by JH Fletcher
‘More’n flesh and blood could stand!’
And so, in Adelaide, the nail, squeezing itself free from the deck into which it had been driven, had jumped ship and headed north to seek its fortune at the newly opened Burra Burra copper mine. Perhaps it had been the incompatibility between copper and its own iron nature, but for whatever reason the nail had failed to find riches at Burra Burra, and moved on.
To and fro across the state Harold had wandered — with a woman of his own now, first with one child, then two — settling nowhere, falling out with his neighbours, always ready with his fists when he came reeling home from whatever wine shanty he had favoured with his custom.
He took up a block of land but the isolation got to him and he traded it for twenty sovereigns and a racehorse that was going to make their fortune. The sovereigns were soon drunk, the horse came last in its only race and it was the road again, accompanied always by the same refrain.
‘You dunno what it’s like to live hard. I was brought up like a iron nail, you hear me? A iron nail!’
The gipsy years.
Harold had been working, on and off, on the wharves at Port Adelaide when Authority, anxious to settle the Murray riverlands, launched the precursor of what in later years came to be known as the Irrigation Settlements.
The idea of expending his iron nature upon the red gums of the wilderness appealed to the wanderer in Harold. Besides, he was sick of labouring. There was land for the taking upriver and he thought the life of a country gentleman would suit him very well. Sober for once in his life, he tramped into Adelaide and applied at the office that was handling the matter.
Two months later, the Keaches climbed aboard a barge to be towed upstream with half a dozen other families. Each family was dropped off at a different place along the river. Each was supplied with an eight-foot rowing boat and oars, a pump for irrigation, a shovel, an axe and crosscut saw, half a dozen corrugated-iron sheets and a bolt of hessian. Later, grape vines were also provided and they were issued with instructions from the beneficent Authority that, out of the goodness of its heart, had given them such a golden opportunity. All they had to do was clear the land, build themselves a house out of the iron and hessian, and produce the sultanas, currants and raisins that would — or so Authority said — form the basis of their fortune. In the meantime — was there no end to its generosity? — Authority would provide them with rations of tea, sugar, flour and meat. All they had to do was report weekly at the post at Evans to collect them.
Evans was twelve miles from the Keaches’ selection, but that couldn’t be helped. If they didn’t report they’d get nothing, so each week Harold dispatched his offspring to row the twelve miles downriver and then, with a full load, the same distance upriver again, this time against the current.
Not that Harold Keach was idle in their absence. He felled trees with furious energy to begin with; then, enthusiasm tempered by experience, more slowly. He built a log pile to provide fuel for the pump and for cooking. He scratched a clearing in the bush big enough to set up a lopsided house and some even more lopsided vines, but Harold’s heart was no more in agriculture than in mining, and soon he was paying regular visits to the Cassidys, who lived a couple of miles down the river and specialised in the manufacture of what Sean Cassidy called jungle juice, a home-made whisky calculated to blow your head off.
Harold’s wife, Belinda, was blonde and weathered, with huge blue eyes in a boozy face. Through her efforts, and those of the two kids, they somehow managed to survive. While all the time Sarah Keach — seventeen years old, then eighteen, finally nineteen, tall and capable, with her father’s dark colouring and her mother’s eyes — told herself how she was going to leave home at the first opportunity. She’d settle down with a good man in a town with neighbours and shops and laid-out streets, and never see the Murray or her drunken, brawling father again.
In the meantime, the river was their only link with the outside world. It delivered the first accounts of a bushranger called Kelly; it enabled them to fetch their weekly rations; its waters were full of fish. It also brought the riverboats that travelled upstream and down, servicing the scattered communities of the Outback. The river was their life. Sometimes they had too much of it.
You could trust Harold to take the easy option and build his house on the flat ground by the riverbank. The river rose with every spring flood, and this October morning they had woken to find themselves under a foot of water, with the shack’s hessian walls in ruin, the timber uprights washed half out of the ground and the river continuing to rise.
