Hello from the Gillespies

by Monica McInerney

  He knew he’d let himself down. Let Angela down. The kids. Not just his own family. His ancestors. He’d always been conscious this was a fourth-generation property. It was on the homestead gatepost, under the Errigal nameplate: ‘Established 1887’. It wasn’t until he’d started on the family tree that he’d discovered they had been mispronouncing the station name. It was Erra-gull. Not Err-rye-gal. A mountain in Donegal, the home county of one of the original Gillespie cousins. A mountain he would soon see for himself.

  All because of his doctor.

  That afternoon Dr Mitchell had discussed the treatments available for his depression. He also gave him some medication to get him sleeping again, to help calm his anxious mind. He stressed how important it was that Nick get outside as often as he could, do some exercise every day. He also wanted him to think about talking to someone.

  ‘A psychiatrist?’ Nick said. ‘No, thanks.’

  ‘A psychologist,’ his doctor said. Not a local, but a good man from Adelaide who visited the area twice a month. Against all Nick’s instincts, hating the idea of it, telling Angela he was in Port Augusta meeting his lawyers – more lies – he had already had three sessions. It was helping, even if sometimes there was more silence in the room than conversation. Jim, the psychologist, had echoed his doctor’s advice. Stay active. Get outside. Eat properly. He’d suggested he find a new interest. Something to stop the despairing thoughts from taking over. Think of your brain like a radio, Jim had said. You’ve been stuck on a bad channel. A negative channel. You don’t have to listen to it any more. You can tune to different thoughts any time you want to. Or need to. That’s where a new interest will help. A hobby.

  ‘Like what?’ Nick had said. ‘Stamp collecting? We get three mail deliveries a week if we’re lucky.’

  ‘You have a computer and the internet out there, don’t you?’

  Yes, Nick had said. It was an expensive satellite connection, but they did.

  ‘Have you ever thought of tracing your ancestors? Irish, aren’t you? Bet there’s a few good stories.’

  The idea lodged in his mind. He’d thought about it over the next few days. He decided he wouldn’t start on it until he heard back from the mining company. They’d done tests on four other properties in the area, he knew. All four shared the same rock formations, geological signs to what might lie below. Over the years, there’d been lots of speculation about what could be there – uranium, gold, copper, diamonds. He had actually prayed that they would find something of value on Errigal. Angela didn’t know the extent of their financial problems. No one but he and his bank manager knew.

  They owed nearly a million dollars.

  He felt the sweat bead now, remembering what it had been like to hear that figure.

  The crash in wool prices as well as the long drought had affected everyone in the area. But his neighbours had fared better. Not only because they were better graziers. It was luck as well. Their stations were on better land, with more water. Or they’d diversified. Or they had better management of feed, or stock levels. Better-quality wool, better profits. The variables were endless. The result was the same, though: when the rain did come, when wool prices started to rise again, his neighbours were ready. They’d scraped through. It was too late for him. He was in huge financial trouble.

  He couldn’t talk about it with Angela. It wasn’t his way. He’d also made a decision from the very start not to burden her unnecessarily. It had been hard enough for her to settle into a new way of life, a new country.

  He knew there’d been a lot of gossip when he first brought Angela back to Errigal, so soon after meeting her in Sydney. He knew he was considered one of the eligible men in the area. The only son and heir to a big property. Well-educated, courtesy of an expensive all-boys boarding school in Adelaide from the age of ten to eighteen, and then a three-year university course in agriculture management. For four years he’d gone out with Diane, the oldest daughter of one of the neighbouring station families, three properties away. He’d thought it was a casual arrangement between them, even though he knew their parents were keen. Celia had been even keener. She’d always been very conscious of the advantages of a good social and financial match. The pressure had been on for him to ask Diane to marry him.

  But then he’d gone to Sydney for that rugby match, walked into a pub to get directions and met Angela. And that was that.

  He knew all the reasons why it shouldn’t have worked. She was six years younger than him. She was a Londoner, not an Australian country girl. She’d never even been on a sheep station. But she had looked at him – it felt so corny but it was true – she’d looked at him with those incredible blue eyes and he’d fallen in love. He’d thought, this is the woman I’m going to marry.

  People tried to talk him out of it, remind him of his responsibilities, not just to his family but to the station, to Errigal. He was the sole heir, after all.

  He shouldn’t have been. He’d had an older brother, Anthony, who died when Nick was four years old. He’d drowned in one of the creeks, one winter’s afternoon. Only eight years old. To his shame, Nick didn’t even remember him. Sometimes, after his parents had retired off the station but were back visiting, he’d seen his dad looking at the photos of Anthony. He’d wondered what he was thinking. Would Anthony have been a better son? A better sheep farmer?

  Yes. Anthony would have married a local woman. Anthony would have made the right stock decisions, negotiated his way through the wool crash, coped with the drought, diversified, prospered, been poised for recovery when the time came.

  Most especially, Anthony wouldn’t have got Errigal into this position, where the only option was to hand over half his land to the big enemy, one of the mining giants, who could afford to pay a fortune for it.

