The Burning Land

by John Fletcher

  Git chewed his lip, thinking of that prospect. Eventually he said, ‘You wanted a place you could grow vegies and such. Ain’t nowhere around here you can do that. No one to sell ’em to, neither.’

  ‘It ain’t the vegies that matter,’ she told him, ‘it’s having our own place.’

  Git looked at the vast emptiness around them. ‘Where?’

  Nance’s patience frayed a little. ‘Anywhere we damn well like! Space we ain’t short of! Get Matthew to pay us in cattle and stores, we’ll take up some land next to his and ranch our own property.’

  Git was nervous: it wasn’t the country to forgive mistakes and he doubted he was up to what Nance was proposing. ‘I wouldn’t know how to start.’

  She could have spat in his eye. ‘You know cattle, don’t you?’

  Git thought about it. ‘Reckon I do,’ he allowed.

  ‘That’s all you got to do: look after ’em. I’ll do the rest, what little there is to do.’

  ‘We stay on and work for Matthew, we can do that too.’ Without the responsibility, he thought but did not say.

  ‘Our own place or nuthin,’ Nance said. ‘I mean it, Git. Either we do this or I swear I’ll take off and try my luck back south again.’

  He didn’t want that. He didn’t want to work his own place either but to lose Nance would be worse and he had a fear that this time she meant what she said. Yet could not bring himself to give way at once. ‘I’ll think about it.’

  ‘Don’t think too long.’

  ‘What’s the rush?’

  ‘No rush, not so long as you let me know by tomorrow.’

  She meant it too. When Nance woke in the morning Git had already left the waggon so she went looking for him. She found him, hat on the back of his head, staring out across the shimmering plain.

  She wasted no time. ‘Well?’

  He sighed. ‘You’re so set on it, reckon we’ll give it a go,’ he told her.

  Ecstasy hit her like a blow. Tears trembled in her eyes. ‘You mean it?’

  ‘I’ll live to regret it,’ he said gloomily.

  ‘Oh no!’ She had told herself she hated this country; now she loved it. Tears spilled down her face. ‘You’ll never regret it.’ She seized his arm. ‘I promise I won’t let you. Oh,’ Nance cried out to the bright day, the sunlight that splintered into rainbow shafts through her tears, ‘I thought it would never happen. Oh thank you, Git! Thank you! Thank you!’

  ‘This rate we’ll be herding the stock by ourselves,’ Matthew told Aggie but the departures were not over yet. That day Charlton came to see him.

  ‘Not you too,’ Matthew said. ‘You’re the one talked me into coming here. If it hadn’t been for you I might have been sitting under a palm tree right now, looking at the sea. I thought at least you’d stay around.’

  ‘I thought I’d head back a way,’ Charlton said. He seemed embarrassed.

  ‘Where to?’ Matthew asked him.

  Charlton would not meet his eyes. ‘I was thinking of that Catriona,’ he confessed. ‘Don’t seem right, somehow, a woman out there all on her own. I thought I’d drop in and see how she was making out.’

  Matthew stared at him. ‘My God, Charlton, I think you’re in love.’

  Charlton’s face was red. ‘It’s no more than common decency to ask, I suppose.’

  ‘Of course it is,’ Matthew said, trying not to smile.

  ‘Been preying on my mind a little,’ Charlton confessed. ‘Handsome woman like that, all alone except for a bunch of blacks. Thought I’d stop by a spell, see if she needs a hand.’

  ‘You were the one always talking about new horizons,’ Matthew told him. ‘I suppose that’s what you could call this, at that.’

  ‘I don’t see what’s so funny about it,’ Charlton said.

  ‘Who said it was funny?’

  It took a matter of minutes; as Charlton had told him once before, he travelled light. He swung himself into the saddle and looked down at Matthew and Aggie.

  ‘I’ll be moving on, then.’

  ‘Take care, Charlton,’ Aggie said. Her eyes were wet. ‘We’ll miss you.’

  Charlton, like Matthew, had never been one to show his feelings. ‘Yeah, well,’ he said.

