Long smiled and lowered his lean face. ‘It suffices when they are proper meted. In the meantime it’s the sad truth there are no perfect men here, Mr Bettany. All the perfect men are in Parliament.’
Long soon left the table again, and when I had settled the bill and brought the rest of the men out of the inn, we were arrested by a scream from the wagon. Long had the barely resuscitated Clancy naked at the tail of the cart and was beating him earnestly with a knout of rope. Clancy was not tethered but somehow knew that to move away would entail worse punishment. This was what Long meant by warnings and, remembering the magistrate’s advice that in the high plain Long and I would be the sole authority, I chose not to intervene for the moment. But presently, when he brought the knout crashing across Clancy’s jaw line, I moved up and ordered him to cease. He gave the grey and tottering Clancy his clothing back, and then stepped away, looked at me, blinking rage out of his eyes, and said, ‘We shall not be shamed or delayed further, Mr Bettany.’
I was pleased Long possessed such volatility, but flattered myself I didn’t. Perhaps it was in such excess of feeling that crime arose. If so, where was my father’s share? I had not seen it. It was hidden now beneath the restrained features of a Tasmanian sheep farmer and solicitor.
That night we slept amongst tall trees and a light frost settled as I profoundly rested.
I AM PROPOSED TO, AND START BUILDING A HOMESTEAD
When I reached Goulburn and reported to Mr Finlay, as I expected he told me to bring the flocks into pasture of his, and he sat astride a black mare beside me as we watched our sheep into his fields. As Long, my men and the dogs drove them in he murmured, ‘Passable, passable,’ which from his canny tongue meant something like, ‘Excellent! Excellent!’
Since Mrs Finlay was in Sydney, Mr Finlay’s daughter of fourteen or fifteen years, Phoebe, a young lady with whom both Hobbes and I had become favourites during our recent visit, was ex officio chatelaine of the house. Phoebe, as I have already mentioned, had a grand prospect. Her father intended to send her to Europe for instruction and finishing, and so she would return to New South Wales a young woman of accomplishment. There was a particular school in Geneva to which a number of young titled British women were sent. Mr Finlay told me at table how many letters he had needed to write to the English and French nuns of Geneva, who had educated the noblewomen of Europe over the past century and a half. He had needed to enlist the help of the Colonial Secretary in Whitehall, with whom he’d been to school in Edinburgh.
But despite his evident weakness for British titles, Mr Finlay seemed a devout Australian and could not see his daughter, once she had been adequately exposed to the cultural glories of the world, embracing any other future than that of a New South Wales woman. Neither, it seemed, could Phoebe, as I discovered in the most remarkable and perilous way.
I woke on my last night at the Finlays to find Phoebe standing in my room in her nightclothes but at a great distance from my bed and by the window, where moonlight did something to soften her childlike – although not utterly childlike – form. She was present in the manner of someone who has entered a hall to make a speech and was just clearing her voice to begin.
I sat up, feeling naked in my nightshirt.
‘Mr Bettany,’ she announced. ‘I regret to wake you. But I think you might care to know that at the end of my European polishing I should like to join you on your tableland. I could be your helpmeet. Because I leave for Europe in six weeks, I must seek a guarantee from you. Are you willing to delay marrying for four years? Until I return to New South Wales?’
I knew she would not appreciate laughter from me. I said that I was flattered, and then realised that I was indeed, and I felt a sort of midnight urgency to give her my strongest undertaking. But wisely I resisted it. I explained it was a large decision for a man, and I would need to consider it.
‘God will guide you,’ she told me airily, but also with such vigour and confident prescience that I feared she could not be sent away with some adult prevarication as the only fruit from her dialogue with me.
‘I hope He will,’ I managed to say.
Fortunately this pious hope seemed to satisfy her, for she began to leave, her white feet crossing the boards to the door. But before vanishing she laid down a condition, which coming from the lips of one so young, surprised me. ‘I would, of course, expect you to remain utterly chaste in the interim.’
