Edward and Elizabeth and I could walk about our own acres and each day see some new shoot, some flush of green. It was by no means Devon. But there was the familiar sound of a rooster at dawn, and the comfortable bustling of hens in their yard, and pleasure in watching them flap and fluster back into their shelter as the sun set, as if they could picture the teeth of the native dogs. I loved that flock of mine, the complacent fat hens gossiping to each other as they scratched, the rooster standing up on his dunghill announcing how important he was.
Mr Macarthur had bought a pair of peacocks that had been sent on a ship from the Cape. I found them to be insolent, boastful birds, with their bullying screams, and the cock draggling its tail in the dust or quivering it upright. They were a boast by their owner too. Peacocks were part of a gentleman’s estate.
ATTACKS
In Sydney it was possible to imagine that the natives were a temporary inconvenience, but those of us who lived away from the town could cherish no such illusions. Here the wild lands were not out of sight beyond hills and across water. Starting a few yards beyond the outhouse, immeasurable miles of what was strange dwarfed the speck of what was familiar.
The township of Parramatta was so heavily defended that no trouble was likely to come to it, nor to our house, within earshot of the barracks. But out in the new farmlands to the north there were attacks. Not every week, but like a headache, always returning. Crops were burned, stock killed, huts robbed. It was thought that many of the attacks were led by a man named Pemulwuy, but there were other leaders too, their names unknown to us. Whoever the warriors were, their talent for warfare was evident. They knew how to do the most damage to the settlers at the least risk to themselves, quickly raiding an isolated place, then disappearing back into the forest. They never made a direct massed charge and never attacked a township. They left a farm alone if there were soldiers stationed nearby, or if the farmer had a gun. Never struck twice in the same place.
Now and then a farmer was speared, but everyone knew that out on the isolated farms many more could have been killed. The warriors did not seem concerned so much with killing their enemies as with striking at the very foundation of their existence, and for this they had the perfect weapon: fire. In late summer, fields of corn ready to be harvested were burned out, the labour of the past year and the food for the next destroyed in half an hour. The power of the weapon lay in its simplicity and the way it worked hand-in-hand with nature. A fire sparked on a day of hot wind was unstoppable.
Thieving, with or without violence, was an activity the people here were uniquely qualified to understand. What was happening out beyond the settlements was something else. Corn burned rather than stolen, hogs slaughtered but uneaten, huts robbed of clothing when the natives had little use for it: in the eyes of the settlers this was proof that the natives were irrational, childish, spiteful. How else could their behaviour be read?
The general instructions from Whitehall remained as they had always been, that bloodshed should be avoided when possible. Natives should, when practicable, be taken prisoner and brought in to be dealt with like any other criminals. Buckshot should be loaded in the muskets rather than balls, to terrify and wound rather than kill. But the Dear Dunce was happy to leave the details to his commanders’ discretion, and the people on the farms made up their own minds about how to defend themselves.
My husband had arranged to be appointed commander of the Parramatta garrison only as part of a larger strategy, but it soon became clear that for once he had miscalculated. Until now his military duties had demanded very little of him. Now they threatened to take over his life.
As commander at Parramatta, it was Mr Macarthur who was responsible for dealing with the attacks and depredations on the outlying farms. After each attack he was obliged to send men out to track down the perpetrators, though no one had any illusions about the likely success of this, as the natives did not stand still to be caught. Detachments had to be organised to stand guard over the most vulnerable farms, even though the natives were not blind, and wherever the soldiers were, the natives attacked somewhere else.
Still, the motions had to be gone through, the appearance of control maintained. My husband was kept busy, moving men around from one place to another and trying to guess where the next attack might be made. A serious fear was that runaway convicts would join the natives and add muskets to spears. The situation smouldered on, neither bursting into frank flame nor being extinguished, but taking up more and more of Mr Macarthur’s time and energy when there were other, more profitable uses for them.
