Bettany's Book

by Thomas Keneally

  During these days, Nugan Ganway functioned well, horses being reshod, my remotest shepherds greeting visits by Long and maintaining my flocks. On the fourth day I felt a passion to go out for an extensive ride, but first, and after thought, I tested Bernard with a question.

  ‘Will not Sean Long expect you to visit him?’

  ‘Long knows that I am needed here,’ she told me, standing back from feeding the fire at my hearth. ‘Long and all the men know how badly I am needed in your house now.’

  ‘Badly needed,’ I confirmed, and reached a hand for her wrist.

  But of course as days passed the most unlikely, or some might say improper, of arrangements rose to be normal. After a week I emerged and went down to Long’s hut, and discussed a coming ‘bang-tail’ muster, that is, a muster of all our neglected hill cattle, which he had been urging upon me. There was no sign of altered knowledge or resentment from him. But then there would not be, since he – like many of his people – had learned to swallow resentment more profoundly than the marrow of his own bones.

  Long told me he would need a dozen riders, and I promised that he would have them. Felix wanted to go, he told me, even though he was still mourning Mrs Bettany and George.

  ‘Are you sure he is matured enough to muster cattle?’ I asked. ‘We have had sufficient tragedies on Nugan Ganway.’

  ‘He dearly wishes to be with us, and is as robust as many boys of sixteen.’

  ‘You may count me in too,’ I told Long. It was mere justice to him for me to join in the risk.

  His eyes were dark and deep-set and could hardly be read. But in some distant corner of his brain, Long must have hoped that I would fall – such things were possible – and the mad, unbranded, so-called ‘Bushian’ cattle would trample my head to pulp. For he suspected, surely, that in offering to go on a muster with him I was declaring myself restored, in so far as anyone could restore me. And he must have apprehended too that I would not surrender up to him the means of that restoration, Bernard. I did hope this was tolerable to him, but if not he could – since he possessed his ticket-of-leave – take his share of cattle and work as overseer for someone else. He was still remote enough from his conditional pardon however, which well-behaved men such as he acquired after fifteen years of their sentence, that I had power over him. Yet I did not want to see him anything but well used. As long as he did not try to take Sarah Bernard, my daily rescuer, away.

  Bernard and I lay at night in George’s room, awaiting for the time of grieving to pass so that the relationship could be formalised as a marriage. And in this ambiguous period, the thought of my father was a perverse comfort. Whomsoever I seemed to shock, I knew my father at least. There was ultimately a letter, conveyed to me on a visit by the new police magistrate, in which the Reverend Paltinglass urged me to consider the unspeakable sufferings of the Saviour and be wary of new and sudden and false attachments which grew merely from my present desolation.

  News of my attachment to, or, more correctly, my passion for Sarah Bernard, barely needed lips to whisper it. The information was borne on the vigorous winds of the Maneroo, travelling further than pollen or bees. I confidently imagined Charlie Batchelor hearing of it in Yass, and the Finlays in Goulburn, and feeling justified in their attitudes. There were frequent confessional letters, published by the editor of the Herald in Sydney, from priests and parsons of all denominations, which declared that the communities of New South Wales seemed so debased and reprehensible that they deserved to be denied all rite and sacrament. I imagined I must reconcile myself to living not only beyond the limits, but beyond the sacraments too.

  In the year after Prim’s visit home, Dimp’s unease about the annulment of Bren’s previous marriage had not diminished at all. She felt no rancour against Bren. As she saw it, the annulment itself was something he could not go back and amend. But it was the toxic root of her marriage. So she was able less and less to argue with him about it. Arguing, and raised voices, would have been a comfort. But what use was a debate between parallel universes, exchanges travelling meaninglessly on tangents into infinite space.

