Outback Station

by Aaron Fletcher

  At the storeroom, the clerk, an aged convict, issued David sets of brown wool trousers, coats, and rough cotton shirts. Carrying the clothes, David went to the barracks, a sprawling, gloomy structure of slab lumber that quartered some three hundred convicts. A number of men were loitering in the barracks when David went inside, and they watched in silence as he gathered up his belongings and left, knowing from experience that the wisest course was to leave the tall, muscular man completely alone.

  The foremen's huts near the barracks were scarcely less dingy than the main building, but David was more than satisfied as he stepped into an empty one and looked around. It offered solitude as well as escape from the filth and stench of the barracks. He put his things on the cot, then went to the bathhouse.

  After washing off the coal dust and grime, he lathered his face and shaved, as he did daily. Returning to the hut, he looked at the new clothes in satisfaction and put on a set. Wearing yellow woolens that identified convicts as far as the eye could see had never particularly bothered him, but his had become shabby, while the new clothes were neat and clean.

  When he finished dressing, David walked to the cookhouse as others straggled toward it from the barracks. At a workbench beside the building, one of the convict women scrubbed the kettles. Young and pretty, she drew whistles and ribald comments as well as polite greetings from convicts, which she disregarded.

  Glancing up at David, however, she smiled warmly. "Wearing browns now, are we?" she remarked gaily. "When I first saw you, I knew you wouldn't be wearing canaries very long." Her voice became softer, her smile inviting. "If you asked me, I'd go walking beside the river with you."

  David made no reply, ignoring her as he passed. She flushed with embarrassment and anger, then tossed her head and dismissed him with a shrug as she bent over the kettles again.

  In the noisy cookhouse, David stood in line for a bowl of tepid, watery fish soup and a slice of coarse bread. Taking it to the end of one of the long, puncheon tables where no one else was sitting, he sat down and ate. Amid the hubbub of conversation, many of the convicts complained loudly about the unappetizing meal, but David ate without distaste or enjoyment, but simply satisfied his need for food.

  When he left the cookhouse, he walked past the village and down the peninsula between the river and the ocean. It was a deserted wasteland where he often came. The crests of the sandy dunes were covered with gorse and tussocks of hardy grass, thickets of wiry boxbush filling the hollows, and clusters of tall eucalyptus trees. The trees were still in full foliage even at the end of autumn, the eucalyptuses shedding bark instead of their leaves.

  Gulls and terns circled overhead in the sunset, and the trees were alive with a variety of noisy parrots finding roosts for the night. A flock of galahs, small cockatoos with gray backs and pink breasts, passed overhead against a cloud touched with crimson by the setting sun. The birds seemed to change color when they swerved, showing gray then pink and then gray once more.

  At the foot of the cliffs flanking the mouth of the river, the blending fresh and salt water swirled around stumps of petrified trees, remnants of a forest from eons ago. Across from Hobby's Head, the southern point of the river entrance, the peninsula rose to a knoll overlooking the shoreline. On the knoll was a solitary gum tree, gnarled from the buffeting of ocean storms, but still tenaciously sturdy and robust. Sitting under the tree in the fading daylight, David pulled out his watch.

  Twice during the voyage on the convict transport ship that had brought him to Australia, David had savagely beaten men who had tried to steal the watch. While it was not a particularly expensive timepiece, to him it was priceless, worth immeasurably more than the few guineas it would cost in a shop. But it was also a source of constant torture, an agony that haunted him with every breath he took.

  Inside the lid of the watch was a miniature of a young, beautiful woman. As he looked at it, David writhed inwardly with yearning love that was bitterly caustic from a sense of betrayal. It was a searing, consuming torment that had become more intense rather than fading with time.

  Chapter Two

  Aboard the Phoebe, a sloop that plied between Sydney, Newcastle, and ports in Van Diemen's Land, Lieutenant Oliver Bethune stepped down into the companionway to the crew cabin as he took out his snuffbox. He opened it and inhaled a pinch of the powder, then stifled a sneeze. Sighing in satisfaction, he put the box away and brushed his nose with his handkerchief as he went back up into the cold, winter wind sweeping the deck.

