To Chase the Storm: The Frontier Series 4

by Peter Watt

  At six all gathered in the dining room to share a roasted haunch of Balaclava beef served with station-grown vegetables. Wine was also served from a precious supply kept for special occasions. With the station manager at the head of the table, his wife to one side and Kate on the other, the ramifications on trade following the newly formed Commonwealth of Australia were discussed, along with news from the war in South Africa and the price of cattle. Anything and everything was spoken of except why they had gathered at Balaclava, as if any mention of the subject of Wallarie might cause the curse to manifest itself in the room.

  Neither Kate nor Karl and Helen had any idea of what they were supposed to do except wait. After a pleasant evening at the dinner table the men huddled together on the verandah with their pipes whilst the women shared a conversation on family and the hardships of living so far from the comforts of civilisation. Eventually all retired to their respective rooms.

  Kate lay in her uncomfortable bed, staring at the ceiling. The subject of Patrick and his absence had arisen in her conversation with Helen, who mentioned that she had heard very little from her half brother since he had been wounded and sent to England to recuperate. Kate now wondered what was happening to her nephew, the illegitimate son of her much loved brother, Michael Duffy. So many terrible tragedies over the years had come to both her family, and the Macintoshes.

  She started to doze, the gentle, familiar night sounds of the country lulling her into a soothing sleep. As a young woman she had spent her early years forging her financial empire by trekking with her bullock teams to the Palmer River goldfields and even now Kate required little excuse to leave the comforts of town to return to the country. She had grown to love it with a passion.

  Suddenly Kate was awakened fully by a noise alien to the calls of the night birds.

  ‘Mrs Tracy,’ she heard from outside her window. ‘You ’wake, Mrs Tracy?’

  Kate slipped from the bed and pulled a shawl around her shoulders to pad to the window.

  ‘What is it, Nerambura?’ she asked. ‘I thought you were over at Glen View.’

  Nerambura stood in the dark outside the window with his hat in his hands in the European manner. ‘I come to get you,’ he whispered. ‘Wallarie wants to see you.’

  Kate felt her heart skip a beat. ‘Wait for me by the tank stand,’ she replied. ‘I will be with you in a short while.’

  The man she had heard so much about – and yet had never met – was commanding her presence. But why her? She buttoned a long-sleeved shirt and tucked it into her trousers. And why under such mysterious circumstances was she being summoned?

  As she dressed, Kate felt no fear. Just a wondrous anticipation of finally getting to meet the legendary warrior who had once ridden with her oldest brother, Tom, as a bushranger in Burkesland over a quarter of a century before.

  When Kate appeared, Nerambura was waiting with two saddled horses. He passed the reins of a gelding to her. ‘We ride over to the waterholes ’bout an hour away,’ he said as he swung onto his mount with the ease of an expert horseman.

  A couple of hundred yards out from the shallow banks of the dry creek bed Kate saw the glow of a campfire.

  ‘That’s him,’ Nerambura said quietly. ‘He wants to see you alone.’

  Kate tried to ascertain the expression on Nerambura’s face but it was too dark. Had it been fear or awe, she wondered. In her own heart she felt a tremendous awe for the events unfolding.

  Kate slipped from her horse and Nerambura took the reins. To avoid stumbling in the dark she walked carefully towards the glowing beacon of the fire.

  Wallarie sat cross-legged on the other side of the gently crackling flames. Kate felt strangely deferential, as if waiting for a headmaster to bid her to enter his room. She could see Wallarie’s long grey beard touching his chest and when she looked into his eyes noticed that they had an opaqueness about them.

  ‘You Tom Duffy’s sister,’ Wallarie said. ‘You sit down.’

  Obediently Kate sank to the earth on the opposite side of the fire. She no longer felt any apprehension but instead a new peace. It was as if this time and place had always been ordained by unseen and unexplained forces that few men of reason believed in.

  ‘You got any baccy?’ Wallarie asked unexpectedly, and sighed when Kate apologised for not having any.

  ‘Maybe you bring baccy next time,’ he said. ‘Good stuff that baccy.’

