by Thea Astley
Boss dead. Wife too. Crushed under a ten be eight beam, huge beam hold up his house. Must’ve gone hide downstairs from the big wind, dadda say, they all say, looking at the body of this once boss/ruler. Silly man, dadda say.
They know better. You can’t hide from the wind. You close doors on the big wind it get angry, shake your bones, your house bones, body bones, little sticks it think, it know little people sticks. Flesh fly away like grass in big wind.
So they live like that, build up grass humpies, one week, two, dadda fishin, helpin the other men bury the dead, shelterin under bits of tin left from the boss house and then one day the bullimen come, the gubbamin men. They round them all up—like cattle, mumma say, under the Dog Act—and they put chains on dadda and uncles and make mumma and all the kids march behind to the beach and then they put them in a boat and won’t tell nothin.
Where we goin? mumma keep askin. Where you takin us?
You shut up, Mary, they keep tellin her. Mumma’s name not Mary. It Lou. He know that. Grandma Rosie, she keep crying. But the men won’t say and they frighten all day on the boat roll roll in the swell made by the big wind and all the time chains on dadda and uncles rattle. All night too they rattle and the smells get bad in the little place they sit and he wet himself just thinkin.
The littlies they won’t stop howlin.
A night of closed rolling.
The blue fire spits and stabs but in the morning, blinded by light, they are taken up on deck to see in a bracelet of small islands that other bigger island that will be home.
This island swims north like a platypus, beak and tail peninsulas clutching beaches, the island’s back humped to mountain size while all the suckerfish islets cluster as if they had come up to gulp for air. The boat moves closer, another remora, and draws gruntingly in to a jetty where the knotted green slopes rush down to the water. They see strange black men standing there with two migaloo and one of them, one white man, slender, youngish, watches as they stumble down the gangplank, chains rattling a grief song.
This man step forward, his eyes that crazy migaloo blue, and he act bulliman, act boss, his voice givin orders too fast while he slap his side with a shiny stick.
But a smile now and then.
That we-ra, mumma say, that wind. It bring us here.
THE WORLD IS FULL OF MORAL DISAPPROVAL
The world is full of moral disapproval. I have always tried to run a respectable establishment: clean rooms, clean linen, no drunks, no nonsense in the gentlemen’s rooms of an evening—I mean girls, of course, and even boys. (Oh yes! I’m aware!) But since that terrible morning last year I seem to be thrown into a worm-pit of confusion. What is right? What is wrong? After that murderous Monday who can judge the reason for things? There is more forgiveness, Father Donellan told me in that hopeless hopeful voice of his, than we can ever assess.
You might have thought I could see it all coming.
But how? With my boarders to look after? Landladies get very possessive. And my daughters? But look after them I did, despite the appalling blanketing heat, the jellied air of monsoons that never hatched. Arguing often as not with that military martinet who ran the place. It wasn’t easy. Nothing is easy.
Rollcall: Doctor Quigley, Matron Tullman, Misses Starck and Weber. Briefly, schoolmaster Vine. Then even more briefly that misfit Morrow. (I couldn’t help liking him.) To say nothing of my girls: Claire still wrestling with correspondence lessons, refusing to stay at boarding school on the mainland; and Leonie at that older, troublesome age, so difficult, realising she is truly the hostage of biology.
There isn’t anything sadder than the educated poor.
Us.
Sometimes I find myself repeating those words of Mother’s, uttered grimly over some meal in the stewing Brisbane summer, flies whizzing around the unscreened kitchen in that whistling timber house on the edge of Moreton Bay, whizzing to be captured on dangling treaclecoloured fly-catchers that hung their golden mobiles from ceilings. Caught and buzzing. The sounds of summer, waiting for the Trades to blow up across shoaled waters. I watch her hand, the wooden spoon, the endless stirring of cake batter, while the veins stand out under her papery skin. For we ate like our forebears, heavy food in heavy weather, frightened to step out of cultural line, idiot ties dragging us backward twelve thousand miles to memories of cold-climate fodder.
