Poor Fellow My Country

by Xavier Herbert

  She grimaced: ‘I don’t like crippled things.’

  ‘Why’s that . . . excess of compassion, or lack of it?’

  She shrugged: ‘I don’t know . . . bit of both, I expect.’ She turned her back on the cripples: ‘It’s all right for you . . . you’re like a doctor with sick people . . . it’s your job. I’d have to have them done away with.’

  ‘Life’s a peculiarly precious thing . . . surely to everything that possesses it.’ He paused, then added: ‘Do you know . . . the first quarrel I had with my first wife was over the same thing. She couldn’t stand the sight of the poor brutes. I had to keep them in a special compound. You know who my first wife is, of course?’

  ‘Yes . . . I don’t like her and she doesn’t like me . . . but she’s the nearest thing to a lady I’ve met in a long while.’

  Jeremy sighed: ‘That’s why I married her . . . God forgive me.’

  She looked at him quickly: ‘Tell me about it.’

  ‘Later. Let’s go in and have a quick drink . . . and you can look over the place while I’m attending to some things. I’ve got some old and sick blacks down the back . . . and a couple of old horses . . . hear ’em neighing? . . . and other small chores. It might interest you to know that I built this house for Rhoda . . . to bring her into as my bride.’

  She exclaimed, ‘Ah . . . I’ve got it . . . the cause of the bitterness . . . a woman!’

  ‘Wrong . . . a man.’

  ‘A man . . . what man?’

  ‘Vaisey . . . always Vaisey . . . but I’ll explain later. You ought to know about it, seeing you’ve done the Vaisey dough.’

  ‘Who says I have?’

  ‘You said you’re not marrying him now.’

  ‘What’s wrong with marrying his son?’ When he stared at her she added, ‘They still get the blood . . . with more chance of mixing theirs with it.’

  Jeremy, still staring, shook his head. Then he turned to Prindy, standing by the car, and asked, ‘Want to come inside?’ Prindy was silent. Jeremy went on: ‘All right . . . have a look around. We won’t be long. By’n’by we go look lagoon . . . and after that to Painted Caves. Might-be we see that old-man there.’

  The grey eyes widened.

  Before leaving the Big House, Jeremy got stuff from the kitchen store and refrigerator and loaded it into the utility. Then with Prindy in the back again they set out northward. Some of the old blacks were out to wave to them. Lady Lydia remarked on the neatness of the cottages compared with those at Beatrice homestead, adding that Clancy, in showing her round there, had said it was impossible to get blacks to live in any other way than squalor. ‘How do you manage it?’ she asked.

  ‘Simply by having a rule for sanitary living on the place, and seeing it’s enforced . . . but not by the people themselves. Cleanliness as we know it means nothing to them. In their natural state they’re as clean as animals . . . which is really being cleaner than humans, when you know animals. Humans accumulate dirt through living in one place. These people in their natural state are always on the move. The squalor comes only when they’re forced to live in one place . . . like animals in a zoo. I keep a crew to clean up for them. I don’t expect them to do it themselves . . . although some do. And when they get sick of living so unnaturally, as literally they do, I see to it that they go bush for a while. If they’re old and sick or crippled, I see they’re transported wherever they want to go, and brought back when they’re ready. It’s the only way it’ll work, I’m sure. The information might be useful to you when you come back to run things as Lady Vaisey.’

  ‘Who says I’m coming back?’

  ‘Didn’t you swim in the Rainbow Pool?’

  ‘Oh, that! Well, if I do, I won’t be coddling them like that . . . nor the way they do at Beatrice. I’d pay them properly, and expect them to work and live like civilised beings.’

  ‘What if they didn’t want to?’

  ‘Then they could get back to the bush and live like animals . . . as you said yourself.’

  ‘With their hunting grounds spoilt by Vaiseys stock, their water fouled?’

  She shrugged.

  They came to a racecourse. Prindy dropped down to remove the rails.

