Above the Starry Frame

by Helen Townsend

  Joseph Irwin to his dear son William

  * * *

  William had told them in his letters home about the building of the hotel, but he barely mentioned his theatre, except to send a concert bill when Catherine Hayes sung, and to say that he had engaged a fine concert master to be in charge of his music. These things sounded respectable. His theatre itself was perfectly respectable, but that was the difference between Ballarat and the Parish of Kildress, where even the idea of theatre was not quite respectable, or would not have been, had there been such a thing there, which there was not.

  William had neglected to notice that the bill he sent mentioned the dancing sisters and a comic act called ‘The Irishman who lost his purse’. It was about these things that Eliza wondered, and how the theatre must be lit at night, and how many people were in it, and what they did, and how late William must be up, as he had to be up early in the morning for the coaches. All in all, she longed to see it.

  Her eyes had got worse and were of great concern. Mother had got some potions from the old woman beyond the church who knew of herbs, but it made no difference, and Father had insisted on taking her to a doctor, although it was a great expense indeed. The doctor had given her a tonic and she was better for a time, but then her eyes were sore again, so she could not open them properly. She was so miserable, Father insisted on another doctor, at even greater expense.

  ‘It is fortunate,’ Father said, ‘that William sends money. For times were, we never could have seen one doctor, and not ever thought of two. But I am glad, Lizey, for we want you well.’ The second doctor gave her another tonic, but she was anxious, forever testing herself to find if she could see things that she used to be able to see. She could not remember whether she’d been able to see the stile onto the road from the laneway, or count the sheep in the distance. She worried too, with the bad season, for although they had enough to eat, they were short of some things again. And there were poor folk who had less than them, on account of so much being sold to the English, as had happened in the famine. But now, with the money sent home by William and the others, they could help their poor neighbours some.

  But old Knockaleery Farm was unhappy on another account. When Robert came home he was sullen, and went out again quickly to see his wife and baby. He would not talk to Eliza, and she did not know how he felt towards Jane Cander and the child. She hoped that they were happy together, at least a little, for he was very ill disposed towards everyone else, especially Father, and Father towards him.

  ‘Shouldn’t we see Jane Cander?’ she asked her mother.

  ‘She’s Jane Irwin now,’ said Mother.

  ‘Isn’t that why we should see her?’ said Eliza.

  ‘Not after what she has done, Lizey.’

  Eliza knew that Mother thought Jane had trapped Robert, but to Eliza the thing seemed to go both ways, although she never said so.

  It troubled Eliza about Jane, whom they used to know and speak to before this happened. It troubled her about the new baby, who was called James and whom they did not see.

  Next time she went into Cookstown with Joseph’s wife, Eleanor, she bought some little clothes for a baby and a warm shawl with the money she had from William.

  ‘Who are they for?’ Eleanor asked. Eliza shrugged and coloured a little.

  ‘Your mam won’t be pleased.’ She put her arm round Eliza. ‘But it’s kind of you. Jane’s my cousin, as you know. Joseph blames her for it, but I think not. It’s done, and they best make peace with it.’

  They talked some more, and Eliza found some comfort with Eleanor, who had always scared her a little, because of her lavender oil and her red shawl. But today she felt Eleanor’s kindness and she went back and bought a ribbon for her.

  ‘You should be buying ribbons for yourself, Eliza. You’re a pretty girl; you’ll be wanting to be married one day.’

  But there were no young men left to marry, many having gone to America and some to New South Wales, so Eliza still pinned her hopes on emigration. Robert no longer talked of it, since he hardly talked to Mother and Father. And Father, whose spirits were crushed, seemed a little less expansive in his ideas. But Eliza prayed it would come in time, for she longed to go to William.

  She didn’t tell Mother or Father about buying the baby clothes. She bundled them up into the shawl and went down to the poor and tiny house where Jane and her mother lived. She knocked and Jane poked her head out the door. She looked ill, and angry too.

  ‘What would you be wanting?’

