The Far Horizon

by Gretta Curran Browne

  All this Mrs Ovens knew. Elizabeth had revealed Mary’s true crime to her on the day the girl had been promoted upstairs and therefore entitled to eat in Mrs Ovens’ kitchen.

  Usually, the subject of a convict’s crime was not something anyone asked or talked about. Whatever had happened was in the past and was their own business, and all they had left to do now was serve out their punishment and be done with it.

  But it was time, Mrs Ovens decided, to end the fun and tell the truth to poor Mrs Kelly who had been suffering for weeks at the thought of having a murderess in their midst.

  Mrs Kelly's black eyes nearly popped out of her head when Mrs Ovens told her over a glass of rum.

  ‘It's the truth, m'deary, not a word of a lie. But why the girl has to keep saying she done murder is beyond me. I don't understand it at all.'

  ‘Oh, well, now,’ said Mrs Kelly, after a thoughtful pause. ‘You don't understand because you've never been transported. It's a terrible thing. The voyage here on the convict ship is like a nightmare in hell. And the humiliation! Oh, that’s the worst of all. Irons on your ankles. No water to wash the filth from your skin or clothes. The hatches battened down tight so there's no air, just the stinking stench of the crowded berths.’

  ‘I don’t bear to even imagine it,’ said Mrs Ovens pityingly.

  Mrs Kelly nodded. ‘And when life is that bad, when all hope seems gone, some people just lose their mind and go mad. But others – like our Mary – stay sane by thinking of the person that put them in that position, and that's when the fantasies of murder begin. In her mind Mary has probably killed that mistress of hers a thousand times and in a hundred different ways. And even now she is still fantasising. And sure she knows she is, but she feels free to do so because her former mistress is half a globe away and as safe as houses. But the fact that Mary needs the consolation of these fantasies shows the bitterness and hatred is still in her heart.’

  ‘Then it's pitiable,’ said Mrs Ovens, ‘to let her heart burn up that way. But in time it will fade, surely?’

  ‘Well now, that depends on how her life works out.'’ Mrs Kelly sipped her rum and pressed her lips together. ‘I know how Mary feels because I went through the same myself once upon a time, that I did. And this I know – if her life was to stay bad, then her craving for vengeance will get worse. But if it turns out not so bad, as mine has done, then the past will eventually fade away into forgetfulness.’

  ‘She works the cards, you know? Works spells. Did she tell you? She uses the Black Queen to wreak evil on her former mistress.’

  ‘So she said?’ Mrs Kelly looked impressed. ‘Now I wonder who taught her that?’

  Mrs Ovens poured herself some more rum. ‘Speaking only for myself, and you know I'm not a vengeful person, Mrs Kelly, being brought up in a good Anglican-Church family as I was, but I hopes the Black Queen takes a ton of bad luck to that black-haired witch who consigned Mary to the bottom of a convict ship. Callous cow!’

  *

  The following morning Mary Neely met George Jarvis on the upstairs landing. Once again they both felt that instantaneous attraction of opposites, the fair to the dark, the dark to the fair, but there was something else, something more, and both felt it.

  They regarded each other in silence but there was a subtle excitement in the sudden tensing of their bodies. Mary's face flushed the colour of roses.

  ‘And you are Mary Neely,’ he said.

  Mary eyed him with amusement.

  ‘Yes, I know I am,’ she replied.

  George smiled as she haughtily swept past him into the nursery.

  *

  In the days and weeks that followed George Jarvis and Mary Neely found it hard to keep away from each other, seeing as they both shared the same house, the same backstairs and front stairs, the same landings, and even on occasions the same private apartments of Governor and Mrs Macquarie.

  Each day they waylaid each other on the upper landings or lower halls when their conversations grew longer and longer. Their meetings became tantalising interludes when time always seemed too short.

  And then both, at the same time, developed a passionate love for quiet walks in the warm gardens of Government House between dinnertime and sunset, and both knew the path they were treading.

