In the puritan Australia of my childhood, you could only get a drink on a Sunday if you were a ‘bona fide traveller’. That meant you had to have travelled fifty miles or more. Around Sydney a ring of townships at exactly the fifty-mile mark filled with cheerful people every Sunday. One of them was a little place called Wiseman’s Ferry.
It was called that because its cluster of houses and shops stood on the south bank of the Hawkesbury River, at a point too wide to be easily spanned by a bridge. For the last two hundred years, anyone wanting to cross had taken a ferry. The original ferryman was a man named Solomon Wiseman.
He was my great-great-great grandfather.
It was Mum’s idea to go and look at the place, one autumn day when I was about ten—it would have been around 1960—not because it was Sunday and she wanted a drink, but because of her feeling about family history. She’d heard a few stories about Solomon Wiseman from her mother, who’d got them from her mother, and so on back for five generations. Some families hand down christening mugs or silver teapots. We inherited stories.
She was proud of them: not of the stories themselves so much as the fact of having them. She enjoyed knowing the exact ways she was connected to the past along the family tree, and being able to tell a few anecdotes about some of those forebears.
All four generations had been rough country people—right up to her parents, who’d run a succession of pubs in country towns. There were several convicts in the family tree. She was proud of them. They’d shown a bit of spirit, she thought, in trying to get something for themselves and their families. They were survivors.
Remarkably for her time and background—both her parents had left school at fourteen—Mum had scrambled into an education. She’d trained as a pharmacist and married our father, then a young solicitor with political leanings.
Now we lived in a big old house with a glimpse of Sydney Harbour. The roof leaked, the bathroom was a lean-to out the back, and the house was earmarked for demolition by the Department of Main Roads, but it was built on a generous scale. Mum had a dressmaker who made her copies of stylish—even outlandish—clothes from pictures in French magazines (the green brocade evening-coat made in panels so it hung like a piece of sculpture, the organza cocktail dress with the oversized collar that stood up around the back of her head). But her thrifty country childhood was never far away. She kept every piece of string and rag, she darned the elbows of her jumpers and she scraped the last speck off the butter-paper, using it later to line the cake-tin. She was a vigorous, intelligent, original, plain-speaking woman with a clear sense of what mattered and what didn’t.
One of the things that mattered was keeping those family stories alive.
Solomon Wiseman had worked on the Thames, but ran foul of the law in some way and was transported to Australia. Once in Sydney, he quickly won his freedom and, the story went, took up land on the Hawkesbury River. He’d done well for himself and died a rich man.
The best bit of the story, as far as I was concerned, was the part about his wife Jane. Wiseman was supposed to have killed her by throwing her down the stairs of the house he’d built on the Hawkesbury. Her ghost was rumoured to haunt it.
So, when Mum suggested a day at Wiseman’s Ferry to see the land Solomon had settled on and the house he’d built, I was keen. I pictured something Gothic and spooky. Creaking doors. Faded bloodstains. Maybe even the ghost herself.
I was short-sighted, but nobody knew. I was a teenager before anyone—myself included—realised that I badly needed glasses. Anything further away than a metre was a blur. As a result, my memory of the day at Wiseman’s Ferry is a series of close-ups and details. Nothing hangs together.
I remember a long dull drive through fuzzy bush, Mum exclaiming at a view that I couldn’t see (I thought that being able to appreciate views was something that happened when you got old, like enjoying oysters and olives). An alarming series of hairpin bends zigzagged down the side of a valley, the river swimming greasily at the bottom. The little township—a dozen houses, a shop or two, and the pub—was terribly quiet, steaming under a sultry sun, and with that humming silence you get in the country.
The house that Wiseman had built was now the pub, a sprawling two-storey stone place, with verandahs all around, top and bottom. From the bar I could hear a murmur of male voices and the races on the radio. Being so young, I wasn’t supposed to be in a pub, so it felt as if we were breaking the rules when Mum took me by the hand and led me inside.