  As they went on, Jeremy began what he called, ‘The sad story of my first marriage.’ He told how his Irish father had been a trooper of mounted police in South Australia, how the old man’s ambition had always been to make his family Landed Gentry. ‘It was with that in mind,’ he said, ‘that when we settled in a biggish country town after a lot of wandering in the bush there, he had us . . . myself and my brother Jack, apprenticed to trades that would be useful . . . essential in our case . . . when eventually we went on the land. The old-time trooper was the watchdog of the squatter . . . “Up came the squatter, mounted on his thoroughbred, up came the troopers, one, two, three!” . . . and Da was shrewd enough to know that the only country we could get would be that which the rich man didn’t want because of the difficulty of raising stock on it owing to climate, disease, poisonous plants, et cetera. Expert knowledge would be required to overcome the difficulties. He apprenticed Jack to a farrier . . . in case you don’t know what a farrier properly is . . .’

  ‘Of course I do . . . a blacksmith . . .’

  ‘You’re wrong . . . he’s a shoe-smith . . . and in the old days he was also a veterinary surgeon. The druggist was his medical aide. There was no such thing as degrees in Veterinary Science and Pharmacy in those days. I was apprenticed to a druggist . . . or Chemist and Druggist, as they were then called. We both took to our jobs with pleasure. Botany, a very important thing in old-time medicine, had always interested me. Chemistry opened up a new world of understanding of nature. My master was a learnt old fellow. The old-time chemist and druggist was a man of wide knowledge and in demand for it. He had to be horse-doctor, plant expert, mineral assayer. At eighteen I was doing everything from pulling teeth . . . human or animal . . . to classifying poisonous plants and identifying minerals. Jack had always loved horses. Da was a great horseman, but a cruel one, which rather spoils it. Jack was the kindest man I’ve ever known with horses. That’s what made him, as I’ve told you, the leading horseman in this land of crack riders . . . Flash Jack!’

  He paused while the big white gate was being opened, and directed Lydia’s attention to the glimpses of the red wall of the Plateau away beyond the trees where eventually they would be going.

  He went on: ‘We were common Laceys before we became squatters. Da claimed that the De was real enough, that he had dropped it when becoming a common policeman, so as not to antagonise his superiors . . . mostly Irishmen . . . by appearing to be superior. One of his favourite sayings . . . when you argued with him about some dodge he was up to . . . was: “Ye’ve got to be politic, me boy!” I never was that.’ He sighed.

  ‘Well, this was the land of opportunity to Da. He used to hear about it from fellow officers who’d done duty here. He was always after a tour of such duty himself. He organised it to coincide with our coming out of our time as apprentices, Jack and I. He sent Mother and my sister Kathleen round by boat . . . the usual way. He took us boys with him overland . . . most of it camel-riding. Da already was as good with a camel as a horse. He soon had us riding like Bedouins. They used to think it was all camel country up here in those days. Horses and cattle wouldn’t live here, they reckoned. In fact Jack and I brought the first bovine stock in to this district.’

  ‘Da . . . by being politic . . . quickly climbed the police ladder. In no time he was Inspector, and as such wielding a lot of power. He had come here as such with the Knowles Creek Tin Rush. In those days the railway came only as far South as the Princess Caroline. Everything had to be packed in across country. No one thought of bringing cattle. The miners were living like blacks on lily roots and native game. Da sent Jack and me racing round the stations newly founded down on the rich Eastern Downs country, which were too far away to know of the advantage offering, and had us buy up any stock they would sell. We came
back with a big mob of store cattle we’d got for a song. Da got a fine herd of breeders by confiscating a mob he found being overlanded from the South and suspected of having been stolen. But meantime, Jack and I, with Shamus Finnucane, who had a grog shanty on the tin-fields, were running a thriving butchering business. We didn’t deal in money. It was a pound of tin for a pound of meat . . . and the meat meant by the quarter, bones and hide and hoofs and all. Da sold the tin to Chinese in Port Palmeston. He had a lot of them in his pocket too.

