The Grass Castle

by Karen Viggers

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he calls before she is upon him. ‘But I couldn’t stay away.’ He flings his arms wide, and swings his gaze over the valley, the rocky tops, the hills of rustling forest. ‘Look at this, will you? How can it all be so normal after yesterday?’

  She stops and contemplates him, unmoved.

  ‘I’m sorry for what you had to go through,’ he says. ‘Both inside and outside the gate. I was so frightened for you.’

  She stays where she is, keeping her distance, staring off down the valley, unsure what to do with him.

  He walks up, stands near, close, warm. ‘What’s with the beanie?’ he asks, smiling.

  She looks at him, raises her hand and pulls the beanie from her head, waiting for his reaction.

  His face crumples and tears spring in his eyes. With warm hands, he reaches for her, crushes her to his chest, strokes his hand over her scalp, softly and gently murmuring, his lips against her head. Then he pulls back slightly, his hands lightly gripping her shoulders. There is a smile in his eyes, kind, patient. ‘Don’t worry,’ he says. ‘Hair grows. And I know a good hairdresser who can fix you up. Maybe not glue the hair back on, but at least make you smooth and silky. A Sinead O’Connor. Very brave, very sexy.’

  She leans her forehead against his chest, and his fingers glide over her ravaged scalp again, unafraid of the bristly texture, somehow still loving her.

  Then she is crying. For herself. For her mother. For everything.

  He holds her till the tide of tears passes, then he bends to catch her eyes again, serious now. ‘Let’s walk down the valley,’ he says. ‘Like the first time we met.’

  She moves to say something, but he shushes her gently. ‘You don’t have to talk,’ he says. ‘We can walk as long as you like. For ten minutes or forever. It doesn’t matter. I’m happy to go as far as you want.’

  She takes his hand and they walk through the shuffling grass with the wind chuckling in the trees like a river. Then she begins to tell him about her mother.

  The valley sighs around them, and above, a flock of galahs shrieks at the sky.

  EPILOGUE

  The first time the two old women meet, Daphne weeps.

  It is in a city café. Daphne waits at a table with Abby, while out in the street the winter wind rattles long-shed autumn leaves up and down the gutter.

  Daphne’s heart taps a fast rhythm. She is anxious and excited and a little afraid. This is a beginning, a small chance to make her peace. The offering she wants to make may mean nothing in the scheme of all the wrongs that have been done. But it is something she wants to do.

  She doesn’t know what to expect of this woman, Betty, who should soon be here. Abby has described her as damaged but wise, strong but gentle. It’s a bundle of contradictions and Daphne doesn’t know what to read into it. She envisages Betty might be angry. She could be indignant and self-righteous. Daphne figures she has every right to be. But whatever Betty says to her, Daphne knows she can carry the burden.

  We all have matters of grief, she said to Abby in the valley that day after the cull when Abby told her story. It’s how we bear that grief which makes us who we are, and marks the strong from the weak. Now she knows that both strength and weakness reside in everyone, along with the courage to renew. This is the journey she has undertaken: her life’s journey. Today is another step on that path.

  When the woman enters the café, Daphne knows immediately who she is. It’s not the colour of her skin that sets her apart, although she is distinctly darker than Daphne. Nor is it anything about her features, even though she has a broadish nose and black eyes. Rather it is something about the sad, humble aura she wears like a coat: a sense of agelessness, an earthiness, a strange pull of gravity that somehow puts her at the centre of things.

  Daphne watches her close the door then glance around the café with measured deliberation. Trembling with anticipation, Daphne rises slowly to her feet and extends her hands. The woman steps forward, a smile spreading her lips. They reach and clutch each other, fingers entwined.

  For a whisper of a moment, Daphne remembers Johnny Button, his dark fingers against her skin. Then she is back in the present, holding Betty’s hands.

  The two women grip each other without speaking, eyes locked, nodding. Daphne sees that Betty already knows what she wants to say. She sees that she is forgiven. She knows this as surely as the wind lives in the mountains.

  Their exchange takes place without words. Then Daphne ushers Betty to a chair, the old leading the infirm. Daphne needs words to create reality. Words unspoken have coloured her life. Today there must be no doubt.

  They sit, and Daphne’s eyes are already clouded by tears. She feels in Betty a wealth of kindness and compassion. She wasn’t prepared for this—she’d expected rejection, hostility at least. But Betty’s eyes are deep, full of life’s punishment, and softened by a glow of acceptance, infused with a sliver of hope.

  ‘Thank you,’ Daphne says, and Betty chuckles: a warm bubbling sound that rises from within and rolls in her chest.

  ‘I done nothing yet that warrants thanking.’

  ‘You came.’ Daphne says. ‘That’s important to me. You could have said no.’

  The two women look at each other, and Daphne’s tears spill onto her cheeks. She feels the trickles running warm down the creases that line her mouth. She tastes salt as the tears spread on her lips.