  The sloop was low in the water, its hold full of coal and stacks of thick cedar slabs lashed down on the deck. Pulling up his collar against the wind, Bethune sat on a stack of the aromatic wood. He looked at the coast several miles off the starboard beam and contemplated the possibility of his being transferred to a regiment in India or Africa.

  It appeared favorable because he had solicited the help of his family and friends in London who had influence in military assignments. His chances of promotion would be better in India or Africa, but far more important, he would be a soldier again instead of a jailer. He hoped he would find mail with encouraging news on the subject waiting for him in Sydney.

  As he scanned the horizon, he saw that the trip from Newcastle was nearing an end. In the far distance to the south, the sails of two ships out at sea from Sydney came into view. A few minutes later, Jackson Heads, the entrance to the harbor, rose above the tops of the waves.

  At the bow of the sloop, two crewmen were relaxing during the run down the coast ahead of a favorable wind. One of them stood up, looking back at the man at the helm. ''Jackson Heads off the starboard bow, Captain Barnes," he called. "Shall we make ready to put about?"

  "Wait your hurry, jocko," the captain replied. "I'm the boss cockie here, and I'll tell you when to get ready."

  The master and owner of the vessel, a tall, well-built man in his early twenties, had the accent of those born in Australia. It was completely unlike any that the lieutenant had ever heard. While it had overtones of Cockney and Irish accents, it was neither of those nor any other regional accent from Great Britain. Twangy, sharp, and nasal, it divided some words and crowded them into adjoining words. It was unique and unmistakable, as distinctive as the land of its origin.

  His efforts to be transferred gave him a transient's attitude of detachment, making him an observer of the Australian people and their customs. Social barriers existed, principally between free immigrants and emancipists. However, among the free immigrants was a wealthy, landed group called "exclusives," who kept aloof from everyone. The groups were divided by social distinctions and not by wealth, because some of the emancipists were as wealthy as many of the exclusives.

  The activities of the exclusives were the subject of much amused commentary among other free immigrants and emancipists, who often referred to them as the "bunyip aristocracy." It was a term that always provoked great hilarity, because the bunyip was a part of Aborigine mythology. Supposedly, it was a hideous creature that inhabited ponds and streams, leaping out to devour the unwary who came to drink.

  Social distinctions had done nothing to inhibit progress in the colony, Oliver thought, noticing the numerous vessels as the sloop drew closer to the port. A major transshipment point of sandalwood, pearlshell, beche-de-mer, and spar timber from all over the South Pacific, Sydney carried on a lively trade with ports in England, Ireland, India, China, and the United States. In addition, scores of whaling ships from various nations called at Sydney frequently, many of them using it as a base of operation.

  When the port was almost straight southwest from the sloop, Captain Barnes shouted to the crewmen, "Look alive there, mates! Check the lashings on the deck cargo to make certain it won't shift when we come about, then we'll go in with the wind off the quarter."

  "No need to bother with the deck cargo, Captain," a crewmen replied. "We drew up those lashings tighter than a nun's knees."

  "You'd best shut your tucker hole and take a look at those lashings," the captain retorte
d. "Ahead of a quartering wind, we'll have a rail awash, and that wood mustn't wobble about. If it shifts as much as a hair's breadth, I'll batten down this wheel and use your talleywhacker as a pinch bar to snub up those lashings."

  The crewmen laughed, going to the stacks of cedar and examining the ropes securing them to the deck. Finding some that had stretched slightly during the run from Newcastle, they used a boat hook as a lever to tighten the ropes and retie the knots. "Stand ready to let go the boom," Captain Barnes ordered when the crewmen finished. "Lieutenant Bethune, have a care that the boom doesn't take you over the side when it comes abaft."

  Oliver returned to the companionway and went down into it, taking out his snuffbox. As the rudder gear rumbled and the sloop began turning, the captain shouted at the crewmen to release the lines on the boom. Pulleys chattered, ropes whipping through them, and heavy timbers groaned as the vessel swung to the southwest. The dark shadow of the thick boom and sail crossed the companionway hatch to the port side of the deck.

