The Dickens Boy

by Tom Keneally

  ‘They are enchanted by wool, our hosts,’ Maurice remarked to me as we walked in moonstruck dust as soft as talcum.

  ‘They speak well of it,’ I agreed.

  ‘I am not so certain as they are that I want to give my life to it. I like Melbourne. I like Sydney, at least from what I have read of it. Adelaide seems too colonial altogether. But I fear I’m an urbanite. Do you despise me for that, Plorn?’

  ‘I’ve lived in cities. In fact, the closest I’ve been to any pastoral project is around Rochester and the Medway River. And a farming school my guvnor sent me to. To me, all this . . .’ I said, making an encompassing gesture. ‘To me, it is all astonishing. And such interesting men.’

  Maurice laughed. ‘Thank God they didn’t get onto the topic of cross-breeding and the benefits of Border Leicester rams! What they did not tell you – though Willy did broach it – is that their wonder and poetic vision is as much subject to the cruel intrusion of vulgar cash as any merchant house in London or Melbourne. You can be sure that even the Bonney brothers are in debt to somebody, whether it be a bank or a stock and station agent. Even to my uncle. It is the suited men in towns and cities who would not know a Suffolk Downs or Dorset if it shat on their boots, who end up singing the alleluias of the wool business.’

  ‘What would you do if you left your uncle’s business?’ I asked.

  He paused for a while and then said, ‘Look, Dickens . . . Plorn . . . that has been on my mind for the whole journey. It is why I chose to bring the dray rather than leave the Momba goods order to the usual drayman. The truth is I yearn for ink! I would like to be at the least a newspaper hack. I would write for any liberal-minded journal in any country town in the colonies. My politics tend to the liberal – my uncle would call it radical – side. I have written local articles under the penname Juventas and I would not trouble you with them. But . . . I have a novel too. All written, though only a quarter or so viable. I would be so honoured if you read it. If you halfway approved of it, I might then have the temerity to send it to your father’s journal, All the Year Round. It would be wonderful to be published in the same magazine that, to its eternal glory, published the instalments of Collins’ The Woman in White, and your father’s The Signalman.’

  I thought of Wilkie Collins with his pixie-like face and full-blown whiskers. He’d long been my father’s kindred soul on rambles, and they were all the time doing plays together. I paused, in something of a familiar panic, not knowing what to say. Maurice had done me the favour of assuming that I had a fragment of my father’s literary discrimination in me. I had none. Alfred and I were notoriously backward readers, let alone writers – though we could manage letters. I was framing what to tell him, when I realised this young man, who could drive a confident wagon into the hinterland, was weeping.

  ‘I’m sorry. I want to get away from my uncle . . . I shouldn’t have presumed though,’ he said, after gathering his emotions a little. ‘It’s not a simple matter. I don’t like the stock and station business. Wait there if you will, Plorn.’

  He vanished into the store, but was back quickly holding bundles of paper tied with red tape. He presented them to me as if giving up something sacred, tears still in his eyes and a pleading look.

  ‘You hold my soul,’ he told me.

  My hands, holding the pages, had an impulse to let go and hand them back.

  But who can hand a man his soul back?

  6

  The first Sabbath of my education in the fleece industry was the next day, and the Bonneys, being the sons of a parson, observed it, but without fanaticism. By the fire site in the midst of the drovers’ huts, Edward Bonney read a brief service from the Book of Common Prayer. As he did, I noticed the young Aboriginal boundary rider who had taken Coutts from me when I first arrived stood nearby frowning. Down the track a little, five Papists, including Tom Larkin, had gathered to recite their Rosary.

  All apart from the native women were males in this enormous acreage, and that suited me fairly well at nearly seventeen, when the idea of a future beloved, a woman of vapour, had certainly arisen in me but with no urgency to see her in the flesh. I had decided that women in the flesh were a challenge to the callow, whether they represented an uncomplaining wistfulness like Mama, a sturdy and overriding competence like Aunt Georgie, or a jovial irreverence like my clever sister Kate. Papa had nicknamed Katie ‘Lucifer Box’ for her capacity to flare, but she had married Wilkie Collins’ sickly brother, Charlie, a fellow who seemed to have no fire at all.

