The Making of Martin Sparrow

by Peter Cochrane

  ‘What matter the colour?’

  ‘You ever met a brigand?’

  Her first thought was the sealers but she would not speak of them. ‘I’ve met Caleb and I’ve seen Wolgan, and the one they call Napoleon.’

  ‘Met?’

  ‘They came to Joe’s. He’s faithful to the governor’s concession. He says they are the true proprietors of the soil, so he pays them a tithe.’

  ‘A tithe?’

  ‘He says the time has come to pay the tithe.’

  ‘What’s he like, old Wolgan?’

  ‘He’s ancient but he’s sharp as a pike.’

  ‘Joe’s pretty ancient too.’

  ‘I know. I have to get back, see to him.’

  ‘I cannot go back, and I ain’t even a bolter, strictly.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No, that’s Seamus, he’s on a bond, see, and Winifred, she came out free and he’s bonded to Winifred and she’s a feme sole !’

  ‘And now he’s a ruin. He can hardly walk.’

  ‘That’s Seamus, betrayed by a woman and kicked by a horse.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘I done my seven years, got a grant, my own patch, thirty acres.’

  ‘And that’s not good fortune?’

  ‘It’s endless toil, the stumpin’ nearly killed me, and I’m deep in hock too. It ain’t freedom.’

  A faint sun hazed through thick grey cloud. They stood there, on the ridgeline, gazing across the valley, the far cliff walls fissured and scarred like the hide of an old dromedary.

  To the west the mountains appeared to shudder, dappling with the shift of cloud, a land remote and alien, empty as the voids of space, so it seemed to Sparrow. ‘You think he told us a pack o’ lies?’ he said.

  ‘Pinney?’

  ‘Perhaps there’s nothing over there.’

  ‘It’s of no import to me.’

  ‘I have to see.’

  ‘And I have to go back.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I owe him that, Joe. He treats me decent. I only hope he’s alive,’ she said.

  Sparrow didn’t wait to think, he just said it. ‘I would treat you decent,’ he said.

  Bea Faa smiled. ‘You would?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘Then come back to Joe’s.’

  ‘I don’t know if I can.’

  ‘But you won’t tell me why?’

  He shook his head, stared down at his boots.

  ‘Is it too awful?’

  ‘It’s worse than awful, it’s the other side of awful,’ he said.

  ‘You don’t have to tell me.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Thank you, too . . . for what you did.’

  ‘Did he hurt you bad?’

  ‘Not so as new to me.’

  ‘I am not sorry I killed him.’

  ‘Nor I.’

  Bea was still thirsty. She took up the costrel and drank till she could drink no more and Sparrow watched her drink, every drop.

  He worked his fingers into the young dog’s scruff and the dog sat, content, and they with him, and that made Sparrow feel a little bit better though by no means untroubled.

  The pleasant moment was all too brief. Sparrow felt the young dog bristle and rise on all fours, his hackles up, every muscle taut as an archer’s bow. Bea sensed it too. They were not alone. They heard something pushing through the heath. A mongrel dog quick-stepped onto the rock, a big dog, poor design, bulldog shoulders and duck hound legs. A dog muscled like he was fired in a kiln, jowls quivering, pacing to and fro, a guttural rumble up from his innards like he might erupt and spew red hot lava and cook the soles of their feet.

  That heath was a fount of unpleasant surprises for it quickly came to pass the dog was attended by a tall savage who followed in line, his hair much matted and richly gummed with eagle feathers and shark teeth. The claws of the great bird hung from a fibre necklace, the talons upon the scarring on his chest.

  The savage barked a command and the mongrel dog stood alert yet at ease, uncoiled, so to speak.

  Bea searched the scene before them for every detail that might count towards their deliverance. She could see naught but severity in the eyes of the savage and the mongrel dog. Sparrow swallowed hard and wondered why it had to be a savage and a menacing dog, why not just one or the other. He remembered various sermons from his childhood wherein the Lord was forever visiting trials upon this man and that, not just Abraham, but just like Abraham the trials seemed always to be somewhat excessive, Kill your son! and so on. He had once discussed this puzzling matter with Mortimer Craggs and Mort had proffered the observation that God might be a maniac. It was not a thing that Sparrow, personally, would ever say out loud, but now that observation came to Sparrow’s mind as his gaze flicked from the savage to the mongrel dog and back to the savage again.

