When Fred Bonney suggested I should ride all the way to Alfred’s station at Corona for Christmas, my first impulse was to ask, ‘But won’t you need me here?’ He replied that Cultay wished to visit his wife’s people for some of what Fred called ‘law or lore’ down there. Cultay would go with me and knew all the waterholes along the way. It should take a little more than two days’ full ride, three at the most in severe heat.
I decided to go, and inscribed two editions of Our Mutual Friend to Fred and Edward Bonney to mark the season. I’d ordered the copies through Willy Suttor thinking they were least likely to have read it, it being only a few years old according to my reckoning. I felt the usual fraudulence passing it on while barely having read a word of it. I knew it was a book that had influenced the brilliant and doomed Maurice. On that original ride into Momba he’d told me, ‘The most truly drawn of your father’s characters is Bella Wilfer. You know, from Mutual Friend? She starts mercenary, then she identifies herself as mercenary, then she repents and cures herself, and then becomes a full moral being.’
‘Oh yes, oh yes, old chap,’ I replied before asking, ‘Why is Bella Wilfer the character that all those competent with print so admire?’
I gave non-literary presents of chocolate and tobacco to Willy and the Larkins. The heat of the season sat most appealingly on Grace Larkin – a girl growing, it seemed, to become a woman of the house and a figure of bush authority so far from the sea. And then, a few days before Christmas, I set out with Cultay.
Fred Bonney gave me a present of four guineas and insisted I take an extra-sturdy Waler, as well as Coutts. Cultay was a magisterial fellow traveller, his attitude to the apparently barren country one of tranquil ownership. His father would have been the first of his forebears to see a horse – probably that of the exploring surveyor Charles Sturt or one of his followers – and yet he rode his Waler with an authority far more antique than that.
We travelled westward and along the creeks, and rested amongst the trees from noon to three or later, before venturing on into the evening. On the first late afternoon we saw some prospectors’ huts by hills of white shale, but had no reason to trouble them this festive time of year. We also came upon a camp of Afghans and their laden camels, bound for the town of Packsaddle, and exchanged courteous greetings with them. Soon the plain opened wide on the straight red-dust way, with emus far off, rendered legless by the intervening waves of heat throbbing like a sea on our vision.
It was very late in the long day that we reached Packsaddle and came upon a great yard full of horses. Alfred had asked me to call in for further directions at the Packsaddle Hotel, a shanty pub owned by former shearer Robert Norwich. Robert Norwich and his wife, who faithfully repeated the end of her husband’s last sentences with editorial flourishes of her own, were not as pressed for company in this great vacancy as I’d expected. For Norwich supplied changes of horses for a weekly stagecoach from Wilcannia to the most distant of settlements, Tibooburra, with enough stations and possible mineral grounds in between to provide him with the sort of customers who might bring in their entire cheques for him to cash or drink.
As Cultay made camp behind the hotel – for a lot of country publicans did not like darks coming inside – I went into the main bar and found Robert Norwich alongside an old watery-eyed man in a brown suit that still declared its pretensions.
‘It is him!’ said Mr Norwich, slapping the bar. ‘It is Alfred’s Dickens’ brother! Likewise a gentleman and scholar, likewise a Dickens!’
‘. . . likewise a Dickens,’ repeated Mrs Norwich.
‘Expecting you yesterday when we had many passengers in the house, bound for Mount Browne.’
‘. . . bound for Mount Browne for rumoured gold, yes.’
I told him Alfred had asked me to call in to get accurate directions to the Corona homestead, to which he replied, ‘But could I first supply you with a drink, Mr Dickens?’
‘A shandy, perhaps,’ I said, a shandy being half ale and half lemonade and the minimum a colonial publican could be expected to serve.
As Mrs Norwich set to work to supply the shandy, I nodded to the man at the bar, of whom, Mr Norwich said, ‘Our permanent guest Mr Gaggin. A long-term leaseholder in our district.’
‘Long-term leaseholder indeed,’ said Mrs Norwich.
‘I live here, on these premises,’ Gaggin told me like a boast, ‘and from here when I fall from my stool will be taken forth to my burial place.’
I could barely help saying, ‘Do you have no relatives in other parts?’
‘I have none, sir,’ said Mr Gaggin. ‘If it were not for the shelter offered by the Packsaddle Inn . . . And yet it seems only yesterday, mind you, that I came to the west as a boy like you. Bad seasons, too much hope and reckless loans destroyed me. But I am lucky, since I have found a haven.’
I thought him the saddest man I had ever met, somehow even sadder than Dandy Darnell, but said nothing.
‘Now, you’re looking for directions to the Corona homestead, then?’ said Mr Norwich, taking some paper from a drawer and beginning to sketch a map, which his wife seemed to examine in case of errors. Then, speaking very quickly, he said, ‘You take this left here, off from the coach track, get out there to this junction at Fowler’s Creek – don’t take the left, it’s a really dry stretch to Menindee, but take this right one here to Euriowie.’
Since he did not spell what he pronounced as Your-irr-owy, I was confused.