Once she was gone it was possible to look on all that had passed as, in a sense, play acting, and I could not understand why I remained half-awake for the rest of the night and woke at dawn feeling not ecstatic but pleasantly exhilarated. I was the least impetuous of young men – I was determined that no one would accuse me of rashness, as my father had been accused.
When I left that morning, being seen away from the portico by Mr Finlay, Phoebe strolled beside me, in a way which might indicate harmless infatuation to her parent. I had my speech prepared to explain to her that she would meet young men, though it was unlikely that where I intended to spend the next four years I would meet young women.
‘What do you say to my concept?’ she asked me and I saw her green eyes raised to me, and her wonderful heart-shaped face.
‘I can’t make any serious pledge even if I wanted to,’ I said. ‘Let’s decide nothing till you sail home again. For I wish to leave you room for affections which may develop in you. If that happened, if you felt a warmth for another person in the interim, then I would not believe I would have the right to feel betrayed at all.’
I was saying, perhaps too ambiguously, that she would grow out of it. But, looking up at me, she adopted a determined, level gaze.
‘You know me very poorly,’ she said, shaking her head and turning back to the house. That was the last I was to see of Phoebe Finlay until after she had been ‘polished’, and learned to sketch and stitch petit-point and carry on a full conversation in French.
By mid-morning, inhaling the sweet dust my flocks and herds kicked up, I was convinced that the total discourse between Phoebe and myself had been so much vapour. It astonished me that she had the condidence to come to my room, but I imagined that might represent a forthright colonial innocence, and I was a little uncertain whether that innocence and determination were admirable or not. But since I had behaved properly, and the school in Geneva would teach her less recklessness, I was more than prepared to let the question go unanswered. With any luck I would have passed forever out of her head by the time she crossed the equator. Some young ship’s officer might very well receive from her a chaste but determined visit of the kind I had experienced. I hoped he would behave well towards her.
It would be hard to overstate the conditions of raw and squalid bush democracy under which Charlie Batchelor, my convict overseer Long, my stockmen and shepherds lived in our new, casually named country. We shared our two large tents informally, and no man ate better beef and bread than another, since the conditions did not favour preference. Charlie and I believed we were reforming the earth, and blazed with confidence that in this new and immaculate world we would be made new, immaculate men.
The flavour of those splendid days can be had from a letter I wrote to my parents, and innocently made a copy of for the day when as a successful older man I might wish to include it, edited perhaps, in memoirs for the instruction of future pastoralists.
The place we have chosen as our campsite – our centre – in Nugan Ganway is a generous and gentle hollow atop a blunted ridge. Granite stones large as a Van Diemen’s Land residence are spread about this ridge in clusters and save us from the south-westerlies which in this region are always present, sometimes as a murmur, sometimes in full-throated fury.
Each morning, the two squads of shepherds leave here and take their respective flocks off to pasture in different directions, and at night drive them back closer to the camp. Here they enclose each large flock in a separate fold, within hurdles we have made out of brushwood. A nightwatchman guards the sheep from the native dogs wh
ich are seen in this area and which are said to be able to smell the blood in the sheep’s veins. Ultimately these two flocks, with their rams, two, four and six teeth ewes, wethers and weaners of both sexes will be placed with their shepherds miles from each other and from our central habitations, to reduce the risk of boxing, or undue commingling.
Our shorthorn cattle graze wide, left for now to their own plenteous, unfenced and natural devices. This is the opposite of well-ordered Van Diemen’s Land, but the size of the country allows different methods. The herd finds for the moment the natural fords in the river below our encampment and stands ankle deep to drink from the same water which sustains us.
After our dinner of mutton and tea, which one of our shepherds has taught us to sweeten with a gum from a particular species of tree, we crowd into our tents. Charlie and I are not always under the same canvas. All men equally smell of campfire and innocent sweat. I thank God for allowing us to be many Adams in this place of barbarous name but grand quietude.
But it becomes evident from the effluvia of some of the men that the huts will need to be built before the weather turns warmer.
Lightning has been our companion. You would laugh to see me, Father, wrapped in a possum skin under the thunderous canvas reading Horace by the light of a tallow lamp made from a jam tin, and by the tempest’s flaring, intermittent gusts of white light.
