To Love a Sunburnt Country

by Jackie French

  Yet, said a whisper in his mind.

  His brain hiccupped so he missed what she was saying next, about packing and passports and the passage booked to bring them home.

  Was he seriously thinking of marrying a girl he had just met — well, just noticed anyway — thinking of marrying anyone, when he was only fifteen, with another two years of school ahead of him? Marriage was something another fifteen years away, another life …

  A jigsaw assembled itself in his mind. The pieces had been there waiting, just needed the final piece to make a whole.

  The music, the laughter of friends and neighbours, the complaints of sheep in the river paddock, the whicker of horses greeting each other closer to the house, the feeling when a mob of sheep flows over the hill, like a brown flood of wool and baas. So many pieces, waiting for him now.

  Not another life, in fifteen years’ time. This life. Yes, more of his life — much more — before marriage would happen. But for the first time he knew that the soil of his life was here, under his feet. Not as a doctor or lawyer or banker, like some of the distant cousins, or with inventions and factories, like Dad. His parents had never discussed who would inherit what. He suspected that with two substantial but quite different inheritances, the farm and factories, and two sons, they were waiting to see who fitted what. He knew too without it ever being spoken, that both farm and factories were too deep in the hearts of his parents for them ever to pass them to someone half-hearted. Whole heart, or not at all. If neither of their sons loved them, or wanted another career, farm or factories would go to a trust, with managers, like Blue McAlpine’s family’s firm, leaving the boys free to find their own niche in the world.

  And this was his. Even if he never inherited Drinkwater, he would be a drover, earn enough for his own property … ‘And the bush has friends to meet him …’

  He had said the words aloud.

  Nancy’s eyes narrowed. ‘You making a joke?’

  ‘No.’ He wondered how many people had taunted her with the words of the Banjo Paterson poem about her grandfather and almost namesake.

  She heard the truth in his voice. The grin reappeared. ‘All right then.’

  Someone clapped him on the shoulder. A woman, powder, scent and lipstick, kissed him on the cheek.

  ‘Michael, merry Christmas. How is school? What year are you in now?’

  ‘Going into sub-Junior,’ he said. He waited till the couple had passed, then his eyes met Nancy’s again. ‘Look, we can’t talk here. Come down to the river with me?’

  She looked at him assessingly. He flushed, suddenly realising what the invitation must seem to suggest.

  At last she said, ‘All right. Do you need a lantern?’ The last was almost a challenge.

  ‘Moonlight’s enough.’ Besides, he thought, a lantern would show everyone that two young people were slipping off into the dark.

  He stepped out of the pools of light around the shearing shed. She followed him, walking through the tall English garden trees, planted by his great-grandfather, then the smaller, more sparsely branched fruit trees, carefully pruned, then into the sheep paddock. Three hundred sheep turned towards them as one, assessed them, then turned back to grazing, chewing cud, dozing. Humans did not bring hay or do in fact anything of interest after dark. Further down river Mah McAlpine’s elephant helped herself to hay.

  Nancy walked as he did, eyes down at the ground, adapting to the dark away from the relative light of the sky. Only when he’d led her to his favourite spot, a bald knoll above the river, did they look up. The moonlight turned the river into a shimmer of silver flowing between sandy banks growing shaggy with tussocks and thorn bush now, after the last big flood three years back.

  Doubt flooded in as soon as they sat down. He had no idea what to say. Or do.

  Would she expect him to kiss her? He had kissed Morrison’s sister last Easter break, but someone’s sister didn’t count and, anyway, it had really been she who’d kissed him.

  He’d been crazy, back by the shed, to think he had anything in common with the Clancy girl. Loving Drinkwater, yes, that was a small solid walnut in his mind. But this girl had left school at fourteen, not even doing her certificate so she could go to high school. Nor had she gone to boarding school, like all his friends’ sisters: just the one-roomed school her mother had taught in before she’d married and taught in again now that so many male teachers had gone to war, even though married women were not supposed to teach.

