The White Earth

by Andrew McGahan

  And one boot, William thought, understanding.

  His uncle was nodding. ‘The journal was enough to make an identification. The initials A.K. are carved into the cover. One other thing — the skull was smashed in. Kirchmeyer hadn’t just wandered off and died, he’d been killed. It was the blacks, of course. They weren’t stupid, they knew the white man was bad news. I suppose he came up here for the view, all alone, and they cut him down.’

  The old man pondered this a while.

  ‘Anyway, the agent buried the body, but kept the things he’d found and took them back to Heatherington. Years later, when Heatherington decided to build a House on his station, he chose this hill. Maybe he thought even a failed explorer deserved at least that much in his memory.’

  ‘So it’s true? His grave is under the House?’

  ‘Supposedly. No one really knows. The funny thing is, Heatherington didn’t name the station after Kirchmeyer, but after the Aboriginal tribe who killed him. Still, it’s hard to say who really won in the end. The Kuran people are long gone — shot, or killed by disease, or carted away. And Alfred — no one around here even remembers his name. Heatherington put up this statue, before the Whites took over, but it fell down years ago. Now there isn’t a single memorial to Kirchmeyer anywhere on the Downs. Not even a street named after him.’

  The old man was staring up at the House, the southern face of which was all in shadow.

  ‘The worst of it is, he was still one of the first people to cross this part of the country. He might have named a creek after himself, or a peak in the Hoop Mountains. If he’d got back alive, the names might have stuck and he’d be remembered. But when his journal was found, it’d been out in the weather so long that nothing in it was legible. So no one knows what he saw or discovered. An awful thing, that book upstairs.’

  William looked up to the dark windows of the red chamber. ‘Have those things always been in that room?’ he asked.

  ‘No. That was my idea. It seemed the decent thing to do. The Whites just kept them in a bag in a cupboard somewhere. I don’t know how they came to my father, but he left them to me in that chest. I’m probably the last man alive who knows the whole story.’

  ‘Is it a secret?’

  ‘It’s a lesson.’ The old man regarded William seriously. ‘Discovery isn’t enough. Doing something great isn’t enough. Someone has to know about it, for it to mean anything. Whatever you do in this world, you have to leave someone behind who remembers.’

  And contemplating this, William thought that he understood why his uncle had forgiven him so easily, and why their argument in the office had been forgotten.

  The old man was hunched low now, rolling the army cap between his fingers.

  ‘Was that his too?’ William asked.

  ‘No. This was my father’s.’

  ‘Was he in a war?’

  ‘It’s not from the army — it’s a police hat.’

  William studied the cap, and remembered the jacket he had pulled from the chest, reeking of mothballs.‘The police…’ he said, doubtfully.

  His uncle rubbed at the badge. ‘It’s from late last century. My father was in the police then, when he was young, long before he came to the station. It was only for a few years. But the police had different uniforms back then, that’s why it looks strange.’ The old man caught William eyeing the cap, and abruptly he reached out and placed it on his nephew’s head.‘You like it, do you?’

  William repositioned the hat, lifting the brim from his nose, and nodded.

  ‘Isn’t it too big for you?’

  ‘No.’ William discovered that he wanted to keep the cap. He felt that he’d earned it for having braved the locked doors and the empty hallway and the red room.‘No, it fits okay.’

  His uncle was smiling. ‘Well, it’s only rotting away up there. Keep it if you want. So long as it stays in the family.’ Then his face grew sober.‘But the guns …You stay away from them. If you want to play soldier, use a stick or something.’

  William nodded again, amenable to anything now.

  The old man lifted himself from the edge of the fountain, rubbing his back as if it was sore.‘Thanks again for the newsletters, Will. I mailed them all today.’ He glanced out at the afternoon one last time.‘Now we just have to wait a month, and see who turns up at the rally.’

  ‘Do we really get to go camping?’

  ‘That we do. Amongst other things.’

