To Love a Sunburnt Country

by Jackie French

  Overflow is your home. It is not mine. Please believe me that this is not because of anything in your heritage. I admire whatever ancestors made Nancy of the Overflow, and the man who I will always love, and my son, whose face I will see every day, for as long as I may live. If either of them had lived, I would have gone with them to their home and made it mine. But they’re gone and somehow I must live with that. I do not think I can do so at Overflow, or not yet.

  Goodbye, my dear, until we meet again. You have been closer to me than a sister, another mother to my son. Please do not ever blame yourself for his loss, as I try not to blame myself either. One day, perhaps, we might succeed.

  Give my love to your river and to your family, who are still mine, even if I can’t bear to meet them yet.

  With all my love, always,

  Moira

  MOURA, 26 JANUARY 1946

  MICHAEL

  Michael sat in the Moura kitchen, looked at the woman opposite him, knowing she was trying to help. Knowing too that she could never understand.

  Blue held up the teapot. ‘Tea? It’s stewed, not fresh, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Don’t think I’d recognise fresh tea if it bit me.’ He accepted a cup and a biscuit.

  ‘A new one of Mah’s. No sugar, and beef tallow instead of butter. The tallow makes them better keepers too. We’re hoping to get the factory back to domestic production by the end of the month.’

  He bit into the soft pillow of the biscuit, trying to guess its flavour.

  Blue grinned. ‘Prunes. But don’t tell anyone. We’re calling them “Luxury Fruit Rolls: a pudding in a biscuit”.’

  ‘You wanted to talk to me about Nancy?’

  Everyone wanted to talk to him about Nancy. His mother, her mother, her father, all trying to say without actually using the words that five years was a long time for two young people whose lives had diverged so much. That while of course everyone would be delighted if the girl who was now the sole heir to Overflow married the man who would inherit Drinkwater, he should not expect Nancy to feel the same, should not pressure her, should give her time to adjust, to know what she might want. Time to recover.

  Only Nancy’s grandmother had not tried to take him aside for a quick word, though she’d given him a hug and a kiss at the Christmas party. And now Blue had invited him over and he suspected it was not for a trial taste of Luxury Fruit Rolls.

  ‘Yes.’ Blue seemed to hunt for words already rehearsed. ‘You know she’s been very sick. Much, much sicker than Joseph. And the child …’

  He nodded to stop her talking more about the little boy. He didn’t have any way of even thinking about that.

  Nancy had been sent from Singapore to recuperate further in Darwin, where Kirsty had visited her. Kirsty had written to the assorted families. Nancy’s hands were still unable to hold a pen, she’d said. But she’d sent her love to everyone, naming them one by one, including Michael. But then she had sent love to a couple of school friends too, and the dogs, and her horse. She had also asked that no one meet her in Brisbane, or even Sydney.

  Michael knew that her mother, at least, wondered whether this meant she wanted to be home before she told them things they might not want to hear: that she had met a doctor, perhaps, in the hospital in Darwin, and was going to marry him and live far from Overflow. Perhaps even that she felt she could never marry now, after what she had seen or perhaps had had done to her in the prison camp.

  ‘Joseph has nightmares,’ Blue said flatly. ‘They’re easing a bit now. He’s going to be fine. But … it might be worse for a woman. Joseph says many of the men will never recover. Others will bury it so deep they won’t know what frightens them.’

  ‘You want me to go gently with Nancy?’

  ‘I … we … want you to understand that she may never get over what has happened to her. Even once her body has recovered, her mind …’

  ‘She won’t be Nancy of the Overflow?’

  Blue said nothing.

  ‘How is Joseph? Really?’

  ‘He is home. Really home now. Not just in his own house. I … I’m not very good with words.’

  ‘And the bush has friends to meet him, and their kindly voices greet him,

  In the murmur of the river and the whisper of the stars.’

