by David Vernon
The job was not difficult but it was very detailed. The old plaster was as fragile as an old man’s skin. Held together only by a hard coat of paint, it often broke and bled fine sand and mortar as soon as I touched it. I had to carefully match my compounds to the original work and gently work my trowel so as not to damage more than I repaired. I thought of the original tradesmen, doubtless convicts, and how much they had achieved so long ago. Perhaps Michael Ryan was one of them. The age of the building pressed on me. They were tough times for everyone I thought. The church must have seemed like a haven to many in those days. Yet as a local boy, I knew that Samuel Marsden, the infamous ‘flogging parson’, had died in this very building. I wondered whether he had ever regretted any of his judgements or whether he ever had doubts that redemption by the lash and the book was possible. In my imagination, I saw him returning to the house from his day in the Parramatta courts. Taking off his robes and hanging them … there near the door perhaps.
Slowly the cracks and scuffs of time responded to my attention. Oblivious to everything, my hands worked through long practice as though by some automatic process. Time passed and the pale light faded from the high windows. I worked slowly and intently, hunched in my haven of light surrounded by darkness that grew ever deeper. The odd sounds in the dusty timbers, the occasional creaking of the roof as it cooled from the summer sun, or the soft brush of a tree branch against the wall did not disturb me. Absorbed in my work, my thoughts drifted to the wretched men and boys who had done this work. I pictured myself kneeling awkwardly in leg irons applying a trowel to this wall. I wondered about the pain and suffering of the convicts, how they lived, the isolation and lonely despair they must have felt …
Suddenly I knew I was not alone. A chill stilled my hand. Though I did not turn around, I knew that someone was behind me, watching. A presence that I could not deny. I slowly turned, convinced that someone, perhaps the verger, had entered unnoticed and was here with me, but no soul appeared within the limit of my lantern light. The chill passed quickly but the conviction remained. I returned uneasily to my work; but I could not shake a feeling of dread and terrible loneliness. My heart pounded and thoughts of a dignified escape filled my mind. I soon paused again, ready to stop work and resume the next day. It was then I noticed it. The tiny corner of yellowed paper peeping out from the crack between the floor and the skirting. To this day I cannot say why such a minor thing would interrupt my thoughts of escape, but it did. I considered it for a few moments, not daring to touch such a precious artefact, then, very carefully, I pinned the corner of paper with the sharp point of my trowel and worked it carefully from the crack.
The chill returned as I slowly pulled the paper free. I felt a sudden draft and my breath came in short bursts as I leant forward. The paper was yellow and crisp with age and about the size of my palm. I held it carefully as though if might crumble into pieces at the slightest movement. The rough edges suggested that it had been torn from a book or journal. There appeared to be writing but it was very faded and appeared crude and uneven. I stared intently, as though I could somehow divine the meaning by imprinting it on my brain. Slowly I made out a few letters, then a word, yes ‘lashes’, my breath stopped and the chill on my neck returned, but I was no longer frightened. Now I could read more, ‘died in punishment’, it said. I pictured the poor soul slumped at the triangle, his back shredded by the lash, and, as I did, the presence that had hovered left me. I felt a great loss, like the death of someone close. The door rattled and a warm draft began.
“Is anyone there?” enquired a voice.
I don’t know whether Steve believed me but he looked at me sharply when I finished speaking. We have met a few times since but we don’t talk much now. Perhaps he thinks I’m a bit strange, perhaps he’s right. I haven’t tried to sell the scrap of paper or anything. I keep it safe at home and don’t mention it to anyone. It’s just a private matter between Michael and me.
Chris Curtis lives in the beautiful harbour city of Sydney. He took up the pen after a long technical career and now enjoys writing short fiction. He is actively involved in community service and enjoys fishing, golf, and travel when he can. His first published story David and the Man appeared in Blue Crow Magazine in October 2012. He has also published a small e-book of amusing stories called Unlikely Tales, on Amazon.
Historical note: In 1817 Governor Macquarie chose a site at Windsor on the Hawkesbury river, for a church. Near an earlier cemetery, St. Matthews would become the oldest Anglican church in Australia. To commemorate the construction, Macquarie placed a holey dollar under a cornerstone of the partly erected building. It was stolen the same night, as was its replacement a few days later. Construction by convict labour continued without the dollar and the Greenway designed church was consecrated by cleric and magistrate Samuel Marsden in 1822. The nearby rectory and stables were finished the same year. The buildings are considered to be among Greenway’s finest and most beautiful achievements.
Sally Peak, Tasmania, 1823
— Graeme Scott
Now that my end is near, I must set down our story so that others might learn the truth of this matter, and so the history of my people might be complete.
As a young boy, I was named Dorak because I was lively and determined. My extended family of forty-two relatives lived on the east-facing coastline near a place the colonists call Sally Peak, in Van Diemen’s Land. It was a fine place; a place where our ancestors had lived since the Dreamtime, where the surging sea brought seals, fish, crabs, and oysters for our sustenance, and the grasslands to the west brought kangaroo in countless numbers. Living in the same manner as us, many other families in my great Linetemairrener tribe occupied the coastline to the north for as far as I had ever explored.
