The Man on the Headland

by Kylie Tennant

  They became friends and Alan struck an agistment rate with Ernie on a yearly basis for so many head of cattle. He would leave his farm at daylight, drove the mob down and get a feed.

  “I wouldn’t say he was a clean washer-up,” said Alan. “He’d put the plates on the floor for the pups and cats. Said it took the rough off them.”

  “Always go easy on water,” Ernie advised Alan. In the old days in Queensland, he told him, he reckoned he could last two days over a dry stretch on two billycans of water. Half a billycan was for a drink. The other half was for cooking and to boil for tea. On foot you could carry two billycans with you and get through at least a day, a night and the next day. When you were prospecting you sometimes couldn’t take a horse. It needed too much water.

  Alan observed that the white ants had eaten through the floor under Ernie’s stove which, as he said, “sank and reposed on Mother earth”. Ernie threw out the stove in the back yard and hatched ducklings in the place it had occupied. He reckoned the foxes wouldn’t get them there. He rigged a stick across two uprights in the back yard to boil the billy.

  The old cat had a litter of kittens in the sideboard in the kitchen whose walls and ceiling had sooted up to a fine Rembrandt brown. So that the mother cat could get to her young when he was away Ernie had knocked out a pane of glass from the window and covered this with a sack. In the wet, frogs used to flop through the opening to hunt flies in the lamplight and the rain came in with them. Kittens popped through the hole in the floor and as Roddy and Ernie played chess with Ernie’s old cardboard men the mother cat would pounce on the table and sweep them aside with her tail. Clara’s house was reverting to the wild.

  Ernie’s hens came in and pecked for crumbs by day, and they so liked to roost on the cane settee on the back veranda that he finally put it down in the fowl-pen. “Reckon they get more use out of it than I do.”

  About this time Ernie and Dimandead seemed to have come to some equilibrium. With the cattle providing him with a small income Ernie no longer tried to make a living from agriculture. He still tended his bees and kept his ditches clear. He “burnt off”, keeping down undergrowth. The paddocks were now green parks and glades with the red-and-white cattle cropping them.

  The mysterious “rheumatism” which had been painful for so long vanished completely. For many years thereafter he was strong and well. Dimandead and Ernie, an irresistible force meeting an immovable obstacle, were to remain in adjustment. Perhaps Dimandead had accepted him, even then, as part of itself, a protector rather than a nuisance.

  Chapter X

  THERE WERE PEOPLE who somehow did not find that Dimandead brought out the best in them. Benison’s godmother, Doris, had been with me on some very rough trips and had once suffered heroically and silendy for days when she tripped over an iron tent-peg. But she was not silent about Dimandead. Benison and I had taken her out especially to see it and we were bogged. I set off at a run to bring Ernie. Doris and Benison, becoming impatient, took a short cut that Benison knew over some rough country while Ernie and I were coming back by road.

  Doris’s description of how they were met by a pack of huge and savage dogs was only a prelude to how she sat in a sooty kitchen with rain beating through a broken pane covered by sacking. The cats spat at the dogs and the dogs growled at the cats and kittens popped up through a hole in the floor. I had snatched Ernie from his washing-up, and dirty dish-water mixed with toast crusts made pools on the kitchen table.

  When Ernie and I arrived he brewed tea hospitably and, as a mark of honour, took out a cream cake which had been kept in a tin for a special occasion. In the dark kitchen he did not notice that the cream had gone green. I told Doris afterwards that she had only to make some excuse and scrape off the cream on the back veranda as I did, but she seemed to brood on it. She was an editor and whenever I saw her in her city office she would say, “What about the man with the beard? Is he still living in that awful place?”

  But the Rodds always looked forward to doing their accustomed rounds and our spirits lifted when Dimandead lay before us. Ernie’s house was not to be seen from ours nor was our house in Ernie’s line of sight. Two paddocks, a belt of trees and the rise of the ground lay between. We would drive up by the lake and round by Ernie’s back door to leave the magazines and papers. Ernie would be standing under the grape trellis or he would come to the door. The truck would then jounce off over the open paddock where Jack’s “furrers” were fast sinking into the turf, carefully through the gutter of stream. The she-oaks brushed us as we came through the clearing.