Mother was the widow of a pub owner who lost everything on a race at Ascot. ‘Everything?’ she had asked the foolish chap. ‘Almost,’ he had replied with a flash of his old spirit. ‘You’ve still got me.’ Did he realise that wasn’t enough? He voluntarily removed himself, as Mother put it delicately. A messy business with a shotgun. Despite widowhood, instant poverty and a breathtakingly boring job in a school-of-arts lending library, Mother was determined I would have contact with educational refinements—a little French, a little music, non-inflammatory poetry.
It was all wasted.
We moved north. Inn-keeping must have been in the blood. Mother found work as a station housekeeper on a sheep property west of Townsville, and those four years of boarding in a second-rate school on the coast left me with nothing except an ability to tolerate flies, stodge, and to recite excerpts from Browning’s ‘My Last Duchess’. (Applause from baffled parents on speech nights.) And all of that, mark you, all of that to be thrown away on a curly-headed pub-keeper’s son (I told you I had inn-keeping in the blood!) ten miles down the line who married me with Mother’s grudging and pettish blessing and taught me how to serve beer and spirits in his daddy’s bar and still remain a lady. Trapped in the rainshadow.
I wasn’t really suited. Not for ages. A little Browning is a dangerous thing.
When his father died, Liam took charge. By then we had two small girls in danger of becoming bar-room pets as they trotted in and out, kitchen to lounge to bar, ignoring liquor regulations, along upstairs verandahs peeping into the stale tobacco-smudged rooms of commercial travellers and bank clerks. Then Liam went to save all this for Britain by spilling his guts in Flanders. (Forgive me if perhaps I’m crude now and then. It’s the bar work.) I was left to cope.
Cope is a soother of a word. That round sound supports.
‘We must learn to cope, girls,’ I would instruct my children as the money dwindled. ‘We must manage on what we have.’ Hearing them mock my words with a passable but bitter imitation as they wrestled for possession of a shared toy, I would tiptoe away from the not quite closed door of their room trying to reassess.
By this time Mother had forgiven my wasting a little poetry and French and, though declining to move in with me and share the running of a country hotel, saw us regularly enough on visits when she tried to persuade me to sell up and move south or at least to the coast. She spent her visit days with us constantly trying to fan away the climate and the flies while she dreamed of blue water. She infected the children with her dream.
What is the derivation of happiness?
About that time I was summonsed for a minor breach of the Liquor Act’s trading hours. (Let’s be frank: I’d refused to lock the local constable inside after ten p.m.) Mother returned south and faded quietly and then, in the late twenties, I heard of this boarding house for lease on Doebin Island, a place called Shippers Vale bang in the middle of a government reserve for Aborigines. And why not? I thought, counting pence, realising that life amid bottles was not for me, especially not for the girls now trembling on the unfurling of frightful prettiness.
Yes, I can call it that: Leonie with her passionate hair and troubled troubling mouth and a way of playing Rachmaninov that was too disturbing altogether and did nothing for the bar trade. And Claire, not quite finished with schooling (a convent on the coast), but able to cope—there’s that word again!—with the grammatical rules of being beautiful.
My enterprise was thwarted by the Church who purchased ahead of me but was happy enough to see me installed as temporary chatelaine until a missionary settlement could be established.
I was ripe
for a change, a weather-turn that took me bouncing across September water for hours, it seemed, in those last months of 1929, the girls with their faces set toward unknowns, the crew, eyes downcast, being bullied all the way over by the foul-tongued skipper of the island motor launch. Still, the girls had heard all those words before in the bar of the Taws Railway Hotel. Their ears ignored; their eyes were moist with expectation.
A tiny bay. A tropic landscape Gauguin might have lusted after. We trailed behind blacks who lugged our bags through a world stuck and strangled with leaves to Shippers Vale. A glade. A hillock. A low sprawl of a building. A windmill. Water tanks.
‘It’s different,’ Leonie said, Claire said, the three of us remembering the claypans dust drunks dogs whiteanteaten main-street shops of the Taws. On the island jetty the departing landlady had swept past with barely a blink. Could there be a worm in this tropic bud?
Waiting for us on the verandah was a slender, boyish gentleman in starched whites and pith helmet. An inner febrility fired him. A twitcher. A foot-mover.