  ‘Banjo had the words, didn’t he? Though I think some of those are yours, not his. I suspect,’ Blue’s smile was a true one now, ‘every second, sleeping or waking, every step he takes, Joseph knows he’s home.’

  ‘It will be like that for Nancy too.’

  ‘Maybe. She … she did choose to leave, you know, for Charters Towers, then Malaya. Maybe for her …’ Again she floundered.

  ‘The roots of home don’t hold her close, like Joseph? They do. I’ve seen it. Felt it. Nancy will be all right, Blue. Thank you. But once she’s home again, she will be fine.’

  And she would be. She would belong to Overflow. The swans still nested down on the river, more and more of them each year. But would the girl who returned from war still want him? The swans and pelicans couldn’t tell him that.

  Blue nodded, her face still uncertain, and poured him another cup of tea. Michael took it.

  The beginning of the old poem came back to him. I had written him a letter …

  It was time he wrote a letter too.

  He looked at the paper on the desk in front of him, bare of words, then out the window. Cicadas yelled. Sheepdogs panted in the shade. Sheep clustered under the gum trees.

  Somewhere out there his parents were by the river with a picnic basket and an elephant, in what he suspected was their first day off since the war began, except when they’d gone down with food poisoning, and he’d seen the swan, and known Nancy was alive.

  Jim was at the factory, interviewing new employees, his uniform mothballed in a chest up in the attic with Michael’s.

  Their parents had accepted with what might even have been relief that neither of their sons planned to go to university or college. As Jim had said, it was time for real life now, old men and weary women, paddocks tired from war, welcoming back the young.

  Michael gazed at the paper again, as if words might have grown there by themselves. He knew no etiquette for what he had to write. Just put down the bedrock, he thought, like the stones of the land under its fuzz of green. Just tell the truth.

  Dear Nancy,

  It is strange to have an address at which to write to you after so long. I have been sitting here wondering how to say things, some words to hide behind in case you don’t feel as I do. But there should be no hiding now.

  There has never been anyone for me except you. I know that you will not be the girl who left here five years ago. I am not the same boy either. I feel guilty that my war has been an easy one and yours unimaginable. You have endured so much more than me. I don’t think the last five years have changed me, just made me more of who I was back then.

  The morning you left Overflow you told me: ‘We are birds, both of us, but we are rock too. I want to soar with you, and know the land below is us as well.’ I did not know how to reply to those words then. Now, if I ever get the chance, I do. I think, I hope, that you still are the person who said them, and who will want my answer.

  But if you are not — or if you are, but do not want to be that person with me — then please do not feel bound to me either by memory, or by my helping to manage Overflow as well as Drinkwater now.

  Both of us will survive and thrive if you decide your life is not with me as a husband or as a farm manager. It made sense to combine the shearing this year, especially now Jim is back. He is putting the factories into post-war production. Between the two of us we’re able to take much of the load from our parents and yours. He is well and happy, and engaged to a WAAF he met on the ship coming back.

  Joseph McAlpine is back too, and hoping to begin practising again soon.

  I have no words enough to tell you how sorry I am about the loss of Ben and Gavin, and what you have been through, but glad that y
ou are coming home to us, no matter what you choose after that.

  If I send you all my love, please don’t think I expect you to do the same. But still:

  All my love,

  Michael

  Chapter 62

  And he sees the vision splendid of the sunlit plains extended,

  And at night the wond’rous glory of the everlasting stars.

  From ‘Clancy of the Overflow’

  by Banjo Paterson, 1889

  SYDNEY, FEBRUARY 1946

  NANCY

  She dressed carefully, that last day: the cream linen dress with green edging Kirsty had bought her in Darwin, the one that the nurse with kind hands had taken in for her so it fit. Tan peep-toe shoes — she had to catch her breath after putting those on. Bending down still made her dizzy.

  She looked at the mirror in the hospital bathroom. Thin, but no longer gaunt. Short hair, growing back at last. She lifted the lipstick, a present from the American doctor who had done such magic for the ulcer on her leg, and who had produced from that miracle the Americans called a PX store a lipstick and powder for every woman in his care.

