by Alison Booth
Harriet.
PS Telegraph at once if not convenient and indicate what you would like me to bring.
Sarah’s elation found immediate release in a few excited skips around the room and she even clapped her hands with joy. But then she paused: perhaps she had misunderstood. She reread Harriet’s scrawled lines: yes, July 5th or thereabouts. Harriet at Dimbulah Downs, what an adventure that would be.
After running the length of the verandah, Sarah pressed her face against the fly screen of the enclosure. Frank was in mid-yarn, but she paid no heed and burst out, ‘Harriet’s coming! She’ll be at Port Darwin in just over a month. Isn’t that wonderful?’
Henry’s expression was blank, as if he couldn’t recall who Harriet was. He must have been miles away, Sarah thought, caught up in Frank’s story. Or perhaps he was tired out after the day’s muster; fatigue could slow his reactions terribly.
‘Harriet’s coming,’ she repeated. ‘She said she could make her own way here! She was so droll, she said she’ll take a coach from Pine Creek. She has no idea of what it’s like.’
‘That’s what I’m afraid of,’ said Henry slowly. ‘She has no idea of what it’s like here. And of course, we’ll have to go to Port Darwin to meet her.’
‘I’m so excited! We’ll have to telegraph back. She wants to know if we want her to bring anything.’
Now Henry was staring towards the billabong. He appeared to be deep in thought as he contemplated the dead gum tree adorned with white cockatoos.
‘We must telegraph, Henry. Can one of the men be spared to take a message to the telegraph repeater station?’
Henry transferred his gaze from the cockatoos to Sarah. ‘Perhaps Harriet could bring a Louis Lot flute,’ he said. ‘A silver one, not ebony. Ebony might crack out here, with the days so hot and the nights so cool.’
‘Or the termites might make a meal of it,’ Sarah said. ‘Yes, Harriet must bring a silver flute with her.’
‘A Louis Lot flute, Sarah. Write out a message and one of the boys can take it to the telegraph station tomorrow.’
‘That telegraphic office’s a grand thing,’ Frank said. ‘And Dimbulah Downs is barely a few days’ ride away.’
‘A very grand thing,’ Sarah said, laughing now she saw that she had Henry on side. ‘I’ll tell Ah Soy next. He’ll be so pleased.’
‘He doesn’t know Harriet.’
‘I’ve told him all about Harriet.’
Ah Soy wasn’t in the kitchen, but she could hear water splashing in the kitchen garden behind. She looked out of the window and in the fading light saw him watering the neat rows of vegetables with one of the Aboriginal lads. She wouldn’t disturb them; they looked so peaceful.
Glancing around, she tried to see things through Harriet’s eyes. She would love the lush kitchen garden and the line of lemon trees flourishing along one side. The plumbing facilities would be a shock to her but she need never see the lavatory for the stockmen. A kerosene drum positioned over a pit, it was screened on three sides with hessian stretched between sapling posts. The lavatory for the main house was also some distance away, although in a different direction. It was of the same design, with the addition of the crude wooden seat that Henry had asked one of the men to fashion soon after they arrived. The stench there was so awful she’d have to issue Harriet with a clothes peg to wear on her nose, although the problem with that was the flies would get in her mouth. The enclosure had no door, just a hessian curtain that neither she nor Henry ever used; the throne had what he described as a quite splendid view of the bush. The shower room was located near the bore. It too had three hessian walls but possessed the added sophistication of a stone slab floor.
There were other hardships too. In the middle of the day, the temperature was in the low nineties Fahrenheit, and the light was blinding. You couldn’t roll up your sleeves in the sunlight without getting burned. There were flies in the daytime and mosquitoes at night. And everywhere there was dust: remorseless dust that covered everything. Sarah could never get it out from under her fingernails: they were permanently bordered in red dirt.
Harriet would find the manager’s residence a bit of a shock as well: two bedrooms with walls of unlined corrugated iron attached to bloodwood sapling supports, and separated by a large living room with roughly hewn doors that could be opened to let the breezes flow through. Living here was akin to camping, and at this point Sarah remembered the snakes. Harriet would have to learn how to shoot a snake. You never knew when one might come across a king brown, or that’s what Henry said. She herself had never had to dispatch one, but she knew how to do it. She had seen how it was done.
