The Secret of the Black Bushranger

by Jackie French

  ‘Yes, sir. Down the river near Rose Hill.’ My words tumbled over themselves. ‘There are flats there for crops — they flood, but that just makes the soil richer. And the hills for sheep and orchards.’

  ‘I see.’ Governor Hunter looked at me a moment more. ‘Mr Johnson, can you spare this young man?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  What? I stared at Mr Johnson. Would he really stop my chance?! Then I saw that he was smiling. ‘Barney Bean is my right hand. I have never had a companion I wished to part with less. But if I am to have more convict hands, then I must learn to do without Barney Bean.’

  I flushed, then looked over at Elsie. She’d been acting strange ever since the governor arrived, staying in the kitchen mostly except when she’d brought in the tea or hearth cakes, or to take young Henry and change his napkin, though she knew Mrs Johnson would have been happy to have her sit with us, just like she was a daughter of the house.

  But Elsie had paused by the kitchen door now, listening to the conversation. She gave me a nod and a quick smile, as if to say I was doing right to tell the governor my dreams of farming.

  ‘Come and see me tomorrow, Master Bean, and we will see what we can do.’

  It was like a choir of angels was singing around the sitting room. Like the clouds were dancing in the sky. Me, Barney Bean, to have land, good land, for I’d been to Rose Hill with Mr Johnson often enough now to be able to tell good land from bad, and where the floods might rise. My farm must be close enough to the river for a boat to take my corn and wheat and wool to sell in Sydney Town. And I’d build a hut . . .

  Do you ever have days that shine out in your memory, like a star had come to settle on your hand? I’ve had a score of days like that in my long life — the day I looked into the eyes of the woman who had just become my wife, the day I held my firstborn in my hands and heard him yell, the day Elsie and I followed Birrung and Mr Johnson up the hill to our new lives.

  This day was another of those.

  CHAPTER 13

  A Farm!

  Mr Johnson came with me to choose my land. He had a map of all the area explored around the colony. I’d studied it over and over, dreaming of where I might go.

  It had to have fresh water, which meant it couldn’t be around the harbour. It needed good soil too. Mr Johnson said you mostly got that on flood plains by big rivers, where new soil was brought down every time the river rose and flooded the low-lying land. I wanted to be near enough to Sydney Town to sell what I grew, and my wool too, as well as to come back and see Elsie and the Johnsons.

  Which meant down by Rose Hill. The Rum Corps had picked out all the best land, of course — great big blocks with lots of convicts to work them. But when Governor Hunter’s secretary showed me his map, the one with all the grants on it, there were still large areas that no one had claimed.

  ‘Well, Master Bean?’ The secretary looked impatient, like he had better things to do than deal with a nearly sixteen-year-old, just because Governor Hunter was friends with Mr Johnson.

  ‘How about here?’ I asked, pointing to land on the river down from Rose Hill. I would have liked to have seen it first, but if I waited, the governor might decide I was too young after all. And I wanted land straight away!

  Mr Johnson peered at the map. ‘A good choice, I think, though I haven’t been down that far.’

  ‘Very well.’ The secretary marked off a section, using a ruler. ‘Your lower boundary will be the river from this bend to this, then up to the ridge here. Four hundred acres.’

  Four hundred acres! I’d been hoping for ten!

  And all mine, though when I signed the land title, I was described as a ‘ward of Mr Richard Johnson’, for I was under age. But the land was in my name.

  I wanted to ask about convicts to help me clear it and build my hut. But just as I was about to speak, Mr Johnson said, ‘If you assign me more men, sir, I can supervise them to help young Barney here.’

  So I said nothing about convicts of my own. I was tall enough by then, and strong. But I’d never had convicts under my command before, not with Major Grose taking away our workers. I needed practice telling men what to do, for if I didn’t get it right, they’d steal my corn to brew rum and drink the night and sleep the day away. But I did know it wasn’t easy to get convicts — most of whom were in the colony because they’d rather steal than work — to work.

  Land of my own! Barney Bean, landowner and farmer.