  Nick remembered the day he’d got the news. They’d found something on Errigal land. He’d heard a lot of geological detail about drilling patterns, surveying techniques, surface indicators, volcanic basins – all in search of something called diamondiferous kimberlites or kimberlite pipes. In layman’s terms, diamonds. The draft contract they’d given him had run to over fifty pages. His lawyer had summarised it. They’d found enough evidence and enough micro-diamonds during their exploration to warrant further extensive testing and drilling. They wanted a five-year exploration lease on 30 000 hectares of Errigal. Nearly half of the property. In return, they were offering him a lump sum. Crazy money. Enough to pay off his main debt. Not only that: they were offering him a paid position as caretaker on their share of the property. It had nothing to do with sheep. They had no intention of running it as a going concern. They wanted him to do fencing work, windmill and floodgate maintenance, fire-fighting. Work he had done all his life. Work he could do without thinking.

  It was like winning the lottery. Or was it more like a pact with the devil? The mining company mightn’t touch the land for years. There might not be as much wealth in the land as they hoped. It was speculation on their part. For days he’d wrestled with the decision. What was the alternative? Saddling all four of his children with a huge debt for the rest of their lives? What kind of a father would do that? What kind of inheritance would that be? Day after day, night after night, he’d tried to think of another way out. He could think of nothing else, but he couldn’t talk about it with anyone. Especially Angela. He felt too guilty, too ashamed, too helpless, too hopeless. This was his fault. His problem, not hers. She was busy enough taking care of her tourists, running her own business. Her successful business.

  The night he’d told Angela about the deal had been one of the worst of his life. The shock in her eyes, the disappointment, the disbelief. He had registered it all. He had expected it. He had felt that way about it himself. She’d asked question after question. He couldn’t answer them. He still didn’t tell her the size of the debt. He’d been worried that if he started talking, he wouldn’t be able to stop. Every worry, every doubt he had would come pouring out. So that night, and since, he’d said as littl
e as possible. Hidden his own doubts from her. It was the only way to get through it.

  As a family, they’d kept the news to themselves for as long as possible. It was Angela who had convinced him he needed to tell their closest neighbours. If it was up to him, he’d have said nothing to anyone. She was more linked in socially in the area. She heard more than he did about what people thought of mining deals. Jealousy from some. Anger from others. No one wanted what the mines would bring, the noise, the trucks. No one believed the mining companies when they said there would be minimal damage to the environment. They’d be ripping up rocks and earth that hadn’t been touched in hundreds of thousand of years. Tearing down three-hundred-year-old trees.

  He knew that. But he could see no other way out.

  As news of the lease spread, he stayed put on the station. Angela was in town more often, either in Hawker or in Port Augusta or Port Pirie. She was the one who bore the brunt of it. She hid a lot of the comments from him, he knew that. But she didn’t need to say anything for him to guess how she felt about it, and about him. Disappointed. Ashamed. He could see it in her eyes.

  It hadn’t always been like this between them. He’d thought they had a good marriage. Better than good; a great marriage. He wasn’t a big talker. That wasn’t his way. But they’d had plenty to say to each other. They’d laughed a lot too. She was great fun. A hard worker. A wonderful mother. His sounding board. His best friend.

  But all of that had now changed. Because of him.

  He knew she’d already had enough to concern her this year. Victoria. Genevieve. Lindy. And Ig, all his problems at boarding school, the running away. One more worry, on top of all the others.

  Nick had hated his own first years at boarding school. He’d gone there at the age of ten too. Even now he could remember the lonely nights in the dormitory. All the jostling for position, the wrestling, physically and emotionally. Maybe it had been good for him in the end. Got him out of his shell.

  But Ig hated it even more than Nick had. Hated it so much he kept trying to run away. On one occasion, he’d made it as far as the country bus station in the city centre, before a teacher saw him and brought him back to the school. It caused more tension between Nick and Angela. She’d thought Ig was too young to leave home. She understood it had been the Gillespie family tradition, that all the Gillespie males went to boarding school, but traditions could be changed, couldn’t they, she’d argued. They’d gone back and forth about it, without any resolution.

  In the end, it hadn’t mattered anyway. After Ig tried to run away a third time, the principal made the decision for them. When the new school year began in February, Ig would be back at the small school in Hawker.

  Around that time, Angela had started taking pottery classes in Port Pirie. She’d not only signed up for a three-month course, she’d put in a successful bid for the school’s old wheel and kiln. He’d expected her to make cups and mugs and vases. Instead, she seemed to be producing shapes of some kind. She’d shown them to him in the early days, but he hadn’t known what to say. He’d just tried for the best and said they looked great. He’d seen more disappointment in her eyes. Later, he’d heard her describe them to Joan as sculptures, artwork based on the bird life she saw around her in the Flinders Ranges. ‘Good for you, love,’ Joan had said. ‘I wouldn’t have a clue about art.’

  It was while Angela was at her pottery class one day that he first took his psychologist’s advice. Tried to distract himself from the despairing thoughts. He’d started with a website simply called ‘How to trace your family tree’. He sat down with the documents that had been in the house for years. His own father hadn’t been interested. His grandfather had often wanted to talk about his ancestors, but back then Nick had had other things to do. As Nick started to delve deeper into the family history, he wished he had made time.