‘At the fork of the road, the one you should take,’ he told me, ‘is marked with an empty can of cocky’s joy on a stick.’
‘Can of cocky’s joy right there,’ echoed Mrs Norwich, ‘hammered to a stake.’
Seeing my confusion, Mr Norwich said, ‘Listen, bring your black fellow in.’
So I went and got Cultay, who had started a campfire, and he stood up and listened to me, and then followed me in, where Norwich concluded the instructions to him and then gave me the map as a supplement.
Cultay said, ‘I know her, that road. I know Corona.’
Mr Norwich laughed, ‘That’s right, you big mongrel. You’d have darkie relatives there, wouldn’t you?’
Cultay nodded but said nothing, then left. Norwich insisted I accept a beer from him now, given the season and because he thought highly of Alfred. He also suggested I buy a bottle of the ‘dark lady’ – port – for Cultay.
‘Isn’t that illegal, Mr Norwich?’ I asked. Influenced by Fred Bonney and stories of Americans weakening the fibre of Red Indians with firewater, I was ambivalent. Yet port is not as perilous as brandy or rum or whisky, I told myself. Hardly the downfall of a noble race.
‘I think it might make you a friend, Mr Dickens,’ said Norwich. ‘I am not in the business of making drunks of the darks. But I know that one of yours, and he’s a good drinker. Here, be my guest.’ And he put a dark-labelled bottle of sherry on the table. ‘Don’t drink it yourself. I’ve got better stuff for you . . .’
‘Much better stuff for a Dickens boy,’ echoed Mrs Norwich.
Mr Norwich asked again what I would take now and I ordered ale and sat to drink it.
‘We are of course, as I say, honoured, young Dickens, but in Mr Gaggin you see one of the veteran pioneers of this country. What year did you settle out here, Mr Gaggin?’
‘I settled on Fowler’s Creek in winter 1840,’ the old man replied. ‘The kangaroo grass was taller than my horse.’
‘They were still shipping convicts then,’ said Mr Norwich with awe.
‘They were,’ Mr Gaggin agreed. ‘But not to where I was. South Australia I came up from as a young geologist. I thought I was made. Since the sandstones, dolomites and quartz indicated the likelihood of iron, copper, silver, gold. I had a wife in Adelaide then who had not yet lost patience with me.’
‘And you found these treasures, Mr Gaggin?’ I asked as I sipped my mixed ale, wondering why my elders considered it a staple of life.
‘Ore-bearing rock is not hard to discover, young Mr Dickens. Oh, I sang to God amongst the low escarpments, I can tell you. I found chloride of silver in rocks the colour of ginger snaps.’
‘Ginger snaps,’ said Mrs Norwich. ‘I’m partial to ginger snaps.’
‘All I needed to be the Australian Croesus, young Mr Dickens, was capital for someone to bring rock crushing and refining equipment, the smelters and mills, into the Barrier Range, on the many camels needed. All I require even now is still capital and a railway to – at the very least – Wilcannia. I have spent nigh on thirty years ranting at governors and politicians, first in South Australia, then in Sydney. The imagination of Sydney politicians dies at the Darling River, young sir, with the map in their brains not including this immensity. They are criminally deficient. Anyway, they tired of me and I became a byword for the obvious they would not see. It all made me sour, my young friend, impossible to cohabit with.’
Mrs Norwich repeated the bit about the map of their brain. ‘Fort Bourke not on it either,’ she added.
Tears seemed to come into Mr Gaggin’s eyes and he drank the rest of his brandy and passed the glass to Norwich to refill. Doing so from a bottle of brandy, Norwich said to me. ‘You see, young Mr Dickens, Mr Gaggin is a man before his time and lesser men have failed him. One day this area will be full of cities and the earth honeycombed with rich mines. One of the conurbations should be named Gaggin.’
‘Gaggin,’ murmured Mrs Norwich. ‘I would be honoured to live in a town named Gaggin.’
‘And so my last years are spent as a guest of the Packsaddle Inn.’ Gaggin concluded.
‘You said you have a family . . .’
‘I have a splendid daughter married to Justice Peter Bright of the South Australia Supreme Court. They kindly meet my modest needs. I am not too proud to tell you this, Mr Dickens. I am immune to pride . . .’
With a surprising suddenness Mr Gaggin took up his stick and brought it down on the bar, before intoning, ‘In the hideous solitude of that most hideous place, with Hope so far removed, Ambition quenched, and Death beside him rattling the very door, reflection came as in a plague-beleaguered town; and so he felt and knew the failure of his life . . .’
He struck the bar again and said, ‘No one can say I do not know my Martin Chuzzlewit!’
‘Chuzzlewit,’ chorused the amazed and delighted Mrs Norwich, who was probably used to Mr Gaggin’s recitations. ‘Chuzzlewit puts it to the Americans.’
Mr Gaggin then pointed his stick at me emphatically. ‘Your father, sir! Your wonderful father!’
‘My father would be honoured to know that there is no Australian village where his words are not cherished.’
‘In Packsaddle, tell your father. In Packsaddle, sir!’ Gaggin drank his brandy. Then he reflected further. ‘Born in London, and I’ll die in bloody Packsaddle. There you go. A caution.’
