The Dickens Boy

by Tom Keneally

  The wool classer at Momba that spring was a dapper fellow by the name of Wick, and he made it very clear he was a citizen of the city of Sydney who had learned the business there in the Australian agency of a big Yorkshire textile mill. Like most patricians, he did not get too familiar with the shearers, saying they were a rum lot and would take advantage if they could. I didn’t want to cast any doubt on his high stature by asking in what sense they could take advantage. But in the red republic of the shearing shed, I was left in no doubt he was the autocrat.

  He would sometimes leave his magisterial table and check what was happening at the tables of the piece pickers and wool-rollers, ensuring the right wool was going in the right bin. He further divided the fleece back at his own table into first and second combings, based on the length of the fibres.

  The Bonneys had decreed that the first and second combings be labelled A and AA; and if a little disappointing, first and second clothing, or B and BB. The Bonneys seemed sure the wool classer could not live with the price of his ‘first clothing’ falling by letting discoloured wool be placed carelessly in the wrong bin. His reputation, like the reputation of princes or foreign ministers, was in his gradings. And if the wool of a first clothing could be used to make billiard cloths, that was the ultimate test, for billiard cloths signified the finest wool. Far away in Europe, or in the north of England, agents knew, year by year, what stations’ first clothing was the one to buy. Momba had that repute, and the wool classer could not afford to let down its fame.

  The wool taken from the sheep of Momba was greasy with wool yolk and had to be washed with soap and water in the creek behind Momba homestead. It was then dried in the sun before being pressed into bales, otherwise the Bonneys would have to pay hundreds of pounds for the transportation of grease.

  That shearing season of 1869 increased my wonder at the Bonneys’ great enterprise in this country beyond the Darling. And I committed all I learned to memory. If there was application available to me, this was it.

  It took a little while to become used to the altered intensity of life after the shearing was complete, and as if to help me on the way Fred took me out chasing the large, stiff-gaited flightless birds called emus, which Fred was very sentimental about and wouldn’t allow to be hunted on Momba except by the Paakantji. We encountered a flock of these robust birds amidst the mulgas and the grass and saltbush. They stood over six feet tall and ran absurdly fast in ruthless straight lines, so to make them turn direction was a triumph, though when they did change course they veered faster than a horse. Fred told me to settle on one as my target and go after it. The one I chose led me on a cross-country ride of miles, all at the gallop, before it rounded on its track and turned at right angles.

  During the shearing I hadn’t had time to think of either the high question of that enchanting girl Connie Desailly, or of what course Maurice and Mrs Fremmel might have taken. Now I wondered if Mrs Fremmel had been able to take much money with her. And if not, how would Maurice feed them, given his uncle had not paid him? Or indeed, how would he be able to afford two ship tickets to distant ports even in New Zealand? I felt an occasional fretfulness for him, but it was combined with a bewilderment about what I could do. It was obvious that in one way or another he had taken fatal choices at too young an age, and that his intelligence and imagination seemed a blight on him.

  And throughout this country either side of the Darling River, wherever there was cricket, racing and debt, people out of politeness or dread went on subscribing to the belief that Mr Fremmel’s wife and nephew were on holiday.

  A somewhat delayed letter from Aunt Georgie told me the guvnor’s younger brother, Uncle Fred, had died. I’d hardly known him, but I thought Alfred might have since Fred had been part of the family before he proved himself unworthy in many ways. Aunt Georgie outlined these in her letter, writing:

  After his unfortunate marriage to Anna Weller, a barmaid he got to know – which all of us predicted would be a disaster – he actually fled the country rather than pay alimony to her. And then on his return, of course he was arrested and put in the Marshalsea just like his father. But he gathered together enough money to get out by trading on your dear father’s name. Terrible, terrible, and everything a true man should not be. The poor fellow was only forty-eight, and it was a burst abscess on his lung that asphyxiated him. Your father wisely and charitably said, ‘It was a wasted life, but God forbid one should be hard upon it.’

  She then went on to talk about the guvnor, saying:

  Your father has not been in good health – he has had many trips to France but they do not seem to have rested him – and the autumn has been severe on top of that, and so he sent young Charley to represent him at the funeral in Darlington, a bad enough place to begin with . . .