Then there was the domestic staff. Harriet couldn’t help but love Bella and Daisy once she’d accustomed herself to their ways. And Ah Soy too, who could grow vegetables under even the most unpromising conditions. What she would make of the stockmen was another matter. But the homestead was quiet in the dry season. Most of the men were out at the stock camps. Bob would probably wish himself there too once Harriet arrived.
Sarah glanced up at the sky, already darkening to indigo and with a scattering of stars faintly visible. Harriet couldn’t fail to love it here. There was so much space, so much freedom. She would become obsessed by the light and do her best paintings here, paintings that would bring her happiness and not despair. Sarah smiled to herself and went inside to draft the telegram. The silver Louis Lot flute; Henry had been most particular about that. A piano wouldn’t go amiss either, but you had to be realistic.
* * *
Once supper was over, Sarah persuaded Frank to pull out his fiddle. He’d made it himself and, while it lacked the resonance of the instruments that Sarah was used to hearing, she was delighted with the expressiveness of his playing. Soon a chorus of frogs from the billabong started up an accompaniment, followed not long after by the intermittent croak of a bullfrog that sounded so close it might almost be in the fly-screened enclosure with them.
When Frank tired of playing, Sarah took out the Hohner harmonica Henry had given her after his trip to Queensland all those months ago. It would be fun to play a duet with Henry once Harriet arrived with the Louis Lot flute, she thought as she put the harmonica to her lips. Now she would play some of the bush ballads she’d learned, beginning with the cheerful ones and then moving on to the saddest in her repertoire. Henry and Frank would be unable to resist singing very loudly about heartache and loss. Her own heart filled with joy. She had everything she could ever want here this evening, this moment.
Chapter 18
On the End of a Rope Was a Young Black Girl
Later that evening, Sarah went into the living room to retrieve Harriet’s letters. The shutters, crude affairs of corrugated iron that were hinged at the top to the frame of the building, were still unfastened. Through the open window she heard the men’s voices and saw, illuminated by the brilliant moon, Henry and Frank standing on the hard ground below the verandah. Frank was recounting a tale to which Henry was paying little attention. When Frank stopped talking, Henry said, ‘A week ago, I saw something really odd at a station south-west of here.’
‘What was that?’ Frank leaned against the verandah rail as if preparing for a long conversation. He’s used to isolated people yarning half the night, thought Sarah, just as Henry’s about to do.
Henry kicked a number of pebbles to one side as if he had to clear a space before continuing. ‘It was at Empty Creek Station,’ he said. ‘They’ve got a blacks camp there too, and three gins working in the homestead, and plenty of black fellows as well as whites working as station hands and stockmen.’
Henry paused, and Frank grunted as if to offer him encouragement to continue.
‘So it seemed there was no need for them to try to get more blacks from elsewhere,’ Henry said. ‘But while I was there, and with no sign of shame, Bert Carruthers and his mates rode up –
white fellows all of them, and they were all laughing. Carruthers was trotting at a fair old pace and behind him, running on the end of a rope, was a young black girl, no more than twelve or thirteen. It looked as if he’d lassoed her; she had a rope around her neck. She’d have had her neck broken if she’d fallen over.’
Sickened, Sarah turned off the lamp and knelt next to the window.
‘They chained her up near the house, like a dog. “Niggers aren’t human,” Carruthers said, and laughed again. He told me they were going to keep her chained for four or five days, until she was tamed, and then she’d work around the place. I had to leave not long afterwards, but it’s been on my mind ever since.’
If it had been on his mind, why hadn’t Henry mentioned it to her? Until this moment Sarah had thought that he told her everything – the anxieties as well as the joys. She understood Bella’s fears now.