  ‘One thing you should remember,’ Matthew told him.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘You go a-courting, remember to wipe the dust off your boots first.’

  ‘Courting? Who said anything about courting?’ But smiled as he said it and the smile was what remained long after he was gone.

  ‘Do you think he’ll have any luck?’ Aggie asked Matthew.

  ‘Who knows? It makes sense for both of them but Catriona always had a mind of her own.’ Matthew turned to Tom. ‘I suppose you’re next?’

  ‘Me?’ Tom was shocked. ‘I ain’t goin’ nowhere. Not unless you tell me to,’ he said as an afterthought.

  Matthew laughed, slapping him hard on the shoulder. ‘I’m not planning to do that.’ They walked together back towards the cluster of houses, so small in the immensity of the landscape. Matthew paused in midstride, looking about him with sparkling eyes. ‘Isn’t this the best country you ever saw?’ he said to the pair of them. He turned to Tom. ‘Let’s get to work,’ he said, ‘we got a fortune to make.’

  ‘I wondered if it would ever happen,’ he said to Aggie that night after they had made love. ‘To be here, our own place, with you … It’s everything I ever wanted.’

  He fell silent.

  Aggie stroked the side of his face. ‘Not quite everything.’

  He propped himself on one elbow and looked at her questioningly.

  ‘You said you would take the horses south to Kapunda,’ she reminded him.

  ‘We’ve only just got here,’ he protested.

  ‘It’s not the horses I’m thinking of,’ she said. ‘It’s your foster mother.’

  He stared. ‘Lorna?’

  ‘She’s alone. That ain’t right. She should be up here with us. We’re her family, now.’

  ‘She’ll never come.’

  ‘She might if you asked her.’

  He thought about it. ‘It’s a long way.’

  ‘She cared for you when you were little. You told me you loved her. We’re here and she’s there.’ She shook his shoulder. ‘Alone, Matthew. No one there to care if she lives or dies. I don’t know why we’re even talking about it.’

  ‘I’m not leaving you alone.’

  ‘No one said anything about leaving me alone! Tom will stay and two of the boys will help him. We’ll manage just fine. You take the others and the horses.’

  ‘It’s five hundred miles to Kapunda,’ he pointed out. ‘A bit less than that from Kapunda to Jim Jim. Then all the way back again. We’ll be gone for months.’

  ‘It was your idea to live out here in the wilderness,’ she said and met his eyes. ‘Unless you’re afraid you can’t trust me with Tom.’

  ‘It was a girl caused him to leave his last place,’ he told her, smiling. ‘Maybe I should be afraid, at that.’

  ‘All the more reason to hurry back,’ she said. She took his face in her hands. ‘I love you,’ she told him. ‘Sometimes it scares me how much. But I think you should do this.’

  ‘You think I owe it to her?’

  ‘More than that. I think you owe it to yourself.’

  They rode south through the fringes of the big desert that stretched away immense and inviolate to the west. They travelled as fast as the horses would travel. At length they came out of the desert and the land grew steadily greener and more undulating. They arrived in settled country and the eyes of the black stockmen grew round as for the first time they saw the patchwork shape of the cultivated paddocks, the spires of churches pointing skywards. After so long in the empty land even Matthew found the countryside strange. His spirit felt cramped in these small and tidy spaces. He knew that the vast and empty country, that land for which his spirit had burned for so long, was really his place.

  They rested the animals be
fore Kapunda, sold them for a good price and set off almost at once, heading southeast, travelling even faster now they had no horses.

  They arrived at Jim Jim on a cloudy day of spattering rain. The town had grown almost out of recognition. The countryside was the greenest they had seen and Matthew thought, I shall never persuade her to leave. This whole journey has been pointless.

  But it had not been pointless, he knew, even if she refused to come. They rode down the remembered trail, past farms and houses that had not been there the last time Matthew had ridden this way, and came at length to the hill overlooking the valley, the cluster of dilapidated buildings on the knoll, the wide sweep of the hill-girt valley with the river running down the middle.

