40

Fred and Edward Bonney accompanied us as we mustered the sheep to Wonkoo and Wonkoo South. We rounded up an additional ten thousand sheep from some of the nearer home pastures and met with flocks from other pastures at Peery Hills to herd them all onwards. There was something steady but acutely exciting about moving a vast flock in a vast country at almost languid speed. Our indefatigable dogs did the bulk of the work each day, pushing the sheep forward from their positions at the rear and flanks of the flock.

I brought along Momba Station’s copy of David Copperfield, the title pressed upon me by Mrs Wivenhoe. I’d decided I would prove my fitness to read it by succeeding at Wonkoo, and prove my fitness to run Wonkoo by reading it.

The country was undulating as we went north, more intimate by the standards of the great openness around Momba homestead. Yellow and ochre rock on rises answered well to the saltbush scrubland. Emus ran away crooked-gaitedly but faster than a racehorse, inviting chase, but even the dogs were too engaged to think of running after them. We watered the flock on the broad shore of Lake Peery, which the older stockmen said was not as full as last year, opining that spring rain would be welcome.

One day, on a ridge beyond Lake Peery, Cultay pointed to a place miles off where a party of Aboriginal people were travelling, as if above the ground, through air wavering with heat.

‘Those men,’ he told me. ‘Those fellas in a hurry.’

Without dismounting, I retrieved my telescope from my saddlebag and was able to discern, at the tail of the party, a ragged white cassock, which I surmised belonged to Father Charisse. There seemed to be no horse with the party as it disappeared in the wafery foliage around a far-off creek. I told Cultay that if he ever made contact with the group he was to invite the priest to come to dinner at Wonkoo homestead.

The homestead at Wonkoo was a low structure built of stone and designed, with its capacious roof and veranda, for coolness. The Bonneys bid me goodbye and a stockman named Bellows settled in with me then, to act as cook. The flocks watered themselves along Purnanga Creek, and with the help of Whitelock I drove some thousands of head into adjoining vast paddocks of Purnanga and Mourquong. We spent pleasant nights with the hutkeepers and boundary riders of these two paddocks, each of them a solitary man for whom previously the arrival of a supply wagon was an exceptional event. One had a particular interest in newspapers, and indeed all local news, and had spent time on an island in the Bass Strait, bludgeoning fur seals. Another frankly confessed to us that he’d been a machine breaker in Yorkshire, had been through the penal mills of Van Diemen’s Land, and since only other people could judge a man, he avoided other people.

As I managed the flocks and dealt with the spring lambs in the Wonkoo yards, I was reading, actually reading, David Copperfield. The early pages were a test but somehow in those homestead hours I was able to penetrate them, searching for the point of captivation which everyone had always assured me overtook them when they read my father’s work. I was interested in the fact that David Copperfield had been born with a membrane of flesh called a caul. This was seen by some as a sign that a baby would not drown, and that people would buy the cauls as a means of avoiding drowning.

I wasn’t fully captivated, however, until I met David’s aunt, Miss Betsey Trotwood. I still needed to negotiate the paragraphs, with their hedge of verbs and adjectives, spiky parts of speech, but I wanted now to know more. At last, when David was sitting with Miss Peggotty discussing crocodiles, the novel caught in me! And then when Mr Murdstone arrived with David’s mother, and clearly disapproved of David, I was hungry to find out how David’s merit could emerge, as despicable Murdstone and his sister degraded him. I even daydreamed about the Peggotty family and the upturned fishing boat they lived in so cosily on the strand at Yarmouth. I was pleased that my father had an appetite for such a unique and playful habitation.

I was horrified to see David lost in the squalor of the company of Murdstone and Grinsby. It was at Blackfriars, and we knew from intermittent references that the guvnor hated Blackfriars and its ‘crazy old houses’.

David’s progress and self-discipline led him to ultimate success, and marriage to Dora. But that union made me uneasy because of Dora’s coyness, how she addressed so much of a conversation through her dog, and how she spoke all the time of her stupidity, using this artifice in all circumstances. I do not remember conversations between the guvnor and my mother partaking of this quality or mirroring those between David and Dora, yet I felt a little guilty as I saw on David’s behalf the limits of such a relationship, which in the end was closed not by a separation but by Dora’s death in childbirth.

Now I became engrossed in professional debtor Mr Micawber, for I knew the guvnor would consign the Micawbers to Australia, as he had the Peggottys, for whose class in any case Australia was the best of choices. Of course Mr Peggotty prospered in the Antipodes, stirring my colonial pride, and he brought back to England news of Britain’s fallen but colonially redeemed gentleman Mr Micawber.

And Mr Micawber wrote to David, saying, ‘You are not unknown here, you are not unappreciated . . . Amongst the eyes elevated towards you from this point of the globe will ever be found, while it has light and life,

The

Eye

Appertaining to

Wilkins Micawber

Magistrate . . .’

At this point of the novel, I was in tears. David had by now remarried the charming character named Agnes.

‘The guvnor wrote this,’ I told myself and was breathless with amazement and awe. How could such a majestic mind as that give birth to a plain boy like me?