When I was eleven years old, the stockmen came. We laughed at the many woolly, bleating creatures they brought onto our grasslands — grass eaters that could not jump and ate with their heads always down, so that even in daylight a skilled hunter could stalk to within a spear’s throw of them. Before long we all feasted regularly on these helpless, tender animals.
Stranger even than the sheep animals were the stockmen who came to speak with us. They came in the night with rifles held ready, moving quietly on their horses until they surrounded our camp. Then they began shouting at us, while their black translator, who we saw was a criminal punished with spears thrust through both calf muscles, smirked as he limped around our camp, translating their rantings.
Their message was simple: they owned all the hungry white creatures on the grasslands, and they would hunt down and kill any black man who took even one of their sheep, just as they killed the striped wolves that came down from the hills to hunt.
These stockmen astonished us with their ignorance of the laws of the Spirit Ancestors. We derided them loudly and the hunters among us rattled their spears in warning. In response the stockmen made clicking noises with their rifles. Our admired elder, Barina, stood and spoke for all of us, saying that the grasslands were created for us in the Dreamtime, when our people, the land, and the animals of this place came into being. If the stockmen wished to use our grasslands, we Linetemairrener must approve the arrangement, and we must also receive a portion of the sheep animals, because the Spirit Ancestors ruled that food must be shared equally.
The stockmen laughed at us, and replied saying their Spirit Ancestors in Hobart had decreed that the grasslands of the Linetemairrener people now belonged to the Crown, and soon their Crown spirit would divide ownership among the many stockmen who wanted to settle this land.
Enraged beyond restraint, my foolish cousin ran at the translator with his spear raised, but before he could release it, many rifles shouted together, and he pitched forward into the red dust, his blood spilling, his broken head on one side, and his face without a jaw.
The stockmen rode away, laughing among themselves.
In my eyes these matters were all without wisdom, because I could see in them nothing but tragedy for both
Linetemairrener and stockmen.
We Linetemairrener were a numerous people — numerous enough to encircle the stockmen’s small settlement at Bushy Plains with many hundreds of spears, and while some of us might die, we would dispose of the stockmen with fire and spears, and so end this invasion.
This is how I expected the matter to end.
But while some of us prepared for an attack on the stockmen, others began listening to their offers to barter. The stockmen offered five sheep carcasses in return for a young Linetemairrener woman, who would become a slave and concubine to be passed among them, and returned when all had finished with her. In this way, they said, you may share in our sheep without bloodshed, and we can share in your women, also without bloodshed.
Soon the practice of bartering women became widespread among Linetemairrener families.
My sister, who was twelve years old and not yet a woman, and who was called Janail because she was beautiful like the moon, was offered for exchange by my family. Janail and I had spent our childhoods together — hunting with the brown grass of the plains under our midnight feet, and fishing with spears, laughing in the foaming blue ocean. It was unthinkable to me that she should become a concubine to be passed among uncaring men. For several nights I scolded my family as they sat around the campfire, but they laughed and made fun of me, saying I was not yet circumcised, and therefore still a child who should seek comfort at his mother’s breast.
Then came the night when a stockman arrived to claim Janail. After inspecting her carefully, and making sure she had not been penetrated, he offered six sheep carcasses for her. My family agreed at once, and the stockman tied a rope around Janail’s neck. She walked out of our camp with quiet dignity, her head held high, until the stockman tied her rope to his saddle, mounted his horse, and rode off, forcing her to run, naked and stumbling, behind him.
None of my family made a movement until Janail and the stockman were out of sight, when they began a scramble to butcher the sheep carcases and claim portions.
Great anger overtook my mind, so I took up my spear and followed Janail into the darkness.
It was easy to follow the horse’s tracks across the grasslands until, just as the moon touched on the earth, they stopped and I caught up with them. I became a lizard lying motionless in the grass, watching as the stockman dismounted, lit a fire, ate his food, and drank from a bottle of spirits. Kneeling beside his horse, Janail received neither food nor water. Then, singing loudly, the stockman pushed my sister face down on the grass, pulled her hips up to him, and mounted her. Three times he mated her in this manner, wrenching at her hair and shouting angry words into the bowl of bright stars above while the spear at my side quivered and shook with rage.
Then, satisfied, the stockman fell on his side and was asleep in an instant, snoring loudly.
Throughout her ordeal, Janail made no sound until the stockman fell asleep, when she began crying quietly, her face buried in the grass. I made a bird sound, our hunting call, and at once she stood up, looking around for me. When our eyes met Janail smiled through her tears and once more we two were the silent hunters of the grasslands. My angry fingers tore at the knot at her throat until it unravelled. Then, working together with rage driving our hands, we took up the stockman’s saddle and his rifle, and buried them beneath a patch of bare sand. Janail gave his horse a slap on the rump, causing it to disappear into the night. Then we ran, laughing with triumph, until we reached the hills of Sally Peak, where we hid for three days.
