by Kim Kelly
‘I’m hurrying.’ I am laughing still more as I rise. ‘What on earth do you want at the bargain tables?’ Flo doesn’t want for anything.
‘I want the most dreadful stuff imaginable,’ she says. ‘A great big splashy hat, specifically, for Federation Day. Something that even Mother will disapprove of.’
I would ask her why but I know the answer: yesterday the Evening News proclaimed that at present we ladies are far more concerned about procuring charming hats and gowns from Grace Brothers than we are about the ‘birth of the nation’ or ‘the women’s suffrage question’.
I think I might just have to procure for myself something a little splashy, too.
Ben
‘Cut your hair, son – you look like a sheila,’ Pater greets me after he’s finished conferring with Blaine about the particulars of Mama’s death.
Don’t argue with your father. No, I won’t; neither will I have my hair cut. I walk away.
Into Mama’s sunroom. He doesn’t follow me. I sit at her desk and pull out her current notebooks: her calendar of the garden, address book, birthday book, correspondence folders, and her diaries, her pages and pages of observations, day after day:
The honeyeaters seem to have stayed long into the season, well into summer. Last summer. Lists for Christmas dinner and table settings, and: Ben looks so very well. A little thinner than he should be perhaps, or perhaps that’s a mother’s imagination. He’s big enough, as always. He seems sad, however. I cannot bear that he should ever be sad. But he’s a human being, so there’s nothing to be done about that, I suppose. He’ll get along all right. They all do, don’t they? God, please send him someone to cherish beyond me. A good match. Joyfulness. He was such a joyful child.
Rain remains incessant …
Not a cloud in the sky today. I stare into the sky until I can no longer see.
Time is marked by the opening and closing of the front door. The undertaker and his assistant come and go, taking her away with them. Then comes Reverend Ainsley, the new vicar, whom I don’t really know, so I don’t move from Mama’s desk to greet him. Then a cohort of the Queensland Parliament arrives – the hardest boiled Protectionist cohort. I hear their voices, possibly half-a-dozen of them. ‘John, John, bad luck. So sorry to hear about Ellie, old man. So sorry.’ And that dispensed with, the commiserations quickly fall to what will be the certain death of the colony after the first of January, when the newly formed Commonwealth conspiracy of southerners will rob Queensland of its trade tariffs and its Kanaka slave labour force. I can’t hear Pater’s responses; perhaps that’s my imagination. He is never quiet on such issues: he is the Minister of Agriculture, self-proclaimed despot of Central Queensland, and you’ve never heard hypocrisy until you’ve heard John Wilberry decrying the injustices of the proposed Immigration Restriction Act. How else do you break a shearers’ strike unless you can bring in black slaves?
Their voices rise, the drone of massive, overgrown wasps. ‘What is this Australia for?’ I hear one above the rest. ‘We will never agree on taxation rates – we can’t even agree on a standard railway gauge. The only state that we will become is one which is destroyed. We’re still getting back up from the collapse of ’93. It is insanity.’
Insanity. Whose fault was the collapse of ’93? Melbourne bankers, who have only one goal in mind: to ruin Queensland, by withdrawing capital, provoking all manner of strikes, which only in turn encourage the nuisance that is the Labor Party, and push up the cost of wages. Whereas in God’s country, shearers and stockmen and canecutters should work for free, because they are so bloody privileged to be allowed to be Queenslanders at all, and any such thing as a federal bank is satanic. I can’t sit here a moment more. I shall go out to the greenhouse; I shall look over Mama’s trays of seeds.
‘Ben.’ I am stopped halfway across the back verandah. ‘Benjamin, isn’t it? Sorry to hear about your mother. The worst.’ My eyes are blinded looking back into the shade; I see the shape of the head, bald, and a voice I vaguely recognise, now asking me: ‘Still at the roses and all that?’
‘What?’ Roses? For a second I don’t understand what he’s referring to, as I’m not particularly interested in roses, and then when I do understand him, when I hear the trace of mockery, I walk away, into the greenhouse, and I shut the door behind me.