One night when I rode up to the Wonkoo homestead after herding a flock along Purnanga Creek towards Whitelock’s hut, I found Father Charisse on the veranda. He had let his beard grow long, and wore a kangaroo cloak around his shoulders, under which was his now thoroughly tattered cassock.

‘Father,’ I said enthusiastically, with an eye out for Barrakoon’s people nearby.

‘Please, Mr Dickens,’ he told me as if he understood my mind. ‘My people are a day’s walk off. I am here by special dispensation of the remarkable Barrakoon.’

I asked him to come in and told him he must join me for a meal. He drank some sherry, which seemed to help him converse, and said of his new endeavours, ‘It is a strenuous life, Mr Dickens, when the desert nomads decide to move quickly.’

I said I was sure it was, and having had the informed Fred Bonney to guide me, I had never thought otherwise.

‘It is what makes it worthwhile for me to attempt,’ he added. ‘I have little doubt I am where God wants me to be, bearing witness as I am intended to. If God is the God of deserts, then I am in the desert, with desert travellers.’

I felt an urge to tell him to come back to his own people, but that was just bonhomie on my part. I was not equipped to argue the intentions of the Deity, and it seemed natural to argue that Father Charisse had misread the signs. Yet there was an authority both in his decision and to the way he looked at a person.

‘Father,’ I said, settling for a humbler aim, ‘why don’t you stay the night and have a good sleep? Cultay can take you out in the morning on horseback.’

‘That is very kind of you, Mr Dickens. I know your intentions are good.’

They were not as good as all that, though I did think that if he enjoyed a full night on a mattress, God’s intentions might be clarified for him, to make them more normal, more predictable, and town-dwelling. For there was something shocking about his dedication.

‘But,’ he said, ‘I do not have a night to squander away from my people.’

‘Do they accept you as theirs?’ I asked. ‘A kinsman?’

‘Yes. They think I am an idiot and help me at all stages of life. Their care for me is most touching and is far from the supposed emotions of barbarism. I doubt if any other society would have accepted me so quickly. Scottish Presbyterians, for example, would have thought me a child of the whore of Babylon. The native people have no such prejudices to overcome.’

So he could not be argued with, and had not come to be argued with. His purpose emerged over a dinner of mutton and potato and split peas, all of which he devoured with honest appetite as if it were his nightly fare.

‘I wanted to confide to you,’ he said as the meal went on, ‘something you can pass on to Mr Bonney. I suffer from a certain unease about events when we were further north of here, I suspect in the colony of Queensland. Four of the younger men went off in a party on their own, and when they returned were talking to Barrakoon. I cannot gauge it, and no one will answer me truly. I do wonder whether they encountered white men, and whether there was a confrontation and bloodshed. We travelled south after that as briskly as we could, so my concerns were in small part confirmed. If they did engage in an incident of blood or plunder, or both, I do not want all the people paying for it. I would be grateful if Mr Bonney could use his influence in this matter.’

I assured him I would send a message to Mr Bonney within days; that I had a letter addressed to any police commander who came to Wonkoo to say that Fred Bonney’s eyes were upon him and that anyone from Queensland lacked jurisdiction in New South Wales. And if any such commander brought a party of troopers, he would be sure to call at Wonkoo for information and Mr Bonney’s letter would be handed to him.

Father Charisse was reassured, and after a brandy seemed set to drowse off in his chair, but then he thanked me and told me he would pray for me, as if I were in peril with the supreme tempter, as distinct from Mrs Wivenhoe. After dinner, he told me he would get on his way and take some sleep later. The kangaroo-skin cloak would be very welcome, he said, for though it was spring the nights could still turn icy.

I saw him to the gate of the home pasture, but then he insisted I turn back to Wonkoo homestead. He continued forth, a penitential figure despite the dinner he’d had. He was a man who had abandoned all shelter for Christ’s sake, and I could not avoid revering him. He was, in his way, a saint. The fact that he expected to achieve nothing measurable gave him more authority, since pious people were often strident about the results they would have. And even the guvnor had expected results from Urania Cottage, and achieved them. Charisse’s achievement was the humble one, and witnessed by no one but me: of going back to sleep on the same earth as Barrakoon.

Some four days later, two dozen Queensland troopers arrived in caps and blue coats and riding boots. The white commander of the troop, a very lean man of perhaps forty, introduced himself to me as Sub-Inspector Belshire. He told me his native troopers were camped a little way from the homestead, making free of a well and the water from the Purnanga Creek. They sounded like a normal squad of young darks, hooting, teasing, musical when they spoke their native language. I presented Belshire with Bonney’s letter and then felt bound to offer him the hospitality of Wonkoo, such as it was, though he assured me that to him it was a palace. It was his choosing, though, he admitted, to lead the rough life he did. He had gone home to Lincoln two years before but found it would never suit him again to live in Britain. ‘Queensland has well and truly cured me of that,’ he confided, although his confidences sometimes had the quality of policeman’s edicts.