  CHAPTER 14

  My Place

  October–December 1794

  Mr Johnson arranged for the boat to sail further down the river to my place before he went back to his duties at Rose Hill. I had to count the river bends from Rose Hill to make sure I got it right. I was almost shaking as the sails flapped above us. What if I’d chosen four hundred acres with cliffs above the river instead of creek flats? I should have come down and looked at the land first.

  ‘I think this is it,’ said Mr Johnson as we rounded another bend. He sounded almost as excited as me.

  No cliffs. Instead a broad sweep showed where the river flooded, leaving the land clear, sloping up to brush and trees over low hills to the high ridge beyond. We unloaded my gear — the tools I’d been given from the government stores, spade and shovel and pick and axe, and the bags of rations too — even a musket and shot and powder, which I reckon I only got because Mr Johnson had asked the governor. The captain agreed to wait on the river till midday — I think he planned to do some fishing — so Mr Johnson and I set off up the hill to explore.

  There was grass under the trees, sparse but thick enough to feed my sheep. Even better, when we got to the top of the hill, we saw the other side was a gentle slope down, leading to a creek, with land that could be planted out for vegetables and an orchard out of flood reach, and then another gentle slope up to the ridge that was my top boundary.

  ‘This is where I’ll put my house,’ I said. I could hardly believe the words. My house!

  Mr Johnson smiled at me. ‘I am so pleased for you, Barney. Pleased and proud. You’ve grown into the finest young man in the colony.’

  I flushed, proud as if I’d been made king, not just at his words but because I could see he meant them. He was proud of me. And I’d make him prouder still.

  Once I had waved Mr Johnson off back at the river, I climbed up the hill with my tools and rations and began making a mark on my very own land.

  My first job was to put up four poles with a fifth strung between them, then cut stringybark to make a lean-to, to shelter me that night. I didn’t bother with a fire. Elsie had made me a giant pudding that would feed me for two days, and a sack of hearth cakes too. Mr Johnson had given me a tin trunk to keep my food in — nothing else would keep the rats or o’possums out, except hanging it in sacks from a branch with a rat roof on the rope that the rat couldn’t climb over.

  I sat in the darkness, nibbling hearth cakes and watching the great wheel of stars turn above me and then the moon rise up behind the hills. It almost looked like it was grinning at me, to say hello, welcoming me to my new home. Then I wrapped myself in my blanket and crawled into my lean-to to sleep.

  The next day I took my axe and started to notch all the trees around what I reckoned was my border. Then I began ringbarking. The sooner the trees were dead, the sooner I could burn them — next winter maybe, even. Without the tree cover, the grass would really grow.

  How many sheep could I run on four hundred acres? If I had a good crop next year, would the governor maybe grant me even more land, for being a good farmer?

  I slept deeply those nights, waking only when the o’possums complained because they couldn’t get into my trunk.

  Lonely? I had the bush songs all around me, the bell birds and the chirp of parrots and the laughing jackasses to call when it was morning, and the owls at night. But I had my dreams beside me too. Grand dreams — a hut at first, but one I could add more rooms onto, one with a proper stone chimney and fireplace for a kitchen, and then another room, and a
nother, till it became a right good house. And fruit trees laden with apples and plums, damsons, apricots, pears, figs, peaches, lemons and limes, trellises of grapes just like Mr Johnson had, a field of melons and a paddock of corn, with convict shepherds minding my sheep. And Elsie singing in the kitchen, because in my dreams Elsie didn’t just talk, but sang as well.

  Mr Johnson brought six convict men with him the next week when he came up to Rose Hill, staying with me the whole day to see that they were working well, then leaving me in charge for the week till he returned. He brought more tools for them to use too, lent to me from the government stores, and sacks of rations for the men, and more rations for me too.

  He’d chosen the men well, for they did work. We finished ringbarking the trees, then cut some of the straightest for the corner poles of my new hut, and wattles to fill in the walls, and more wattles to make a night pen for my sheep, which were still at the Glebe farm of Mr Johnson, wearing knotted rag collars Elsie had made to show they were mine.

