The Philosopher's Daughters

by Alison Booth

  ‘Not now, Percival. Don’t get poor Harriet worried. She has enough to think about without fretting what else can go wrong. Come with me into the garden, Harriet. Several of my camellias have just come into flower and I’m sure you’ll be interested in seeing how well they flourish here.’

  Outside, the narrow strip of lawn was fringed by a dense row of camellias pruned low. Below this the land fell away steeply and the late afternoon light struck gold from the sandstone ledges descending to the harbour foreshore. Harriet struggled to interest herself in the pale pink blooms of the camellias, their veined petals edged with white, and their centres dense and creamy.

  ‘Why Henry should want to take up the position of acting manager at Dimbulah Downs I really can’t fathom,’ Mrs Morgan said, breaking off a dead camellia flower. ‘And it’s a mystery why your sister Sarah seemed almost as keen about it as he did, heaven only knows why. The place is a veritable outpost. My guess is that it was on the recommendation of Mr Arnott, who has a lot to answer for. Not to mention the letter of introduction from Henry’s father.’

  Sarah and Henry on some remote outpost, Harriet thought. How typical of Henry, intent on spiriting Sarah away.

  Mrs Morgan said, ‘But you mustn’t fret, Harriet. I’m sure they’ll be perfectly safe. It’s the dry season up there so there won’t be any floods to worry about. Now, let’s talk of other matters. Your pearls, for instance. They’re very beautiful.’

  ‘They were my mother’s.’ The last time Harriet had worn them was the night her father had died. At the time Harriet had felt that the pearls had no sentimental value, but she’d been wrong. Fingering them now, she felt she was fastening on to her memories of Father, her memories of home, her memories of Rose.

  ‘They’re lovely,’ Mrs Morgan said, smiling. ‘They show your complexion to advantage.’

  She means they make me look less sallow, Harriet thought, while thanking her hostess for the compliment.

  ‘Now, let me show you this other camellia. See how different it is? Vermilion and with a double row of petals.’

  ‘Very striking, Mrs Morgan. And what are those strange cones on that shrub below?’

  ‘That’s what they call a banksia. Hairy little brute, isn’t it? Do watch your step, dear, the rock falls away quite sharply here.’

  Rooted on a lower ledge, the tree was taller than Harriet had thought, its dark green leaves serrated and showing a silvery underside. The feathery new blooms were upright cathedral candles, while the hard and woody old fruits were something you might throw on a fire if you didn’t think, as Harriet did, how splendid they looked on the tree.

  When she rejoined her hostess, Mrs Morgan took her arm and said, ‘It will be lovely having you to stay. Shall we go inside again? The afternoon is getting chilly. We’ll see if Percival has managed to eat up all the cake in our absence.’

  * * *

  At least Port Darwin was easily accessible by wire; the telegraph line had opened up the north around three decades before. Several days after moving into the Morgans’ flat, Harriet received a telegram that read: ‘DEAREST APOLOGIES NOT THERE WONDERFUL ADVENTURE PERHAPS FOLLOW US SOON BUT AWAIT CONFIRMATION ACCOMMODATION UNCERTAIN LETTER FOLLOWS.’

  The next day Harriet remembered that Charles Barclay had an old friend who was the Government Resident of the Northern Territory, so she sent a telegram to Charles. If she were to decide to follow Sarah to Port Darwin, it would be good to have another contact there.

  But she was unlikely to go, she thought. She could stay in Sydney until the Vincents returned.

  * * *

  Some weeks later, Harriet was sitting in a cane chair on the brick paving bordering the Morgans’ lawn. Her travelling desk on her lap, she picked up her pen and began to write.

  Dear Charles,

  Thank you so much for your interesting letter. It was dated three months ago so you must have written not long after I left, and it was so lovely of you to do this.

  Thank you also for the telegram you sent introducing me to the Northern Territory Resident, Mr Richardson. How convenient that you and he were at Oxford together! I have received a wire inviting me to stay with them if I should decide to visit Port Darwin.