‘You understand,’ Captain Brodie, superintendent of Doebin reserve, hoped after the sketchiest of greetings and barely a glance at my wide-eyed daughters, ‘that your…um…management is properly under the jurisdiction of the Church, who will be paying your salary. You are, as it were, caretaker here. However,’ and he paused and we paused with him, ‘because this establishment is part and parcel of the settlement—some of the staff board here—you will have to conform to the regulations governing the settlement. Just laying down a few of the ground rules, Mrs Curthoys. My little kingdom.’ Quirkish smile. Apologetic. ‘My deputy will explain things later. You do understand?’
I told him I understood. I was longing to sit down and plagued by wondering if the Rangoon creeper that rioted along the verandah had attempted serious invasion of the inner rooms. Tendrils tongued at shutters.
‘Let me show you through,’ the superintendent suggested. ‘My wife usually…not too well, I’m afraid.’ His mad eyes, I note with later knowledge, were wildly blue. Leonie and Claire kept fiddling with the cigarette-shaped flowers of the creeper. Then the superintendent dismissed the boys with a jovial shout and their silent presence was replaced by two shuffling housegirls who giggled and rubbed bare toes against stork-poised legs, palming grins behind hand flaps and lowered frizz. They kept snatching shy peeks at my daughters who were now pretending the pink flowers were indeed cigarettes and making the correct hand movements, puffing petal and air while the black girls stuffed back titters before their righteous—I could tell—boss who said reprovingly, ‘Quisqualis indica! Surely you’re too young to be smoking.’
Suitable blushes. I hadn’t taught them that!
‘Come,’ Captain Brodie invited, one arm gesturing towards the french doors. We followed demurely.
A wide hall cut straight through the building and opened onto the green light of a garden. Doors stood ajar left and right of this hallway: a large dining-room, a sitting-room, six small bedrooms, a kitchen at the rear and next to that a fernery and wash-house, showers and lavatories. Across the shaggy grass, swamped by that green luminescence and tucked beneath trees, were four sleeping huts for casual visitors to the reserve. Later I discovered that launches brought stickybeak holiday makers across from the mainland and that native curios were sold, small boys dived for pennies, tribal dances were performed under duress.
Administration pocketed the profits.
‘Casuals,’ Captain Brodie said, indicating the huts, ‘or for those who prefer more privacy. Mr Vine, who is teaching here temporarily, has that end one. Matron Tullman often stays up at the hospital annexe and when we organise her rooms better will probably be there full time. Then there’s the doctor.’ His mouth tasted something unpleasant. ‘And the missionaries. It’s only a small family for you after all. Your daughters mightn’t mind sharing for the time being.’ A blaze of blue eye from them to me that would not stay for an answer. ‘In any case the whole situation is…well, temporary.’
Mrs Stopgap, there to caretake until mission staff took over! And then? I asked myself. For the moment, heat forbade thought.
Rollcall: Quigley, Tullman, Starck, Weber, Vine.
Starck and Weber, I understood, were rival proselytes but the speed with which the Church expected them to depart, two middle-aged maiden ladies lugging their fundamentalist baggage, seemed less than Christian, the speed tempered only by my employer’s inability to persuade suitable (read ‘correct’) religious to take up an immediate apostolate. (Are you surprised I know all the jargon of evangelist zeal?)
The superintendent’s feet were itching to be gone. He kept swapping positions on the polished floorboards, now minimal courtesies were done, and went to poke his head into the kitchen, suggesting the housegirls make tea for the missus. Then, slapping his thigh with a swagger stick, he strode off abruptly through curtains of leaf and heat. Snappy! I settled my daughters’ belongings in one room and my own in another and left the pair of them to rest on their camp stretchers, dazed by the suddenness of this new future.
Do I admit the smallest twinge of resentment at Captain Brodie’s charmless manner? I am what is known as a fine figure of a woman.
Start as you mean to go on: Mother. (Pity she never did.)
There was full rollcall at dinner. I inspected my charges over tough steak and salad. Briefly, they inspected me. Eyes lingered longest on my daughters.