  Ernie found me constructing a causeway over the little run of water that joined his creek so that we were bounded by water on two sides of our land. Taking the stones from me, he fitted them together so expertly that they never washed away. Before the visitors and food were unpacked he would be striding across with a cabbage or pumpkin under his arm.

  There came at different times a racing driver, the pretty Viennese who managed a dress shop, a great scholar and university librarian, a crocodile hunter from the Northern Territory, a swimming champion and his manager, all kinds of people. I would put on the dinner and follow the others to the beach or Ernie and Roddy would settle to games of chess on the side veranda or in front of the fire.

  We would go down by the creek, round the south flank of the hill to the lagoon on the beach, walking along towards the cliffs to find pipis for bait or going down the immense emptiness towards Crowdy Head to see if some far object in the blowing mist was worth our beachcombing. Usually it was only a tree-trunk washed ashore, but we would find hatch-covers from ships, timber, purple nautilus shells, and once a small bench which was added to the house furniture.

  I might leave Roddy surfing, Benison and Ernie catching the horse, and go up around the cliffs to the “diamond mine”, with a knapsack on my back and a knife to scrape out the quartz crystals. A German firm had mined there for industrial diamonds before World War I, but now there were only three low mounds of upturned clay overgrown with prickly hakea. Sometimes picnic parties from Laurieton fossicked there, digging out what looked like pendants from a lost chandelier and mislaying them after they reached home.

  Behind Ernie’s house was the disused trail up to the cliffs, along them to the trig station on the highest ridge above the diamond mine. Only once did I strike home in a direct line and was lost in a maze of thickly timbered gullies, the undergrowth higher than my head, Benison was very scornful. A green tree-snake six feet long jumped straight up on its tail, a beautiful creature whipping away in panic. When I regained the cliffs the sunset showed me two great golden beasts from a myth, curved horns, shining manes. They were the two survivor goats leaping for their caves when they scented me.

  All to the west spread the coloured plains, swamps, moors, the Comboyne faded by distance to dim blue behind the dark trio of peaks, the Three Brothers.

  Once Ernie and I took a German refugee, Gundel, up to the diamond mine, and as we paused on the cliffs under a wrinkled banksia tree Gundel looked at the empty country with such depression and longing. “So much land,” he said. He had spent years in a refugee camp in Spain after his escape from Hitler’s Germany. His eyes devoured the beauty and openness with a terrible craving. The atmosphere about him grew black with his sadness as he thought of the old countries like a worn doorstep trodden by the feet of centuries and the thousands who would have flung themselves on such country, hordes of human locusts.

  Ernie stood looking attentively at Gundel from under the brim of his army hat. He wondered that the sight did not make Gundel free and joyful. To me, who did not ever want possessions because I had always been lucky and careless enough to throw them behind me and walk on, there was something horrible in the craving to own all that your eye fell on. But I had never endured the wretchedness of a refugee camp or been hungry for just a little more bread. The slums had been beautiful behind St Mary’s Cathedral with the great oaks in the park coming into leaf and the bells chiming at night. There
had been the uncanny mountains of the Warrumbungles, die mid-west with its contented towers of grain. But poor Gundel, who taught me to cook a dish of fried rice with a few vegetables and a little pork cut small, a dish that would stretch to any number of people, brought his misery with him and settled in the ugliest and dreariest of Sydney’s outer suburbs.

  After some years he decided to return to Spain with his wife and daughter. Better to be very poor in the Balearic Islands, he said, than endure the ugly living places of Australians. The poorest peasants in Europe had more fun. And at their farewell in a city garret there were guitars and wine, men with gold rings in their ears, yells of “Olé! and Spanish dancing. Gundel claimed that if he stayed in Australia for ever he would never own the land he wanted.