  I haven’t had a letter from Sarah yet, although she did telegraph me. In the meantime, I am kept busy with the Morgans. Mrs Morgan has taken me to visit the artists’ camp at Balmoral and she’s absorbed me into her work for women’s emancipation when I’m not painting. You know how you introduced Sarah to Henry at the Women’s Franchise League? That was an accidental meeting if ever there was one: Henry there solely to fill in time before his dinner engagement with you! Of course, life is a series of accidents. I live at the Morgans’ because the telegram I sent Sarah from London was either lost or incomprehensible. Sarah and Henry are travelling to Dimbulah Downs because, so Mrs Morgan asserts, of the random encounter Henry had with someone in Queensland.

  I spend my days painting and my evenings fund-raising – and consciousness-raising – for the suffragists. There is much poverty here: people without jobs, banks collapsing, depositors losing their life savings. But at the Colonial Office you would know all about that.

  The light here is harsher than I ever imagined. It cuts unrelentingly through the surplus dross to reveal the truth beneath. The structure, the shape, the meaning. Whether I can capture this on canvas remains to be seen. I can only try.

  She paused, wondering if she should start the letter again. Charles might find her struggle to paint dull. On the other hand, he was a good and loyal friend. After putting down the pen, she massaged her aching fingers. Rather than tell him of the dozen canvases she had painted – and repainted – in the weeks since she’d arrived, it would be better by far to tell him about politics here. Although Charles would certainly be getting detailed reports through the Colonial Office, she knew he would appreciate her perspective. She picked up the pen again and rapidly covered several pages. I might be a journalist, she thought, or an academic, if I were a man and not obsessed by converting light into paint.

  * * *

  Although the apartment under the Morgans’ house proved to be a delightful place in which to live, Harriet still felt alone. But she’d chosen this way of life, and one couldn’t be independent without being occasionally lonely. Sometimes she thought that Mosman was so isolated that she might be living on an island, even though it was served by ferries. And although she loved the sparkling water of the harbour and the coruscating light, she seemed unable to translate this into paint, let alone use it to illuminate the nature of existence. Everything changed too fast. The light altered too quickly. Nothing stood still; only herself, stationary on the northern edge of this beautiful harbour. She was going nowhere.

  Perhaps the flaw was in herself. Perhaps she would quite simply never be happy, wherever she was, whatever she was doing.

  Feeling in need of a day out, Harriet took the ferry to Circular Quay and wandered through the Rocks area. Up narrow steps and along terraces, where life seemed to be lived as much in the streets as in the houses. Children were charging up and down, couples were shouting at one another through open doorways, men were propped up against pub walls while they set the world to rights. Harriet viewed herself as unseen. Her lack of looks was equivalent to a cloak of invisibility that gave her the confidence that prettier women might not feel on their own and allowed her to wander about as an observer of life rather than a participant.

  After a while, she realised she was lost, although she wasn’t concerned, for she could always ask for directions. She came at last to a long flight of stone steps opening into a vista of the lower street that she decided she must sketch. It was only when she’d stopped to pull out of her bag a pad and pencil that she realised the two young lads behind her had stopped too, ostensibly so that one could do up his bootlace. Yet they were too close to her for comfort and at any second the
y could grab her bag and make off with it, or with her pearls. One tug at her necklace and it would be gone.

  And there would be no one to whom she could call for help. The alleyway was deserted. She raced down the steps two at a time, hearing as she did so the thud of boots as the boys pounded down behind her. Her heartbeat pulsing in her ears, she accelerated, but they seemed to be gaining on her.

  Halfway down, she saw another figure enter the alley from the bottom: a middle-aged man in a shabby suit, surely an accomplice. He began to run up the steps towards her, and she shifted her bag to her other side, away from where he would pass. Behind her sounded the thump of the lads’ footsteps; they were closing in on her now. She would relinquish the bag if they snatched at it. Better by far to lose her money and her sketchbook than to feel a knife sliding between her ribs. She took a deep breath and prepared to hand it over.