  ‘I bought some things for the baby,’ said Eliza.

  ‘I want no charity,’ said Jane.

  ‘’Tis a present only,’ said Eliza. She spoke as softly as she could. Jane had reason to be angry with her family, although they too perhaps had reason to be angry with her. ‘I want to help you,’ she added.

  ‘I want nothing,’ said Jane angrily. ‘You have the sticky eye and I cannot abide you, Eliza Irwin.’

  ‘I cannot abide you either,’ said Eliza. She felt angry, for her eyes were not her fault. Yet Jane had brought this trouble on, and now she was rude and ignorant on top of it. ‘You don’t have to abide me, nor myself abide you. There’s limits to abiding all round, but you need to care for that child.’

  Jane slammed the door. Eliza put the little things on the doorstep and ran up the hill.

  Eliza had imagined that Jane would ask her in and show her the baby, which she had heard crying. Every decent person knew to offer hospitality, however poor. Maybe Mother and Father were right about Jane.

  A few days later over tea, Robert came in, late as usual. ‘Jane says to thank you for the things for the baby,’ he said to Eliza.

  She blushed. Mother and Father said nothing, and she did not know whether Robert said it to make trouble, or if he was really grateful. With Robert, it was always hard to tell.

  CHAPTER 7

  August 20, 1854

  Dear Son,

  You will no doubt be sorry to hear of a great loss I have met with by two of our best cows dying from some disorder which is prevelent among cattle this year and cannot be accounted for. I have received a letter from your brother James, and likewise one from sister Mary and they all complain of not hearing from you. They are all well, so is Ann Jane. I have been advising her to come home, and that she and Robert might go to Australia to you. As for Mary & her husband they have taken a place in the British Settlement.

  I have seen a letter from Wm Carey to his brother here. You have seen Carey when you were at home and as I understand he is about your place I am sure he would be glad to see you.

  Barney Quin wishes if you could see Michael, his son or hear any accounts of him that you would cause him to write, for he is entirely lonesome at not hearing from him. He has had accounts of Nancy Quin in Newberry’s Letter but no account of Michael and he hopes you will do him that kindness by letting him know in your next letter to me if you can make him out.

  I am sure you will be happy to hear that it is in contemplation this day for me to settle that troublesome business with Edward McCrea and when I write you again I hope I will be able to give an account of the whole concern, and for the present, my mind will be easy to have it wound up.

  I forgot to let you know where Carey lives. He is within 2 miles of Melbourne at a place called Little Brighton. Your Mother desires me let you know that one of the Cows we lost was the Big Moilee. We had her when you were at home and she wishes you to let her know if you received the things that were sent by Bernard Murphy, for you never mentioned any thing about them in your letters.

  Your loving Father

  May the sovreign of heaven and earth bless you,

  Joseph Irwin

  * * *

  William remembered the year of 1854 for many things besides being the time he became a hotel keeper. He never again worked as a digger, although he went down plenty of shafts as a partner or an investor. After four winters digging in the cold, mud and slush, he found the bar and the concert hall of the St
ar Hotel were more pleasing and snug than a hole in the mud. And 1854 was the year he learned to worry about profit and loss and the debt he was carrying. Sometimes the liquor he stored was worth a thousand pounds or more, a sum that kept him awake with the worry of it. He learned he had to make hard deals with the coach service and the cook. He learned how to get his money back on spoiled oysters and on melted ice, and what the diggers required in a nuptial bedroom to please both bride and groom.

  He begged his father again to send Robert or Eliza to be with him, for he missed his family more than ever. When he read letters from his sisters in America or from his father proposing they all come to Australia, he felt a great sadness at the scattering of the family, because however Father planned and schemed, they were still apart when just a few years ago they had all been together at Knockaleery. But even missing them so, he did not see how he could fulfil his promise to his mother to come home within the six years. The hotel needed watching and despite his father’s advice on how he might invest his money and live like a gentleman in Ireland, he couldn’t imagine it at all.