  Just as Kate was beginning to wonder if the old man would ask her anything more meaningful, a strange sound caught her attention.

  At first she did not know where it came from, but then Kate noticed the slight rise and fall of Wallarie’s scrawny chest. He was chanting, and the rhythm of his song became hypnotic as Wallarie sang to the ancestor spirits.

  Transfixed by his eerie song, and a little exhausted from the difficult ride, Kate did not realise that the sound was drawing her soul to another place and time. She was no longer sure whether it was her imagination or even that she might be asleep and dreaming, but suddenly the old Aboriginal was gone. In his place stood a young and tall Aboriginal warrior, with long spears in one hand and fighting sticks tucked into the human hair belt about his waist. Kate recognised Wallarie as that young warrior and beside him materialised an old Aboriginal man daubed in ochre and feathers.

  Kate also recognised Wallarie’s companion, although so many years had passed since he had first come to her when she was a young woman trekking with Luke Tracy to Glen View in search of her father’s grave. Then he had come to her in the early hours of the morning and shown her the tragic slaughter of the Nerambura clan: the many scattered bodies of the men, women and children who had once been part of Wallarie’s extended family. Now only Wallarie remained alive, the last of the tribe.

  Kate was vaguely aware that she was travelling through time and space and always the eerie chant came to her. And she saw her brothers, Tom and Michael side by side, as she remembered them as young men. Death had brought them together in the world she had entered with Wallarie. She wanted to reach out and touch them but they smiled and faded from her sight. Kate felt the tears streaming down her face for what had been taken from her life so violently. How could the night be so bright, she heard her own disembodied voice ask, as she was swept along on a journey that knew no time or space.

  ‘Wake up, Mrs Tracy.’ Kate heard the voice calling to her as if down a long tunnel.

  She stirred and blinked against the blazing light that seared her eyes, groaning as she attempted to sit up from where she lay in the red earth beside the dry creek. A total confusion overwhelmed her.

  ‘Where? What?’ was all she could utter as the morning sun continued to blind her. ‘Where is Wallarie?’ she finally asked Nerambura Duffy, who crouched beside her.

  ‘Gone,’ the young man replied with a shrug. ‘Maybe flew away.’

  Kate sat up and brushed down her trousers. Her head felt fuzzy but all that had occurred in the night was still fresh in her memory. Nerambura gave her his hand to assist her to her feet and she stood uncertainly, gazing around at the scrubby plain. It was a normal day in a normal world where the sun travelled the cloudless, blue sky, radiating an infernal heat and baking the plains below.

  Nerambura handed Kate a water bag and she gulped down the cool liquid with gratification.

  ‘He told me everything,’ Kate said quietly as they walked together towards their saddled mounts grazing a short distance away. ‘Wallarie will be back.’

  Nerambura did not question Kate as to what his kinsman had told her. It was not his place to ask the words of one as magical as Wallarie. In time, Mrs Tracy would tell him what he was supposed to know. That was the way of Wallarie.

  ‘We were worried,’ Helen said, hurrying towards the dusty figure dismounting in front of the homestead. ‘You were not in your room when we rose this morning and nobody seemed to know where you were.’

  Kate passed the reins to Nerambura who led the horse away. ‘I went for a ride last night,’ she repli
ed without concern for the worried expression on Helen’s face. ‘I met Wallarie.’

  ‘Wallarie!’ Helen gasped. ‘You have spoken to him?’

  ‘He has told me what we must do,’ Kate said wearily. ‘Then the spirits of his ancestors will be at peace.’

  As Karl walked up he overheard Kate’s last statement. ‘What does he want?’ he asked.

  ‘Not much,’ Kate answered. ‘Just that no woman ever enter the cave on Glen View, and that all men remain out of it, with the exception of Nerambura who is initiated. He has said that for a woman to enter the sacred place is taboo and would result in that woman going mad and dying a violent death.’ Kate could see the disbelief on Karl’s face. ‘As far as I know, no woman has ever entered the cave – not even Matilda, who is Nerambura’s mother. It is something that I do not confess to understand but that does not mean I cannot accept it. I think that you will be able to keep people away from the cave when you establish your mission station on that tract of Glen View. Wallarie says he wants to come home to die amongst the spirits of his people.’

