To Love a Sunburnt Country

by Jackie French

  ‘I want to tell you about the letter,’ she said.

  For a moment he didn’t know what she meant, then realised. The letter. The one in the poem by Banjo Paterson. I had written him a letter …

  ‘The one your grandfather never got because he’d gone to Queensland droving?’

  ‘And we don’t know where he are. But Granddad did get it. They kept it at Overflow for him.’ She took a breath of river air, glanced for the swans: they had vanished, realising at last that it wasn’t day.

  ‘The letter said, Don’t do it, my friend.’ Her voice was obviously a quote, from something read a hundred times. ‘Don’t throw your life away on a native girl. Come and stay with me in Sydney and I’ll guarantee you’ll meet girls you can take home to your family with pride.’

  ‘But he didn’t,’ said Michael.

  ‘No. He’d married Gran before the letter arrived, and they went droving and Dad was born in a camp up by the Condamine. Then years later my great-grandfather died and he’d left Overflow to Granddad anyway, even though they’d never even spoken again. Maybe he forgave him for marrying Gran. Maybe he never got round to changing his will. Granddad never knew. Dad had bought his own place next to the Sampsons’ by then, but after Great-Granddad died we all moved to the main homestead. Mum told me last year that Granddad had told her he never regretted it,’ she added softly. ‘Said riding with Gran was like being an eagle, flying across the plains. Said Gran was the land, the sky and the rain to him, all the years that they were married.’

  Michael thought of the dark-skinned elderly woman he’d last seen helping Mrs Mutton mix the punch. Nancy’s grandmother must have been decades younger than her husband. Had she regretted marrying a man so much older, leaving her so long a widow? He didn’t think so. He suspected that Nancy’s mother had no regrets about marrying a half-caste either, that in telling her daughter of her father-in-law’s happiness she was talking about her own fulfilment too, even if so much was closed to her children because of the colour of their skin.

  He reached out, and touched Nancy’s cheek. No, he thought. He was wrong. Nothing — not even the touch of the tarbrush — would stop Nancy of the Overflow from doing what she wanted, what she felt was good.

  Nothing at all.

  The daylight was seeping from the world. Michael scrambled to his feet, stiff. The river still flowed. But Nancy was gone.

  They’d had the New Year picnic, too crowded with kids and gossips and friends and relatives to slip away together; two half-days together after that, at Overflow. Dinner with her family, her mother playing Bach on the piano afterwards, and then a family game of Scrabble. Nancy’s gran’s eyes on him, watchful, almost amused; her father judging him and, he hoped, approving.

  And then that hour at dawn the next day, the only time they’d had alone, sitting together in green shadows as the water spilled across the rock, before her parents woke. Had she meant what she said then?

  Her words had moved him so much he hadn’t known what to say. He’d thought of a hundred things since then, but you couldn’t put something like that in letters. They had walked back to breakfast, the bustle of loading her haversack into the car — no neat leather suitcase for Nancy of the Overflow. He’d said goodbye to her on the station with the rest of her family, had kissed her cheek, in front of her aunt and her grandmother and half the district, and felt her skin on his lips for days after. It had faded at last, but not the memory.

  She had written, as she had promised. He’d written back. Letters that anyone could read, if they’d wanted to, with little that was personal in them, except I miss you and I hope you will be home soon.

  Had Nancy really meant what she’d said that last morning? Was it as important as he thought? More even than saying ‘I love you’ which neither had yet, even in the letters.

  She had not been home by Easter, nor had the situation in Malaya been quite what she had expected. Moira was worried for her husband, but not in pieces, or at least those pieces had come together to competently arrange new clothes for her sister-in-law and suitable amusements — picnics, dances, tennis parties, even driving lessons with the young officer she’d met at one of the picnics.

  Moira was also pregnant, which was possibly an unexpressed reason Ben had wanted his sister to come to Malaya to help her pack and travel, with the nearest white neighbour an hour’s drive away. But the pregnancy had not been easy. The travel plans had been delayed, and then delayed again. The baby had been born three weeks early, with Moira bedridden at times, and for all of the last weeks of her pregnancy.

