Bettany's Book

by Thomas Keneally

  I was appalled that this was what had happened to a kindly man who considered himself virtuous – that New South Wales had reduced him to this moral inertia. I was pleased that my only contact with the official side of New South Wales would be to employ shepherds and stockmen.

  Rested the next morning, I felt more kindly towards the doctor as he rode with me to a large brick inn named the George, and led me to a stable at the back, where in a series of stalls a number of apparently newly released felons were lolling amongst straw. Strope called for Long, and he came forward, tall, lean-faced, wearing a blue coat, canvas pants and big boots which he probably retained, as a favour of government, from his career as a constable. His manner was restrained and wary yet correct.

  Strope said, ‘This is Mr Bettany. He is starting a new pastoral run in the interior, and is looking for an overseer. As a start, stock must be purchased.’

  Long fixed me with a melancholy but, I thought, generous eye. ‘Ah well, stock!’ he intoned in a rhythmic, Celtic voice which gratefully did not have any tone of blather. ‘There I think Mr Bettany could do all right altogether. We’ve barely had a proper rain the past eight months around Parramatta, and the cattle are slipping a little in condition. If you could get yourself some thin darlings, Mr Bettany, and rest them on good pasture on your way inland …’

  ‘It is Merino and Leicester sheep above all though, Long,’ I told him. ‘I shall let the cattle have the run of the hills. But fine wool, that is the game. Do you think you might be up to the task of overseer?’

  ‘Well, I suppose I have had management of men as constable.’

  Strope said, ‘Long had management of the boats which brought the women to the Factory and behaved well in keeping them orderly. Indeed, how can he be replaced?’

  ‘But do you have any experience in livestock?’

  ‘I have worked in fine wool, Your Honour. With Leicesters, in another place.’ He meant, I think, the place he’d been transported from. ‘They’re a fine mix of talents, those boys! But everyone tells me the Saxon Merino, though shorter in staple, has a great amount of crimp and is the sheep for the further country.’

  I smiled to think that the convict shared the same high opinion on the virtues of the Leicester as exclusive Mr Finlay.

  ‘I suggest, Mr Bettany,’ said the doctor, ‘that you take Long with you to the stockyards, and thus assess his strengths.’

  Dr Strope indeed had his official calls to make, and so I rented Long a horse. If he proved his mettle I would soon need to buy him one.

  As we rode past the end of Church Street, we saw the great structure of the Female Factory beyond the river.

  ‘There it is,’ I told Long. ‘The house of unruly women.’

  Long murmured, ‘Oh, it is not as bottomless a hell as they say, Mr Bettany.’

  ‘Oh no? Why do you say so?’

  ‘I was constable bringing the women upriver to here. You would find women of lesser crimes and honest backgrounds there lately.’

  We rode a little further, looking at the high walls of the place, perhaps ten feet, I think. Though of course I said nothing of Surgeon Strope’s confidences of the night before, Long seemed willing to address the very views Strope had uttered. ‘You see, they are loud girls in there, but loud is not the same thing as vile. If ever you got as far as needing a housekeeper, I know at least one good woman who inhabits that place.’

  ‘Well, we are years from that, I’d say.’

  ‘Yes. And the woman herself is likewise years from being one.’

  Arriving at the saleyards and tethering the horses, Long moved with me in the dust very companionably, amongst yards of shorthorn cattle. A stock agent came forth from a hut with his dusty cravat and descended upon us, full of advice we didn’t need, as we climbed from yard to yard choosing our bulls, our steers and heifers, and watched the stockmen run them down races to holding pens. There were no choices I made that Long took issue with, no choice he suggested which was not worth making. The agent stood by bawling out his professional incantation, hammering the palm of his left hand with his right fist. ‘All calves under six months given in with the lot.’ And Long murmured quite properly, ‘I should bloody well expect it.’

