The Man on the Headland

by Kylie Tennant

  Allen & Unwin’s House of Books aims to bring Australia’s cultural and literary heritage to a broad audience by creating affordable print and ebook editions of the nation’s most significant and enduring writers and their work. The fiction, non-fiction, plays and poetry of generations of Australian writers that were published before the advent of ebooks will now be available to new readers, alongside a selection of more recently published books that had fallen out of circulation.

  The House of Books is an eloquent collection of Australia’s finest literary achievements.

  Kylie Tennant was the author of nine novels, plus short stories, plays, journalism, criticism and biography as well as much writing for children. She is noted for her social realist studies of urban and rural working-class life from the 1930s, that began with Tiburon (1935), and included Foveaux (1939), named after a street in the slums of Surry Hills.

  Her working life encompassed such jobs as a barmaid, reviewer, church sister and publicist for the ABC. Seeking to be true to the society she observed, she took to the road with itinerant workers in the worst years of the Depression, and went so far as to spend a week in gaol for the sake of research.

  Tennant was born in Manly, New South Wales, in 1912 and died in 1988. She was awarded the Order of Australia in 1980.

  HOUSE of BOOKS

  KYLIE

  TENNANT

  The Man on

  the Headland

  This edition published by Allen & Unwin House of Books in 2012 First published by Angus & Robertson Publishers Pty Ltd, Sydney, in 1971

  Copyright © Kylie Tennant 1971

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

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  Australia

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  ISBN 978 1 74331 362 6 (pbk)

  ISBN 978 1 74343 077 4 (ebook)

  Contents

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter I

  LEAGUE AFTER LEAGUE the headlands curve up the coast of the continent. The white fingers of the sea play on them, each bluff giving out its unique note, making its own music. When the waves surge in under the golden arch of basalt at Diamond Head, between the ledges dripping with weed and cunjevoi, you can hear the boom from the cliff-top with the surge of the bombora and the boom again. This roar comes not only from the golden arch but all around a half-mile of rocks and cliff; squeaks of tiny beaches of red and green pebbles roiling, slate-coloured and cream and mauve pebbles straining in the froth, quiet pools of shells and limpets, the undertow from fishermen’s platform rocks and tumbled stone.

  The song goes up the cliffs with the quivering heat of grey driftwood, the scent of seaweed and dry grass, up where the track winds higher than the sea-hawk hovering to the ridge-top where the spray gives way to flannel flowers and golden everlastings, pale violets, thick wrinkled banksias holding out honeycombs for the gill-birds. All the froth of flowers splashes over the great dragon-spine slanting inland, rearing up above the sea its crown of glittering quartz.

  Diamond Head has its own special illusion. Anyone who comes there is seized with a wild resolution to stay for ever. No man but is possessed with the urge to bend Diamond Head to his secret longings, to make it his own. Diamond Head deals with them. It outlasts. Its great bulk of basalt was doing just this a few hundred years ago when Captain Cook and his crew of constipated heroes swept past, claiming the continent in a distant and gentlemanly manner. They heard the roar of the cliffs as so many cheers for their passing, a bombardment of welcome salutes. And Diamond Head will give a belch and a roar for the passing of all who come after him.

  When Cook sailed past it was a grey May day as cold as the captain’s eye. There would be a steely light on the sea, the sails stretched by the following southerly wind. Coming round Crowdy Head they would have kept well out to avoid the tail of foam on the Mermaid Reef. So that Cook must have been looking through the spyglass to see the black stick figures of aborigines on our headland and log it as Indian Head.

  “Of the aborigines and their manner of life,” he wrote elsewhere, “we know little as we have never been able to form the least connection with them.”

  In my mind’s eye there is blown smoke from the crest where the aborigines are. They are sending a message inland of the unknown flying object on the sea, concentrating the picture of it. The smoke is only a signal that they are about to send. The message would go to the three peaks across the lake which Cook named the Three Brothers, on to the Comboyne Range and to the Great Dividing Range, the high plateau where, being human, the relay men would begin to get it wrong. Cook by this time would be ’way up the coast, headlands dropping behind, with a thousand and three hundred miles before him.

  The real reason for the aborigines being on the crown of Diamond Head would be that they were digging for quartz crystals to tip their tools, grubbing low-grade industrial diamonds out of the clay pockets. They dug powock, an edible root, on the swampy plains behind Diamond Head and fished the long beaches, found pipis in the sand and used the river crossing seven miles north at Point Perpendicular which they later showed the white explorers. But by the time the Metcalfes came to Diamond Head the aborigines were gone, all gone, like the smoke blown from their fires.

  In 1770 when the great captain swept past our headland Ernie Metcalfe’s great-grandfather was a poacher on the Welsh mountains. I see the aborigines running like shadows and a line of Metcalfes running like deer before the men who hunt down men. Ernie’s grandfather was transported for taking a pheasant for a bet and I always see him as a young man. He has inherited his grandson’s sardonic manner, his arched nose and hazel eyes, the curls touched with bronze as Ernie’s were when we first knew him. Indeed I am not sure that it is not Ernie who is stepping off the ship and looking about him, light-footed and alert. He has the expression he had when he went off to fight World War I for the country that sentenced his grandfather.

