39

Alfred sent me a copy of a letter he’d written to Mr Rusden, to whom I would be forever grateful for finding me my place at Momba. Alfred’s letter was pitiful to read, because in some elements it was in contrast to his private thoughts, although it is possible that he believed utterly in what he sent me as a copy:

I do not think I probably realised the full extent of my loss till yesterday when my home letters came, and then all hope of some mistake or contradictions vanished. It is very hard to think that I shall never see him again, and that he who was so good, so gentle with us all, has passed away. There is but one unfortunate incident in our dear father’s life, and that was his separation from our mother. As people will doubtless talk about this, may I ask you to state the facts properly for myself and Plorn, should you hear them be misrepresented. When the separation took place, it made no difference in our feelings towards them: we children always loved them equally, having free intercourse with both, as of old: while no word on the subject ever passed from the lips of either father or mother. Of the causes which led to this unfortunate event, we know no more than the rest of the world. Our dear mother has suffered so much, my eldest sister, Katie, in a letter said to me, ‘Poor dear she is better than I dared to hope she would be, and I’m sure that in a little time she will be more settled, and even happier than she has been for years, for she says what is true that she has already lived twelve years of widowhood, and now she feels that there is nobody nearer to him than she is.’ My heart is too full to write of any other subject than this today.

And I was sure that at that moment he was taken by tears, my poor brother.

I was not long back in Momba and barely reacquainted with its pulse when, at table, Fred Bonney asked Willy, ‘Have you told Plorn of your plans, Mr Suttor?’

Willy coughed a little but was frank. ‘I’m going back to run my place, Plorn, Goonawarra. Through the kindness of the Bonney brothers, I put together some money here and in Adelaide and I have resolved it is time to face the whole equation to take what comes. This year has been dry but not disastrously so. We wish for seasonal rains in the next year.’

Fred was nodding. ‘We all wish you well. People who have been here years tell me that the kangaroo grass used to be so tall it met above the rider’s head.’

‘That would be delightful,’ Willy Suttor said. ‘Very delightful.’

‘Would waist-height be adequate?’ asked Edward with a smile.

‘Oh yes. Waist-high would set us for life.’

By the time the whole riot of shearing came round, I’d not had time to confide in either of the Bonneys about my sighting of Maurice and his aunt. The frenzy of the shearing, sorting, washing and pressing of wool consumed us. One day the shearers threatened to walk ‘off the board’ because their boss was abusive and harassed them. In theory I liked the Australians’ industrial sense of their own worth. They went back to ‘work the board’ after Fred’s intervention, and the sacked ringer went off to find a job on another station. Ringers were profuse with insults and shearers were impervious to being called maggoty mongrels and being asked whether they were shearing the sheep or ***ing it? These insults were part of the casual music of shearing. But this ringer had insulted their women and the intelligence of their children and that was unacceptable.

The spring was busy with cricket, which I coordinated. Fred and Edward Bonney’s interest was such that at least one of them rode out with us to play our various games. Fred came with us to Wilcannia – where our success against bank clerks and Connie’s legal friend Malleson was recorded in the newly founded Wilcannia Times, whose correspondent wrote like a serious Home Counties cricket writer. ‘Mr Dickens is not at all an agricultural player and his capacity to drive through the covers as well as his ability to late-cut the ball makes one wonder whether such a player, if at Home, might be fit for selection as a county player.’

Fred said to me at dinner one night, ‘Edward and I have been wondering if you and your brother would like to spend Christmas with us this year? It would be a great honour for Edward and I to meet him at last.’

‘That is true,’ said Edward. ‘It would be capital for us.’

I offered them the normal thanks and said I would see if Alfred could get up from Corona; I was sure he would like to see the fabled Momba. That was settled but they looked to each other like men with fascinating business still pending.

‘But you may have to ride down here yourself to keep that appointment,’ Fred told me. ‘We’re thinking of moving some fifty thousand or more stock up north beyond Lake Peery.’

‘Yes,’ his brother said. ‘The big Wonkoo paddock up there has not been as heavy used lately as the rest. It has good stockfeed on it.’

I said that as far as I could tell, it would make good sense.

‘Wonkoo even has its own shearing shed,’ Edward further enlarged.

Fred pursed his lips and said, ‘Plorn, we think you might be sufficient in knowledge and skill to manage that northern end for us.’

At this I felt raised by a tide of exaltation.

Knowledge and skill. I had acquired a new and unexpected definition.

‘There’s a homestead up there from the fifties. Three rooms and no doubt a few resident snakes. You should take firearms.’

‘And not chiefly for snakes either,’ said Edward.

I had an impulse to embrace Fred for making himself so pleasant to me. He considered I had applied myself. I had done all I could, and he and Edward had seen it.

‘You’ll have Cultay with you to settle in up there. And you’ll have two stockriders to go with you, and there is of course the boundary rider up there. Whitelock. He doesn’t use the house. Asks how anyone could need three rooms. But what do you say? You may miss some cricket, I’m sorry.’

‘I will do all I can, Mr Bonney, to justify your and your brother’s opinion of me.’

‘Very well,’ said Fred, apparently gratified, as his brother nodded his head.

‘I could ride in there with the flock,’ I assured the brothers.

‘But don’t forget all cricket once you’re settled in,’ said Fred. ‘It will take you only a day to ride into Momba for games. And don’t forget Christmas here, either.’

‘And,’ said Edward, ‘if you run into that poor damned priest up there with the stand-alones, give the old chap a decent meal, won’t you?’

Over the following days Fred issued me with further instructions. I was indeed to have an eye for the welfare of Father Charisse. If the blacks of Cooper’s Creek presented, Cultay was to talk with them. If any white policemen led his native troopers to Wonkoo, I was to hand him a letter Fred was going to give me setting down his idea of what was permitted within the confines of Momba and its sundry pastures. He had told me the mounted police of Queensland and South Australia recruited their black troopers from Victoria, south of the Murray. They were young darks who, being loyal to their own people, had no fellow feeling for the people they were set upon far from home.