  As the service continued, I thought fretfully of the pages Maurice had thrust on me. I was pleased he was not at the service, and in a little while he would be going back to town, hopefully not to appear again to hear my verdict – I was incapable of aiding his ambition. I supposed I could tell him to send the pages to my eldest brother Charley at All the Year Round. The risk was that the guvnor might see them since he had an apartment in the magazine building in Wellington Street where he often stayed during the week. But he would probably be too busy with more eminent pieces to hear about Maurice’s item unless it was very good, in which case my repute would shine a little.

  Forcing myself back to the present, I looked at the worshippers about me, who were so sun-leathered that I had to judge their age chiefly by the colour of their hair and beards. Some would head off tomorrow with their kelpie sheepdogs to spend a week patrolling the boundaries of some huge paddock as far across as Boulogne from London.

  Many of these vast half-desert pastures were also inhabited by solitary hutkeepers. And in the really vast paddocks there might be two men living in a shanty keeping an eye on the stock, rabbits, the carnivorous intrusion of dingoes, the condition of wells and fences and all other matters. It was apparently important to visit these men, since sometimes their isolation bred an oddity of soul.

  After the service and morning tea, Frederic Bonney asked me would I care to visit the Paakantji camp with him and help him with his photographic equipment.

  Yandi was the name of the young Aboriginal man with brooding eyes who’d attended the service. When we arrived, he was waiting by the room in which Frederic Bonney kept his photographic equipment.

  Frederic introduced us and spoke to him very casually in the Paakantji tongue, as if this were a daily exercise. The upshot was that Yandi waited in the shade while Frederic and I went into the darkly curtained room, which had just enough light for us to see each other.

  ‘I make my own plates for now,’ he told me. ‘It gives me great satisfaction. They say in America they have ready-made dry plates, but one feels closer to whatever image ends up on them if you make them yourself. It will take me a few minutes to prepare them.’

  ‘Yandi would make a fine picture,’ I suggested.

  He smiled warmly, as if I had complimented a relative. ‘Yes. He can be easily distracted though. I always send him out with older men, since he has a tendency to dream off. He’s a fair enough horseman. He’s also an artist. I gave him a copy of the Illustrated Melbourne Post and some pencils and he was away, sketching exactly, and handling light and shade. I pay him for his drawings which allows him to buy tobacco for the older men and thus be a hero . . .’

  Frederic moved to a window and adjusted its black curtain to exclude some light so it was all at once hot and dim in the room. Now he put on cloth gloves, cleaned off a glass plate and very deftly poured some brown chemical on it, judging the amount expertly and pouring excess chemical from the plate back into the bottle.

  ‘The brown fluid is collodion,’ he told me as we watched it dry on the glass. He then put the glass plate into a dish he had filled with another fluid, murmuring that it was ‘silver nitrate’.

  I looked on as Frederic continued his sorcery, explaining, ‘One can’t do this too long before one goes out to make the picture. If you let the plate sit too long it won’t achieve the effect.’

  ‘How did you learn all this, Mr Bonney?’ I asked.

  ‘Please, since I call you Plorn, you could c
all me Fred.’

  ‘Are you sure, sir?’

  ‘Certainly. It is the manner of the country. But still, to answer your question, I learned from manuals and trial and error. And – I must admit, a travelling photographer from Sydney who came out photographing homesteads. But otherwise I never had a master.’

  He waited some minutes, timing the process with his dimly perceived watch until I wondered whether, if I spoke, it would interfere with the alchemy. At last he said it was time. He extracted the plate and directed me to a wooden rectangular box into which he locked the plate away from light. Then he went to the camera apparatus and slid this box into a slot in it. ‘Safe now,’ he said and pulled the curtains open and then wrapped the black cloak of the camera cloths around him. Before I could get used to how elfin he looked in this posture, he emerged and asked me to carry the tripod. He then called Yandi in to fetch and transport the camera box. Yandi picked it up with a broad, worried smile.

  ‘I believe, Yandi, you’re an artist,’ I said to him.

