A Far Country

by John Fletcher

  ‘He was hard once‚’ Ian allowed. ‘As hard as any man I know. Asta’s made him soft.’

  ‘Asta wasn’t exactly soft today‚’ Mary protested tentatively.

  He dismissed it. ‘All that fuss about nothing …’

  She said, ‘Blake’s a horrible boy.’

  ‘He’s tough. It’s what this country needs.’

  She thought of Blake’s wanton cruelty and shook her head. ‘No-one needs a person like Blake.’

  ‘They would probably have drowned the damned cat anyway‚’ he said. ‘Anyone would think it was a child he killed.’

  ‘I wouldn’t put it past him‚’ Mary said.

  They rode in silence, listening to the rhythmic thud of hooves on the grass, and started up the hill beyond which, sheltered from the hot north wind, they had built their house.

  If Asta is so upset by the death of a kitten, Ian thought, how will she take it if it ever comes to a fight with the blacks?

  It probably would: it had everywhere else. The sooner the better, as far as Ian was concerned. Back in Adelaide, shortly before they had left to come here, people had been using a new name for the blacks: aborigines, abos for short. He liked that. Abos: it had the right sound to it, easy to say, with a ring of contempt. He had nothing against them as long as they left him and his flocks alone but they were savages, after all, barely human. They had to give way to the Europeans, that was inevitable. He couldn’t see it mattered. There was plenty of land in the interior. Let them go there.

  Alison’s small arms were wrapped tightly about his waist.

  ‘You all right, baby?’ he asked over his shoulder. ‘We’ll soon be home.’

  ‘I’m all right.’

  Ian couldn’t find it in his heart to make much of what had happened to the kitten but he did feel it was a pity that Alison’s day had been spoiled by it. Heaven knew she had few enough treats in her life.

  Seeking to make amends to her he said, ‘How would you like me to ask Auntie Asta for one of her kittens?’

  ‘That would be very nice‚’ Alison said politely, disappointing him with her lack of enthusiasm, ‘if you think that would be all right.’

  Ian, Mary and Alison dismounted outside the house. After their hour or two of holiday the duties of the farm surrounded them again. There were cows to milk, chooks to feed, sheep to pen against the coming dark. The three shepherds—Luke Hennessy, Cato Brown and the black man with the unpronounceable name whom Ian called Sinbad—looked after the stock in the outlying areas while Gavin and Ian handled those nearer home.

  Ian thought that next day he would ride out and see how the shepherds were going. Check, check, check: it was his way. He took nothing for granted, never had, never would. No doubt the men cursed him at times but he cared nothing about that. All his life he had taken what he wanted from life and held it. To hell with what men thought.

  At least they didn’t have to worry about fences around the perimeter of the run but he supposed that time would come, when other settlers arrived in the district. Work, he thought, there is no end to it. The thought pleased him.

  Appetite—for work, for the future he sensed ahead of them all—gave a spring to his step as he went to fetch the hurdles he would use to pen the sheep against the forthcoming night.

  Inside the house Alison went into the curtained-off section that was her bedroom. She sat on the bed, feeling the house draw close and comforting about her. The wooden walls, the thatched roof, creaked softly in the heat. The house had the mixture of smells that in only a few months had come to mean home to her: sun-warmed wood, cooking, the tanned kangaroo skin rugs on the floor, others used as bed coverings at night, the fresh smell of the material that Mother had brought with her from Adelaide and used to make curtains and cushion covers.

  It was a nice house, Alison thought, much nicer than the one they’d had before coming here. She wondered if they were going to stay now or if they would just get settled and then decide to move on again. She had heard there were some families that never settled at all. She hoped they weren’t going to be like that. She liked it here despite what had happened to Edward. She had thought the sun rose and set on her cousin. Everything about Edward—the way he looked, the things he did—had been wonderful. He had even let her go with him when he had inspected the stock—not all of the time, of course, that would have been too much to hope—but at least sometimes. On the long journey north he had kept her company, told her stories … It was hard to think that he was dead.

