‘Yeah?’
‘Yeah, we got sent these activity packs, different ones for different grades. They’re from the mining company.’
‘What’s in them?’
‘Oh, just kiddie stuff, really, but you know – I saw the site proposal. Hubby is happy for the contract work that’s gonna come in – but yeah, heaps of greenies are chucking a tantrum.’
‘What’s it got to do with the school, though?’
‘I don’t know, primary-school propaganda. The kids get to build little cardboard things and pretend to put them in the ground and then there’s these multiple-choice questions: What is great about having a mine? A. Jobs. B. Jobs. C. Jobs?’
She threw her head back laughing then, her mass of curls lifted away from the conversation.
‘You really want to see them? I can drop them off – you staying with your grandparents?’
‘Yeah. I mean, Poppy died.’
‘I heard,’ her face scrunching into distaste, ‘I’m sorry.’ She sighed as if for the two of them.
August could feel jet lag had buckled down on her. ‘I should go – I need to help Nana.’ She raised her hand and held up the pharmacy bag, as if it were proof.
‘She okay?’
‘She’s okay,’ she nodded, and lowered the bag.
‘I’ll drop the stuff off Monday?’
‘No worries.’
She hugged August’s shoulders briefly and pecked her cheek.
Before August walked back to the rental she took another look into the empty windows of the Aboriginal Medical Centre; she breathed against the glass, a hot breath that made no steam in the dry air. As she stepped onto the street a twin-cab ute drove past too closely, too slowly. Below its tinted windows in discreet silver letters the words RINEPALM MINING stretched along the length of the white, shining body as it sailed towards the town’s end.
On return she daydreamed that the week after she wouldn’t fly back to London, she wouldn’t take the train to Guildford, not the taxi back to the White Horse in Shere, not carry her backpack up the iron stairs out the back of the English pub and sleep, wake, repeat. Not finger those dog-eared books of faraway poets until her next shift, not drown her hands in scalding soapy water and work off stuck gravy and Yorkshire pudding from plates. Not back to the scent of stale ale and starched aprons. That’s what she imagined she wouldn’t do.
Pulling into Prosperous and since shown, she could see the three drill sites in the field, and the roofs of high Rinepalm utes parked alongside. Inside, the sound of things being moved came from the old preaching room. August walked to the doorway and found Elsie in there taking a lid off a tea chest.
‘I’m back, Nan.’
Her nana looked animated in her long-sleeved black cotton dress that brushed at her bare ankles. She looked up at August. ‘Ed came looking for you.’
‘I’ll see him later. Can I help?’
‘Mmm-hmm.’
Elsie knelt on the carpet and August did the same, a pile of cloth cut into squares lay between them. Elsie took a framed photo of Albert and sat it in the centre of the cloth, then wrapped it like a baby swaddle. They’d never had photos in rounded frames, not like the antique oval ones of someone else’s ancestors that August had seen in England. Years before Elsie had run the mothers’ groups in that same room, where the girls chatted and practised the fold and pin of cloth nappies. The girls who came for free frozen meals and whose reluctances were only stoked seeing the walls hung with idols. Then they’d be in the kitchen, Elsie and her audience of new mums, their faded prams hustled together on the verandah, there Elsie would show them how to stew sugarless apples or mash up salt-free vegetables for baby. Bub never needs salt or sugar, okay, girls, her nana would say. Salt and sugar are no good for bub.
Elsie leant over the tea chest and placed the wrapped photo of Poppy into it. August picked up another picture, it was of a group of people dressed in knee-length shorts and elbow-length shirts standing outside a bus. Both her nana and poppy were there, though they stood apart. She knew it was the Freedom Ride trip. The photo in its large frame always rested against the wall in the living room, ornaments arranged around it as if it were the centrepiece of the house.
‘Should I wrap this too?’
‘Yes, please.’
‘What was it like?’
Nana momentarily regarded the photo in August’s clutch before returning her attention back on her own. ‘Bumpy.’