  She applied the lipstick carefully. This is for Moira, she thought.

  Moira’s letter was in her bag. Moira’s loss was like a cord cut from her heart. She had read the letter, reread it, cried over it a hundred times. Knew that what Moira had chosen was right, just as what she was going to do today was right for her too.

  The bag also contained a crumpled photograph of a Japanese girl that she had hidden from the ‘fumigators’ back in Singapore, a note from Nurse Rogers, back home in Albany, the whole town it seemed conspiring to fatten her up, and a slip of paper that had reached her in Darwin that said simply: Dear Miss Clancy, I saw your name in the shipping lists. Welcome home. Yours sincerely, Cyril Harding (Colonel)

  A Red Cross volunteer took her to Central Station, walking slowly, carrying the bag, ready to help her up onto the train. It was good to have help. The noise, the size of everything, the mass of people were bewildering. But her legs could have walked for miles.

  My last day, she thought. No more after this. Ever.

  The train chugged and muttered. She closed her eyes, not to sleep, but to remember her last train ride, fleeing through the jungles of Malaya, Gavin laughing as the girls held him. Her arms ached as well as her heart when she thought of Gavin. Her arms felt empty now.

  If she opened her eyes, perhaps they would be there: Gavin gurgling, Moira with her face concerned with appearances and her heart closed to everything but her husband and baby. It was almost as if there were two women, that one and the other she loved. But Moira had not really changed, there on the island. Hardship had simply stripped her down to the woman she had always been.

  Moira was right. She must remember the good of the past four years today, the love, the friendship. Gavin, laughing as she told him about the bunyip. No, not that. She almost sobbed aloud. That memory was like a bayonet, pain that stabbed, too much to bear. Just get through today, she told herself. That was what she had decided, way back in Darwin.

  Just get through the journey. Then get through today.

  She opened her eyes, but there were only strangers in the carriage. It was still hard to smile at strangers, after the years with just themselves, so close at the end that they were almost one person. Only me, she thought. How can I live with only me?

  The train stopped in a vast protest of brakes. Yass, and another woman in a Red Cross uniform who had obviously been told to look out for her, who bought her tea, which she drank gladly — was Mrs Hughendorn drinking tea now, with scones and her father’s plum jam perhaps? — and a rock cake, which she didn’t want but ate, because eating was what people expected her to do. She needed Mrs Hughendorn to help her eat it. Needed Nurse Rogers. Only today to get through …

  Chug a chugga chugga chug I want Moira I want Moira cannot bear it cannot bear it chugga chug …

  She grasped the window ledge and looked out. She knew the shape of the country now. There’d be water in that gully, where the hills creased. That was where the wind would meet itself, fragment and tear, roaring one way then another, shoving the clouds back and forth across the sky. Wallabies would gather after dusk.

  She tried to smell the air, to taste for rain or drought, but all she smelt was train smoke.

  She had waited five years for this. Suddenly it was too hard to wait this next half-hour. She sat back, trying to still her heart, telling herself that nothing could stop the train now, no invading enemy would pull her off. Her mind sang to the music of the train: I will be there, I will be there, I will be there, one more day to get through, Moira, Mrs Hughendorn, I need you now.

  Ten miles, three … The train should be slowing now. What if it didn’t stop at Gibber’s Creek at all, but went flowing on forever? In a world where small boys could be ripped away from life, anything could happen.

  This is the last day, she reminded herself. After this all the panics would be gone.

  The brakes screamed again. The land outside stopped bouncing past.

  ‘Gibber’s Creek! All out for Gibber’s Creek!’

  She couldn’t move. She had asked her family not to meet her in Sydney because she didn’t want a taste of home. She wanted the real thing. The song of cicadas, the taste of hot rock in the air, the faces of those she loved in the land she loved. All of it, together, not in bits and pieces. Everything, on this one last day. But now she needed someone to take her hand, and lead her back to it. Moira, she whispered. Mrs Hughendorn.