  Oh God keep him safe, she prayed, wherever he is.

  When she had first heard the news she had refused to believe it—someone as alive as Edward couldn’t just die—yet part of her must have believed or she would not have cried so much.

  Crying had done no good. It hadn’t brought Edward back. And now she was discovering how difficult it was to keep the memory of someone—however dear—whole and clear in her mind when they weren’t around any more. He had been her true friend; it should have been easy to remember him, and it puzzled and upset her to find that it was not.

  Now I have no friend, she thought, suddenly filled with self-pity. Then a flash of anger: one thing was sure, she certainly did not want to be friends with Blake Gallagher.

  The house creaked quietly around her as she thought about Blake. She hated him. He had always been a bully but today had been the worst experience of all. She had known how mean he was but would never have imagined him or anyone stamping on the kitten’s head the way he had.

  Once, not supposed to be listening but doing so anyway, she had overheard Mother and Papa talking about Blake, saying he was horrible because of the way his father treated him. Papa had said that things had got so bad he’d spoken to Mr Gallagher about it, that Mr Gallagher used to beat Blake until he was almost unconscious. It was difficult to imagine anyone beating Blake, almost a man himself, but Alison supposed it was possible. If Alison herself had been beaten like that perhaps she too would want to take it out on something that couldn’t hit back. Yet she thought Blake had done what he had done more to hurt her than the kitten: although why that should be she had no idea. She had never done anything to make Blake Gallagher angry with her. She hardly saw him, even.

  Shivering away the thought, she hoped she would never find out what it felt like to be beaten as Blake had been.

  NINE

  When Nantariltarra went to meet the kuinyo he took with him Jason and several members of the Council. Mura and about half the clan, men, women and children, went along, too.

  They headed north along the coast in the direction of the newcomers’ camp. The rumble and suck of waves along the shore, the grate of pebbles, was never far away. Except at the cliff edge there was little cover. Grassland, tawny now at the beginning of winter, extended inland as far as Jason could see.

  A few miles northwards the cliffs petered out in shallow dunes of coarse yellow sand. The beach smoked with spray from the tumbling waves; above high water mark lay piles of sea grass, grey and dry.

  The children ran laughing and shrieking along the edge of the surf, water drops bright on their dark skins.

  Jason said, ‘It looks more like a party.’

  ‘Why not?’ Mura walked at his side, long-legged and confident, as much at home here in the tawny grass as in the gum scrub they had just left. ‘They want to see what the kuinyo look like when we’re all together. Besides, the kuinyo are still far from here.’

  ‘I thought the idea was to see them without them seeing us. With this racket they won’t need to see us. They’ll hear us ten miles off.’ Jason was surly, uneasy about what lay ahead, remembering only too well what white attitudes to the blacks had been in Van Diemen’s Land.

  Mura did not share his misgivings. ‘They’ll be quiet enough when we get closer.’

  Jason thought it would make little difference. Nantariltarra was fooling himself if he thought that seeing the white strangers would give him a better idea how to handle them. The Europeans were here to take
the land; spying on them would achieve nothing.

  At midday on the second day they came to the valley, little more than a shallow fold of ground, where the kuinyo had set themselves up. The valley ran east and west across the peninsula and was choked with trees and bushes. On the far slope and sheltered from the north by a low hill there were a number of buildings: a house of timber slabs with four smaller buildings around it, some paddocks marked off by paling fences.

  The house was shaded by a cluster of trees. A feather of smoke came from the stone chimney, some hens scratched in the dust around the door, there were a number of lambs in one paddock, three cows in another.

  Nantariltarra and Jason advanced cautiously across the valley bottom and up the far slope until they reached the edge of the undergrowth. The house was no more than twenty yards away. They parted the branches and stared out at the innocent curl of smoke, the hens quietly pecking. It looked peaceful enough but Jason did not trust it. Somewhere there would be men with guns. They would be quick to use them if they felt threatened; even if they didn’t, perhaps.