  The old man headed inside, but William hung back, sitting on the fountain. He took off the cap and examined it once more, frowning. A police hat. Studying the badge, he could make out the letters QMP embossed around a coat of arms. Did the P stand for Police? But there was nothing very interesting about the police. He decided he would wear it as an army cap, no matter what his uncle said. A captain’s hat. William settled it back firmly on his scalp. He liked the way it felt. The badge seemed to cast a glow of authority before it, the way the torch on a miner’s helmet casts light. He gazed out over the plains as if he commanded an army gathered there. Not that there had ever been anything like an army on the Kuran Plains, or any great battles, but he could always imagine.

  And his uncle liked him again.

  When William went to bed that night, he hung the cap on the bedpost. He would wear it all the time now, wherever he went. It was a sign of his uncle’s favour, it was good luck. He tossed and rolled for hours, reflecting on the day.

  He was hardly aware that his ear had started to ache again.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  IN THE HOOP MOUNTAINS THE SUMMER OF EARLY 1943 WAS HOT and dry. Creeks dwindled to dust, and even the rain forest took on a brittle tinge. It was bushfire season. John McIvor organised the mountain militia into a fire-fighting brigade, and for weeks on end they were kept busy, patrolling up and down the range, extinguishing small outbreaks. The whole time, John’s thoughts were filled exultantly with memories of the events at the water hole. He had claimed Harriet now, irrevocably. But far more, he had regained purpose to his life. To think, he had almost abandoned his dreams for Kuran Station. His childhood disappointments had blinded him. The Whites. His father. All along he should have realised that none of them mattered — only his profound link with the property itself.

  In the meantime the fire danger left him no moment of leisure to seek out Harriet again. Instead, late one searingly hot afternoon, as a blustery west wind was scorching across the hills, he received a visit from her father. John had set up camp that day on the western slopes of the range, not far, as it happened, from the borders of Kuran Station. He was resting his leg at the tents, his men fanned out through the scrub below, when he looked up to see Oliver approaching. John was surprised, for the sawmill owner rarely came up into the hills any more. But there were no greetings. Oliver was red-faced, breathless and furious. Harriet had broken down and told him the news just that morning.

  She was pregnant.

  In the first instant, John was actually thrilled. For what could be better than Harriet carrying his child? What could bind her closer to him? (And when he had climaxed into her, his skin still cold from the water, had he hoped for this?) But he understood a father’s feelings, and hastened to explain that, of course, he and Harriet fully intended to marry. And yet Oliver’s rage only grew. Marriage? To a timber-getter without prospects, without home or property? To a cripple? He would never allow it. Or was that why John had stolen Harriet away to a secret spot in the first place? To entrap her? And what was really happening here anyway? Was it her money he was after? Was he that sort of a man?

  John was stunned. I don’t need her money, he managed to get out.

  Fine, Oliver retorted, because he wouldn’t be getting any of it. From this moment on, he was banned from the Fisher household. And what was more, he could consider his employment terminated. Harriet would not be blackmailed. Pregnancies could be terminated too.

  It might have come to blows at that point, with the hot wind gusting through the trees around them. But th
ey were interrupted. Night was falling and the other men were returning to the camp. John and Oliver retreated from each other. Darkness arrived with its sudden mountain swiftness, and a carefully watched campfire was lit to prepare dinner. Silent and hostile, John and Oliver haunted opposite ends of the clearing while the rest of the men watched them warily. Then there was nothing to be done except go to sleep. But the tension remained, and the west wind blew on, spattering the ground with dead leaves from the trees, and filling the dark with dust and noise.

  John lay awake, brooding far into the night. Shocked as he was by Oliver’s reaction, he had no intention of heeding the instructions. The sawmill owner could dismiss him, sure enough, but that was nothing to do with Harriet. John would spirit her away and marry her before anyone could stop it. He’d find other work too. There was no shortage of work now, not with the war. Maybe he’d take Harriet as far as Brisbane. John had heard promising things about Brisbane. It had turned into a wild, overpopulated garrison town, stuffed with troops and transient workers and money. He and Harriet could disappear from her father’s eyes completely there, until the baby was born.