  Much to his surprise and to Bea’s surprise as well, he spoke.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ he said.

  Bea was wide-eyed. ‘Hello,’ she said.

  ‘I am Daniel.’

  Sparrow held tight to the pup.

  Then they heard singing and they were now thoroughly bewildered if somewhat relieved, for the song was unfamiliar but they were, Bea and Sparrow both, conversant with the genus.

  Oh don’t you remember sweet Alice, Ben Bolt,

  Sweet Alice whose hair was so brown

  Who wept with delight when you gave her a smile

  And trembled with fear at your frown . . .

  It was on ‘frown’ that a compact white man, a man of square frame and quick parts, stepped into the scene like some impresario. The man threw down his field haversack and removed his straw hat and he bowed an elaborate bow, thus revealing a tight cropped head of light brown hair.

  ‘Permit me, I am Mr Catley, explorer, botaniser specialising in the eucalyptii, and latterly anatomist for Sir Joseph Banks, whose servant I am . . . Are you lost?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Sparrow, studying the man’s sandals.

  ‘We are probably lost, yes,’ said Bea, thinking a confession of lostness might bring forth some assistance.

  The savage toed the mongrel dog in the ribs and the dog sat down and the savage squatted beside him, watching them, the tips of his fingers fanning over the pitted rock.

  Catley looked them over, these two lost souls. He noted their sorry condition. ‘We must see to your needs . . . what are they?’

  ‘I am Joe Franks’ wife,’ said Bea.

  ‘Well I never. You’re Mr Mackie’s ward,’ said Catley.

  ‘I am nobody’s ward,’ she said.

  ‘You’re the Yetholm girl, sold into matrimony?’

  ‘Yes, times over.’

  ‘I am Martin Sparrow . . . single,’ said Sparrow.

  Catley took note of Sparrow’s marital status, nodding as if Sparrow had touched a chord. ‘I sympathise . . . it is my misfortune to have a bachelor patron who, notwithstanding his eminence and virtuosity, has a strong belief in the incompatibility of marriage and field work in the cause of natural science. Thus, here I am, nose to the grindstone, shoulder to the wheel, but truth be told I wouldn’t be anywhere else, for what few talents I possess are not to be exercised upon a fine Axminster carpet nor beneath the glass panes of a conservatory, nor upon the gravelled pathways of a manicured garden, no no. No no no.’

  Catley turned about and waved his arm in an arc, gesturing to the wilderness. ‘Let me be tried upon the lofty mountains, the dark and intricate wood, the sun-drenched uplands, the marsh and the peaty bog, the intricate weave of precipitous chasms . . . and so on.’

  The savage called Daniel rolled his eyes from left to right as if to say not again. Sparrow saw this and he smiled and the savage smiled back and it pleased Sparrow to think a savage as tall and fierce as this one could smile like a civilised man.

  ‘So here you are, hungry, yes?’ said Catley. He seemed to be addressing his question entirely to Bea.

  ‘Yes,’ said Sparrow.


  ‘Are you hungry?’ Catley said to Bea.

  ‘Yes, ever so.’

  ‘Well then, follow on. Moowut’tin, Daniel, he’ll lead the way.’

  44

  Catley hustled them into the wild hedgerow so he might take up the rear. ‘Mr Pinney’s bandolier,’ he said, as Sparrow walked by. He winked and Sparrow wondered if he should wink back but he didn’t. He followed on, behind Daniel and Bea, with Mr Catley taking up the rear, the pup ambling along, sniffing at the mongrel dog.

  They followed Daniel across the uplands, traversing gullies and tributary creeks where necessary and skirting the headwalls of deep-cut gorges where possible, and correcting where they could to hold their north-west line, closing on the upper Branch.

  Catley was a good talker, happy to convey to them his various achievements in the wilderness and pleased to keep them informed as to their whereabouts while delicately probing for information in return. He was walking close to Bea, Sparrow now a little way behind. If he was a dog he’d be sniffing her arse. That was Sparrow’s foremost thought at that moment. Bea’s foremost thought was onions – the man reeked of them.

  ‘The Branch forks sharp west above the gorge,’ Catley said to her. ‘Notwithstanding the vicissitudes of the fastness, we shall meet with the upper reaches in an hour or so.’