  ‘I think that he should be instructed in the grace of Our Saviour for the sake of his eternal soul,’ Karl muttered and Kate flashed him an angry look.

  ‘I think that Wallarie should be left alone to live out his life according to the beliefs that he holds sacred,’ she snapped.

  ‘Mrs Tracy is right,’ Helen intervened. ‘There will be other heathen souls to save. From what I have seen of some of the stockmen here I would include their souls as well. Is there anything else?’ Helen asked, turning to Kate.

  ‘Nothing to be dealt with by you,’ Kate replied. ‘Just something that I must do to make things right.’

  By her tone, Helen realised that whatever Kate referred to was a matter for her alone and she let the subject drop. Together they walked to the homestead where they were met by a cheery station manager who declared a late breakfast had been spread out for them.

  A few days later Kate returned to her home in Townsville while Matthew remained at Balaclava to assist with the branding of stock. Kate would be glad to have him back with her in the weeks ahead. Although his terrible experiences of war had changed him forever, she still saw him as the little boy whose shoes she had once laced and whose face she would wipe with her handkerchief, much to his dismay.

  Kate sat in the library, which doubled as an office from which to manage her widely dispersed enterprises. A cooling breeze wafted the scent of frangipani flowers into the spacious, shady room that opened onto the broad verandah. Wallarie’s request was the reason she had penned the letter to her nephew, Patrick Duffy. She addressed it to his home in Sydney although she knew he was most probably still in England. Eventually he would return and read her words which set out why Nerambura Duffy should be granted rights to share Glen View with Patrick’s family.

  Kate used the pad of blotting paper to dry the ink on the delicate envelope and placed it aside. Listening to the crackling of palm fronds as the breeze fluttered through the majestic trees, Kate sighed for the battle she knew that she would be facing with her nephew over the issue. Despite being Duffy in name, Patrick was in most ways a Macintosh.

  The thought rekindled an almost forgotten conversation with Matilda from a long time ago. Nerambura’s mother had been sent over to Balaclava on a task at a time when Kate had been visiting her property. Matilda had taken her aside and announced Catherine’s pregnancy. The baby would become Catherine’s firstborn, George. As happy as Kate had been for Patrick and Catherine with the news, she had hardly taken much notice of Matilda’s ominous warning; she thought the child had been conceived in the sacred cave.

  ‘Baal,’ Matilda had scowled. ‘No good for Mr Duffy. Evil spirits live near the sacred place. Child be born a devil spirit.’

  Normally such an event could be dismissed as the superstitious ramblings of a woman steeped in ignorance, but now, remembering Matilda’s fearfully delivered words almost fifteen years later, Kate was not so sure. If George had been conceived in the cave, as Matilda had suspected, then under the beliefs held by Wallarie, Catherine was doomed to go mad and die a horrible death.

  Kate could feel the hair on the back of her neck bristle. She was suddenly very afraid for Patrick and Catherine but fought to reassure herself that her fears were just as bad as the superstitious beliefs of her Celtic ancestors with their banshees and leprechauns.

  Shaking her head she rose from the desk, determining to rid herself of such thoughts. Instead she would go shopping in town for a new dress. From what she had heard of George, he was no biblical devil. He might be a strange boy – but not a devil!

  Kate picked up the envelope to be posted to Sydney. For now, she would worry about the old warrior’s final request, to be fought out between her and Patrick when he returned.

  A world away, a weather-beaten Irish fisherman puffed on his pipe as he rowed steadily towards the rocky shore below the cliff, overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. It was a good place for mackerel and his son prepared the tackle for the schools that swam in the light swell. The fisherman sighed in contentment at the peace God had brought to this day. A rare vista of blue sky and fluffy white clouds hung over a still sea.