  ‘When the tin petered out, as it soon did, because there was really only a pocket of it . . . and a lot of the stuff they’d mined as tin turned out to be Tantalite, quite valueless at the time . . . we were ready to set up as graziers. I’d already taken up the nice bit of country back there on Knowles Creek on a mining homestead lease. We put our breeders on it. It may not convey anything much to you . . . but it’s typical of the country, that when I asked that the name of the place be put on the map as Lu-lalla-goon, the native name, the Lands Office made it Lily Lagoons, arguing, when I protested, that native names have no significance! Their alternative was Knowles Creek, which would have perpetuated the name of Nat Knowles, who’d hunted the local blacks off the lagoons because they wouldn’t work for him, destroying them. Poor devils had to come back and work for the miners when the rush started simply to live . . . or rather put their women to work . . . the blackmen didn’t know how to work . . . and the women were handy for other purposes. It was then I began to feel quilty about the Old People. Before that I’d blithely accepted the general idea that they were only animals in the form of humans, much less valuable than a horse . . . that’s how we were brought up . . . that’s how most Australians still think of them. The local horde was practically wiped out . . . not actually murdered, although there were a number shot, women mostly, for giving the whitemen who used them Gonorrhoea they’d contracted from other whitemen! There was no venereal disease before the whites came. The blacks of the coast have a disease of their own of the kind, Granuloma . . . but whites rarely contract it. Fortunately this disease has made them immune to Syphillis, which has done so much to wipe out the blacks of the Centre and the South. But how Gonorrhoea didn’t wipe out those of the North, too, by rendering them sterile, beats me. There’s still an awful lot of it about . . . and no real treatment for it, because of the ill-treatment in the beginning. As I’ve said, one of the methods was to quietly murder any woman known to be infected. The official one was to put the suspects on the chain and march them up to the Railhead and dump them in the Aboriginal Compound at Port Palmeston . . . but what am I using the past tense for? That’s still the official method. According to my inquiries, treatment is practically non-existent . . . there seems to be a token of it, and that’s about all. It’s something no official will talk about or let you look into. Anyway, I started treatment of a kind even back in those days. There’s a very useful species of santalis grows up on the Plateau there. I still distil the oil from it. In those days treatment of VD by a druggist was quite legal. It isn’t now . . . but I defy the Health Department to try to stop me, till I see them giving treatment as good as my own. I sometimes wonder if it isn’t official policy to exterminate the unfortunates with disease . . . but I see the subject’s distasteful to you . . . sorry, Your Ladyship!’ He said it with a wry smile; but his voice became vibrant with anger when he added, ‘My lady wife didn’t like to hear about it, either!’

  She reddened. They drove for a while in silence, till he said, ‘We’re coming to the lagoons now . . . or billabongs, as properly they should be called.’

  She asked, ‘What’s the difference?’

  ‘Properly a lagoon is a salt-water arm . . . but inland can be any sort of depression filled with water during Wet Season and holding it for some time. A billabong’s a backwater of a regular stream that becomes one with it during floods. A great river runs through here during heavy spells of rain . . . we can get up to ten inches in a single night. The so-called lagoons are what’s left of it during the Dry. See that ridge ahead? Well that’s where they are . . . Knowles’ Ridge as it’s called on the map . . . called by the blacks Numburra, which means a gunyah, or humpy, that is a native hut, as called generally in Australia . . . because the Old Woman, the Earth Mother, was supposed to have camped there when she made the billabongs. The ridge was what caused all the trouble subsequently, because that’s where the mineral is, a lode outcropping in the middle of a plain . . . there you see it . . . one bit of a hump in the middle of acres of water. He drew up: ‘Take a good look at it as a whole. See how there seems to be an electric blue glow oyer it all . . . that’s the lilies. The wave-like motion’s made by the birds swimming . . . thousands of birds . . . water-birds . . . of every kind. You see there’re few trees anywhere near the water, except round the ridge. The clumps of stuff you see round the edges and out on the flats there are pandanus palms. That’s how it would be in its pristine state . . . I assume from seeing other places like it, still unspoiled. I say I assume, because . . . well, when first I saw it the mining was in full swing and it . . . well, it was just torn to pieces. They’d even pumped the billabongs dry, running the water out over the dry plains, to get at the rich lode they reckoned ran underneath. I put it back as it is . . . or helped to. Nature only wanted a hand . . . but she demanded an awful lot of time, and money, too. I had to keep a tribe of blacks. I like to think she’s paid me back . . . not merely with the great satisfaction I feel in the accomplishment, but in actual cash. That valueless stuff, the Tantalite they mined so much of and had to dump, has since become worth ten times the price of tin. You see I’ve got a bit of a mine on the ridge there. When I feel like working it I do. I have to, occasionally, to keep the mining lease I hold on it . . . but it’s mainly from the Tantalite dump I make the money. By the way, my best customers are friends of yours.’

