by Tom Keneally
It was easy to agree, since this earth seemed so ancient, and the balance of plants sagely wise.
‘It is said to be Devonian. This catchment. This channel. Four hundred million years old. How venerable, Plorn, eh? How venerable is that?’
‘That’s pretty venerable, Mr Bonney,’ I agreed.
Several boundary riders lived in huts along the Paroo River, some in twos, some solitary. Sometimes they were men accustomed to solitude – Scots Highlanders who you thought were welcoming you to their household in the old Gaelic language but which after a while you began to realise was English. Others were from cities and sought the paddocks as a gesture of their being finished with all that clamour and closeness. They papered the gaps in the timbers of their huts with newspaper stories which they would pause and read for a while, a frying pan in hand, perhaps, morning and night. We met a West Country man who was the boundary rider and hutkeeper in the south-easternmost paddock of Momba named Analarra, who would stop to read aloud an advertisement on the wall when bringing damper to the table for his visitors to eat.
One day I heard him read, ‘Matrimony. Spinster, middle-aged, lady-like and affectionate with ample private means, feeling lonely, wishes to communicate with high-principled Christian gentleman, bachelor or widower, of a quiet and sympathetic nature, with a view to marriage. – Address: Miss Henley, 83 Grosvenor St, London W.’
He then shook his head as if he pitied the yearnings of Miss Henley, and said, ‘Such is the world, my friends. Such is the world.’
We mustered and brought in and marked and drafted the sheep from the south. I was using an Australian stock saddle by now. And was to have one of a litter of sheepdog pups due to be dropped by the bitch Calpurnia. So complete a colonial gent was I becoming!
Back at the homestead in the evenings, when not flattened by fatigue, I continued to be drawn by fascination, by the very riskiness of Maurice’s situation, to read more of his story.
My Aunt Mariepier had a great reverence for my uncle Amos Fremmel. She frequently told me how she was an unworldly person who had been saved again and again from falsely misreading the world by his wisdom and savoir faire. She seemed absolutely convinced of her great good fortune in having him to set her right and to save her from silly misjudgements. She was a woman who had thus a complete explanation for the contempt with which Uncle Amos advised her on her behaviour. She was discouraged by his mockery and code of prohibitions, from extending any charity to Aboriginal people or smiling at hungry-looking Irish women with bruised faces. Yet I am sure she was the one who persuaded him to extend his version of charity to me, his nephew. ‘Mariepier,’ he told me, ‘would feed all the families of itinerant workers who live in those shacks on the flood embankment. Their men waste their pay in bush shebeens, but your aunt would feed all of them regardless of merit.’
‘That is the truth,’ said Mariepier. ‘I had no discrimination until I met your clever uncle.’
Initially I accepted this theorem, because they both believed it so thoroughly and appeared to see it as constituting the nub of their marriage. As I observed them more, though, I began to believe that the truest instincts of Aunt Mariepier were more admirable than those of my uncle. Since he was often absent at night on committee meetings and other matters, I took my aunt aside and started to suggest that Uncle Amos was wrong to condemn her for childishness and she could follow some of her natural impulses of generosity without seeming to be what she feared herself to be, a fatuous woman.
While I assured her of this I might sometimes take her wrist, which was strong and dimpled and robust, not at all like that of a woman who could not rely on her own instincts. As we discussed these matters more, some of the heightened emotions I was familiar with from my closeness to Aunt Livinia recurred. But Aunt Livinia had been a girl, while the woman I was advising to be less grateful to her husband was a woman of some years, a woman who in her movements did not seem as young and unaware as Aunt Livinia.
I said to her one night, ‘You tell yourself you are somehow simple-minded, all to convince yourself that your husband is moved by good intentions to you. But do you, in your heart, and before God, believe you should be so bullied? Do you believe that without him you would make mistake after mistake?’
One day, after much persuasion, my delightful French aunt grasped my upper arm. ‘Oh, Maurice, what does it mean if you are right?’ I was by now reckless because of her closeness and her broad shoulders and beauty. ‘It means he is able to dismiss you and control you at every turn. You must open your eyes, Aunt, to who he is. He is not a great man. He is a small one.’