  For George, just having Mary in the same world as himself gave a new and tender beauty to life, and nothing in nature could compare to the loveliness he saw in her face and those light blue eyes of hers. Whenever he saw her he felt his heart beating furiously, although he always faced her with a calm serenity that hid most of his thoughts and feelings.

  For Mary, the influence of George's quiet and calm voice whenever he spoke seriously to her was beginning to dispel her melancholy and need for mysticism and creating spells of revenge. Everything he said to her seemed to fill her with a new sense of peace.

  One morning he asked to see her pack of cards, and when she brought them to him, he instantly lifted out the Black Queen and tore it in two pieces before her shocked eyes.

  ‘This is not the way,’ he said quietly. ‘In the East we believe that "Heaven's way always comes around," and life eventually serves out its own justice.’

  Mary stared at the two torn halves of the Queen of Spades and gave a shudder of superstitious terror.

  ‘If you truly do believe in the power of the cards,’ George said slowly, ‘then you will know that this card always holds the power to break the spell of any black card in the pack.’

  He handed her the Queen of Hearts.

  The card of love.

  She lifted her eyes and looked at him and felt the darkness leaving her soul. He had destroyed the Black Queen. The spell of the card and its hold on her thoughts was broken.

  They stood facing each other in silence. Then a smile moved on her face as bright as the sun. She lifted the Queen of Hearts to her lips, kissed it, and handed the card back to him.

  A new spell had begun.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The ship, the General Browne, finally arrived in Sydney Harbour carrying two hundred and fifty tons of Bengal grain.

  As relieved as he was, Lachlan was livid when he saw its inferior quality. ‘They would never dare to send this dirt to England!’

  Even more galling was the fact that a third of the weight of the Bengal grain consisted of the weevils swarming through it.

  The sifting process began. And while it did, Lachlan realised that his threats against those settlers hoarding hidden grain would now be laughed at. Even the convicts objected to eating Indian weevils.

  As the months passed the situation became even worse: the hot summer sun of January and February had burned every new shoot of grass. Bush fires began to rage. By March 1815 more than five thousand cattle and three thousand sheep had died.

  Lachlan silently looked towards Heaven for help ... and as he did so, his eyes rested on the Blue Mountains.

  *

  The Blue Mountains, which hemmed in New South Wales from the rest of the continent, truly were blue. Maybe it was the reflection of the blue sea and the blue sky that coloured the mist that hung over them.

  The mountains were covered in density with huge trees and thick bush. Speculators in the past had been sure that rich verdure and shaded grazing land lay beyond the Blue Mountains, breaking their way through briar and bush, but those explorers had returned after travelling miles, unable to go any further forward due to the rocks and granite boulders that were impossible to pass.

  ‘Some say China lies beyond,’ said George Evans, the emancipist engineer and surveyor.

  ‘I have been to China,’ Lachlan said, ‘and so I know it is not behind those mountains.’

  Still, in the days and weeks that followed, Lachlan could think of nothing else but the Blue Mountains and the possibilities that may lie beyond them. He studied every report from every previous explorer, from Flinders to Blaxland, and all their observations led him to believe that the only possible way over the Blue Mountains – if there was
a way – was in the west.

  He decided to visit King Bungeree, certain there were Aboriginal trails all over those mountains. After all, this had been their land for aeons, before the white men had come and taken it from them.

  *

  Normally King Bungaree would never discuss the exploration to find more land with any white man, but to the Aboriginals and King Bungeree, ‘Massa Mawarrie’ was more than just a white man – he was a King-Man who strode over this land of Koori like a colossus of greatness, a King-Man of brightness and goodness who used only kind words and kind gifts – not a despot of discrimination and prejudice who ruled Koori with no other command but the lash of the whip.