  ‘Say “sketcher”,’ Mr Bonney advised me in a whisper.

  ‘You sketch, Yandi.’

  Yandi’s smile increased in breadth. ‘Too right. I’m bonza sketcher, mister.’

  ‘The Paakantji don’t waste much time on definite or indefinite articles, or tenses,’ Frederic confided in me. ‘Wise of them.’

  ‘I’d like to see some of your work,’ I said to Yandi, more for the sake of sociability than out of desire.

  The three of us set out in the spirit of perfect fraternity Fred had casually set for this small adventure. I inhaled the ancient dust – a profound, sombre smell with an overtone of peppery eucalyptus.

  The native houses were well made of a frame of hardwood boughs and shaggy accumulations of branches. Four of the older native women seated in front of them watched us arrive and help Fred set up his camera. Some men who’d been kicking a makeshift animal-skin ball in the air saw our arrival and gathered in to observe. The older men with their full grey beards also joined us. ‘Picture eh, Mr Bonney?’ one of them called, and the older women shrilled.

  ‘Cultay, could I introduce you to young Mr Dickens here?’ Fred said to one of the older full-bearded men.

  The man extended a mahogany hand, which I shook in the spirit of the equality Fred was keen to impose on us citizens of Momba.

  ‘Mr Cultay is my source on all important matters concerning the darks.’

  As Fred helped Yandi set the shuttered machine on top of its tripod, the Paakantji people took up positions very quickly, staring in all that vastness at the dark circle of the camera’s barrel-eye, even though Fred was still moving it about, finding proper ground for the whole rite of photography. When he’d managed that, I stood slightly behind him as he attached the black cloth to the frame of the machine and disappeared beneath it.

  A few moments later he emerged to order everyone closer together. ‘Shoulder to shoulder, that’s right,’ he said, and ‘Betty, closer in to Wonga, please.’ He also gave them some instructions in their own language. He was a serious practitioner, who could not have taken greater trouble with a set of important Londoners.

  At one stage he paused in his work to ask about a particular man and woman he didn’t recognise who’d appeared and seemed ambitious to be in the photograph, finding out they were cousins from a station northwards called Budda.

  ‘They love to visit each other,’ he told me.

  After Fred made a number of further darts into and out of the dark cloth to adjust the lens and check on how things looked, he cried, ‘Are you all ready?’

  The Paakantji assented with a roar. Fred then removed a cover from the lens, and – coached to match his gesture – the subjects all stood still, those unbreathing, antique faces. It was as if even the desert oaks behind the native huts seemed to hold their breath, waiting out the necessary time for the light of the day to inscribe their images on Fred’s glass plate. I had no need to, but I held my breath anyhow, and was beginning to find it a test when Fred placed the cap back on the lens.

  ‘Thank you all so much,’ he called to great laughter and pride amongst the Paakantji.

  By the afternoon, Maurice McArden had readied his sturdy horses to take the dray back to Wilcannia. It would be a lonely ride, but as he said goodbye to the Bonney brothers he showed no dread of it. Before he departed he asked me if I would walk him back to the store. As we neared the horses, Willy Suttor emerged from his residence at the back of the store to bid Maurice goodbye.

  ‘Plorn,’ Maurice told me in a hurry, ‘forgive me for last night and pushing the pages on you.’

  For a moment I thought he was going to ask for the bundle back. Unfortunately he didn’t, saying, ‘I shall wait for your word on the book I am writing.’

  I told him I was honoured by his confidence in speaking to me and had kept his pages safe.

  ‘I’ll wait anxiously for your judgement on them,’ he replied.

  I wished to say, came close to saying, ‘Maurice, I am a schoolboy. And not a clever one.’ However, I did not want to call myself a schoolboy in this country. It was an unpromising description of any fellow.

  Willy and I watched Maurice drive the dray away, and a young drover open the homestead gate for him.

  ‘I don’t believe he’s happy at his uncle’s agency. He has a soul, though he’d be better without one in the stock and station business.’

  ‘What should he do?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, he is there for his aunt, who has a great affection for him. He won’t leave her to the undiluted company of Mr Fremmel.’

