Spirits of the Ghan

by Judy Nunn

  About the Book

  She did still feel the call of the desert.

  It was in her blood that land …

  she felt it in her very heartbeat.

  It is 2001 and as the world charges into the new Millennium, a century-old dream is about to be realised in the Red Centre of Australia: the completion of the mighty Ghan railway, a long-lived vision to create the ‘backbone of the continent’, a line that will finally link Adelaide with the Top End.

  But construction of the final leg between Alice Springs and Darwin will not be without its complications, for much of the desert it will cross is Aboriginal land.

  Hired as a negotiator, Jessica Manning must walk a delicate line to reassure the elders their sacred sites will be protected. Will her innate understanding of the spiritual landscape, rooted in her own Arunta heritage, win their trust? It’s not easy to keep the peace when Matthew Witherton and his survey team are quite literally blasting a rail corridor through the timeless land of the Never-Never.

  When the paths of Jessica and Matthew finally cross, their respective cultures collide to reveal a mystery that demands attention. As they struggle against time to solve the puzzle, an ancient wrong is awakened and calls hauntingly across the vastness of the outback …

  Master storyteller Judy Nunn takes us on a breathtaking journey deep into the red heart of Australia in her latest spellbinding novel.

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Author’s Note

  Map

  Prologue

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Part Two

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Part Three

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Also by Judy Nunn

  Copyright Notice

  There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

  William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act I, Scene 5

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The anglicised spelling of Indigenous peoples, lands and languages varies immensely. This may well be dependent upon those who initially chose to translate a purely oral language to the written word, for example the German influence of Lutheran missionary Carl Strehlow in Hermannsburg during the early twentieth century.

  There are several central desert groups mentioned in this book. These are the Arunta, the Western Arunta, Eastern Arunta, and the Anmatyerre a little further to the north.

  These anglicised names are also recorded as Arrernte, Arrarnte, Arunda, Anmatjere and Anmatjerre. Indeed, there may well be many other ways to spell them, but I have chosen Arunta and Anmatyerre. In the first instance I followed the advice of a local Indigenous authority who adamantly favoured ‘Arunta’, mainly in order to clarify pronunciation as the emphasis should be on the first syllable, which I’ve found to be the case in the pronunciation of most groups.

  The characters in this book are fictional and so are their names. In all instances I have changed the spelling of traditional names for my Aboriginal characters. If in doing so I have inadvertently used the real name of a deceased person, I humbly apologise.

  PROLOGUE

  1876

  James McQuillan knew he was a dead man. He knew the instant the snake struck. A large king brown, a good six feet in length. He didn’t know how long his death would take or how much pain might accompany it, but he was aware the sight would not be pretty. ‘Get back to the homestead, Emily, and fetch help,’ he said. Quelling as best he could the fear that accompanied his awful knowledge, he kept his voice authoritative: ‘Hurry along now, there’s a good girl.’ There was no point in her fetching help, he would be dead long before her return, but if his daughter were to witness his death she might panic and lose her way home. It was imperative he give her a sense of purpose.

  Legs outstretched on the dusty red earth, he leant his burly frame back against the rock, the very rock with the very crevice from which the snake had darted its head. The very rock he’d steadied his hand upon while leading the way down to the rock pool. He’d so wanted to share with his daughter this oasis, this perfect gift of nature nestled in the desert. A place of such beauty, where white-trunked gums grew stark and ghostly out of ochre-red rocks that walled a pristine lagoon of blue. He cursed himself now. How could he have been such a fool? He was a dead man, and his daughter’s life was in jeopardy. Emily should be safely home in Adelaide. He should never have brought her to this wilderness.

  Sixteen-year-old Emily stared down at her father, dumbstruck with fear. She had seen the snake. Light brown in colour with a flat cobra-like head, it had struck with such speed and ferocity and then disappeared so quickly that she hadn’t even screamed. Now, upon her father’s instruction, she was galvanised into action.

  ‘No, Father, no,’ she said, crouching beside him and urgently taking a hold of his arm. ‘I can help you to your horse. We’ll get you home together and Alfred will look after you.’ Alfred was the property’s overseer. A tough outback man, Alfred would know what to do. But even as she spoke, her father’s arm began to shudder. The action was not deliberate, she knew, but a series of involuntary muscular spasms, and it frightened her.

  ‘Do as you’re told, Emily.’ James tried once again to sound authoritative, but he was starting to convulse and his throat was swelling. His larynx restricted, his voice was only a painful rasp. Soon paralysis would set in and he would be unable to speak at all. ‘Go home and fetch Alfred. Be quick now.’ They had set out in the late afternoon to avoid the heat of the day, but she had a good hour of light still ahead of her, he told himself, and the homestead was only a two-mile ride away. So long as she doesn’t get lost, James prayed, so long as she doesn’t …

  ‘Head east,’ he said with the last few words he could push out, ‘keep the sun behind you. Head east …’ Then as his throat restricted further his voice failed him altogether.

