If Blood Should Stain the Wattle

by Jackie French

  Matilda placed her coffee cup neatly on the coaster on the side table. ‘I want you to work on Nicholas’s campaign.’

  Jed managed to keep her face steady. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because it is what my father fought for, nearly a hundred years ago: the right for each person in this land, rich or poor, to have a decent education and proper medical care. Because it is what I have fought for all my life: equal rights for women, land rights for my relatives whose skin is black, not white. I am all too aware that but for a lucky accident of geography my darker relatives would be imprisoned on so-called reserves, with even their wages going to the government. Because I never thought I might live to see all that my father had dreamed of come true, and nothing — not even death — is going to stop me seeing it.’

  ‘You mean you’ll stay alive to see a Labor government?’

  ‘Not any Labor government. Some have been disasters. The next Labor government. The one that will change Australia.’

  ‘That means more to you than staying alive for your grandchildren?’ And me, she thought, but did not say.

  ‘Of course not, you stupid child. This is for my grandchildren. And for you, who are deeply mine because we share the same heart and soil.’

  The silence stretched as both realised what she had said. At last Jed said lightly, ‘Calling me a stupid child isn’t necessarily the best way to get me to do something.’

  ‘Isn’t it?’ It was the urchin’s grin again.

  Why had Jed never realised how much of Matilda was still an urchin, not just the dragon of Drinkwater? ‘All right, old woman. You win. What do you want me to do? He’ll have the Labor Party to help him,’ she added. ‘Surely he doesn’t need me too?’

  As long as I don’t have to see him, she thought. There’d been other young men. Well, sort of. She’d been kissed on eight occasions, twice thoroughly by the same man on consecutive nights. She had been to bed with none of them. ‘Sleeping together’ for most of her friends seemed to mean less than spending hours with a man, working out the meaning of the world and how to want to survive in it. She had done that with no man, except Nicholas.

  There had been offers, of course. When you were young and beautiful, there were always offers.

  But there had only been one Nicholas.

  Matilda relaxed slightly, as if she had managed to drive a frisky horse across the river. ‘Write articles for the local paper. People in this electorate don’t read the big city ones. The present editor believes that cows will turn purple and communists will take up residence under all our beds if Labor gets in.’

  ‘But you own the Gibber’s Gazette.’ The Gibbering Gazette, or the plain old Gibberer, as it was mostly known. But it was not tactful to say that to its owner. Matilda had bought the local newspaper during World War II to make sure her assessments of the war were printed, though she had never quite managed to buy the deeply conservative soul of its editor.

  ‘I can’t sack the man for his political beliefs. He does his duty well enough.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘To mention every citizen at least once a year and to include a photo of every child and, if possible, every dog to keep the community buying the paper.’ Maxi rolled over on her back, exposing her stomach. Matilda rubbed it absently with her elegant foot. ‘You do have an extraordinary gift for the written word,’ she added.

  Jed stared. ‘What do you know about my gift for words?’ She put her coffee cup down. ‘Have you had a private detective watching me again?’

  The detective had been hired to discover if she truly was Tommy’s descendant or not. Jed hadn’t liked it, but admitted the necessity, especially as it had led to her having a family of her own. But now . . .

  ‘No detective. But I have read some of your university essays.’

  ‘How? No, don’t tell me.’ For suddenly it didn’t matter. Darling Matilda had to control her empire, which included everyone she knew or cared about, including all of Gibber’s Creek.

  ‘Then you’ll do it? Write feature articles about various ALP policies and the incompetence of the McMahon government? You can fit them in easily with your studies.’

  Which was true. ‘All right.’

  ‘And draft some speeches?’

  ‘He can write his own speeches. He wrote a book!’

  ‘And you know what young people feel these days. He’s been up on that mountain for three years.’

  Jed nodded reluctantly. ‘A few ideas. That’s all.’

  ‘Excellent. And go to fundraisers, of course?’

  ‘No.’

  Two women, one old, one young, and one Doberperson dreamily having her stomach scratched breathed six times before Matilda spoke. ‘No?’

