Just Relations

by Rodney Hall

– Your husband is it? Keepin you under his thumb? He raised his voice to be heard from the house. Ah well, take me arm and he won’t suspect a thing.

  – He’s just a visitor, she whispered. A stranger who’ll soon be going and then you can tell me everything.

  What a morning it had been: the children at the fence; her visit to Mum’s tea meeting; conflict with the children’s mother; the crazy truck; her run to get help; the haunting face of a pale child at the Brinsmeads’ door; the motorbike ride; that young man with demanding eyes; the dead body in the truck; meeting with a senator; and now Uncle bringing a reminder of poor Auntie and the prospect of loneliness. She unlatched the gate.

  – That still works then, he observed.

  – I’m Vivien, she introduced herself as they walked up the path together studying one another’s shoes. Vivien Lang.

  – So you’re a Lang. Her brother’s …

  – … son was my father. Yes.

  – And where’s he now?

  – Dead. In England. Even Auntie is in England you know. Though she’s not dead. Anything but.

  – Go along with you! I can’t seem to see Annie over in England. How did she come by the money?

  – Now, Senator Halloran this is Mr Swan who was nearly my great-uncle.

  The guest on the verandah offered formal greetings.

  – What’re ya doin here then? Uncle demanded. Try the other ear, that one’s gone on me again.

  – Waiting for the police.

  – Fine place to pick, considerin they haven’t got a station for thirty-five mile and too damn close at that. Uncle scrutinized him. You must be city-bred then are you? He shook his head, pleased and amazed, confirmed in his knowledge of the world. Police out here at Whitey’s… Shall I tell you a story? asked Uncle crashing into the shaky clutches of a wicker chair.

  – Please go ahead, the senator replied testily.

  – Well there was this fellow walkin along a riverbank, see? He come on a lump a string. Simple ordinary string. So he kicked it out a his way. You can understand that. No use to him. But he got his foot caught in a bit of a tangle. And when he pulled at it he found one end led into the river. What does he do but pull on it, gentle fisherman’s touch, you see. Pulled in the wet string till it got a bit heavier and he found the end of the string tied to a piece of wire. You with me? Well this fella said it was a mystery, so he pulled on the wire till he found the end of that tied to a chain. He couldn’t stop now could he? A course he pulled the chain, you’d do the same, and up with the wet chain came the end of a bloody great cable. The cable was so heavy he could only just lift it but he pulled all the same. The cable was as heavy as he was. They pulled at each other, stuck like that and him on the river bank, a toss up whether he’d get it out or it’d pull him in the water.

  Pause.

  – Then what? the senator prompted, airing the virtue of patience.

  – Then nothin a course. That’s it. What more do yer want to be told? Sorrow welled up in Uncle. Hadn’t he seen with his own eyes the letter Annie wrote to Sebbie Brinso in her unmistakable writing while there was no letter for him? He took hold of himself.

  – A friend of mine collects folk stories, the politician volunteered.

  Vivien solved the enigma of that sick feeling in her stomach.

  – Have you heard the news Uncle? The dead woman in the truck?

  – Mrs Mercy Ping, Senator Statistician recited.

  – Mercy Ping dead? the old man reached out his hand helplessly, bewildered by life.

  Think of Uncle’s hand already bearing the signs of decay, stretched, like a blindman seeking direction. Yes. And now see it with Vivien Lang’s eyes, because she touched it and recoiled. Yet she had held his hand down by the gate. Was she reminded of some fear? The hand of the man who exposed himself to her. The flaking painted hand of God in an Italian fresco. Mum Collins’s hand that morning when she covered her mouth at the omen of calling her relations the Whitey’s Fallen. Miss Brinsmead’s hand on the newspapers making a secret of the day. Or was it that hand in the grass, the severed wrist issuing a small blot of blood, the hand still there, halfway down the mountainside?