  Nancy had written of longing for home; that she missed him, and the river, and the horses, though she had never quite said she missed them in that order, of her disappointment as month after month dragged by and Moira’s condition remained too uncertain to travel. But she had seemed to enjoy herself too, with the parties and picnics when Moira had felt up to it, or even by herself, chaperoned by the Commissioner’s wife.

  Why did no one ever tell me clothes could be fun?! she’d written in one of the early letters. This tiny little Chinese lady in the village makes them. I have an evening gown of beaded silk, pale blue. Wait till you see it! I have even learnt to walk in high heels. Moira lent me her lipstick for the party last night. Mum would have a fit if she knew I was wearing lipstick.

  He had wanted desperately to see her in anything; had been reassured too, at some deep level, that the harum-scarum girl was learning to dress well, to hold her own in polite society. He had counted out the months of pregnancy, added one more, and tried to wait till then.

  But even after the baby’s birth he still hadn’t seen the evening dress, nor the blue spotted voile, whatever that might be. Blue because Moira says my skin is too tanned to wear white. She makes me wear a hat with a veil whenever we go out, and my arms covered. My tan is fading, fast. You can’t even see any freckles!

  The premature baby was even more fragile than his mother. A boy, Gavin. With the tiniest hands you ever saw, said Nancy in her letter. We were so worried at first, but he is feeding well now. We should be able to travel in another month or two, I hope.

  But in another two months the danger from German U-boats and destroyers was greater. Moira had declared that it was safer to keep her baby son in well-defended Malaya than risk German torpedoes. And Nancy, it seemed, had felt that she needed to stay with them, despite the longing in each letter to him, and he suspected to home too.

  It had been a strange year. A waiting year. Waiting for newspapers, the lists of dead or wounded, the campaign maps; waiting for the news on the wireless after prep, the boys crowded into the housemaster’s living room. Waiting, waiting, waiting, while the war was lived by others, beyond his school grounds.

  More Australian troops were sent to Malaya in February, to bolster defences there. Michael didn’t know whether to be relieved about that or worried that it was necessary, with Nancy not yet home.

  That was the month Banjo Paterson died, the ‘poet of the bush’ who had made her grandfather a legend, had played a part, perhaps, in sending Clancy droving up north with his wife, away from disapproving tongues and faces — and letters.

  Michael felt strangely bereft by the old man’s death. The poet had been there for so much of his family’s history, creating the poem and song ‘Waltzing Matilda’, inspired by the death of his grandfather in the billabong, watched by a twelve-year-old girl who was now his mother. The man who had heard the story of the Man from Snowy River’s exploits, had written the words that had inspired Flinty Mack on the ride where she had helped capture Snow King, sire of the winner of the Caulfield Cup; who had perhaps inspired Flinty to write the books for which she was now almost as famous as the poet. The man who had made Nancy’s grandfather famous.

  And he was gone, an article in the newspaper, read after prep, with other boys around him, far from the bush and its folk that Paterson had celebrated. An era seemed to have vanished with him.

  Australians, including perhaps his bro
ther, had taken Tobruk in North Africa and twenty-seven thousand Italian prisoners of war too, but German Field Marshal Rommel was on the attack again.

  The year had worn on. Telephone operators were instructed to say ‘V for Victory’ as they connected calls, but the order was withdrawn after too much stumbling and mumbling. Blue and Mah McAlpine’s factory started baking biscuits for army rations, instead of their famous ‘squished fly’ Empire Rich Teas. Andy McAlpine was elected Captain of the Gibber’s Creek Volunteer Defence Corps, as well as of the bushfire brigade, the same men being in each.

  Prime Minister Menzies had lost the support of his party and resigned from the leadership after his return from a four-month overseas trip during which he had presented the case to the British War Office for greater forces to defend Australia, not just the Motherland. Arthur Fadden was elected Prime Minister, but he also resigned after only a month. Labor leader John Curtin took over. Michael’s parents seemed pleased about this political outcome. ‘A hard worker’ was Dad’s verdict, one of his highest compliments to any man.