  Had Nancy ever read a book in her life, except school textbooks? What would Morrison say, or Taylor? Had they even spoken to someone with dark skin? There was a name for men who went with Aboriginal women, and it wasn’t a polite one. Her dress looked like one of her mother’s. And those shoes …

  He was being a snob, his mother’s worst insult for anyone. But was it snobbery to feel that someone’s world was too different from yours to ever meld, despite what he had felt back among the light and chatter? Was it prejudiced to acknowledge that skin colour did make a difference, simply because it did matter to so many, despite what Dad said about everyone being the same under the skin? How could he have thought about marriage to someone from another world …?

  The thought stopped as if it had been cut off with a knife. His world — the part of it that he realised mattered — and hers were only a few bends of the river apart. And even if he had carefully never mentioned it at school, one of his own maternal great-grandmothers had also been Aboriginal, the beloved Auntie Love who had helped bring his mother up, and many — including those at school — knew it.

  Overflow was a good property. Prosperous. Wealthy, even. Nancy’s brother was a plantation manager, for all that his skin colour — and hers — was probably too deep a shade of brown for them to have ever got into a decent boarding school. But Ben had gone to agricultural college, hadn’t he? And Nancy had mentioned her father had put books in her swag to take to Charters Towers. You didn’t do that unless the swag carrier loved books.

  He was glad thoughts couldn’t be heard. His head circled, leaving him exactly where he had been a few minutes before. He liked this girl. More than liked her. Knew her deeply, even though in one way they had only just met.

  A breeze ruffled the river, sending silver feathers shivering along its surface. The lights from the shearing shed and house reached here, he realised. He could even see the freckles on her nose.

  ‘I didn’t know Aboriginal girls had freckles.’

  She looked carefully at the river, not him. ‘Dad’s half-caste. Mum and Granddad were white. Reckon I take after the three whites, not Gran.’

  He wanted to say his great-grandmother had been Aboriginal. Wanted to say that it didn’t matter. But of course it did. His mother’s acknowledgement of her black relatives meant that invitations from other squattocracy families to the Thompsons had been conspicuously lacking. His mother’s crime was not having Aboriginal ancestors, but openly acknowledging them.

  At school he’d been called ‘abo legs’ — Hawker said you could always tell an Aborigine by his skinny legs — till he got picked for the under-sixteen rugby team. Footballers stuck together, and every one of them was bigger than Hawker and his mates. There had been no more insults after that.

  Nancy would know about his great-grandmother anyway. The whole district knew every bit of gossip about the Thompsons of Drinkwater. She seemed far away in the moonlight and the pale yellow edges of the electric lights.

  What could they talk about? Most of his life had been spent at school, home too far away for any but the long vacations. He didn’t resent it, even if he didn’t like it. That was just what one did. His life was made up of blokes at school; the only girls he met of his own age were the sisters of friends, town girls, with hair carefully curled. Soft hands. Soft lives.

  He tried desperately to find words. To ask what it had been like, spending a year droving up to Charters Towers and back. But everything he thought of sounded too much like that poem. She’d think he was making fun o
f her. Or that he thought an Aboriginal girl, even a quarter-caste, was fair game for the son of Drinkwater.

  Something moved in the shallows. All at once she seemed no longer made of wood. She leant forwards, breathed, ‘Look.’

  A swan glided from the reeds. Silent, not even seeming to paddle, she rode the water. Behind her came three smaller swans, almost half grown.

  ‘It’s the light. She must think it’s day again. Funny, I haven’t seen swans here before. River’s too fast for them, mostly.’ Michael glanced at Nancy as he spoke. Her face glowed as if the starlight shone on her alone. She looked … he wasn’t sure how she looked. Like she thought life was on one page but had found it on another. As if the swans were wondrous. Meaningful …

  Like Mum with his pelicans. It had been the first Parents’ Day at school. Mum’d been there, with Dad, in her go-to-Sydney silk, and what he suspected was the most elegant fresh-from-Paris hat among the crowd of parents. They had gone for ice cream at a café by the river, sitting on the veranda. A pelican had landed on the railing, right by their table, its beak full. And Mum had said, as casually as she’d said she’d like strawberry ice cream, ‘They’ll always protect you, you know.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  Mum kept her gaze on the big bird gulping down its fish. ‘The day you were born. Before they even put you in my arms. I looked out the window and there were the pelicans, flying above the house. And I thought, they’re here to look after him. I knew you’d be safe, after that.’