  The lads overtook her a second or two before the middle-aged man was level with her and carried on galloping down the staircase, still laughing. ‘Gidday,’ said the man as he passed her, doffing his hat. ‘Good-day,’ she replied, her voice unsteady.

  Emerging into the bright sunlight at the bottom of the alleyway, she walked fast towards the crowds milling around the quay. Although she was unharmed, the incident – if you could call it that – had unnerved her. The price of independence wasn’t just loneliness, it was also fear. Yet it was a low price, she decided as she strolled through the stream of passengers disembarking from several ferries that had recently arrived. The fear she was likely to feel and the need to take precautions were costs she was willing to pay to live alone. Yet despite this rationalisation, she started to experience once more an unwelcome detachment.

  When the Mosman ferry pulled into the wharf, she was the first on board. Sitting on a slatted wooden bench towards the front of the boat, she stared at the dark choppy water. No one knew where she was at this moment. Not a soul. If anything were to happen to her, it might be days before the Morgans noticed, so separate was her little apartment under their house. It might be months before Sarah would find out.

  When she looked up, she saw that the formerly brilliant blue day had metamorphosed into an evening suffused with a strange yellow light. The bruised-looking sky promised a later storm, which she hoped to watch from the security of her sitting room, and she willed the boat to depart.

  Yet later, sitting by her harbour-side window and watching the lightning perform, Harriet experienced no security. Instead, she was overcome by a feeling of depression so overwhelming it was almost paralysing. It was the incident in the Rocks, she thought; that moment when she’d felt she might be attacked and robbed made her acutely aware of how isolated she had become. She began to shiver. If only she could talk to her father again but that would never be. Nostalgia was negative; she must be positive. If only she could talk to Sarah.

  And to Charles. Reluctantly she admitted that she missed him. Her teeth began to chatter, and it was with the greatest of effort that she was able to force herself out of her chair, to find a warm shawl and to light the kindling in the open fireplace.

  The blue flames flickered around the logs and grew rapidly into a strong red blaze that spurted up the chimney, as if to find a way out. As she watched the progress of the fire, Harriet felt as if she was on the wrong side of the ocean, the wrong side of the world.

  It was tempting to take the next available ship home, and there were plenty of departures. But she couldn’t possibly do that. She would be leaving Sarah behind; the only family she had left apart from Aunt Charlotte, and she’d give anything to see her sister again. She couldn’t possibly leave without doing that.

  After throwing another log on the fire, she went to the window to close the curtains. The storm had passed and, as she watched, a thin moon slipped out from behind a cloud. She observed it for a time as it almost imperceptibly sliced through the dark velvety sky.

  The following morning the long-awaited letter from Sarah arrived, and not merely one letter but four. Sarah and Henry were at Dimbulah Downs Station, Sarah wrote, and she was expecting Harriet to take a steamer north. Harriet’s spirits lifted when she read Sarah’s words: ‘Write at once to let us know what steamer you will take. We can’t wire you yet as we are days away from the repeater station and Henry can’t spare a man, so do please write as soon as you receive this letter. I am so much looking forward to seeing you again!’

  Chapter 17

  ‘A Louis Lot Flute, Sarah.’

  The homestead was deserted, apart from Ah Soy’s chickens. These scrawny creatures, impervious to the midday heat, were scratching around in the dust in the yard next to the kitchen. After finding her hat, Sarah clattered across the wide verandah surrounding the three rooms forming what was grandly known as the manager’s residence. Shed would be a more accurate description, she considered, not for the first time. Dimbulah Downs consisted of a collection of corrugated-iron sheds in a large paddock sparsely treed with eucalypts: the manager’s residence, the kitchen block, the stockmen’s quarters, the horse yards, and a miscellany of assorted shelters housing tack, horse feed, stores and equipment. About a quarter of a mile north lay the Aboriginal camp, close to the billabong.