  And then, some six months after Sudan’s civilian government fell, while Prim was still involved in trying to clear the way for a health survey of the Red Sea Hills camp named Alingaz, or Hessiantown, Dimp suffered what she saw as another crucial and revelatory experience in Sydney, and believed that, though an account of it would annoy Prim, Prim would need to be told by fax.

  As always, she began with a plea for Prim’s return.

  Your friends get blown up, and that awful regime comes in with – according to an article I read – moral police prowling the streets with power to take a person to court! Come home and bring Sherif too. He’s graduated from a British university hasn’t he? They’ll let him practise here.

  If you were home I could tell you this better. But I have to tell you anyhow: I know the marriage is finished now. I have to stop moaning and act. I know you won’t be surprised to hear it’s Benedetto who brought it about – and no, it’s not Benedetto in the obvious sense. He kind of said the determining word, that’s all. What an admirable fellow he is! The Archangel Gabriel of my poor squalid little life.

  I remember you used to warn me that I was wrong if I fancied that behind Bren’s old-fashioned front, and his ideas, and the functional way he embraced them and applied them, lay an exotic wizard, a sort of sage in a cave. You thought the cave was empty. And you said that’s okay as long as you know it’s empty, but don’t go into this marriage thinking there’s something there, that the cave is full of charming goblins. You’ll deny having said it, but you did, once – during the Auger business. I thought it was your mess that made you talk like that. But it’s the truth. Most of Bren’s opinions are predictable to the core. Well, whose aren’t? But again it’s that cautiousness! A man who’d seek an annulment … But we’ve had that conversation. And his boringness is now out of kilter with my boringness.

  The conversation at our last dinner got on to this character named Eddie Mabo. Only people in mining and those of like interest know about him – as yet, anyhow. He’s a Torres Strait Islander. With the help of a few lawyers from Melbourne he’s claiming ownership of his vegetable patch on an island, Murray Island. At the moment the case is being heard by the Supreme Court of Queensland. Doesn’t sound of much significance. Except all the industry newsletters Bren gets say that if Mabo wins, it will mean that Australia did belong to the Islanders and Aboriginals all along and the lot of it was filched illegally from them, in violation of international law. That may also mean Aboriginals have a right to block mining and drilling! The industry newsletters are full of panic at this, and the judge intends to go to Murray Island and hold a hearing right there. This is seen by Bren’s friends as an indulgence! See what I mean by predictable? If this Eddie Mabo wins, the result round here will be full-throated fucking hysteria! Gut fury amongst some of Bren’s set. You know the stuff: how dare those damn pinko judges give away our country! The Aborigines had this country for fifty thousand years and what did they do with it? Didn’t build a single 747 or put up one Sheraton. And now some Islander wants to turn the law of possession upside down just in time to bugger up the economic recovery! Etc., etc.

  I think of Bren’s associate, Peter Ignacy and his wife, Thea. Did you meet them at our party? Peter was born in Hungary. Thea’s a Scot whose parents came from Glasgow. Tough little reddish beauty. Last year the Ignacys spent three whole weeks with Bren and I in a chalet in Aspen owned by an American bank. They’ve done well out of the Australian earth and the bounty thereof. I find it hard to believe that a native land claim could put a dent in the Ignacys’ happiness. They’ve got a huge Lloyd Rees in their dining room – it’s like a great blob of liquid light and it seems to gleam with love. Thea runs a second-hand shop for your crowd, Austfam. So she’s no primitive bigot and, unlike me, she’s not a frivolous woman. But the rhetoric I mentioned above comes from Thea too. She has a sort of primal anger against this Mabo
, just in case he succeeds. I get defeated by this sort of thing. I don’t know how to utter my dissent, you know. This whole business strips the air out of the room at the moment. Or the air cries out for things to be said, the air’s thirsty. And I find myself silent, and I wish I wasn’t. Big Bren is spraying the bloody earth with opinions, of course. Incautiously. That’s the whole thing – the sod is rampantly incautious when he should be wary. And cautious when he should be free! See the history of my life, under A for Annulment.

