THE BOYS WORKED ON the yards until lunchtime, cutting and shaping long branches and wiring them to tree trunks. Luke and Lawson put in new posts where there were no trees, and unbolted the gate from the old sheep yards and hung it off a new corner post that Steve had tamped into the ground with a spud bar. When there was only a small section of railing left to build, they stopped for a break.
‘Won’t be much longer, girls,’ said Luke.
‘Still thinking about renovating?’ asked Mrs Arnold as she sat on the edge of the river eating pies from the local bakery.
Luke looked forlornly at what was left of the house. ‘Might salvage the bathtub,’ he said. ‘Make a good horse trough.’
‘The original hut is cute,’ said Jess. ‘It must be really old. It’s like the one we found in the mountains that time.’
Luke nodded. ‘Have to burn the rest, though. It’s crawling with termites.’
‘Let’s have a bonfire tonight,’ said Grace cheerfully. ‘We’ll all sleep out in our swags!’
Jess looked hopefully at Mrs Arnold. She nodded. ‘Fine by me. Sounds fun.’
They spent the afternoon on the snigging chain, behind the tractor, dragging all the timber from the house and stacking it into a huge teepee. Jess raked up piles of debris and tossed all the old sacks of rubbish on top. The corrugated iron was stacked by the shed and the old nails collected in a bucket.
It was when Lawson looped the snigging chain around a large section of wall and the tractor started pulling that Jess saw it: a flash of metal glinting in the sunlight, between the timber studs and noggings of the walls.
‘Stop!’ she yelled, waving her arms at Steve, who was driving the tractor. ‘Stop! There’s something in there.’
Luke saw it too and began pulling the scraps of splintered timber and broken plasterboard away from the frame. He put his hands into the cavity and jimmied out a large, rectangular tin, the kind Jess’s grandmother would have put a Christmas cake in.
He prised open the lid, which had nearly rusted closed. It was stuffed full of papers, old and crumbly. Luke carefully pulled them out and laid them on the grass beside him. Beneath them was a small bundle of pound notes, and rattling in the bottom were two rings and a golden necklace.
‘Someone’s life savings,’ said Mrs Arnold, mesmerised, ‘and I bet those are wedding rings.’
‘D’you mind?’ Jess knelt beside Luke and picked up the rings. They were plain and flat and made from gold, one smaller than the other. She held them in her hand and wondered about their origins.
And then she saw a small, tarnished white box, small enough to fit in the palm of her hand. On the lid, written in old-fashioned typewriter font, it read:
AIF Military Medal
Awarded to Pte. Gordon Robertson
For his gallantry and devotion during
the taking of Beersheba
31st October 1917
‘Oh wow, a war medal,’ said Jess, carefully pulling the lid off the box. Inside, resting on tissue paper, was a round silver medal, not much larger than a twenty-cent piece. Jess picked it up and turned it carefully around in her hand. A king’s head was on the front, and on the back the words FOR BRAVERY IN THE FIELD were inscribed. It hung on a short striped ribbon.
‘Where’s Beersheba?’ asked Luke, leaning over her shoulder.
‘It’s in Israel,’ said Mrs Arnold. ‘It’s where the Light Horse charged and helped the Allies win the First World War.’
‘That explains this, then,’ said Luke, scratching around in the tin and bringing out a small pewter object. ‘It’s a badge!’ He held it in his open hand. Above a number 12 stood a proud kangaroo. Beneath that were the letters ALH and written on a scroll were the words, VIRTUTIS FORTUNA COMES.
‘Fortune favours the brave,’ said Steve, looking over Luke’s shoulder. ‘The motto of the Twelfth Light Horse Regiment. They’re legendary around these parts – tablelands boys, many of them were, on tablelands horses.’
He pointed up to the mountains. ‘Remember I told you those brumbies you’re so fond of are all direct descendants of the Walers, the horses that carried our boys into battle.’
‘That’s right,’ said Jess.
‘It’s well documented,’ said Steve. ‘The station folk bred them for the remount trade during the war. They would run ‘em wild in the bush, release good stallions, then muster them up and let the boys buck ‘em out.’ He laughed. ‘Legend has it there were rodeos going on all over these mountains. The bush boys stuck to the saddles like glue and one after the other the horses were broken in and led away to the Light Horse training camps at Armidale.’
Jess read the date on the small box again. ‘In October, same as the brumby massacre.’
‘Yes,’ said Steve in a grim voice. ‘Eighty-three years later, almost to the day. Instead of celebrating those horses, they slaughtered their descendants. Bloody shameful, if you ask me.’
‘Disgraceful,’ agreed Jess. She imagined all those wild brumbies being run out of the bush, broken in, put on ships and taken to a foreign land where they were ridden into a storm of bullets.
