The judge struck his gavel three times. ‘Luke Tyler, it is therefore ordered and adjudged by this court that you be sentenced to fifteen years’ hard labour.’
The gavel came down one last time to seal his fate.
CHAPTER 3
Would it never stop raining? Luke bent his head to the blast and trudged into camp with the other prisoners at the end of another ten-hour work day. He sucked the smooth stone in his mouth, a trick supposed to keep hunger at bay, but it wasn’t working. His belly clenched in pain and all he could think about was dinner. He could already taste it, see himself sopping up the possum stew with a hunk of bread. His mouth watered as a sodden guard slammed the timber gates behind them.
Mr Collins, the new superintendent, watched them from the porch of his hut. He was portly, with a florid face and bushy beard. Luke stared enviously at the column of smoke rising from his chimney. At his warm coat and dry clothes. The shivering men shuffled into a rough line and waited. Once Luke stopped moving, the cold sank deep into his marrow. The wind redoubled its fury, piercing through his thin clothes with icy needles.
Collins stumbled and swore as he stepped off the porch. ‘Line up, you ragtag bunch of bastards.’
Luke groaned to hear him slur his words. He’d been drinking, which meant he’d been gambling, which meant he’d been losing. Which meant the men would almost certainly go hungry tonight.
‘We’re missing a man,’ said Collins. A web of red lines flared up his cheeks.
The guard stepped forward. ‘I’ve checked ’em twice, sir. They’re all there.’
‘Are you saying I can’t count?’ Collins’ eyes bulged from their fleshy pouches. ‘I’ll have you flogged.’ He took a swig from a flask he found in his pocket.
The prisoners shuffled about in the rain, rubbing their hands together and stamping feet, as the guard counted them for the third time. When he turned around again, Collins had already retreated to the warmth of his hut. ‘Get off with you,’ said the guard, and made a dash for his quarters. The tired prisoners did the same.
The prison farm stood a mile from the small goldmining town of Hills End, nestled in the foothills of rugged ranges. More than five hundred convicts had once lived there, in huts they built themselves from bush timber. Guards told stories about the heyday of British transportation, when thousands toiled in such camps as little more than slaves, building roads, drains and bridges. They were log-cutters and quarry men, even used as beasts of burden to pull carts full of timber and stone. But the convict ships came no more and the work camps and their inmates had been largely forgotten. As these lost men served out their sentences or absconded into the bush, the prison population had declined to less than fifty.
Luke pushed in the door of his leaky hut. The rain had turned the dirt floor to smelly mud, and it seemed almost as damp inside as out. He climbed onto his bunk and sank back on the straw – cold, wet and hungry. Pulling the filthy blanket around him, he slammed his fist into the wall.
‘Steady, lad, you’ll have the roof in,’ came Bob’s voice from the bunk below. ‘Come here and I’ll lend you a dry shirt.’
Old Bob Nelson was the most senior inmate, and seemed to lead a charmed life. He pilfered shirts from the laundry, food from the kitchen, tobacco from the guards, and never got caught. He was also the unofficial leader of and spokesperson for the prisoners.
Luke stripped off his wet clothes and hung them over the end of his bunk. He pulled on the dry shirt Bob offered him, wrapped himself back up in the blanket and tried to stop his teeth from chattering. ‘I swear, Bob, we’ll starve before spring gets here.’
All the recent talk in camp was of what to do about Mr Collins. He wasn’t an excessively harsh man and, being bone-lazy, did not push the men beyond endurance as some had in the past. But he did possess one major flaw – he was an inveterate gambler and never missed an opportunity to try his luck. The problem lay in the fact he was both stupid and illiterate. Unable to read, write or accurately perform even the simplest calculations, Collins invariably found himself on the losing page of the bookmaker’s ledger. At such times he would down great quantities of rum and swap his mild disposition for one of vile ill-temper – dishing out random beatings and refusing to feed the men.
‘I’ve got an idea.’ Bob produced a biscuit from nowhere and handed it to Luke. ‘Get your pants on.’
