by Barbara Wood
"What are you talking about?"
"I know you had faith in me, and I so badly wanted to show you that you were right to have it. You must be very disappointed. I'm sorry."
He stared at her. The clouds shifted, and moonlight swept across Beth's face. For an instant Judd had the curious sensation that he was looking not at a girl of twelve, but at a woman the same age as he, and that they were standing on the steps for a very different reason.
"I don't want to leave Tongarra," she said quietly. "I will come back."
"Is it so important to you to be here?" he said, as he watched how the night breeze stirred her damp hair.
"It's more important than anything." she said.
The Westbrooks came out of the building. "Come along, darling," Joanna said. "Let's go home."
"Mrs. Westbrook," Judd said, "I'll talk to the boys. They'll listen to me. I'm confident that once I have made things very clear to them, they will leave your daughter alone." He looked at the girl and smiled. "We want to see Beth here with us in the second term."
TWENTY-SIX
D
O YOU SUPPOSE THERE ARE SONGLINES OUT THERE, Mother?" Beth asked, as she peered through the window of their train compartment.
"I imagine we're following one right now, darling," Joanna said. "They told us in Perth that the railway follows the old migratory routes of the Aborigines."
Beth was so excited she could hardly sit still. She pressed her face to the window and looked out at the wilderness and wondered about the people who had walked this way, long ago.
Joanna, too, could hardly contain her excitement. When Captain Fielding had said, "Western Australia, that's where the Makepeaces went," she had been afraid to let herself believe it, to get her hopes up again. He could have been another Miss Tallhill, who had apparently been mistaken about Bowman's Creek and Durrebar, or he could have been like so many others over the years, who had responded to Joanna's letters and advertisements, offering information for money. But Fielding had told Joanna things that he could not possibly have known if he were a fraud: "Young Makepeace was searching for the Garden of Eden ... His wife, so pretty, pregnant at the end of the voyage ... had the baby at Perth ... a girl, I think it was ..."
And so they had left, a small group consisting of Hugh and Joanna and Beth, as well as the old sea captain, who had entertained them during their four-week voyage around the southern coast of Australia with stories of his adventures. And, as a favor to Frank Downs, there was also Eric Graham from the Times, to cover what he hoped was going to be an interesting story. Sarah was not with them. "I'd better stay here," she had said, "so that someone will be home when Adam comes back from school on holiday. And I'll take care of the garden. Who'll look after things if we all go?"
Just before they had left, however, Jacko had raised some concern by reporting early signs of fly-strike among one of the flocks—a condition where flies infest the wool and live off the sheep, causing sickness and ultimately death. Nonetheless, Hugh had insisted that they make the journey. "There will be no better time than this, Joanna," he had said. "Captain Fielding is willing to take us there, and everything is quiet here at Merinda. Adam is away at school. And Jacko can take care of the fly-strike."
But when they had landed at Perth, Hugh had found a telegram waiting for him from Jacko: FLY-STRIKE SERIOUS, CAN'T STOP IT. COULD LOSE ENTIRE STOCK. URGENT YOU COME HOME.
"Oh Hugh," Joanna had said. "What are we going to do?"
"This telegram is a week old," he had said. "The situation might have improved. I'll send Jacko a wire at once."
But the next morning, another telegram had arrived from Jacko: HUGH, it read, EMERGENCY AT MERINDA. DO NOT THINK I CAN SAVE STOCK.
"You had better go home," Joanna had said to Hugh. "Beth and I will stay here."
"I don't like us being separated like this, Joanna," he had said. "We've never been apart. But I'll make it as quick as I can. I reckon it'll take me four weeks to get home, a week to take care of the fly-strike, and then I'll be on the first coastal steamer back. You should be all right," he said. "You have Mr. Graham and Captain Fielding and Beth with you. And I'll be back before you know it."
But now, three days later, Joanna was on a train out of Perth on the west coast of Australia, accompanied by Beth, Captain Fielding and the reporter from the Times, and heading toward a town in the interior, a gold-mining town called Kalagandra.