  Letters. Letters, letters and waiting. He wrote his letters after prep at school, the weekly letter to his parents and the twice-weekly letter to Nancy, sitting at the table in the library, where anyone could look over his shoulder and read what he was writing. Trying to hide away to write was impossible, would draw attention even more to anything he wanted to keep private.

  He imagined Nancy writing to him on a dark wooden desk in Ben’s study, on thick cream notepaper, her writing curiously bland and neat, he supposed a product of her mother’s drilling, the teacher who’d have insisted on copybook after copybook until each letter was an exact duplicate of what an educated hand should be. Each one began Dear Michael, and he tried to tell himself the ‘dear’ meant exactly that. Each was signed Yours always which was how he signed his too, both carefully avoiding the word ‘love’.

  She missed him, she told him. But as Gavin grew older and stronger and Moira recovered, she also described a dinner party and a friendly lieutenant who’d taken Moira and herself on a picnic and given her driving lessons. She seemed unaware that Michael might be jealous. Perhaps because he had no reason to be.

  But she was far away, beautiful, in her new clothes in a social life far removed from his schoolroom, separated from him by an ocean and German ships, guns and torpedoes. Had he misunderstood what she had told him, on that morning at Overflow? Had she changed her mind now that she had seen sophisticates like the lieutenant?

  He had so little to tell her in exchange. What would Nancy of the Overflow want to know about his life at school, afternoon prep and evening chapel, rowing or rugby practice and swotting for exams, where afternoon cadet practice and weekend cadet camps were as close as he got to real life and the war?

  He told her instead of his weekends and holidays at home, that there were more pelicans on the river, but he hadn’t seen the black swans again. Told her about the last round-up, getting the scrub bull that had been breaking down the fences, how he and Andy McAlpine had potted over two hundred rabbits in a night. Told her the gossip from his mother’s letters to which Dad contributed a weekly PS — how two of the stockmen had joined the air force, how the air force had refused to accept Kirsty McAlpine as a pilot for the second time, despite all her prizes and experience.

  The British government might allow women pilots to ferry aircraft from the factory to the airbases, but the Australian authorities wouldn’t even let women do that, not even one who had flown her own plane across Southeast Asia from Europe and had paddock-bashed her way around Australia more times than she could count.

  He told her how Kirsty had put her plane in a shed for the duration, a lightweight racing aircraft, like its owner deemed unsuitable for war.

  With every letter from the world outside, he felt more and more a schoolboy, while the men she mixed with prepared for war. But he didn’t tell her this. Didn’t tell her either how the day Jim had left, his embarkation leave over, his unknown destination probably the Middle East, his mother had saddled up Lady Grey and ridden down the road. Michael had been given special permission from school to be there for his brother’s final leave; also, he now realised, simply to be there for his parents when the house was empty of Jim’s voice.

  He had mounted Billy Buttons as his mother rode down the drive, followed her horse’s tracks in the dirt, keeping well behind. She had gone to a bend in the river beyond the Drinkwater boundaries. He’d left Billy tethered, had walked towards her, then stopped when he heard the howling.

  For a moment he thought it was a dingo, then realised it was Matilda. Mum never cried — never — not even when his father had had his stroke. Especially then, perhaps.

  He thought maybe she wasn’t crying now. The noise was grief, pure and artless, the lament of ewes when their lambs were taken to the slaughter, as if they knew the abattoir they’d never seen would turn their babies to chops.

  He couldn’t go to her. She had ridden this far to be private and alone. He must allow her that.

  And slowly the sounds stopped. There was silence, and then the slow clop of Lady Grey coming back.

  He met her on the road. He saw in her face that she knew he had followed her, knew he had heard. She reached out a hand. He urged Billy Buttons over, held her hand for a long minute. They didn’t speak till they were almost at the homestead, when she said, ‘Don’t tell your father. Or Jim.’

  And he’d said, ‘No.’