‘Iam satis terris nives atque diraes grandinis misit Pater …’
Remember that? I make translations designed to satisfy that eminent Tasmanian tutor Mr Bettany with as much accuracy of cadence and meaning as I can muster. ‘I am content now with this ordeal, the snow and hail storms which the Father has sent, and the thunder bolts thrown red-handedly at the sacred summits, and the terror awoken in the city …’ Or the terror awoken in the bush of Australia, one might say.
You would tell us, Father, you would tell Simon and myself that the great poet’s father did not altogether escape the taunt which adheres to persons even of remote servile origin. Your monitions rang like a generous warning that the ill-advised and malicious might seek to harm us. But I feel that any risk of such an unjust reflection upon us, deriving often from men less worthy by far than yourself and than the great Horace, has been outrun here in deepest New South Wales, and simply has no place in this vast plain and under our fraternal canvas. For this is conundrum country, which seems to make all of us equally servants, all of us equally masters. My shepherds and my hutmen may not yet be conscious of this reality, yet they walk on the earth, and talk amongst themselves, as if the truth had somehow penetrated them.
Yet in this Eden lay elements hard to command and many serpents. We needed to build two residences, a shearing shed and a stockyard, as well as two further-out huts for our shepherds. And so we sent a party off in the wagon under Long, with axes, wedges and adzes, to cut logs. They returned chastened. They had been able to cut much bark for the roofs but the most likely looking trees on the ridges above had blunted the blades and proven knotted.
We needed to consult with someone local, probably Treloar’s overseer Goldspink, about suitable local wood for splitting, but we were busy so contented ourselves to stay under canvas for the time being.
Two days later, as Charlie and I rode out to one of the flocks, we saw two horsemen descend a far-off ridge, bulky creatures in their shaggy possum or kangaroo skin coats who seemed too top-heavy for their delicate Hobbes-like ponies.
‘Are these the absconders?’ I asked aloud.
‘The absconders?’ Charlie asked me in return.
We paused and Charlie eased forward in his saddle, and began filling his pipe. We gazed across the plain towards the western mountains. As the two horsemen came on, they proved not to be alone in the landscape. A mile beyond them, by a tree-marked creek, was the almost alien sight of one of our flocks grazing docilely in the care of a shepherd. Only a black, darting dog, Boxer, introduced frenzy to the scene. Charlie did not seem afflicted by any frantic or subtle thought but by a clear vision of how the wild miles of pasture before him represented substance: how grass might be transmuted, by the vehicle of sheep, to fibre and thus to wealth. More conscious of the approaching riders, I explained what I had until now told Charlie only cursorily, and not adequately to engage his interest; of my meeting with the absconders Rowan and Brody, of their attempted drowning of the Aboriginal child, and of my adhering to the advice of the Goulburn magistrate Mr Gonfleur and placing Felix in Mr Loosely’s school, a detail which made Charlie chuckle and shake his head.
‘I suspect it would suit this Goldspink’s mischievous character,’ I told Charlie, ‘to fetch the very same men down on me now.’
‘And when they get here, would you have me help you hang them?’ asked Charlie, amused still, unshocked by anything I told him. He looked at me indulgently, as if he had been in New South Wales twenty years and understood all its grammar perfectly. It was the same gaze he had directed into the middle air, above the plain. ‘I would let it go, my good chap,’ he said. ‘New South Wales is so vast and so incapable of being policed that I’m advised one sends some crumbs in the direction of absconders lest they come down from their hills at night and snatch the whole loaf.’
‘No,’ I told him. ‘If it is the same men, I shall have it out with them.’
‘Well, they will certainly be happy to have a frank discussion,’ he said, openly laughing. How had he so easefully given up being a Tasmanian man of ideals to become a cynical New South Welshman?
‘We should not ride out like hosts to meet them,’ I told him. ‘We should wait for them in camp.’