  He’d glanced at Dad. Dad just looked tolerant, vaguely amused, like he often did with Mum. Mum was normally one of the most sensible women around, but sometimes …

  A shadow passed across them. He looked up as a pelican came in to land on the water, its legs forwards, pushing at the water like a seaplane braking.

  Suddenly it was hard to breathe.

  Nancy said, ‘Look! The light’s drawn him too. Maybe he was flying and thought, hey, it’s still day by the river.’

  His voice seemed to speak without him willing it to. ‘Mum told me once that she saw pelicans flying around when I was born. She said they’d watch out for me.’ It was the first time he had told anyone that story. The first time he had ever admitted to himself that at some level he did indeed believe it. But the stars didn’t crack from the sky. Nancy looked at him, assessing, approving, then back to the birds on the river. He let himself continue. ‘I was hating school — all the people, all the noise after life here. And Mum said, “If you see a pelican, you’ll know it’ll be all right.”’

  A pelican gave me something to say to a girl, at least, he thought. Something that might make her laugh at the quirks of parents. He waited for the giggle.

  None came. Nancy said, ‘The swans are mine. Gran told me. She was there when I was born. So were the swans. This year, coming home, when the floods nearly got us, a line of swans flew right up high above us. Travelling west, like us.’

  ‘Warning you about the floods?’ He tried to keep the incredulity from his voice.

  ‘Telling me I’d be all right. To do what was needed and I’d get home safe.’

  ‘Have they … told you … other things?’

  ‘It’s not really telling, is it? You see them, and you know.’

  She made it sound as if he knew what she meant. As if he didn’t think the idea crazy, old women’s superstition.

  And she was right. He did know and he didn’t judge it crazy.

  ‘I row at school,’ he said. ‘It gets me down on the river. Sometimes the pelicans almost seem to be telling me something too.’ Like before that exam, he thought, when he was in a blue funk, and he saw one paddling by, eyeing him as if to say, ‘All you have to do is glide along,’ and the panic had gone. He’d steadied, had written well.

  ‘Pelicans and swans together on the river.’ Nancy grinned at him. The light gleamed on one chipped side tooth. ‘I know what Gran would say to that.’

  She looked back at the river, not completing the thought. She won’t put it into words either, he realised. We are too young. But what we aren’t saying is still there. Will always be there. Drinkwater. Overflow. Us.

  Words came at last. ‘What did it feel like, the day you left for Queensland?’

  ‘Good. Cleared my head out, after sitting at that desk in school. Mountains instead of four walls. The sky instead of a window. I could breathe again. Find out who I was away from Mum and Dad. Nine years of school was bad enough. Plus Mum eagle-eyed over homework every single night.’

  ‘And the team let you go with them?’

  ‘Like I said, Ringer had known Granddad. Everyone knew Granddad, all the way to Charters Towers.’

  ‘Were you the only girl?’

  ‘No. I don’t think they’d have taken me if I was. Mrs Bailey was there too. Said it was because she wouldn’t trust Ringer not to stop at every pub they came to. But she loves being in the saddle, just like him. It helped that I looked like a boy though.’

  She said it as though it was no big thing at all for a girl to join a man’s world, as if it had never occurred to her that a girl should spend her life only in kitchens, or with her children on her knee. Just as it never seemed to have occurred to Mum, he thought, or Blue and Mah McAlpine with their biscuit factory.

  ‘So Nancy of the Overflow was allowed to go to Queensland droving?’

  ‘Yep. But they knew where I was. All the time. Used up most of my wages sending them all those telegrams.’

  ‘Would you go again?’

  ‘No. I’m only leaving now because Ben needs me.’

