by Mark O'Flynn
‘How can this wondrous act of Creation belong to one man?’ Fisher asked, with a rhetorical flourish of his arm. ‘It is the property of God.’
‘And the mine upon which you trespass,’ said Edwards, ‘belongs to Mr North.’
The Aulds, good Salvationists, continued to refuse to serve Fisher or his wives until he paid his bills. He declined. Without their credit, or Crusher’s blessing, his position on the talus became untenable. He didn’t have a miner’s hands, nor a miner’s resilience, and so, in time, he was forced to leave the valley and climb the Golden Stairs along the Narrow Neck track to a new life in Katoomba, taking my father’s third wife with him. There was little protest. Ann went and saw them off, reporting that Fisher had ‘vowed to return’. He had tried to entice Ann to go with them, too, but she turned her back. Not on your nelly. Mary Jansen went willingly. Her gripes with life as a Shady were manifold. She didn’t fancy the mist or the leeches. She hated the marsupials. The bed was too small. There wasn’t enough to eat. Fisher had promised manna from heaven, even though Mary would have been happy enough with mutton every day.
Emma and Ann, with a son each, continued to live with Douglas Wilson. There was now more room in the bed. They were realists. Their former zeal for the New Church of the First Born wavered in the breeze of more practical concerns, and came to lapse. There was wood to be chopped. Their attendance to matters of the spirit became one of a more ecumenical nature. Church once a month was about all they could manage. Sanctuary was something they would have to provide for themselves. They devoted much of their time to the life of the community in which they now found themselves, although they maintained a fondness for hymns and Irish dirges. ‘The Rose of Tralee’ got a good going-over. Sometimes a hymn begun in one hut would be picked up by the women in another, and the song would drift through the settlement like a sweet mist. This is another of my earliest memories. The uncouth man who dared to make a fart noise at such times would have sticks thrown at his door. Clancy learned this lesson pretty quickly – how to make a fart noise at inappropriate times.
My mother kept a clearing at the front of our hut swept clean with a broom made from a switch of gum leaves. It was just a branch with most of the leaves stripped off, a tatty mop at one end, but it seemed to give her an element of pride. It was a powerful dust raiser on hot days.
Clancy and I thrived in the shadows of the escarpment under the man ferns. We thrived also in the brilliance of the summers. When we were naughty, caught with our fingers in the flybog, we were threatened with the Hairy Man, who would come and take us away; the Hairy Man who tied his beard in a knot behind his neck. He would chop off our fingers, as he had done to our daddy, who tickled us with his bony stump. This kept a semblance of fearful order in the hut. Clancy and I gauged in each other the yardstick of what we could get away with.
When we were seven years old we saw our first angel.
TWO
Clancy saw it first.
Caught high in the trees on the Cedar Creek side of Castle Head the angel dangled awkwardly in an attitude of lethargy when the wind stirred and swayed the branches. We could see the rags of its heavenly garments and the white protrusion of a wing from its back. When we told our father and brought him and a few of the other men to the spot at the base of the cliff he said, sombrely, that it was not an angel. It was a person, or the remains of a person. A woman, by the look of the clothes. It wasn’t a wing but a bone jutting from the back. All the men stood beneath the tree gazing up. Clancy and I found our feelings of importance diminishing rapidly.
‘I seen it first,’ Clancy squeaked, all the same.
The excitement of our discovery was replaced by a different kind of awe. No one knew who the woman was. Only that she must have come from the cliff top high above.
‘Jumped,’ said William Garbutt, a friend of my father’s. ‘Some poor poon at their wits’ end.’
Over the years, that was proving to be a common pastime. Throughout the mountains people were often being pulled out of the gorges and gullies. Lost, injured, addled, dead. There must have been other skeletons hanging in trees that no one had yet discovered, fussed over by birds, waiting for unwary passers-by to one day glance up. Above our heads the tree cradled the bones swathed in indeterminate cloth, while the men discussed what to do.