  These weren’t dry, dusty tales. They were adventure stories. These were his ancestors living their lives on this same land, in this same house, trying to get to grips with all that he had spent the past decades coming to grips with. Weather battles. Stock problems. Life in this wild part of the world. He kept thinking about those two Gillespie cousins. What had gone through their heads when they found themselves in Australia, swapping grey Irish clouds for the huge blue sky, exchanging damp, minuscule fields for massive open paddocks? Were they homesick? What had they left behind? What had their farms in Ireland been like? Their families?

  Question led to question. It became a treasure hunt. He never knew what he would find next on the internet. He’d always thought he would have to go to Ireland to learn anything about his ancestors, but it was extraordinary how much he’d been able to unearth from his desk, in the office, on the old, shared computer.

  He joined chat rooms, all of them frequented by amateur researchers like himself, everyone expressing frustration at the unpredictability of Irish record keeping. He got in touch with Gillespies all over the world. They started talking about a reunion in Ireland. He offered to coordinate it. Following others’ suggestions, he posted his email address, with a general call for information about two cousins with the surname of Gillespie who’d emigrated to South Australia in the 1880s. Three days later, he had a reply.

  Dear Mr Gillespie,

  We were very interested to see your recent post regarding your Gillespie ancestors in Ireland and believe we can help you. For a monthly fee, you receive expert, on-the-ground support from an appointed genealogist, who will answer your questions and help you find all the photographs, records and stories of your family for your personalised family history.

  He was impressed with the letter. He checked out the company’s equally impressive website. He read the testimonials. There were dozens, all glowing. It did make sense to have someone in Ireland doing the hard graft, visiting the archives, phoning the parochial houses, everything that was too difficult and time-consuming for him to do. It was expensive though. Not just the monthly fee – he was also expected to cover any travelling and accommodation expenses incurred during the research.

  But perhaps, just perhaps, his grandparents and his father would approve. They might even forgive him for what he had done to their property.

  He filled out the online form. He set up the bank transfers. Two days later, Carol came into his life. Even thinking about her now made him feel better.

  Better. Not guilty. Despite what the kids thought, what Angela had asked him, he had nothing to feel guilty about. It wasn’t an affair. Carol was simply a voice on Skype, on email. A scholar, a historian, a trained genealogist. In the past few months, she’d found so much information for him. His great-great-uncle was a political activist. A great-great-grandmother was a poet. Carol had sent him pages of records, old family photographs. When he’d mentioned the idea of staging a reunion, she immediately offered to help.

  They’d negotiated an increased monthly rate. Money was still tight. The lump sum from the mining company had paid off the debt, but his wage as a caretaker still had to cover a lot of other costs. After long deliberation, he’d decided it was worth it. He hoped his ancestors would approve. He was in charge of bringing together Gillespies from all over the world, after all. He wanted to do it properly. He couldn’t just rent out a room in an Irish pub and stick up a photocopy of a ship’s log on the wall. Carol had already suggested many good ideas, of tours they could take, ancestral places they could visit.

  It was now more than a hobby for Nick. More than a way to fill long, empty hours. He’d discovered a love of history. The research had given him purpose again. A sense of adventure. It seemed incredible that he was even making plans to visit Ireland. To travel overseas for the first time in his life. Not just for the reunion, but on a reconnaissance trip before that. And not on his own.

  With Angela.

  He’d been planning it for weeks. He hoped she would say yes. He’d decided the best time to ask her was after the twins had arrived home for Christmas. After he’d had the chance to ask Victoria in person if
she would stay on and look after Ig and keep an eye on Angela’s station-stay website, manage any bookings and answer any queries.

  Of all his kids, Victoria would be the best choice. She shared his love, and Angela’s love, for the land around here. In the days before things went bad, he’d often thought she would be the one to take over from him. There’d even been casual conversations between him and Kevin Lawson, joking about Fred and Victoria getting married one day and combining Errigal and the Lawson property into one mighty one. Until Fred and Victoria had broken up so suddenly and her career had gone in a different direction. Nick had long ago ruled out Genevieve as his successor. She’d made it clear from early on that she wasn’t sticking around. It would never suit Lindy, either. She’d lose interest too quickly, start something but never finish it. And Ig? Despite being the only son and traditional heir, Ig’s interest clearly wasn’t on the land. Computers, yes. Station life, no.

  In the meantime, Nick knew he could trust Victoria to take care of things while he and Angela went travelling. They could afford to go for three weeks, he’d decided. Ireland for ten days, and then on to London, her home city. And then to somewhere else in Europe, wherever she wanted to go. Just the two of them.

  The trip couldn’t come soon enough. He missed her. He missed what their marriage had been like. He hoped that going away together might help bring them back together. Help her to forgive him for the mess he’d made of the station.

  As he turned to look at the map of Ireland on the wall, his email pinged. It was Carol, working all hours as usual. She’d already researched a list of Gillespie places he and Angela could visit.

  He was smiling as he wrote his reply.