  ‘I don’t want to see Nicholas. I’ve got over him,’ she added hurriedly. ‘But if I draft his speeches and go to his fundraisers, he might get the wrong idea. Think I’m still in love with him. It would be . . . uncomfortable for us both. If I make a point of not going to places where he’ll be, he’ll know I’m not. That’s all.’

  Was it? Jed didn’t know. But she did know that was the only way it could be. Nicholas had hurt her, but she owed him her life too. Without him — and Matilda, Nancy, Michael, Scarlett — she’d be a ghost now, like old Fred. Fred had saved her too . . .

  ‘Very well,’ said Matilda.

  ‘Nicholas’s fiancée might not like an old girlfriend tagging along anyway,’ Jed added.

  ‘Felicity will be at university much of the time. They agreed not to marry till she finished vet science.’

  Felicity had only been seventeen when she met Nicholas, up at her grandmother’s farm above Rocky Valley. Jed had been seventeen too, when she and Nicholas became friends. But it was Felicity he had asked to marry him.

  ‘So my uni career can be interrupted, but not Felicity’s?’

  ‘Felicity is an excellent girl. No, Maxi! Not on the sofa! Down! But she is better with horses than people. You are useless with horses, but extremely good at manipulating human beings. You had to be, to survive.’

  Matilda was correct. Nor had the old woman been insulting her, just stating fact. The skills of watching faces, knowing the right tone or face or posture to convince people, remained.

  She knew how to convince people in essays too. Which probably meant, she accepted, she would be a good speech and political feature writer.

  ‘And anyway,’ said Matilda, ‘you’ll pass this year’s exams even if you never went to another lecture.’

  ‘Are you sure you didn’t hire an investigator?’

  Matilda laughed. ‘I simply happen to know the aunt of the Dean of Social Sciences. And know Jed Kelly very well indeed.’

  And I know you, old dragon, thought Jed. She held out her hand.

  Matilda took it. ‘Deal?’

  ‘Deal,’ said Jed, leaning down to scratch Maxi’s ears and receiving a small slobber in return.

  Matilda lifted her coffee cup for a toast. ‘Then we will drink to the beginning of the world. And to those who have left us, who fought for it, and longed for it, and will not see it.’

  Jed shivered. The room was full of ghosts, ones she could not see this time — ghosts of women with dark faces, crying for children stolen from their arms, anguished for loved ones speared with no more thought than if they were kangaroos, grieving for land they were part of, yet parted from. Ghosts of men with untrimmed beards and fire in their eyes and hearts; ghosts of ladies in long skirts carrying placards reading Votes for Women; smudged-eyed children labouring in factories; single mothers, with no one to help, no place to go, starving, as she had been, her unborn baby lost for lack of food and shelter and medical help . . .

  And all at once the thought of trying to right these ancient wrongs that still held Australia in their grip was irresistible. We might just win, she thought.

  Chapter 6

  Gibber’s Creek Gazette, March 1972

  Mrs Roger Hilson received a postcard from her son, Wayne, presently serving his country in
Vietnam. Mrs Hilson proudly shared the contents with readers of the Gazette:

  Dear Mum,

  I hope you are well. All is good here but hot! Thanks for the cake. Tell Auntie Nell that the jumper is bonzer, but I probably won’t wear it till I come home.

  Love,

  Wayne

  MATILDA

  Matilda waved as Jed’s car spun down the drive, Maxi panting at her heels. Such a silly, wonderful car.

  She remembered the car Tommy had built, when the century was new, and no car had yet been seen in Gibber’s Creek. Old Drinkwater had commissioned it. The car had exploded on its trial run, nearly killing Tommy and her. It had taken Tommy years to forgive himself for that . . .

  And then Tommy had gone, and it had been the end of the world, till years later they found each other again. Two impossibly different people made again into one rich life. By then Auntie Love had died, and her fiancé James, and old Drinkwater was dead too — the great-grandfather who had loved her more than anyone in his life, except perhaps the dark woman who had been his first wife, but who had never once admitted he and Matilda were related . . .

