Poor Fellow My Country

by Xavier Herbert

  Soon after the huge meal, Jeremy, Dickey and Alfie were sitting out on the patio, drinking brandy, while her ladyship was hounding her staff at the washing-up, when a car came skittering up the gravel drive. Alfie groaned, ‘Oh, Lord . . . the Colt!’

  There was no time for explanation. A shortish thick-set man of fifty or so alighted springily, wearing the golfing outfit called Plus-fours. ‘Hello, hello, hello!’ he cried with cheery raucousness, and came to Jeremy with hand outstretched. ‘Delacy, eh? Mighty glad to meet you. From the wide open spaces. Might come up there look you up some time . . . do a bit o’ shootin’. Crack shot in my time . . . sniper, AIF.’ He turned to Alfie. ‘Hello, sweetheart . . . that long-overdue kiss for Uncle Tom, eh?’ He would have taken it. However, with a grimace that could have meant anything, she dodged his assault on her, ducked inside. He shrugged. ‘Gratitude in women! Y’know, I did the advertising of her book for nothing . . . and in a big way, too. That’s my line. Ad-man.’

  He flopped into Alfie’s seat. ‘Brandy, eh? Don’t mind if I do . . . although I been beering a bit at the Nineteenth. And how d’you like our neck o’ the woods, Old-timer? But I better introduce myself, seeing old Dickey here’s forgotten his manners . . . Tom Colt. Usually known just as the Colt . . . ha, ha! . . . don’t know whether they mean I’m a young stallion still . . .’ He gave a poor imitation of a neigh, ‘. . . or am a straight shooter. Well, here’s cheers!’

  It seemed that Mr Colt’s arrival wasn’t mere coincidence, but that Dickey, doing an early round of golf for exercise, had met him and told him of his coming guest, and that he happened to be a foundation member of the Free Australia Movement, but was an active critic of it now. Promptly he began to vociferate about the chaotic state of the country, the threats of Communism and Catholicism, advocating a militant counter-force, backed by the RSL to take drastic action to do what he called Put Dear Old Aussie Back On Those Feet She’d Marched So Proudly On From 1914 to 1918. Very definitely he wanted the Movement to get rid of the Bloke, and had heard enough from Dickey to reckon Jeremy the man to oust The Hun-loving Bastard. ‘Down-to-earth bushman-returned-soldier type . . . that’s what we want. None of your Masters of Arts and Cambridge Dons . . . with the taint of Commo! Getting the Jews’ backs up, too . . . that’s plain silly. The Jews’ve got the dough. Besides, we’ve got smart Jews, good dinky-di Aussies, too. Look at Monash! Best soldier in the war. Liked what you wrote about the mad bastard’s Anti-Semitism. Now . . . what’s your policy about other things?’

  Jeremy hedged, saying that all he wanted for the moment were facts to base a policy on. This irritated the Colt, who said what they wanted was Action. Dickey got into it, waving his hand about the landscape, as if seeing it again thronged with dusky warriors, and declared that their basic policy must be concerned with the Aborigines, and had babbled out just about all that Jeremy had inspired him with, before the Colt, till then staring at him in growing astonishment, jumped on him: ‘Where’d you get that bullshit?’

  ‘Why . . . from Delacy here,’ faltered Dickey. ‘He wrote about it in Australia Free, remember?’

  ‘No . . . I don’t remember tripe like that. I remember he wrote about Anti-Semitism and our being too bloody nitwitted to run our country ourselves, which is true.’

  Jeremy said quietly, ‘I did write that. Also, Alfie Candlemas wrote it in that book you say you sold for her.’

  Colt stared at him, frankly puzzled. Then suddenly he grinned. ‘I get it! Now I remember. Alfie told me. You got a black wife, eh?’

  Jeremy coloured slightly, Dickey deeply. Jeremy answered stiffly, ‘My wife has Aboriginal blood.’

  The Colt returned cheerfully, ‘Same thing, eh?’

  Jeremy maintained the stiffness. ‘May be . . . but what difference should my wife’s complexion make to my believing our first responsibility is to pay for the country we stole?’

  ‘I didn’t steal any country, mate.’

  ‘Do you own any property?’