Down at the bottom of Cedar Valley the whipbirds sharpened their cries, the females immediately answering the male call. Unless it was a lyrebird mocking them. With the arrival of people and industry, the lyrebirds had all been pushed further down into the depths of the valley, away from the smoke of the settlement and the activity of the mine. Unlike the currawongs, they were too shy to test their measure against the human colonists of the valley. Sometimes in the inaccessible distance we could hear the lyrebirds copy the chip chip chip of the picks against the rock, as though someone was digging out there. Or else the crisp echo of crowbars and sledgehammers, the sound the miners made as they chiselled through the base of the cliff searching out fresh seams. All that could be heard, and more. A horse’s neigh. A kookaburra’s laugh. An adze at work. Perhaps a scream in the night might be held in a lyrebird’s mimicry.
Clancy and I were sent a little way off, but we crept back. The sun filtered through the leaves like spilled shillings of light. One of the men, Ossie Farnell, clambered up the tree with a rope and a saw. The saw rasped above and a soft snow of wood dust floated down. When he was done, the branch, its distorted fist clutching the angel’s ribs, was lowered to the ground. The men stood considering it. When one of them saw Clancy and me peering from behind a rock he cried us off and our father gave us a serious glare.
No one from the topside ever came to claim the bones, apart from a policeman who looked at them and shrugged, so they were buried in a makeshift plot near the Ruined Castle Gully. The women, led by my mother, sang some hymns, and because no one knew who the angel was, or whom we should pity, the singing had a disembodied melancholy.
As we grew more independent, Clancy and I explored further afield. The little village couldn’t contain us. We knew the contours of the Jamison and all its landmarks like the freckles on each other’s faces. We annoyed the miners at their work. We hunted lyrebirds and quolls. We fed the ponies that hauled the skips along the tramway. Often we ventured topside for the various reasons of religion and commerce, or simply to seek out the society of others. But the people at the top of the cliff didn’t like that we were from the valley. Katoomba was a hard town. The grog shops up there turned the men crapulent and nasty. Fisticuffs, as I said. The winters transformed the street to mud and kept everyone indoors.
Ascending the steps beside the Incline was hard work. Our mothers hated it. It took nearly an hour of straight, steep climbing and it was dangerous, too. Sometimes the empty coal skips of the funicular railway would rattle past, descending into the valley, or else they would rumble upwards through fissures in the rock loaded with coal, balanced by the counterweight travelling in the opposite direction.
The coal had a much easier journey than the people ever did, and the stokers who ran the train always kept an eye out to make sure no one like us stowed away in the coal carts. Once down in the depths it was often best just to stay there. Enterprising shopkeepers, like the Aulds, brought their produce down to us. They supplied us with bread and milk. Shoes were one of the hardest things for us to come by; in the hut we wore slippers made of possum skin.
From the cliff edge at the top you could see our valley, sometimes carpeted over with fog, stretching all the way to the isolated mount and beyond. In the fog the lone mountain rose like an island out of a white sea. It was a frothing, agitated stillness, a saucer of curdled milk still with the ripples from the cat’s whiskers in it. Down within that sea, of course, you couldn’t see the mountain, nor even, sometimes, your own hand in front of your face. They could have been two different worlds, without definition.
Above our village rose the imposing rocks and pillars of the Ruined Castle, called for its
casual resemblance to one. I had never seen a castle, ruined or otherwise, but I could imagine: the fog all about it like a moat, the hawks floating overhead. It was a formation on the ridgeline of upstanding massive boulders taller than the trees, and the trees were mighty. The ridgeline ran from Castle Head south to the flank of the isolated mount, all covered in she-oaks and pink-skinned angophoras. Castle Head was one of our favourite haunts, with a grand view both up and down, left and right, the Cedar Valley to one side, our Jamison on the other. The spectacle from there was so remarkable that we became cloyed with it. Beyond the Narrow Neck wall lay another world, the Megalong, the escarpment in between like a gigantic tennis net separating the valleys, as foreign as England.