  ‘That soon?’

  ‘The upland’s a mere bagatelle; a doddle compared to that gorge . . . Griffin Pinney would know that.’

  Bea was unsure as to how to respond for she was committed to silence on the subject of Griffin Pinney and the succession of horrible doings in the cave. ‘I suppose he would,’ she said.

  ‘The man’s an unspeakable villain, but I’ll tip my hat to his bushcraft,’ said Catley.

  Both Bea and Sparrow were pleased to hear Mr Catley’s dark take on Griffin Pinney, Sparrow especially, for it was he who had – and this he still found hard to believe – actually killed the man.

  ‘Swift now, we’re almost home,’ said Catley, and with that he strode off, munching on a raw onion, passing Daniel, only to stop again while he examined the underside of the narrow lanceolate leaves of an upright little shrub he had formerly named Cistomorpha lanceolata but had never before seen, until that moment, in anything but a moist and sheltered rift.

  He got up and brushed himself off and leant close to Sparrow. ‘We are trekking in a garden of infinite wonders, you do know that?’

  Sparrow took this in, looking about, searching for the wonders. He could but nod. It seemed the polite thing to do.

  They walked on through the heath. Soon they were there, standing four in a line atop sandstone cliffs, a sheer drop to thickly timbered slopes that flattened to a valley floor perhaps a mile wide, the river there flanked by irregular patches of forest and wild meadow and game feeding on the grasses – emu and wallaby, a wild dog loping along and wildfowl breaking from the reeds. They saw a flock of parrots skimming the canopy, their colours coursing down like windswept rain. They saw a wedge-tailed eagle, those ragged wings, wheeling, slow, hypnotic, in the heavens above.

  ‘That is a wonder,’ said Bea. She was trying to take in the valley, every detail.

  ‘It is beautiful, like a poem,’ said Sparrow. It occurred to him that perhaps Griffin Pinney was not all lies for, at that moment, he was, indeed, transfixed in wonderment.

  ‘A river with many faces,’ said Mr Catley.

  ‘Yes,’ said Bea. She was thinking of the gorge.

  ‘It is the sublime incarnate, except for the mosquitoes in the heat, say nothing of sandflies and leeches. In spring it has no rival, nowhere in the world that I know.’

  ‘What of autumn?’ said Sparrow.

  ‘Autumn, as ever unpredictable, can be hot like summer running on and cold like winter, altogether bracing.’

  ‘It don’t run west?’ said Sparrow.

  ‘It’s the Branch, runs west to east, to the Hawkesbury thence to the Pacific, the infinite flow.’

  ‘Is there a river runs west, on the other side?’

  ‘I’m advised there could be, but I much prefer to have the answer firsthand, exploration being one of few categories within the small frame of my genius, botany the other.’

  Sparrow looked puzzled. Catley came to his assistance. ‘I am good at exploration,’ he said. ‘I have the vanity to think God has gifted me a pre-eminence as a traveller in this country.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Beyond that I might say no more of the other side.’

  Daniel led them west along the cliff top. Late in the afternoon they followed him down a slot gully, picking their way on a narrow track through elkhorn and bird’s nest fern and tumbledown stone mottled in bright green moss that glowed in the pale grey light; honeyeaters and silvereyes darted away and a hulking lizard flashed its forked tongue at them and paced off, fearless, claws the size of a man’s hand.

  Further down the gully opened out and they walked onto the timbered slope and followed along at the foot of the sandstone cliffs, eastward through stringybark and waratah and a carpet of fern.

  ‘Almost there,’ said Catley over the din of cicadas and parrots roosting somewhere close.

  They passed by a small army tent strung on a rope between two trees, the sides fanned out with pegs on twine, the words TAFT DUCK faintly there, the near side blemished with a gaping tear, the canvas splashed with bat droppings.

  Ahead of them they saw a Cape mule picking at the underbrush and a crude stairway up to a cave beneath a basalt-capped overhang. The cave was walled off with stone; a dry-stone wall with a window framed square with split timber and a door hinged with leather and fashioned to a similarly unrefined standard.

  Sparrow was delighted. He could see a big old teapot sitting on the windowsill. He saw a raggedy old pair of boots by the steps to the door, the flaps and tongue all gnawed and dog-eared. ‘It’s a cave house,’ he said.