  As Captain Barnes shouted orders, the crewmen scrambled about, securing the boom and trimming the foresail. Oliver brushed his nose with his handkerchief as he went back up to the deck. Ahead of the wind off the starboard quarter, the sloop was heeled over sharply to port, the tops of the waves splashing over the rail on that side. Moving carefully across the slanted deck, Bethune returned to the stack of wood and sat down.

  As it sailed toward the harbor entrance, the sloop passed within a hundred yards of a dozen Aborigine men, women, and children in three bark canoes. They were fishing, as well as cooking and eating the fish, the smoke rising from fires on clay in the center of the canoes. The captain shouted something to them in their language, and they laughed happily as they replied in a chorus of voices, holding up several large fish for him to see.

  A few minutes later, sandstone cliffs, soaring two hundred and fifty feet, flanked the harbor entrance and towered over the sloop. At the waterline was a jumble of boulders the size of houses. The sea was more turbulent near the coast. The long swells that had run unimpeded across seven thousand miles from South America slammed into the boulders. They exploded, turning into a maelstrom of boiling foam and hurling shimmering spray a hundred feet into the air.

  The spray drifted across the deck of the Phoebe as it smoothly rounded North Head into the harbor. In the shelter of the cliffs, the vessel slowed as it started up the vast expanse of water. Captain Barnes shouted orders, and the crewmen raced about, trimming the sails to the lighter wind. As the sloop glided on up the harbor, past a reef and outlying rocks called the Sow and Pigs, the heights of the cliffs were lower and the breeze freshened again.

  Ahead of the sloop, a cargo ship moved slowly, its sails patched and ragged from a long, stormy voyage. Peering at it closely, Oliver made out its name, the Harmony out of Bristol. The sloop was catching up with the ship, and one of the crewmen pointed to it as he called, "We're overtaking her smartly, Captain."

  "Of course we are!" the young captain replied impatiently. "That old scow has a bottom as foul as yours and rags for sails, while Phoebe can make good headway in a heavy dew ahead of a lamb's fart of wind. We'll be unloading cargo before she wets her anchors."

  The distance between the two vessels continued to close. Only two hundred feet from the ship, the sloop began nosing past it. At the rail of the ship were some fifteen men and women, with several children. Evidently free immigrants from England, and showing the effects of their months at sea, they were exuberantly relieved that their voyage was ending. They waved happily and shouted greetings to the sloop, and one man's voice rang out over the rest as he asked how much farther it was to Sydney.

  "Sydney, did you say?" Captain Barnes exclaimed in pretended astonishment. "You're a bloody long way from there, jocko. Sydney is in Australia, you know, and this is the Bay of Islands in New Zealand."

  The people fell silent, all of them motionless for a long second. Then, turning as one, they rushed toward the quarterdeck in a bedlam of angry voices. The captain of the ship came into view as he stepped to the edge of the quarterdeck and looked down at the people. Shaking his head vigorously and replying to them, he motioned up the harbor. The people disagreed in a babble of voices, pointing to the sloop.

  The captain looked at the sloop, then stormed down the steps to the main deck. Leaning over the rail, he shook his fist and bellowed in rage, calling Captain Barnes a lying scoundrel. The captain and the crewmen howled with laughter as the sloop drew away from the ship. Oliver smiled, both amused and sympathetic toward the travel-weary voyagers.

  Up the harbor, the cliffs diminished into ledges between numerous inlets. The coves were densely forested, the underbrush striving for sunlight under the canopies of huge eucalyptuses. Occasionally Oliver spotted a tree with a large oval scar where Aborigines had chopped off a slab of bark that was shaped to fit over a skeleton of sticks for the hull of a canoe.

  Where streams had carved gullies in the sandstone, paving it with beds of colorful algae, giant cabbage palms spread their fronds and provided damp shade for a variety of ferns and mosses. Along the shore tons of shell had accumulated at the entrance of caves where countless generations of Aborigines had eaten oysters and discarded the shells.

  At the largest of the shell middens, boats were drawn up on the shore. There, convicts worked around smoking stone kilns, burning the shell for lime to make construction mortar. In some of the coves, crews of convicts were felling trees, trimming them, and assembling the logs into rafts at the edge of the water to tow up the harbor to Sydney.