  BOOK TWO

  The Golden Fleece

  One

  The goldmining operations are twofold. First there is the main ridge settlement, a cluster of canvas dwellings, a jostle of tents like whitecrested waves, among which rough-hewn public buildings float their ungainly timber barges. The waterdiviner appears incongruous then, as he drifts about with his split rod quivering and a penny on his tongue to tell if it’s salt or fresh. Smoke rises from all quarters of the settlement and hangs perpetually in the treetops so that everything smells of it. Dogs and children riot unchecked. And at all times during daylight the mountainside issues a sound of lakewater breaking on pebble beaches as hundreds of fossickers rock their cradles, stone chippings racketing against the wooden rims and slapping backwards and forwards in the trays, till their eyes jump with strain and they disbelieve their failure. People whistle, pickaxes clink randomly. The creek water swirls down from the mountain clear and sweet till it reaches a network of channels, the races, cut in geometrical shapes, where miners squat in lines with their puddling tubs. The water is then scooped up and given back yellow, liquid clay washed clean of gold, so that it flows on slower, salted with the sweat of men. The unity of the place is in the frenzy of work. Main Ridge is hand-work personified, a chaos of rivalry, the individual as king. Every man is your enemy; if you miss a nugget today your neighbour will be sure to stumble across it tomorrow. Only newcomers on the field are able to work levelly, with sober patience, without emotion beyond a general expectancy. Older hands are either feverishly elated or else downcast, energetic with success or hopeless with lack of it (nothing can tire the former, everything exhausts the latter). Men jump claims and fight, they arm themselves, in gangs they assault each other, they beat up the licence inspectors who suspend the claims pegged by this one and that. Pits the size of manholes are dug and gold winkled out, little one-person mines with nostalgic names: For the Love of Irene, Stanford-Dingley, The Holy Mary Mother of God Goldmine, The Red Flag of Liberty Mine. People are in the holes working. People are working around them, along the creeks and inside the hill slopes. Men and women, they are all hectically alive, murderously joyously alive. Such is Main Ridge settlement with its shanties selling rum, its stooks of bark drying ready for making roofs, its washing hung up and its countless open fires where pots simmer, its self-appointed experts and officials, pimps and informers, quacks and spruikers, its drunks, no-hopers and cheerful layabouts, its hubbub of small-scale activity.

  Away on the northern horizon are the timber towers of the other kind of goldmining operation, the mines at the New Reef. Here huge forest trees lie felled and left to rot at odd angles on the ground, here wooden rail tracks weave their bumpy erratic course from minehead to crushing mill, impressive steam engines mounted on rubble huff and sizzle, driving moving-parts deep in the pits and tunnels, water can be heard perpetually splashing over the vanes of a pair of paddlewheels set up for the only electric generator ever seen in the district. The New Reef is the preserve of companies. Individual diggers have no place here. The crushing-mill stamps and thunders all day, horses whinny as they lug huge loads and drive windlasses round and around. The whim-boys in charge of these blinkered beasts grow dizzy with power. People are shouting orders, something seldom heard across the valley at the ridge. Here the rains wash mad rivers of stones and mud down the mountainside, setting the fallen trees rocking and groaning. In general the men work cheerfully and may be seen on occasion in large groups drinking tea from pannikins, but just as their security is greater so their excitement and energy are less. They might rarely be penniless but they’ll never be rich either; and riches are what it’s all about. Their gold is the company’s. Small wonder the Main Ridge people hold them in contempt.

  During cold winter mists, the frames at New Reef, like medieval siege-machines, float i
n air so that when the buckets are wound up they emerge from cloud; the fur frost eats through old boots and grows into feet as mould; shouted instructions bounce among the rocks like wooden balls; and during the all-obliterating act of copulation steam creeps out of lovers’ hair as their breaths come short, explosive, regular, timed to the sigh of pistons. Water freezes on the paddlewheels, the generator whines to immobility, modern civilization weakens and fades. The ancient god of slavery is invoked, till human pride survives only by frequent derisory excursions to Main Ridge to laugh at the mud-puddlers and the clay-caked ratlife popping indignantly out of slimy burrows. They are saved by the onslaught of spring. Spring hits the mountain with a deluge of rain followed by a blast of sunny days when cliffs crack and landslides gather force, when countless birds swoop down to scavenge among the diggers’ pantries, lizards as long as a mineshaft terrorize the dogs, butterflies grow strong enough to carry off the beads of gold, and a conspiracy of grasses covers the cleared soil overnight obscuring all trace of where gold might be discovered.

