The Opal Dragonfly

by Julian Leatherdale

  The ’Loo was no longer the sleepy cove, with its mangroves and mudflats, its melaleucas and casuarinas, that my mother had painted when she was only eighteen. The quiet valley where Clara’s most loyal friend, Mrs Palmer, and her husband had planted their orchards was unrecognisable now. Mrs Palmer did not live long enough to see all the changes; she passed on a few months after I was born. ‘The one true heart in this whole town stopped beating,’ said Clara whenever she talked about the death of her dear friend. When I was little, I used to love looking at my mother’s ink and watercolour A View of Woolloomooloo Bay that hung over the fireplace in the parlour, like a window onto the past.

  Many years after she’d painted it, they drained the mangrove swamp behind the bay and the valley filled up with workers’ cottages, springing up like weeds. Most of the older larger places were turned into boarding houses or started to fall apart, with rotting floorboards and ceilings made out of brown paper. Then they built the long half-moon of the timber wharf round the bay, which, when it was deepened, became crowded with clippers and coal ships and steamers, and the little boats of Sydney’s fishing fleet. Before too long the ’Loo sang to the buzz of sawmills and timberyards, the hammering of boatbuilding sheds, the cries of fishmongers, and the whistles, shouts and cooees of sailors and lumpers out for a lark at the pubs, brothels and billiard rooms. And all about, the streets filled with rows of terrace houses with their hunchbacked, shingled roofs and narrow windows.

  It was a pretty rough neighbourhood when I grew up there, I can tell you. And this was even before the days of the larrikin thugs of the Push and their nasty street fights. The prostitutes hung in the doorways in a state of half-undress and even paraded up and down the streets with no bonnets on, openly inviting men to sample their wares. I can remember seeing one of the constables pushing a drunken doxy to the lockup down Forbes Street in a wheelbarrow, screaming her lungs out in language no Christian child should have to hear!

  Our neighbours were all sorts. Some of the women were on the game, others did factory shiftwork or worked as maids in the private houses of the rich. Mrs Latimer and her three daughters ran the corner store and made enough to own a piano in the backroom behind the shop. Clara sometimes gave music lessons, often to earn a little credit at the store, and entertained the family and customers with performances of Chopin or cheery music hall numbers. She told us what a fine pianist Anna had been, her poor mad sister who died in Tarban Creek Asylum when I was six.

  Meanwhile, up on the ridge, the estates with their grand houses that my mother knew so well when she was a little girl continued to be split up and sold off to sharp men with wads of cash and an eye for the main chance. Here and there appeared townhouses and villas, including the great Gothic pile of Maramanah with its gables and turrets and showy ironwork. A few fine terraces went up along Victoria Street, which we could see from down in the smoky valley of the ’Loo and could reach, much later on, up the steep Butler Stairs.

  I knew Mama had grown up on the Hill, as she still called it, in the ‘big house’, Rosemount. She was careful not to go on about those ‘golden days’ too much for fear of making me, Angus and Polly sick with jealousy. From the back streets of the ’Loo, we looked up at the plateau with its high, mossy wall of rock and its tall trees and white buildings as it floated above us like something out of a dream. It was not a place for the likes of us.

  One day when we caught the ferry over to Watsons Bay, I saw Mama looking all misty-eyed across the water at her old home. Her sister Grace and her husband had three children by the time Angus was born: Olympia, Edward and baby Ellen. With the gold boom and some wise investments, they prospered. Their names were often in the newspapers, either regarding Augustus’s law business or political ambitions (he stood for the Legislative Council twice with no success), or in the social pages. Grace and Augustus never allowed my mother to darken their door again.

  It was only much later I found out that every now and then a man would come by our house and deliver a packet of money wrapped up in old newspapers. It was an under-the-counter payment, a charitable donation dropped in the collection plate on the quiet to assuage whatever guilty conscience Grace still had about her impoverished, disgraced sister. It was delivered and received on the understanding that Izzie would never make any claims on her old family or come haunting them. My mother was too proud not to keep up her end of the bargain. But she took the money. She was not too proud for that. She needed it.