Bob knocked on the half-open door of Collins’ hut. Luke could see the superintendent slumped on a chair by the fire, muttering curses and swigging from a nearly empty bottle of rum.
Bob stepped into the crude doorway, looking as respectful as possible. To Luke’s surprise, Collins beckoned them in. He was in the maudlin stage of drunkenness. Rage would come later.
‘What is it?’ asked Collins, staring into space.
‘If you please, sir,’ said Bob. ‘The men and meself feel uncommonly grieved by your rotten luck, and we think we can help turn it around.’
‘Nothing can lift this curse that’s upon me.’
‘Here’s me idea. Luke’s your man. Real quick at calculations is young Luke. Why, he’s beat the best of us at cards ten times over. Why don’t you take him along next time and no bastard’ll swindle you. He’s sharp as a tack, is Luke.’
Collins looked up. Luke was well-known around camp as a card sharp, with an uncanny ability to remember cards played. For a time the superintendent seemed lost in thought. ‘Think I’d trust one of you thieving scoundrels?’ he said at last. ‘Get out, and you’ll see no dinner tonight.’
‘Great plan,’ said Luke, as they returned to the hut.
Bob winked and gave him another biscuit. ‘Give it time, lad. Give it time.’
The stars were out by the time Luke climbed into his bunk and closed his eyes. He flinched as Henry Abbott’s face swam into view. The man who’d violated his sister and unjustly condemned him. One day he’d settle the score.
Luke groaned and scratched at the bedbugs. Who was he kidding? The truth was, he was a coward. There’d been chances to escape, and each time he’d lost his nerve. Early on in his sentence, a boy made a bold but poorly planned bid for freedom. He almost starved in the bush before being recaptured, flogged and sentenced to a timber-gang – a punishment usually reserved for the roughest men. He returned a year later, barely recognisable, with failing health and a broken spirit. The memory was never very far away. So Luke always convinced himself to wait until he was a little older, or wiser, or healthier, or warmer, or closer to Hobart before trying. Yet as prisoner numbers dwindled, rumours grew that the camp might close down altogether. A return to the more secure Hobart Gaol would make escape almost impossible.
Luke’s empty stomach growled like an angry animal. He rocked back and forth in an effort to keep warm, and received a thump and shout from below. Arrgh! Time to go to his happy place. He’d long ago learned to tune out the present, leaving his mind free to roam in the painless past. It was the only thing that had kept him sane over the last four years. Recalling memories of home and family. Memories of school and his teacher, Daniel Campbell. For Luke was well educated at a time when most boys of his station had no formal teaching at all.
Hobart’s government schools were bleak, unpopular places. Alternative schools sprang up, run by emancipists and charitable benefactors. Campbell College was such a school. Lessons were first held in an old wool store adjacent to Coomalong, Mr Campbell’s Hobart home at Sandy Point. Luke’s father was one of the tradesmen engaged to remodel the building into classrooms. A former convict, he’d always resented his lack of formal education. When Mr Campbell offered Luke a place in his new school, Papa jumped at the opportunity. Luke had loved Campbell College, its spacious grounds and native gardens such a contrast to the smell and squalor of Wapping. By simply imagining the rutted roadway that led there, overarched with blue gums, all things became tolerable.
He found a memory. A day-long ramble with his teacher up Mount Wellington. The cool, timbered slopes as familiar to Luke as his own street.
There, among the wattles and sassafras, among the chorus of currawongs and the buzz of bees, Luke’s thirst for knowledge grew.
‘What’s this?’ he’d say, over and over, on finding a bird’s nest or a lizard or any manner of thing. He dropped a brilliant beetle with vermilion bands into Daniel’s hand.
‘Ah, a Buprestidae, and a very pretty one at that. Some are metallic green, others azure blue and gold. I imagine you found this on a tea-tree blossom?’
‘Do you know all about beetles?’ asked Luke.
‘I’ve collected more than six hundred species in Tasmania alone, but gave up with many still to go.’
‘Why?’
‘Somehow, I no longer wished to kill them. I still look for beetles, as before. When I find an old friend I admire him awhile, then let him trundle away in peace.’
With extravagant care Luke replaced the beetle on the tea-tree.