  I knew that Uncle Fred had been rather like me when young but had never found his Momba, the place that concentrated the forces of his soul. I had a yearning to see Alfred, to receive Alfred’s memory of the man. And yet Uncle Fred Dickens’ spirit did not oppress me, for I believed I had escaped the family failure of many of my father’s brothers, and even the failings of his father – the same lack of application from which Momba had delivered me.

  I was going down to take tea at the store with Willy Suttor when Tom Larkin came to me through the dusk looking solemn. ‘Mr Plorn,’ he told me, ‘my wife’s persuaded me that you would want to see this. I don’t know what it means. Nothing but good, I hope,’ he said and handed over a segment of newspaper, gave me what passed in the bush for a salute and withdrew.

  ‘My regards to your charming wife,’ I called out to him, and he raised a hand to acknowledge this greeting.

  Following the letter from Aunt Georgie, the newspaper cutting had a wistfulness to it.

  The announcement by Mr Dickens that he would not this year publish a Christmas number of All the Year Round has been regretted by tens of thousands of his readers in this country. But it seems that nothing is to be lost in that an edition of his Christmas stories, containing the favourites of the past, The Holly-tree Inn, The Wreck of the Golden Mary, The Perils of Certain English Prisoners, A Christmas Carol and A House To Let, will be published under the imprint of Household Words. Mr Dickens has had an exhausting year involving a tour of the United States and is presently giving his acclaimed readings in Scotland and Ireland.

  This was the intelligence, reprinted in the Melbourne Argus and taken originally from The Times of London, that Larkin had passed to me with the solemnity of a treaty between great powers. He had not known how it would influence me, since he could not imagine being in my place. In his natural grace he had managed to do it well. I am left home, I thought, and for the first time the guvnor has no child left to write a Christmas story for. That’s what it was, apart from all the other causes. No child left.

  20

  When Fred Bonney suggested I should ride all the way to Alfred’s station at Corona for Christmas, my first impulse was to ask, ‘But won’t you need me here?’ He replied that Cultay wished to visit his wife’s people for some of what Fred called ‘law or lore’ down there. Cultay would go with me and knew all the waterholes along the way. It should take a little more than two days’ full ride, three at the most in severe heat.

  I decided to go, and inscribed two editions of Our Mutual Friend to Fred and Edward Bonney to mark the season. I’d ordered the copies through Willy Suttor thinking they were least likely to have read it, it being only a few years old according to my reckoning. I felt the usual fraudulence passing it on while barely having read a word of it. I knew it was a book that had influenced the brilliant and doomed Maurice. On that original ride into Momba he’d told me, ‘The most truly drawn of your father’s characters is Bella Wilfer. You know, from Mutual Friend? She starts mercenary, then she identifies herself as mercenary, then she repents and cures herself, and then becomes a full moral being.’

  ‘Oh yes, oh yes, old chap,’ I replied before asking, ‘Why is Bella Wilfer the character th
at all those competent with print so admire?’

  I gave non-literary presents of chocolate and tobacco to Willy and the Larkins. The heat of the season sat most appealingly on Grace Larkin – a girl growing, it seemed, to become a woman of the house and a figure of bush authority so far from the sea. And then, a few days before Christmas, I set out with Cultay.

  Fred Bonney gave me a present of four guineas and insisted I take an extra-sturdy Waler, as well as Coutts. Cultay was a magisterial fellow traveller, his attitude to the apparently barren country one of tranquil ownership. His father would have been the first of his forebears to see a horse – probably that of the exploring surveyor Charles Sturt or one of his followers – and yet he rode his Waler with an authority far more antique than that.

  We travelled westward and along the creeks, and rested amongst the trees from noon to three or later, before venturing on into the evening. On the first late afternoon we saw some prospectors’ huts by hills of white shale, but had no reason to trouble them this festive time of year. We also came upon a camp of Afghans and their laden camels, bound for the town of Packsaddle, and exchanged courteous greetings with them. Soon the plain opened wide on the straight red-dust way, with emus far off, rendered legless by the intervening waves of heat throbbing like a sea on our vision.