After Hugh had left, Joanna and Beth had searched for traces of her grandparents in Perth. She had conducted a search of the town, whose population was less than eight thousand, going through records, talking to people, exploring the graveyards. But, in the end, she had found no trace of the Makepeaces having ever been in Perth. "After all," Captain Fielding said, "it was over fifty years ago. When the Beowulf landed here, there were only a few tents on Garden Island, where the first settlers who had come the year before were camped. There weren't any immigration officials checking papers!" Nor had anyone heard of Karra Karra, or Bowman's Creek and Durrebar.
But Joanna did hear stories about a "crazy white man" who had taken his wife out into the desert many years ago to live with a clan of Aborigines. The story had many variations, depending upon whom Joanna spoke to. The head of a local missionary group had said, "I remember hearing about it when I was a boy. Scandalous it was. The Aborigines ate the man and his wife. They were cannibals then." The official at the Colonial Land Office, who had examined Joanna's deed, had said, "I heard that story when I first arrived here. The white man went crazy, they say. He married a native woman and ran off into the desert with her, abandoning his white wife and baby." In the end, after hearing several outrageous versions, Joanna had come to the conclusion that the true story of the Makepeaces was not known, and that the legend of the "white man who had gone searching for Eden" was just another in the store of legends and myths about Western Australia's colorful past.
However, after three days of searching, Joanna did learn two things: that, if they were looking for the tribe that had once occupied the Perth region, they should search eastward, approximately following the railway line, because that was the old migratory path of the tribe whenever they went walkabout; and that the man they needed to see was Commissioner Fox, who knew "everything there is to know about this area." Fox was currently in Kalagandra on one of his official biannual visits to the interior.
They were on their way to the gold-mining town now. Eric Graham was writing in his notebook, glancing out the window every now and then, laying the groundwork for his story; Beth was next to him, excitement in her eyes and posture, the thrill of adventure glowing on her young face; Captain Fielding, in the next seat, was dozing. Joanna sat opposite her daughter, facing forward, watching the terrain slowly change from coastal forest to farmland to desert. The train was crowded and noisy, filled with men on their way to the goldfields—the hopeful diggers and fossickers, with their swags and shovels and pickaxes. Everyone was covered with soot and cinders. The meticulous Eric Graham continually brushed himself off, frowning now and then over the state of his brand-new bowler, while Joanna's hat was up in the overhead rack, in the brown-paper bag the railway company provided for ladies.
Because Kalagandra was three hundred and fifty miles inland, Joanna and her companions had left Perth the night before and had slept sitting up as the train chuffed through the night. Now it was nearly noon and the goldfields lay just ahead. Kalagandra was the terminus. Beyond it, she had been told, there was nothing except scrub and kangaroos.
"Do you suppose there are songlines out there?" Beth had asked, and as Joanna looked through the window, trying to see through the black smoke that belched from the train's engine, she imagined in the barren wilderness the songlines that an Aboriginal woman, Reenadeena, and the little English girl, Emily, might have followed as they made their way through the wasteland toward the river where the black swans arched their fine necks. A woman and a small child, Joanna thought, trying to picture them, all alone out there, with th
e sun pounding down upon a waterless land, a beige landscape broken only by mulga and dry scrub.
Joanna looked at Beth, at how excitedly she stared out the window. And she noticed for the first time new dimples in Beth's cheeks—unusual dimples, high on the cheeks, just below the eyes. Joanna remembered that her mother had had the same dimples; she recalled how people had remarked on Lady Emily's compelling smile. And as she watched her daughter, Joanna began to think that it was almost as if her mother were making this journey with her after all.
She thought of what she had read in her grandfather's notes about the ritual that took place inside the sacred mountain—a pilgrimage that was made periodically by mothers and daughters.
Was that what impelled her now? she wondered. Was her quest perhaps motivated by more than just fear for her daughter and the future? Were she and Beth under some sort of compulsion that had been dictated long ago by an ancient race and their beliefs? And might this journey, in fact, be a quest motivated not solely by fear, as Joanna had always thought, but by positive forces as well?