There was something more frank and less restrained in my Wilcannia aunt than there had been in Livinia. Mariepier, I sensed, was more aware of the possibilities between bodies, and somehow aware also, perhaps from my kissing of her wrist, that I did not subscribe to the pious cant that the body is a lesser entity than the soul, but as William Blake declared, ‘the one being’. For if it were not all one being, the soul would belong to God and the body to the devil, and Blake did not believe that. ‘Man has no body distinct from his soul,’ he said.
I paused in my reading after Maurice avowed that he had reached an age now when he wanted to possess a woman, body and soul, but asserted they were the one thing, and thus the soul could not be truly possessed unless the body was. The concept caused a prickling in my shoulders and thighs. I wondered how ordinary folk, me included, managed to find a girl to marry without asking such questions. I wondered, and did not want to dwell on, whether the guvnor had thought that way about Mama in the earlier days they were together. In any case, Maurice, who I was beginning to suspect of thinking too much, decided that his aunt had chosen to have a child’s soul so that she could believe Uncle Amos’s view of the world, and thus that she must be rescued from the said uncle. I continued on.
Uncle Amos was at committee meetings many a night – jolly affairs such as the Wilcannia Jockey Club committee where race meetings were planned and motions were passed concerning programs and notification of meetings and the methods by which purses worth riding for could be created. Men drank nobblers at such meetings, and no one had a better time out of talking about horses and nominating a subcommittee to look into weights and handicaps than the committee of the jockey club did. He was also on the committee of the Church of England, whose meetings were a soberer affair, but some of whose members at least adjourned to drink nobblers or enthusiastic bumpers at the Commercial Hotel. One night I decided to stalk him after a committee meeting held on the lower embankment of the Darling River, where to my astonishment a wagon driver kept a shanty and sold his blank-faced young wife to my uncle. And to such crude structures of branches and seal cloth did I follow that exemplar of worldly wisdom, that source of good sense for my aunt.
One day when I was consoling and arguing with her, I yielded to the impulse to kiss her wrist, and as I did so her other hand descended on the back of my head like a benediction. I could if I wished to stop all connection there, for that is where the modern novelist would stop, or in any case the hand descended on the back of the head would be that of a supposedly chaste maiden and future bride. There was no exemplar in the writing of my age which could serve me or my aunt at this moment. And yet I knew that there must be many lovers like us, caught outside the railway lines of courtship and marriage, carried along with the same conviction and sense of inevitability that ever marked any marriage.
Where is there guidance for us in Dickens or Thackeray or Bulwer-Lytton or Wilkie Collins, who is said to be an extremely lively and modern man? Where did my beauteous aunt and I fit into this narrow equation of obedient wives and fallen women? For to call my aunt fallen in any way was an outrage of language and morality. Where then in our case was the joy of seeing a woman in desperate hunger expose herself not to the world but to her lover, as a privilege, and to gratify him and herself? Where was glorious interiority of woman and the fierce exteriority of man?
For the time being, the words
‘interiority’ and ‘exteriority’ evaded me, yet carried with them an unknowing and delicious pang. They were terms on which it was no use consulting the Momba homestead’s dictionary.
And where is the weeping submission of the man and the sublime acceptance of the woman? Where do all the extraneous enthusiasms of a novel go, and what do they mean, without this? When Ham, the big lusty shipwright of David Copperfield, throws himself into the sea during a prodigious storm, willing to rescue his fellow beings but willing as well to be swept under and consumed, he does so in part because he has lost his woman and has lost this specific and extreme joy. The joy which I now discovered with my aunt.
Here I ceased reading Maurice McArden’s confession, and his literary examination of my guvnor and his friends’ failings. Not that Thackeray was a friend.
Lying in bed later I wondered, is this how the guvnor feels about the Irish actress?
