The Secret of the Black Bushranger

by Jackie French

  I thought she was still just a girl, but no — she was a young woman.

  Which of us had changed? Her or me? Or both?

  I’d been going to give her a hug, like I always had. But suddenly my arms couldn’t move. I couldn’t say anything except, ‘Elsie . . .’ I felt like I should bow to her, like a young man does to a young lady. But I couldn’t bow to Elsie!

  I felt a flush cover my face like I was sitting too close to the fire. But then Milbah ran out and put her arms around me and Henry toddled out too, with Mrs Johnson following. I hugged them both and Mrs Johnson kissed my cheek, and with all that I was inside, and hadn’t really greeted or touched Elsie at all.

  But I looked at her. Was she blushing too?

  The Johnsons had a new servant now, Annie. She was about twenty, with pitted skin, and from her swearing I wasn’t sure how long she’d stay.

  But it was grand to sit in our church again, this time with the governor and all his household in the front rows, and even some of the officers and a lot more of the convicts who came to class each week.

  The Johnsons had been asked to dine at Government House after the sermon. Mr Johnson said that the governor had been so good to his household it would be churlish to refuse. Annie had some friends — or a friend — she went to meet. So Elsie and I took Milbah and Henry down to one of the coves with a cold rooster Elsie had roasted the day before, and a warm damper and some fresh goat’s cheese she had rolled in herbs from the garden. Elsie was good at things like that, adding bits and pieces to make the same things taste different.

  We took the children’s clothes off so they wouldn’t get muddy, watched them splash in the waves and dig in the sand, looking for shells and crabs.

  It was funny, I thought. I’d never even seen anyone naked until I came to the colony. Even these days the Indians mostly didn’t wear anything at all, except string around their waist to carry tools or baskets, and sometimes an o’possum-skin cloak slung over their shoulders. But back at my farm I swam naked every night in the river to clean off the day’s sweat and dirt, though I couldn’t get Bill to try it. Too much washing was bad for the lungs, Bill reckoned.

  ‘You’ll like the farm,’ I said. I’d hardly said anything to Elsie all day. Of course she hadn’t said anything to me, or to anyone else. But she’d hardly looked at me either.

  She did look at me then, smiling at me inquiringly, a bit like the big green birds that tried to rob Mr Johnson’s fruit trees.

  ‘There are swans on the river. And I’ve got the whole river flats sown to corn and pumpkins.’ I hoped Bill was keeping a good lookout for the roos. Normally we took it in turns keeping watch at night, which was when the roos mostly came out to eat.

  ‘It’s only a small hut now, but there’s fresh water just a few yards away, in the creek. We don’t even need a well! I thought I’d add another room next year, a proper kitchen with an indoor fireplace and a verandah . . .’

  My voice trailed away at Elsie’s expression. I could tell as much from that as if she’d spoken.

  We weren’t two ten-year-old brats hiding in a ruined hut now. Elsie was a young lady, and I was a young man — a landowner!

  If Elsie had been a convict, she might have been assigned to me as a servant. But whoever Elsie had been, she was no convict. She was the ward of Mr and Mrs Johnson.

  The only way Elsie was going to any man’s farm was as his servant — or his wife.

  But you can’t get married at fifteen, unless your guardian says you can. And why would Elsie want to leave the comfortable house in town to live among the kangaroos and gum trees? Women were scarce in the colony — and pretty young women with all their own teeth who could cook and look after a house and had manners just like a gentlewoman’s were far rarer. Elsie could marry any man she wanted to in the whole of New South Wales.

  I’d heard her talk before. Maybe in a year or two she’d decide to speak even more. Perhaps she’d marry a wealthy officer, have a two-storey house with ten chimneys and glass in its windows and dozens of servants and a carriage with four horses to pull it.

  Why should she choose me?

  I flushed and said, ‘Maybe next year Mrs Johnson will bring you and the children up to visit for the day. I’d . . . I’d like you to see the farm.’

  Elsie grinned. It was the best, biggest grin I’d ever seen her give. She nodded, then leaned over and kissed my cheek. She hesitated, almost like she was going to speak again, then wrote in big letters in the muddy sand: Happy Christmas Barney!