  One of the convicts wasn’t much older than me — only seventeen. His name was Bill and he’d stolen a sack of turnip seed back in England. He’d only been in the colony a few months, just enough time to get his strength back after the voyage. We got talking around the fire one night, as the other convicts snored in their lean-tos, and he told me his story. Most of the lags in the colony either told you they were innocent, or had been the grandest highwayman England had ever seen or king of the London pickpockets.

  But Bill just said his pa was a tenant farmer and with a wet summer the wheat had rotted, and after his pa had paid the rent there was no money for seed. So Bill stole some seed with the idea that the turnips might see them through the winter. He seemed more worried about how his family was doing, seeing they didn’t get that turnip seed, than about his being sent here as a convict.

  Of course no one in his family knew how to write, and even if they did, they’d know Bill would need to pay sixpence postage for it before he was allowed to take it.

  ‘I could write a letter for you,’ I offered. ‘Mr Johnson will see that it gets to England with the governor’s letters on the next ship that sails. If one of his parson friends collects it, they could pass it on to the parson in your village. That way your family won’t have to pay sixpence for it. Maybe your parson will read them the letter, and even write to Mr Johnson to tell you their news.’

  ‘You can write?’

  I nodded.

  ‘I’d like that,’ he said slowly. ‘I’d like them to know that I’m not just alive, but free of chains too.’ Bill shot me a quick glance. ‘The work isn’t too bad either. And at least here I get fed.’

  Dinner had been roast kangaroo, almost as tough as the hide now drying on one of the tree trunks, and damper that tasted more of ash than flour. Mr Johnson had brought me potatoes, but I was keeping them all to plant.

  ‘I could ask that you get assigned here,’ I offered carefully. I didn’t want anyone working on my farm if he didn’t want to. Not that I thought Bill would cut my throat when I was asleep, like some convicts might, but because being so far from the shanties and life in town wasn’t to everyone’s taste. And sometimes when I looked at the convicts labouring on my land, I could almost hear John Black’s voice whisper, ‘Slave. Slave.’

  ‘If you work here a couple of years, I bet the governor will give you a ticket of leave,’ I added hurriedly. ‘You could have land of your own. Next door to me, even. Of course it’s a long way from Sydney Town, even from Rose Hill . . .’

  ‘I like it here,’ said Bill. I could tell it was the truth. ‘Trees suit me better than the stink of a town. You really think I’d get land of my own?’

  ‘That’s how it works here. There’s enough land for everyone. The colony needs farmers.’ The word ‘slave’ vanished like rain drying in the breeze. ‘I’ll show you how to build a hut and plant fruit trees.’

  ‘I know how to do that,’ said Bill slowly. ‘My grandpa was under-gardener at Lord Vance’s. If I had a farm, I could maybe make enough to pay my brothers’ passage out here. And they could get land too.’

  ‘You got any sisters?’ I grinned. ‘Any girl who can keep house has got a choice of husbands here.’ I nodded at the snoring convicts. ‘Not much of a choice, most times. But there are some good men.’

  So Bill stayed, when the others went back to Rose Hill. Bill really did know how to farm, how to build a fence of branches to pen the ewes at night, and how to build a muck heap to feed the soil right, though growing crops in New South Wales was strange for him, with winter where summer should be and plants growing in the cooler season but drying up in the summer heat. But Bill liked learning too.

  It wasn’t me giving him orders either. We worked together, because Bill knew that the better my farm was, the sooner he’d be able to say he deserved a ticket of leave and land of his own. One day I’d help him build his hut, just like he helped me now. We got the roof on my hut and the walls finished, and even a door hung that I hoped would keep out snakes.

  Mr Johnson only visited me each fortnight after that, after his sermon and magistrate’s duties at Rose Hill were done, sometimes with a team of men, like when we ploughed my river flats for corn.

  By Christmas time the corn was knee-high and the local kangaroos mostly in Bill’s and my bellies — I was good with a musket by then — and their skins tanned with wattle bark and then used to make two hammock beds and quilts ready for the winter. Bill was to stay at the farm to guard the corn from the roos while I went to town for Christmas with the Johnsons. I promised him a week at Rose Hill when I came back, and a pudding too.