‘No, really?’
Elsie squeezed her eyes together as if trying to remember or push it away. Finally she said, ‘We had hope that people would become happy.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘We were young and hopeful, I guess.’
‘And now?’
She looked at the photograph and cloth she was working on and pressed her lips together. ‘I think people need to make a different thing that makes them happy.’
‘Is that where you and Poppy met?’
‘That day,’ Elsie smiled, letting herself remember. ‘And I left the same day, too.’
‘When did you meet back up?’
Nana kept wrapping and chatting, ‘I was meant to travel the whole country, that was the plan. But then I met Alb, and love threw a spanner in the works.’
‘Did you ever regret it? Coming out here to the farm from the city?’
‘Never, not with kids coming along as quick as they did.’
August just nodded as Elsie heaved herself up and headed into the living room, returning with a wide coolamon in her hands. She picked up a square of muslin for it.
‘I always loved that. Did Poppy make that one or is it an artefact?’
‘This? No, Poppy didn’t make this one.’
‘Where’d it come from?’ August asked.
‘Your pop and I went away, we took a Greyhound bus trip for our anniversary when you were little, we went right to the exact middle of Australia – the local women made them.’ Elsie held it up at August and smiled. ‘What a thing to see – all that red earth and all those flowers. It was special to us. When we came home he went and made his own coolamons too – he called them gulumans.’
August touched the lip of the coolamon, the thin rough red wood sloped into a long bowl, dark ochre and white were painted in intricate, blending patterns down the length of its base. Elsie covered it completely in the cloth. ‘You won’t keep it out?’
‘I think I’ll have to pack the entire house up soon. Anyway it’s not important anymore, these things. It’s his story – it goes with him now.’
‘Are there any artefacts? From the Gondiwindi?’
‘I don’t think so. There was a war here against the local people. In that war the biggest victim was the culture, you know? All this stuff—’ she lifted the wrapped coolamon out in front of her ‘—well, culture has no armies, does it?’ she said.
August bit the inside of her mouth and began to wrap the next frame.
Elsie put her hand at August’s ear. ‘Don’t be sad for his life, August. He had a very happy life. We aren’t victims in this story anymore – do you see that?’
They wrapped some more in the easy silence. Poppy the storyteller, not Nana.
A timer alarm buzzed from the kitchen and Elsie placed the lid atop the tea chest. She stood up and leant against the door entrance, turned back to August.
‘Please don’t be a victim, Augie. It’s an easy road, that one. I never let Alb walk it. The land, the earth is the victim now – that needs an army, I reckon. She’s the one in real trouble.’
‘Nana?’ August stepped out after her. ‘Why can’t you stop the mine? Why can’t people protest it? Isn’t that what you want? That’s what you meant – you had hope before?’
‘I don’t think so, Aug,’ she said, entering the kitchen. ‘Too many people want this to happen, everyone at that town hall meeting was for the mine. Everyone, darlin’, even Ed.’
‘Southerly Eddie?’ August asked, as she followed her nana into the kitchen.
She nodded. ‘It’s progress, isn’t it?’
Elsie washed her hands in the sink, then drew a bowl of cold water as August rested against the wall.
‘We did that,’ Elsie continued. ‘We protested in the street, for our rights and against the wars overseas. We protested with flowers, protested to save the river being dammed, peaceful protests.’ She looked out the back window. ‘We carried flowers in the street. Afterwards we threw the flowers on the side of the road when they all bent in the heat.’ She took a tray from the freezer and bent the plastic mould over the bowl until the ice cubes fell in.
‘It’s too late I think, Aug. We’re just a few small people, anyway.’ She drained a saucepan of steaming eggs and placed them in the ice water.
August shifted to the sink with Elsie, ‘I don’t think it’s right, I think something needs to be done. It doesn’t make sense to me.’
Elsie touched the pads of her fingertips atop the eggs, reading the temperature like a ouija board. ‘You can’t ask hungry folks to go on a hunger strike, bub. But …’ Elsie hovered above her eggs and then pushed her thumb into a sphere, cracking the shell.