  Then she ran down to bring back Milbah and Henry to have them dry, clean and dressed when their parents came home and a good Christmas supper on the table to welcome them.

  CHAPTER 15

  Reward!

  January 1795–January 1796

  I missed Elsie back at my farm, which was beginning to look like a farm now. I missed her good cooking too. I missed Mr and Mrs Johnson and Milbah and Henry. But it was good to be back with the trees and my crops growing about me.

  I’d brought back a month’s worth of rations for me and Bill, and the pudding I’d promised him, and another for both of us, and a big wheel of cheese. I brought the sheep back with me too, all twenty-three of them in a pen on the boat, bleating and complaining as if I planned to cut their throats, not take them to the best grass and water they’d ever had.

  It took me a few weeks to make them realise the new pen was their home, and not to wander too far away. Bill and I cut grass and dried it to make hay, and the sweet stuff tempted them back each night, so I could pen them where I’d hear them call if dingoes or the big spotted native cats attacked. I could hear the dingoes howl across the hill sometimes, but they never came near my farm, or not yet. I need a dog, I thought, to warn me if anything gets too close.

  A lot happened that year — most you probably don’t want to know about, like the wallabies breaking through the orchard fences and tearing down half my fruit trees in one night, and more that’s more interesting, but that’s for another story.

  The major changes were that Mr Johnson stopped coming to the farm now I was getting myself established — he had little time with so much work. I traded two axes with the Indians for a big canoe. It took me a week and lots of duckings to learn to paddle it, but after that I could take bags of corn or potatoes down to Rose Hill to sell; go to church and bring back the pudding or the parcel of hearth cakes or pasties Elsie sent out each week with Mr Johnson. You should have seen me and Bill with those puddings on Sunday night, after a week of boiled vegetables, ash-coated damper and tough kangaroo. Each apple fritter or piece of goat’s cheese I ate meant Elsie was thinking about me, and that warmed me even more than the food.

  There wasn’t much to send back with Mr Johnson — the Johnsons’ farms and garden gave a far richer harvest than mine. But I collected any pretty feathers or bush flowers I saw, and sometimes an o’possum skin tanned and soft and warm that could be used for the collar of a coat or to trim a winter jacket, and gave them to Mr Johnson to take back. I never said they were for Elsie, not for Mrs Johnson, but I had a feeling he and Mrs Johnson understood.

  Bill never did take to the canoe — I still couldn’t get him to try swimming, and he was afraid it would tip over. But once a month he walked to Rose Hill and stayed a couple of nights there. So it was Bill who brought back the news that John Black Caesar had attacked Pemulwuy, the Indian who had speared and killed Governor Phillip’s game shooter years back.

  ‘He didn’t kill Pemulwuy — he got away. But they’re calling Black Caesar a right hero,’ said Bill as we sat by the fire that night, cutting off another hunk of kangaroo and trying to chew it. One thing about kangaroo — by the time you’d chewed each bite a hundred times you knew you’d eaten dinner.

  I nearly said, ‘I’ve met Black Caesar. Talked to him.’ Which mightn’t have meant a thing in the old days. Once everyone in the colony knew everyone else by sight at least. But I didn’t. Bill would ask questions and there were some I shouldn’t answer
. So I just said, ‘Good,’ and reached for another slice of kangaroo.

  Bill stayed to look after the farm again while I went back to Sydney Town for Christmas week that year. Someone needed to be there to stop the sheep from straying too far, and to keep watch on the corn crop at night, as now it was nearly ripe the roos would be at it as soon as they could no longer smell a human about. In return I let him have a whole week at Rose Hill when I got back, and a silver dollar as well, which I hoped he might save but suspected he’d spend on rum and his girlfriend there.

  So it was Bill who brought the next news of John Black too. I’d been getting worried, as dusk was settling in — late, it being so close to midsummer — but still no sign of him. I was just wondering if the moonlight would be bright enough for me to paddle the canoe along the river, calling for him, or whether he’d forgotten what day he was supposed to get back, when he appeared, a big bundle on his back.