Rotund handsome Doctor Quigley. Flashy big-breasted Matron Tullman. Annie Starck and Mitzi Weber in shapeless cottons and scrubbed dedication. Schoolmaster Vine, a silent angular man with a sharp carved profile under a sandy thatch. A Mr Morrow, staff supplement, would arrive shortly.
There were careful smiles on introduction, I had noticed, but no small talk, Doctor Quigley having quickly assessed my social position as had Matron Tullman whose observant black eyes already interpreted, in intersecting glances, Doctor Quigley’s interest in Leonie and Claire.
I had my vowels to support me.
While my daughters are beauties, I am, I repeat, a fine figure of a woman. Upstanding, some have said, with deportment classes behind me, memories of stately walks, head balancing a textbook (Palgrave’s Golden Treasury) along classroom aisles, with Sister Virgilia’s voice a caustic goad. I stink with respectability. Sorry about that word. The general reserve of my charges maddens. Only the missionaries, Christian to the core, seem disposed towards friendliness.
‘Very nice, Mrs Curthoys,’ Miss Starck complimented me as she and her partner left the dining-room. They had sat at the table slightly apart from the other three, near the french doors leading to the western verandah where there were glimpses of an ominous sunset. ‘Very nice indeed.’ Somehow I had whipped up a trifle from stale sponge, mango and custard. ‘I’m sure you’re going to manage very well. We’ll be sorry to leave. We’re under notice, you know.’ She gave a little smile.
‘It is only my job, Miss Starck,’ I assured her with stately reserve. ‘I believe in coping always.’
‘Too true,’ she said while Miss Weber nodded and nodded and my girls smirked. ‘One must always do that.’
It would take me some days to learn the running of the kitchen, the capabilities of my helpers, Essie and Peg, the pantry stocks, the times for ordering supplies on the mainland launch, the ways of the kitchen garden and the idiosyncrasies of my boarders.
Doctor Quigley, after the most cursory of nods, had taken a newspaper into the sitting-room and, despite Matron Tullman’s pursuit and attempted conversation, pretended immersion. In shallows. Under the flickering light from the generator.
‘That paper is two weeks old, Doctor,’ I pointed out, following him. ‘I brought the latest over with me today on the launch. Would you like to see it?’
He looked up over his glasses (your friendly concerned GP) and I was halted mid-thought by the juicy quality of his lower lip now stretched into a smile.
‘Very kind indeed,’ he said in his rich brogue. I must say it was a
ffecting. Matron Tullman called after me, ‘And the mail if there is any?’ (Everyone lived here in a state of expectation, I soon realised.)
I tossed a reply back over my shoulder—there was something about that woman!—‘Sorry, Matron, nothing for you I’m afraid,’ and kept my face steadfastly turned to the office near the stores so I could not see her reaction.
We were cut off on Doebin and wed to each other.
Pen portraits are in order. Perhaps you have decided on your own already.
The lady missionaries achieve fadedness as well as vigour. Strange. Partly, one supposes, because of the climate and perhaps because a drab zeal is to be expected from orthodoxy. (‘You’re so biased!’ Leonie chides.) In fact Miss Starck is a hefty and highly complexioned forty-year-old with sturdy ankles, straight brown hair cropped short and worn with a dogmatic fringe. She is excessively goodnatured, almost aggressively thoughtful and adores the blacks, spending hours hiking from one family to another, visiting the girls’ dormitory, running Bible classes, and administering capable first-aid to those who live at a distance from the main settlement. These are small scattered groups, often a few miles apart. Mitzi Weber, fair and genuinely washed-out, has, despite that, a wiry tenacity that can also tramp the same formidable distances as her companion. In a way their work supplements the hit-and-miss arrangements of the island school where Mr Vine is briefly employed. No one bothers about their education after the children reach eleven.
Matron Tullman is in charge of the six-bed hospital/shed. (‘Not enough! Not enough!’ I hear her complain to Doctor Quigley who administers treatment of an altogether other kind.) I interpret irregular early morning returns of the doctor from the hospital annexe where Matron Tullman shares alternate supervisory duty with a trained island assistant. I translate the giggles of Essie and Peg as they slyly serve the matron at mealtimes. The missionaries’ eyes speak a different language that shames my prurience. Mr Vine counts the days until he leaves for a mainland posting.