  Matthew dismounted, staring. There was the chapel where Andrew and he had fought out their battles of the will. There were the trails he remembered, the secret places of childhood, the patch of garden where he had caught the Ulysses butterfly. It was like looking at a map of his early life.

  Matthew told his companions to wait while he walked forward, as nervous as a colt about meeting Lorna after so long. He knocked on the door. He waited. After a long time it creaked open. He looked down at Lorna with her hand poised motionless on the latch. He smiled. ‘Hello, Ma. I’m back.’

  He had expected her to be old; she was. Her body was thin, a little hunched, and her face and neck were lined but the indomitable spirit still shone in her eyes.

  He had thought she might weep at the sight of him but she did not. He suspected he was probably closer to tears than she was. She looked him up and down, unsmiling. ‘Ye’re bigger than ever,’ she said. ‘I hear ye made money on the goldfields.’

  ‘Some.’

  ‘That’s guid,’ she said. ‘You heard aboot Mr McLachlan?’

  ‘I heard he died, yes. I knew you’d be alone. That’s why I’m here.’

  She looked at him. ‘Is that so? Ye thought I needed help?’

  That was not what he had meant. ‘You know I could not come before.’

  ‘Aye.’ She sighed. ‘The pair of you were always too strong-willed to get along together, more’s the pity. Come along in, anyway.’

  He followed her into the house.

  ‘I can offer you a cup of tea, if ye’d like one.’

  He wanted only to tell her the reason for his visit but now was not the time to say so. ‘That would be good.’

  While she made the tea she talked: how the weather had been, the crops they had harvested, the prospects of wool for the next season. She said nothing about how her life had been, alone with the bigoted man she had married all those years ago.

  ‘Ye’ll stay the night,’ she said.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Those men of yours … Eat Christian food, do they?’

  ‘Whatever you can spare.’

  He realised she had asked him nothing about his life, either. ‘I’m married, you know.’

  She nodded. ‘That’s to be expected, I suppose. Any bairns?’

  ‘Not yet. We’ve only been married a short while.’

  ‘Aye. Well, there’s time enough for that, nae doot.’

  ‘We have a place up north. Good sheep country.’

  ‘I hear it’s barren in those parts?’

  ‘Beautiful when it rains, though.’

  ‘Aye, when.’

  ‘I want you to come back with me,’ he said.

  She eyed him. ‘Do ye now?’

  ‘I’m the only family you have, now. It doesn’t seem right that we should be so far apart—’

  ‘No,’ she said.

  He hesitated, looking at her. ‘No?’

  She said, ‘I’ve nae mind to try anything new.’

  He thought, I knew she would not come. He began, ‘But—’

  ‘No,’ she said again firmly. ‘I ken ye mean well, Matthew, but I’ll no’ move to another place now. This has done me well enough for twenty-three years. It’ll do me now. But I thank ye for asking me.’

  ‘We’ll talk about it some more,’ he said. ‘In the morning.’

  ‘Talk and welcome,’ she told him, ‘but the answer will be the same.’

  Lorna had spoken from instinct, the instinct upon which she had relied all her life, yet later when she was alone again in the wooden shack that had been home to her for so long she wondered if she had been right to refuse Matthew’s offer.

  She watched the figure of a young woman, as unfamiliar to her now as any stranger. Watched her as she came ashore in a strange land, saw her set out on her journey to this place. What an adventure it had been, she thought. In those days it was like going to the ends of the earth: everything new, everything unknown. For all that stranger had known, there might have been tigers in the bush. Whereas now …

  Lorna rocked in her chair, remembering. It was hard to credit how much things had changed.

  The young woman had made and lost the only friend she had ever had. She could no longer remember Mary’s face, her voice, anything physical about her at all, but that was not important. The essence of her remained. Mary will live as long as I live, Lorna thought, and after I am dead it will not matter. It was strange to think that Matthew was Mary’s son and not her own but that did not matter, either. Matthew was her son and always would be.

  Yet she had refused his offer. Why?

  Because my life is here, she thought. My memories are my life, now. They gather about me like old friends.

