The Philosopher's Daughters

by Alison Booth

  She turned and noticed a younger well-dressed Aboriginal man walking along the dusty track, perhaps a hundred yards behind her. After a moment she recognised the man she’d seen in the distance at the station: Henry’s stockman, Mick.

  She felt a stab of annoyance at seeing him here. She was probably being irrational, for there was no reason why he shouldn’t be walking along this road at the same time as she was; the cricket was after all a big occasion here. On the other hand, her chagrin might not be irrational. Perhaps Henry had instructed his man to keep an eye on her, his recalcitrant sister-in-law.

  She accelerated and after a few hundred yards, casually looked around again. The man was nowhere to be seen. I was mistaken, she thought. He hasn’t been sent to follow me. She slowed down and resumed thinking about her mission for the next half-hour, the sketching of mangroves.

  After her walk with the Richardson girls, she’d tried to draw these trees but had failed dismally. That was why she wanted to return. She remembered the dense, dark green foliage of the mangroves pressing down on her, like a tent roof strung too low, and perforated in one place by a shaft of brilliant sunlight that was almost apocalyptic as it illuminated its chosen patch. But this was the problem, this was what had escaped her, she couldn’t grasp the meaning of this illumination, although she felt that if she could visit the place again, on her own, she might be able to comprehend its spiritual significance. And perhaps, if she were really lucky, to translate it later into paint.

  Yet she was wrong about the tide; the water was now rising when she had expected it to be low. She strode up and down impatiently, until suddenly she became aware that she wasn’t alone. Somehow Mick had managed to get ahead of her; he was leaning against a tree, not exactly watching her, for his eyes were fixed on the sea, but certainly near enough to be observing her movements.

  ‘No good walkem there today,’ he said, gesturing to the path down to the sea.

  ‘Why not?’ said Harriet. Although she thought the reason was fairly obvious, she wanted to hear what he had to say. She wanted an opportunity to challenge him for this intervention, or possibly she was seeking someone to blame for her miscalculation of the tides. She stopped a couple of yards away from him but he still didn’t look at her. He had an attractive face, with a wide mouth and a deep furrow running from each side of the bridge of his nose down to the corners of his mouth.

  ‘White feller followem. Him no good.’

  This wasn’t what Harriet had expected to hear and she looked around in surprise. There was no sign of anyone else. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘In trees back there. Him no good.’

  ‘What did he look like?’ Harriet said.

  ‘White feller. Black hair, big black beard.’

  Her palms started sweating as she recalled that night on the Guthrie: Brady’s gleaming white shirt, the black spade-shaped beard, that look of hatred. Would spitting at her be sufficient revenge? Would staining her white dress settle the score for him? He had looked triumphant that afternoon in Chinatown, but that mightn’t be enough.

  She said as calmly as possible, ‘White fellow, black hair. That could be anyone.’

  ‘White fellers all lookem same to missus.’ Mick smiled broadly, revealing all his teeth. Good teeth, she couldn’t help noticing. She laughed. For the first time Mick looked at her, very briefly, before turning back to contemplate the view of the sea. ‘Why you bin comen here?’

  ‘To draw. I wanted to sketch the mangrove trees down there by the water’s edge.’ But it was impossible to complete that today and she would have to return another time. After pulling out her little notebook and a pencil, she did a quick – and rather crude – drawing of the view from where they were standing: the curve of the land, the sea fringed by the mangroves, and the sampan with a dark sail heading towards the heads.

  Mick didn’t say anything but looked closely at the drawing and then the view. Harriet wondered what he was making of it. She was glad that he didn’t do what many people did when confronted with a sketch: feel that they had to praise it – and sometimes to criticise it. This man was quite simply examining it and keeping his impressions to himself, and the silence lengthened to the point where Harriet became almost soothed.

  ‘I keepem sketch,’ he said at last.

  ‘Why?’ Nevertheless, Harriet tore off the page and handed it to him.

  ‘Why not?’ he said, smiling. There was no trace of rudeness in his tone. It appeared he simply didn’t see any need to justify his request, or perhaps he was making fun of her earlier response.