‘Ever since then,’ Henry went on, ‘I’ve been agonising about whether I should have taken a stand. With men like Carruthers and his mates, persuasion doesn’t work. I had no gun with me. Not even the revolver I usually carry, while Carruthers and his mates had a rifle and a revolver apiece. Mick had stopped off at the Empty Creek Aboriginal camp, so I was on my own.’
‘What could you have done if you’d had a gun anyway?’ Frank said. ‘You were outnumbered.’
‘I could have said more, I should have said more, rather than simply stating that I thought it was bally inhumane. Those were my precise words, bally inhumane. They sniggered at that. I know that some people see black versus white as the survival of the fittest. But the Aborigines I’ve met aren’t savage, or at least not as I understand the word. Take Mick, for example. He’s gentle and every bit as intelligent as I am. More so, in fact.’
‘The Daly River massacre showed up the white fellow as pretty bloody savage,’ Frank said.
Henry agreed. ‘If I were a bit smarter I might be able to see a way out of this mess. But I’m not and I don’t see how the two cultures can ever be reconciled. Life here isn’t simple, I’m starting to realise. I thought being acting manager at Dimbulah Downs was going to be a straightforward adventure but it’s not. I knew there were issues about black fellows before we decided to come up here, but I didn’t expect they’d be this bad. Why aren’t we paying the Aborigines, for instance? They’re not paid, or only in food and clothing. And this is one of the better stations, isn’t it?’
‘It is indeed. And I know, I’ve seen them all.’
‘Sometimes I think I’m on the wrong side. I’d rather be with Mick than people like Carruthers any day.’
‘Now that’s a thing I’d be after keeping quiet about,’ Frank said. ‘And there’s no way I’ll be repeating it, so don’t you worry. These abductions happen, as you saw for yourself. Not as much now as they used to, but they happen. How do you think they got workers here to begin with once the leaseholds were granted? The blacks had to be pacificated. It’s not so bad here at Dimbulah Downs. The boss here had a kindly attitude right from the start, but it doesn’t work that way everywhere. Got to get their workers somehow or the place’ll never get civilised. And they don’t always care how.’
‘If dragging women in on a rope is civilisation, it isn’t what I understand by that term. It looks more like slavery to me. Carruthers is an animal.’
‘They say a lot of the murders of whites by blackfellers are about the gins,’ Frank said. ‘They don’t mind sharing their women but they draw the line at abduction.’ He pulled out his tobacco pouch and rolled a cigarette. When he had lit it, he sucked hard before continuing, ‘I’ve seen plenty of things at some of the cattle stations that would really shock you. Lubras belted over the head with hobble chains. Lubras forced to crouch on a hot tin roof in the heat until they were almost dead. And worse.’
Sarah shuddered and felt her stomach churn.
‘The Territory’s a beautiful place but it attracts all sorts,’ Henry said.
‘Folk who love the isolated life and the landscape. Though there can’t be too many of those or the Territory wages for white fellers wouldn’t be so high. Got to compensate them for the diet of beef and damper,’ Frank said. ‘Not to mention the infrequent mail.’
‘Then there are people who are escaping from something. Or who think they can get away with doing what they like up here.’
‘Until they get a spear in their backs, that is.’
The frog chorus stopped abruptly and the ensuing silence put an end to the conversation. When the chorus began again, Frank said, ‘Time to turn in. I’ve got a long day tomorrow.’
‘Sure you don’t want to sleep under a roof tonight?’
‘No, I like my roof star-studded and I’ve a grand place to lay my swag not far from the lagoon.’
* * *
Henry sat on the edge of the bed and yanked off his boots.
‘I couldn’t help overhearing your conversation with Frank.’ Sarah pulled up the blankets to cover her shoulders. ‘Why didn’t you tell me about Carruthers and all that?’ Her horror at what she’d learned was spilling over into hostility towards Henry, yet his crime of omission was by far the lesser. Although she should be supporting him not accusing him, she found it impossible to stop. She willed him to reach out his arms to her and hug her, but he didn’t. Instead he sat staring at the wavering lamp, while letting her harsh words wash over him. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ she repeated. ‘Why did you keep it all bottled up until Frank O’Connor, a man you hardly know, came by? Why tell him everything but keep me in the dark? If I hadn’t accidentally overheard the two of you talking when I went to collect Harriet’s letters, I might still be oblivious of what’s going on in front of our very noses.’