  ‘What a most astute fellow you are,’ said Mr Catley.

  ‘A snug in the fastness,’ said Bea.

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘You built this?’

  Daniel laughed a raucous laugh and shook his head at this highly improbable suggestion.

  ‘He of little faith,’ said Catley.

  ‘You did!’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Who built it?’ said Sparrow.

  ‘I don’t know, some bolter,’ said Catley. ‘It was here, teapot included . . . entirely convenient.’ He threw down his field haversack and Sparrow rested the musket on the stone wall.

  They followed him up the steps, single file through the narrow doorway. They stood blinking, their eyes adjusting to the faint light within. There were strings of wild figs and tubers hung like chimes from a centre beam recessed in the walls, a swing lamp in the middle. There were plant specimens and seed pods and bird skins laid out on bark fragments on the floor and a flintlock and a short-handled mattock against the wall and a small table to one side, upon which Bea could make out what seemed to be a blowpipe, a salt pouch, a bird’s nest, a little pile of fishhooks, small bottles and jars all in a row, and a tubular vessel, a strange thing with a hinged lid and woven cotton shoulder straps. To the rear was a sleeping place, set snug in a niche, crypt like, thickly bedded with grass and fern fronds and draped with a pelt rug.

  ‘My sabbatical digs,’ said Catley.

  ‘You live here?’ said Sparrow.

  ‘As required by Sir Joseph, I seek the duckbill in situ, something of a digression given my botanising inclinations but there you are. I don’t pay the piper I just play the tune.’

  The girl had picked up a cork-stopped jar in which she could see a large black spider pierced through with a long black pin. She lifted the cork top and peered in.

  Sparrow figured this creature would hardly fit on the palm of his hand, considering the legs extended. ‘What is that?’ he said.

  Catley peered hard, squinting at the jar until he recognised the content. ‘That is a mountain funnel-web, which Moowut’tin assures me is dead
lier than a brown snake, day or night, happy or sad, utterly fatal!’

  ‘Worse than a brown!’ said Sparrow.

  ‘There is no known means of assuagement whereas, swift to the task, his people have means to deal with a snake bite.’

  ‘They do?’

  ‘They do, yes. In some regards they humble us.’

  ‘What happens?’ said Sparrow, scrutinising the jar. He noticed the long pin, the spider speared through, perhaps to minimise contact in the course of embottlement.

  ‘We’ll have to ask Moowut’tin that one,’ said Catley.

  They could hear Moowut’tin outside, the snapping of twigs and the crackle of the cookfire. ‘Come and sit, warm yourself,’ said the specimen hunter. But he went first to the niche and retrieved a flannel jacket and he put on the jacket and then he took up a fur cloak and he gave it to Bea. She put on the cloak as they exited the cave house.

  They settled themselves on a damp log beside the fire, watching Daniel turn square cuts of pickled meat in the cookpot, the cuts mixed with possum bones from another meal, the smell of it all a pure delight.

  Bea noticed a bark hut on the far side of the clearing, the bark positioned loosely on a frame of cut saplings. Sparrow sat quietly, wondering about his prospects for a cosy sleep in the hours to come, in the cave house. He wondered, too, about the canvas tent on the fringe of the camp. ‘Whose tent is that?’ he said.

  ‘That’s Sergeant Peskett’s tent, somewhat diminished.’

  ‘Does he come here?’

  ‘Chasing Nabbinum he did, once.’

  Sparrow fell silent. He was surprised to know the soldiers came this far into the wilderness.

  Moowut’tin set some baked onions in the warm coals at the fringe of the fire. The smell rose up and filled their nostrils.

  Catley spoke to Moowut’tin in the tongue so harsh on the ears of most white men. Moowut’tin replied and Catley translated for the benefit of Sparrow and Bea. ‘On the matter of the funnel-web spider, my good friend advises the poison is swift and the symptoms irreversible – first goose flesh all over, then tingling around the mouth and tongue, then the face will twitch and the agitation will spread until the body is convulsing. He says it is pitiful, the poor pilgarlic will lapse into babble, he’ll vomit and pant as if running and then his system will slow and the symptoms with it, ere death release the poor soul.’