  Spring at Main Ridge is quite a different season, powdering the hills with wildflowers, washing away the hopeless dust of winter pickings, laying bare new shiny pellets of the precious metal, herding succulent mobs of wallabies to within easy shot, raising spirits and gilding the skin of young families, scattering new roofs on old shanties and patching the canvas city, bursting from the earth as lusty cabbage seedlings and potatoes, bearing the scent of new bread like triumphal banners among the trees, and gathering people in laughing crowds for the full rigour of the coming summer. The butcher might be seen on any Sunday afternoon, standing on his step in the sun, scissors in hand, clipping the hairs on his chest so the young women will still find him attractive; the publican’s wife ties gay ribbons to the scroll of her fiddle and the patrons dance till they’re struck down by drunkenness. And over at the Germans’ Camp a glee club, sick with sentiment, beefs out folksongs about hunting in the Black Forest and shipwreck on the River Rhine.

  Summer is the season of brawls and disputed claims at Main Ridge, wives are unfaithful to husbands, as are husbands to their wives, because of the weather; there are even husbands and husbands, wives and wives, who take revenge making covert gestures together in the small hours high up at the furthest edge of the goldfield. Illness strikes: first the people are half-blinded by sandy-blight and then they fall victim to dysentery. The only relief for the bowels is Mother McAloon’s Miracle Medicine (bring your own clean bottle) compounded of chalk and brandy with a dash of opium. Summer. Leaves hang limp and vertical in the sun. The ground turns to iron at the touch of a pickaxe. This is the time for poisonous snakes to pay their annual visit and for the water supply to turn brackish, for suspected foot-and-mouth disease to break out among the small herds of dairy cattle, for the bullock team to labour up from the plain so slowly all the goods come out spoilt and shrivelled, rotten and fermenting by the time they’re unloaded. Granny Collins declares ruffianism is rife. But it’s summer after all, season of excesses. Summer at Main Ridge is the time for white ants to bring down the shop buildings and chew church floorboards to lace, it descends on the settlement so that you breathe dust and speak clods of hard dirt, it is a magnet lifting scales of paint from rockinghorses, drawing the colours from washed clothes to disperse them on the glittering wind.

  For the New Reef mining companies, summer marks an annual record production, the eroded landscape left in the wake of spring now falls apart at the touch of organized labour, the mountain begins changing shape and yielding its secrets, in cool mineshafts the workmen sing to set the mountain itself murmuring of the new Jerusalem from tiny orifices, trucks squeal and bounce along the rails, the uprooted trees season into building timber and carpenters hunt out the tallow-woods for flooring, new windlasses reach higher than the old, packhorse tracks are widened into roads, a crusher is installed for the quartz reef, heaps of rivetted iron pipes arrive for a grandiose plan of tunnelling through the mountain for more water, long evenings gather up the sound of banjos and magnify them till the bush is alive with music. What could matter more than music in summer! The dancers are dancing, so that the moralists also flourish. And to cap it all a notable worker for the Good Templars Lodge assembles a choir to sing in the Wesleyan chapel. These are the quartz miners, the crushers, cock of the walk, stiff with braggadocio wearing their company’s colours as a sash or a hatband. Owned men, sold out and proud of it, disdainful of the clay-footed puddling sluicers down at Main Ridge.

