Читать книгу All That Swagger - Miles Franklin - Страница 4

Table of Contents

The Jane, 374 tons, entered Port Jackson, "the beautiful land-locked marine lake", and anchored in Sydney Cove, seven miles from the Heads, six months from the day she had sailed from Southampton. The arrival of the Delacys was chronicled in the Australian of the date:—"Mr George Moore, of Ballyshannon, Co. Donegal; Mr and Mrs Daniel Delacy, of Ennis, Co. Clare, as well as 20 steerage passengers, principally mechanics and their families. All the passengers spoke in high terms of the gentlemanly treatment afforded them by Capt. Jas. Riddell."

Mr George Moore of Ballyshannon had a promising estate in the Colony at Bandalong and at Quebarra on the Morumbidgee. He had been out for some years, driven from Ireland by the death of his wife, and had returned to Dublin only to place his son at Trinity College. On the Jane he had shown a warm interest in the immigrant bride of nineteen-and-a-bit with her groom of eighteen, and his kindness and generosity had mitigated some of the hardships of the voyage for Johanna. To conserve his currency Danny had taken a steerage passage for himself and put his wife in the between accommodation. Mr Moore had had them both removed to berths near his own so that his young countrywoman could have the company of the ladies in the cuddy. From his ample stores he had coaxed her appetite and exerted himself for her comfort in other ways as well as by cheering and sustaining her during the trying months of their passage. He also offered Danny the position of overseer, and invited Johanna to take up her residence as lady-housekeeper at his station. For the moment Danny had other ideas.

Mr Moore was an esteemed patron of Petty's grand new hotel for the gentry on Church Hill, and, on landing, took the young pair to a select boarding establishment near by, which the proprietor had "the distinguished honour to announce is recommended by ladies of the first respectability, that his dinners are got up in the first style with change of soups daily and mock turtle three times a week". This gentleman also pointed out that his hostelry had a fine view of Port Jackson and Darling Harbour, and that his clients could hear the strains of the military band from the Fort near at hand.

Those elegancies which Johanna had expected, were, as elsewhere, for the privileged. She saw little of them at her boarding establishment, where the cark of funds running low and the discomfort of approaching motherhood depressed her. She was not at that date susceptible to the swagger of the military bucks, nor was she concerned with the lady, who desired, for a consideration, to undertake "the preservation of the complexion from the burning pernicious influence of the solar beams of the Antipodes". She was delighted with orange blossoms, water-melons, guavas, and pomegranates. Grapes and peaches were to her taste, but the clouds of flies and mosquitoes and the heat distressed her. A "brick-fielder" frightened and prostrated her. Danny demanded her enthusiasm for the lively harbour with a forest of masts like a deciduous wood, and shouted in her ear that there were twenty-two whalers at sea, in addition to all those in port, and that their capacity was from 70 to 700 barrels.

"Moi! Think of that wealth. Sure, a boat with 500 barrels of sperm oil put in the same day as ourselves because ten of the crew refused duty. They've been a year away in the Antarctic."

It was a blow to Danny to learn that land grants had ceased in 'thirty-one. The information imparted to Johanna in the coomb had been out of date. There were no special prizes for a young man because he was free and honest. He had to acquire by toil. Without a trade or any special influence there was a stiff prospect ahead of the little pair in the Colony, thrusting beyond its garde-major days, but still hampered by bedraggled swaddling clothes of convictism.

Danny was out every hour of the day seeking an opening. Johanna was left much to herself. Mr Moore had too much business demanding attention to pay her any but a short call. A lady—especially one in her "delicate" state of health—did not walk abroad alone when the quarterly muster of ticket-of-leavers was proceeding at the post office, when prisoners were marched about in gangs under guard, when misdemeanants were sent aboard the hulks as a respite from severer punishment, or were sentenced to days on the treadmill. Danny would burst in to declare that the cattle market had excellent beasts, but that he saw a rubbishing lot of ewe-necked horses. "Och, the field for breeding horses that's here—the uses for them!" Or he would tell of the cricket match for £50 a side.

Johanna read the newspapers and learnt that bread was 4 lb., 7d.; bacon, 6d. lb.; beef, 3d.; butter, 1/2; cheese, 4d. to 8d.; and candles, 6½d. Salted hides were 2d. per lb.; horns, 10/- per 100; guinea fowls, 6/6 per pair, and turkeys, 5/- each.

Danny was determined to own land, but how was he to clear and work it without capital, and in competition with established and favoured men who could command all the Government labour they needed? He had not arrived early enough. The big fellows, with parents to provide capital and influence, frequently dishonestly exercised in official circles, had already pegged their claims and were squatting on them west, north, and south, to the full extent of the Nineteen Counties.

Danny said he would be doomed if he had travelled thirteen thousand miles for land, then to sit down like a hen in a town as a servant to any man. At length, when funds ran out, he consented to go up country with Mr Moore until he could set-up on his own land. That she was to be with Mr Moore was to Johanna the only factor to temper the strangeness and uncongeniality of her new environment. Had Mr Moore been situated near Sydney, she could have been comparatively happy, but what elegancies or ease could there be in the untamed bush from which came bloodcurdling tales of bushrangers and aborigines.

