The Chant Of Jimmie Blacksmith

by Keneally, Thomas

  Of course, Jimmie told himself, the waters by which you grow to be man are clear. The perch and the crayfish are set in them as in diamond. They admit the light. Not only that, they break it into long crystalline spangles and hurl it back into your young eyes.

  Then he saw that his eyes had fixed themselves on the shine of the light on burnished board, that he was tottery; that the apricot preserve was slipping out from the hold of his left elbow.

  He adjusted his arms and went back to his tall ecclesiastical bed.

  He slept and his wound pained on. As any rebirth wound could be expected to.

  When he was conscious and remembered how he had got the wound, he fell into a worse delirium.

  Often it was the lurid corner where Mrs Healy had died between the dresser and linen cupboard. Those he loved were there considering with shoppers’ interest the bloody remnants.

  And Mort – trust Mort! – was the first of them who got the idea of painting himself with tints from the rotten traces of Jimmie’s old hatreds; painted his cheeks and chin with dipped index finger and looked at the effect in a glaring mirror on the left of Jimmie’s vision and seemed happy with it.

  So intently, no indecent gaiety, they all began, competing with patterns against each other. They would not be told or warned off. Their purposeful limbs faded from his hold.

  Then Farrell rattled about. All at once, Jimmie was in a hospital. He had never been to one before yet recognized it by its solemnity.

  His churchman’s bed lay beside that of a naked white boy with neatly sewn hare-lip. The boy was to be married today but was fatally sad. He could not be persuaded to put on his wedding suit.

  And so on. Jimmie slept in hell.

  One day the sun struck at him, quick as a blow. Something had gone wrong. It had flown beneath the dark rafters. His legs were hot under bed-clothes. His jaw was milder. The teeth they had ripped from him had begun to itch.

  Then a cunning door in the forest opened and into the heart of tribal secrets stepped Dulcie Blacksmith.

  He threw his arms about. It was well established that they would be damned by seeing each other.

  But bloody Dulcie would not be stopped. There was a sternness he had not been used to in her face.

  She said, “My poor man, you’ve done so many evils and suffered so much.”

  From the Bulletin:

  There is great irony in the fact that the notorious homicide-cum gynocide-cum-infanticide should have been found in a dignitary’s bed in a country convent. Sister Cecilia entered the guest room of Kaluah Ursuline Convent to prepare it for the visit of His Lordship Bishop Thomas Grogan. She found a swollen-jawed aborigine, surrounded by corroded pieces of food, in a delirium in the bishop’s bed. She ran in terror from the room – not for a moment thinking that she was eligible for £2,500 in reward money. It seems that a citizen’s arrest was then made by Reverend Mother Evangelist.

  Jimmie Blacksmith is now recovering in Kaluah lock-up of a wound contracted two weeks ago when a stray bullet from one of his pursuers damaged his jaw.

  Meanwhile the bishop’s sheets are being thoroughly laundered. It seems that while the flower of the manhood of east and west were pursuing him, Jimmie had spent four days at least in the convent’s guest room and foraged for food while the nuns were in chapel singing their office.

  The Bulletin was the work of safe city-dwellers, who could afford to be flippant.

  Dowie Stead and Dud Edmonds were one day late to Kaluah. It made Dowie feel hollow and ridiculous that Jimmie Blacksmith had snared himself in the guest room of a convent.

  They remained in Kaluah two or three days but it became obvious that Jimmie would not quickly recover.

  “He’s still an outlaw,” said Dud. “Yer got a right t’ go into the lock-up and shoot him.”

  Dud was right, legally speaking. But Dowie did not have the nervous energy, after the long dismal ride, to act with such Mediterranean force.

  To complete a pattern he felt to have been imposed on him, he went south and joined the army. His father wrote to him complaining that because of his enlistment they would have to hire a manager for the property. Could he visit stock and station agents in Sydney and find someone honest and capable and preferably unmarried? Jessie would perhaps keep such a man happy.

  Dowie failed to complete the ideal and necrophiliac Romantic pattern: he did not die at a Boer’s hands. By the time he reached the Southern Transvaal it was difficult to find a Boer to pay you the compliment of a bullet.