  ‘I certainly do. Dickey here’ll tell you I got the biggest place on this peninsula. But I’m not paying any tax on it to keep a tribe of no-good niggers!’ He looked belligerent.

  Jeremy held his brown-eyed challenging stare for a moment, then shrugged, looked away at the view.

  Colt resumed in a tone quite amiable: ‘Sorry, old man . . . but you’ll have to change views like that if you want to be our leader.’ When Jeremy looked at him, he chuckled: ‘We know you boys Up North. The old Burnt Cork, eh? Half your luck. I’ll try a bit of it myself when I get up there. But it doesn’t go down here. We got strong views on race, you know. That’s what holds the country together, really. White Australia. It’s basic.’

  Jeremy nodded. Then he said, ‘Well . . . if you’ll excuse me. I was going for a bit of a stroll. Rather heavy lunch.’ He rose.

  The Colt chuckled again: ‘She does stuff you, doesn’t she?’ He tossed off his brandy, also rose. ‘Look, I’ll give you a run around in the car.’

  ‘Thanks . . . but it’s the walk I’m needing.’

  ‘Well, let’s run you down the hill, anyway. See my place from down there . . . show place of the district.’ There was no gainsaying it, without bluntness inexcusable in another man’s house. The Colt fairly shoved him into his huge car.

  They went winding down the inlet side, with the Colt talking all the while, mostly about the Movement: the Bloke, whom he detested, the Chief, whom he seemed to fear, finishing up with Alfie: ‘You seem to be doing all right there, feller. See her hanging over you when I arrived. Way she used to talk about you, too. You’d be a fair bit older than me, too. What you got, Dad, that I ain’t?’ He guffawed. ‘I been trying to knock her off ever since the book. What’s the secret?’

  They were down on the waterfront, halted near a jetty running out into the inlet. Jeremy, opening his door, answered dryly, ‘Maybe it’s the burnt cork.’

  ‘Aheeeeah! No doubt about you. But wait a bit.’

  ‘I want to take a stroll out on the jetty . . .’

  ‘I’ll come with you. Haven’t shown you my place. Can see it from there.’ The Colt leapt out. Jeremy gave him a look that would have discouraged most people. Not so Colt, who trotted along with him onto the jetty, telling him how good the fishing was there. Some half-dozen fishermen were squatting with lines.

  Out at the end, Colt pointed out his Hollywood-type mansion amongst several acres of gum trees. He laughed: ‘Expect me to take in a tribe of boongs as boarders to give me proper legal title . . . Aheeeaaaah!’

  Jeremy answered with a good-humoured grimace, but a surprising statement: ‘I presume you can swim, Mr Colt?’

  ‘Eh?’ The Colt looked quite surprised. ‘Swim? Yes, course I can . . . got a special shark-proof enclosure across there . . . see! That big ketch there, too . . . she’s mine. Why d’you ask?’

  They were close to the unrailed edge. Jeremy answered, ‘Oh . . . just to make sure. Let’s see you.’ He gave the Colt the slightest shove. Over he went.

  No one seemed to notice till the Colt came up, gasping, shouting. Jeremy glanced down at him, grinned, waved, started back for shore. The Colt was screaming, ‘Bloody bastard . . . sue you . . . help, help, sharks!’

  There was no sign of sharks. Still, the fishermen were running, one of them with a lifebuoy. Jeremy went on his way, reached the shore, glanced back to see the knot hauling on the rope of the buoy. Chuckling, he went on strolling.

  It was a couple of hours later when Jeremy got back to the Banker’s, to find the household waiting for him with a sumptuous afternoon tea and happily agog over the news of the event on the jetty. It seemed that the Colt himself, in haste to tell them they were harbouring a dangerous lunatic, had reported it by phone. Evidently all detested the man. Jeremy’s answer to their eager questions was simply that he had thought the fellow could do with a ducking. That especially delighted the lady of the house, who boomed, ‘Just what my father and brothers would have done to a cad like him . . . dump him in the horse-trou
gh . . . ha, ha, ha, ho, ho!’

  Dickey chuckled: ‘He swears he’ll sue you for assault. But he won’t be game. He’d be scared of making a fool of himself. He’s got too many enemies . . . aheeeah!’