  To the west, between the furthest building and the track to the river, were several coppers. Behind this, a small army of trousers and shirts hung limply from several clothes lines strung between ironbark posts. Nearby was a windmill that, on a breezy day, pumped water into a tank and some troughs. Today the windmill’s blades were still, apart from a shimmer as they dissolved then reformed, dissolved then reformed, in the blinding sunlight. Sarah wandered across to the kitchen block, and then past the fenced-off vegetable garden, the greenest part of the homestead.

  Eventually she found the cook sitting on the ground in the shade of a stringybark tree, with his wide straw hat pulled low over his eyes. Ah Soy, usually so active, seemed to be in a kind of heat-induced trance, or perhaps he was soundly asleep despite the smouldering pipe gripped between his teeth. He appeared almost frail, she thought with surprise. It was his ebullient personality that gave him stature when he was awake.

  ‘Ah Soy,’ she said gently. He opened his eyes and began to struggle to his feet. ‘Don’t get up,’ she said, but it was too late.

  Smoothing down the wrinkles in his navy-blue trousers and jacket, he smiled at her around the stem of the pipe. ‘Missee wash plenty muchee clothes.’

  ‘There’s a bit more to do yet.’

  ‘Missee swimmen river.’

  She laughed; on washday she always kept the best part to the end. ‘Have you seen Bob?’ A stockman on light homestead duties while recovering from a riding accident, Bob found the presence of a white woman on the station confronting, and she guessed he was avoiding her.

  ‘Over there.’

  She looked where Ah Soy was pointing, and saw Bob crouched low behind the woodpile, stacking logs.

  ‘Bob!’ she called. Unable to pretend deafness in front of the cook, he sauntered towards them. A tall thin figure, he had a thick grey moustache whose ends drooped down to the jawline, giving him a mournful expression. The visible part of his face was a parched landscape, and his eyebrows small ledges that cast his eyes into shadow, making them appear deep set.

  ‘Can you saddle my horse please? You can tether her to the verandah rail. I’ll be back in an hour.’

  She headed towards the river track. The stream meandered over the plateau until the ground started to fall away steeply and the water was channelled into a series of rock pools. When she’d first seen this place, she’d thought it looked almost like the sequence of locks on the Grand Union Canal, but less even, less regulated. Some of the pools were short, some were long, some were curved, some almost rectangular. As the water flowed into these various receptacles, it altered its tempo, from adagio to allegro, and it varied its volume too, from pianissimo to fortissimo.

 
Her favourite spot for swimming was the long pool with twin waterfalls. The Aboriginal women were here already, splashing about in the water. She watched Bella, who was perched on a rock, and rubbing a bar of soap into a piece of clothing. Though Sarah still didn’t understand why Bella viewed her as kin of the absent manager of Dimbulah Downs, she was glad of the friendliness this had brought her.

  When Bella tossed the garment into the water, it swirled about for a few seconds before vanishing under the surface. The other women started diving for it, naked black bodies flashing through the white foam, and emerging faces whooping with joy. One of them retrieved the garment and tossed it around like a ball, until eventually another seized it and wrung it out, before putting it on to a small mound of clothes on a flat rock at the side.

  After taking off her shoes and stockings, Sarah hitched up her skirt and tied it into a loose knot above her knees. She picked up a bundle of dry clothes and stepped on to a broad rock above the pool. ‘Next!’ she shouted and flung a cotton petticoat down to Daisy balanced on the rock below.

  When the last piece of clothing had been washed and rinsed, Sarah slipped off her skirt and blouse, and undid her corset. Wearing only her chemise and knickers, she dived in a clean arc into the pool below, emerging some yards further down. Shaking her hair off her face, she began to float on her back, feet pointed downstream. What heaven it was to be in the water, to feel its softness caressing her skin. Far above was a circle of harsh blue sky, ringed with the dark foliage of casuarina trees. She was swept a few yards further downstream before she started vigorously kicking with her feet and moving her arms in a kind of backstroke – in which she raised both arms simultaneously then lifted them backwards and down into the water. Slowly she inched towards the women, her arms working furiously as she struggled to make progress.