  A letter (published) to the Editor, the Bulletin:

  Dear Sir,

  It appears from a report in your edition of January 15th that the jailhouse parsons are already at work on Jimmie Blacksmith. It all reflects on the ridiculousness of hanging such a murderer. As a man of primitive mind, and in the hothouse atmosphere of the condemned cell, he will be easily persuaded of the prospect of heaven for the repentent sinner and will therefore die easily at a nominated time by a humane method.

  Why then hang him? It is no punishment. If a murderer must be punished, if punishment is the motive behind the hanging, should not the public executioner be permitted to enter Jimmie Blacksmith’s cell at an unpredictable hour and cut him to pieces with an axe?

  Either do this to him, or leave him in prison longenough for boredom and doubt to enter his bones, so that he will die in doubt at some unpredictable time. After all, this is the “punishment” we all suffer, a heavier one than hanging.

  I say too, keep the parsons away from him. They will not awaken him to his guilt but rather drown it in false comforts.

  Yours sincerely,

  Tom Dancer,

  Secretary

  Union of Wharf Labourers

  A letter (unpublished) to the Editor, the Methodist Church Times:

  Dear Sir,

  I believe that I carry some responsibility for the recent sad history of atrocities committed by the half-caste aborigine, Jimmie Blacksmith. It was I who, lacking any definite instructions on how to proceed in the management of a mission station, encouraged particular ambitions in Jimmie Blacksmith – the ambition to work and complete work, the ambition of owning property, the ambition of marrying a white woman. As inexusable as Blacksmith’s crimes are, there was almost certainly some white provocation of the young half-caste, especially in the matter of his marriage to a white girl.

  So that one wonders if society is yet ready to accept the ambitious aborigine. And the question then arises, what should we, as pastors, do in regard to our black or brindled flocks? Should we raise our own kind of hopes and ambitions in them, ambitions of industry and honourable labour, of increase and ownership of property, connecting these hopes and ambitions to the message of Christ? I certainly thought so once, but wonder now.

  Should we, as an alternative, attempt some amalgam of Christianity and the native spirit? Is such an amalgam possible?

  If we cannot readily answer these questions (I make the point because I cannot myself and must rely on more enlightened colleagues) we must examine carefully our role in native mission camps and even ask ourselves what we are doing there at all.

  I humbly request all your readers, sir, to pray for the repentance of this murderer who once lived under my roof; assuring them that due to his imprisonment, he has come to a lively sense of horror for his crimes against Christian men and women.

  Yours etc.

  Rev. H. J. Neville

  Muswellbrook, N.S.W.

  Mr Neville was permitted to visit Jimmie, who was shocked to see him. Mr Neville had, in Jimmie’s mind, always connoted a black gloss of clerical certainty.

  Now he looked like a man who had surrendered. The black silk of his clerical stock was worn at the collar bone to show the stained buckram beneath. The notebook in which he took down the names of people to whom Jimmie wanted him to write letters of goodbye and repentance was full of fluff, and the pencil so blunt that he had to work lumps of wood away from the lead with his fingernails.

  Jim
mie got a terrible feeling that here too was one of his victims and was glad that distance and duty kept Mr Neville from visiting him more than twice. The young parson from whom Jimmie was contracting his jailhouse fervor was natty and unblessed with doubt.

  Jimmie had not liked Mr Neville’s stammer of laughter when he said, “What I git sorry about is I never had no good woman to love an’ respect, like you and Mrs Neville.”

  Of course the trade unionist was right. Jimmie Blacksmith underwent a fundamentalist conversion in jail. In the early days of his recovery he had been beaten up by policemen – in Kaluah, on the ship to Sydney. More blood in his throat to go with the sea sickness.

  But in Darlinghurst, that kingly jail near the Hospice for Dying, he was treated well though coldly, and a chaplain was kind and opened his heart to Christ.

  The sweetness of it carried him through a swift trial in December. In the dock, he told how innocent Jackie and Mort and Gilda were.

  Then Australia became a fact.