They had struggled out to see what could be saved from the flood and found that their rowing boat had disappeared in the night. The loss of the boat was more serious than that of the house; without it there was no way of getting the supplies on which their lives depended.
Harold threw up his hands.
‘I’ll drop over to Cassidy’s, see if I can get ’em to help us put the house up again.’
He disappeared at a rate of knots, splashing knee-deep through the floodwaters.
‘We’ll see no more of him today,’ Belinda said.
Sarah knew her mother was right. The Cassidys’ only notion of help came out of the mouth of a bottle. If the Keaches didn’t want to sleep in the rain, they would have to deal with the situation themselves.
Soaked to the skin and covered in mud, Belinda, Sarah and her younger brother Arthur pulled down what remained of the house and dragged everything they could salvage to higher ground.
One thing you could say about a house made from hessian and corrugated iron: it didn’t take much to put it up again. With the rain pouring down, Sarah dug holes for the corner posts, slid them home and stamped down the saturated soil around them. Working together, they fastened the hessian walls and replaced the corrugated iron roof. Inside the ground was as wet as the river, but at least they were out of the rain. Sarah managed to get a fire going to warm them and dry their clothes and bedding. Belinda mixed damper and grilled it with what was left of their meat. Arthur went prospecting along the riverbank in a vain attempt to recover the missing boat.
‘We gotta do somethin’,’ Belinda said. ‘We got no food left.’
‘I know what to do,’ Sarah said.
So now she had come down to the river, the water above her knees, and waited until a riverboat appeared, heading downstream. She had waved frantically, arms like windmills, pleading with them to stop, and the bastards had ignored her. If she could have sunk them, she’d have done it, no worries.
‘Now what do I do?’
Another steamer appeared. It was also heading downriver. It was a three-decker, with side paddles, a black hull and white superstructure. The wheelhouse was perched above deck with a cabin, the walkway had a guard rail about it and a flight of wooden steps led down past the starboard paddlebox to the lower deck, which was packed high with what looked like bales of wool. The steamer’s name stood out in bold characters on a board below the wheelhouse: Brenda.
As Sarah waved her arms, a man she thought must be the captain leaned out of the wheelhouse window and shouted across the water at her.
‘Need any help?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’ll try and get a bit closer,’ the man shouted.
He disappeared into the wheelhouse. A moment later Sarah heard the sharp note of a bell. The engine took on a deeper tone. The paddles increased speed. Brenda turned athwart the current and began to inch towards the bank. With the river in flood it wasn’t an easy thing to do, but somehow the captain managed it.
As the vessel drew closer to the bank Sarah saw him spin the wheel and heard the clank of the steering chains. Thirty yards from where Sarah was standing up to her thighs in the water, the riverboat turned, the paddles holding the boat against the current.
Thank God, Sarah thought.
The man came out of the wheelhouse and called across to her. ‘Can’t get no closer. What’s the problem?’
Sarah explained about
the lost rowing boat and the rations that must be fetched.
‘Wanna lift down?’
‘Would you?’
‘I’ll send a boat across for you.’
‘How do I get back?’
‘There’ll be plenty willin’ …’
Sarah ran back through the trees to tell her mother what was happening. Belinda’s raddled features took on a suspicious look.
‘On a riverboat with blokes you never seed before? I don’ like the sound of that.’
Sarah sighed heavily. It was true the riverboat crews had a bad reputation, but fetching the rations was more important than any other consideration. ‘I’ll take Arthur with me,’ she said.
Arthur was delighted at the idea of travelling aboard a real paddle steamer. Together they hurried to the edge of the water.
A rowing boat with a young man at the oars was waiting for them. He was wearing a blue jersey, not too clean. Beneath oil-stained pants his feet were bare. He had broad shoulders and a truculent expression on his face. He brushed his blond hair out of his eyes and glowered at them, making no attempt to give them a hand as first Sarah and then Arthur clambered over the side and settled themselves on a plank set in the bow.