Fortunately Long was there by the tents, returned from visiting a flock in the other, eastern, direction and drinking his tea from the pint pot at the campfire. The speed with which our men had committed themselves to their work, undemanding and possibly stupefying as it might be, was to a large extent due not to my wisdom but to his authority. I told him that I thought absconders were approaching, and asked him to stand with us to greet them.
The men who approached us on their ponies, crackling their way across the not yet fully evaporated frost, were identifiably the two I had met at Goldspink’s hut, and as if they had foreknowledge of our difficulties in hut-building, they carried axes, heads encased in scarred leather, at their horses necks. When they reined to a halt they showed no embarrassment and did not dismount at once, but considered Charlie and Long and myself for a while. The red-bearded one, Rowan, self-styled the Captain, said to me, ‘We have met before this, sir.’
‘By Christ, get down!’ called Charlie in a huge voice.
‘By Christ then we will, mate,’ said the second, younger one, Tadgh. And they did, at their own speed.
When they stood before us, their hands innocently occupied with holding the reins of their horses, I said quietly, ‘I did not want to see you again, unless it was before a magistrate. Whatever befell a native woman whose body I saw, I know for certain you sought to drown that child I had with me.’
‘As one might drown a kitten,’ said Rowan. ‘To save you the trouble of it.’
‘Then you anticipated my desires with a murder!’
‘We did not think it murder. It was a mercy, to stop him starving.’
‘Good heavens, then you would anticipate God’s desire with a murder!’
‘I don’t know what God’s desire is. To a fellow positioned such as I am, it can sometimes seem twisted.’
Long stepped up to him, the supposed Captain, and pushed his shoulder. Though Rowan took Long by the wrist, I was pleased to see that Long would not be held. He began chastising the two absconders in the Irish tongue. Their tones began in anger and then ran to a quiet intensity. Long seemed very much on top of them – he evinced their respect or their fear or both. Now they waited by mutely as Long turned to Charlie and me to explain their arrival.
They had seen our campfires and approved, it seemed, our choice of site for a homestead. They were used to building from the timber of the area, and they thoug
ht they might come down to offer their temporary labour.
I was bewildered by this idea, but Charlie was soon well-advanced in negotiating a price for the home, a further hut, the habitations of the shepherds, and for other split logs sufficient for the erecting of a serviceable shearing shed. Somehow these men, who had chosen to treat Felix as an unwanted animal, and who were incapable of being rendered contrite about it, knew well enough we were from Van Diemen’s Land and began by proposing a contract fee of £45. Charlie argued them down to £20 and asked them to be kind enough to wait there and – if they chose – have some tea. ‘I shall need to confer with my partner, Mr Bettany.’
Thus, meekly, the absconders went and sat on a log, facing Long and two of the hut-keepers, continuing with seeming jolliness their reminiscences sometimes in the English but also in the Irish tongue.
A little way off I opened a parallel discourse with Charlie.
‘It is dishonour to employ these men,’ I argued. ‘We must send them away.’
‘And thereafter be forever watchful of them?’
‘If that is the price.’
‘Their actions are not without reason, Jonathan. It is you solely who believes this impossible child has a future of any description.’
‘I don’t believe you could talk in such a way.’
‘Dear God, I don’t have to justify myself. I say I would not drown the child, but can see why they might! In the meantime, are we to go hut-less?’
He stepped away, to the place where the vigorous discourse between Long and the absconders was drawing to a close in flurries of dark, sputtering language. I frowned, thoroughly disappointed in myself at the prospect of admitting such men into my equation but wondering what else was to be done.
‘Then enough!’ Charlie cried. Long and the absconders stood up. ‘It is not yet for us to pursue or curtail you gentlemen,’ Charlie told the absconders. ‘But we know of your acts, we know! It is not in our interest to send for police and to find out your habitation. If we suffered depredations – let me tell you! – it would quickly come to be within our interests indeed. For the moment you are fellow inhabitants of this country and we do not wish to see you unless we call for it, do you understand? While you are here companionably, we are willing to be companionable. An intrusion upon our flocks would create rigour in us, and motivate us to combine with Treloar’s fellows and seek you out.’