He refused to dignify what was happening with the word war. It was the erratic and malicious actions of savages, he maintained, essentially pointless and ultimately futile. It was true that this was not the kind of war that soldiers like him meant by that word. In their tradition, not to stand in formation and fight an orderly battle was called by another name: treachery. Men guilty of treachery deserved no mercy.
In any case, he assured me that he had no intention of losing sleep over depredations led by men he dismissed as naked savages. Parramatta was in no danger whatsoever, he said, and he brushed off the attacks on the farms.
– Oh, let them burn out a few crofters, he said. We cannot protect every hut and every cob of corn. But I take the long view, my dear. Make no mistake, Pemulwuy and his fellows will not occupy our time for much longer.
There was an edge to his tone that made me look at him, but he only gave me a tight bland smile.
BURRAMATTAGAL
I had been told that, in the first weeks of settlement at Parramatta, there had been the beginnings of cordial relations with the Burramattagal. A commerce had been struck up, an exchange of bread and salt beef for fish. But at some point things had gone wrong, some business of a native canoe wantonly destroyed by one of the convicts, and there was no more trade.
A few Burramattagal families still lived around us, in the ever-smaller places where grants had not yet made them trespassers. These people chose a strategy different from Pemulwuy’s: they simply became invisible. Two or three men might be seen down by the river’s edge with their fishing spears when the eel were plentiful, and groups of women with their children hunted crabs among the mangroves. I would have liked to get close enough to greet them, thinking that the words Mr Dawes had taught me might be understood. But they always saw me as I approached, and had disappeared before I reached the spot where they had been, leaving nothing to see but shifting leaf-shadow. We were two sets of people inhabiting the same space, each set going about its affairs as if the other were not there.
One afternoon soon after we removed to Parramatta, I surprised some women down by the river who disappeared in their usual way. When I got to the place where they had been, I found a hidden fire, hot embers without smoke or flame, and nearby, left behind in the haste to be away, a stick of the kind I had seen them using to dig. When I picked it up, it seemed still warm from the grasp of a hand.
A person had to hold it to see how cunningly it had been wrought. The wood, darkened as if from a fire, was hard and dense like metal, but the weight balanced itself sweetly in the hand. One end was shaped into a rounded bulge that you could lean on to give yourself leverage. The other was a sharp flattened blade. And there was the place where the hand grasped it, polished to a dull gleam. I could see that it was the product of many hours of labour, as beautifully and knowledgeably made as any carriage wheel or dining chair.
There was an urge to keep it. To walk away feeling it balanced in my hand. To take it home, show it to others, display it on a mantelpiece, steal some of its glory for myself.
But there was an intimacy about grasping it where that other woman grasped it, her hand smoothing it to a fine gleam over the years. It put me in mind of the big spoon my mother had used to stir her custards, one side worn away from so many years of stirring against the bottom of the pan, leaving its mark on the shape of the spoon as if she had signed it with her name.
I was ashamed
of my urge to take. I laid the stick back down beside the fire. She would come back for it and be glad to see it still there. She would recognise that I could have taken it away, and had not. It would be a communication between us. A friendly greeting, perhaps even the start of a conversation.
As I lay that night waiting for sleep, I mused about the trade of fish for salt beef that we had been told of. I thought of those Gadigal women I had come to know, whose insight about Mr Dawes and myself had far outstripped mine, and whose subtle humour had needed to be explained to me as you might explain something to a child. Those women would never have been so dull as to believe sour salt beef was a fair exchange for fresh fish. Why would their neighbours the Burramattagal be any less shrewd?
Another possibility occurred to me with a feeling like relief, a puzzle solved. Trade was our word. But what the Burramattagal were doing, when they exchanged their fish for our beef, was perhaps not commerce. Perhaps it was something more like education. Look, they might have been saying. I am showing you the proper way to do things: I give to you, you give to me. And in accepting your inferior food, I am teaching you grace, forgiveness and generosity. Perhaps also shame.