  ‘Forgive my asking, but how interesting Tom Larkin’s gratitude to you was,’ I commented.

  ‘Ah,’ he replied, ‘gratitude to my father in particular. My father was educated by an Irish convict, you see, in the days before Catholic emancipation in the colony. He has since been vocal about Irish rights in the New South Wales legislature and is seen as something of a spokesman for Catholics. As for me, I lack sectarian passion too. My father had very fine Irish tenants with whose children I mixed in childhood. It is like Fred and the Paakantji. It is hard to pursue the hatred of the mass if you know one or two of their faces so intimately.’

  ‘But the religion, Mr Suttor . . .?’ I meant Papism.

  ‘It is strange and rich in frenzies, which is to be regretted. But it is not their fault.’

  I didn’t say much more for fear of being seen as undemocratic in an age when democratic feeling was the norm of progressives. The guvnor had been a democrat and a radical and republican. He had some Catholic friends, but did not like Catholics as a lump.

  At dinner Fred showed me a thick cardboard print taken that morning. ‘The light is good and the images sharp,’ he told me. ‘I’ve written the names on the back so that it can be an aide-mémoire for the people depicted.’

  I felt that wherever Fred turned, light was shed. In his photograph it had fallen on the faces of the Paakantji by their huts.

  The next day, Fred helped me become more familiar with the station. I visited Tom Larkin, who was setting himself up in the blacksmith shop to work on the metal winding mechanism of a wool press. There were two men helping him, one of them working the bellows.

  As I stopped at the door Tom called out ‘G’day, Mr Dickens.’

  ‘Hello, Tom. Would I be intruding if I came into the shop?’ I said, for though the fire gave double heat to the smithy I was willing to go in.

  ‘No, sir. ’Twould be our honour,’ he replied, rubbing his hands on his leather apron as he came to meet me.

  ‘Plorn,’ he confided, ‘I hope you don’t mind my calling you “Mr Dickens” in front of my blokes. It’s just as well to maintain the formalities with them.’

  I nodded and moved forward to be introduced to his two offsiders. The older of the two seemed to have some lung problem, having been a miner once.

  ‘You passed my respects to Mr Suttor?’

  ‘I did. And he was very grateful.’

  �
�Ah,’ he said, ‘I knew you were the one to do it. I find by the way there is but one white woman on Momba as yet until my beloved arrives. It’s the wife of Gavan and she cooks for the drovers. I hope my wife won’t find it too strange here.’

  He was actually open to reassurance on this – despite me being a youth a couple of days shy of seventeen! I thought of children, which seemed a natural outcome from a hearty man like this. Who would be the midwife? Mrs Gavan? Or a Paakantji woman?

  After the visit to the smithy, Willy Suttor took me to meet the bullock wagon driver, a Mr Piggot. He was a man of some worth on the station, and ran the eighteen bullocks he owned on a stretch of pasture by one of the many streams flowing from the Paroo River. Today the bullocky was two miles out, and Willy rode with me to visit him and see his bullocks while he parbuckled logs onto the tray of his wagon.

  Everything I had heard of bullockies had me expecting to meet a wild, solitary, cursing man bearing a whip in contest with his team of beasts. To get their bogged bullocks to drag a load out of the mud of the plains in rain time, I was told, they would light fires under their abdomens. It turned out that Edgar Pigott was a different man altogether. He kept his huge whip sloped on his shoulder and though we heard him cry to his team, ‘I’ll see to you in a minute. I’ll put the tape on you!’ he did not move his whip at all.

  Once the log was loaded, Edgar proved himself to be what the colonials call a ‘bush lawyer’. He discussed freight rates with me and told me he had come to work for the Bonneys because working for yourself at £4 per ton per hundred miles didn’t make sense for him and had been making him poor. He talked about how he had been stuck at riverbanks with his loads for weeks in floods, saying, ‘That puts paid, Mr Dickens, to the sum per hundred mile part of the equation. Or rather, for me, it puts not paid. And in drought time an entire team can perish. I knew a man in Cobar owned three teams, but all of them died in the same season on the one track. If a blight struck my team here, Mr Bonney would give me time and credit to restock.’