He learned to recognise each bird call. He noticed everything from tiny ants to a camouflaged eagle’s eyrie in the soaring canopy of a mountain ash.
‘The she-eagle’s mate was shot long ago,’ whispered Daniel. ‘It took her years to find another. When lightning struck her nest, she built it again in the splinters of the thunderbolt.’
Luke clambered through the bauera bushes to the other side of the tree, craning his neck to examine the eyrie from every angle. The fluffy white head of an eaglet poked over the broad, tangled mass of leaves and branches.
Daniel cautioned him to silence and pointed skywards. A vast, moving shadow glided above them – the crooked-beaked she-eagle with a rabbit gripped tight in her talons. Luke had seen eagles before: bedraggled corpses strung along fences by farmers or huddled captive in cages. But this graceful, beautiful bird – he could no more imagine taking her life than he could his own.
‘My dad says they eat lambs,’ said Luke. ‘He says they should be shot.’
‘They eat rabbits and cats and carrion. Our foolish farmers don’t know what a friend they have.’
With Daniel by his side, Luke learned that wild Tasmania was far from the harsh and forbidding land that townsfolk portrayed it to be. To those who loved and understood her, the island was Eden itself: boasting abundant game, reliable rainfall and a temperate climate very much like England. Daniel taught Luke about bush food – fern roots, native plums, kangaroo apples and giant land crabs that grew more than a foot long and weighed ten pounds. Where to seek shelter in a mountain storm. How to light a fire, track game, find fresh water.
One day the pair sat on a mossy log overlooking a little spring. A wayward swamphen chick wandered further and further away from its parents, darting for a hovering damsel fly that always remained out of reach. As they watched, a snowy goshawk plummeted to earth, seconds later clutching the lifeless baby bird in its grasp.
‘See, Luke? Unwary youngsters make easy targets for hungry hawks.’
‘It doesn’t seem fair,’ said Luke. ‘To die for such a small mistake.’
‘Perhaps, but the harsh consequences of mistakes are common and, I might add, they’re not confined to careless baby birds.’
One day Daniel took Luke to a new part of the mountain. Here blackened soil and smouldering piles of branches extended into the distance. No bird sang. Red mud seeped like blood from the wounded earth, oozing downhill in jagged channels that cut the naked ground. A lone wallaby hopped forlornly across the vast, empty slope.
‘Why?’ Luke’s voice cracked with emotion. ‘This land’s too steep to farm.’
‘The brewery,’ said Daniel. ‘The government granted them a large slice of this mountain. They burn even the biggest logs in their furnace. The same thing happens all over the island, and all over the world.’
‘Where will the eagles live?’ Luke’s misery turned to anger. ‘When I grow up I’ll protect the eagles. I’ll protect the forests.’
Daniel smiled. ‘Perhaps you will, my boy. Perhaps you will.’
Luke had a more powerful secret weapon than memories of his home, family and school – one that worked even in his darkest hours. When floggings or hunger or solitary confinement threatened to drive him mad, he’d think of Bluebell, his tomboy princess.
He’d given Belle that nickname because she loved blue flax lilies and often wore them in her hair or behind her ears. A girl utterly unaffected by the hardships that ruled the lives of common people. A sweet, shining creature from another world. At fourteen, he’d made up his mind that one day he’d marry her. And, although he’d never told Belle of his plan, he’d sensed they had an understanding.
They’d first met when he was ten and she was eight. At first Belle had been jealous of her father’s new protégé. Luke won her over with a three-legged quoll. He rescued the half-grown native cat from a steel-jaw trap and arrived with her one morning at Coomalong, the Campbell’s gracious home adjoining the school. Luke pulled the quoll from the burlap sack, half-dead from blood loss and shock, her mangled foreleg hanging from a sinew.
‘What have we here?’ asked Daniel as Belle stroked the velvet softness of the quoll’s spotted fur. ‘That leg must go,’ he said after a quick examination.
Belle made a small, strangled sound, then ran to the house in tears.
Luke assisted his teacher to remove the leg, then cleaned and bandaged the little stump.