The sun set under long thin skeins of cloud, and I had got a good fire going on the hearth. He read the missive of Bonney’s by lamplight, finished it without comment and returned it to its envelope. Dinner was cooking in Bellows’ kitchen outside at the time, and I was hoping our drink would be sociable and conclusive. I had a certain prejudice against Belshire to begin with, given that Fred Bonney considered men of his ilk licensed killers of the darks.

It was an evening when a high wind began moving, and spirals of red dust were kicked up, but by now I knew that atmospheric drama in the upper air did not necessarily foretell the arrival of a rain front. I served Belshire his rum and we sat at the table, face to face, avoiding the two easy chairs the room provided. I had poured a companionable rum for myself, but a small measure which I diluted with water from a jug. The inspector had taken off his belt and loosened the buttons of his jacket before he sat. He took a sip of his spirit, but not a hungry mouthful.

‘Did you know that we caught Dr Pearson?’ he asked me. ‘Weren’t he and his chaps the ones who held you up here?’

‘That’s right,’ I agreed, almost casually, as if Dr Pearson and his associates had not brought me the fatal news.

‘It was at Eulo. He took the entire town hostage and then boasted that he had a particular wild mare – a grey – amongst his horses, and that he would show how he could ride her in the main street. Well, she threw him so bad that his skull was damaged and his gang could not move him, yet had to move on themselves. And that was how the Queensland police got the doctor.’

I would have laughed that du Barry had caused Pearson’s demise except that the main issue of Belshire’s patrol was no laughing matter. I uttered a sincere hope that Pearson was not too badly injured.

‘Well, now he will stand trial. He will not hang, but he will be long detained,’ he replied with considerable satisfaction, then said, ‘I’ve read your boss’s letter. I have every intention of according with his wishes if that is at all possible.’

‘He is very insistent, Inspector, that you have no standing here,’ I said firmly.

‘On the other hand, Mr Dickens, I am interested in crimes committed within my jurisdiction. There may be people on Momba who are suspected of the murder of two Welsh prospectors west of Toompine in Queensland. Besides, I see no other sworn enforcers of British law here, certainly not the New South Wales police. And the enforcement of law as it is recognised by our society, not some other fanciful one, is my vocation, my church and my mandate.’

‘Within the colony of Queensland, however,’ I replied.

He took another sip of the rum.

‘These niceties can’t be maintained in country like this, Mr Dickens,’ he replied. ‘The matter of jurisdiction is a civilised concept meant to regulate the behaviour of servants of the law in places where they are thick on the ground. They are not thick on the ground here, or in southwest Queensland. Here the first principle of civilisation, that the traveller should sleep safely, has not yet been established in the minds of the savages.’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘there is no need for the response to murder to be murder. I should remind you that if you are seeking to punish in this region crimes of the group led by Barrakoon, there is a priest with him, Father Charisse, from Belgium. He would inevitably be a witness to any actions you took, and thus you would be under the same scrutiny as if you were acting in a city street.’

The inspector inhaled and opened his eyes wide to take account of this. ‘What work of your father’s is your favourite, Mr Dickens?’ he asked me.

‘Why, it’s David Copperfield.’

‘Bleak House for me,’ he told me. ‘“An infernal country dance of costs and fees and nonsense and corruption as was never dreamed of in the wildest visions of a witches’ Sabbath.” Such is his view of the law as practised in cities. Besides, your good father seemed to think appropriate punishment a fine thing, whereas the letter of the law is a stumbling and silly thing. See his mockery of the prison system in Copperfield. So I have to say I am a little surprised to get here and find the son of the great man presenting me with that very letter of the law. Especially when two men were killed by their campfire.’

‘I regret their deaths,’ I replied. ‘The security of the night camp is a consideration all bush people place weight on. But I have no reason to believe the miscreants are anywhere on Momba.’

The matter of the concern about the young men that Charisse had raised with me was, after all, nothing near proof.

‘Mr Bonney respects the Paakantji and is respected in turn by them. He wants nothing to blemish or destroy his connection with them. When the Cooper’s Creek blacks come down here on their way to find ochre, Mr Bonney allows them to spear whatever sheep they need. As a result, we barely lose a head. If we applied the letter of the law they would become criminals, and what benefit would there be to us in describing them as such? If you destroy the friendship between the Bonney brothers and the native people, it is certain they will not take it calmly and that it will be difficult to restore.’

The inspector swallowed a large mouthful of rum now and its sweet acridity set his lips in a rictus. ‘So,’ he said, ‘I am to be concerned for a priest and the Bonney brothers.’

‘And for me,’ I felt I owed it to the Bonneys to say. ‘For me as well.’

‘Oh dear me,’ said the inspector with a short laugh. ‘I don’t want to take on the Dickens family as well.’

The next day there was a lot of inspection of police horses, the draining of a hoof abscess, and a great deal of walking back and forth of a suspect gelding. But then the troop saddled and set off in a south-west direction, where Belshire would encounter the western and lower reaches of the creeks that flowed from the Paroo, and thus less certain water.