  He didn’t tell his father. But he would tell Nancy when he saw her again.

  But when was when? It had been simple when she’d left. But every month that passed now made the passage from Malaya to Australia more dangerous. Malaya was defended by its army and air-force units, by the strength of Singapore. The seas were not. Until war with Japan was a reality — if it ever was — he’d reassured himself that perhaps it really was safer for Nancy and her brother’s little family to stay in Malaya, as her sister-in-law wished, and not venture home.

  A week ago the government had finally released the news that the HMAS Sydney had been sunk by a German raider disguised as a Dutch merchant ship off the coast of Western Australia, with the loss of all six hundred and forty-five of her crew. The HSK Kormoran had been crippled in the battle, but almost all her crew survived to reach the Australian coast.

  And then the news on the radio this morning. Malaya was not safe now. Had anyone in Australia dreamt of news like this morning’s? Not just the Japanese attack on Malaya, not just the final declaration of war, but worse, much worse, the grim announcer’s words of devastation by the Japanese far across the world. All around the earth today people would be trying to cope with what the last twenty-four hours might mean.

  And like him, perhaps, each would be wondering what the affairs of the world would mean to those they loved.

  Was Nancy all right? He bit his lip. Tucked away on the plantation, with most of the white men gone, did she even know of the disasters that had struck across the world last night?

  He was afraid for her, so afraid he could not even speak of it to his parents at breakfast; nor would he be able to speak of his fear to hers when they came to the Christmas party his mother had insisted still go on however disastrous the news.

  Or would her parents not come to Drinkwater this year? Because if … something … happened to Ben or to Nancy … If … something … had happened last night, might happen tomorrow or today …

  He could not allow himself to even think the words. She had to be all right. And now, at least, one thing was clear.

  Nancy must come home. Now.

  Chapter 6

  Gibber’s Creek Gazette, 9 December 1941

  Our First War Aim is to Win the War

  Councillor Bullant’s entry has won the ‘new slogan’ competition for the Gibber’s Creek Gazette. From now until the end of the war Councillor Bullant’s words will be below our masthead: Our First War Aim is to Win the War.

  Other contributions included ‘All In to Win
the War’ by Councillor Horace Ellis, and ‘Save Australia!’ by Alice McAlpine, aged five and a half, daughter of Mr Andrew McAlpine, manager of Drinkwater Station, and Mrs McAlpine, co-proprietor of the Empire Biscuit Factory.

  MALAYA, 9 DECEMBER 1941

  NANCY

  The heat grew as the day progressed. So did the smuts. Gavin subsided into sleep, his eyes smudged with tiredness and overexcitement, stretched across the laps of the girls, Arleen and Irene. Nancy was not sure which was which, and they seemed to answer to either.

  Mrs Armitage nodded into sleep too, her curiosity sated. Nancy wondered if it would have been ‘good form’ to have given Michael’s pedigree, hinted at his family’s wealth and connections. No, probably not; nor did she want to. Michael was private, not discussed with Moira or even Ben, though they knew about the letters between them, and Mum would have written to Ben, telling him that the Drinkwater heir had ridden over to their place, stayed the night before his sister left and come to the station to wave her off.

  Nor was she even sure if Michael was ‘hers’; if he ever had been. One kiss, she thought, if you didn’t count the kiss on the cheek goodbye, in front of everyone on the platform, Mum already in the train to accompany her to Sydney.

  His visit to Overflow had been crammed with packing, and a brush fire in the house paddock had taken away even the chance of a quiet walk together in the dusk. By the time it was out they all were grubby, tired and hungry and had to scrub off the grime before the roast chicken farewell dinner Gran had made, the evening of piano playing and Scrabble. She had stayed awake too long regretting their lost walk and was still asleep when a handful of pebbles thrown at her window woke her.

  She had peered through the window, glad that she hadn’t taken her nightdresses droving, that for the first time she was wearing something that wasn’t either far too big or tatty, even if it did have the rosebuds and lace Mum considered suitable for her daughter. ‘Michael?’