  Alfie said, ‘That makes up for all the bruises he’s put on my bottom.’

  After another huge meal called Tea in bush style, Alfie and Jeremy set off back to Town. Jeremy insisted on being set down at his flat and left alone there. Alfie agreed, on condition that she could come and fetch him tomorrow afternoon to eat with her and Frank and meet some politician friends.

  Sunday morning he went roaming the empty city, looking at the shops — so obviously bushy, despite the neat grey business suit and pork-pie hat, that thrice he was accosted: by booze-reeking beggars muttering for the price of a meal, which he gave liberally without comment: by a battered young prostitute, who when he gave her the fee she asked but declined to go home with her, yelled after him, ‘What’s wrong’t yo’ . . . can’t raise one, eh?’

  End-point of one hundred and seventy years of the greatest chance for social advancement ever offered mankind — Australia Felix in reality!

  He peeped into each of the great cathedrals, with their well-dressed congregations, their hidden organs thundering like the Voice of the Almighty Boss, whimpering like the souls of sinners who’d lacked the price of prayers for Indulgence, their hidden choirs wailing of Pie in the Sky, their clergy quaffing the Vinous Blood, with fat ornate silken backs turned on the world of reality.

  Two thousand years of hypocrisy imported along with the blatant evil of all history.

  He took the steamer trip to Manly, looking at the view with an expression to suggest that he was seeing not so much the bright modernity of shore and islet as the past, a natural enough thing in a thoughtful person not familiar with a locality but well knowing its history. A landmark that interested him particularly, as it does everybody unused to it, and one that had changed but little in all the years, was the fastness built on a rock and into it: Pinchgut, as our convict forebears called it, where those who dared rebel against the hideous inhumanity of the day were confined to starve in dungeons, with a periodic feast off their own blood drawn by the wire cat. Mediaeval dungeons set up in view of those shining eucalypt-clad shores, from which the free-roaming blackman and the leaping marsupial in its vast variety had first peeped in wonder — then in terror — then had run for their lives. Pinchgut — eternal monument to the horror of our beginnings that fathered the squalor of our destiny.

  Australia Felix!

  Jeremy must have been thinking of so much as he stood and stared and stared; and the blade of the ship’s bow cut the blue silk of the water and the screws churned it out as creamy lace.

  If only Captain Phillip and his First Fleet had foundered with all hands, on the reef near the Heads called the Sow and Pigs, that morning of January 26, 1788 — or Captain Cook had gone down in the maze of the Great Barrier Reef, as by all that’s nautical logic he should have, that Sunday, April 29, 1770 — would there have remained for ever the magic land mariners dreamt of as the Southern Land of the Holy Spirit — or would some other and even stupider bastards have come along and made an even worse mess of it? The grey eyes roved the length, the breadth, even the deep depths, it seemed, of Port Jackson. Who was Jackson, anyway, that his name in perpetuity should supersede whatever red-gum-scented, wattle-blossom-tossed-in-southerly-buster name the blacks had for it? That name lost for ever of course — like the God-given opportunity for Australia Felix.

  He returned to his flat to find Alfie in possession. Clever girl had bagged a key for herself. She took him utterly by surprise, in that way of hers. However, she went easy with her amorousness on finding him in a negative mood. He declared that he felt it was hopeless trying to do anything positive with a nation so ill-begotten. She took him home.

  The politician visitors were already there: massive men, rather like policemen in build and hard-eyed staring, but exceedingly amiable, almost taking Jeremy to their bosoms in greeting him. Both were of the Labor Party, Federal Representatives. One had been President of the Senate, the other a Senior Minister, in the Government brought down by the recently deceased Prime Minister’s treachery to his Party. There was no doubt about their interest in Jeremy personally and his association with Free Australia. Instead of pontificating in the usual way of politicians with those not having the privilege of being called Honourable whether having honour or not, they questioned him eagerly. It was also evident that the Senator, a handsome oldish man of about Jeremy’s age, was interested in Alfie. Although she held his overt fatherly affections at bay in company, a number of times she was out with him in the kitchen preparing drinks overlong.