  ‘Where’ve you been?’ I called from the hut door. ‘I thought you might have been bitten by a snake.’

  Bill waited till he’d slung his bundle down and taken the pannikin of tea and the hunk of only slightly burned damper I handed him. ‘Bought another musket at the store, and shot and powder too. The storeman put it on your account.’ This was how we mostly bought things, with so little coin in the colony — the storekeeper marked up what I owed and gave me credit when I took in corn or wool or vegetables.

  ‘What do we want another musket for?’ One kangaroo was enough to keep me and Bill in meat for a week, and there wasn’t any shortage of kangaroos, and one shot was enough for me to bring one down. I was a bit annoyed, to tell the truth, because that musket would have used up all my credit, and then some.

  ‘You know that big black convict, Black Caesar? Well, he’s turned highwayman.’

  ‘We haven’t got any highways,’ I said, while my brain was thinking: Why? Why has John Black had to ruin things for himself again, just when he’s lost his chains and is being called a hero? The governor would have rewarded him with land for what he’d done the month before, and convicts to work it. His wife and daughter could have come over from Norfolk Island . . .

  ‘They’re calling him a bushranger now, because he ranges the bush,’ said Bill. ‘He raids places just like this. He’s got a gang of cutthroats. They say no one’s safe.’

  ‘Have they killed anyone?’

  ‘Not yet that I’ve heard.’ Bill spread bush honey on his damper — even burned damper tasted good if you put on enough honey. ‘But I reckon we both need muskets now. And I ain’t going anywhere without one, even to hoe the corn . . . The governor has offered five gallons of rum for Black Caesar’s capture or his head! Imagine! Five gallons!’

  Five gallons was enough for Bill to buy a flock of sheep, once he got his ticket of leave, or for me to pay a carpenter to make some proper furniture, the kind a young lady might like in her house, and buy things like proper cooking pots and a skillet.

  And then I shivered, because I’d been thinking of selling a man’s freedom for five gallons of rum. Just like he was a slave . . .

  John Black Caesar was a thief. I owed him nothing. If he’d helped stop Mr Johnson’s enemies destroying the church while it was being built, then it was no more than proper thanks for all the kindness Mr Johnson had shown him.

  But nor should you sell a man for five gallons of rum.

  I looked at my hut, at the hammock and the bush bed and the rough chairs I’d made myself, the slightly wobbly table, thought of my big new shed that now held sacks of wool and had bags of potatoes and hay hanging from the rafters. Not much to steal, but as much as most farms in the colony: food, blankets and, most of all, muskets and shot, all needed by ‘bushrangers’ who had never learned how to live from the bush.

  I stood up. ‘I reckon we need to keep a watch out for men then, as well as roos. I’ll stay up tonight. You look done in.’

  I sat on the hill and watched the moon rise above the river. I thought about freedom and what chances a man had in life. We’d both had nothing, me and John Black. We’d both had lucky chances too. It looked like my choices had been good ones. John Black Caesar no longer had his Norfolk Island farm, his pigs and wife and daughter. But he had a gang who followed him like he was their chief, or king.

  Was that all he would ever be? A . . . What was the word? Bushranger? Or would his gang get bigger and bigger, as convicts realised that they outnumbered the soldiers and began to follow Black Caesar as their king? Would John Black finally become Caesar?

  I didn’t know.

  Something moved in the darkness. Kangaroo! And there was another. They must have been able to smell the ripening corn from miles off.

  And that was all I thought about Black Caesar that night.

  Turned out we didn’t have to wait for a convict gang to come up the river to help us harvest. Bill left to hike to Sydney Town to lead the convicts back, and I’d just begun to cut and shuck the first cobs when a black family arrived, father and mother and three children and grandpa and a couple of aunties too, by the look of it. I couldn’t understand more than a few words they said — most of their words sounded different from Birrung’s, or maybe they just spoke them too fast for me to hear them properly. But they knew how to cut corn, and shuck it and hang it in the big sacks from branches to dry. And they knew how to make me understand that they expected a share of the corn for their trouble.

  Or did they just expect some of the corn because there was lots, and they had none, so they expected me to share it? Would they have helped me anyway if there’d been nothing they wanted to share? Birrung had taught me that there was so much about the Indian ways I didn’t know.