‘You mean because the town needs jobs?’
‘That too. Forget it, Augie, it’s a done thing now.’
She placed the first shelled egg on a paper towel.
‘You said but? But what?’
‘But?’ she asked back to August and answered vaguely. ‘Well, food isn’t just the things you can eat. That’s all. You should take a walk. Have you gone down to the river since you’re back or what?’
‘I’ll take a walk, yeah,’ August said, absent-mindedly crushing the discarded eggshells on the sideboard.
August took her nana’s elbow and hugged her tight, she’d felt breathless, like she’d shed a skin. As if she had something she needed to say, finally, but then couldn’t find it.
With her hands in the water Elsie hummed the beginning of a tune.
‘I’ll see Eddie,’ August said. She looked back to her nana who was shelling eggs easily in the bowl of ice water. She didn’t look up.
FIFTEEN
Reverend Ferdinand Greenleaf ’s letter to Dr George Cross,
2nd August 1915, continued
III
It had become clear to me, in the granary of the Motherland – that the first countrymen may have sown wheat but reaped thorns. I was in many ways still a babe when we arrived in Australia. A small and unworldly child. As time progressed, many of the kind residents of our town, our town that was expanding with vineyards and less sour white wine each year, revealed to me our heritage and how it was that we ended up on the other side of the world. That they themselves were persecuted and exiled and sought refuge in this country, and now to suffer this great harassment because we came from that same place has me questioning the reason of man to no end. I must tell you here and appeal to your sensibilities – I am shoulder to shoulder with my fellow citizens under the British flag and am no threat to the State. Yet, what has occurred towards people that I know also to stand shoulder to shoulder with Britain, and to be simple and good-natured in their lives here, is most deplorable and must be aired.
After numerous subsequent visits through the grasslands to Massacre Plains, I took it upon myself to write to the Colonial Secretary. The letter was sent in May 1879 upon the subject, and, after waiting two months, I received a kind reply signifying his interest in my proposal to erect a House of Mercy, and requesting certain items of information, which, according to my memory, I supplied. It was six months after this reply, in searching for a suitable site for a Mission, that I found a portion of the river at a dogleg rapid below a large rock peak, large enough to get one’s bearings from each corner of the property’s five hundred acres. The land had recently been revoked from lease and I had hoped that I should thus escape any unpleasantness with the resident squatter, but when word filtered through the district that I would establish the Mission it was not well received. I had come upon the sentiment while lodging at the less aristocratic hotel in Massacre Plains, as my preferred accommodation was closed upon arrival.
I had ridden the horse to the rear of the premises, where several rough-looking men had gathered. I dismounted to enquire after the manager. There was a strange manner to these men and I soon ascertained that they were, more or less, under the influence of liquor as they hurriedly cleared away bottles and pannikins from the back table. It was clear I had interrupted their recreation, but on saying, ‘Well, men, I see what you have been doing, now don’t be dishonest, make a clean breast of it’, they seemed to regain their wits. I explained who I was and what I wanted. They directed me to the front of the hotel and the manager received me kindly, at the same time apologising for the disorderly state of domestic affairs. On signifying my wish to remain overnight, he said I had better go on and bed down at the woolshed some three miles distant. But on my complaining of fatigue, he agreed I could stay, saying he expected every patron to provide his own blankets. Having assured him I could do that, the horse was turned out and I turned in to my room.
To my surprise over the course of the evening, three of the young men came to me and said they had recently been making asses of themselves, and would I give them the abstainer’s pledge. I should only be too happy to do so, I replied. The result was that six took the pledge, some for a year, and some for half that, but all with the understanding that it was not to commence until twelve o’clock at night, so that they might finish the supply they had on hand. I made myself as comfortable as circumstances would allow, my greatest discomfort being the sounds of revelry from the adjoining room, for as soon as my address had finished they hurried away to drain their bottles, which I think they managed to do. As I was departing the next morning and having not complained of the noise, the manager said that he had heard from other fellows in the region that I was a stuck-up parson and he was glad to find I was not so. Little did I know, those same men taking abstinence would later become the greatest cause of distress on our very lives at the Mission.