  He looked at her as she watched the dark water. Nancy’s voice almost seemed the whisper of the river. ‘I realised on the way back home that it was, well, home. Nancy of the Overflow. It’s who I am. But I had to go to Queensland to find out. What about you? Who are you?’

  ‘Me?’ He watched the pelican, gliding across the light. The mother swan ducked her head under the water, looking for food. One of the cygnets copied her. ‘I go back to school at the end of the hols.’

  He was embarrassed, a schoolboy compared to a girl who had done so much. ‘Four more years, if I want to go to university. Don’t know after that. Maybe Hawkesbury Agricultural College, or even Christchurch in New Zealand. Army or air force if we haven’t won the war by the time I’m twenty-one.’ He met her eyes. Dark eyes, like the sky. ‘Then back here. No matter what.’

  She nodded. He realised with a shock that he didn’t have to say any more. Never, perhaps, would need to say more about the heart of his life to this girl, or the woman she’d become.

  They watched the swans, ducking in the shallows. The pelican hunched by the reeds. It seemed to be asleep. Music swam around them, a waltz now, played on the piano in the shearers’ quarters, not the gramophone. Someone who played well.

  ‘That’s Mum,’ said Nancy. ‘She tried to teach me.’

  ‘Not interested?’

  ‘A singsong is all right for a wet afternoon.’ She laughed. ‘Poor Mum. She tries so hard with me. Like this dress.’

  ‘It’s pretty awful,’ he said frankly.

  ‘I know. But none of my old ones fit and there was nothing ready-made in Gibber’s Creek that would do, not with all the shortages. Mum went on like it was her fault — she should have stocked up on dresses for her growing daughter before the shops emptied. So she tried to fix up one of hers for me.’

  ‘And her shoes too?’

  The grin was wicked. ‘How did you guess? But my moleskins are pretty tatty after a year away. Even my boots are falling to pieces.’

  ‘How will you manage in Malaya?’ From all he’d heard society there was more formal even than in Sydney.

  ‘Doesn’t matter how I look on the ship — it’s a cargo boat anyway, not a passenger liner, so there’s no dressing for dinner. Moira has a dressmaker who’ll run some things up for me. I’ll come back looking like Princess Elizabeth, except for the gravy stains.’ Another glance at him. ‘Mess likes me.’

 
‘So do I.’ He’d said it before he knew what he was going to say.

  She just nodded again.

  ‘Will you write to me?’

  ‘Of course. I’ll be back by the end of March. When are your next holidays?’

  He realised with relief that she seemed to be taking it for granted they would meet again as soon as possible.

  ‘Easter.’ That seemed an eternity away. ‘Would your parents mind if I rode over to Overflow before you go?’

  ‘They’d be ecstatic. ’Specially Mum. A boy coming to call would be the first properly daughterly thing I’ve ever done in my life.’ She flicked him a cheeky glance. ‘And you’re sober. Wear decent boots. And won’t boast to Mum that you can dock a hundred sheep an hour like poor Bluey Smith did when they brought me home.’

  He wanted to kiss her. Not, like Morrison’s sister, because she was a girl, but because she was Nancy. He wanted to breathe her in. He leant towards her, waiting to see if she drew back.

  Instead she leant to meet him.

  She tasted of lemonade and ginger sponge, of sunlight and water and the bush. A lifetime later he pulled back. If they kissed again, they would keep going.

  Not here. Not yet.

  ‘We’d better get back.’

  She let him help her to her feet. A girl who had ridden to Charters Towers and back didn’t need his hand. But it was what a man did for a woman and, besides, it meant his hand was in hers. He kept it there, as she looked at him, serious, in the soft gleam of distant light.

  ‘Can I tell you something? Something I’ve never told anyone. Will you keep it secret?’

  She liked him. She had to like him or she would never have asked him that. She might let a boy kiss her … and he’d punch anyone else who tried … but to tell him a secret … The wonder of it prickled through his skin. He wanted to stomp a dance of triumph all around her, sing till the birds woke up again. Instead he said, ‘Yes. Of course.’