‘Spread out!’ the young man snapped. ‘Balance the boat or you’ll have us all in the drink! Keep still!’
Brenda’s captain was doing them a favour by picking them up at all, so Sarah bit back a smart answer. Instead she put on her snootiest look and ignored the young man, who was now pulling on the oars with all his might as he fought the current.
The river, brown as chocolate, swooped and swirled about them in foaming eddies. The young man headed so far upstream that Sarah wondered whether they would miss the steamer altogether, but they did not. At the last minute the current seized them and brought them alongside, with Brenda’s lower deck swaying two feet above their heads.
‘Git out,’ the young man said, hanging on to the steamer’s hull with his left hand. ‘An’ do me a favour. Try not to fall in. Do that, the river the way it is, we’ll never fish you out.’
Sarah stuck her nose even higher and did not deign to answer, but it was harder than it looked. As soon as she stood up the boat lurched one way, then the other, and it was all she could do not to fall down in a heap. Somehow she managed to avoid that, but climbing aboard the steamer was still a problem, with the deck two feet higher than she was and her wet skirts tight about her legs.
‘Gimme your hand.’
She looked up. The captain was reaching down to her. She would have preferred to manage without his help, but that would have meant crawling over the side on hands and knees, skirt halfway up her legs and the young man scalding her with his derisive eyes from the rowing boat. So she took the proffered hand with as much dignity as she could manage and stepped aboard as though she had been doing nothing else all her life.
She blew the air out of her cheeks. ‘Thanks.’
‘Not bad.’ The scowling young man spoke from behind her. ‘I seen plenty do worse.’
She ignored him, looking first at the boat, then at the man facing her. She guessed he was three or four years older than she was. He had a strong, lean face and green eyes, and a cap of light brown hair bleached the colour of straw by the sun. He was smiling at her with half his mouth, a habit that gave him a raffish look, like a good-natured devil.
‘Charlie Armstrong,’ he introduced himself. ‘And that’s my brother Will. Welcome aboard.’
1889
CHAPTER 6
Sarah looked at the clock tick-tocking on the cabin bulkhead.
‘There you are. That’s how I met your Dad.’
‘Go on,’ urged Alex.
‘Not now. It’s getting late. Time you were asleep.’
‘Ohhh …’ Alex pouted for the record, knowing it would do no good.
Yet her mother paused, smiling a little wistfully, blue eyes fixed on the past. She murmured, ‘It’s funny …’
‘What is?’
‘All my life security was the one thing I wanted.’
‘Security?’ Alex wasn’t sure what Sarah was talking about.
‘Bein’ safe. Havin’ a real home. Bein’ loved.’ She smiled sadly. ‘Grandpa don’t know the meaning of the word. Don’t want to know. Nor does Grandma. Not really. But that was all I ever wanted. And look what happened. Married to a riverman!’
‘Why?’
‘Why did I marry Daddy? Because I loved him. The moment he helped me come aboard and I had my first good look at him, I knew. The same as I love you.’
‘I’ve never helped you come aboard.’
Sarah laughed. ‘That’s true. But I love you, just the same.’
‘And Lukey?’
‘Of course!’
‘And Tibby Slippers?’ The family’s marmalade cat, who had sneaked on board one day and taken over Charlie’s old slippers and all their hearts.
‘And Tibby Slippers. You and Daddy and Lukey and Elsie and Tibby Slippers. All of us together.’
A boobook called, somewhere in the darkness.
‘Tell me the story of how you went up the river with Daddy before you were married.’
‘Not tonight.’ Her mother kissed her briskly. ‘Like I said: time you was asleep.’
Alex wanted to protest but was drifting, drifting. She sensed Sarah pulling the mosquito net down about her while the polished brass lantern swayed in the wood-lined cabin, the night-time noises of the river came through the window screens and the world was reduced to a peaceful refuge of brown and golden light. It dwindled and dwindled and at last went out.