  Father had never grasped the extent of the colonies. If someone came to Sydney, Father assumed William would meet them. He gave him addresses of people in Melbourne he thought William should contact, never taking into account that Melbourne was sixty miles away. William had once had a chance meeting with Michael Quinn, and ever after Father assumed he could find anyone missing in the colonies. Even in Ballarat, there were estimated to be ten thousand diggers and at least as many others again, so when Father asked him to find someone, it took considerable time.

  He did not remember the names of the animals at home or even some of the people whose deaths Father reported. He had not seen brother Joseph’s son, or Robert’s new child, and there was sadness in that.

  Father sent people to him, sometimes from families he knew, sometimes more distant acquaintances. They were supposed to be able to tell him of things at home, but the reality and the detail were lacking. Mother was well, they said. Father was well; Eliza was well; John was well; Robert – ah . . . well, considering his marriage; and Joseph and Eleanor, and their little William – they were also well.

  Then they would compare the prices at the Cookstown market with the prices at the Ballarat stores and shake their heads. There was news of weather and crops which had been and gone. While it was familiar, it was not quite the feel of home, sitting round the fire at night with Mother telling stories, or rising early to go out to the harvest, or meeting a cousin in the lane, or seeing everyone at Christmas. It wasn’t rabbit snaring with Robert, or Eleanor’s comely shape, or dear Eliza with her seriousness, then her sudden laughter. Those were the things that came to mind, that familiarity, that shared life that he often felt the lack of now.

  Although Father was most curious about his hotel business, William could not share all the details of that, because the sums of money in the business seemed so great. If he explained what he had to pay out for insurance, for horse feed and the like, and for his staff in the hotel, it would seem like he was grudging them back at Knockaleery, which he did not and never would.

  Despite all the things that separated him from his family, William felt great satisfaction in sending off drafts of fifty pounds or more. When Father wrote back saying how he’d finally paid McCrea in full, he felt a great pride in the matter, although he thought Father should have been more willing to send Eliza or Robert, given the sums he had sent and seeing that he felt the separation so greatly.

  When Bridget had moved into the hotel, she would not share his bed, but she had firm ideas on how he should run the hotel, what would make a profit, which new dishes and delicacies should be served in the dining room, the maids and cooks to be hired, and much else besides. She was at times extraordinarily energetic; at others, she would declare she needed an afternoon to read. Quite apart from being in love, William depended on her and shared almost everything with her, reading her the letters from home, telling her about his family.

  In turn, she told him about her family, although she had few left in Ireland. She was attached to her parents and her sister, but she didn’t miss them once they had moved to Geelong. ‘They’re a miserable lot, Billy,’ she told him. ‘And at times, I have a streak of discontent myself, so I’m better off with a man like yourself, who sees sunshine everywhere.’ She said this as if she was indulging a child’s view of the world.

  ‘Then you should marry me,’ he told her. They were sitting in the parlour together in the armchair near the fire. The bar had closed and the guests had gone to bed. If Bridget would marry him, he thought, and they became a family themselves, his loneliness for those back in Knockaleery would be less.

  ‘So you keep saying,’ she said, ‘but you’re my young man, and that must do you. I don’t want to be bearing children right now, and you can take your hand from under my skirt, thank you. For I don’t mind kissing you and cuddling, but what you’re trying is exactly what leads to children.’

  ‘I have money, Bridget, we’d have a fine life.’

  ‘I’m having a fine life, thank you so very much.’

  He knew if he persisted in speaking about marriage, she would become somewhat distant, and his prospects in that department would seem more remote.

  The next morning, he took a newspaper and a pot of coffee down to Paddy Madden, who was shepherding a claim for their syndicate, and then went to see Danny Phelan, who was working their shaft. He climbed down the shaft to Danny, who was looking desolately at the shale they were digging.

  ‘Goes on forever,’ he said. ‘No pay dirt.’