  Emily stood, her chest heaving, her breath coming in frantic, fevered gasps. Her father’s body was starting to shake uncontrollably, but his eyes were still upon her, very much alive and ordering her to go.

  Half blinded by tears of sheer terror, she turned from him and ran to where the horses were tethered twenty yards away. She must save her father. ‘My daughter can ride like the wind!’ She could hear his laughter and the proud boast to his friends; he delighted in her skill as a horsewoman. She tightened the girth strap and mounted the hardy little mare. She could hear him now, urging her on. ‘Ride like the wind, Emily! Ride like the wind!’ Well, she would ride as she had never ridden before. There was still time: there had to be. She must save her father’s life.

  James tried to watch her go, his eyes rolling in their sockets, but he couldn’t see her. He couldn’t move his head. He couldn’t move any part of himself. Brain and body were disconnected, no longer his to command. All that remained was thought. And thought said, There is no road to the homestead, not even a track, and I didn’t think to teach her the landmarks. Then a further thought … I should have told her to let the mare have her head – the mare will sense the way home. Then all that was left as the venom overtook him was a terrible guilt and self-recrimination.

  How could I have let this happen?

  James Angus McQuillan, only son of Angus Donald McQuillan, gentleman, farmer and Director of the Bank of Scotland, was born in 1820 in Dundee, Scotland o
n 21 August, a birthday, he often remarked, that he shared with King William IV.

  After migrating to Adelaide in 1854 to appraise and report on his father’s already-established land-holdings in South Australia, James had formed a business partnership with lawyer and fellow Scot, Edwin Moss. The two presented an odd couple in appearance, James ginger-bearded and burly, Edwin moustachioed, lean and lanky, but a strong friendship developed between the Scotsmen, a friendship based on mutual respect, for they were similarly shrewd when it came to business.

  In 1859 McQuillan, Moss & Co invested with Elder, Stirling & Co to finance the Wallaroo and Moonta Copper Mines. After initial risks, the investment brought them a handsome return, and over the ensuing years James and Edwin went from strength to strength, acquiring vast tracts of land that spread further and further into the untouched wastes of South Australia and the territory to the north known as Alexandra Land. In tackling the problems presented by the outback, they spent thousands of pounds on fencing and the sinking of bores until finally their pastoral properties constituted a land mass far larger than the whole of their native Scotland. James McQuillan and Edwin Moss had become wealthy men.

  James lived a happy, fulfilled life. He had fallen in love two years after his arrival in Adelaide, and became engaged to Eleanor Welles, a fair-haired, pretty young Englishwoman. Eleanor was the daughter of a prominent banker with whom James did a great deal of business and everyone agreed it was an ideal match. ‘Convenient’, some even said a little archly, which was an apt enough comment for the relationship did indeed benefit all parties concerned, but this happy fact did not make the love shared by the couple any the less real.

  The two married and in 1860, after several unfortunate miscarriages, Eleanor finally bore James a daughter, Emily, who grew to be a replica of her mother. James, who could be surprisingly effusive when something delighted him, as Emily did, would happily declare to one and all in his rich Scottish brogue, ‘She’s the apple of my eye, that wee girl, the apple of my eye.’

  The McQuillans lived in a gracious three-storey home that James had had specially designed in North Terrace, the very heart of Adelaide. A wide circular carriageway led up to the front of the house, where a series of impressive stone arches formed the ground floor facade, while the broad balconies above, encased by a lacework of ornate railings, offered excellent views of the surrounding township and countryside. The grounds were spacious and beautifully landscaped, with separate servants’ quarters at the rear near stables housing James’s beloved horses and a large barn sheltering a selection of vehicles – work-drays, traps, buggies and a covered carriage – together with the requisite harness tackle.

  McQuillan House was a symbol of James’s position in society and far larger than was necessary to meet the family’s requirements, but it was not a deliberate show of ostentation. James and Eleanor intended to have many children, and their lifestyle obliged them to entertain. Along with the many philanthropic concerns both had embraced, Eleanor was a keen follower of the arts and nurtured budding writers and painters, while James, as a member of the Adelaide Legislative Council, took his civic duties very seriously.

  Given the diversity of the couple’s interests, McQuillan House saw numerous and eclectic social gatherings over the years. There were dinners with twenty to table in the formal dining room, gala charity concerts staged in the front salon, casual afternoon teas held on the balcony and huge garden parties each spring. But sadly, as time passed, the house did not see a growth in family numbers. After suffering another two miscarriages, both times well into her second trimester, Eleanor was warned that any further attempt to bear children could prove dangerous, perhaps even fatal.

  ‘Oh James, I am so very, very sorry.’ When the doctor had gone, Eleanor succumbed to the tears she’d been desperately fighting back. In her weakened state, they now flowed freely as her husband sat beside her on the bed. ‘Oh my dearest, how I have let you down.’