  But again Bren, like the Ignacys, is a decent fellow according to his lights, and what else do any of us have to sail by? He has enthusiasms too. He bought a big Colin Lanceley for one of the lobby’s walls recently and was so pleased with himself. He’d seen one in a bank and thought it was great and wanted one similar. Bren said he bought it because it looked like a map of childhood seen from above – rivers and painted boughs and the whole caboodle. So he did that for love, and that should cover a multitude of banalities!

  Now I introduce the difficult bit, the bit designed to test your patience. Benedetto. I hear your smirk, if hearing a smirk is possible. It’s not what I think of him though that’s the issue. It’s what he does. He’s at dinner at our place the other night, the night the Ignacys are there, and he’s brought along some sexy, glasses-wearing girl barrister from his chambers. And everyone’s talking like the clappers about this Mabo case and Thea Ignacy says one of the expected things. ‘My ancestors were Highlanders,’ she says, ‘and a person can’t help asking if the descendants of Aboriginals are allowed to try land claims, why aren’t the descendants of eighteenth-century Highlanders?’

  And she’s a bit more proud of the originality of this argument than she should be. But I must confess I’ve never known the answer to that one – I’ve known there must an answer, but have been too lazy to pursue it. And yet whenever that idea is uttered, generally by someone more bombastic than Thea, I develop an absolute itch to find the answer, an enormously intense itch while it lasts, but easily forgotten. I have this intense desire to correct them. I feel there’s a place, and they ought to be put in it. But more, I feel if I knew the answer I would somehow understand being that curious thing: a woman of European (and as we now know, Semitic) descent living on this outlandish bloody continent.

  Now Benedetto’s got a lot of credit with Bren and Ignacy. He took and won some case over diamond drilling for them. So there he is, his broad face, close-cropped but thickly growing hair, his standard issue Italian brown eyes. He sits all through this talk about how the Mabo case is full of potential recklessness, and sits through Thea’s lines about Highlanders and how she had better put in a claim for Banffshire. And he’s able to say nothing. Dispassion is a great gift.

  And after Thea’s non-original point, instead of spraying their own annotations on Mabo about the room, the men ask Benedetto for his ideas. And Benedetto grins without malice and begins to talk. I do not think, Thea, he says, smiling, that you could successfully pursue a claim to your ancestral land before British courts. It would be an enormously difficult case to research. The point is that rightly or wrongly the Scots were seen as having forfeited their land by rebellion. Parliament enacted laws to that effect, and those laws have not been challenged, so that the common law is against you on this. But the Aboriginals and the natives of the Torres Strait never committed any act to enable forfeiture of their land, and they did not forfeit it voluntarily through treaties. In Australia, says Benedetto, country was taken away not because it was forfeit for some act of sedition but because it was considered terra nullius. Land belonging to no one.

  God, says Thea, I’m sick of people rabbiting on about this terra nullius!

  Yes, says Benedetto, but it means that either Australia was terra nullius, or else the native peoples had title to it. No middle possibility. If Australia was terra nullius when we occupied it, this man who wants to claim his ancestral yam and banana patch will lose. But otherwise he’ll win.

  Bren soberly asked him what he thought would happen.

  Oh, said Benedetto, I believe terra nullius is contrary to international law, and Mabo will win in the end.

  All of this said lazily, and with a casual grin.

  This was the moment, Prim. I felt an exhilaration out of proportion to the substance of the information. I actually felt I had been all at once set free by a Torres Strait man I’ll never meet and who wants secure title to his vegetable garden, and by Benedetto’s clear exposition. It was as if he had made rain in a dry town. I had betrayed myself into marrying wrongly. I’d mistaken the annulment for something enchanting. But it had made me invalid, and I lacked the power to walk until Benedetto had turned up and freed me with his few words. I found myself clapping, and Ignacy turned to me and said, ‘But you’ve always been a pinko!’

