Читать книгу The Tom Wills Picture Show - Martin Flanagan - Страница 8

1840, Western Victoria. A wagon labours across a grass plain and up a slope, surrounded by several hundred sheep and a number of shepherds. The camera lingers on the face of one of these, a rough-looking man called Miller. In the wagon is a pregnant woman of 24, a four-year-old boy and a short exuberant man of 30. This is the family of Horatio Wills. His Irish-born wife Elizabeth is clearly weary from the arduous journey overland from New South Wales. She holds her belly, there is discomfort in her face. The boy’s name is Tom. They are in western Victoria only that name has not been invented. They are in the colony of Port Phillip and they are this particular area’s first white settlers. He is a man who dreams grand dreams and has the drive and energy to make them real. He is the son of Edward Wills, a convict trans-ported to Botany Bay for highway robbery. He would have been hanged but for the intervention, on his behalf, of the Duke of Marlborough, thus leading to the belief that Edward Wills was an illegitimate member of the Duke of Marlborough’s clan, the Churchills.

Horatio springs from the wagon. Before him are the range of rocky outcrops the Scottish settlers who follow will call the Grampians. The local Aboriginal people, the Tjapwurrung, call the mountains Gariwerd and say it is the place where fire first fell to earth. The Wills family are surrounded by rolling hills and native grass plains. Horatio takes Tom from the cart. Holding him in his arms, he says gleefully, “Look, Tom, look! This is the new world and it is ours, ours to fashion and shape”. Horatio hardly seems to notice the boy does not respond. Horatio turns to his wife. “Elizabeth,” he cries. “Elizabeth, I am naming this place Ararat because here, as in the Bible, we rested”. Her response is remarkably like her son’s. She merely wants to lie down. Horatio’s zeal, his excitement, remain undiluted.