  Away from here she would have nothing.

  Matthew tried everything he could think of. He described the beauty of the plains, the rich future they were planning, he talked about Aggie and their hopes for a family, he told her how useful Lorna would be to them in their new place. It was no use. Lorna remained adamant. She would not come.

  ‘Ye will go with a large part of my heart,’ she told him, ‘and with all my prayers and good wishes. But my place is here and yours is there. It willna do for us to pretend anything different.’

  Early in the morning, four days after their arrival, Matthew and his boys mounted their horses. Lorna stood by Matthew’s side. The early morning light showing every line of her faded face.

  He tried for one last time. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘I am sure,’ she said.

  ‘I’ll write,’ he offered.

  Her lips twitched: they both knew the truth of that. ‘Aye, well,’ she said.

  ‘I’ll visit.’

  ‘If ye can.’

  He looked at her helplessly. ‘Well …’

  ‘Ye’ve a ways to go,’ she told him. ‘Ye’d best be moving.’

  He raised his hand, not trusting his voice. He touched his horse with his heels; they moved slowly up the slope. At the top he turned. Lorna was standing outside the house. Behind her, a plume of smoke rose from the chimney into the brisk air. He raised his hand and, after a moment, so did she. He turned, the black men following him, and rode away through the trees.

  AUTHOR’S NOTES

  The Mary arrived in Sydney on the day stated, bringing immigrants to the new colony.

  The Squatting Act of 1837 helped to open up to settlement the rich lands of what was then called the Port Phillip District. Settlers often claimed huge tracts of land far beyond their capacity to stock or run. Often the authorities reduced these holdings to more manageable proportions.

  A severe economic recession in the 1840s devastated the new farming communities. Prices collapsed and many settlers were forced off the land. The economy only really recovered with the discovery of gold.

  Thomas Chapman was a shepherd who found two pounds weight of gold on the Glenmona Run in 1848. He took it to Melbourne and showed it to Brentani, a Melbourne jeweller, who came north with the boy, hoping to discover a payable goldfield. Shortly before he reached home, however, Thomas seems to have had second thoughts. He disappeared, never to be seen again, and Brentani returned to Melbourne empty-handed. Brentani existed, as did Thomas Chapman. This is not to say that in real life they were anything like the characters I
have portrayed. The unpleasant Henry Cusack did not exist, thank goodness. He is a product of my imagination, as is my explanation of the boy’s disappearance.

  The goldfields were much as I have described them. Because there were so many fields, many of them fairly small in reserves, the mining population was extremely mobile and it was not unusual for diggers to travel widely between strikes. Although the long-term economic benefits of gold were considerable, it caused disruption in the short term since so many men were lured away from their normal employment by the—often illusory—prospect of riches.

  Real life characters mentioned in the story include the Cornish preacher Jimmy Jeffrey, who was given to haranguing the diggers about the merits of staking a claim by Mount Calvary.

  MacTaggart’s Store existed. It was the owner’s boast that he could supply ‘everything but snowballs and fresh pilchards’.

  The goldfields police were notorious for their bullying ways. This fact plus tensions engendered by deep-shaft mining at Ballarat, often without reward, and the perceived inequities in the licensing system, all formed part of the brew that in 1854 came to the boil in the uprising known to history as the Eureka Stockade.

  The episode involving the bottle of brandy at the Melbourne performance of Hamlet actually occurred.

  First settlement of the Channel Country did not in fact take place until the 1860s but was along the lines described. Wild stock mustered from the New South Wales ranges was often used.

  Railways and river boats were indeed in operation by the time Matthew went north. The first telegraph line in Australia was opened in February 1854. On 24 February 1859 the river boat Gemini reached Brewarrina, one hundred kilometres upriver from Fort Bourke on the Barwon River.

  The settlement on the Darling was founded by Major Mitchell in 1835 and named by him Fort Bourke. The name was later shortened to its present name of Bourke.

  There are numerous records of cattle and horses being taken across country from what is now southwest Queensland for sale at Kapunda in South Australia.

  Acknowledgement