  I tried to learn more of their language, and to teach them some words of mine. I wanted to ask if they knew Birrung and what she was doing. She’d be married by now, of course. But I longed to know if she was happy, if she’d had children. Had her life been as good as mine?

  But they just laughed, as we all ate lots of boiled corn that night, as well as fish the women caught and cooked and their flat cakes of some ground-up seed. Those cakes were good, but not as good as Elsie’s hearth cakes. And two days later they were gone, and all the corn harvested and shucked and hung up in sacks in the shed, drying, ready for my canoe to take it to Sydney Town to sell.

  Of course I’d make more money if I’d rigged up a still and turned the corn into rum, which was what most small farmers like me were doing. I was far enough away from town that probably no officer would muscle in and demand his cut of the rum either, except from the shanty owner down at the harbour I’d sell it to.

  But Bill and I had worked hard for this corn. I wanted it to fill people’s bellies, to be made into good cornbread or corn puddings, not be lost in drunken dreams, nor turn people into someone else, like the rum had done to Sally.

  I wished I’d spoken to Sally now; told her how good life could be without the drink. But she already knew that — and Mrs Johnson would have told her too. But still she had turned back to the grog.

  And then I forgot about Sally, and leaned back against a tree, and imagined Bill’s face when he arrived with the convicts and found all the corn hanging in the shed, and how I’d use a little of the money to buy a blue ribbon for Elsie because . . .

  Well, just because.

  The air was hot and still around me. I’d learned what that meant. Storm! Sure enough, the clouds to the south rose high like purple mountains. I was glad the stringybark roof on the shed was a good thick one. I scrambled up and headed for my hut.

  CHAPTER 16

  Bushranger!

  February 1796

  That storm! The skies turned as black as a burned gum tree. The rain pelted down all afternoon, and when it was over, the river surged up over what had been my cornfield.

  But I just grinned. Enough grass had grown since the corn was planted to stop the soil washing away, and my pumpkins and melons were higher up, where the floodwaters didn’t reach. Instead this deluge would brin
g fresh soil for my next crops to grow in. But I reckoned Bill wouldn’t be coming back with the convict gang the next day, not till the floods went down.

  I’ll get the men to plant turnip seed, I thought. Turnips were a good crop for the winter. I hoped the memory of the turnip seed wouldn’t make Bill sad. I’d rather have grown peas — peas taste better than turnips, and got a better price too, because you can dry peas to sell to ships, and you can’t dry turnips. But until I had at least one other convict to help me, or built more fences, we couldn’t keep watch on the peas all day and night, and that’s what it would take to stop the wallabies eating them. Wallabies like corn, but they love peas: young pea plants, peas in the pod, it didn’t matter.

  Peas would have to wait another year.

  As the last of the silver raindrops dried on the leaves, I harvested some potatoes and carrots from the vegetable garden by the creek, which had hardly risen at all — I’d chosen well. I boiled them and remembered the corn and potato omelette Elsie had made, and how she’d kissed my cheek a month earlier. She hadn’t spoken again, but she’d made me a new shirt for Christmas and sent me back with three giant puddings. I smiled at the memory as I boiled up a haunch of kangaroo too, then hung it up in the chimney where the smoke would keep the flies off it, so I could eat the rest the next day.

  I let the fire die down as darkness spread over the land. I put a big green log on it so there’d be coals to start it again in the morning. I lay on my bed, full of kangaroo and potatoes and carrots, and watched the stars out the door, listening as always in case the dingoes attacked the sheep, dreaming of one day when my farm would be a hundred times bigger and my hut a proper house. And Elsie . . .

  He came like a monster in the night again, his vast bulk blocking the starlight at the door. He aimed his musket at me. ‘You! On your feet!’

  I scrambled up and he gazed about the hut. He’d grabbed my musket before I could reach it. ‘Where’s the powder and shot? In there?’ He nodded towards the trunk. ‘Hurry, if you don’t want a hole in you.’ He grinned. ‘And your head hung up outside your hut as a warning to any who’d hunt Black Caesar.’