Belle named the quoll Pallas, and became her devoted nursemaid. Pallas recovered, sleeping in Belle’s dressing-table drawers by day, and making herself useful catching mice in the kitchen at night. She even learned to ambush rabbits in the garden, substituting speed with cunning, stealing into low branches and launching herself upon her prey from a height, like an owl.
Pallas was the first of many waifs and strays that Luke brought to Belle: possums, magpies, bandicoots, cockatoos and a little wombat that dug a hole under the house and ate the garden. Groundsmen no longer mowed the sweeping lawns, now kept in good trim by an assortment of kangaroos and wallabies. Belle’s mother, Elizabeth, made some half-hearted attempts to curb Luke’s penchant for collecting wildlife, but in this she received no support from her husband. He thrived in the midst of this growing menagerie, using the animals in class discussions, following them round with a notebook and making endless sketches.
One of Daniel’s preferred pastimes was to sit in the garden while Luke and Belle copied John Gould’s magnificent full-colour plates and he read aloud from the text. He often held forth on his pet subject – the destruction of the island’s native species and the need for national parks.
‘Quolls, like our sweet little Pallas, relentlessly trapped for their pelts. Devils labelled vermin. Then there’s the thylacine.’ He turned to an illustration of two native tigers and read the caption. ‘Thylacinus Cynocephalus, the pouched dog with a wolf’s head. Of course it’s neither wolf nor tiger. It’s the world’s largest marsupial carnivore. You can’t imagine what an important animal it is to the zoologist.’
Luke looked up from his sketching. ‘Then you’d outlaw the trapping of tigers?’
‘Certainly. Otherwise they will be lost to us forever.’
Belle became obsessed, drawing nothing but native tigers, bringing the animals to life with a few simple pen-strokes. She was quite the artist.
‘I wish I had a tiger cub for a pet. Can you find me one, Luke?’
He’d tried hard to fulfil her request, but it seemed there were no tigers to be had. Even then, Tasmania’s unique thylacines were rare as diamonds.
Luke rolled over in bed and smiled, picturing Belle’s bright, expectant face, wishing he’d been able to make her wish come true. Thumps and yells sounded from out in the night. Collins would have a sore head tomorrow, and the whole camp could sleep in. Luke yawned. His body found a more comfortable position, and his mind found another memory.
CHAPTER 4
Bob’s suggestion must have stayed with the superintendent. Come next Saturday race day, Luke joined Collins on an outing to Hills End. He was first subjected to a string of the most dire and bloodcurdli
ng threats imaginable should he try to escape. He had to wear tattered prison clothing, stamped with broad arrows, branding him a criminal for all to see. Yet no threats or humiliation could detract from his excitement. Being out in the real world for the first time in four years was a dream come true. Trotting down the same roads he’d slaved for years to build. Trotting into town, past shops and dogs and pretty young girls in ribboned hats. He could almost imagine being free again.
With Luke’s capable assistance, Collins not only avoided falling victim to unscrupulous bookmakers, but also came away with a tidy profit. That night the prisoners enjoyed a golden syrup and damper supper, requested by Luke and agreed to by a – for once – happily inebriated Mr Collins. Both old Nelson and Luke were regarded as heroes, and the nightmare of Collin’s drunken furies became a thing of the past.
On the first few occasions Collins watched Luke like a hawk, bringing along Curly, the gang foreman, and two guards for added security. Curly proved more trouble than he was worth, somehow managing to down such a large quantity of liquor that Luke and a guard were twice required to carry his supine body back to the cart for the journey home. The gambling trips continued without Curly and, eventually, even without the guards.
Luke often contemplated running on these trips to town, but each time fear triumphed. He had no clue as to what to do or where to go. There were rumours of successful escapes, of some men making it to Hobart, but nobody knew for sure. However everybody knew what happened to the rest; they perished in the bush or were recaptured with ten years added to their sentence. In any case, going home would put his family at risk. Harbouring an escaped convict was worth a decade in prison. So instead he meekly returned to camp with Mr Collins, always swearing to himself that at the very next opportunity he’d give his foolish captor the slip.
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