  Ernie and the Rodds had different views about owning land. The Rodds believed that nobody should be allowed to own land outright, but only be able to lease it for a lifetime. The administration of the land should be the supreme work of any government, and those who did not enrich their land should not be left to ruin it. Ernie claimed that a feller wasn’t going to do much to a property unless he owned it lock, stock and barrel. Maybe he might cut down all the trees like we said and leave it an eroded bit of dirt, but these days (Ernie seized an illogical point) Science could do wonderful things. Nature would restore the worst desert if men didn’t get in the way. We didn’t believe him and said so. He didn’t really believe it himself.

  “A thousand years ,..” he murmured.

  “A thousand years and it’d still be ruined. Show me a desert and I’ll show you where there were once thousands of people who ruined the land.”

  Ernie and I were down by the lagoon one morning and I was examining the sparkling grains in the clear water. “That is gold, Ernie,” I said.

  Ernie, who had prospected all over the continent, stroked his beard. “Alluvial,” he said. “Only a trace. You’d need heavy expensive equipment to get it.”

  “And that black stuff,” I pointed to the outline of dark mineral round the ripples, “is probably valuable, too. The beach is coated with it. If we staked a claim and put up a notice it would prevent other people coming to dig up the creek.”

  On the other side of Laurieton along the beach when we first came some local men had a claim in the grey soil behind the sand-dunes but gave up because there was not enough gold.

  Ernie looked at me with the same clear, considering inquiry that he had turned on Gundel. I felt mean. To him, the idea of staking a claim to prevent anyone else from doing so was abhorrent. If you couldn’t or didn’t want to mine yourself, why prevent anyone else mining?

  I had a strong foreboding about this, and sure enough I came down to the beach a year later to find a sharp stake driven into the ground with the notice of a mining claim. I made a great outcry about it.

  “I told you, I told you, this would happen.”

  Ernie only stroked his beard, “Some silly cove with more hope than sense,” he said. “just on spec he puts this up. Maybe never do anything about it.”

  The notice faded. The post slanted and presently became part of the landscape.

  Ernie had strong opinions as an old miner about landlords too mean to let you cross their land to look for ore. “Some of them’d shoot you sooner.”

  We both felt without saying so that Dimandead was a state of mind. People came there worn down with worries and after a few days of that enveloping silence and peace, with the birds singing in the clearing and the creek pouring into the deep brown pool where we washed off the salt from surfing on our way back up the leafy track, their anxieties were smoothed out, they lived minute by minute in the sunlight, fleeting the time carelessly as they did in the golden world. But odiers were too far gone in civilization; the silence made them uneasy and they hurried away, casting glances of dread over their shoulder at the roaring bulk of cliffs and sea which might swallow up their little day.

  It depended on your own disposition how Dimandead affected you, and only Ernie could live there permanendy because he had grown close to the hidden and awful character of Dimandead, an old bushman solitary but never lonely.

  Ernie was supposed to be some kind of philosophical anarchist. I never found out what his real politics were, although they were of a ferocious and leftist nature. Actually he was just Australian democratic, certain that he held life and fate in his own scarred and resolute hands. We spent many pleasant hours denouncing not only our own country’s government but that of every other country. If they had only followed his advice years ago, Ernie would say, his eyes merry, when he was first ready to give it to them, the Government could have made a much better fist of everything they’d done. Because, he said, the essence of democracy is that fellers who know nothing about what they’re advising the Government on, such as himself, couldn’t do much worse than all the experts had.

  With or without Ernie’s advice the country was changing and even little Laurieton was losing all its old lawless character. Old Sam the puntman had been only too pleased to let us row passengers over in his leaky boat while we admired the sunset. Now we had a new, efficient and smiling Dutchman with a new engine-driven punt.

