by Judy Nunn
The construction of the homestead on James’s property was completed well before Emily’s sixteenth birthday. The mud-brick and timber house consisting of five rooms with surrounding verandahs was modest, but comfortable; several smaller outbuildings and sheds housed employees and supplies; and there were corrals for the horses and camels. Already, within only three short years, Eleanor Downs Station was running smoothly, although yet to turn a profit, which was hardly to be expected at this early stage.
James had named the property in honour of his wife and Eleanor had accepted the tribute although they both knew it was doubtful she would ever travel there. The gentle foothills outside Adelaide were as far afield as Eleanor McQuillan wished to venture.
Now, as his daughter’s sixteenth birthday approached, James intended to fulfil his promise. Indeed he couldn’t wait. He was excited beyond measure by the prospect of showing Emily the glories of the outback.
‘Oh James, must you?’ Eleanor couldn’t stop herself saying. ‘Must you really?’
‘Of course I must, my dear, a promise is a promise.’
Eleanor breathed a sigh of resignation, knowing any protest would go unheard by both her husband and daughter.
Several months later, final arrangements were made.
‘No, Emily, of course you can’t take Nell with you.’ James laughed at the preposterousness of his daughter’s suggestion. ‘Nell’s a city horse. She’s not made for the bush.’
‘But she’s tough and she’s spirited, Father – that’s why I called her Nell Gwyn. My Nell’s afraid of nothing. And she can go like the wind,’ Emily added eagerly in the hope her father’s favourite catchphrase might clinch the matter.
It didn’t. ‘There’ll be plenty of outback ponies at Eleanor Downs,’ James said firmly, ‘I can assure you of that. And they’ll be tough and spirited and fast enough even for you, my girl.’
Realising the response was a definite ‘no’, Emily didn’t persist any further. But she would miss her Nell.
Now, as she urged the hardy little chestnut on to its very limits, Emily tried to keep her panic in check. Normally she would not work a horse so hard in such terrain; there were rocks and the mare could injure herself. But these were not normal circumstances. She must trust in the outback pony’s sure-footedness and ability to avoid danger.
‘Ride like the wind, Emily! Ride like the wind!’ She kept hearing her father’s voice in her head as she rode, little knowing that, a mile behind her at the rock pool, James McQuillan already lay dead.
She tried to recognise landmarks she might have passed on the ride out from the homestead. Was that red, rocky outcrop familiar? That clump of mulga over there? That ghostly white gum to the right? But there were so many rocky outcrops, so much mulga, so many white gums dotted about in the endless sea of spinifex and grasses – everything looked the same.
Then they were into slightly different terrain. The bush was becoming a little denser, more acacias, more casuarinas, more mulgas. A spindly dead tree lay on its side up ahead. The little chestnut sailed over it with ease. We must surely have travelled two miles by now, Emily thought. Once again, panic started to set in.
The horse had occasionally tried to veer to the right, but Emily forced it to stay on the course she had chosen, directly ahead. The animal now slowed its pace just a little, uncertain, indecisive, but Emily urged it on with her hands and her heels and her voice. In her terror-stricken state she had forgotten her father’s one instruction, ‘Head east, keep the sun behind you.’ The sun, which was now setting, was no longer behind them. She was heading not east, but north, and had been for some time.
The mare, well trained, would have continued to obey instructions, but sensing her rider’s panic she took the bit between her teeth and veered sharply off course. Emily kept her seat, but in fighting to regain control she jagged at the reins, dislodging the bit, which tore into the sensitive corner of the animal’s mouth.
The mare too was in a state of panic. Ignoring the pain and the harsh metal bit, she wheeled sharply about, prepared to bolt in the direction that she sensed was home.
Emily was thrown from the saddle. She had been thrown from horses before and instinctively let go of the reins as she’d been taught, protecting herself with her hands and rolling with the fall to land bruised but unhurt among the desert grasses.
She sat up, winded and nursing a painful elbow, and, as she watched the horse gallop off she knew she’d taken the wrong action. She should have kept hold of the reins, even if in doing so she’d checked the animal’s stride and risked an injury from its hooves.
Rising to her feet, she stood motionless, staring after the horse until she could barely see it in the surrounding scrublands, and as she stared there was strangely just one thought in her mind. Nell would never gallop off like that. Nell would never abandon me.
Then the horse was gone. Even the distant dust of its flight had settled, and she was alone. Alone in the gathering dusk, and soon darkness would fall.
The hours that followed were terrifying beyond Emily’s wildest imaginings. Night crept around her, sinister and threatening, and in its black cloak she could hear sounds. Sounds from all directions – strange animal sounds, encircling her, closing in, bent on attack.
She ran, crashing, stumbling, falling in the darkness, scrambling to her feet and running desperately on, but she could not outdistance the sounds. They were not following her: they were everywhere. There was no escape.
Finally, exhausted and unable to run any further, she curled herself into a ball among the undergrowth and dried branches of dead trees and waited. Shivering with terror and on the border of madness, she waited for whatever fearful animal was about to devour her.
But as time passed no animal came, and in her fatigued state she drifted into a fitful sleep.