  So, after sharing the refreshment of some fruit together, King Bungeree confessed to Lachlan there was a wonderful land beyond the Blue Mountains, a place far, far beyond where other Aboriginal peoples had lived from the beginning of time and still lived there – a place called ‘uluru’ – but his own people, no, they had only ever lived in Koori.

  Lachlan knew that Koori was and had always been the Aboriginal name for the land that the British now called New South Wales, but uluru – King Bungeree spoke of it with a reverence of tone and wonder that a white man might speak of the mythical ‘Shangrila’.

  So did it even exist … or was it some place of ancestral Aboriginal folklore that existed only in King Bungeree’s imagination?

  ‘It is not only from our Dreamings’, King Bungeree said, as if reading Lachlan’s thoughts. ‘Aboriginal peoples have been crossing the Blue Mountains for thousands of years before the white men came.’

  Lachlan was stunned. ‘You mean … you know the way across?’

  King Bungeree nodded. ‘We know our own way across.’

  ‘Will you tell me that way?’

  King Bungeree thought for a while, and then sighed and said slowly, ‘The white men came and found Koori with no help from us … The white men invaded our land with no agreement from us. So why now do the white men not go and find a way to cross the Blue Mountains … with no help from us.’

  Lachlan understood, and because he understood he had always felt sympathy for the Aboriginal people, but he had been commissioned and given a job to do in the name of his own King, and it was his duty to do that job in the best way he could.

  He sat for a long reflective moment thinking of Blaxland, Lawson and Wentworth, three white men who had found a way into and across a small part of the Blue Mountains, but only for a distance of fifty-six miles and it had achieved them little, leading to their return.

  And now – even those three men still did not know what lay beyond the Blue Mountains.

  He said quietly to King Bungeree. ‘The white men will find a way across the Blue Mountains to whatever is beyond. If not now, then in some future time. But now it is essential to the people’s health and existence here that they do find a way across the Blue Mountains, if only for the purpose of finding more land to grow more food. And I came to you, King Bungaree, because I had hoped the Aboriginal people would help us.’

  King Bungaree sat staring at the sky and refused to answer.

  ‘Not even some hint?’ Lachlan asked. ‘Not even, perhaps, a finger pointing in the right direction?

  King Bungeree turned his head and looked silently at Lachlan for a long time.

  ‘You are good white man, Massa Mawarrie, good friend to Bungaree and his people,’ he said finally, and then he slowly raised his hand, pointing west.

  *

  A few days later Lachlan sent George Evans and a small party on an expedition of discovery. He made their object clear.

  ‘If possible, the discovery of some new tract of country fit for agricultural cultivation that might help us to grow more food to feed the colony and not have to rely and wait on ships from other countries.’

  George Evans nodded, marking his map. ‘From Sydney – the westward route.’

  Lachlan saw the explorers off on their journey, having agreed that they could take with them an Irish guide named Tom Byrne who was excellent at shooting kangaroos, a handy skill if food was desperately needed. James Coogan, John Grover and John Tighe, all ex-convicts, accompanied them. Their orders were to venture as far as they possibly could, so Lachlan knew it was going to be a long wait for their return.

  Meanwhile, from the place that he now called, ‘our Newcastle’, he sold one hundred and fifty tons of coal to Calcutta, to be repaid in Bengal grain which he gave to the convicts, more and more of whom needed to be fed by the Government. The drought had ruined many of the small emancipist farmers who found they had no means of business, and were left with no choice but to give their assigned convict labourers and servants back to the Government, no longer able to meet the cost of feeding them.

  The drought continued, without a sign of rain.

  The Betsy finally arrived from India with another two hundred and fifty tons of life-saving grain, with a smaller proportion of weevils.

  *

  Two months later, George Evans and his party returned from their expedition of discovery and reported their findings to the Governor. This time it was certain they had crossed the Blue Mountains and seen beyond them.

  ‘We rested on the bank of a running river,’ Evans said excitedly. And we saw meadowlands clear of trees, and good soil watered by chains of waterholes not affected by the drought. It rained, and drenched us to the skin.’