One sunny morning, typical mountains weather, having done our chores, we sat up there on the battlements of the Ruined Castle, peeling lichen from the rocks and pasting it over our own skin. A butterfly played about our heads.
‘Or else was pushed,’ said Clancy suddenly.
He was still wanting to make a mystery of our old angel.
‘A body doesn’t get in the trees all by itself. Didn’t you ever wonder it? No, a body gets in the trees in one of three ways.’
‘I suppose you’re going to tell me,’ I said.
‘Either a body falls by chance, or else a body jumps. Or else the body gets pushed.’
The butterfly, with red eyes on its wings, drifted over the edge of the castle precipice. I wondered if butterflies felt vertigo as I always did up there at the edge with only the air beneath me. Clancy cracked his knuckles the way he had seen our father do. I never really thought of Douglas Wilson as the man who was or was not mine. He was not my father, singularly. Nor was he Clancy’s. He was both of ours. He was everyone’s. All fatherdom. I suppose in this regard, like many a son, we took him for granted. It was our mothers who bound us.
We pondered this matter of the angel, gazing out over the valley towards Sublime Point in the distance. The rolling landscape of the trees washed softly in the wind. The various waterfalls that drained off the uplands were invisible to us, but we could follow their progress through the depressions and contours of the forest, the cleavages and nates in the talus slope like the folds in a wrinkled blanket. It was soft and inviting to look at, but underneath we knew it was difficult, even perilous, to navigate. Not soft and smooth and nate-like as it appeared on the surface, but gouged and precipitous. An easy place to die in; an easy place in which to be lost. Clancy and I had been lost often enough, but for us, two wild, growing boys chasing each other over rocks and fallen logs, that was all part of the adventure, something to sharpen our skills. If I was lost Clancy would find me, and I him. We never stayed lost for long.
‘Come back from the edge,’ I said. I remember him sitting with his legs hanging over the precipice as if it was merely a chair instead of mortality. The butterfly’s dizziness had transferred to me. There was a queasy sickness in my stomach.
‘Why should I?’
‘You might fall.’
‘You’re not my ma.’
‘If you fell I would have to tell her.’
‘Are you afraid of heights, Byron?’ he asked accusingly, and I was shamed.
‘Clancy, I think I am.’
‘Will you tell my ma?’
‘I might.’
‘Fizgig. Topoff. Shelfer.’
‘I ain’t no fizgig.’
‘Then promise you won’t tell.’
‘All right, I promise.’
‘Swear?’
‘I swear. But you’ll have to come back from the edge.’
With that we made our pact by spitting into our cupped hands, enough spit to form a small pool, then slapping our palms together so that the spit would fly about. This act sealed a boyhood bond between us. A partial brotherhood that was closer for the proximity of our ages. He was only three months the younger. It seemed such a simple bond to make, to swear allegiance; perhaps I didn’t have the same faith in it as Clancy, perhaps I wanted less, but at least I had drawn him back from the edge. I didn’t know then how often such a bond would be tested, not by the edges of things, but by those things at its core, by the fires it goes through.
THREE
Douglas Wilson worked as a miner for the Australian Kerosene Oil and Shale Company. So did I when I was old enough to swing a pick. Katoomba would never have become the town it did but for the mine; it would have remained a stop on the line between the greater villages of Weatherboard and Mount Victoria. Of course, those who lived on top of the cliff would have told you that Katoomba could not have become the town it did were it not for the fortunes and opulence of the Carrington Hotel, the grand edifice on the hill. There were two schools of thought.
Before he became a miner, descended into the valley and met my mother and my aunt, Douglas Wilson had lived in the town of Weatherboard. Buildings there sometimes only lasted a year or two, such was the dearth of good nails. He then moved to Clissold Street in a district of Katoomba eventually called Paddy’s Town. He had been told there was work down in the valley, and he was just the sort of hardy fellow who could expect to be given a start. No tool was a stranger to him. He could remember the early days when the collection of shacks on top of the cliff was nothing but a railway siding called the Crushers.