  ‘Back to the cricket pitch, I suppose.’ Harriet shut her notebook and slipped it, and the pencil, back into her pockets.

  ‘Good feller game.’

  ‘Black fellow too good at it,’ Harriet said, laughing. She again examined his face. His forehead was high and cut back sharply to his eye sockets, so that the eyebrows jutted out like a rocky overhang providing shelter to the eyes. His nose was straight, the upper lip long, and the jaw line firm. Perhaps she would paint him at Dimbulah Downs Station, if he would let her.

  Without another word she began to trudge back along the road to the cricket ground. She scanned the bush on each side of the road to see if Brady were visible but there was no sign of him. The Aboriginal encampment was as it had been when she passed by earlier; the same ring of elders sitting in the shade, the same sleeping man and his dogs at the side of the road. The bush was silent, for it was too hot yet for the birds to start calling. Beads of moisture formed between her shoulder blades and under her arms, and trickled down into her waistband, but she didn’t slacken her pace. She turned several times and saw Mick a couple of hundred yards behind her; he was making no pretence now about the fact that he was following her back to the cricket ground.

  For once she was glad that someone had intervened on her behalf.

  Chapter 23

  The Mosquito Nets Looked Almost Like Ghostly Termite Mounds

  The glowing campfire illuminated the pack-bags littering the campsite and cast shadows that danced like living things. Sarah helped Henry and Mick to suspend mosquito nets from the low-lying branches of trees. When they’d finished hanging the netting, she stood back to admire the effect: the mosquito nets looked almost like ghostly termite mounds leaning at strange angles. Although Harriet had offered to help, Sarah had refused her offer; she thought Harriet looked exhausted, with dark smudges under her eyes and a slight limp when she walked that was almost certainly caused by long hours on the saddle. Now she was sitting on a log on the other side of the clearing, with a sketchbook on her lap, even though there were just a few lanterns and the firelight for illumination.

  ‘You’ve been unusually quiet this trip, Mick,’ Henry said. ‘That’s not like you. And I’ve noticed that when Harriet’s within earshot you only speak pidgin.’

  ‘I talk to people in the language they expect.’

  ‘What makes you think she only wants to hear pidgin? Your English is very good.’

  ‘It’s Mission-school English.’

  ‘It’s perfect English. And you can’t carry on like this. Why did you start?’

  ‘I thought Harriet was one of the Palmerston white ladies, so I spoke to her in pidgin.’

  ‘But surely you knew she was my sister,’ Sarah said. ‘Didn’t you see her at the railway station?’

  ‘Boss kept me too busy.’ Mick grinned. ‘Found out after the cricket match. Too late then.’

  ‘Didn’t you tell him, Henry?’

  ‘I guess I forgot.’

  Sarah looked at Henry. Refusing to meet her eye, he said to Mick, ‘But you’ve never spoken to me like that. Or Mrs Vincent.’

  ‘That’s different.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You’re my mate, boss.’

  Henry’s expression softened. He cleared his throat bef
ore saying, ‘Harriet will find out and she’ll be annoyed. She’ll think you’re patronising her.’

  ‘She won’t,’ Sarah said smoothly. ‘I’ll tell her tonight. She’ll think it’s a good joke. And tomorrow you’ll be able to talk freely to us all, which will be a relief after your silence the last two days.’

  Later that evening, after dinner was over, Sarah told Harriet. She seemed to think it amusing, or at least she laughed a lot.

  ‘You’re a Palmerston lady,’ Sarah teased when they were preparing for sleep. This simply involved removing one’s boots and pulling on a jersey before crawling into a swag laid out on a mattress of freshly cut grass, and unfurling the mosquito net suspended from a tree branch overhead.

  ‘I suppose I am. We white women all look the same.’ After a brief pause, she added, ‘When I first met Mick he said, “White fellers all lookem same to missus.” That was his little joke. The trouble is that most white fellers think the Abos are savages.’