  That’s it. The whole incident. It’s happened in a thousand places in the nation – the same opinions and elucidations. But at the end of this explanation the contract between Bren and me did lie shattered. It’s a strange feeling. I feel that I must retrieve myself. It’s a pressing obligation, even though you’ll think it’s self-indulgence, and I can’t prove otherwise.

  I’m trying to be more than serious. I’ve started looking for small houses for rent back in Redfern. I’ll keep you posted.

  And just because I eat well and have lived in a palazzo, don’t be remiss with me. Accept this as an event of some moment in the life of

  Your pilgrim sister,

  Dimp

  In Prim, panic revived. Dimp might say anything, and be socially rowdy. But Dimp’s job in Prim’s universe was to be, behind all the passion, steady, secure in her life and her marriage. If Dimp fell apart the world might too, in some radical way no one had thought of.

  ould not help writing to her in fright and with even more of the usual and futile severity, of the kind which might itself serve as a provocation. She saw with some alarm that she could not refuse to believe in the idea of a word which once uttered changed the known world. She had had that same experience when she heard the word ‘slave’.

  When I read your faxes I don’t want to read any more of the transcript. It seems Benedetto didn’t do you much of a favour, giving you that stuff. I see that as having set up too big a sense of debt in you, as if now you have to take everything he says as some sort of prophetic statement.

  As for the idea of scales falling from your eyes as Benedetto spoke, I just don’t believe it happened. You sound like someone who’s likely to be converted to a sect just because some swami comes up with the right, plausible line. Just because you fancy Benedetto – well, I don’t have to complete the sentence. I could see the signs at your party.

  You’re lucky to find me still here. I was supposed to be off with Sherif to Hessiantown. But Sherif’s finding it a bit slow getting Ministry of Health approval – they say they want to supply one of their own officials to work with us. I don’t know what their problem is – they might be sick of negative reports getting out.

  I’ll let you know before I go, so your anguish isn’t sitting unread in the fax tray for four or so weeks. I hope I don’t come back and find you’ve done something extreme.

  Your stern and loving sister.

  She had not sent it an hour when Sherif appeared at her office door with a letter from the Ministry of Health. They were permitted to make their journey. A government health official would meet them at Alingaz when they arrived.

  Prim knew she would take her sister’s malaise with her on the journey, and had a superstitious fear it might poison things.

  To take the road from Khartoum to Port Sudan, all informed travellers – and there are few of the uninformed variety in the Sudan – leave Khartoum at night and hope to reach the Red Sea Hills late the next morning. Thus Erwit, Sherif and Prim left the city after an early dinner. In two days the two nurses who had worked on Sherif’s earlier health surveys would come on by bus, which also made maximum use of darkness, slipping away east into flat country to the north of the ir
rigated fields of the Gezira.

  The rains were late again this year. Indeed, Prim by now took their irregularity as the norm. The night Sherif, Erwit and she left was breathless. The upholstery of the Toyota exuded that peculiar hot-weather chemical breath which had always made Prim sick when her parents had strapped young Dimp and younger Prim, still sticky from the surf, in the back seat and told them not to fight.

  As they left Khartoum, all their papers were in order. It was thus almost welcome to Prim to be stopped at the checkpoint on the edge of the city, to have to get up off the vinyl and explain to the officials that she was not carrying sacrilegious books, whisky or rifles. At each of the recurrent checkpoints they encountered through the furnace night, there was a petrol pump, and an awning beneath which sweet tea and flat bread were served.

  ‘Are you married to this gentleman?’ men, sometimes in khaki, sometimes in civilian shirts and pants, politely asked at each road block. Prim told them no, that the man there was a doctor, the other a mechanic and driver. They saw Erwit was Eritrean which caused them to frown, but slightly. ‘So you are not the woman of that man there?’ they would ask Prim again.

  ‘I am nobody’s woman,’ she would say.