  But World War II had come on before we met Ernie. If we understood time—and nobody does—we should probably find patterns in it, but it is simpler to call it chance that directed our three lives so that Ernie and the two Rodds were converging on a fly-speck fishing village on the North Coast of New South Wales. And if you think that it was hard on the little town of Laurieton that three such queer characters were arriving at the one time, remember that then the town seven miles north of Diamond Head at what was once an aboriginal river crossing had not yet grown its paunch of prosperity, was already charged with queer characters and well able to take care of itself.

  Chapter II

  E
RNIE TRAVELLED SLOWEST and was the first to arrive. He came down the coast from Queensland in the old sulky, taking it easy not to tire the horse or the dogs padding behind. The blue cattle bitch that Ernie called Ole Mammy had a little pup and part of the time she travelled with it on the tarpaulin that covered all Ernie’s worldly goods, his miner’s tools, his other suit, a ground sheet and blankets, the camp oven, the “bit of tucker”. The water-bag swung below the sulky covered in dust.

  Ernie was just coming home to Diamond Head on a visit to see “the sister” and his brother Jack. He had liked Queensland and had spent years roaming and foraging over it from the Gulf to the tablelands. Originally he had travelled up to see his brother Charlie, who had a sheep property out from Winton, but no two Metcalfes could be together without one of them telling the other how to run the farm. After Ernie had advised Charlie on the proper rearing of sheep there was one final argument and Ernie left to do a bit of gold fossicking. In the Depression he lived on the dole. He was an expert fencer, he could handle a pick and shovel. “The navvy,” Ernie always said, “is the gentleman of the working class.”

  Neatly tucked away under his well-shaped skull were all he needed—skills, memories, nuggets of pure intelligence, jokes, a few useless foibles, and seventy thousand different varieties of observation on everything under the sun. For although Ernie was close-mouthed about himself and his own affairs he was one of the world’s great talkers. He was solitary but sociable and he made friends easily. Like most bushmen he could make anything he wanted with his own hands.

  Under his slouched old army hat his eyes were as green as a sunlit clearing and his expression was that of the Laughing Cavalier who on suburban walls reminds the wistful dwellers of what they have lost. But the Cavalier is fat and Ernie would never be fat. He was too energetic. As he came slowly down the coast, the reins loose, he rolled cigarettes as a man fingers praying beads. The blue sea, dodging behind trees and the turns of the road, kept him company. And there rode with Ernie also, a companion of a sort, an acquaintance to whom he paid little attention—Death.

  Ernie treated Death as he would a drunk trying to borrow money. He was good-humoured but ready to give him the slip, more occupied with the prospects of a camp for the night, with water and a pick for the horse.

  When the sulky at last came slowly down the broad main thoroughfare of Laurieton where cows roamed the wayside grass under the camphor-laurel trees, the blue estuary was just as it had always been, sea-banks uncovered at low tide, mangroves clicking with crabs, fishing birds stalking, the breakwater of great rocks holding off the surf where the Camden Haven River met the sea below the coastguards’ cottages and the lighthouse. The river bank smelt of dried seaweed, tar, decayed fish-heads and mud. Over Laurieton in the late afternoon fell the shadow of the Big Brother like the pointer of a sundial advancing down towards the sea as the sun sank behind the mountain.

  Ernie had decided to spend the night with his niece Dot, who had married Athol Stace, the owner of a snapper boat. The Staces had once owned a timber mill, but the big timber was almost cut out around the Camden Haven, and Longworths had the mill with its sawdust pile smoking blue in a curve of the river. Ernie would catch up on the news, play with Dot’s children, give the horse a rest, and maybe stroll down to the hotel for a beer. In the morning, as soon as Sam the puntman was ready to take him across, Ernie would cover the last seven miles south to Diamond Head.

  Sam was a morose character, slowly turning the punt-wheel by hand, shining drops and strands of weeds circling and falling back like unheard prayers. But Sam was old enough to recognize Ernie as one of the Metcalfes of Diamond Head, the roving one who never settled down.

  It took us longer to make our way there. We had been planning for years and were not like Ernie, who merely slung the camp gear on the sulky. We were the Rodds and when we married bets were taken that it wouldn’t last a year, but at the end of ten years we were still the Rodds, who would leave off arguing with each other to unite in arguing with anyone else. We were born seven years apart under the sign of the Poor Fish who are tied together by their tails and trying to go in opposite directions. Frequently and dramatically we offered each other a divorce, an offer instantly accepted and never acted on.

  When we decided to go in the same direction nothing could stop us, but we first had to disentangle ourselves from all the other claims, plans, obstructions and entanglements.