  ‘Rained!’

  ‘Only for a day, but rain it was!’ said Evans. And his report went on, just as he and his party of explorers had done, further and further into the unknown.

  He described the lovely scenes they had seen: green grass which looked so good after the burned-out territory they had left behind – ‘Grass so abundant and fresh – and so high we had to wade our way through it,’ Evans said excitedly.

  They had crossed the mountain boundaries that marked the eastern and western watershed of the region. That was why they had tasted rain when Sydney had not.

  From the Blue Mountains they had seen open country stretching as far as the eyes could see, with a long river flowing through it. Although, Evans added, in his opinion this long river could not in any way be reached from the eastern range without difficulty, and as the mountains there were covered with granite it would be difficult to push a horse faster than a walk.

  ‘But the land to the west that we saw,’ Evans continued elatedly, ‘I cannot speak too highly of it or describe to you what beautiful country it is – rich enough and big enough to grow food and raise cattle and sheep on it for more than a hundred years!’

  Lachlan could hardly believe it or restrain his own excitement – Evans and his team had travelled one hundred and fifty miles and seen a beautiful country of huge extent and great fertility – Shangrila!

  ‘Did you mark out the route?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh yes,’ Evans laughed, ‘we marked the route on our maps as we went along. Too right we did!’

  And they had indeed! As Lachlan studied their maps he realised that they had found the elusive large river that the explorer, Captain Matthew Flinders, had spent so long searching for.

  Flinders had been convinced that a large river was there, somewhere, but he and his explorers had searched for miles along the coast looking for a start to the river from the sea. It had never occurred to Flinders that the river was inland – a freshwater river – beyond the Blue Mountains.

  And so Lachlan Macquarie – the same man who, as a young officer in India, had once organised the building of a road over the treacherous Indian mountain Ghauts into the land of Mysore, now began to draw up his own specifications for the building of a road climbing more than four thousand feet and one hundred and fifty miles long, based on Evan's westward route, across the Blue Mountains, into the new Australia.

  And in that new land to the west, George Evans was to be rewarded with a grant of one thousand acres of land sealed to his name, and the same grant of one thousand acres was also to be given and sealed to the names of Tom Byrne and
the other three ex-convicts who had travelled with Evans

  Inside Government House, Lachlan invited George Evans and his four explorers to raise their glasses and drink a toast with him.

  ‘Gentlemen – from here into the new and bigger Australia.’

  ‘Ausssstralliiaaa!’ the four ex-convicts cheered, while the Governor and George Evans laughed.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Less than a month had passed since his return, and George Evans was once again preparing for another expedition into the mountains, joined by a huge number of people this time, because a road was going to be built along the way.

  ‘The road must be at least twelve feet wide,’ Lachlan instructed William Cox, a former member of New South Wales Corps who lived in Windsor and was joining the expedition.

  ‘Why twelve feet?’ Cox asked.

  ‘Because when the road is completed, homes will need to be built if farmers are to live and work the land there, so building materials will have to be transported up the road, and depots will have to established, food and timber carried up, so the road will need to be wide enough to allow two carts to pass each other with ease and without any danger or difficulty.’

  ‘The expense of such a road,’ Lachlan wrote in explanation to the Colonial Secretary, Lord Bathurst, ‘would be trifling, as I have offered the convicts who will be doing all the hard labour the reward of receiving their ticket-of-leave and emancipation on completion of the road.

  It was a masterstroke – the greatest incentive that could have been offered to any convict. The hard slog of cutting through bush and briar and building a road of four thousand feet up and across the mountains under tough and rough conditions would not be a punishment, nor would there be a chance of escape because a guard of soldiers would go with them – but every step the convicts took would be a step further on their path to freedom. That would be their goal and their reward at the end of the road: Governor Macquarie's certificate of emancipation.

  As the huge expedition set off to leave, the Governor gave the convicts some final few words of encouragement.