Joanna suddenly thought: It is as if Beth and I are on our way to finish some important business.
The time was coming, she knew, when she was going to have to tell Beth the truth, the real reason why they had come here. She closed her eyes and the wheels of the train seemed to whisper: Hurry-up, hurry-up, hurry-up ...
With a great hissing of brakes, the train pulled into the station. Men were jumping off even before it had come to a halt, and, gathered on the platform, the Westbrook party was immediately engulfed by a milling crowd of shouting, excited people, running in all directions.
Joanna looked about her in the smoky afternoon haze. Kalagandra seemed to have sprung up in a hostile, arid region. To the west of the town there were a few wheat farms, to the east was the Great Desert. Trees had been cut down for as far as Joanna could see, leaving a sandy plain stretching for miles, scarred with hundreds of pits like a lunar landscape, the earth turned up as if an invasion of moles had passed through. Joanna saw men's heads everywhere bobbing up and down in the holes, she heard the ring of pickaxes, the rattle of gold cradles and the constant thud of steam-driven quartz crushers.
There were so many people! A shanty town and tent camp surrounded the goldfields, where crude lodgings had been hastily erected to accommodate the thousands of men who came pouring into the district with shovels on their shoulders. A kind of panicked prosperity was seen in the log-cabin saloons and the open-air theaters with canvas walls, the makeshift bowling alleys and boxing booths, the gin sellers, their bottles displayed on just a board laid across two barrels, and the inevitable women beckoning from open doorways. There were thousands of tents, Joanna guessed, with flags of every nation flying over them—she could even identify the Russian eagle snapping over one sagging hut. The town itself, Joanna saw, was rough and crude, filled with wooden storefronts, hastily erected stone buildings and creaking sidewalks.
"I remember another time when gold fever struck," Captain Fielding said as they made their way to the hotel. "It was back in 1850. You could go down to Melbourne Harbor and see ships at the piers loading up with passengers bound for San Francisco. Shortly after that, of course, gold was discovered in Victoria and the great exodus to California came to an end."
"They seem to be prosperous here," Joanna said, looking into windows at the various goods for sale, from digger's boots to solid-gold watches.
"Yes, but the people who are making their fortunes here weren't born here," Fielding said, "nor had they had even heard of Kalagandra before a year ago. They come from all over Australia, all over the world, even. They get rich and they leave. And when the gold is gone, the town will die."
"Where are the Aborigines?" Joanna asked.
"I'm sure they're here somewhere. I suppose they live on the edge of town, like they do everywhere else, on the fringe so to speak. This used to be their land—they called this area galagandra, after a common local shrub—but they don't live in the town or benefit from its prosperity."
They arrived at the Golden Age Hotel and had to wait while the clerks tried to handle customers demanding rooms, even though a no vacancy sign had been posted. Joanna looked around the crowded lobby, where people were sleeping in chairs and camping out on sofas.
She secured their room keys, and went upstairs with Beth, who was anxious to get started writing letters to her father, Sarah and Adam. After Joanna was certain her daughter was settled, she met Captain Fielding in the lobby. Eric Graham had already gone off to the nearest newspaper office to see what he could find out about the Makepeaces. Joanna and the captain went across the street to the police station, where they asked for Commissioner Fox.
A man emerged a moment later from the inner office. "Mrs. Westbrook?" I'm Paul Fox, the police commissioner for this district. I understand you wanted to see me."
Commissioner Fox was a handsome man in his late forties, with a curiously attractive scar down one cheek. His khaki uniform with its Sam Browne belt and holstered gun, though dusty and sweat-stained, was worn with all the correctness of a man who maintained personal standards against impossible odds.
"I hope you can help me, Commissioner," Joanna said, and offered him her hand.
When Fox had been told that a Mrs. Westbrook was asking after him, searching for lost relatives, he had expected to find one of the two types of women found in Kalagandra—those who came to break the law, and those who came to spread the gospel. He was pleasantly surprised, however, to find himself in the company of neither. Mrs. Westbrook was pretty, in her mid-thirties, and she carried herself with the poise of a lady. She wore a smartly tailored dress and a stylish hat. Her gloves, he noticed, were of the softest chamois.