She awoke she didn’t know how much later, perhaps minutes, perhaps hours, but still in darkness, still in the awful nightmare of her existence. Only there were no sounds, no noise at all, just a deathly silence. Had the sounds earlier been of her own making? Not able to tell, she stayed, curled up in a ball, not daring to move – the slightest rustle of the grasses could alert whatever might lie in wait out there in the night.
When next she awoke it was dawn, a radiant desert dawn, vibrant colours rising from the horizon to paint a cloudless sky and herald the sun. She uncurled her cramped body and stood stiffly, her bruised muscles aching, but feeling with the beauty of the dawn renewed hope. Surely the worst must be over. She had thought she was dead, but she was not and a new day was beginning.
Then as the first of the sun’s rays appeared over the horizon, she again heard her father’s voice, ‘Head east … head east …’, and she started towards the sunrise, walking now with purpose.
But the day, as it wore on, proved more horrific than the night. In only minutes the sun had made a mockery of the dawn. Dismissing all colour, even the very blueness of the sky itself, the sun glared down relentlessly, harsh and uncaring.
On and on Emily tramped towards the east. She knew it was far from midday for the sun was barely halfway up in the morning sky, and yet the heat was so intense. And she was so incredibly thirsty. Thinking of water, she involuntarily tried to swallow, but found she couldn’t, her mouth was too dry, her throat too parched. Doggedly she continued, one foot after another, plodding in time to the mantra that rang in her brain, head east … head east …
Two hours later, she was dizzy and disoriented. The sun was directly overhead now and she no longer had any idea where east was. Through squinted eyes she could barely see for the glare. Her face was burning, her lips cracked, her breathing dry and laboured, but still she walked on, perhaps in the hope she might find water. In her dazed state she didn’t know, just as she didn’t know where she was going, but she was too afraid to stop. If she stopped, she would die.
As she walked, flies settled on her face, gathering around her mouth and her eyes and her nostrils, seeking her moisture, but she made
no attempt to brush them away. All energy was preserved for walking. Even thought was banished as her mind simply planted one foot after another.
She started to stagger, several times nearly falling, but saving herself, pausing briefly and moving on. She was hallucinating now. In a shimmering world somewhere on the brink of death, she could see lakes of water and the shapes of people waving, beckoning. She even waved back as she struggled towards them, although something told her they weren’t real.
Then she staggered a final time and couldn’t save herself. She collapsed, first to her knees, then forwards onto the hot, red earth, knowing that she would never get up. The long walk was over.
She rolled onto her back, looked up at the blinding sky of white light and, closing her eyes to the sun, she surrendered.
Emily was to all purposes dead, beyond thought, beyond hope, when something stirred her back to consciousness. Strange sounds, harsh and discordant, registered in the hazy recesses of her brain as something akin to the human voice.
She opened her eyes to find the blinding light of the sun blocked out and in its place the faces of black men. They were leaning over her, three of them, peering down closely and speaking to each other in their strange language.
One of the men prodded her roughly in the side with his foot, as if to see what life was left in her.
She tried to scream, but no sound came out. The man barked an order at one of the others, who bent down and picked her up with ease, flinging her over his shoulder as he might a kangaroo he’d speared.
Then, as the men loped off into the afternoon with their catch, Emily once again lost consciousness.
PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE
Jessica Manning was proud of her Aboriginality.
When people asked about her parentage, as they so often did, she would say, ‘Aboriginal Irish,’ then add with her irresistibly cheeky grin: ‘An exotic mix.’
She was directly quoting her father.
‘Exotic, that’s what you are, Jess,’ Toby Manning had told his daughter back in the seventies when she was tiny and he was preparing her for her first day at school. He doubted there’d be any other Aboriginal children in attendance at Balmain primary school and he was concerned she might cop some taunting from the white kids.
‘A mix of the Dreamtime and the blarney,’ he’d assured her with a wink. ‘You don’t get much more exotic than that.’
As it turned out, Toby had no cause for concern. Little Jess had encountered no taunting. To the contrary, her schoolmates had gravitated to her, as had her teachers. There was something magnetic about Jess. And as she grew from childhood to womanhood, her magnetism did not diminish, if anything it increased. It was difficult to say exactly why, but Jess attracted people.
In appearance, she was not really exotic, she was not even particularly beautiful, not in the conventional sense anyway, but when Jess walked into a room people noticed. Above average height, unruly black curls that bounced with an independence of their own, and fine, toffee-coloured skin that bore a satin-like sheen contributed to make her an arresting figure certainly, but it was her carriage and her manner that were most demanding of attention. She moved with an easy grace, at one with her body. She was confident without being cocky, opinionated without being arrogant. She looked people straight in the eye and said what she thought, and when she laughed she threw back her head and relished the moment. Jess was fun to be with.
Jessica Manning’s self-assurance was no doubt inherent, but her comfort in being the product of an inter-racial marriage was directly attributable to her Irish father. Toby Manning had instilled in his daughter all the positivity he’d hoped to instil in his wife, the person he’d loved more than anyone in the world.