  I tried to imagine what life had been like for Clara when she was still Isobel, ‘little Izzie’, all cultured and poised and in her finery. Not that she had changed so very much in her manners as far as I could tell. She still liked to read and borrowed books from the circulating library. She sketched and painted whenever she could spare the time and the money for a box of colours and pencils. Polly, Charles and I were always bothering her to do a little picture for us, a thumbnail sketch of our street or a view of the bay with its boatsheds, jetties and Jem Punch’s busy hotel on the corner. Or even a portrait of us children. We loved those sketches most of all, my mother’s hand moving lightning fast and her eyes darting up and down as our faces appeared like magic out of the blankness of a page.

  One day Angus and I went with her on one of her rare weekend ‘drawing trips’. We watched her at work, sitting on the grass, sketching Fig Tree Baths and the bay beyond while we played jacks and ate jam sandwiches. Mother looked so at peace that day I even asked her, ‘Tell me, Mama, why does this make you happy?’

  She looked at me quizzically for a moment and then smiled as if pleased to have worked out her answer. ‘I have everything I want, right here. My children. My drawing. And my harbour.’

  Most of the locals thought she was eccentric; that wasn’t the word they used, of course. Her nickname was the dragonfly Lady because of the fancy brooch she wore whenever she went to a meeting for worship with her Quaker group on a Sunday. In all the years we lived in the ’Loo, it amazed me that no one tried to steal it from her. She walked the streets with no fear, even in the dark days of the Maritime Strike and the Push. Everyone knew her.

  She tried to bring us up properly, Polly and Angus and me. We went to the Ragged School and later Plunkett Street. But Clara also made a point of teaching us at home. Reading, writing, sums, even a few words of French. If I’d tried on any of that ‘parley-voo’ stuff at school I would’ve got my teeth knocked out! I’m afraid to say I was not a model student. I was not a model anything. I was a bloody tearaway, to tell the truth. Clara did her best to keep me in line but I had some kind of demon in me. I was angry at everybody. With Father away at sea and Clara and Sarah with their hands full, I fell into bad company.

  I became what the coppers called a ‘street Arab’, one of a gang of layabouts, eight- to twelve-year-old girls and boys both, roaming about the ’Loo and all the way over to Darlinghurst and the domain, climbing fences, taking pot shots at birds and cats and dogs, larking about at the Fig Tree Baths, singing bawdy songs, harassing the prostitutes and the drunks, begging for farthings and threepenny bits off the sailors, breaking windows and beer bottles, and even pinching stuff like fruit off the barrows and lumps of coal off the carts.

  The thing I remember with the greatest shame was the day I pinched Mama’s brooch. It always fascinated me, that thing. She’d told us the stories of how it was supposed to be bad luck. Maybe it was, after all that had happened to Mama and her family. She explained that opals were such brittle stones they were hard to cut and mount. Jewellers who cracked or scarred them were made to compensate their owners; it was said that one French king even cut his jeweller’s hands off as a punishment! She told us of Mr Walter Scott’s creepy book and how it spread the word about the opal’s curse. We loved these spooky tales, of course. But by the time Isobel turned twenty-five, the opal was back in fashion thanks to Queen

  Victoria herself, who took a shine to it and gave out lovely opal jewellery to her daughters as wedding gifts. Now opals were worth a fair few bob!<
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  Whatever the reason, I decided that Clara’s obsession with her dragonfly brooch was madness. Here we were living on bread and dripping, mutton, tripe, oysters or fish straight out of the stinking harbour. The house was falling down around our ears and our landlord never lifted a finger to fix anything. And there was my dreamy mother, waltzing about the streets of the ’Loo as if she was some genteel dame from Potts Point or Elizabeth Bay. It was merely a matter of time before someone knocked her on the head with a sand sock or a brick and made off with her opal insect!

  I would lie in bed at night thinking about what we could buy with the proceeds from selling or pawning that damned dragonfly. A roast chicken in gravy, something we had once a year at Christmas if we were lucky. A pineapple! I had seen one once. Now, what would that taste like? Clara said they were so highly prized as decorations for the dinner table when she was growing up that you could even hire one for the evening! I have to say, the few things that Clara told me about her life with the Major and her sisters were hard to credit.

