Gibber’s Creek Gazette, March 1972
Mrs Roger Hilson received a postcard from her son, Wayne, presently serving his country in Vietnam. Mrs Hilson proudly shared the contents with readers of the Gazette:
Dear Mum,
I hope you are well. All is good here but hot! Thanks for the cake. Tell Auntie Nell that the jumper is bonzer, but I probably won’t wear it till I come home.
Love,
Wayne
MATILDA
Matilda waved as Jed’s car spun down the drive, Maxi panting at her heels. Such a silly, wonderful car.
She remembered the car Tommy had built, when the century was new, and no car had yet been seen in Gibber’s Creek. Old Drinkwater had commissioned it. The car had exploded on its trial run, nearly killing Tommy and her. It had taken Tommy years to forgive himself for that . . .
And then Tommy had gone, and it had been the end of the world, till years later they found each other again. Two impossibly different people made again into one rich life. By then Auntie Love had died, and her fiancé James, and old Drinkwater was dead too — the great-grandfather who had loved her more than anyone in his life, except perhaps the dark woman who had been his first wife, but who had never once admitted he and Matilda were related . . .
The world ends often when you are young, she thought. You think, I cannot live with this. And then you find you do.
Tommy’s death three years earlier had not been an ending, just a beginning of cherishing memories instead of making new ones. She felt him with her, every moment, even though the scent of him had faded from their bedroom, his shaving soap gone from the bathroom, the imprint of his body on cushions he liked best on the sofa slowly changing as others used them too. Which was the way it should be. Life’s river should not stop.
And yet . . .
Matilda hesitated, then stepped over to the garage. ‘Stay, Maxi,’ she told the Doberperson.
Maxi whined, crouching on her stomach, gazing at her mistress. She had, perhaps, been hoping for an evening walk. And she was really getting far too fat. But you couldn’t ask a stockman to take a Doberperson for a walk, and Maxi could not be trusted among the sheep with the other dogs.
Once Matilda would have walked the four kilometres to the billabong, or saddled her horse and ridden there. She could still manage either, she told herself. But at her age, and at night, a car was sensible. And this time she did not want a dog, even a beloved one, chasing leaf shadows and following the scent of wallabies, though if Maxi ever did track down a wallaby she’d probably jump into Matilda’s arms in case the strange beast attacked her. Despite her ancestry, Maxi lacked a killer’s instinct.
Matilda looked down at the pleading dog and smiled. No, she thought as she opened the car door, she did the Doberperson an injustice. Maxi would go for the jugular to save the life of those she loved. As would all the females Matilda admired. But it was best if none of them ever had to.
The Rolls-Royce had butter-soft leather seats and polished wood finishes. Jim had bought it for her and Tommy, twenty years back, because this was the kind of car her other son, her city business son, felt they must drive, or better still, be driven in.
You couldn’t love a car like this. You could, however, love the memories made in it. And so she had not sold the Rolls when Jim urged her to buy a new one. A good car lasted as long as a good pair of shoes. Good memories lasted even longer, if you were lucky.
She drove sedately down the road, then turned down the track. A Rolls had decent clearance, nearly as good as a ute. But she stopped before she reached the moonlit gleam of water. Matilda didn’t think ghosts were scared of cars, but the billabong smelled of leaf-sodden water, of fish and rotted vegetation left by the last flood. She wouldn’t pollute the billabong with the smell of an engine.
Pollute. Such a modern word. They used to say ‘made a mess’. Humans had made a mess of the whole world, with sprays like DDT that she had used too for decades, thinking she did good, pouring it on to kill the maggots that ate a sheep alive. She who watched the land so closely had never guessed that DDT made birds’ eggs thinner, so that eagles and goshawks died. She too was guilty of this new word — pollute.
She stepped from the car, annoyed because it took her a full three seconds to stretch and stand straight these days, and walked carefully through the orchestra of shadows cast by a million leaves and branches to her favourite tree. A perfect tree to sit against, each insect scribble on the ghost bark a friend, its arms reaching upwards to brush the stars.
She shut her eyes. The world narrowed: night air like moth wings against her skin; the breath of water; the dappled song of trees.
Jed said she had seen ghosts there, of the past as well as the future. That this was one of the places where time had rubbed thin. Jed’s glimpses were as real as the wallaby pretending to be a shadow just past the sandhill created by the landward lunge of the last big flood. Flinty McAlpine, Matilda’s oldest friend — well, oldest friend who still had all her marbles — saw ghosts of past and future too, on the giant rock below her mountain house.
Matilda’s ghosts came only from her memories and imagination.
Well, Dad? she thought. What would you think of your daughter? That I’ve betrayed the working class? Become a squatter? But I’ve done good. We’ve always been a union station. And you, old Drinkwater. Would you admit I’m your great-granddaughter now? Auntie Love? I’ve done my best for this land we love . . .
And yet she hadn’t, quite. For her flocks of sheep and herds of cattle had plundered the land of the bettongs and bandicoots. Dingoes howled no more along the ranges, lost to traps and baits and guns, even if none had been set by her.
Even Matilda’s promise to herself to let the land rest had been broken by the urgencies of two world wars, with cattle needed for corned beef for the army; and because jobs were so badly needed to give men wages and dignity during the Depression.
By the 1950s keeping the land at its maximum stocking capacity had become a habit. These days Drinkwater and Overflow were managed by her son Michael and his wife, Nancy, as wise in the signs of the land as Matilda was, or even more so.
And they managed the land well. No erosion gullies on Drinkwater or Overflow, cracking the land in orange gullies across so much of farming Australia. No hills collapsing from rabbit holes, or thistles colonising paddocks where the grass had been nipped too close by sheep’s teeth or compacted by cattle hooves. Trees clad the land around Drinkwater’s and Overflow’s creeks, gullies, river banks and ridges, almost as if the white men and their sheep had never come.
Almost, unless you had known the richness and complexity of what the land had once been. Young people never knew what they had lost, as they did not know what had once been.
Matilda opened her eyes. She stood, watching the shadows flicker on the water, half hoping that she too might just this once see an image of the future.
‘Finally,’ she said aloud to the ghosts of the billabong. ‘Finally, we are going to get it right . . .’