‘Ben – Ben, old matey.’ I hear Cos, my old matey, at the window. Cosmo Thompson. My oldest friend. Bothered to turn up, good on him. But by now I can’t speak at all. I am flicking through Mama’s packets of seeds: carnations, coreopsis, cornflower … ‘Come round when you’re ready,’ he says. ‘We’ll get nicely schnigged.’
I nod. Yes, I will want to get nicely, arselessly drunk soon. After the funeral.
One hour folds into the next until the sun is rising again and I am dragging on a suit. I am not much a part of the day; it’s all more of the same, but with Protectionist party wives, and some Labor members of the Legislative Assembly, good on them for bothering. Faces, hats. Shaking hands I barely touch. I have more to say to the elatum in the brass vases. I stare at the casket: willow wood and silver plate; she’d have liked the wreath: Mrs Farenall designed it, she and Mama were friends, laughing over teacups and dividing boat orchids for winter. Cos whispers in my ear before I rise to give the eulogy: ‘Doesn’t matter what you say. Say whatever you must.’
A handful of words: ‘Eleonora Trenton Wilberry might have been a brilliant botanist, but as it was, in her horticulture and floral artistry she was an inspiration to many, not least to me. A tireless worker for the church and for her community, had time and circumstance allowed her to do more in her own right, only God knows what contribution she would have made to the botanical record. I am certain it would have been an invaluable one. Her garden was the outward reflection of her soul: bright, all-embracing, and ever joyful. She was my mother. Farewell.’ At least that’s what I meant to say.
Whatever I have said, Pater waits until after the burial to get into me for it. He waits until all are dispersed, heading to their carriages. We are not ten yards from where Mama lies in the ground, when he says: ‘You are a shame to me, son. A bloody embarrassment – you always have been.’
I look at him square on for the first time in I don’t know how long. We are very alike in basic construction: large, heavy muscled, bullish. But different in every other way. I might get into him, right here, right now, if it wasn’t for Mama, and the more of her that is in me.
‘You are not returning to Melbourne,’ he says, and he’s been wanting to offload this for the past two days. ‘If you’re not going to take an interest in the property, then you will at least do your time with the QMI – and you will do it this coming year. You are leaving in January.’
With the Queensland Mounted Infantry. No, I am not. I am not going to South Africa for this bastard’s misguided sense of honour: where to kill, to tame, to press your will is to win, and winning is everything.
‘I’m not making any more excuses for you,’ he says, narrowing his eyes at me.
I narrow mine back: he doesn’t need to make any excuses for me, it’s a volunteer force, even if Queensland treats it like a compulsory sport – like the rugby. Got to be better than the New South Wales Lancers. Got to be the first ones on the troopship to Cape Town – pick me, pick me – that desperate to impress Mother Britannia. I want to tell him that I’m not surprised he’s embarrassed. But that’s just Queensland, isn’t it. Terrified that Federation will rob them of their colonial army, and they’ll all have to muck in under the one flag, with all those sheilas from the south, too – Jesus Christ, even Tasmanians. As though this land we’re standing on right now wasn’t called New South Wales itself forty years ago. As though Pater forged the boundary single-handedly in some bloody battle – one he is still waging in his permanently belligerent mind. I don’t say anything: there is too much to say.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ He does look be
wildered now, and old. He is old: he’s sixty-two. And I suppose he is lost in his own kind of grief – at my intransigence. ‘You can shoot, you can ride, you can do both at the same time, making daisy fucking chains as you go. You are a Wilberry. You will do your duty. Fuck. You will do as you are bloody well told.’
Except that I am possibly more Wilberry than I will ever care to admit: no man tells me what to do. A strange feeling comes over me, a kind of deflation; perhaps it’s pity for him.
He says: ‘If you go back to Melbourne, I’ll cut you off. I’ll disinherit you.’
I say: ‘Go on then.’ And I walk away. He won’t disinherit me; he can’t anyway: I’ll sue him for all he owes Mama, for all that is my legal right to her estate – to every Trenton penny held in trust. If he knows anything about me, he must know I’d do that, on principle.
‘Coward,’ he says at my back.
Because he doesn’t know me at all.