  I used to watch her sometimes at night when she would sit by the fire with the brooch in her hand. She seemed to stare at it for hours at a time as if it would reveal a secret. It reminded her of her mother, she said. My namesake. As far as I could tell, it just made her sad. I would be doing her a favour to get rid of it. So one night, I snuck upstairs and spied through a crack in the door. She kept her brooch with a few other bits and pieces in a tin box. But where did she hide the box? That was the question. So on this particular night, I watched closely through the crack as she pulled a brick out of the bedroom wall and pushed the box inside before replacing the brick. I now knew its hiding place.

  The day I stole the opal dragonfly was one of the hottest in months, if not years. Mother had fallen asleep in the front parlour and Sarah was out in the shed, washing. I wrapped the brooch in an old bit of rag and slipped down the back lane. There was a pawnshop over on Brougham Street. The owner was an old Jew, Mr Solomon Levy. He knew our family on and off for years as my mama often pawned the odd trinket for some ready cash.

  ‘Mama sent me over with this,’ I lied. To cover my crime, I even wrote a short note, copying my mother’s handwriting as best as I could from one of her shopping lists. I was a forger and a thief. Mr Levy read the letter and squinted at me quizzically.

  ‘What have you got?’

  I took the dragonfly from its rag. Mr Levy’s eyes just about jumped out of his face.

  ‘Where did you get this?’ he gasped.

  ‘My mother was given it by her mother.’

  Mr Levy shook his head mournfully. ‘I can’t take this. does your mother know you have it?’ He studied me with that same quizzical squint.

  ‘You have the letter,’ I protested.

  ‘Yes, yes. But I need to speak with her first,’ he insisted. ‘My, my, such beautiful workmanship. And these stones. I have never seen anything like them.’

  Despite the vicious talk on the street about Mr Levy, it seemed he was an honourable man and would not take the brooch without my mother’s authority. I was furious. My plans were in tatters. ‘Well, if you don’t want it, I guess I’ll take it to someone who does!’

  I could feel the struggle in him. The piece was obviously very valuable and there was little doubt that Mr Levy could make a very tidy sum if he took it and found the right buyer. But his conscience got the better of his business instincts. ‘I think you should take this home. And tell your mother to see a jeweller in the city.’

  I was about to storm off. There were no other pawnbrokers in Woolloomooloo but there were surely some in Surry Hills. I could probably even get a good price off some of the sharp men who hung around Punch’s hotel or the Rose and Crown. There were always fences prepared to take stolen goods down here in the ’Loo.

  ‘Hold on a minute,’ said Mr Levy as I reached for the door handle to leave.

  He asked for the brooch again and inspected it closely with his jeweller’s eyepiece. ‘Very well, this is what I’m prepared to do. I give you a chit to say I have the piece. And I make a down payment of, say, one pound. I want one of my colleagues to take a look at this rare item to make sure we can agree on a fair price. Yes?’

  One pound! That was a fortune to my ears. What could I not get with one pound? I took the chit and the money and raced off. On the way home, I stopped off and bought a pie and peas from the pie cart near Mr Press’s boatshed. The pieman’s eyes bulged at the sight of the florin I flourished in my sweaty hand. I was rich!

  Of course, that slippery old Jew had done the dirty on me. Afraid that I would hock this beautiful brooch on the street or to a less scrupulous pawnshop, he tricked me into handing it into his safekeeping. That evening he came by the house and told my mother everything. She was mortified. I was summoned and told to pay back all the money. I had already spent two shillings and sixpence on sweets and a hat that I had hidden under my bed. I was a shameless fool!

  It was the angriest I ever saw Clara. She gave me two spoonfuls of castor oil and put me in Coventry for a week. Not a word. And then, when my father got home on shore leave, he gave me a thrashing. With his belt. He’d never hit me before. Thrashings were strictly for Angus, but this time he made an exception. It took me the longest time to forgive them.

  I am so tired, my dears. I must get some sleep now. I will tell you more tomorrow.