The size and height of the trees frightened her. "Sure, they'd make gallows posts big enough for the devil to collect his own," she cried, and withdrew her eyes from those standing stark and dead early on the route; and she never forgot the gibbeted form she saw along the way.

The trees inspired Danny. "They're giants, bedad! From the top of them you could slip into heaven itself, me brave Johanna."

"There's nothing that would be called grass at home—nothing that affords a full bite."

"But if it provides a full belly, it is the same thing."

"At anny rate the whole world is a forest. There is ne'er a meadow at all," said Johanna, disconsolately.

"They're for me to make," maintained the undefeatable Daniel.

"Och! Live horse till ye get grass!" murmured Johanna.

They travelled in two drays, with only a few yoke of oxen in each vehicle, and progress was retarded by the necessity of double-banking at stiff pinches. They had assigned men to attend them, men glad to be going to Mr Moore, who had a good name.

The Goulburn Plains were already held by families, which, in some instances, hold them still with prestige and comfort. Lake George was gone, likewise Gounderu. Limestone Plains was in the hands of first families, there to remain, in imitation of the English squirearchy, until dispossessed by an imperative democracy in favour of an ideally modelled city.

They reached Bandalong, one of the farthest-out stations, not far from Mount Bowning, which a year later was declared the official limit for settlement. The holding was large and watered by the Bandalong, a short tributary of the Morumbidgee. Mount Bowning's round blue head was a sentinel from every direction.

For Johanna's sake Danny was relieved to anchor, but he was emphatic "It's only till I can foind meself."

Johanna's child did not live long, but it was only a girl, and Johanna had a reverence for producing males that was descended from a racial era when an adulteress, with sons, could wear a bolder face than an honest wife with nothing but daughters.

"The poor little thing would have been a help in manny ways," observed Danny, having in mind that family labour with which men of various designations made their way on the land.

Danny pegged away with Mr Moore, with little adventure but that of a strange environment. Johanna was weak and fretful. This fact and the unwelcome attentions of Walter Moore prevented Danny from going with Major Mitchell in 1835. Lack of capital kept him from joining the overlanders who rushed along the Major's Line in the years following, years during which the squatters extended their occupancy of the land from the Morumbidgee to the Darling, and changed the social and economic composition of the Colony. The sheep owners within the Nineteen Counties authorized for land settlement, had, under existing policies, been able to secure most of the grazing areas. Later arrivals coveted holdings beyond the jurisdiction of the area delimited for the maintaining of law and order, and soon spread like a bursting dam in disregard of an Act declaring squatters to be unauthorized trespassers on the Crown. The mere name did not wound the hardy and mostly unscrupulous adventurers, there beyond the application of law, in millions of acres of inland grass country to be had for the seizing. The Governor preserved Governmental prestige by sanctioning what was too strong to suppress, and licensed the squatters to trespass by the payment of a small yearly fee, or rental, for vast stations. "Squatter" acquired an antipodean connotation approximating that of manorial lord as the graziers entrenched themselves in parody of English County Families. Conditions have ensured that they remain a parody to this day.

There were no coolies, Zulus, nor abducted negroes here. In the serf class were only British prisoners, and transportation was soon to cease. Thenceforward for several generations, Australian men were to establish their homes, if not by the sweat of their brows, then in saddle galls and the physical hardihood of an existence which demanded the pluck to ride colts that had run ungentled until mature. Women had had to give birth to their families in the same way since Eve, but in Australia, the highest type and breed of white woman had to add to that fundamental travail the secondary labour, which in more populous lands is delegated to the disinherited and servile classes, or to the backward races.

Though he was hobbled by domesticity plus lack of capital, Danny never settled as an underling at Bandalong. He disliked his relation to the convicts as overseer, and abhorred theirs to the lash. Though of invulnerable integrity himself, no man was more merciful to transgressors. Decency abode in him as melody in music and without any sense of superiority. There was little of either the bully or the servant in him; he was ineradicably a free man, an individualist. His father was a Trinity College man; Danny himself at least knew of the classics when only "betters" could read or write. Old Cooley, too, had the status of a fox-hunting squire, and Johanna had not forsaken her country and forsworn her faith to sink in the social scale.