  The world ends often when you are young, she thought. You think, I cannot live with this. And then you find you do.

  Tommy’s death three years earlier had not been an ending, just a beginning of cherishing memories instead of making new ones. She felt him with her, every moment, even though the scent of him had faded from their bedroom, his shaving soap gone from the bathroom, the imprint of his body on cushions he liked best on the sofa slowly changing as others used them too. Which was the way it should be. Life’s river should not stop.

  And yet . . .

  Matilda hesitated, then stepped over to the garage. ‘Stay, Maxi,’ she told the Doberperson.

  Maxi whined, crouching on her stomach, gazing at her mistress. She had, perhaps, been hoping for an evening walk. And she was really getting far too fat. But you couldn’t ask a stockman to take a Doberperson for a walk, and Maxi could not be trusted among the sheep with the other dogs.

  Once Matilda would have walked the four kilometres to the billabong, or saddled her horse and ridden there. She could still manage either, she told herself. But at her age, and at night, a car was sensible. And this time she did not want a dog, even a beloved one, chasing leaf shadows and following the scent of wallabies, though if Maxi ever did track down a wallaby she’d probably jump into Matilda’s arms in case the strange beast attacked her. Despite her ancestry, Maxi lacked a killer’s instinct.

  Matilda looked down at the pleading dog and smiled. No, she thought as she opened the car door, she did the Doberperson an injustice. Maxi would go for the jugular to save the life of those she loved. As would all the females Matilda admired. But it was best if none of them ever had to.

  The Rolls-Royce had butter-soft leather seats and polished wood finishes. Jim had bought it for her and Tommy, twenty years back, because this was the kind of car her other son, her city business son, felt they must drive, or better still, be driven in.

  You couldn’t love a car like this. You could, however, love the memories made in it. And so she had not sold the Rolls when Jim urged her to buy a new one. A good car lasted as long as a good pair of shoes. Good memories lasted even longer, if you were lucky.

  She drove sedately down the road, then turned down the track. A Rolls had decent clearance, nearly as good as a ute. But she stopped before she reached the moonlit gleam of water. Matilda didn’t think ghosts were scared of cars, but the billabong smelled of leaf-sodden water, of fish and rotted vegetation left by the last flood. She wouldn’t pollute the billabong with the smell of an engine.

  Pollute. Such a modern word. They used to say ‘made a mess’. Humans had made a mess of the whole world, with sprays like DDT that she had used too for decades, thinking she did good, pouring it on to kill the maggots that ate a sheep alive. She who watched the land so closely had never guessed that DDT made birds’ eggs thinner, so that eagles and goshawks died. She too was guilty of this new word — pollute.

  She stepped from the car, annoyed because it took her a full three seconds to stretch and stand straight these days, and walked carefully through the orchestra of shadows cast by a million leaves and branches to her favourite tree. A perfect tree to sit against, each insect scribble on the ghost bark a friend, its arms reaching upwards to brush the stars.

  She shut her eyes. The world narrowed: night air like moth wings against her skin; the breath of water; the dappled song of trees.

  Jed said she had seen ghosts there, of the past as well as the future. That this was one of the places where time had rubbed thin. Jed’s glimpses were as real as the wallaby pretending to be a shadow just past the sandhill created by the landward lunge of the last big flood. Flinty McAlpine, Matilda’s oldest friend — well, oldest friend who still had all her marbles — saw ghosts of past and future too, on the giant rock below her mountain house.

  Matilda’s ghosts came only from her memories and imagination.

  Well, Dad? she thought. What would you think of your daughter? That I’ve betrayed the working class? Become a squatter? But I’ve done good. We’ve always been a union station. And you, old Drinkwater. Would you admit I’m your great-granddaughter now? Auntie Love? I’ve done my best for this land we love . . .