  ‘Da!’ his son shouted, pointing towards the rocks around fifty yards from their boat. ‘I think I see a lady.’

  The fisherman followed his son’s finger to something being washed gently against a rocky sea ledge. He first noticed the fiery red hair, drifting like seaweed in the water as the body rolled on each small breaking wave.

  The fisherman groaned. Recovering the body meant spoiling what was promising to be a good day of fishing. But he had a duty to the law – and some poor colleen, who did not belong to the sea, needed a proper place of burial in a churchyard.

  In England, Patrick received a letter from Father Eamon O’Brien informing him that Catherine’s body had been found in the sea just a couple of miles from the Fitzgerald manor. He further wrote that it appeared she must have fallen and would be granted a Church burial in the parish graveyard.

  Patrick knew that had there been any hint of suicide she would have been denied such a burial. As it was, no-one would ever really know what brought about his wife’s death. After all, there was no such thing as the power of a curse.

  EPILOGUE

  I sit in the red earth on the land of my ancestor sprits. I cannot see the plains anymore although I feel them, hear them and smell them. The ancestor spirits are all around me and I talk to them in the night when they come to me in my dreams.

  ‘But you don’t believe in blackfella curse and want to go into the cave. Ha! You should not disturb the old ones. They got power over the living. And you got questions about Matthew, Patrick and all the others. That take a long time. Mebbe, I think ’bout telling you. Mebbe not.’

  AUTHOR’S

  NOTE

  From the hills and plains of India, the prairies of Canada, the fern forests of New Zealand and the Outback frontier of Australia, the tough colonials volunteered to fight in far-off South Africa in the last year of the nineteenth century. They went to fight for the British Empire against men not unlike themselves – independent-minded farmers of Dutch stock known as Boers – and it would become the first war of the twentieth century as the campaign extended into 1902. Like the Korean conflict of the early 1950s, it would become a ‘forgotten war’. Yet, in the South African campaign of 1899–1902, the world saw the trend for conflicts for the next one hundred years: war waged against a civilian population to meet strategic needs, and the technology of weapons of mass destruction employed on the battlefield, such as machine guns and quick-firing artillery.

  It was a war where Britain initially saw serious military setbacks and any victories were given wide media coverage to allay the fears of the tax-paying public at home. Sadly, the outstanding tenacity of the colonial defenders of the Elands River siege gained little attention or recognition from the British commanders. But the brilliant Boer commander General Smuts would later comme
nt: ‘Never in the course of this war did a besieged force endure worse sufferings . . . [They had shown] magnificent courage, albeit fortified by dugouts and drink, and had taught local Boers a proper appreciation of the Australians.’ Flattery may come from friends and allies but praise is best expressed by your enemies.

  I found Craig Wilcox’s book Australia’s Boer War: The War in South Africa, 1899–1902 (Oxford University Press, 2002) a great source of information on the Australian involvement in that campaign. I would recommend it as a starting point to any student interested in the subject.

  The Palestinian aspect of this novel is grounded in the history of the Zionist state of Israel. There is a misconception by many that the terrible Holocaust of World War Two began the mass migration of displaced Jewish people to Palestine. In fact a half-century earlier, Jewish men and women were fleeing bloody pogroms in Russia and settling in the Ottoman-controlled territory of Palestine. But it was a young Jewish journalist from Vienna named Theodor Herzl, covering the infamous Captain Alfred Dreyfus case in France, who recognised that something had to be done to free the Jews of Europe from their two thousand year history of bloody persecution. He put forward his ideas for a Jewish state at the first Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897. At first Argentina was mooted as a place to found a Jewish state but later in 1906 Palestine was formally nominated as the home of people of Jewish beliefs. And so the first settlers after the Russian pogroms of the 1880s drifted to Palestine to seek a new life free of persecution. The rest is the tragic history that extends into our lives in the twenty-first century.

  Not to be forgotten in history is the unsung role of Australia’s economic gift to the world – the humble gum tree. Because of its ability to live in arid and supposedly infertile land, it has been planted from Africa to Israel to the United States of America to reclaim land for agriculture.

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