With the discovery of coal Katoomba became a mining town. You’ll have to take my word for it, but no one had yet thought to capitalise on the views. Mining was what put food on the slab tables of those families scratching out a living from the stone. Torbanite, shale and kerosene, our clothes were black with it. The few adventurous visitors from Sydney seemed to think everyone in the mountains was there to pander to the likes of them who had come to pay homage to the landscape. They acted as though the landscape belonged to them, and we were merely fixtures in it. Let me tell you, it’s hard work living in a landscape, one that will still be there long after we have been absorbed back into it. Once Douglas Wilson had lost his own zeal for the New Church of the First Born, this was as close to a state of grace as he was prepared to imagine, and he used to say he looked forward to it. If there was a heaven full of Fisherites then they were welcome to their patch. The state of his soul no longer concerned him so much as the state of his stomach.
The blue folds of the distance stretched away like the ripples of a dress thrown over a stool. The rarer spectacle was the one that loomed above us. Rarer because only the daring took the time to descend the Incline into the depths and look up. The time and effort it took to climb back to the top was too daunting. Most visitors would go to the edge of the precipice and look out, contemplating whatever it is those who find themselves at the edges of precipices think about. (For myself I only ever thought of getting away from the dizzying edge.) In the shadows we would sometimes hear their cooees flying across the valley, a fainter cry echoing in return. But I have told you enough about the landscape. There are postcards for that.
Before he took on Emma Gorman and her sister, my father lived in Clissold Street and would make the descent each dawn to the valley floor to chip away at his livelihood. It was a dangerous and dirty trip to make each day, especially in the rain. There was plenty of coal in the valley and plenty of work for strong men. Douglas Wilson was broad-shouldered and of middle height. He wasn’t afraid of cramped spaces. He had brown hair and a good beard and a voice that had lost all but the last vestiges of Roscommon.
The miners soon learned the futility of lugging themselves and their tools up and down the slippery steps. More and more men moved down into the valley, and at each day’s end a stockpile of equipment formed at the base of the Incline (before an office and storeroom were built to house them). Incline was a misnomer; it was more like a vertical drop leaning slightly off-kilter, down which the funicular railway, hooked to the endless cable, descended, to rise again later, full of shale. Crusher Edwards, hawk-like, counted each pick and shovel, stinkpot, tommy dodd, coal fork and drill bit before they were packed away for the night. No one could say Crusher di
dn’t run a tight ship. At each day’s end, after the climb there was still the long walk back to Clissold Street – that is, if Douglas Wilson and the others like him didn’t detour to the Shepherd and Flock or the Centennial or the Biles Hotel. By the time he got home he was exhausted beyond measure, with it all to do again tomorrow. The magnificent Carrington Hotel, looming over the town like a fancy cake of triumph, catered to a different clientele. I don’t think my father ever went in there. Certainly not in his after-work duds. The plush claret carpets and candelabra and lacy ironwork made a person quickly realise whether they belonged there or not.
Following the lead of other miners, Douglas moved down into the valley where he knocked up a lean-to, adding over time more solid walls, wattle and daub, then stone. In time, too, he came to meet James Cowley Morgan Fisher and, soon after, his wives, as I have told you.
The miners lived where the work was, in the cool shade at the foot of the cliffs. They helped each other build their huts. Other families went down into Nellie’s Glen in the Megalong on the western side of Narrow Neck Plateau (that great stone tennis net), to work the Glen Shale Mine. It was strange that although the two villages were separated only by half a mile or so as the currawong flies, it was a fierce climb and a half-day journey by horse to make a visit there.
One of Douglas Wilson’s early jobs was to help construct the Daylight Tunnel, which burrowed straight through the cliff face so as to join up the two mines and the two villages. That was a back-breaking task. Sometimes, after rain, it would fill with black water, breeding mosquitoes. Because the air under all that rock was always the same temperature, people who lived close by would store their mutton in there for cool-keeping; the Aulds, for instance, and the Nellie’s Glen butchery. However, two miles away at the Ruined Castle we made do with hanging our meat under a length of wet hessian.