‘Don’t you walk off,’ he calls after me. ‘I need you to sort out the staff at the house.’
Sort out which of the servants should stay and which now should go? Today? Wouldn’t want to waste a penny there, would you. There is some desperation in his voice, some pain of his own. He can have that all to himself. I keep walking away.
I set off for Cos’s place, only a mile from the cemetery, at Woolloongabba, and the weatherboard sprawl of the town through here numbs me again. It’s a very pleasant area. Pleasant. Sleepy. Torpid. And my feet know the way, even if my mind doesn’t know where it’s going. Where am I going? To Cos’s, to the Swamp, which is the name of Cos’s place, for it sits by a marshy bog, stumbling distance from Brisbane Cricket Ground. He’ll be here by now; he didn’t come to the burial. And here I am now, too.
At the gate of the Swamp the callistemon are suddenly magnificent – ordinary viminalis but their screaming scarlet bottlebrushes are blooming as though they are also insane. They love this swamp. They are so prolific they almost conceal the house, consume it, except for the roof. What a sight they make. As does the house: a Brisbane original, built by his grandfather when there was nothing much else around and the old man was just a spud farmer looking for a brave woman and a more suitable crop. This is a place that Mama has never seen, though; I would never have brought her here, as much as she always found Cosmo entertaining. I wonder if she sees me now.
‘Wilber, is that you?’ Susan’s face appears by one of the verandah poles at the front door; she wipes her hands on her apron and beckons me in. ‘Cossie’s out back – he said you might come.’ Her large dark eyes are full of compassion but she says nothing more, only leads me through the door and down the hall, not quite his wife, not quite his housekeeper, not quite black, not quite white, not quite his at all, but always his muse.
He is in the studio, the back room of the house, stuffing his pipe. He looks up at me from amidst the mess of his life: two easels on the go, a riverscape and a Susan, papers and books everywhere, paint splatters on the walls, the floor, the windowsills, his taxidermied native cat, Kevin, by him on the sideboard, standing guard over his brushes. Good old Kevin, curator of hanging offences here at the Swamp. And I feel my face smile for the first time since I got home. I breathe out. And in again: this house smells of the river; it’s part of the river. I look through the row of windows at the back wall, to the mess of lilli pillies and black wattle and birdsnest fern that make no attempt to be a garden all the way down to the massive bunya pine, where the bog becomes a creek.
Cos presses a rum into my hand. ‘Get that into you.’
I toss it down my throat, don’t even taste it, and I reach for another.
The sound of small children is coming from the kitchen: Tildy and Ted, it must be, the twins, banging pots and pans: one of them runs in half-naked and giggling, and wearing a pot as a hat. They were babies in a basket the last time I saw them; the first time. ‘Come back here, scallywag!’ Susan calls and the little brown bottom wobbles back out.
I say to Cos: ‘They’ve grown.’
He rolls his eyes. ‘Not fast enough.’ He scratches his beard and says: ‘So. What do you want to do, apart from drink? What can I do for you, my old Wilb?’
‘Not a lot,’ I say, but there is something I must do and fairly quickly; all I want to do. ‘I’m leaving in the morning,’ I tell him, and then I ask him: ‘You don’t feel like coming on an expedition with me, do you? Bit of a ramble? I wouldn’t mind having an artist along.’
‘Where to?’ He regards me warily, chewing on his pipe.
‘New South Wales – out to Mama’s old property, past Bathurst somewhere. Looking for a plant. Helichrysum. Possibly. A daisy, of some kind.’
He makes a face of disgust. Brisbane Cricket Ground is a long way to go for Cos these days, and I can see its telegraph wires from here. I shouldn’t ask him to come with me; can’t go anywhere with Cos without him making a mess of some kind. But I don’t think I want to be alone on this ramble; and I’ve got to go. It’s not only the promise I have made to Mama; I’ve got to get away from here. And he is my best old matey, and the very best botanical illustrator I know, when he can be bothered doing something for me.