When the exchange of goods ended, it may have been because the pupil was too dull to learn. Too coarse-grained to feel shame.
I had been pleased with myself for using the stick as a friendly message to its owner. But was it possible that it had been left as a message for me—one that I had been too obtuse even to recognise as a message? This is my place, and this object shows that it is my place. As one of its manifold uses, the stick might be a title deed as clear and unambiguous, to a person who knew how to read it, as the piece of paper on which was written J. Macarthur 100 acres.
It was a shadow at the edge of my life, the consciousness that I was on land that other people knew was theirs. On the days I walked without glimpsing any of the Burramattagal, I was glad to pretend that there was no shadow.
THE FIRST SHEEP
A hundred acres was not a fraction of what Mr Macarthur wanted, and we had not seen out a year at Parramatta before he was trying to buy the land of the man on our western side, an ex-convict by the name of Ruse. But it turned out that, on board the Neptune, Mr Macarthur had delivered himself of some particular insult to the convict woman who was now the wife of Ruse, and Ruse had not forgotten. He steadily refused any price that Mr Macarthur offered, and in the end, to make his point, he sold it to someone else for half what it was worth. Ruse was the only man I knew who had ever bested my husband.
Mind you, I heard later that the poor fellow had fallen on hard times, and I wondered. The Inspector of Public Works was a dangerous person to cross.
The way to get more land by government grant was to show that you had made the most of what you already had, so Mr Macarthur drove Hannaford and the convicts hard. But crops were slow. Clearing the land required too much labour. If a man had his eye on a big spread, he needed sheep or cattle that could simply range between the trees and eat the native pasture. As their numbers multiplied, so would the acreage they needed. Mr Macarthur’s eyes shone with the arithmetic of procreation.
In short order he bought the only stock he could get, which was sixty Bengal sheep off the Atlantic out of Calcutta. Accustomed to the great woolly tubs that had made up Grandfather’s flock, I could barely recognise these ugly creatures as sheep. They were sad scraggly things, no better than goats, covered with coarse wiry hair in dirty colours, twitching their strange dangling ears. You have been diddled, Captain Macarthur, I thought. Someone has spotted a draper’s son coming along who has never seen a sheep at close quarters.
– It is what we can get, he said indifferently. I will look for a chance to obtain better, but for the time being they will serve.
The sheepstealer Hannaford went to inspect the new arrivals the first afternoon as they huddled together on the grassy rise behind the house.
– What do you think, Mr Hannaford, I said, they are a sad apology for sheep, are they not?
– Ah well, Mrs Macarthur, he said.
I had laid a trap for him without meaning to, for what shepherd criticises the animals belonging to his master? He eyed me from under his hat-brim.
– Indeed they are not sheep such as I am familiar with, he said. But they may surprise us yet, Mrs Macarthur, I will do my best with them, you can be sure of that.
He turned to catch one of the sheep. It was apparent from the understanding authority with which he handled the animal that Mr Macarthur may have been diddled with respect to the sheep, but not with respect to the shepherd. This was a man who knew what he was about.
Soon after the Bengals arrived, Hannaford came up from Sydney with three Irish sheep, two ewes and a young ram. The big-framed Irish were a pleasure to look at, solid and creamy-woolled in spite of the months on the ship. A leg in each corner, as Grandfather had said of his strongest sheep. They joined the Bengals up on the hill and set to straight away on the tufty grass as if they knew nothing of sweet Irish pasture.
It became a daily pleasure to stroll up that slope in the late afternoon with Mrs Brown and Edward and Elizabeth as the sheep were being walked back down to the folds. I called the place the Fairview, from the way the land eased up into a natural stage, the ground falling away on every side, trees standing solemnly among the grass as if planted to enhance the beauty of a gentleman’s park. From there you could see as far as the line of distant mountains that marked the perimeter of our world.