1876–1877
CHAPTER 7
Later that night Sarah sat in her cabin, remembering how Charlie had taken her downriver, as he had promised, and delivered Arthur and her safely to the Evans wharf.
During the journey he had invited them both into the wheelhouse. She had stood at his side looking out at the river. It was brown with the silt brought down by the flood, the muddy banks grey and sad, and she saw he took care to keep in midstream — not an easy thing to do with water spilling in every direction across the rain-shrouded land. The uprooted trunks of many great trees twisted and tumbled in the water, their branches imploring the clouds like the arms of drowning men.
‘Need to keep well away from them,’ Charlie said. ‘Ram one, get a hole in the hull, where would we be?’
She guessed. ‘At the bottom of the river?’
He laughed. ‘More likely on the bank. Or berthed on a sandbar, if I could find one in time.’
She was conscious of his big hands, suntanned and confident, resting lightly on the spoked wheel, which stood almost as tall as she did.
There was a narrow chart of the river drawn on a long strip of paper. The paper was fastened between two rollers screwed to the bulkhead behind the wheel. The channels were marked, and the rocks. Charlie saw her looking at it.
‘As we travel along the river, we turn the rollers so we’ve always got the right section in front of us.’
‘Do you ever go aground?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘What do you do then?’
‘We winch ourselves off again.’
‘How?’
‘It’s not so hard. Maybe I’ll show you, some day.’
It didn’t seem very likely, but Sarah nodded. ‘Maybe you will.’
On one side of the wheel a bell hung from a metal bracket, with a short length of cord attached to its clapper.
Arthur had not moved but his eyes were everywhere. ‘What’s that for?’ he asked.
‘To tell the engineer what I want him to do with the engine. One ring to stop or go ahead, two to go into reverse.’
They entered a stretch of the river that was much wider than the section they had just passed. Sarah and Arthur knew it well. They had rowed into town from their selection more times than they could count, but on those trips they had always hugged the bank. Now they were in midstream, in a flood, and to Sarah it felt like the middle o
f the ocean.
‘Want to have a go?’ Charlie asked.
Sarah was delighted, but frightened, too.
‘What happens if somethin’ goes wrong?’
‘Why should it? Besides, I’ll be standing here.’
She took the wheel. Her throat was dry. She stood frozen, not daring to move a muscle, feeling the power of the engine throbbing in her arms.
Cautiously she turned the wheel a fraction. Did the boat change course? She couldn’t be sure.
There was a tall tree on the skyline, where the river curved. It was a long way off but she could see it clearly, despite the rain. They were steering straight towards it. She moved the wheel a little further. A little more. There was no doubt about it now. The tree had moved.
Sarah laughed, excited, and eased the wheel back again, watching the distant tree resume its place.
‘See?’ Charlie said. ‘It’s not so difficult.’
‘Maybe not out here.’
She remembered how Charlie had manoeuvred the big boat across the current when he had picked them both up. That had taken real skill. Playing games where there was plenty of room might be easy enough, but navigating the narrow stretches or coming alongside a wharf would be an altogether different matter.
Arthur had a go too, before the river narrowed and Charlie took the wheel once more.
And so, finally, to Evans.
Sarah stood in the rain, waving, as Brenda pulled out into the current and headed away downstream with the water arching from the paddles. She felt bereft, yet happy too. He had liked her, she knew he had. She was confident she would soon be seeing him again.
Yet things didn’t work out quite as she expected. It was four months before she saw him again, and she came close to slapping his face when she did.
The summer was winding down, though there were days when the weather was still as hot as Hades. Riverboats passed every day, heading upriver or down, but Sarah had long given up looking for the three-decker with the white superstructure. During her vain vigil she had gone through many changes of mood, from expectation to despair and, finally, indifference. Or what she told herself was indifference.