  But the indictments still burned. A cripple! And worse, the accusation that he was after Harriet for her money. That was beyond belief. Harriet’s wealth had never even entered his thoughts. And yet, perversely, now John did find himself thinking about money. He had so little, and if Oliver cut them off, then he and Harriet would be alone in the world. A vision came to him of the two of them in a few years time — living in a rented room in Brisbane, trying to raise their child on a labourer’s wages. He had no schooling, no qualifications. Even as a labourer, his leg would tell against him. Could Harriet live like that? Or would she begin to yearn for her luxurious house back in Powell? Would she look at her husband then with new, disappointed eyes?

  John’s imagination ran on horribly. It wasn’t just that he would have a family to support. How was he ever going to raise the sort of funds he would need to regain Kuran Station? He had decided that it must happen, but how was it to happen? He rolled back and forth, tortured. Could it actually be true? Had he been assuming, all along, that the wealth from the sawmills would be his to collect one day, through Harriet? That Oliver would welcome him as a son, and inevitably raise him into a partnership? Was that the reason he had fixed upon Harriet in the very beginning?

  He slept finally, but the doubts plagued his dreams, and so he was the first to wake in the camp. He realised at once that something wasn’t right. His watch told him it was nearly dawn, and yet there was a thick rolling blackness in the sky. The wind had risen to violent gusts that set the forest dancing. Was a storm coming? He climbed to his feet, sniffed the air for the heralding scent of rain. Instead he smelled burning. In an awful instant, he understood. There was no storm. The blackness above was smoke, underscored with red, and he heard now a deeper roar above the wind. He cried out and the other men started up from their beds in alarm, but it was already too late.

  The wall of fire came rushing up the hill. There was no time to do anything, no defence to be prepared, no line to be drawn and held. Men simply scattered as the flames bore down, the trees behind them exploding in fiery expectoration. The only safety lay on the far side of the ridge. John laboured upwards as best he could, his bad leg singing. Ash and flaming cinders rained down about him and smoke whipped along through the trees ahead, black and choking. He scrambled through tinder dry undergrowth, until suddenly he was out of the trees, running over grass and rock. Above him the ridge crested in a bald crown against a pale dawn sky. Turning on his heel, he looked back and beheld a terrible thing. The entire mountainside was aflame, but worse, in the gully below him, lost amid the smoke and raining debris, a single figure staggered.

  It was Oliver Fisher. He was grimed black with ash, and his hands were cupped over his eyes in a vain attempt to see as he coughed and retched. John yelled out, but his voice was tossed away by the wind. Smoke obscured Oliver for a moment, and then he was visible again, on his knees, his head turning blindly. John gauged the progress of the fire. Were there ten seconds before it swallowed them, were there thirty? Was there time to get down to Oliver, to drag him back up the slope? Could he even manage it, with his bad leg, and Oliver disorientated and perhaps unconscious by then?

  The instant of hesitation seemed to last forever. And then John saw a monster step out of the smoke. It was a tornado of flames, a giant eddy in the firestorm, crowned with the white-hot sparks of detonating leaves. The whirlwind howled, swayed this way and that in search of prey, and then curled gleefully to engulf Oliver where he crouched. John stayed stricken for one last second, long enough to see his employer rear up, a flailing, burning shape of arms and legs. Then the whole slope below was one torrent, gushing upwards. He fled. Fire licked his heels, singed the hair from the back of his head and set his shirt smouldering, but he dashed across the hilltop, leapt over a low cliff on the far side, and fell to the earth. A great sheet of solid flame streamed into the sky above him. It roared in frustration for a time, and then, deprived of fuel at last, it fluttered, wavered, and died.

  Two other men were lost that morning, besides Oliver.