  A man’s voice said her name. ‘Nancy.’ He held out his hand.

  She took it, and there was Michael. Taller, broader shouldered, thinner faced. Not the same. Never the same, but still himself. The river changes every day but it is still the river, and he was Michael, and she was Nancy of the Overflow.

  Five years ago her life had changed its course, as if in flood, uncontrolled, impossible to stop. Now, suddenly, it was in its banks again. She knew where she was headed, just like the river.

  She would step from this train and the last day would be over. And the first one would begin.

  My children will be your children, she thought. My land yours, and your land mine. One day we will talk of these things, but there is no need today. Today I’m me, and you are you, the war is past and we have tomorrow and tomorrow, stretching before us like the plains.

  He said nothing, this new man who was still the one she knew, would always know, this man who was the land as she was too. He looked into her face, and nodded. He didn’t kiss her then, just took her bag from the luggage rack and put his other arm around her. He did not let go.

  They stepped from the train. Beyond the platform was what looked like the whole of Gibber’s Creek; a banner saying Welcome Home, Nancy and two small girls with bunches of bright flowers and a band. A band! The Gibber’s Creek Brass Band playing what was probably ‘Waltzing Matilda’.

  She shook in Michael’s arm. Too much. Her first breath was train smoke and soot; the second mothballs and dust.

  The third was home. The smell of dirt, of sheep, of kangaroos, the tang of river. She steadied.

  She wanted to cry. She wanted to stamp a dance of rage and joy, for what was lost, and what was still to come.

  Couldn’t. But something seemed to wriggle through the soles of her feet, up through her legs, twining about her heart, gathering her arms, the core of her being. Roots, she thought. They can grow again now.

  She glanced up, knowing what she would see. The heron, the traveller, the bird of here and far-off Malaya too, winging below puff-white clouds across the town towards the river. Gavin, she thought. For the first time she could think his name without agony so great it turned to blackness.

  She would never leave this land again. Her life would be bounded by Overflow and Gibber’s Creek, and the country in between: Drinkwater and the billabongs, the brown hills and the ridges. Only by staying here — knowing she was staying, would never leave, could never leave
— would she be healed. Knowing that every breath she took would be warmed by this soil, the breath of a hundred thousand trees to give her life too.

  The land would feed her body, feed her life. And she would give it love, and children, who might wander the world, free, because their mother was anchored here.

  She looked along the platform. There was Gran — so small, too small, how she had shrunk the last few years — with Michael’s parents, and Mum and Dad a little way in front of them, strangely hesitant, as if this meant so much that they too knew not quite what to do.

  She had no words yet, not for Michael, nor for her family. Her father’s lips twisted like he had a toothache, and she knew he could not speak. She saw her mother’s face, small, so small, and knew her mother had no words either.

  So Nancy had to find some. She broke from Michael’s arm, keeping only her hand in his. She said, ‘I’m sorry, Mum.’

  What else was there to say? For she had failed: lost Ben, Gavin. Lost them both.

  Her mother’s face looked like it might shatter. ‘No. I’m sorry. We should never — but you’re home,’ she whispered. ‘That … that is everything.’

  Her father choked something unintelligible and reached for her, and suddenly they were all hugging, Dad and Mum and Michael, every person crying and somewhere children singing and the band still playing even as tears dripped into the tuba player’s beard and she knew that the band played for all that had been lost and won these last years. The flowers, the banner and the music were for more than her.

  Only Gran stood back. Smaller, darker than she remembered, but the same hat, the white straw with the cherries, the perfectly ironed white dress that she wore defiantly as though to emphasise her black skin.

  As the hug slowly broke into separate people, Gran stepped forwards, looked at her, then looked at Michael, his arm around her shoulders, hers about his waist. (How had he grown so tall? So solid? My rock, she thought. My eagle.)