  Pinchgut, Goat, and Cockatoo Islands, and other islands rose out of the harbor, some only bare knobs of stone. The shore dipped back into larger, sheltered bights, including Parsley Bay and Farm Cove. Whalers and other vessels were at anchor in some of them, their crews making repairs.

  The harbor extended on to the west, narrowing into the mouth of the Parramatta River, and the sloop turned in at Sydney Cove. On a rocky point at the west side of the anchorage, ramshackle huts were set along narrow, winding alleys. This thieves' kitchen of the colony was where some female ex-convicts worked as whores. Officially designated the Rocks, it was more popularly called the Pissmire.

  Vessels of all descriptions were at anchor in the wide, sheltered bay, as lighters ferried cargo between them and the piers. Others were docked at the wharfs. Warehouses, storage yards, refitting docks, and a shipyard lined the waterfront, and the town spread up the slopes back from the cove. It was neat and pleasant, with streets of shops and small manufactures. Farther back, half-timbered houses and tidy cottages built of freestone were fronted by well-tended yards enclosed in hedges and paling fences.

  When the sails were furled and the anchors set, a crewman rowed the lieutenant to the piers. From a distance, the town always reminded Oliver of English port towns and seaside communities, but his sense of familiarity faded at close range. There were acacia bushes instead of ivy and privet hedges, noisy, colorful parrots took the place of wrens and finches, and he heard the distinctive Australian accent on every side.

  Most of all, it was different because of the canary woolens of convicts. Scores of them were working or filing down the streets to tasks, some followed by guards. Oliver passed a group repairing holes in a street, wearing leg irons that identified them as either new arrivals or convicts being punished for minor offenses.

  Farther back in the town were large, luxurious private homes, and the homes of government officials. Government House was a two-story stone building in the Regency style, set back on landscaped grounds from a wide, shady street. A church and other large structures were being built on the street, evidence of the governor's large-scale construction program.

  Inside Government House, Oliver crossed the lofty, expansive foyer and ascended the wide staircase to an anteroom outside the governor's office. He took a seat and waited. Soon after, the colonial judge advocate exited the governor's office, then an aide showed the lieutenant into the large, well-furnished room.
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  At fifty-nine, Governor Lachlan Macquarie was a tall, lean man with a military bearing from a lifetime as a professional soldier. Pausing inside the door, the lieutenant bowed. "Good day, Excellency, and thank you for receiving me so soon."

  "I've been looking forward to seeing you, Lieutenant Bethune," Governor Macquarie replied as he returned the bow, a slight Scottish burr in his deep voice. "Please sit down. I was reading your last report on activities at Newcastle again this morning, and I'm very pleased with it."

  The lieutenant sat on a chair in front of the desk and took out papers he had brought to present to the governor. The aide helped Governor Macquarie find the report on Newcastle among the papers on his desk, then left. The governor put the report aside for the moment and sat back in his chair. "Now, what do you have that you'd like to discuss, Lieutenant?"

  Handing the governor a paper, Oliver explained that it was a list of convicts he was recommending for a ticket-of-leave which would set aside the remainder of the men's sentences so they could find work in the colony or do whatever else they wished. However, it could be revoked for any offense. The governor put on his spectacles, looked at the list, and discussed each of the convicts with Oliver. Satisfied, he nodded in approval and put the list aside for his clerks to prepare the documents.

  The other paper the lieutenant presented was more controversial, a recommendation for a pardon. As the governor frowned musingly and studied the paper, Oliver understood his reasons for hesitation. Many of the landowners in the colony, having influential friends in London, had brought pressure to bear on the governor through official channels because of the number of tickets-of-leave and especially pardons he had granted.

  Those disapproving property owners objected on the basis that convicts should serve full terms in the interests of justice, but Oliver knew their real motives. Landowners were authorized to have convict workers. In return for the labor, the owners provided room, board, and clothing for the convicts. But between those convicts the governor employed on public construction and the number granted tickets-of-leave and pardons, some landowners rarely had as many convict workers as they wanted.