  ‘Don’t you cry,’ Betty says, rubbing Daphne’s hand in hers. ‘Been too many tears over the years, and they don’t fix nothing. I ought to know. I shed a few.’

  Daphne’s tears keep coming. The infinite well that never runs dry. For Gordon. For Doug. For her father. For her country. ‘My family had a property on your land,’ she says after a while. ‘It was in the mountains. They lived there for many years. It was good land. Beautiful land.’

  ‘That’s good country.’ Betty says. ‘But I’m Ngunnawal. From further north.’

  ‘I understand,’ Daphne says. ‘But it was Aboriginal land that my family took and somehow I feel that links me to you.’

  ‘My country, my heart.’ Betty touches a hand to her chest.

  ‘I buried my son there,’ Daphne says. ‘Lost my husband to that country too. Part of me is with them up there.’

  ‘Riding the wind.’ Betty smiles knowingly. ‘Like them old crows.’

  Daphne pauses, feels the land beneath her skin, hears the cark of the ravens calling among the rocks, the wind gushing in the trees, sees the little cemetery of sad bleached stones carrying the stories of the lost. She’s certain Betty has many such stories too—written into the convoluted map of life. ‘Maybe this sounds strange,’ she says slowly, ‘but I think I understand the way your people feel about that country. The way the land lives inside you. How it owns you, and you can’t let go.’

  Betty’s face is luminous. ‘Country lives in you and you live in country. All one.’ She sighs as if the weight of life is resting on her shoulders.

  Daphne feels the burden too. It is heavy on her heart. ‘My family settled on Aboriginal land,’ she says. ‘It was the way of the times, but it seems so wrong. I felt it even as a child.’

  Betty’s nod is small but affirmative. ‘Those are hard words for white people to say. Not many see it that way. Even now.’

  ‘I was told all the Aboriginal people were gone,’ Daphne says, remembering her mother’s unsatisfactory explanations. ‘That you’d all died out. It’s no excuse, but it’s what I believed for a long time. I’m sorry for that.’

  Betty sighs again. ‘That’s what everyone was saying for so many years. That we all died out. But we bin here all along. They wanted to forget us. But we’re still here.’

  Betty’s story is a patchwork, quilted together from all the little pieces told to her by the old folk on the mission where she grew up. She tells it to Daphne, piece by piece. After white folk landed in Australia and the sickness wiped out hundreds of her people, what was left of them were pushed onto missions. Most of her family
went to Hollywood down at Yass. But there were other missions too: Brungle up by Tumut, Nowra, Cootamundra. In Yass, her family lived with other fragmented families on the edge of town. They lived in houses made from kerosene tins beaten flat. No electricity. No water. The only jobs were working for the white people who would have them as maids or nurses. The men worked as farmhands, picking fruit, working stock. They were away a lot or home drinking, nothing in between. It wasn’t much different at the other missions she visited over the years. Those were bad times. Her people lost many things: family, language, customs, dignity. But they kept things too. They stayed connected with each other: aunties, uncles, cousins. They worked whatever jobs were going. They held on. In the seventies the missions were shut down and they all moved into towns. That’s when white people thought they’d died out, because they weren’t so visible anymore. But they were there. Making their way as best they could.

  Daphne listens, struck by the loss that equals her own and surpasses it. But as Betty speaks there is only fact, no anger, no blame. Daphne can’t understand it. The injustice. The racism. How can Betty be so calm? Where is her rage?

  ‘All bin happen long time ago,’ Betty says, a weary smile on her face. ‘I’ve had plenty of anger, but you can’t wear your hurt on your sleeve forever. Gotta get on. No point being cut up with it all your life. Anger is for the young ones who got the energy to make change. I’m past it now. Never had the rage, really. What would have been the use of it? My people, they’ve suffered, but they’ve survived. I’ve seen changes in my time. Lots of changes. Most of them good. My people live in houses now, instead of humpies. We can go where we like. Don’t need permission no more. The children can go to school. We can give birth in hospitals. Go to movies. Sit wherever we like. Use the front door. Sure, there’s a long way to go. But I’m old. It’s up to others to take things forward. I done my time.’

  Daphne feels the burden of shame. She thinks of her father denying the existence of Betty’s people, of Johnny’s people, even though he was happy to employ the black man to find his cattle. There was no-one with better bush skills than Johnny, and there was a reason for this: Johnny knew the land. He was the land. It was in his bones. And her father and his men had driven Johnny away. Exiled him for kissing a white girl. Where was the crime in that, compared with the transgressions of her family and all the other families who’d taken the so-called empty land? That was how her father had described it: land for the taking. It was a lie and he always knew it. But she must forgive, as Betty has forgiven her. The sins of the fathers . . . she knows what that means. Feels it.

  And Doug? She never spoke to him of her guilt about her family’s occupation of the mountain runs. A lifetime of love, and a lifetime of silence on this issue. Perhaps she should have talked to him. Through his connection with the land, he might have understood. But land rights had been a taboo topic among farmers, especially if you supported the Aborigines. And yet she ought to have trusted him. Now she needs to forgive him too, for leaving her. Nearly twenty years she’s battled life on her own. He should have been beside her till poor health took him, not the weakness of a shattered mind. He laid down his bones and soul for the land, same as the Aborigines.