  We had intended to stay in Laurieton two years, long enough to write my novel. We were there eleven. Towards the end Head Office would recollect that they had a graduate secondary-school teacher in a fishing village and would offer Roddy charge of some intermediate high school. He would enlist Terry Ewen and his taxi and drive across half the State over the week-end. I would be waiting impatiently with Benison for their return and would hear the taxi draw up in the dark and Roddy laughing at the last of Terry’s jokes as the door slammed.

  “What was the school like?” I would demand, bringing food.

  “Terrible. Poor devil ended up by wanting to swap me. He was on the edge of a nervous breakdown. All the edges were white and I think the pansies in the school garden had their faces washed separately each morning. And wealthy! That school had all the latest gadgets—his Parents and Citizens were running him into the ground.”

  He would send a telegram declining promotion once again, and I would be downcast that by marrying him I had ruined his career. When two inspectors made a special visit to the school they had to step over the tame wallaby, which was lying on the path with the cat between its paws. The wallaby refused to move.

  The cat and the wallaby were great friends, touching noses whenever they met. But there came the terrible day when a stream of children, in great distress, could be seen coming in the gate bearing on a bier the body of the lion cat. It was given a ceremonial interment at the end of the garden. The children of Laurieton had a feeling for funerals because, by old custom, when anyone in the town died the school flag flew at half-mast and they were all drawn up in ranks in the playground as the cortege went past. To have omitted this custom would have given great offence.

  It was the cat’s duty, which it had chosen for itself, to purr Benison to sleep in the evening, and the night after its burial the great purring was heard as usual. The baby stretched out her hand to the lordly presence, for the cat had not yet realized it was dead and it took its accustomed place at the side of her bed. The next night it did not come.

  Benison was now old enough to make a pest of herself trying to join the other children in school, being ejected by the staff. There were four assistants and the school appeared to be swelling like yeast. There were swings and seesaws and a great deal of climbing equipment in the playground. Benison, when thrust out of the school, would console herself by taking to a high horizontal ladder, swinging from one metal rung through the air to grasp another. “I can’t bear to look,” her grandfather said, covering his face. When Benison was at high school years later the only report I can remember said: “Benison is a magnificent little athlete and gymnast.” She was so tiny that we paved the way of specialists with gold, but they only told us that some combination of genes accounted for her size. Her father came of the small swarthy Cornish people who mined tin and,
earlier, lived in caves in the ground and were feared by the large blond in-comers. Benison had the Cornish build, their stature, their intimacy with the earth. As an art student she brought earth and pebbles from Diamond Head and experimented with clay and ochre for her pictures. She had no liking for books, only for animals.

  I would telephone our doctor when Benison could crawl to say that she had just had another fall from a high place, and the doctor would comment unfeelingly, “Lucky she fell on her head”, while Benison would smile merrily. Later, when she had a horse, she would stagger into the shack at Diamond Head and report she had landed on soft earth and I needn’t make all that fuss. She had Ernie’s habit of making light of hurts.

  We now had a doctor in Laurieton, Ella Brunswick, an Irishwoman with four children, two at the school. She had had many adventures during the war and when it ended went searching for her husband, an Austrian and a prisoner of the Russian army. The Brunswicks built a fine house, with a surgery for Ella, next to the church. Rudl, her husband, played the cello and ran the local newspaper, Ella was not only an intelligent and reliable doctor, she was brave. She would go out at midnight to leave her car at the foot of some mountain in the Comboyne and be pulled up the steeps on a horse-drawn milk sledge, sturdily grasping her doctor’s bag. She would cross flooded creeks, go over terrible tracks, to reach a patient.

  Rudl Brunswick offended the returned soldiers by telling them that when their planes came over Hamburg he was on the anti-aircraft gun waiting to shoot them down. He had joined the Nazis when they entered Vienna because, like many young Austrians, he had felt they were offering something better than Schuschnigg’s rule. We begged Rudl to be more tactful with the Laurieton people, but, with his sweet smile, in his rich tenor voice he said just what he pleased.