‘Ah Rosie, my Rosie, you’re magnificent,’ he used to say in the good old days as he watched his wife dance and listened to her sing. Just for him. Rose would sing and dance, just for him: it was her gift. ‘You have the music in you, girl, it’s singing out through your very soul.’ And it was, Toby thought. In all his years as a sound engineer, and a very successful one, he’d worked with many great musical talents, but he never met anyone quite like Rose. Music coursed through her veins: it was her connection with the world. But she had no wish to make a career of her gift – it was something she shared just with him. Music had been their bond, right from the start.
Rose Napangurrayi was a Western Arunta woman. She was born in 1950 at Hermannsburg in central Australia, but at the age of six she was taken from her parents by government agents and placed in the care of the Franklin family, wealthy owners of Eleanor Downs Station, one of the earliest established cattle properties in the Northern Territory.
According to the records, the station had been originally owned by James Angus McQuillan, one of the first developers of pastoral leases in central Australia, but McQuillan, his family and his estate had apparently relinquished all interest in Eleanor Downs late in the nineteenth century. Indeed, the McQuillan name featured only in the driest of texts relating purely to land acquisition. Eleanor Downs Station, a highly successful enterprise, had been the property of the Franklin family for several generations by the time Rose arrived there.
Rose had been educated to a minimal level and at ten started work as a housemaid, a position it was presumed she would serve at Eleanor Downs for an indefinite period, possibly the whole of her working life, as a number of the domestic help had over the years.
Shortly before her fifteenth birthday, Rose lost her virginity, not willingly, but knowing if she didn’t acquiesce or if she made any complaint to the Big Boss, things would take a severe turn for the worse. Walter Franklin Jnr, the twenty-five-year-old son and heir to the Franklin estate, had a taste for ‘black velvet’, and he liked breaking in young virgins whom he would keep to himself for a year or so before moving on. Following her initiation, Rose, like the others, was expected to be available for their secret assignations whenever the Young Boss so desired, which he did with increasing regularity.
Rose’s only escape was music. Without music she would have been lost. One of the other house girls, Betty, a year older than Rose and also taken as a child from a Western Arunta family, had a harmonica and would play while Rose sang. They’d perform the hit songs they’d heard on the wireless, Rose even perfecting the required American accent, or they’d make songs up, singing in their own language.
They often communicated in the Western Arunta tongue, but only when they were alone, for the white bosses forbade their servants to talk anything but English. Speaking Arunta was the girls’ secret rebellion and music was their joint escape. They would play and sing their songs and they would dance together too, inventing the steps as they went along. Rose and Betty were best friends. More than best friends, Rose and Betty were family. Deprived of their parents and their siblings, Rose and Betty were the only family each had.
The highlight of Rose’s station life came every second weekend, when she and Betty had Saturday off. They’d cadge a lift from one of the hands into Alice Springs, twenty-five miles away, and stand outside the pub listening to the music. There was always music playing on a Saturday arvo. If they knew the song, Betty would play her harmonica and Rose would sing along, and if they didn’t know it they’d dance together to the tune. They were neither begging nor busking to start with, they were just having fun, but when people began chucking coins their way, they quickly developed a performance routine. They’d take a break and head off for ice creams and soft drinks or a pie with sauce then they’d return for more. They’d stay right through until the pub closed, getting a lift back with the station hands who were returning, by that time very much the worse for wear, to Eleanor Downs.
It was on one of these Saturday afternoons that sixteen-year-old Rose met Eddie Tjakamarra.
‘You got a real good voice, you know that?’
She was pleased by the compliment, he was around twenty and very good looking, but she gave a noncommittal shrug.
‘What�
�s your name?’ he asked.
‘Rose.’
‘I’m Eddie.’
She gave another noncommittal shrug as if she didn’t care, but really to cover her self-consciousness. She wasn’t accustomed to receiving such close attention from handsome young men.
Eddie was openly eyeing her up and down. ‘You look real nice too,’ he said.
Another shrug. Rose averted her eyes. Then Betty spoke up protectively. Being a year older and a bolder girl by nature, Betty was protective of Rose.
‘Rose is shy.’
‘Oh yeah?’
‘Yeah.’ Although he didn’t seem particularly interested she introduced herself anyway, just to be polite. ‘I’m Betty.’
Eddie gave Betty a nod and turned back to Rose. ‘No need to be shy when you can sing like that. You could be real famous, I reckon. Crikey, looking the way you do and a voice like yours …’ He shook his head in admiration. ‘Real star material, you are.’
Rose smiled; she couldn’t help herself. ‘I like to sing.’
‘And I like to listen.’ He grinned disarmingly. ‘Don’t start again until I get back. I’m gonna grab a beer.’ And he disappeared.
Eddie sat on the pub’s verandah for the whole of the afternoon scoffing back beers and watching Rose, and for the whole of the afternoon she sang to him. That was all it took. By the end of the day Rose was in love.
When the pub closed she didn’t go back to Eleanor Downs. She went off with Eddie instead.
‘He’s camped just out of town,’ she’d told Betty mid-afternoon when Betty had returned with the pies. Rose hadn’t been hungry, so she’d stayed and talked with Eddie, but Betty had brought a pie back for her anyway.