  ‘Of mine?’

  ‘Yes . . . Krupp’s of Germany. It’s used in making special kinds of steel. I presume they’re making things to exterminate those Bolsheviks of yours.’

  ‘I hope so!’

  ‘For my part I’m indifferent. What I’m concerned with is stopping the extermination of the people this land was robbed from . . . and Krupp’s money’s as good as anyone else’s to maintain that robber baron’s castle, as you call it, to do it in. They could use it against the English for all I cared. In fact, I think I’d regard it as poetic justice . . . because Nat Knowles was English, and most of his dirty poxy murderous mob!’ Again the vibrance of anger.

  He drew a deep breath, saying, ‘You’ll have to excuse the outbursts. To me it’s holy ground we tread. Now, let’s take a quick run round to show you the birds . . . then we’ll cut across to the Caves, where we’ll have lunch.’

  There was no doubt about Lydia’s delight in the scene, particularly the myriad birds as part of it.

  As they were coming back from a round tour of it, Jeremy drew into the blacks’ camp at the foot of the ridge, saying as he alighted, ‘Some of my old folk. Have to pay my respects. Don’t suppose you want to come?’

  Looking frankly askance at the scene, Lydia replied, ‘Why not?’ and got out to join him. Prindy stayed where he was, probably through fear of offending against etiquette, and handed down a packet to Jeremy, containing tea and tobacco.

  There were four old couples now, all staring warily, squatting in ashes about an almost dead fire, before the two humpies. All were stark naked, so skinny as to seem scarcely fleshed, the women, with withered dugs, sitting, after the manner of their kind in similar circumstances, each with a heel in her crotch to prevent the intrusion of spirit things in the shape of insects, the men cross-legged, with an elbow covering pubes probably out of deference to the whitewoman. One old woman sucked an empty pipe. All four were crawling with flies they seemed not to be aware of. Three were caked to the neck with reddish-grey mud glistening with mica, evidently through having been grubbing for lily roots, a small heap of which lay by the smokeless fire. A dead goose, sw
arming with meat-ants, hung by a yellow leg from a branch of a small sheltering tea-tree, its twisted neck showing that probably it had been pulled under water while the lily rooting was in progress. The large wing of a goose lay in the ashes, to fan up the fire when need be, near it a black-caked billy-can the contents of which looked like black syrup. Ants of various kinds, black, red, green, swarmed everywhere. A few spears and digging sticks leaned against the tree, and woven dilly-bags hung from broken twigs. Jeremy asked, ‘Everybody all right?’

  They answered together, ‘Yu-ai, Mullaka.’

  ‘Present for you.’ Long-fingered claws, black on the outside, smoky pink on the inside, snatched at tea and tobacco. The woman with the pipe began to shred the tobacco with a long thumbnail. Jeremy said, ‘You gettin’ too-muchee bone-bugger. More-better you come back station I tucker you.’

  ‘By’n’by, Mullaka,’ answered one of the men. The others cackled with amusement, showing apparent interest in the staring Lydia.

  ‘All right, said Jeremy. ‘Time you ready . . . I go now . . . mummuk.’

  ‘Mummuk, yawarra, Mullaka.’

  As Jeremy helped Lydia back into the car he asked: ‘Shocked?’

  She murmured, ‘Can’t say I was delighted.’

  As he got in behind the wheel and started up he said, ‘That’s the natural state . . . but, of course, in a typical camp you’d find babies crawling about, kids laughing and playing, young girls giggling, strapping men painted up for corroboree or hunting . . .’

  ‘All stark naked and crawling with ants and flies?’

  ‘That’s the true Aborigine!’

  She stared at him: ‘And you like them!’

  He waved a hand out of the window: ‘With all the rest of it.’

  ‘But . . . but . . .’

  ‘But what?’

  ‘Do you want me to say it?’

  ‘Don’t say anything to please me.’

  ‘Well . . . well, then, to me they seemed just animals.’