‘Oh,’ I said, sympathetically, ‘you must understand that my father would rather write of men being saved by the colonies.’
They accepted this and became thoughtful.
Though Norwich offered me a meal and room, I excused myself and headed out to my damper, mutton and swag, for I favoured that itinerant bed better than an uncertain bed in a colonial coaching inn. I said to Cultay, who had tea bubbling over the fire, ‘Cultay, I hope it is the right thing, but Mr Norwich suggested that given it is Christmas I buy you some port wine. And so, thank you for being my companion! I feel safer with you. The port is a small tribute.’
By firelight, the ageless Cultay’s profoundly set eyes weighed me though he did not reach out from his kneeling position by the fire. I put the bottle by his knee and he said, ‘Thanks, Mr Dickens,’ and moved the sherry to his side of the fire. We ate dinner and he had not touched the bottle before I washed in the creek and was ready for bed. Before I settled into my swag Cultay held out a wad of gum to me and said, ‘Mr Dickens, you bite on that one and you get good dreaming.’
‘Really?’ I stupidly asked.
‘You need a good dreaming from that feller there.’ Objects were often referred to as ‘fellers’ by the natives, as if everything had a soul. Ever polite, I took the wad of brown gum.
I was suddenly overtaken by a pulse of deep melancholy which perhaps Cultay had seen coming. Gaggin seemed such a sad creature, even in his fruitless knowledge of my father’s writing. But I said, ‘I’m tired anyhow. I might save it for another night when I need it.’
‘Keep him by you,’ Cultay urged. ‘He’s a good one. You travel easy with that feller. With him in you, you see the dead and they talk to you like mates.’
I must have looked stricken by the waning firelight for Cultay chortled and said, ‘You see your missus before you meet her. You make friends with all the people in the dream place. You come back happy then.’
‘All right,’ I said, raising the wad of gum to prove it was on my agenda. ‘I’ll certainly be into it if I have trouble sleeping.’
He nodded and then sang to himself in a monotone and I went very shortly to sleep.
It cannot have been late in the night when I woke in a fright, thinking an owl, or a frogmouth, had been climbing on my face, eying me. I was sure I could taste feathers in my mouth but the taste vanished as I became conscious and was replaced by a leaden weight of wakefulness. I thought of Alfred and felt dread. Why, I did not know, but it was as if I had risen from my mother’s breast a blood-red hateful thing and could not be reconciled to the toil of becoming child and man, and that seeing Alfred turned me as a child to greater unappeased anger still. I was going to my brother for the sake of Christmas, for love’s sake, and yet I felt I was approaching a well of venom, or taking my own poison to it, and not embarking in any way on an amiable exercise of fraternity.
‘. . . if I have trouble sleeping,’ I had said of the gum to Cultay, whose breathing and snuffling indicated he was asleep.
I took a segment of the mix of gum and ash, which had a heavy vegetable sweetness. As I chewed it, all the malice bled out of me and the hell in my head ebbed away. I felt an immense relief, for the alignment of all stars and all impulses was reversed, and the vast and star-crammed night grew kindly. This ‘feller’ is a greater cure than port! I thought.
I started to have visions of being in some grand room playing a violin very fluently with Constance Desailly at her own instrument, a cello or some such, by my side. Over the music I said to her, ‘I never knew that I desired you. I thought you were a very ordinary girl.’ Connie found this amusing but it did not make her pause in her music.
After that I saw Soldier Staples standing at the crease of the cricket pitch in Netallie Station with a cricket ball in his hand and his bloody side bleeding lustrously away over his red Momba XI sash. Mr Fremmel was at the far batting crease, a man in despair, a condition to which our music had reduced him.
My mother then appeared at the fielding position of mid-off and she was as amused as Constance, the way women are in a conspiracy of amusement about men. Mama took Staples by the hands and he dropped the ball and adjusted his arms to her plump body, saying, ‘Mind your dress, Mrs Dickens.’
‘I’ll send it off to those actresses,’ my mother trilled like a girl.
Constance and I were almost disappearing, united in one long curlicue of sound. ‘What a pity you don’t know shorthand,’ Constance murmured. She seemed to think it would be necessary so that we could communicate further.
‘I’ll learn,’ I promised her.
From his batting crease the viperous Mr Fremmel called out, ‘No one is bowling to me!’ For some reason this was the most hilarious thing I had ever heard and I bubbled with laughter down the skeins of music.
There was more, but it lacked the sharpness of the dream to that point. I know I was looking for signs of some sort in Constance’s face. When I woke I was in the usual condition of boys my age. Yet though back in a kinder universe, I thought even then a little contemptuously of my dream self, who had been striving to achieve a single song with Constance Desailly and share her shorthand.
Against any further demons of night, I wrapped the remaining gum in paper and pocketed it.
‘Christmas Eve, Cultay,’ I cried when I woke at dawn.
By the time we set off it was already fiercely hot and as we rode the sun lay on our shoulders like a weight. But we withdrew into ourselves and focused on the thought that we would reach Corona by dusk.