  It was very late in the long day that we reached Packsaddle and came upon a great yard full of horses. Alfred had asked me to call in for further directions at the Packsaddle Hotel, a shanty pub owned by former shearer Robert Norwich. Robert Norwich and his wife, who faithfully repeated the end of her husband’s last sentences with editorial flourishes of her own, were not as pressed for company in this great vacancy as I’d expected. For Norwich supplied changes of horses for a weekly stagecoach from Wilcannia to the most distant of settlements, Tibooburra, with enough stations and possible mineral grounds in between to provide him with the sort of customers who might bring in their entire cheques for him to cash or drink.

  As Cultay made camp behind the hotel – for a lot of country publicans did not like darks coming inside – I went into the main bar and found Robert Norwich alongside an old watery-eyed man in a brown suit that still declared its pretensions.

  ‘It is him!’ said Mr Norwich, slapping the bar. ‘It is Alfred’s Dickens’ brother! Likewise a gentleman and scholar, likewise a Dickens!’

  ‘. . . likewise a Dickens,’ repeated Mrs Norwich.

  ‘Expecting you yesterday when we had many passengers in the house, bound for Mount Browne.’

  ‘. . . bound for Mount Browne for rumoured gold, yes.’

  I told him Alfred had asked me to call in to get accurate directions to the Corona homestead, to which he replied, ‘But could I first supply you with a drink, Mr Dickens?’

  ‘A shandy, perhaps,’ I said, a shandy being half ale and half lemonade and the minimum a colonial publican could be expected to serve.

  As Mrs Norwich set to work to supply the shandy, I nodded to the man at the bar, of whom, Mr Norwich said, ‘Our permanent guest Mr Gaggin. A long-term leaseholder in our district.’

  ‘Long-term leaseholder indeed,’ said Mrs Norwich.

  ‘I live here, on these premises,’ Gaggin told me like a boast, ‘and from here when I fall from my stool will be taken forth to my burial place.’

  I could barely help saying, ‘Do you have no relatives in other parts?’

  ‘I have none, sir,’ said Mr Gaggin. ‘If it were not for the shelter offered by the Packsaddle Inn . . . And yet it seems only yesterday, mind you, that I came to the west as a boy like you. Bad seasons, too much hope and reckless loans destroyed me. But I am lucky, since I have found a haven.’

  I thought him the saddest man I had ever met, somehow even sadder than Dandy Darnell, but said nothing.

  ‘Now, you’re looking for directions to the Corona homestead, then?’ said Mr Norwich, taking some paper from a drawer and beginning to sketch a map, which his wife seemed to examine in case of errors. Then, speaking very quickly, he said, ‘You take this left here, off from the coach track, get out there to this junction at Fowler’s Creek – don’t take the left, it’s a really dry stretch to Menindee, but take this right one here to Euriowie.’

  Since he did not spell what he pronounced as Your-irr-owy, I was confused.

  ‘At the fork of the road, the one you should take,’ he told me, ‘is marked with an empty can of cocky’s joy on a stick.’

  ‘Can of cocky’s joy right there,’ echoed Mrs Norwich, ‘hammered to a stake.’

  Seeing my confusion, Mr Norwich said, ‘Listen, bring your black fellow in.’

  So I went and got Cultay, who had started a campfire, and he stood up and listened to me, and then followed me in, where Norwich concluded the instructions to him and then gave me the map as a supplement.

  Cultay said, ‘I know her, that road. I know Corona.’

  Mr Norwich laughed, ‘That’s right, you big mongrel. You’d have darkie relatives there, wouldn’t you?’

  Cultay nodded but said nothing, then left. Norwich insisted I accept a beer from him now, given the season and because he thought highly of Alfred. He also suggested I buy a bottle of the ‘dark lady’ – port – for Cultay.

  ‘Isn’t that illegal, Mr Norwich?’ I asked. Influenced by Fred Bonney and stories of Americans weakening the fibre of Red Indians with firewater, I was ambivalent. Yet port is not as perilous as brandy or rum or whisky, I told myself. Hardly the downfall of a noble race.

