all their cattle the previous winter! Sometimes, according to twelve accounts, the militia then felt justified in putting a gun to the parents’ heads and firing. Sometimes they made the husband watch the rape of the wife, a practice favoured as a m
eans of implanting faithful seed in the infidel flesh of a Dinka woman. Or if the family were lucky, the militia officer cheerfully said, ‘Your lack of cattle is not our problem,’ and then marched the children away, telling the parents, ‘Come for them when you have a bull to give me.’

  Some of these children had been servants to militiamen, others were sold to army officers in the garrison towns. A number had been sent to Koranic school, and these had been given new names – Abdullah, said a child whose family name was Joseph Odongi; Fayed, a boy named Manute Kassiano; Jafir, a boy named Ismael Yagoub.

  If the interrogated child mentioned beatings, the baroness would make a gentle demand that he take off his newly issued True Saviour white shirt and tan shorts, and would ask about his scars, mapping them on a diagram of front, back, and side views of the body. Over this the baroness spent great amounts of time, for she did not want to count a scar more than was valid. Some of the boys displayed burn scars – Prim presumed these were where cigarette ends had been applied by masters rendered brutal, perhaps, by the war. Each marked boy looked into the middle distance as his body spoke for him, yielding up the map of his captivity. If Prim’s Arabic proved inadequate for understanding a particular debriefing, or if the child was too raw in his own familiarity with that language, or was simply too dazed to respond adequately, the baroness would have the Dinka man question him in his own sonorous, tongue, and then translate his story to English.

  The way the tales accorded with each other was depressing, since there was in the boys’ eyes no apparent knowledge of the fact that their master’s work would remain with them enduringly in life and death; would be encountered by lovers, doctors, undertakers; would speak for them even at the most unconscious hour of sleep or ecstasy.