‘Armed with carbines,’ said Fred, ‘they have European thunder at their command! Divide and rule, as Philip of Macedon had it, and as humankind has practised ever since. Set the piteous to kill the piteous. It is of course all tragic!’

When they asked me what stockmen did I particularly not want to accompany me, I said, as if it were a joke, ‘Preferably I would rather not Clough. He stood by and let me buy du Barry.’

‘The one Dr Pearson took?’

‘Yes. He gave us everything back except du Barry.’

‘It makes one wonder,’ said Fred, ‘if he is really cut out to be a bushranger.’

The letter he gave me to hand to police commanders read.

Dear Sir,

Welcome to Momba Station, and I hope my sub-manager Mr E. B. L. Dickens treats you with every courtesy and consideration, as he has been instructed. In return I seek to see the peace of Momba preserved and respected. If you should command a Queensland detachment pursuing wrongdoers across the border, may I remind you that you lack legal jurisdiction to take action against any person presently found within the limits of Momba. If your jurisdiction and command derives from South Australia, the same rule applies. If you command a New South Wales detachment, you have jurisdiction to pursue wrongdoers but not to commit violence on any individuals you encounter. Within those clear limits, you can expect every cooperation from Mr Dickens.

Yours sincerely . . .

Drovers had brought in a huge flock of sheep from the southern paddocks, which were now massed in the home and neighbouring paddocks, so that from the homestead veranda the earth could not be seen for the backs and heads of sheep. I was readying myself to join the rest of the drovers in herding the sheep up to Wonkoo when a postman arrived on horseback from Cobar with saddlebags full of mail from England, one letter from Mamie, and another from Katie.

After condoling with me for being so distantly absent from his deathbed and assuring me that they had informed my older brothers, Sydney and Frank, Katie told me dear close things about the guvnor. The Sunday before his decease, she said, she and Mamie had gone down to Gad’s to see him and he had let her know he had ordered a voltaic band to treat his permanently painful foot. Katie – and many doctors – called it gout, but Father thought gout a disease of sybarites and princes, and always argued it was something else. Whatever it was, it was capable of near crippling him. And Katie was willing to admit she had wanted to talk to him about a plan she had to pad out her living as a painter by trying the stage – and of course the guvnor knew all the stage people – as her husband, Charlie Collins, was sick and – as the family had already somehow known – had never been much of a husband anyhow. He had taken to writing to plump out the little he made from painting in the manner of the Pre-Raphaelites, whom the guvnor had no time for. The guvnor published some of Collins’ pieces in All the Year Round, but maybe that was more for Katie’s sake.

Katie told me that after Mamie and Aunt Georgie went to bed, our father sat with her in the new conservatory beyond the dining room. When I’d left home the carpenters had been working on the conservatory, which the guvnor wanted to be the glory of Gad’s Hill. When it was finished, though, he didn’t have a lot of time to enjoy it. Anyhow, he and Katie talked for a long time that still evening and Katie told him she had received an offer to go on the stage.

The guvnor’s advice, she said, was that she shouldn’t. She was beautiful and might do well, he said, but she was sensitive too. ‘Although there are nice people on the stage,’ he told her, having after all named her (Catherine Elizabeth Macready Dickens) in honour of the great tragic actor William Macready, ‘there are some who would make your hair stand on end. You are clever enough to do something else.’ Then, Katie told me in her letter, he went on to inform her he wished he’d been a better father and a better man, and started to speak of his health. He wondered would he finish his new book. ‘He spoke to me,’ wrote Katie, as she had no doubt to the other brothers, ‘as though his life was over and there was nothing left.’ She said his face had looked ravaged.

Mamie assured me she stayed with the guvnor’s body all night to protect it. I wondered what she meant by ‘protect’? Surely it would not be stolen. But it would have been like Mamie to think the night was full of body-snatchers. She and Katie had been up the previous night too and must have been giddy with exhaustion. Mamie said she cut a lock of hair from our father’s ‘beautiful dead head’. The girls, as part of their vigil, saw to it that the guvnor’s favourite flowers were cut to decorate the room.

But in whatever terms the sisters wrote about it, it all confirmed the death and established it as history. The ninth of June. Engraved now on the earth’s air, on that of Britain, on that of all her colonies from the Arctic to the Antipodes. Unavoidable, ever ponderous in the calendar.

There were less ominous letters in the mail, too. A letter from Hayward, the songstrel and manager of Toorale.

Dear Plorn,

Doleful news travels faster than good – and I am sorry that the news of your illustrious father’s demise has penetrated the globe as far as Toorale. I have the sad honour therefore to send you the warmest fraternal condolences. The world grieves for your father whereas for mine – as laudable a fellow as he is – barely a suburb. This must make your loss a little easier in itself – given that you are surrounded by so many condolers – but also much harder because you are reminded all the time that the loss has taken place, and can never forget it.

I hesitate to mix issues of sacred and profane – or maybe more accurately sacred and sacred. But you should know that we missed your departure that night in Wilcannia when the Desailly girls and I had finished our singing. You should know, old chap, that no one was more disconsolate or worried at missing you than Connie Desailly. I thought you must know that – for it might help you combat, if I might say, a fatal misconception.

The offer to go sheep farming with you is still extant – I have my eye on Yanda on the Darling. But we shall meet at some cricket match or stock sale – and we can enlarge on the idea then. I hope by then that – though the death of your father will be an immutable day of grief for the whole British race – you will have recovered from the grief of loss – and rejoice in the richness of your memory.

Your friend,
Ernie Hayward