Hidden among the scrub we laughed often, imagining the stockman’s fury as he walked for a day back to Bushy Plains and his humiliation as he spoke of how his horse, his saddle, his rifle, and his black woman all disappeared into the night. But we kept a careful watch because we expected him to track us to this place, seeking revenge.
He never came.
And so, on the third night we descended, eager to rejoin our family. Then, part way down, Janail smelled fresh blood. We found a trail of smears, which led us to a man lying on his back, speared in his belly by a bullet, and consumed by pain. It was our elder, Barina, and although still alive, he was close to his end.
“Barina, what has happened?
When he recognised us he grasped my arm with a grip so strong it would not let me move.
“You must listen.” Barina whispered. “The stockmen came in the night. Their rifles shouted at us again and again until all our family were dead, all of them crushed like vermin.” He gasped with his pain. “Soon I will die too, and you will become our elder who must tell our story to everyone.”
Overcome with despair and rage we sat with Barina. Janail brought him water in her cupped hands while I listened as he whispered of the murderous events of the last two days until, his story told, he died when the morning sun fell on him.
Barina told of how, on the day after I freed Janail, four stockmen rode north along the shoreline looking for young women. When they found an appealing woman, one stockman would dismount, examine her breasts and body, and then rape her, before advising his companions on her suitability for their pleasures. By the end of that day each stockman had a woman roped to his horse: naked, raped, and distraught. These were not women freely exchanged for sheep; they had been violated and abducted against the laws of the Spirit Ancestors.
The revenge of the Linetemairrener men was swift. Through the night a group of six tracked the abductors back to their homesteads at Bushy Plains and then, as the sun rose, two of the trackers entered the settlement and demanded loudly that the abductors speak with them. When the four men appeared, joking and carrying rifles, the other four trackers sprung out of hiding and cast their spears. Two abductors died, speared through they sank to the ground howling with pain, while the others were wounded and ran off, screaming.
Then, the following night a raiding party of settlers fell upon our camp and shot everyone.
Later, we learned that the raiding party then travelled north to the next settlement and once again shot them all. In this way they moved along the coastline until they could find no more Linetemairrener to kill.
Janail and I were among a handful of survivors rounded up by Hobart militia and transported to Pitt Island. Dispossessed of our Dreamtime lands, bereft of our families, and robbed of our spirituality, we were people without meaning; we were nothing. And so, as the years passed, one after another, without complaint and almost with relief, we died.
Last winter my sister Janail died, without ever having borne a child to mourn her passing, leaving me as the last of the Linetemairrener.
Now that our story is known, it is my hope that, in the cold of the coming winter, I will once more follow Janail, tracking her into the far off Dreamtime.
Graeme Scott is a former Scientist and Chief Government Advisor who retired early, propelled by his love of putting words on paper. His journey to professional authorship has been a genuine rags to rags story, but he has won three short story awards and he's convinced fame is imminent. He lives in a small cottage by the sea in the North Island, New Zealand, in the company of a cat with a serious attitude problem.
Historical note: The interactions between the settlers of Bushy Plains and the Aborigines of Sally Peak took place essentially as described in the short story Sally Peak: Settlers took over the Linetemairrener’s grasslands, resulting in continuing friction between Linetemairrener and the settlers of Bushy Plains. When an incident resulted in two settlers being killed, the settlers recruited the constabulary and the militia in a campaign to exterminate the Linetemairrener. The short story invents a ‘back-story’ of an Aboriginal boy and his sister who inadvertently lit the touch paper that set off the extermination campaign.
A Star is Born
— Eloise Ford
Quite unexpectedly, Little Miss Simpson phoned to say she was unable to come and babysit that afternoon. ‘Little’ because of her diminutive stature, and although we knew her first name was Lilias she was always addressed as Miss Simpson, out of respect. Her redden
ed, slightly swollen hands were the soft and loving bearers of comfort and nourishment for the children she cared for. I can still remember the wrinkles, which radiated out from her lips, caused, she said, by too much whistling as a child. Her handbag was always a cavern from which she extracted well-worn brown paper parcels of Extra Strong Mints, which I found too hot, but she found just right. She always smelled faintly of lavender and peppermint, and when she read me stories of Mr Pink Whistle she would dab the corners of her mouth with a white lacy hankie to mop up the little overflow of saliva.
From a bygone era, Miss Simpson lived in her original family home with her partially blind sister Daisy and her brother Clarence, whom they quaintly called ‘Rainbow’. He lived upstairs in the large old house on Rochester Road. They also had an ageing Scotch terrier called Dougal. With the benefit of adulthood I now believe Clarence was probably gay, but that idea would never have occurred to his devoted sisters. They were genuinely honoured to care for him, and held a sort of reverence for his connection to the Boy Scouts. In their eyes he was infallible, and Miss Simpson used to tell me stories of his scouting exploits, which obviously impressed her, and subsequently me. Her importance in our family was taken for granted by me (she had looked after me for such a long time), but I am sure my mother knew how dependent she had become on the steady, reliable presence of this little woman. On this rare occasion, without her support my mother was left with no alternative other than to take me, aged six, along to her workplace.