  ‘I think it might make you a friend, Mr Dickens,’ said Norwich. ‘I am not in the business of making drunks of the darks. But I know that one of yours, and he’s a good drinker. Here, be my guest.’ And he put a dark-labelled bottle of sherry on the table. ‘Don’t drink it yourself. I’ve got better stuff for you . . .’

  ‘Much better stuff for a Dickens boy,’ echoed Mrs Norwich.

  Mr Norwich asked again what I would take now and I ordered ale and sat to drink it.

  ‘We are of course, as I say, honoured, young Dickens, but in Mr Gaggin you see one of the veteran pioneers of this country. What year did you settle out here, Mr Gaggin?’

  ‘I settled on Fowler’s Creek in winter 1840,’ the old man replied. ‘The kangaroo grass was taller than my horse.’

  ‘They were still shipping convicts then,’ said Mr Norwich with awe.

  ‘They were,’ Mr Gaggin agreed. ‘But not to where I was. South Australia I came up from as a young geologist. I thought I was made. Since the sandstones, dolomites and quartz indicated the likelihood of iron, copper, silver, gold. I had a wife in Adelaide then who had not yet lost patience with me.’

  ‘And you found these treasures, Mr Gaggin?’ I asked as I sipped my mixed ale, wondering why my elders considered it a staple of life.

  ‘Ore-bearing rock is not hard to discover, young Mr Dickens. Oh, I sang to God amongst the low escarpments, I can tell you. I found chloride of silver in rocks the colour of ginger snaps.’

  ‘Ginger snaps,’ said Mrs Norwich. ‘I’m partial to ginger snaps.’

  ‘All I needed to be the Australian Croesus, young Mr Dickens, was capital for someone to bring rock crushing and refining equipment, the smelters and mills, into the Barrier Range, on the many camels needed. All I require even now is still capital and a railway to – at the very least – Wilcannia. I have spent nigh on thirty years ranting at governors and politicians, first in South Australia, then in Sydney. The imagination of Sydney politicians dies at the Darling River, young sir, with the map in their brains not including this immensity. They are criminally deficient. Anyway, they tired of me and I became a byword for the obvious they would not see. It all made me sour, my young friend, impossible to cohabit with.’

  Mrs Norwich repeated the bit about the map of their brain. ‘Fort Bourke not on it either,’ she added.

  Tears seemed to come into Mr Gaggin’s eyes and he drank the rest of his brandy and passed the glass to Norwich to refill. Doing so from a bottle of brandy, Norwich said to me. ‘You s
ee, young Mr Dickens, Mr Gaggin is a man before his time and lesser men have failed him. One day this area will be full of cities and the earth honeycombed with rich mines. One of the conurbations should be named Gaggin.’

  ‘Gaggin,’ murmured Mrs Norwich. ‘I would be honoured to live in a town named Gaggin.’

  ‘And so my last years are spent as a guest of the Packsaddle Inn.’ Gaggin concluded.

  ‘You said you have a family . . .’

  ‘I have a splendid daughter married to Justice Peter Bright of the South Australia Supreme Court. They kindly meet my modest needs. I am not too proud to tell you this, Mr Dickens. I am immune to pride . . .’

  With a surprising suddenness Mr Gaggin took up his stick and brought it down on the bar, before intoning, ‘In the hideous solitude of that most hideous place, with Hope so far removed, Ambition quenched, and Death beside him rattling the very door, reflection came as in a plague-beleaguered town; and so he felt and knew the failure of his life . . .’

  He struck the bar again and said, ‘No one can say I do not know my Martin Chuzzlewit!’

  ‘Chuzzlewit,’ chorused the amazed and delighted Mrs Norwich, who was probably used to Mr Gaggin’s recitations. ‘Chuzzlewit puts it to the Americans.’

  Mr Gaggin then pointed his stick at me emphatically. ‘Your father, sir! Your wonderful father!’

  ‘My father would be honoured to know that there is no Australian village where his words are not cherished.’

  ‘In Packsaddle, tell your father. In Packsaddle, sir!’ Gaggin drank his brandy. Then he reflected further. ‘Born in London, and I’ll die in bloody Packsaddle. There you go. A caution.’