  It was the beginning of the worst fire the mountains had seen in decades, and no one knew who or what had ignited it. Either way, it was only after another week of fire-fighting that John, still scorched and blackened, made his way down from the mountains and called on Harriet. Her father’s body had preceded him. There wasn’t much they could say to each other. John was exhausted, and Harriet was devastated. It meant that the two of them never discussed Harriet’s pregnancy. It was simply swept up in events, and accepted. Nor did John ever tell Harriet that he’d witnessed her father’s last moments, or that he and Oliver had argued so violently about her, only the night before.

  His own behaviour in that crucial moment, the hesitation between action and inaction, was something that John long refused to examine. It was only later that he would wonder if, underneath his horror of the fire, he had felt a surge of exultation when he’d seen Oliver trapped in that gully — an excited certainty that Oliver would die, and that with him every obstacle between himself and Harriet and her money would disappear. And later still would come a darker conviction. For the fire had in fact begun in the easternmost reaches of Kuran Station, before sweeping up into the mountains. And so John would return to the memory — the rushing flames, and a frenzied, burning figure — and savour it as a gift both precious and awesome. For his secret belief was that, in his hour of greatest need, the hills of his station had ignited by themselves that night, and so devoured his enemy.

  Within a month, John and Harriet were married. In accordance with Oliver’s will, his estate was split between his children — two-thirds to Matthew, one-third to Harriet. The money involved was something of a disappointment, however, especially to John. It turned out that Oliver had squandered much of his wealth on the stock market and at the racetrack. Still, John and Harriet began their married life in comfort at the Fisher residence, and John and Matthew took over management of the sawmills. Two years later, as the war drew to a close and the timber supply in the Hoops approached exhaustion, they decided to shut down the mills and sell off the equipment. They sold the Fisher family home too, and Oliver’s legacy was complete. John and Harriet’s share was no grand fortune, certainly not enough for John to consider buying Kuran Station. It was, however, enough to purchase a wheat farm on the Kuran Plains.

  At the age of thirty-one, thus, John McIvor finally became an independent landowner. The pride of it filled him to the brim. He had studied the available properties carefully, and chosen a six hundred and forty acre block, one square mile, consisting of the deepest and darkest black soil. It was not Kuran Station by any comparison — but the hill upon which the House sat was clearly visible, seven or eight miles away across the plains, and John knew that this was all the start he needed to reach it.

  He was a father now too, of course. Harriet had given birth to a hea
lthy, dark-haired girl, whom they named Ruth. And little Ruth was in Harriet’s arms when John and his family went to the Powell train station to greet Dudley, the soldier finally returning home from war.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  FOR WILLIAM, THE MONTH LEADING UP TO THE RALLY TOOK forever to pass. It was the biggest event the Australian Independence League had ever attempted, and his uncle seemed to have a thousand things to organise. There were marquees to be hired and erected on the site, portable toilets to be installed, cartons of toilet paper to be ordered, firewood to be cut and stockpiled, lighting and a public address system to be set up, and then an electric generator to power it all. Delivery trucks left great piles of gear at the House, or went directly up into the hills to the campground.

  Amidst all this excitement, William’s only concern was his ear. The ache was never acute, but it was ever present, a throb that seemed to penetrate deep within his skull. Finally he mentioned it to his mother. She had Dr Moffat’s prescription filled, and over the next ten days William swallowed antibiotics. The pain seemed to fade slightly, but to be honest, he wasn’t sure. Nevertheless, he told his mother that he felt better. Both she and the doctor had appeared to regard an earache as a minor annoyance, something that every child had to put up with, and he didn’t want to sound weak. Besides, it would be a disaster if the rally arrived and William was banished to his bedroom just because his ear was hurting.

  Meanwhile, through all the preparations, he’d quite forgotten that the great event wasn’t just a party, that it also had a serious purpose. One night, however, about a week before the big day, he was in the living room after dinner, curled up quietly on a chair while his mother watched a current affairs show. William was paying no attention, but then he overheard two familiar words. He looked up at the television. On the hazy screen he could see a man being interviewed in the studio. The man was answering a question, and the topic, it seemed, was Native Title.