To step out—the birds making their music from every tree, the air with that damp, rich end-of-day thickness, each grass stalk with its own halo of light, its own thread of shadow—that was a humble delight. I loved to watch the blue of the mountains grow deeper and more mysterious, waited to see the sun slide down behind them. I tried to explain to Edward why the last pale light on the slope was wiped away by the shadow crawling across it. We were moving, I told him. We were on a great ball turning away from the sun, like an orange held up to a candle. But I was no Mr Dawes. I could not convince my dear little boy. Never mind, I thought, he will come to it in his own time, and might remember with a smile how his mother had tried.
Hannaford was there too, making sure the shepherd lad did not try to rush the sheep on their way down to the fold, or leave any behind. Had a piece of string to make the tally, and I liked to watch his big fingers sliding, knotting, sliding, knotting, as Grandfather’s had done.
Mr Macarthur told me he had got the Irish in order to put some meat on the skinny Bengals. Mutton always fetched a good price. I doubted that the Irish ram would recognise these goatish creatures as his own species, and wondered whether the light-framed Bengal ewes might be outraged at this heavy stranger approaching them. But one afternoon we walked up the hill earlier than usual, and I could see that the ewes were skittish, ready for the rams. Hannaford was watching them.
– Good afternoon, Mrs Macarthur, he said. And to you, Mrs Brown.
The sheep were moving uneasily, the rams wandering to one ewe, then another, as if they had mislaid something and were asking for help to find it. The Irish ram was scouting around a Bengal ewe and one of the skinny Bengal rams challenged him, but the Irish did not hesitate to see him off and the Bengal did not stay to argue.
– They are, that is, they are, Hannaford said, awkward for once.
– The ewes are ready, are they not, I said, very matter-of-fact, to tell him that a ram covering a ewe was not going to shock me. Watch this now, Edward, I thought. It will be your turn one day to sidle up to some woman and try your luck with her.
– I am curious to watch Irish meet Bengal, I said. How do you think it will work itself out, Mr Hannaford?
He spread his big strong hands in a gesture of making no pronouncements.
– Never in the history of the world has that been done, Mrs Macarthur, he said. We are here at the world’s unknown end.
I knew he was thinking arse-end.
Mrs Brown heard the unspoken word as clear as I did, an
d I felt her shift and cough as if to smother amusement. Hannaford’s eyes went sideways towards her, and the three of us stood with faces lit with humour suppressed, not quite glancing at each other.
Now the Irish was nosing at the ewe’s backside and shaking his ears at her. Pawed at her side, his foreleg scratching at her, while she took no notice, only stepping forward as if she had spotted a better tuft of grass, so he had to follow after, still pawing away at her side.
In my mind it was Mr Macarthur tickling at my arm, which was his way of telling me he required my services, and the ewe was myself, thinking, oh, must you? I made some sort of noise as I saw the resemblance, and Mrs Brown looked at me, our eyes met, and we were two women joined in amusement at the antics of men.
It turned out that the Irish ram was by no means too proud to mount the Bengal, no matter how ugly she was, and she took him as placidly as if he were an old habit.
When Hannaford came to tell us that the Bengals were lambing, we all walked up the hill—Mr Macarthur came with us for once, to count his increase—on a clear still morning with a thick selvage of grey cloud hanging above the horizon, and the sun gleaming through the pearl of it.
Already, even with some of the ewes not yet delivered of their lambs, the increase in the flock was remarkable. Grandfather’s sheep generally had only the one lamb, but most of these Indian sheep stood with two lambs nuzzling at them. Some had three, and a few of these unpromising ewes had produced four healthy lambs, as if they thought they were bitches dropping a litter. They were in good heart, had thickened up on our rich pastures, and their lambs were strong as they ran about among their shadows.
Mr Macarthur, having less knowledge of sheep than Hannaford and myself, was not astonished at the fecundity of the Bengals. But was as proud as if he himself had sired the things.
A Room Made of Leaves Page 20