  ‘Kuinyo,’ Nantariltarra said, a breath of sound.

  Jason nodded. ‘Farmers.’ He did not know the phrase for sheep run but that was what it was. Behind the buildings large numbers of grazing sheep spread out across the slope of the hill.

  ‘They have not come to trade?’ Nantariltarra asked.

  Jason shook his head.

  ‘Where are they?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  A figure came out of the house: a girl dressed in a long green dress with a white apron. Dark hair reached to her shoulders from beneath the white cap that covered her head. She called to the hens, or possibly to someone inside the house: a clear, high cry, too faint to make out individual words. She disappeared around the corner of the building and a minute later re-emerged, running away from them up the hill.

  Instinctively Jason drew back into the undergrowth. Two days earlier, standing in front of the Council, he had been acutely aware of his lack of clothes. Now, as he watched the running figure of the girl, dark hair flying, he felt something of the same: a hot sense of shame.

  If she sees me like this she’ll think I’m a savage.

  He was not a savage. He was white, civilised. He was not a Narungga and never would be. He was a kuinyo, a dead man living. It was good that it should be a term of abuse. It made him proud to be what he was, made clear what the clan’s real feelings towards him were. I almost lost myself these past months, he told himself. No longer. I am a European. My place is there, with those people, not here in the bushes.

  When we get back to the camp I shall have to look for my breeches, he thought.

  The child was coming back towards the house. With her was a man, tall, with high boots, breeches, a long-sleeved shirt. A cabbage palm hat was pulled low over his eyes. Sunlight glinted on the long-barrelled rifle that he carried over one shoulder. The child skipped along at his side and again Jason caught the ripple of her voice. They went into the house together.

  ‘Come …’

  Nantariltarra moved away and Jason followed, the pair of them slipping silently through the trees. Before they rejoined the rest of the clan Nantariltarra stopped and looked at him. ‘Well? Do they intend to stay or not?’

  The answer was obvious yet Jason found himself protective of the unknown settlers: the European man, the child skipping so gaily at his side.

  ‘Who knows what they plan to do?’

  ‘They plan to stay‚’ Nantariltarra said.

  Jason bit his lip. Anyone with half an eye could see that these people with their flocks of sheep, their hens, their buildings and fenced paddocks, were going nowhere. He said nothing.

  ‘What must I do?’

  Jason stared, startled that Nantariltarra, a member of the Council, should ask such a question of someone who was uninitiated, a kuinyo like those whom they had just seen, a threat to the stability and possibly even the survival of the clan. He was tempted to lie, to say leave them alone, they won’t trouble you. He could not do it. Nantariltarra deserved the truth, however unwelcome.

  ‘I think you must learn to live with them‚’ he said.

  ‘We could kill them‚’ Nantariltarra suggested.

  ‘You could‚’ Jason agreed, ‘and then more kuinyo will come with guns and hunt the Narungga out of this land—those they don’t kill first.’

  The truth burdened the air between them. Jason was exasperated that the black man should still be clinging to hope when it was obvious that there was no hope, no future at all now that the white men had come. But it was not something he could say.

  ‘Go to them‚’ he suggested. ‘Get to know them, like you’ve done with me. There’s room enough here for all of us.’ Knowing that there was no room for the black man now, that the whites would take all and grant no space to anyone else.

  Nantariltarra considered. ‘Very well‚’ he said. ‘You will talk to them. And I shall come with you.’

  ‘I shall need clothes‚’ Jason said.

  ‘Why?’ Nantariltarra’s eyes were dark with suspicion.

  ‘They won’t respect me, otherwise.’ Jason remembered his first sight of Fred, how he had seemed so much more naked than the blacks around him. Not for anything on earth would he walk out naked in front of that girl.