  These potentates came out with the pontification after dinner. Both declared that nothing of value could come out of a mere Movement. The Senator said, ‘You’ve got to have a Party with an aim to govern. Nothing gets anywhere, unless spouted in the National Gas House. Even with only a single Rep in Parliament, you’ve got a voice the whole country hears. Otherwise, no matter how good and necessary your reform, you’re a voice crying in the wilderness. Even with one Rep you can gain power by aligning yourself with one or other of the major Parties. In our Governments the balance of power is always so fine that any voice is welcome in a vote . . . and the payment is a word of support for your cause. That’s the great aim of the Comms . . . to put men into Parliament. No matter about swearing allegiance to the King and the Constitution they’re sworn to overthrow . . . anything to get that voice crying from the sanctified benches of the House. British people . . . Anglo-Saxons, if you like . . . have a holy respect for Parliament, and a deep suspicion of anything else. Even if they know the elected Government is largely a facade for Public Service bureaucracy, there’s always one’s power to break that bureaucracy through one’s elected representative.’

  The MHR said, ‘We need reform. For chrissake we need it! Look how we were chiselled out of power last time. Labor will welcome anything you’ve been talking about, Mr Delacy . . . proper treatment of the Aborigines, elimination of outside financial control, absentee landlordism, a real say in Foreign Affairs. The name Free Australia’s good . . . couldn’t be bettered to attract attention to our enslavement from outside. But how’ll you get rid of the Fascist stink that’s got attached to it? Old Labor stalwarts lean well to the Left, you know . . . even if they don’t like the Comms. And the Comms won’t let you get away with your ideal at the expense of theirs. Already they’ve pushed Internationalism into the background and talk Australian Nationalism . . . since Free Australia started. Instead of shouting now of the Octobrist Rising, the Glorious Red Army, and all the rest of it on May Day and such occasions, it’s the Eureka Stockade. Before it was Communist Youth and the Hammer and Sickle. Now it’s Eureka Youth and the Five Starred Flag. The Australian Labor Party’s always been strongly nationalistic. It had to be to get the social solidarity to break the Imperial grip. We started with Eureka, don’t forget. You may be sure we’ll welcome you . . . if you can found a Party declaring itself for Australia and Australians first. Liberty, equality, fraternity . . . for your Aborigines before anyone else, if you like . . . but a nation without class, caste, privilege. Found your Party . . . but first get rid of that Fascist stink.’

  How get rid of it? These warriors of the hustings had the answer.

  They said that when Jeremy attended the special meeting of the Movement next Tuesday, after his formal admission, Alfie should call on him to make a speech, in which he should propose formation of the Party. Someone should second him, and the proposal put to the vote. If, as Alfie said, she could pack the meeting with dissidents to the present regime, it should be carried easily. Then and there arrange another meeting, for formulating a constitution and allotting offices. With all this done, the Party’s platform should be made public at an open meeting as big and as well advertised as possible. Meantime, the whole idea should be kept secret from those master-minds, the Chief and the Bloke,
whose declared policy was opposition to party politics.

  The Senator said, ‘At the public meeting you must somehow denounce or discredit or dissociate yourself plainly from those two. That’ll win you a lot of kudos . . . look as if you’ve overthrown the would-be dictators in the name of democracy. Once you’ve done that, we’ll be right alongside you.’

  Thus through the afternoon, dinner, and a bit of a boozy session afterwards. Jeremy stayed on after the politicians were gone. Alfie was glowing. ‘Isn’t it wonderful?’ she cried. ‘I knew they’d be a great help.’ But then she bridled at finding Jeremy unimpressed. He said he felt they were only using him, wanting ideas to throw about Parliament themselves. He called them Bower-birds. Alfie waxed indignant, as the daughter of a politician should: ‘Of course they have to think of their own party first. But politicians can be as sincere as anyone. You do what they say . . . and I’ll bet they keep their promise. We have to have a Voice, as they said. You’re not going to turn down the idea of a Party, are you?’

  ‘No . . . I’ll give it a go.’

  ‘Bless you, darling Jeremy . . . bless you!’ She tried to kiss him. He held her off, telling her that she stank of the Senator’s cigars. She laughed gaily: ‘You’re jealous!’

  Jeremy saw to it that his being walked back home was a Candlemas family affair.