  We had worked with great and impeccable urgency, the best way to do things. Long and I next inspected some Saxon Merinos at pasture beyond the yards. Into pens made of split saplings, with much hallooing and waving of arms, we drove rams; two, four and six-tooth ewes; and wethers and weaners of both sexes. Then we looked at some Leicesters for Mr Finlay’s share. I was once more impressed by Long’s competence, so much so that, leaving him to finish the task, I rode into town to draw Mr Finlay’s and Charlie Batchelor’s money from the bank. And so the purchase of livestock was completed in hours! We left our selected livestock overnight, and went back to town where we finalised the purchase of a wagon, bullocks, three dogs and a string of six horses. In Goulburn we would still need to buy supplies, tar, shears, soap, woolsacks. But the pace at which two men, co-operating together, being of one mind, could put together flocks, mobs and necessaries excited me.

  At the inn from whose stables he had emerged, Long would introduce me later in the day to a ticket-of-leave man named Clancy. ‘He is not, mind you,’ Long warned me beforehand, ‘a perfect fellow, but I can gouge work from him. He is a sailor, and so not without some order to his mind.’

  Clancy proved a stocky, dark man, an American. I found by questioning that he claimed to be a half-Cherokee Indian, and the other half Irish. He had been tried in Liverpool, the original Liverpool on the Mersey, for assault. He was experienced at driving bullocks and carts. I took both him and Long to the magistrate, signed two papers, and suddenly they were mine in earnest.

  It was a common enough tale of New South Wales, that a settler might travel west with two ticket-of-leave men, who could give him his quietus, take all, and go bushranging. Yet I had every confidence that this was not the plan with Long and Clancy. After less than a day in Long’s company, I would have entrusted him with my life. He seemed a universe removed from the unreliable Goldspink, and I discovered why in the stableyard at the George Inn that dusk, when I had a discussion with him concerning terms of employment. An overseer was entitled to £20 a year. But Long told me, ‘Sir, I have no use for such a sum in the deep countryside. If you pay me £10 per annum, and give me 10 per centum of the increase on the cattle when I receive my conditional pardon … perhaps that would satisfy Your Honour.’

  I told him that the arrangement was very welcome to me. Since the entire enterprise must be financed, in terms of all the necessities of sheep-raising and cattle-farming, by myself and Charlie, I knew that ten per cent of increase on the cattle – the cattle being entirely a secondary matter to me – was a more welcome formula than £10 expended now. I saw too that it gave Long a motivation for industry, and in a modest sense, my partner, with an interest in what was to my benefit.

  ‘Consider that the arrangement,’ I told him.

  But to move my livestock inland, I would need more fellows than Long and Clancy.

  Such was the demand for labour in New South Wales that all the men who had been with Long at the stables of the George were now vanished, employed by farmers. Long suggested that we visit the police magistrate, because he knew there were still men who had been waiting at the Parramatta depot for the bench of magistrates to release the money they had earned as prisoners.

  So we went back to the police magistrate at his office, which was located on the same patch of saffron clay as the depot. He knew or, at least, suspected that though any men I took with me were to be marked down as working in the Goulburn region, I was actually taking them to work a previously ungrazed country far beyond the limits. He led Long and myself to a barracks on the west of the clay square. Here, in a long room, a number of male convicts selected for assignment or else holders of tickets for the first time were sitting on their berths, most of them dressed in dungarees and red flannel shirts, or in some cases i
n sheepskin jackets as protection from the brisk morning. Only a few wore the canary yellow fabric of their servitude. Their faces were full of a dull inexpectancy and even passivity, and I was pleased Long was with me to read these leathered features, and penetrate their take-me-or-bloody-leave-me air.

  ‘These fellows are the ones who have “Nothing Recorded” on their sheets,’ the police magistrate told us, indicating a group of men in a corner marked with a large A. ‘That is, they are members of the “well-behaved” category. I try not to pass on bad fruit to people who need reliable labour, particularly since you say you will be at a great distance and there will be no authorities to help you.’