There were the stairs. They must be the ones down which Jane Wiseman had fallen. Mum pointed and marvelled, and I peered. To my short-sighted eyes the flight of steep and narrow steps seemed to stretch up forever into darkness. It was easy to imagine the argument, the angry shove, and the woman tumbling down step after step, head over heels, skirts tangling.
Mum made a tsk tsk noise and shook her head, the way she did when she disapproved. ‘You can see how it happened, can’t you,’ she whispered. ‘Poor thing wouldn’t have had a chance.’
I’d never been clear whether the story implied that Wiseman killed her accidentally or on purpose. Mum’s tsk tsk could have meant either. I remember squinting up at the stairs and choosing not to ask.
I didn’t ask, partly because I’d heard the story so often that I should have known. If I asked now, it would be obvious that I hadn’t ever been paying attention. And partly I didn’t want to know. The idea of a dramatic death in the family was all right, the idea of a ghost even better. But I wasn’t sure I wanted a murderer for a great-great-great grandfather.
Plus I wanted to get outside. The bar was right beside us. Any moment the publican would come out and there’d be a scene. He’d go, ‘Now what do you think you’re doing,’ and Mum would say, ‘Look we’re not doing any harm,’ and I’d stand there trying to be invisible.
Outside, Mum showed me the stone lions on the tall gateposts. ‘He brought them specially from England, they cost him a hundred guineas.’
The lions were invisible to me, but I nodded. I may not have been able to make the lions out, but I was close enough to the stone gateposts to see the way each block was pecked and pocked with grooves.
‘That’s where they worked it with the picks,’ Mum said. ‘The convicts he had, assigned servants.’
That was real to me: that close-up detail. Each block of stone had a hundred pick-marks, two hundred, five hundred. I could picture it: a man standing in the steamy sun, swinging the pick again and again to square off the lump of sandstone. And, when he’d got it right, he’d have to start straight away on the next one.
I remember running my fingers into the grooves, wondering how anyone could have put up with it.
Later we went off in search of the graveyard. The story included something about Wiseman having been buried with a box of sovereigns at his feet. That sounded interesting, but finding the graveyard was a matter of driving along dusty yellow roads through dusty grey bush. Every time Mum saw a person, she’d pull over. ‘We’re looking for Solomon Wiseman’s grave,’ she’d say. ‘He was my great-great grandfather.’
I’d see their faces open out in surprise, they’d stare extra hard at her, they’d peer into the car to have a look at me, and point away up another road.
What was it I could detect in their faces as they examined us a bit more closely than they needed to?
Cows wandered along the verges of those roads, and Mum stopped every time we drove past a cow-pat that didn’t look too wet. She’d get out and pick it up and put it in the sugar-bag that was always in the back of the car. I slid further down in the seat. ‘Don’t be silly, lovey,’ she said. ‘It’s not dirty, only grass, wonderful for the garden.’
At last we found the graveyard. In my memory it’s a blur of trees and grey headstones until I got up close. Then I could see where the stonemason had ruled guide-lines in the stone: exactly like the lines I drew myself, when I had to do a heading in my Social Studies exercise book, except that I rubbed them out when I’d done the words. But these chiselled lines were still sharp. The letters themselves were a mixture of ‘little’ and ‘big’, the way I’d written when I was in Infants. Some of the words were spelled oddly: did ‘Henery’ mean ‘Henry’? Now and then the stonemason had left out a letter by mistake and had to put it in above the word, with an upside-down v to show where it should go.
‘They probably couldn’t read or write,’ Mum said. ‘Copying it off a bit of paper. You’d get it wrong, you wouldn’t know.’
From that day at Wiseman’s Ferry, that’s all I remember. The steepness of the stairs, the labour of the picks, and the misspelled names of the dead. The past: another country. Nothing to do with me. A day that was too hot and steamy, the smell of cow manure ripening in the car.
It was forty years before I went back.