  ‘There, there, my dear, you have done nothing of the sort, don’t talk such nonsense.’ James drew his kerchief from his breast pocket and wiped the tears from her cheeks. His tone was brisk and business-like: indulging her in any maudlin sentiment would do her no good, he thought, though in truth his heart ached to see his normally vibrant wife so wretched and unhappy. ‘Come along now, blow your nose,’ he said as if to a child. ‘No more tears, there’s a good girl.’

  She blew her nose obediently, but she could not stem the flow of tears. ‘You married the wrong woman, James. You should have chosen a stronger wife, one who could give you the family you’ve always longed for.’

  He took her hand in both of his and pressed it gently to his lips. ‘I married exactly the right woman, my dear,’ he said. ‘I married the woman with whom I wish to spend the whole of my life. And we have a family. We have Emily.’

  ‘But the sons you so craved …’

  Disappointment ran deep, it was true; he would very much miss having sons. But he would teach Emily to ride like a man … He would imbue in Emily the thrill of adventure … ‘Emily is family enough,’ he said firmly, ‘now go to sleep: we need you strong.’

  Although his intention had been merely to placate his distraught wife, the years proved James right. All of the love he might have lavished on a large family he focused upon his daughter, who became the very centre of his existence. Emily was not mollycoddled or spoilt though, for that was not James’s way. From a very early age she was treated as an adult and shared in his life, in his very dreams and expectations. Father and daughter quite simply adored each other.

  To many, James McQuillan appeared a somewhat contradictory man. He was personally wealthy and lived a lavish lifestyle, yet the speeches he made at legislative council meetings were invariably in opposition to what he considered extravagant government spending. He was practical and conservative, his public addresses short and to the point, yet on social occasions, particularly as host in his own home, he was flamboyant and could wax lyrical with the best. But the most contradictory element in James McQuillan’s make-up was something that would have been beyond the comprehension of his desk-bound city colleagues. James McQuillan was an adventurer, a man whose love of the outback was so fierce it bordered on passion.

  Even Edwin Moss, James’s friend and business partner, did not know the degree of passion he felt for the rugged beauty of central Australia. Certainly the two had shared excitement over their ventures into the wilderness of Alexandra Land. Certainly where others had seen nothing but dry desert James and Edwin had seen endless possibility. But Edwin had not bonded with the land as James had, and James had not seen fit to share his feelings about something he regarded as intensely personal. He did, however, share them with his thirteen-year-old daughter, painting vivid pictures of giant gorges and fiery-red escarpments and huge gum trees growing from the centre of dusty, dry riverbeds.

  ‘A primitive land, Emily,’ he told her, ‘a land so spiritual you cannot help but feel at one with it. A person is closer to God out there, I swear. You can feel His very presence.’

  So enthralled was Emily with the images her father painted of a landscape foreign to the green hills of Adelaide that she made him promise to take her to see his newest holding, a cattle station many days’ journey from anywhere.

  ‘I don’t see why not,’ James agreed, much to Eleanor’s consternation. ‘Perhaps in a year or so when the homestead’s living quarters are completed and the station is running smoothly.’

  ‘Not until she is sixteen, James,’ Eleanor insisted. ‘I will not hear of it. Not until she has turned sixteen.’

  ‘Very well,’ James acquiesced good-naturedly, ‘sixteen it is. The homestead will be finished altogether by then.’

  ‘And we’ll travel up by camel?’ Emily asked excitedly.

  ‘We will indeed. You and I will be in a cart drawn by a camel pair-in-hand, and a camel train will follow with supplies. Splendid animals, splendid – this country would be lost without them.’

  Jame
s McQuillan, like a number of adventurous businessmen, saw the camel as the answer to the transport problems of the outback. Recently, with the help of Thomas Elder, a fellow aficionado of the camel and first to introduce the animals to Australia, James had imported a batch of breeding dromedaries, together with Afghan cameleers to manage the beasts. He intended to breed sturdy stock at his pastoral property in Alexandra Land. An area of well over one thousand square miles, the property’s border lay just twenty-five miles southwest of one of the newly established overland telegraph repeater stations, so an accessible track from Adelaide was already in existence.

  The Overland Telegraph Line, traversing the continent from Adelaide in the south to the furthermost northern port of Palmerston, had been completed just the previous year, in 1872, and had very much followed the route of explorer John McDouall Stuart, who, a decade earlier, had led the first successful expedition north through central Australia. A massive undertaking, the Line had linked Australia by undersea cable to Java and therefore Great Britain. Two thousand miles of telegraph line had been painstakingly erected through the desert heart of the country and telegraph poles and materials for the construction of repeater stations had been transported into the barren wilderness. It was an extraordinary feat all round and, as James was wont to point out when enthusing about his new business venture, one that could only have been made possible by the camel.

  ‘Couldn’t have been done without the camel,’ he would declare in a tone that defied argument. ‘Not only is Australia now linked with the rest of the world, but the vast interior of this country is opened up for settlement, and all thanks to the camel! Just think of that! A splendid animal, splendid!’