‘Not one of them came home,’ said Steve. ‘Too costly for the government. The soldiers had to shoot them.’
‘So, these ones, the ones in the mountains now . . . ’
‘When the Twelfth Regiment disbanded, switched to vehicles, they released a lot of the cavalry horses back into the mountains. The wild horses around here are their descendants. Or they were, before the government decided to shoot them all.’
‘So, who was Private Gordon Robertson and why are all his treasures stuffed in the wall of this house?’ wondered Jess.
‘That was my grandparents’ name,’ said Luke. ‘My mother’s maiden name.’
Everyone stared at Luke.
‘It was,’ he said. ‘My grandfather’s name was Frank Robertson. He was my mother’s dad.’
‘That’s right,’ said Steve. ‘That was Matty’s name, before she married Jack.’
Luke kept carefully unfolding the papers. They cracked and split at the creases as he spread them out, one by one on top of each other. Some were forms, typed with clunky bold font, filled out with fancy handwritten calligraphy and sealed with wax stamps. They had signatures scrawled on them with ink that seeped into the thick paper and left bleed marks.
Luke opened several papers that were folded together. ‘Receipts,’ he said. ‘Made out to a Laura Robertson. Hey, looks like Granny Robertson was a horse dealer!’
He held one of the documents out in front of him. ‘“Paid to Laura Robertson, the sum of one hundred and ninety-two pounds, for the purchase of twelve Walers.” ’ He flipped through the others. ‘And here’s one for twenty-three Walers, another one for six . . . ’
‘She’d have been selling them for the remount trade too,’ said Steve. ‘Told you! It was good money.’
‘What else is there?’
‘A birth certificate,’ said Mrs Arnold, rummaging through a different pile of papers. ‘Granny Robertson had a kid, Frank, born in 1932, so she must have been your great-grandmother.’ She lifted the certificate and looked underneath it. ‘And another one, an Elizabeth Jane. Oh, here’s little Lizzie’s death certificate. She died as an infant.’
‘Why would all this be stuffed inside the wall of the house?’ asked Luke.
‘Maybe they hid their worldly goods and went on the road looking for work,’ said Mrs Arnold. ‘They were tough times back then. They were the Depression years.’
Luke unfolded more paper and squinted to read the faded print. He fingered the paper.
‘New South Wales Department of Lands . . . This Indenture made by the . . . I can’t read that bit . . . on the . . . must be the date . . . Year of the Reign of our Sovereign, Defender of the Faith and in the year of our Lord God . . . Geez, they go on with some waffle,’ he said, casting the document aside and reaching for another.
Jess picked it up and scanned it. Most of it was so faded that she couldn’t read it, and the language was obscure, but she could make out words like towns, lands, tenements and hereby granted . . . ‘Is this some sort of thing about owning land?’ she asked. ‘It also says something about the Shire of New England . . . “Granted by the Crown in recognition of service . . . ” ’
‘A land grant,’ said Steve, peering over her shoulder. ‘Twenty square miles, most of them were, none of them fenced, neither.’
Before anyone could answer, Mrs Arnold, who had been squinting carefully at another document, erupted. ‘Certificate of marriage! Gordon Robertson and Laura Margaret Mathews,’ she said, triumphantly. ‘Holy horse dealers, old Granny Robertson’s maiden name was Mathews! These documents belong to the original settlers.’
Everyone crowded around Mrs Arnold, grabbing at her and trying to get a better look at the piece of paper. She held it in the air. ‘Righto, righto, no need to mug me!’
‘Excuse me,’ said an indignant Luke. ‘I think I should get first look.’
The others backed off and Luke held his hand out to Mrs Arnold. She handed it to him. ‘Gentle, it’s a bit crumbly.’
Luke carefully opened it out in his palms. ‘Gordon Robertson and Laura Margaret Mathews,’ he said in a voice filled with wonder.
‘Kwor,’ Grace breathed. ‘You know what that means . . . ’
Jess’s skin began to prickle. Luke looked stupefied.
Everyone’s eyes danced as the possibility percolated through their imaginations. If they were right, Luke was a descendant of the Mathews family, the original settlers of this valley. The owners of Brumby Mountain. And since no one else had come forward to claim the land, Luke might be the last one left.
‘I think we better get all that stuff to a solicitor,’ said Lawson. He grinned and smacked Luke wholeheartedly on the back. ‘Time to lodge a claim, bro!’
‘Reckon?’ said Luke.
‘It’s as much yours as anyone else’s,’ said Mrs Arnold. She threw her car keys to Lawson. ‘Go now. Let’s get this sorted, once and for all.’