  Night, night.

  Chapter 40

  DREAMS

  1905

  Come, sit here, Phoebe, my love. And you here, Joan. I dreamed of you both last night, living back on the Hill in your terrace houses. Your grandma Clara used to have the strangest dreams. She told me once that they showed her the future. That this was the gift and the curse of the opal dragonfly. Not the future fixed like an insect in amber but a future that will happen if nothing else is changed. She had dreams about me too. Terrible dreams about dungeons and caves. She tried to warn me. But I was twelve and angry and determined to punish her.

  My days as a ‘street Arab’ got me into more and more trouble. I am ashamed to say that I drifted into the company of petty criminals, doing odd jobs, pickpocketing, going ‘cockatoo’ to watch out for the ‘jacks’, passing goods. And then one day I got picked up for soliciting. My first time. Thought I was pretty flash, I did, making eyes at the drunks outside the Rose and Crown. I was lucky some of the regular whores didn’t tear my eyes out.

  I ended up in a bad place, just as my mother feared. Biloela it was called, a girls’ reformatory on Cockatoo Island, one of the largest islands in Port Jackson. Its trees swarmed with white cockatoos that screamed like banshees day and night. Us ‘bad girls’ were cooped up like chickens in a cage behind a galvanised iron fence. We shared this island with a girls’ industrial school right next door, a shipbuilding yard, and a nautical school ship for training destitute boys, the Vernon, anchored offshore. What a strange, horrible place it was. The ship and the industrial school were for orphaned and homeless boys and girls, victims of ill fortune who were to be ‘saved’ by training as seamen and housemaids. But us reformatory girls were vicious criminals and said to be beyond all hope.

  We went out of our way to prove them right. It was bad enough that our prison was so cold, dismal, and overcrowded we had to sleep on a hard floor with only a thin blanket and bedroll for comfort. Our superintendent, Mr Lucas, was a cold-hearted, sadistic brute. He and his wife had volcanic tempers and habitually mocked and insulted us. Those he singled out for punishment spent time in solitary confinement in a dark, dank room with nothing but stale bread and water from a bucket. Worst of all, he assaulted us when his blood was up, slamming poor Mary’s head into a sandstone wall and beating others until their bodies were black and blue. I escaped his fists but I lived in a state of terror.

  That’s how I spent my sixteenth birthday, looking forward to a dinner of greasy stew and vegetable scraps and a tongue-lashing from one of the matrons, and contemplating the lovely harbour through a grated, narrow window with no glass. A
bit of a difference from my mother’s harbour views from the gardens at Rosemount, where she spent her idle hours sketching and eating cherry lollipops. I won’t lie. I resented my mother’s plummet from a life of wealth and privilege up on the Hill to the sordid, pinched life we had down in the valley. At times I hated her for it. I blamed her for all my misery.

  This whole sorry episode at Biloela came to an abrupt end when two reformers, the Hill sisters, came to talk to us on behalf of a commission into public charities. Lucas and his wife were sacked. Within a month I was transferred to the industrial school and eventually got a position in service with a good family, the beginning of my path to a better life. It was years later I found out that Clara had written to an old friend, a Mr Simon Davidson, who had served for a short while as the Premier of New South Wales; thanks to him, the parliamentarians decided to investigate the evils taking place on the island.

  It took some time but Mama and I finally made our peace. I forgave her for no longer being the rich daughter of a family on the Hill and she forgave me for being a she-devil. Poor Mama, I was so unkind to her. She had her own demons to struggle with. Her strange dreams continued. Nightmares, many of them, warning her of terrible fates that might befall Angus and Polly and me. Or her husband, Tobias, whose life was hostage to the merciless ocean. All courtesy of that blasted opal dragonfly that she would not give up for anything.

  The strangest dream of all was the one that took her out to Windsor. Night after night, this dream showed her a figure, silhouetted against the setting sun. She could not make out the details of this person’s face in the dying light but she was convinced, as one often is in dreams, that she knew this person. In the background was a church and a graveyard with a big river in the distance. The figure waved at her as if beckoning her to approach.