  It was unsuitable, too indicative of what had been suppressed in the country’s making, to hang two black men in the Federation’s early days.

  Press cartoonists sketched the nascent motherland. She was young, with shoulders like a boy and a firm mouth. In one hand she held perhaps a tome with a title such as “British Civilization”, in the other a blank parchment entitled “The Fresh New Page of Democracy”.

  She rather resembled Miss Graf.

  Easter came and filled centre-ring at the Showground with hearty rams and wide-snouted bulls and stallions from Lismore, Moree, Cobar, Coonabarabran, Kiandra, Jerilderie and all the nation’s strange-entitled towns.

  People laughed in their state of grace, the old crimes done, all convict chains a rusted fable in the brazen Arcady and under the roar of buskers in temperate April 1901.

  And the other viciousness, the rape of primitives? – it was done and past report.

  Scratch a Labor politician and even some of the others and you find twentieth-century daring. Votes for women. Pensions for the old and for the widow. Industrial courts benevolent to trade unionists. Had anyone in London, Paris, Vienna, Washington even hinted at such eventualities? You could bet your bottom dollar they hadn’t.

  So the candy-floss was eaten in sunny April, the spring of the southern world. Men from Quirindi and Deniliquin rode mad bulls. Men from the cedar forests behind Nowra, Kempsey and Murwillumbah, dressed in athletic vests and white pants, raced each other at log-felling, and the summered biceps of a mettlesome gaucho-people flew in the high sun on the day of Christ’s crucifixion.

  They knew they were good. They knew they were strong. They knew they were free and had a fury for equality. The Bulletin, after all its irony, kept saying so.

  It was happy Easter and open another bottle as the wild men pitched over the necks of crazy bulls from Wyalong.

  You couldn’t hang blacks on such an occasion.

  And all the time, Jackie Smolders, his murders now nine months gone, was sequestered from all hints of his tribe and tribal landscape. The walls of Dubbo jail shut out all moieties and totems, and the tjurilnga could lie broken in its holy cleft. Jackie Smolders, wrapped away in the utmost privacy of quarried stone and mortar, had become concerned with his immortal soul, as his nephew had.

  In May Mr Hyberry went to Dubbo and hanged old Jackie. It was a quick and easy hanging.

  The next day Jimmie saw an eye he was not used to, peering full, blinking rarely, at the Judas window. A new warder? Jimmie wondered. A politician? Jimmie, on the second last day of life, had the prisoner’s thirst for novelty and eye for small changes.

  Mr Hyberry was away three days in all, and his fine boys could cope with the customers.

  The Life of Jimmy Governor

  The inspiration behind the book

  The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith is a fictionalised version of the true story of Jimmy Governor, who, like Blackmsith, lived at a time when skin colour was more important than intelligence or ability.

  Half-caste Jimmy Governor was born on the Talbragar River, near Dunedoo, New South Wales, in about 1875, and baptised in the Church of England. He worked as a horse breaker and station hand and was known as a canny police tracker. He could also read and write, which was fairly unusual even amongst white youths of his time.

  It has been suggested that Governor had a dark side to his personality. Once he was caught up in a major brawl in Singleton pub, and a brick was broken over his head. Some historians believe this serious blow might later have been responsible for moods of depression into which he sometimes lapsed.

  In 1898 he challenged the code of the times by marrying a sixteen-year-old white woman called Ethel Page. Many people, both black and white, believed he had broken an unwritten rule about mixed marriages. Others felt he had married ‘beneath’ him by forming an attachment to a woman of reputedly low intelligence.

  In early 1900 Jimmy Governor was working, and living with his wife and their baby, on the Mawbey farm in Breelong, a small town near Gilgandra. Jimmy’s brother Joe and other members of his extended family, including Jacky Underwood, arrived and set up camp. Tribal law obligated Jimmy, who was being paid in wages and rations, to provide for his relatives who were not working. Because he was only being given rations for two people, this must have caused considerable strain for Jimmy and Ethel. They were also being subjected to racial abuse and taunts by the Mawbey family.