Finally the day for our cricket match against Netallie arrived and we set off eagerly for the cross-country trip to the Outer Netallie homestead. Our cavalcade of vehicles and horsemen from Momba was led by the Bonney brothers in a light sulky, Mr Edward having dissuaded his brother from packing his camera apparatus. Alongside their sulky rode Willy Suttor on a big robust Waler gelding. Looking around I thought that we were altogether the hordes of Momba on the plain, going to attack the hosts of Netallie. That was the way I chose to interpret it. A knightly ride!
I rode my mare beside the Larkins’ dray, with Tom and his wife sitting side by side on the seat of the wagon. Inside the dray were perhaps as many as fourteen Paakantji women – young ones with babies held around their necks in blankets, and even two old women with their startling white headdresses of gypsum. Widowhood had not staunched their desire for a journey and a cricket match. Men might have yearned for them with all that dense feeling that was in Maurice McArden’s manuscript. But they seemed to wear the loss of menfolk fairly easily beneath their clumps of white gypsum.
Parts of our way led between gentle hills and mulga wood and leopard trees and rugged grasses, which allowed me to talk to Grace Larkin. She was quick to praise Tom to me, saying, ‘My father once told me you might go a little way to find a gentleman amongst the wild colonials, but when you do, you’ll find a real man whose manners are not based on the rote of etiquette, but upon his very blood and bone and convictions.’
The state of mutual contentment between the newly married Larkins looked to me more humane and desirable than all the heat and argument of Maurice McArden’s confession. It was hard to believe that in darkness or in light the gasping closeness Maurice wanted acknowledged in novels occurred between Tom and Mrs Larkin, who had clearly taken her father’s advice about what made an Australian native gentleman.
She went on to talk of my father’s work easily, including me in her thanks for it in a way that did not cause me to squirm. She was especially taken with Little Nell, but also by all the French cruelty of A Tale of Two Cities, with which, having heard a little from other readers, I was able to make a vague and casual attempt at seeming familiar. She spoke in particular about the way Gaspard attached himself to the undercarriage of the Marquis St Evremonde’s coach and assassinated the tyrannous Marquis in the night. I had actually seen the scenes re-enacted, when I was younger, on the stage at the Lyceum Theatre.
Having heard some of Mrs Larkin’s early life from Tom, including her being the daughter of a Welsh captain, I asked, ‘Is it true you spent your childhood at sea?’
‘It is true I spent all the ages between twelve years and sixteen at sea. I used to dream of living on the land. And every time I touched land, the sea lost its hold on me.’
‘Yet it seems to be a wonderful dream,’ I said. ‘To travel all over the ocean with one’s father. You must’ve been the mistress of the ship.’
‘For all the company I had, other than the rough seamen, I might as well have been. My skills at welcoming guests were rarely put to any test. I must tell you, Mr Dickens, that I am more than happy where I am now, on old and settled earth.’
Willy Suttor had by now joined us and asked Mrs Larkin if she had known Tom’s Emancipist parents.
‘Sadly,’ she said, ‘by the time my father and I decided to take up a holding in Deniliquin, both Tom’s parents had perished.’
Tom Larkin looked at me and smiled in a vague, pleasant way as if all the old history and chains had left him unmarred.
‘The truth is,’ Mrs Larkin declared, ‘that Tom was born of two convicts when they were still serving their sentences, yet if they were at all like him I know them to be noble people, whatever quarrel the Crown might have had with them.’
Here I knew that she was putting paid to a sore point before it should arise. I’d learned that in Australia people of polite classes made a virtue of excluding the children of convicts from the field of marriage partners and friends. Yet she had fallen in love with a child not only of convicts but of Irish convicts, considered one grade down from English convicts. Even my fair-minded guvnor had never extended much of his tolerance in the direction of the Irish, except of course for Nelly Ternan and her family. I admired sturdy Mrs Larkin for letting us know that not only had she admitted the child of Irish convicts to her heart, but considered him to possess a native nobility.