  And yet she hadn’t, quite. For her flocks of sheep and herds of cattle had plundered the land of the bettongs and bandicoots. Dingoes howled no more along the ranges, lost to traps and baits and guns, even if none had been set by her.

  Even Matilda’s promise to herself to let the land rest had been broken by the urgencies of two world wars, with cattle needed for corned beef for the army; and because jobs were so badly needed to give men wages and dignity during the Depression.

  By the 1950s keeping the land at its maximum stocking capacity had become a habit. These days Drinkwater and Overflow were managed by her son Michael and his wife, Nancy, as wise in the signs of the land as Matilda was, or even more so.

  And they managed the land well. No erosion gullies on Drinkwater or Overflow, cracking the land in orange gullies across so much of farming Australia. No hills collapsing from rabbit holes, or thistles colonising paddocks where the grass had been nipped too close by sheep’s teeth or compacted by cattle hooves. Trees clad the land around Drinkwater’s and Overflow’s creeks, gullies, river banks and ridges, almost as if the white men and their sheep had never come.

  Almost, unless you had known the richness and complexity of what the land had once been. Young people never knew what they had lost, as they did not know what had once been.

  Matilda opened her eyes. She stood, watching the shadows flicker on the water, half hoping that she too might just this once see an image of the future.

  ‘Finally,’ she said aloud to the ghosts of the billabong. ‘Finally, we are going to get it right . . .’

  Chapter 7

  Gibber’s Creek Gazette, March 1972

  A Hundred Years Young!

  Mrs L Lee, one of the founders of Lee’s Emporium, celebrated her hundredth birthday last week with a party at her gracious home on Gallipoli Avenue with her close friend, Mrs Matilda Thompson, and her two children, eight grandchildren and twenty-five great-grandchildren. Pictured from left to right are Mr Horace Lee, Miss Matilda Lee, Mrs Gregory (Bluebell) Sampson née Lee . . .

  JED

  Halfway to Eternity sat on a scribble of track from the main Gibber’s Creek Road, the Eternity carved deep into the bark of an old tree on the corner reputedly the work of a mysterious old man who carved, wrote and declaimed the word throughout New South Wales to bring sinners to the light.

  Jed drove one of the Drinkwater utes, even though it meant Matilda and Scarlett were jammed in with her along the front seat and the wheelchair strapped in the back. Boadicea was a darling, but her clearance was too low for rutted roads. She glanced dubiously at Matilda, sitting as regally on the old vinyl-covered bench seat as if it were her Rolls-Royce. Did Matilda r
eally know what she could expect when they reached their destination? At least there was time to take her back in daylight if she became tired or so deeply offended that she exhausted herself laying down the law to counter-culturalists.

  Jed knew hippies. They ranged from one per cent hippie (embroidered flowers on their bell-bottom jeans or a peace sign badge) to Trisha, who Jed had met in first-year history (a ten per cent hippie, perpetually barefoot even though her feet were still tender from a childhood in expensive shoes), to one hundred per cent hippie (Anthea, who’d been at school with Julieanne and now lived in a group house where everything was shared, from sex to brown rice and munga bean sprouts and the hepatitis Nigel brought back from India).

  Anthea’s ambition once she had graduated was to live in a squat in Glebe to prevent the developers from demolishing the historic streetscapes and the almost as antiquated community who lived in them, except for the inhabitants who were leaving, almost as much because of the arrival of the hippies and activists who defended the old houses as from the threat of bulldozers.

  This commune would probably exhibit all the clichés of hippiedom: a geodesic dome; tethered goats; a small orchard that had not been fenced sufficiently to survive the goats’ first, second and third escapes, as well as the paws and teeth of black-tailed wallabies and marauding possums; sarongs; badly played guitars with folk songs sung in a nasal American accent; cheesecloth and beads or nudity; and the ever-present smell of patchouli oil.

  She turned the ute into the gate, drove along a track that was surprisingly well cambered and with decent-sized drains, and there it was — a geodesic dome and goats plotting their freedom from the tethers, just as if she had seen it all in one of her glimpses into past and future.