  We had made up our minds instantly to go to Laurieton when we called to see a friend. We had never heard of the place before. One holiday we called to visit J.N. who was a school inspector and an enthusiast. He had caught enthusiasm young and was a regular Typhoid Mary, infecting anyone susceptible to ideas and optimism. He loved humanity and wanted to write, but while he could tell a good story, as soon as he put it on paper he killed it stone dead. Our mission was to break the news that some poor little tale he had sent was irretrievably mangled and after asking if none of the three endings he had suggested could possibly revive it he changed the subject

  “Now there’s where you should go to write a book. The place is in my inspectorate on the North Coast and the old chap there wants to come to Sydney. It’s on the edge of the river just a mile from the sea. Surfing beaches,” J.N. carolled, “the school has its own oyster lease.”

  A gleam came up behind Roddy’s glasses. He loved oysters but he loved surfing more.

  “You could teach, Roddy, and Kylie could write. Fishermen and cattle-stealers! Miles of lonely bush, lakes, mountains ...”

  “The children are little savages,” his wife put in. “The town girls have a Ladies’ Football Team. The men burn each other’s nets and steal anything that isn’t nailed down.”

  “Peaceful, beautiful, unspoilt,” J.N. continued. “Now what you must do, Roddy, is put in to Head Office before it falls vacant. Get your application in right away.”

  Head Office treated the application with hauteur. A pretty thing if every teacher whose wife was a writer wanted to get himself shifted about to suit her! Was the whole List to be altered for a wife’s whim? Never! They offered Rodd other and larger schools, which he declined. His conduct, lacking in ambition, was something Head Office could not countenance or approve.

  At that time Rodd was deputy head of a high school in a town in the Hunter River Valley. When we arrived the town reservoir showed an interesting pattern of cracked earth, and if you turned on a tap nothing but black mud fell out. The water in the house tanks had to be saved for drinking. The river was a drain choked with rusty tins, old motor tyres and rubbish.

  The town had the usual furnishings of churches, butter factory, a coal-mine, banks, shops and social ambitions. The temperature sometimes rose to 103 degrees and stayed above the hundred mark for days. Some nights we slept in the back yard until the iron roof of our house cooled down and we were once nearly trodden on by a horse which had learnt to lift the gate-latch.

  Our house was not in the town, which had slipped down into a gullet between the hills, but up on a plateau where in better times clouds and mirages swept over miles of open paddock. The sheep could be seen frantically running, following a truck laden with boughs cut to provide them with a little food.

  I swore there were ghosts. Roddy said it was the horse who could lift the gate-latch. I insisted that sometimes at night a dark, malevolent wave came across the paddocks from the direction of a distant mountain peak. Even when the inhabitants of the town told him that over there had been the coal-mine of St Heliers where in the early days convicts worked in conditions of great cruelty he refused to believe me.

  We had glorious roses and the soil would grow anything. Roddy was once, in a drought, prosecuted for watering the roses. At the same time one of his schoolgirls came up for sentence for selling wine to a passing troop train. Ever afterwards, Roddy claimed, she looked slightly patronizing but gave him an encouraging smile, recognizing a fellow law-breaker but one without much talent.

  I used to cry as I typed with the sweat dripp
ing on the typewriter and the iron roof heating up overhead. The cemetery near by was full of black, polished tombstones over the best people and I had formed an aversion for being buried there. Half-way through the year, still crying quietly, I was moved into hospital and the nurse said my inside was “just like a bargain sale” as they kept finding new pieces they could snatch with little cries of pleasure. From the upstairs room of the hospital I could see Roddy on the opposite hillslope in the school playground. The headmaster, a genial man, was himself dying of two conflicting ailments so he left to Roddy much of the running of the huge school. The headmaster, trained to “get on”, accepted a new and even bigger school and didn’t last the first term. So many headmasters, Head Office remarked, either had nervous breakdowns or perished inexplicably. The breed was not what it was once.

  I was judging a short-story competition. The stories came in a packing case from the city and as I read each one I would sort it into another big box on the other side of the bed. They seemed mostly to be about people dying in hospital.

  But you must not think we did not enjoy ourselves. We had hosts of friends and visitors, festivals, gifts and meetings. The ghosts did not really bother us. They were a change from the city slum in which I had written an earlier book. We had a house in an alley which travelled visitors said was just like Limehouse. It had fog when there was no fog anywhere else and our poor neighbours, to whom I used to chat, sitting on the front doorstep which was right on the footpath, often had drunken quarrels by night so that there would be blood on the pavement. You could have a hot bath by heating the copper in the back yard and there was one room and a kitchen downstairs and a room upstairs. We never used the upstairs room because it was crowded in every crack with bugs. A man used to come round on Saturday morning selling bug poison. At first we thought we would spray them. But a female bug, seeing death approaching, gathered her little ones behind her and faced us with defiant feelers. Imagine that! A female bug protecting her young! After this display of maternal courage we left them alone. The bugs, being slow thinkers, waited. They sent out scouts downstairs but they never came back. All in all, the ghosts were a nice change from the bugs, which smelt unpleasant.