That day, on passing the local Police Depot on my route north, I found several unfortunate Natives chained like so many dogs to each other around the neck. They had no space to even turn their shoulders from each steel fixture. A bolt attached them to the main chain, with only a few links between each, the main chain ran along and was secured to a tree. As though that were not sufficient to prevent their escape, some of the poor beings were shackled by the ankles, and in such a condition of squalor that they had obviously sat there hour after hour, and perhaps day after day. They were awaiting the arrival of the Police Magistrate, and thence to be tried, or so the young constable told me. On my asking why they were without complete clothing, just a rag covering their modesty, and in their own mess, and, furthermore, chained!, he simply told me that it was ‘necessary’. I had no business remaining there and no authority to intervene so I proceeded north once again along an established wagon track, with little to engage my attention except for the birdsong and the appearance of a few weary kangaroos. Occasionally I passed a wool team with its inevitable Native girl or woman attached. On making brief acquaintance with several of the drivers, I asked why they had females with them. Some replied boastfully that they preferred their docility compared to the male workers while others did not blush on admitting that they had them for immoral purposes.
The land I prevailed upon ran along the most bountiful area of the Murrumby River where around the banks hundreds of solid acacia pines were growing, fit for construction. The only requirement the Government made of my endeavour was that the Mission be at a sufficient distance from the town to minimise contact with White society. This requirement I met and over the years made further provisions to separate us as much as I could from the township. In the end this was for the betterment of my residents themselves. Only on the occasion of Queen Victoria’s birthday commemoration each year did I encourage all the residents to visit the town for the blanket distribution. I encouraged them to retu
rn immediately and not to engage with the political discussions over Corroboree. It is common knowledge that the neighbouring Natives like to gather during blanket distribution, each May, to persuade each other to demand autonomy. Although I know a marked diminution in number of the race gather there and each year there are reports that death has been busy. They say that soon, the miserable doling of blankets for the ancient lords of the soil will no longer be required. They say with their decrease that the Natives must soon wholly disappear from the face of the Earth. It is written in the local express that soon the Aborigine will be as rare on the banks of the Murrumby as in the streets of Sydney. On the contrary I had still seen a number of, seemingly free, male and female Blacks carrying rocks into the river, which I later learned were for constructing fish traps. The Blacks of this area who seemed still in relation with the land were perhaps the finest I had seen, very tall, lean and nimble.
My friend Pastor Otto Baumann, who had his own small Mission of a hundred souls set up some two hundred miles south and four hundred miles inland by an artisanal lake, had disposed himself, sharing my ambition that Prosperous Mission would be complete within the season. In God’s grace, with my small wages from my travelling work as clergyman, Baumann and I were able to begin work in real earnest, cutting down trees and preparing timber for building. In about a month, two huts – the first I had hoped for a married Black couple as occupants and the other for myself – were drawing near completion, and so it was the correct time to search for our householders.
With Baumann, we discovered a little camp of women and children south of the river and persuaded them to go along with us. The women did treat me with great suspicion and I reasoned that they had not met well with white men before. They seemed to understand none of my language and I, as to be expected, understood none of theirs. This became a great frustration to me, and although Baumann tried some of the few words he had mastered from his region, none volunteered to speak the same language back to him, and we left without the women and children in our care. Baumann suggested that I learn some of the Blacks of Massacre Plains language. That I should integrate them into sermons if I were to truly have them converted to the Bible. Over the years I have tried. In those early days, Baumann and myself then gave in to building the huts of the Mission once more and erected a schoolhouse for proposed lessons. After only two months Baumann was obliged to return to his own Mission, so it was left to myself to set to work on sowing the grain I had acquired for a reasonable sum.
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