  Jason’s breeches were no longer big enough to fit him. Instead they found him a kangaroo skin kilt that had been traded long ago from a group of the Ngarrindjeri from the other side of the gulf. It was a kind of apron and had been made for a woman. There were smirks and nudges from some of the men when he put it on but at least it fitted around his waist, more or less, and hung to his knees. His chest, arms and legs remained bare but that was all to the good: cover any more and the people they were planning to visit might shoot him before they realised he was white. As it was, his skin was so tanned by the summer sun that from a distance he looked almost black.

  ‘I should go alone‚’ Jason said. ‘They see you with a bunch of spears in your hand, they’ll be likely to shoot the pair of us.’

  Nantariltarra would not hear of it. ‘I also wish to meet with these kuinyo, to see how they live.’

  Unspoken between them was the thought that if he went alone Jason might not come back.

  A woman brought a bunch of leafy twigs.

  Jason stared. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘A sign of peace‚’ Nantariltarra told him. ‘When they see the leaves they will know they have nothing to fear.’

  ‘It is not their custom‚’ Jason said. ‘How will they know what the leaves mean?’

  Nantariltarra glared. ‘It is our custom. They wish to stay here, let them learn our ways.’

  With Nantariltarra beside him, Jason crouched in the bushes at the very edge of the cleared ground and waited for someone to come out of the house. His chest felt tight, his breathing constricted.

  I am an ambassador for the Narungga to the kuinyo, he told himself, and strutted a little.

  You are a sixteen-year-old boy, he reminded himself. There will be guns over there and you will be walking straight into them. It’ll serve you right if they shoot you.

  He felt Nantariltarra’s hand feather-light upon his arm and, glancing at him, saw him point with his chin. Jason squinted through the screen of leaves at the cluster of buildings, dark with patches of shadow or varnished to bronze by the afternoon sun. The white girl had come out of the doorway and was busy twisting round and round, hands held high above her head, skirt swirling, in a game he did not understand.

  Jason stood, a gaping hollow in his stomach beneath the awkwardly slung kilt. Over Jason’s strong objections, Nantariltarra had insisted on bringing a shield and spears; he heard them rattle as they got to their feet. Jason took a deep breath and stepped forward into the sunlight.

  Alison had dreamt of an angel, a being white and shining and wondrous, clad in a diaphanous garment of silver and gold, with wings like an eagle. She had never dreamt of an angel before
and the memory of it had entranced her all day. Now she stood on tiptoe, turning and turning until the whole world spun, too. Round and round, eyes shut, then open, watching the swirling blur of the bush, the grass, the pristine blue vault of the sky. The angel danced with her, a glory of gold and silver, smiling, smiling. Grave, courteous, kind.

  She would not say to herself it was Edward; would not say it was not him, either. Edward had drowned but was not dead. Edward was in heaven. Who was to say he could not come back to her in the form of an angel, if he wanted to?

  The bush rippled and swayed, blurring before her spinning eyes. Something out there moved. She stopped. Looked. Heart pounding, she ran to the open door of the house.

  ‘Papa! Papa!’

  ‘What is it?’ Ian Matlock running, wiping his mouth.

  Alison pointed.

  ‘My God …’ Diving back into the house, grabbing for his rifle.

  ‘What is it?’ Mary’s knuckles clenched white before her breast.

  ‘Abos …’

  He ran back outside. He had cleared the ground a week earlier, afraid of fire, and so saw immediately two men, spears bristling, marching towards them, halfway between the scrub border and the house.

  A second glance showed him that only one of the men was carrying spears. It could be a diversion. Ian’s eyes scanned the scrub on either side of the house for signs of others, saw nothing. Rifle ready in his hands he stared at the advancing men. A tall man, a giant, skin as black as night, with shield and spears. His companion was carrying what looked like leaves and wearing an apron of some sort about his waist. His limbs were stockier than the other, his chest and arms brown, not black. His hair …

  Ian stared, unable to believe his eyes. A white man? Barefoot, dressed like a savage, accompanied by a savage?

  White man or not, he would not let them come too close. He cocked the rifle, threw it up to his shoulder, took a bead on them.

  ‘Far enough, mister. Stop right there.’