  At the magistrate’s order a ragged line of men was formed. One was a freckled, wizened gentleman who held a dusty copy of The Edinburgh Review in his hand. I asked him his name and he told me, ‘Shegog, mister,’ and squinted at me. I wondered what to make of this fellow who carried his own entertainment with him.

  The magistrate consulted a roll of paper. ‘Stole tobacco to the value of 30 shillings.’

  ‘He might do, sir,’ said Long.

  A big, watchful man next attracted my attention. His name was O’Dallow, it seemed, and I think that even then I imagined that his crime might have been a technical or a protest one. The magistrate informed me that he had hamstrung a cow. ‘So you have experience of livestock,’ I remarked.

  ‘I do,’ said O’Dallow, ‘working for Mr Clench of Myall Brush.’

  ‘And hamstringing a cow in Ireland.’

  ‘That was … That houghing, as we call it, was a matter between a tithe proctor and myself, sir.’ He did not pretend to too much virtue. He did not plead his case. Long spoke to him in Irish and then turned to enlighten me.

  ‘He says it was his own cow, sir. He houghed it to stop the proctor taking it off. All I can say is I’ve seen that sort of thing, Mr Bettany.’

  O’Dallow seemed unwilling to be described as having committed a justifiable crime. ‘But tell me, sir,’ he said. ‘Would a man have a waler to ride in your employment?’

  ‘I have five or six store horses,’ I told him. ‘Those who ride well can ride them. The others will travel by foot or wagon.’

  ‘I adore to work cattle, sir,’ he darkly told me, more like a lament than an expression of taste.

  I felt in me the inappropriate impulses of improvement, to let the space of Nugan Ganway amend this man. This was something I had from my father, and I understood its peril. I wanted to be more like Mr Finlay and Charlie Batchelor, who were not burdened by delusions about the redemption of man.

  In startlingly quick time, with help from Long and the magistrate, I chose another eight men, making selections on the flimsiest grounds. This was the nature of employment in New South Wales. The value of my choices could only be proven by living with the service of these fellows over time.

  The sight of Long droving my cattle away from the saleyards gave me a pang. They looked so lowly I was pleased that Charlie Batchelor was not there to see what my stewardship had produced. Clancy called from his wagon, ‘They’ll look a heap better, Mr Bettany, after a week’s grazing on those limestone plains.’

  I looked at my men, most in the new red flannel shirts, striped pants and boots which I had bought them at an outfitters in Parramatta, but distinguished by their coats of all marsupial and livestock background, from the kangaroo to the Merino. They had their lag reticence, their determination not to appear too earnest, too clever, too orderly, too respectful or too alacritous. They were of the whole cloth of the convict system. Would they stand by me?

  Assisted by the three sheepdogs we had acquired, I followed our sheep on Hobbes, putting the Leicesters behind in the especial care of sullen but intelligent O’Dallow and one other man. These sheepdogs were splendid, glossy creatures named Boxer, Brutus and Bet, and it was hoped that Bet the bitch would provide litters of future dogs for Nugan Ganway.

  As we passed through the town of Liverpool, I saw from my position in the rear, and with a recurrence of self-doubt, that ticket-of-leave men waiting outside the courthouse in yellow smocks and dungarees jokily took their hats off to mark our passage, finding in our herd of cattle a metaphor for a funeral. My men, who included the quasi-scholarly Shegog travelling on foot with a bag of journals, cried dark curses back. I was pleased to note the proprietorial affront with which Shegog cried, ‘To hell with the lot of you. We’re driving the beasts casual and easy, and we’ll be lords of flocks when you bastards are still begging for a dram.’

  And while I kept fearing to see some old heifer the stock agent had managed to slip into our numbers fall over dead, the cattle kept on with that bovine tenacity which is part of the endearing quality of the shorthorn beast.

  Our conversations on that first droving journey were delightful. When Long spelled me at the rear of the flock, I rode by the wagon and asked Clancy about New York, which I had read of in the Illustrated London News as the coming place of the New World.