  But when autumn comes the New Reef is re-named Dead Reef, which tells its own story. The spider-towers lean, abandoned. The relentless din of the crushers dwindles, stammers and is hushed. The rutted earth lies naked in its wounds. The wheels won’t turn. The steam engine rusts, with a stagnant pool of water oily as poison in its belly. The two churches each have the one bell they possess rung incessantly to ward off thunderstorms that might ruin the harvest. Harvest! This is the end. And fire breaks out, the first wild whisperings of flame scurrying among the grass. Foremen shout for bucket lines to form and squads of the last remaining workers equip themselves with beating bags. The sleepy army troops off into the early afternoon, heavy with bad food and nervous of danger. Where is the fire? they grumble. Where the hell is the fire? they call, sarcastic with relief. What bloody fire? Their hearts are not in it because why should they care, employees of the companies? And the autumn wind swoops blustering up the gullies to reply. Flames, tearing at the ground, ripping the vegetation apart, wrapped ragged around treetrunks, utter an answering blanket of smoke. Before anyone is prepared, fire comes jumping, snickering its dazzle of weapons on every side. The ears are filled with crackling, smoke piles cottonwool inside the lungs. The first treetops flare alight as giant flowers. The crown has caught, there’s nothing any man can do to stop it now. Smoke shoots up in an appalling rush, the sky turns copper, the workmen are on the run. Managers and foremen are running. The shareholders on the other side of the world know nothing of this and will never understand. Flames glorify the crushing mill and dance among the high trees, covering the forest in great leaps. Wallabies in the scrub are roasted and kangaroos topple as burning stumps. Lives are in danger. But God’s hand (it must surely be God) thwarts the catastrophe; a new wind sweeps in from the north-east and drives the fire back on itself, up the mountain and away from camp. The people of Gomorrah flee, they stuff their pilferings, their old survivals of identity, into socks and canvas pouches and by nightfall they’ve unharnessed their horses, packed the wagons; then their trembling lanterns may be seen forming a luminous, spotted caterpillar creeping down the mountain track, frightened by how long they’d stayed, how far they’d forgotten themselves, beaten by the greed for gold; the plunderers who leave behind nothing they have made but the ravages of machines in the choked valleys and their nightmare hummocks of salt. And they hear, as they pass, the residents of rival Main Ridge out in full force hacking firebreaks through the bush, clearing tracks and felling trees just in case the bushfire changes direction again, the women dragging buckets of their precious water to key points of the fire-watch, children raking the ground with branches to clear it of dead leaves, livestock protesting at being moved from their home paddocks down to the dam.

  By dawn the Main Ridge folk are ready; though the work of felling goes on, they’re sitting grimly in groups, not speaking, watching the smoke-line advance towards them. Then someone spots the first flames to cross the lower creek. They slough off tiredness, their rivalries forgotten. This, as they will later see, is the moment when a town is born, at this point they commit themselves to stay, without each other they could not survive, they are brothers and sisters in knowledge. The upper creek will seal their fate, being the centrepiece of their firebreak A teenage girl foams at the mouth and threshes on the ground in a fit brought on by the tension, but young Mr Whitey takes her gently in his mutilated hands and says it is a good omen. A treacherous wind swings about the compass chasing clumps of smoke. Now the sky is brown, driving
in one solid push to blind the defenders. And at that moment of blindness the fire leaps over the trees and among them, raging along the far bank, burning right down to the waterline. The fire has reached the upper creek. An ancient ironbark tree stands decked with ribbons of flame remembering the spinning maypole, black leaves float through the air. Burning twigs and grasses come bowling murderously across the gap, hopping clear over the water, nestling in the ready undergrowth. Men and women beat and beat these crackling colonies, calling for help or soaking more sacks for flails; the children squat behind keeping a lookout for fresh emergencies, tense with responsibility. Hour on hour the fight is held along this front, no respite for the aching exhausted people choked with smoke, the hairs scorched from their arms, quietly swearing at the relentless play of wind. The ancient ironbark falls with a splitting crash, carrying its huge bouquet of flame across the creek. At one touch in that hot air, the surrounding bushes leap alight, trees squeal like animals in the embrace of fire; the population, arms raised to shield their eyes from the heat, edge towards the spot, then a dozen men charge among the flames risking their lives. The last reserves of water are desperately poured about. Some older folk give up with tears, they are collapsing to that blank of no longer knowing why they should keep on, and haven’t they lived through enough?

  Then. Suddenly. There’s nothing else to do. The tree is a corpse. Burnt blots lie in the grass around it. The roaring and popping of the fire has fallen quiet. The black wasteland hangs in rags, empty of life, silent. The mountain stands up stilly in the evening. Smoke trickles free from the guttering wrecks of gums. The fallen ironbark leaking smoke. An hour’s walk away, through a charcoal desert, the new front of the fire blazes with vast waves of flame sweeping away towards the foothills, the swamps and lakes of the plain. The people sit. Their eyeballs are scaled with flakes of soot, their hair stuck out stiff and clownlike with smoke, hearts beating painfully from the strain, a profound sense of well-being in the blood, and smiles breaking out on their white-caked lips. They go back home to a peaceful evening scene of sluicing down the horses, water plashing, quiet voices sounding hollowly, the stamp of a hoof, the pleasurable snorting of a beast that looks back at its long glossy body.