‘Hm.’ He stares at me for a moment, over his pipe, before replying: ‘Why not, hm? Embrace fate. Amori fati. Say yes?’ He turns to Kevin on the sideboard: ‘Say yes, hm?’ And I’ve not got the slightest idea what he’s talking about. ‘We only go round the wheel once, don’t we?’ He turns back to me. ‘Once and eternally: might as well make it interesting, and stop you from doing anything ridiculous. Keep you from harm.’ He scratches his beard again, suspicion and sympathy in his squint: ‘You all right, old chum?’
‘No. No, not really,’ I must admit.
He gives me a nod now and he asks: ‘Read any Nietzsche yet?’
And I laugh, and I tell him: ‘God, no.’
In my mind, I’m already back on the waves, on the steamer south. Where are we going? Sydney first, we’ll stay at the club, at the Union. See where I am, where we are, from there.
Berylda
‘It is not too late to stop this madness,’ the woman at the lectern on the stage implores the crowd gathered here at Newtown Town Hall. A Mrs Ermington of the Anti-Female Suffrage League. She is being given a polite hearing by the housewives and shopkeepers of Newtown, and even some of their husbands, these workaday people who live up the road from the university and, as Flo said when we arrived, probably just want the vote so that they can get the Labor Party in, so their husbands might get better wages or some other nefarious socialist plot. They are not all that interested in charming hats and gowns, it would seem; neither are they much interested in Mrs Ermington, who is getting her pennyworth whether anyone likes it or not.
‘Conserving our social fabric, the sanctity of our institutions, of family, of the right order of things, is a woman’s place and her power. To stand behind her husband is not a diminution of status, it is merely correct. It is right; it is as God intended. Amongst the small number of men who support this heresy of female participation in politics, most are happily careless of the consequences – “Why not let the ladies have the vote if they want it, what harm could it do?” they say – while others are intellectual types, distracted by abstract theories of justice and equality that are simply impractical – nay impossible – in reality.’
Intellectual types – she said that as if you wouldn’t want to be seen in company with one of them.
I whisper to Flo beside me: ‘Why’s she been invited?’ She has no obvious credentials of any sort, apart from being some city councillor’s wife, and her words don’t invite discussion: at what is supposed to be a public discussion of the womanhood suffrage question – one, I had presumed, to encourage pressure on the cadavers in the Legislative Council to pass the wretched law when it is presented to them yet again in the new year, however fruitless that presentation might be.
‘Know thine enemy,�
� Flo whispers back.
I study Mrs Ermington again. She wears a superbly tailored suit of oyster grey, and she is so stuffed into it I don’t know how she is drawing breath at all. Not very many years older than me and condescending to lecture women far more sensible than she is on how they should conduct themselves. Whomever she is, she is really quite awful.
‘It is a woman’s place further to provide quiet and stillness as a balm to such tumultuous, masculine affairs as politics – not to add to their chaos,’ Mrs Ermington continues undaunted by the yawning and blinking before her. ‘And woman will only add chaos to men’s affairs. To be quiet and to be still is the woman’s supreme power, for in this she holds the key to the civilisation of all men, the ability to quell base desires and create in their stead peace, tranquillity. Order.’
Order. The bolt of dread at getting on the train this afternoon shoots through me again at the word – and with yet another thought almost as dreadful: wouldn’t you know it, I have forgotten to return Surgical Anatomy to the med library, haven’t I. Now that’s incredible. I’ve dallied here in Sydney almost a week past the bargain tables, with yet another excuse in attending this awful ‘discussion’ with Flo, because it worked in well with the catching of the Thursday evening Western Mail instead of Wednesday’s, as if any day’s wouldn’t do, and I’ve left my intellectual contraband once again on the night stand, when I meant to drop it back first thing this morning – a week ago. I’m going to have a tough time smuggling it back in there now without being seen, aren’t I. What’s the time? Ten past eleven. My train goes at three fifteen. I’d better do it now.
‘Flo – I’ve got to go,’ I hiss. ‘Stupid library book. See you back at Women’s.’
‘Oh!’ She is appalled at my oversight, that I am prevented from standing here being revolted by Mrs Ermington a second longer. She waves me out the door: ‘Go – go.’