  ‘McCrae’s got a shaft a little to the north that’s beginning to pay,’ said William. ‘We’ll have to go deeper because the gutter seems to be running downward from the north.’

  ‘More drift, more water,’ said Danny. He was deep in gloom, worried this shaft would never pay. Deep shaft mining was difficult. It took considerable time, effort and resources, sometimes for no result at all. Danny dug into his pockets. ‘There’s no gold but I kept these for you. I know you’re interested in fossilising.’

  William held the specimens Danny handed him near the lantern. The imprint on the rock looked as if it might be part of an ancient centipede.

  ‘That’s a beauty,’ he said to Danny.

  ‘I don’t hold with fossilising,’ said Danny, ‘The priest don’t like it, and I try to keep myself headed towards the glories of heaven. But I know it interests you.’

  William thought religion was a wider thing than he had been brought up to, and wished there were more people who thought about such things. Here in the colony, people debated vigorously about democracy and government, but many held fast to a religion of superstition, both Catholic and Protestant.

  ‘How’s your pretty little Bridget?’ asked Danny, as they climbed the ladder to the surface. ‘Still making your heart ache?’

  William often spoke to Danny of his troubles with Bridget. ‘She’s a grand girl,’ William said, ‘her being difficult and all, she’s still the only girl for me. She’s the one I love, Danny.’

  ‘And she knows it’s so,’ said Danny. ‘Mind you, I think she’s got the right idea. I wouldn’t get married myself, although it seems a little unnatural in a woman. All the women I know seem rather too keen to marry.’

  ‘Marry you?’ said William. ‘I’d have trouble believing that, Danny.’

  ‘They love me curly hair,’ said Danny. ‘And they’d like to tame me to sit by their hearth and have me purr. But I’ll be escaping that particular fate long as I can.’

  There were weeks and then months on the Eureka lead where no party struck anything and there was a bleak despair. But the diggers persisted because it was known, or at least fervently believed, that gold was there as it was in Canadian lead and the Gravel Pits. And because it took time to get gold, men settled, and miners started building huts instead of living in tents. Ballarat was becoming a town. A subscription was taken up for the hospital, and a lending li
brary started, for the diggers were avid readers. William himself bought two yards of books for ten pounds for the hotel parlour, plus all the Waverley novels and the book of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which Bridget started and found most affecting. It was stolen from under her nose, so William became inclined to buy less popular books, which his customers might care to read but not steal.

  The town had a newspaper for the first time. There were many fires reported, for most of the buildings were wooden and diggers were inclined to be careless with candles and lamps, especially under the influence of drink. Despite this, Main Street was the heart of the town and felt like a sort of paradise, where life was big and rich and busy.

  It was in this year the Eureka Stockade began brewing after a winter in which no-one would have predicted trouble in Ballarat. But as gold digging became less certain, William heard the resentments of the diggers expressed more vigorously in the bar of the Star Hotel. The troopers were high-handed, hunting men down for their licence, regarding it as a sport, and the diggers as criminals. It gave offence to the independence of the men in the field. They were outraged when men were chained to the logs near the government camp. The licence fee was too high. The diggers, storekeepers and hoteliers never saw anything from their licence payment in the way of roads or proper policing. The police took bribes as if it was their right, and even honest men were forced to pay them. At the same time, the government camp in Lydiard Street was liberally provisioned, which was paid for by the licences. This was all felt to be the fault of Governor La Trobe.

  ‘It’s not just the governor,’ Humffray explained to William one morning over a pot of coffee and a large breakfast. ‘It is the policy of the government in England and the squatters in the council. We need a political system where Jack is as good as his master. Until then, the views of the diggers will be given no substance.’

  So it was with much hope that William read in the paper of the cheering of the great crowds – said to be 60,000 in number – who turned out to greet the new Governor of Victoria, Sir Charles Hotham, who arrived in June to replace La Trobe, who was being retired. In Melbourne there was much singing of ‘God Save the Queen’ and ‘Rule Britannia’, and a triumphal arch.