  ‘That’s only the Jacobs and Gascoignes of this part of the world,’ Sarah said, though she knew it was Carruthers and his ilk as well.

  ‘And the Smiths and the Joneses and the Tom-Dick-and-Harrys,’ Harriet said, struggling to remove a riding boot. ‘Don’t you think it’s strange that Mick only reveals to a chosen few how clever he is?’

  ‘I’ve never thought about it.’

  ‘He’s reinforcing the prejudices of the Palmerston middle classes. To them he’s an ignorant Aborigine, so he retaliates by speaking to them in pidgin. It’s like a type of revenge though it’s not likely to be noticed. Maybe that’s the point: the revenge brings satisfaction and amusement only to him.’

  ‘Hattie, do you have to analyse everything?’ Sarah said in mock exasperation. ‘Why can’t you just be?’

  Harriet took no notice. ‘Maybe he does it for self-protection. If he spoke really good English, people would ask how and where he learned it, and he might want to protect himself from questions.’ She shrouded herself in mosquito netting before easing herself into her swag set up a few yards away from Sarah’s.

  ‘Good night, Hattie.’

  ‘What would it be like being a black fellow in this country?’ Harriet said.

  Sarah pretended she hadn’t heard, and lay on her side with her back to her sister.

  * * *

  Through the mosquito netting, Sarah could see densely packed stars swathing the dark sky with white. She rolled over in her swag and wondered if Harriet was enjoying the trip. She had certainly seemed as charmed as Sarah by the journey south to Pine Creek, the train meandering through jungle, beside rivers and billabongs covered with glowing waterlilies, purple and white flowers held erect on long stalks above the huge green pads. Occasionally the train stopped at one of the tiny settlements scattered along the line and the engine driver passed out mail, once placing letters into a kerosene tin nailed to a tree, and several times handing bags to stockmen waiting by the railway track.

  Sarah now performed in her head the first few bars of the Fauré duet that she and Henry had played again at the Residency. She might have burst into song had she been alone. She rolled over in her swag, taking care not to dislodge the mosquito netting. Out here you could love humanity because it was but a part of the embracing whole. In a town you never thought that. You often couldn’t see the embracing whole; you never saw even the stars in London, let alone the shape of the land.

  Staring up at the sky webbed with stars, she felt herself rising up to meet them. Rising above the campsite, looking down on the rugged territory: the rivers, the plateaus and, a few miles east, the telegraph line snaking its way south. A two-chain-wide avenue kept clear by a line party that moved slowly up and down it, repairing the lines, hacking away at the encroaching grasses and shrubs and forests, maintaining the link between the South and Europe. That was humanity in balance with nature and not substituting for nature. Telegraph wires that hummed and vibrated with the lives of others, with the news from Home. She smiled at the thought of the vibrating wires, like the vibrating strings of a piano as the hammers struck them, playing out some melody at the whim of the pianist.

  But she was getting carried away. Humanity was not in balance with nature. Out here people were jockeying for position, fighting for control over resources just as they were anywhere else. Harriet was right, she was naïve but she wasn’t going to be like that any more.

  ‘Are you awake, Sarah?’ Henry was sitting bolt upright in his swag a few yards away.

  ‘Yes. Can’t you sleep either?’

  After Henry crawled out of his mosquito net, he climbed in under hers and lay down next to her.

  ‘You’re not still worrying about Harriet, are you?’

  ‘Not really,’ he whispered.

  But, of course, he was. She sighed. The peaceful spell of the evening was broken. She guessed he wanted to talk about the cricket match again. That afternoon had gone well until the tea break. Admittedly the Aboriginal batsmen were too good. Henry had said afterwards that the umpires were unsporting in making them play with sticks in place of bats. He should have remonstrated then; he might have remonstrated then had he not felt so carefree and happy.