  On Christmas Eve when Mr Johnson sailed up from Rose Hill I was waiting to sail back with him to Sydney Town, to hear his sermon in that church we’d built with our own hands, to see Elsie’s face on Christmas morning, and Milbah and young Henry and Mrs Johnson, and to eat a proper dinner at a table again — and more than kangaroo roasted on the fire, along with a hunk of damper. I’d get to see my sheep too!

  I’d made two kangaroo-skin rugs, the skins well tanned and scraped and rubbed with emu oil till they were soft, and trimmed with my knife and sewn with the darning needle and thread from the housewife’s sewing bags Mrs Johnson had given me. The small one was for Elsie, and the big one for the Johnsons. They smelled a bit of emu, but I hoped that would fade.

  It was strange to see Sydney Town again, the straggling huts, orphans playing in the mud, old lags playing dice, soldiers lounging and yelling comments to any woman who passed. It looked both bigger and more tiny too — so many houses, so many people after the quiet of the bush. But I was so used to tall trees and mountains about me now, and suddenly town looked small compared with those.

  Everything was so loud after the bush! I’d become used to looking wide, at everything, in case a kangaroo was on the hill about to eat my corn, or to see where the eagles hovered overhead — they might be trouble once I took my sheep out and they had lambs.

  Now in Sydney Town I had to learn to stop looking again: not meet the eyes of a ruffian picking his teeth with his knife, drunk and ready to punch anyone who stared at him too long; not see the woman drunk by the doorway, her skirt risen up so she showed her legs.

  I had to stop myself smelling things so much too. Back home (home, I thought — my own home) I needed to smell the honey in the big tree up on the hill — it had a beehive in it, just like the one Birrung had shown me so many years earlier, and the bees were just the same, small and black, and they didn’t sting me when I hauled out a few handfuls of honey and wax. I loved the scent of fresh-ploughed dirt, of corn seedlings poking green out of the ground, of the clay and tussocks plastering my hut walls, the way it smelled of earth and sunshine as I went to sleep.

  Now I had to ignore the stink of sweat and chamberpots and garbage again.

  I walked next to Mr Johnson, carrying my swag of rugs and my change of clothes. We were passing the barracks now, with the road gang about to finish for the day, wearily shoulder
ing their picks and shovels. I looked for Black Caesar, but he wasn’t there. Had he been transferred to another gang? My heart ripped a little, thinking of him chained, labouring all day with nothing at the end of it except aching muscles and watery convict stew.

  I had so much now. What did Black Caesar have?

  ‘Has John Black been transferred, Mr Johnson?’ I hoped that Governor Hunter might have sent him back to Norfolk Island. At least he’d have some freedom there, and his wife and child.

  ‘John Black is back on the hunting parties,’ said Mr Johnson shortly.

  I stared at him. ‘But he’ll escape again! Doesn’t Governor Hunter realise?’

  ‘I don’t think it was the governor who decided.’ Mr Johnson obviously didn’t want to say any more. So it wasn’t him who asked the governor to free John Black from his chains then, I thought. Mr Johnson might have grieved to see John Black on the road gang, but he would also know he could not be trusted with a musket.

  Or could he? Surely even John Black had realised now that escape was useless? I could see that Mr Johnson didn’t want to talk about him. Perhaps he had no more answers than I had; perhaps he was still wondering whether he had done right: whether instead of letting John Black sleep in my bed, he should have spent that night convincing him to obey the laws of this new colony, to make his way honestly, slowly and steadily. But could anyone have convinced John Black of that, with so much hatred and vengeance in his heart?

  So I said nothing, just walked up the hill. There was the house, and the garden I’d tended for so long.

  The front door opened. And there was Elsie.

  She must have been watching for us to come up the hill from the harbour. She had on her blue dress with the flowers, and a blue ribbon in her hair. She looked just like she had when I’d left two months back. She looked totally different too.