Each time that Danny reached the plateau that lay between Bandalong and another holding of Mr Moore's on the Murrumbidgee—as it was later to be spelt—he was bewitched by the spectacle of the heavens prinked with a necklace of ranges beautiful as opals and sapphires. There it lay, land in plenty beyond County Murray. No one had penetrated its gorges since Hume and Hovell had skirted them in reaching the Doomut ten years earlier. This domain was guarded by natural ramparts and dismissed as inaccessible while there was ample open country. The high blue ranges were the wall of a fountain province beyond which the Colony sloped down and away to droughty plains of heat and mirage, already held in lively cattle runs from the Lachlan to the Murray, and from whence came news of desperate encounters with inhabitants who resisted invasion, or who executed summary justice upon men who upheld white prestige in desecrating black women. The Out Back had no allure for Danny. He babbled of the cool endearing mountains in a way that filled Johanna with apprehension. On the other hand, Walter Moore, a waster and libertine, laid her under continual siege so that she longed for some way of escape. Mr Moore voiced the opinion, volubly upheld by Walter, that native dogs would destroy all young or weak stock in winter in the gorges. In summer, the aborigines, who migrated there for their initiation ceremonies and to feast on the boogongs,* would spear or frighten away what animals escaped the dogs.

[* Large edible moths.]

"Maybe we had better stay where we are well-off," sighed Johanna.

"Well-off, by damn!" was all that Danny said.

Finally Johanna had to complain of Walter, and she begged his father to assist Danny to a place of his own. Mr Moore had seen dubious incidents, and regretfully acceded to Johanna's plea. He had for the handsome 'young woman the affection of a parent, and would miss her, as the society of any women, and especially of ladies, was highly prized. The Commissioner—the all-powerful of the period—was Mr Moore's friend, and through him Moore obtained a sliver of land on the Morurnbidgee, adjoining the Moore property, Quebarra.

Some time earlier it had been a grant to a convict who had saved an official's life. The man, given his freedom, had married and settled there. For the birth of his child he took his wife to Mrs Fullwood, of Heulong, eight miles away across the river. He brought wife and child home on Mrs Fullwood's horse at dusk when the river was a little high, so that he had to give all his energy to guiding the horse and keeping him on his feet. When the horse rushed up the bank past him out of the water, the saddle was empty. The bodies were found days after and buried near by. The man abandoned his land and disappeared. It remained unoccupied because of a legend that the ghost of the woman and child wailed in the crossing when the water was shoulder-high at the dark of the moon.

Danny "arrahed" at ghosts. They raised no fear in his valiant flesh, and the river frontage secured the gorges behind it. Currency being scarce, Mr Moore paid Delacy in live stock, which were allowed to run on the skirts at Bandalong. Now he advanced labourers to fell timber and put up a hut.

Johanna regretted her comfortable quarters and lady's life, with assigned labour for all purposes, including a nurse for the baby, and prepared to accompany Danny into the wilderness once more. She moved to Quebarra to be safe from young Moore and nearer to Danny while he was erecting their shelter.

The new place was called Bewuck by the blacks for the hauls of cod they caught in the fish hole, almost in front of the homestead. It was a reservoir from which the water issued in a slight fall and ran wide on a stony bed that made one of the few safe crossings in a day's ride. While at Quebarra, Johanna was told of the ghosts by the stockman's wile, and that the bottomless waterhole was the home of the bunyip, most mysterious of all the fantastic Australian animals.

Johanna soon moved to her home, with her belongings on a slide. The early settler's heart sank as she struggled down the declivity to the rough spot without a road, and far from neighbours. Terror invaded her when she saw the wild river rushing past so near her door. She clasped her toddler against the mesmeric danger. The river had a long, harsh name and was lined with uncanny trees, strangely called oaks, and clothed in green hair that was tormented by the breeze to the melancholy cadence of the banshee.

The new home was a wooden shell. The cracks let in the sun. Johanna found no bar on the door, and when Danny went out of her sight in the gathering dusk, she wailed that the bunyip would devour her and the child.

"You've been listening to some nullity with an empty skull so that stories rattle in it," said Danny, with scorn. "The bunyip will be all to the good to scare the child from the river. No wan has ever heard of the bunyip away from the water. Sure, I wish I could capture the beast. I'd be clearing up a mystery that disturbs the zoologists and gaining renown for meself."

The brown and the black, and even the deadly tiger snakes were thick about the river banks—an added torture to an exile from the sacred Isle of Inisfail from which the blessed St 'Patrick himself had banished the reptiles. Danny did not minimize the danger from snakes, though he could break their backs by cracking them like a whip, a performance which made Johanna tremble for his safety. He was more than occupied as the founder of one of the first families on the Morumbidgee, and was as full of satisfaction as though his frontage had put him among the landed gentry of Ireland. His gunyah of shrinking slabs, covered with bark, elated him; but the drips spoiled Johanna's bed curtains and made it necessary to hide her few linen treasures, and thus defeated the elegancy dear to her heart.

Day or night there was no relief from the Morumbidgee, so lone and dark and far, with the voice of a ravening wind—thousands of miles of it until it met an unknown sea. Johanna felt that here indeed was the furthest extremity of the globe from the placid Shannon in its park-like plain. The contrast between this stream and that golden mirror in the westering sun, when the gentry's salmon waited head to tail to go up, was so gruelling that her father's curse seemed to have overtaken her. Here, at length, she felt the punishment of her name being tabu in her family, and that never again would she see Cooley Hall in old County Clare.