  Should have, should have, she thought. His conversation is becoming peppered with should haves. He should have known that Harriet would see this treatment as an insult and that she would write letters to the southern newspapers, which she posted before they left Palmerston. Witty, biting letters that were bound to get published, for there was no doubt that she wrote as brilliantly as Father, and considerably more comprehensibly. Sarah would never forget Harriet’s letter to the Northern Territory Times that had been published the day before they left Palmerston, for Henry seemed to know it off by heart. He was forever spouting bits of it, whenever Harriet was out of earshot. It began by describing the cricket match in some detail, and ended up by stating that the replacement of the cricket bats with stout green sticks was a symbol of what was wrong with race relations, that those in control had one law for themselves and another for the blacks.

  Sarah knew that Harriet was right about race relations but Henry needed to get on with their neighbours. He’d seen enough of life in the outback to know you might want your neighbours’ assistance at any time. He thought Harriet should have had more tact than to snap at Mrs Jacobs for calling the Aborigines savages.

  Sarah agreed that, although the comments of these women had been uncivil, there was no need for Harriet to be uncivil in return. ‘Harriet sometimes lets her principles override her manners,’ she said to Henry now, wriggling against him so she wouldn’t be pushed out of her swag. ‘But she’s right.’

  ‘Worst of all,’ Henry continued, ignoring her comment, ‘was Harriet walking away from the cricket match without telling anyone where she was going. If you hadn’t told me and if I hadn’t sent Mick to follow her, who knows what might have happened.’

  ‘Shhh, not so loud, Henry. We don’t want to wake the others. And anyway, nothing happened.’ They had been over this incident many times since that day, but she thought another repetition might help him sleep.

  ‘If I hadn’t been worried about Harriet I might have thought it funny: Harriet being tracked by some white fellow who was being tracked by Mick. But she’s irresponsible. Like a small child, she thinks she can do what she likes without thinking of the consequences.’

  Exactly as he sometimes did, Sarah thought. She dismissed this thought as disloyal. To distract Henry from his catalogue of grievances, she said, ‘She’s certainly brave and fearless.’

  ‘She’s foolhardy. Do you remember how I remonstrated with her afterwards?’

  ‘How could I forget?’

  Although Harriet had laughed at Henry at first, when he told her she shouldn’t have wandered off on her own at the cricket match, she’d apologised for worrying them both and had even thanked him for sending Mick. But Sa
rah suspected she thanked him for the wrong reasons. She and Mick had communicated about the mangroves and the harbour, or at least that was how Harriet described it. Henry had admitted that she did have an acute perception about people. That was often how he and Mick related to one another, he’d said: through silent communication rather than through words.

  ‘I wonder who was following Harriet.’

  ‘Who knows? Mick said it was a man he’d seen in a fight the day before and he didn’t think much of him.’ Henry now rolled over so energetically that Sarah’s mosquito net became dislodged. ‘Sorry, Sarah,’ he said rather irritably. ‘I’m never going to be able to sleep.’ He sat up, yanking a portion of the net with him. ‘I’ll get up and fix your net. I might as well stroll around for a bit after that. No point keeping you awake.’

  Poor Henry, as if you haven’t already, she thought. After adjusting her net, he pulled on his boots. She watched him put another piece of wood on the fire and collect something from his saddlebag. The sickle moon and a swathe of stars illuminated him as he steered his way around the obstacles littering the campsite: the bags and rolls, the trees and bushes, and the occasional towering termite mound. When he was a few hundred yards away, she saw him squat down on the ground and started to play his flute: first a few scales and then a little Mozart. As he played a bush curlew joined in, interposing its wailing cry with the melody. After a while she began to feel peace descend on her once more and was soon asleep.

  Chapter 24

  How to Banish This Annoyance?

  Harriet tried not to toss about too much in her swag. Each time she moved, the mosquito net became detached from its moorings and she had learned to her cost how miserable it could be to share a net with a persistent insect. Three mosquito bites on one ankle were itching and she had to fight the temptation to scratch. Her whole body ached from the previous day’s riding, and her face was painfully sunburnt. It had been a mistake to leave off the hat, even though it had been for barely an hour. To add to her irritation, a twig seemed to have found its way into the swag and was digging into her back. By the time she’d located it, the mosquito net had become untucked and she had to start rearranging herself once more.