  She wonders where Johnny Button’s bones finished up. There was no-one to hide them among the granite boulders like his ancestors. Maybe he wandered up into the hills too, like Doug.

  ‘How did you go on?’ she asks Betty.

  ‘Because, even though we had it bad, we also had it good,’ Betty says. ‘Yeah, the grog and the beatings were there. But I don’t want to remember that. I want to think of happier times. I got plenty of those good memories too. Fishing down by the river. Playing music, singing all together. Caring. Loving. Getting married. Babies. That’s the way forward. Not always beating yourself up over the past.’

  Daphne slips her hand into her handbag and pulls out a folded piece of cloth. It’s her gift—her small attempt to make amends with this woman and her people. She places it in Betty’s hand. ‘This belongs to you,’ she says.

  Betty glances at her questioningly before carefully unfolding the cloth. It’s the spearhead, chiseled by ancient hands, shining dull grey in the light. Betty’s fingers stroke the stone.

  ‘I found it in the mountains,’ Daphne says. ‘Near some rock paintings. I was just a girl. I’ve kept it safe.’ She looks at the stone where it lies in Betty’s crinkled brown palm.

  Betty is silent, feeling the stone, the forgotten lives of her ancestors.

  ‘It’s all I have to give you,’ Daphne says. ‘And my apology, which is long overdue.’

  Betty gazes at the stone. Then, without looking up, she reaches across the table and closes her fingers over Daphne’s hand. Tears drip onto the tablecloth—both women overcome by the long arm of history.

  Betty looks up, her face bright. ‘Everything has to start somewhere,’ she says.

  Abby, watching, weeps quietly too, while outside in the street the leaves rustle up and down, pushed and scattered by the breath of the wind.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Every book is a journey and this novel has been no exception. For ongoing encouragement in the evolution and development of The Grass Castle I thank my agent Fiona Inglis at Curtis Brown. There were times when I definitely needed you, Fiona.

  For pushing me to go further and to explore deeper in order to find the heart of this story, I thank my wonderful publisher at Allen & Unwin, Jane Palfreyman. No-one has greater wisdom in knowing what will and won’t work than she does. Jane, I appreciate your frankness and advice. I also offer immense thanks and appreciation to all the other fantastic staff at A & U who have contributed to refining this novel and putting it all together, including Siobhán Cantrill, Lisa White, Clare James and others who I probably don’t even know. Thank you, thank you. You are a great team.

  I also give special thanks to poet Mark O’Connor for allowing me to use several lines of his lovely poetry in the front of this book. To me, these lines are particularly fitting–beautifully and accurately evoking a sense of atmosphere and time in the mountains.

  Above all, I acknowledge my husband David Lindenmayer for everything. Without his positivity, patience and support, I couldn’t even begin to write novels. The same applies to my children, Ryan and Nina. They are tolerant with my impatience when the story takes hold. This book belongs to them as much as it belongs to me.

  For providing valuable and insightful comments at a critical time in the development of this novel, and for helping my characters come to life, I thank my sister, Fiona Andersen. And for eternal background support and diligent reading of page-proofs I thank Marjorie Lindenmayer.

  The reading of many books has inspired and informed elements of this story. These books include: Moth Hunters of the Australian Capital Territory: Aboriginal traditional life in the Canberra region by Josephine Flood (1996); Rugged Beyond Imagination: Stories from an Australian mountain region by Matthew Higgins (2009); Cotter Country: a history of the early settlers, pastoral holdings and events in and around the County of Cowley by Bruce Moore (1999); Kangaroos: Myths and Realities (2005), edited by Maryland Wilson and David B. Croft; Stories of the Ngunnawal (2007) by Carl Brown, Dorothy Dickson, Loretta Halloran, Fred Monaghan, Bertha Thorpe, Agnes Shea, Sandra and Tracey Phillips; High Country Footprints: Aboriginal pathways and movements in the high country of southeastern Australia by Peter Kabaila (2005); and Mary Cunningham: an Australian life by Jennifer Horsfield (2004). I also enjoyed listening to several episodes of Blue Hills by Gwen Meredith, author of the longest running radio serial of all time which is set in the Brindabella mountains where my novel takes place.

  Many friends and colleagues have assisted me in discussions and conversations about kangaroo management and ecology over the years: thank you to all of you. I also thank the numerous wildlife carers who have trusted me with their native animals—through you, I have learned so much.

  Finally, I thank my parents, Jim and Diana Viggers, for givi
ng me a country upbringing and the freedom to explore the forests and hills of the Dandenong and Yarra Ranges on the back of my crazy little pony, King. I am sure this was the beginning of my love for mountains, forests, nature and solitude. And without the gift of solitude, I could not write.