Joanna introduced him to Captain Fielding, and then said, "Mr. Fox, I came to Western Australia to see if I could find traces of my grandparents. I was told in Perth that you were the man who knew everything there was to know about this area."
He smiled. "I don't know if I know everything, Mrs. Westbrook. But I shall help in any way I can. When did your grandparents arrive here?"
"They disembarked at Perth in 1830, but I don't know where they went after that. I have reason to believe they came to this area."
"That was fifty-six years ago, Mrs. Westbrook. I doubt you'll find any trace of them." He couldn't help staring at her and thinking what an attractive and refined woman she was, such a rarity in Kalagandra. He wondered where the husband was. "My deputy told me you came from Melbourne," he said. "That's a long way to come, Mrs. Westbrook, just to find traces of your grandparents."
"I am here for other reasons as well, Mr. Fox. I believe that my mother might have been born somewhere near here. If so, and if I can determine for certain that she was, then it will fill in an important blank in my family's history. Also, I inherited a deed for some land I believe is near here, but so far, I have been unable to locate it."
"I see. Do you have anything to go on besides your grandparents' names? Any details that might be of help?"
"They lived for a while with an Aborigine clan—for about three years. And, in fact, I believe they were adopted by that clan."
"Indeed," he said. "Do you know the tribe's name?"
"Unfortunately no. But they lived near a place called Karra Karra."
"Karra Karra," he said. "I'm not familiar with it."
"Mr. Fox, I was told at the hotel that there are a lot of displaced Aborigines living outside the town limits. Do you know if any of them came originally from the Perth area?"
"It would be hard to say, Mrs. Westbrook. They've come from all over. After their tribes were broken up, they dispersed to the white settlements, hoping to be taken care of. In doing so, they crossed over traditional tribal boundaries that, at one time, they would never have dreamed of crossing. So we have natives living here who are far from their tribal grounds."
"Would you mind taking me to see them and speak with them?"
"I'd be delighted to, Mrs. Westbrook," Fo
x said. "It isn't often I get a break from my usual chores of rounding up drunks and thieves to escort a lady around the town. Shall we say, in two hours? I'll meet you at your hotel."
The late-afternoon sun slanted across the sandy plains from a cloudless sky. Although Kalagandra was getting ready for the coming evening, the men kept at their work in the gold pits.
Commissioner Fox and Joanna walked along the wooden sidewalk, with Captain Fielding and Beth behind, and Eric Graham following in the company of a black trooper named Michael. The air was filled with the aromas of coffee and dust, and men continued to tramp down the street carrying shovels and pickaxes, their eyes fixed on the goldfields ahead.
"Mr. Fox," Joanna said, "besides gold, is anything mined here as well? Opals, perhaps?"
He shook his head. "I've never heard of opals being found in Western Australia. If there were, it would cause another rush!"
They came to the north end of the town, to a rocky hillside scarred with abandoned mining pits. It was a bleak, waterless area where no plants or trees grew, and the only relief from the sun was in the shade of rocky out-croppings, or in the crude man-made shelters that littered the hillside and gully below.
Joanna stopped and stared.
Hundreds of Aborigines occupied the area. Aside from a few stone huts, the majority of the dwellings were lean-tos constructed from hammered-out kerosene cans, oddly matched pieces of wood, scraps of cardboard and cloth and even bottles and cans. Smoke rose from the many campfires, filling the gully with a thick pall. Flies buzzed in the air, and half-tame dingoes, their ribs showing, scavenged among garbage and debris.
There was a curious listlessness to the scene. It seemed to Joanna as if the inhabitants moved in a dream-like way, their gestures slow, their faces strangely blank. The adults sat on chairs or on the ground, murmuring among themselves, while children played in the dirt. They were all poorly dressed, the women in ill-fitting dresses, the men in mismatched coats and trousers. The children were for the most part immodestly clad. Some of the elders wore blankets around their shoulders; Joanna saw a few draped in kangaroo or possum skins.