  In July Jimmy began arguing with John Mawbey over the quality of his work and the supply of food. On 20 July tensions came to a head when Ethel was insulted by the Mawbeys, and Jimmy and others from his camp exploded, attacking and killing five women and children at the Mawbey homestead.

  Jacky Underwood was caught shortly afterwards and eventually hanged for his part in the murders. But Joe and Jimmy escaped and set out to exact revenge on those Jimmy felt had wronged him in the past. They raged across rural northern New South Wales for ninety-nine days, terrorising communities with their violent attacks. Four more people were killed and many isolated huts and villages robbed.

  In October 1900 the Governor brothers were formally outlawed and a reward of £1000 was offered for their capture. Seven days later, after what is still known as the biggest manhunt in Australia’s history, Joe was killed in a dramatic gun battle near Singleton, and his head was removed for ‘scientific’ study. Shortly afterwards, Jimmy was captured by a group of eight civilians near Wingham. He was hanged at Darlinghurst Gaol on 14 January 1901, after the celebrations for the Federation of Australia were completed.

  Angus & Robertson

  Twenty-seven-year-old Scotsman David Mackenzie Angus stepped ashore in Australia in 1882, hoping that the climate would improve his health. While working for a Sydney bookseller, he managed to save the grand sum of £50 – enough to open his very own second-hand bookshop. He hired fellow-Scot George Robertson and in 1886 Angus & Robertson was born.

  They ventured into publishing in 1888 with a collection of poetry by H. Peden Steele, and by 1895 had a bestseller on their hands with A.B. ‘Banjo’ Paterson’s The Man from Snowy River and Other Verses. A&R confirmed the existence of Australian talent – and an audience hungry for Australian content. The company went on to add some of the most famous names in Australian literature to its list, including Henry Lawson, Norman Lindsay, C.J. Dennis and May Gibbs. Throughout the twentieth century, authors such as Xavier Herbert, Ruth Park, George Johnston and Peter Goldsworthy continued this tradition.

  The A&R Australian Classics series is a celebration of the many authors who have contributed to this rich catalogue of Australian literature and to the cultural identity of a nation.

  These classics are our indispensable voices. At a time when our culture was still noisy with foreign chatter and clouded by foreign visions, these writers told us our own stories and allowed us to examine and evaluate both our homeplace and our place in the world. – GERALDINE BROOKS

  About the Author

  Thomas Keneally won the Booker Prize i
n 1982 with Schindler’s Ark, later made into the Academy Award-winning film Schindler’s List by Steven Spielberg. His non-fiction includes the memoir Searching for Schindler and Three Famines, an LA Times Book of the Year, and the histories The Commonwealth of Thieves, The Great Shame and American Scoundrel. His fiction includes The Daughters of Mars, The Widow and Her Hero (shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Award), An Angel in Australia and Bettany’s Book. His novels The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, Gossip from the Forest, and Confederates were all shortlisted for the Booker Prize, while Bring Larks and Heroes and Three Cheers for the Paraclete won the Miles Franklin Award. The People’s Train was longlisted for the Miles Franklin Award and shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize, South East Asia division.

  Other Books by Thomas Keneally

  Fiction

  The Place at Whitton 1964

  The Fear 1965, rewritten in 1989 as By the Line

  Bring Larks and Heroes 1967

  Three Cheers for the Paraclete 1968

  The Survivor 1969

  A Dutiful Daughter 1971

  The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith 1972

  Blood Red, Sister Rose 1974

  Gossip from the Forest 1975

  Ned Kelly and the City of the Bees 1978 (a book for children)

  A Victim of the Aurora 1978

  Passenger 1979

  Confederates 1979

  The Cut-Rate Kingdom 1980

  Schindler’s Ark 1982

  A Family Madness 1985

  The Playmaker 1987

  Act of Grace 1985,

  By the Line 1989

  Towards Asmara 1989

  Flying Hero Class 1991

  Woman of the Inner Sea 1993

  Jacko 1993

  A River Town 1995

  Bettany’s Book 2000

  An Angel in Australia 2000, also published as Office of Innocence