She paused, waiting for a response that didn’t come. Eventually she said, ‘You told Frank you knew things were bad between whites and blacks and yet you still wanted to come up here. Why did you do that?’
‘You were keen enough.’
‘But I knew nothing. I’d never been further north than the Hawkesbury River.’
‘You read up about it. Leichhardt’s journal and all of that.’
‘That’s history. And why not tell me what you told Frank? How can I trust you if you won’t tell me what’s happening? How can I feel safe here if I think you’re hiding things from me? I’ve had a sheltered life, but I’m not completely stupid. You can tell me these things and I won’t fall apart.’
‘I’m sorry, Sarah,’ Henry said at last. ‘We were speaking too loudly. I didn’t want to tell you because I didn’t want to frighten you.’
‘But I want to know. I don’t want to be shielded. I’m not some silly girl who’s easily frightened.’
Henry sighed. ‘The trouble with the Territory is that too many white men think the black fellow is a lazy bastard and you have to push him hard to get him to work. Carruthers is like that and he isn’t the only one, you can bet on it.’
‘I heard what Frank said.’ I’ve been sheltered all my life, Sarah thought, despite my education. Sheltered by Father, sheltered by Harriet, sheltered by Henry. Hiding behind my music. Escaping into my music. And blind to what’s happening around me.
Henry took off his clothes and climbed into bed. She put her arms around him and, with her head resting against his chest, listened to the metronome of his heartbeat. In a few moments he was asleep, leaving her uncomforted.
For hours she lay awake, unable to push away the image of the tethered black girl running behind Carruthers’ horse and the laughing faces of the white men, unconcerned at the fate that would have befallen her if she’d tripped. She felt a growing anger against Carruthers.
When Henry rolled over, presenting his back to her, she began to feel angry with him too, for falling asleep without talking through the issue. As soon as he began to snore, her hostility was replaced by irritation. She gave him a well-judged shove, sufficien
t to stop the noise but not to wake him. In his sleep he flung out an arm and pulled her to him. Slightly mollified, she began to think of Harriet’s visit.
She wondered what her sister would make of the cattle stations and their practices when she arrived in the Territory. Harriet would be sniffing out injustices, reaching generalisations, writing articles. There was a lot that Harriet and Henry would disagree about. Henry already had enough to worry about managing Dimbulah Downs without dealing with lectures from Harriet.
Yet recording injustice and fighting against injustice were the right things to do. If Sarah had Harriet’s talents she would do it herself. But she wasn’t clever like Harriet. She’d had the same opportunities as Harriet, but she had none of her flair.
* * *
The next afternoon, after filling a number of large empty jam tins with water, Sarah found a thick rough-cut plank near the timber store. There were two trestles a short distance away, and with some effort she managed to lever the plank on to the trestles. On top of this sturdy base she arranged the jam tins, adjusting them so they were equally spaced. Only after she’d extricated several splinters from her hands did she remove her revolver from its holster.
The gun was silver-coloured, and so shiny she could see her likeness in it. Her pale reflection, distorted by the curvature of the metal, looked critically back. To avoid this appraisal, she examined the handle. It was of ivory like the keys of the beloved piano that she’d left behind in Gower Street. Small and elegant, the revolver was a recent gift from Henry. For the snakes, he’d said. But maybe he’d meant for more.
She hated it, although she’d kept that opinion to herself. Her palms were beginning to sweat at the thought of what the gun could do. She placed it on the plank while she wiped her hands on her skirt. A few seconds of deep breathing calmed her. Her fingers were now as steady as if she were about to play a favourite piano piece; Satie maybe, or Chopin. No, she should think of music a bit more savage than that, maybe the cannons from Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. Carefully she loaded the revolver and stepped back a few paces. Don’t think, do, she exhorted herself. You’re becoming a woman of action. You know right from wrong. Do, do, do.