After a brief stop, during which I put on my best hacking jacket, we approached Outer Netallie homestead and the informal village surrounding it while the sun was still at a good height. Some of the Netallie drovers and boundary riders, white and black, the latter Fred had told me were relatives of the Momba Paakantji, rode out yelling and halloo-ing to give us a welcome. Figures started to appear on the homestead veranda, including one who might have been Mrs Desailly, though if so, she was not wearing her veil at this hour. As we got closer other women and gentlemen had come out and were watching us from the railing, across the flower beds of the garden.
Willy Suttor rode up close beside me and murmured, ‘I wish you well, Plorn, for you may be treated with an awe generally reserved in the bush for visiting British princes.’
‘I hope not, sir,’ I told him and I must have looked so alarmed he laughed.
‘Don’t worry. I am invited to dinner tonight, hard-up pastoralist though I might be. I’ll keep an eye out for any potential gushers! I must say, Plorn, it speaks volumes for you that you simply wish to be treated as yourself.’
He overstated my virtue. My fear was that I would be mistaken for someone particularly clever or wise.
12
The two Bonney brothers, Edward first as senior party, then Fred, ascended the homestead stairs of Netallie with me in tow. I realised then that we were the members of the party who were to be honoured with accommodation in the main house. The master of Netallie, Alfred Desailly, came forward to greet us. He was a neat, wiry man of middle height, with a wide moustache and humour in his eyes.
His slightly taller wife loomed up behind him, declaring to me, ‘On the ferry, I thought you a mere boy who would soon leave again. I do abjectly apologise for here you are, captain of our enemies, the Bonneys.’ She had an admirable complexion, with fair skin and few creases in her chin or neck. I realised now what watchfulness it took for her to honour her vaporous complexion and avoid the ravages of the relentless sunlight and to mimic the dimness of Britain in this place.
‘You thought a son of Charles Dickens could not survive the rough Bonneys?’ asked Fred with a twinkle in his eye.
She laughed and it was quite musical. ‘To me you could have been a mere schoolboy from Melbourne or Adelaide. Why didn’t you make a fuss of yourself?’
Fred Bonney said, ‘Oh, young Dickens doesn’t stand on his pedigree, Mrs Desailly. He stands, as a man in the colonies should, on who he is in himself.’
‘That is all sentimental rubbish, Fred,’ she announced, laughing again before turning back to me and saying, ‘Well, we are honoured, sir. Indeed, at this hour we are perhaps the most honoured house in the entire continental mass of Australia! For you are
the son of humanity’s laureate, of the person above all who every Briton would be proud to call friend, or uncle. Or son, if it comes to that,’ she finished, to general laughter.
‘We are honoured to have you, Mr Dickens,’ said Mr Desailly, who seemed amused in the habitual, crease-eyed manner of a good husband appreciating the slight eccentricities of his spouse.
‘My husband tries to staunch my eloquence. In any case, I second my husband’s motion, Mr Dickens.’
‘Indeed,’ said Mr Desailly. ‘There is a prince of the royal household, a son of Queen Victoria, arriving just now in Western Australia and intending to come to New South Wales. He will be an apparition in the eastern colonies within a few weeks, but of course he will come nowhere near Netallie.’
‘Or Momba, by heavens,’ declared Edward Bonney, with his usual shy laughter.
‘But even if we had a choice between you and him, we would choose you,’ Alfred Desailly continued. ‘An honest English stripling, over some wastrel prince.’
‘Don’t say it,’ said Mrs Desailly.
‘Mr Desailly is a republican,’ Fred explained to me.
‘So is my father,’ I declared. ‘Though he doesn’t believe in violent overthrow.’
Everyone found this comment so priceless that I could hear the Desaillys’ children standing around on the veranda joining in.
I was soon introduced to the two quite comely Desailly daughters, neither of whom looked as studiedly delicate as their mother. No war with the sun for them. The elder one, whose name was Blanche, looked physically hearty, like a young woman who rode horses. The younger, perhaps sixteen years, was darker like her father with the same amused look in her eyes, though a little more reserved and watchful. Her name was Connie.