  ‘Oh,’ he told me, ‘it is the devil’s own port. A narrow and stinking place, Mr Bettany, and into the toe of the city is packed the worst of humankind. No tide fails to wash up a murdered corpse or the bodies of strangled babes.’

  ‘But that is what critics say of Sydney,’ I protested.

  ‘True enough. But in Sydney a fellow could blame the System.’ He hammered his chest. ‘Fellows like myself are counted to be fallen and have no pretence of manners. But where does a fellow look to find the blame for what New York is? They are a fast crew, let me tell you!’

  I did not disclose either to Long or Clancy the news that my own father had been a member of a secret and illegal society in his youth, but perhaps the information was already there, tacit in the manner in which we conversed on that first journey. My demeanour, whether activated by some sort of vanity or not, consisted of this: behold, I do not dismiss any man!

  As we came to the little town of Picton, a curricle coach pulled away from the hotel and I saw two ladies inside. I had promised the men ale in Picton, so we turned the herd off onto the common, heavily grazed as it was. Ordering the ale from the owner in the taproom, I mentioned that by the look of the carriage which just passed down the road, he had had guests of quality.

  ‘You know that old Scotch bastard in Goulburn?’ asked the publican – a typical New South Wales man, perhaps a former time-server, and very free with his language. You would not have found in Ross or any other town of Van Diemen’s Land a hotelier who referred to former guests or their connections so. ‘Finlay,’ he said, and before I could stand to a full height and defend Mr Finlay, he was rattling on. ‘That was Mrs Finlay and a lady companion in the surrey there. Goes to Sydney every chance she gets. As you bloody would eh? Married to such a miserable old crank.’

  ‘Mr Finlay has been generous to me,’ I warned the man. ‘And Mrs Finlay has many preparations to make in Sydney. Her daughter is to study in Europe.’

  He tossed his head and concentrated on the settling froth in the pots of ale. ‘If you sit on the verandah,’ he said, ‘I’ll deliver them to you. No harm was meant. All serene, my boy.’

  I had intended the ale to be some kind of secular communion, to bring together the intentions of Long, the men and myself, to give my pastoral sergeants a sense of our corps. For the same reason I amazed the publican by ordering the men a table in the dining room. We would eat splendid the first afternoon of our joint careers! But letting Clancy near the public house was the first great error of the long drove to the great upper plain of Maneroo and Nugan Ganway. While Long and I and, in their own knot, the other men, were content to drink ale on the verandah, and later feast on lamb chops in the dining room, Clancy certainly had ale but also kept, by secret arrangement with the owner, a rum bottle in a back room, which he apparently visited frequently on a series of plausible excuses, including calls of nature. From the window at which Long and I ate our meat and potatoes we could see the quite extensive sight of my cattle and sheep grazing the broad common, a
nd that, not the flitting presence of Clancy, absorbed my attention. Long himself kept his eye on our 2500 head, and on Boxer, Brutus and Bet, who lay in the dust contentedly and with a watchfulness of their own, rising authoritatively whenever any sheep violated the concept of the desirable compactness of the flock which these wonderful dogs carried in their heads.

  Clancy had finished one clandestine bottle at the guzzle and had broached the second before Long and I read the signs, and that was mere seconds before he fell useless to the floor. Our other men ironically clapped and cheered this collapse. The publican entered the dining room and said jovially, ‘I thought it would be too much for him. It is overproof-to-blazes he has been swallowing.’

  It was no use arguing with this amoral creature, but what should we do with sodden Clancy? Long got up from his chair, lifted the raving and bubbling Clancy over his shoulder, and went outside with him. He was promptly back, saying he had dumped Clancy in the wagon and, seated again, he cleaned dust or the redolence of Clancy off his fingers by wiping them on the tail of the tablecloth.

  ‘Perhaps we should find another driver,’ I murmured to him.

  ‘It is my fault,’ said the Irishman. ‘Since didn’t I recommend the rascal? I would not tell you what should be done, sir. But how likely is it we could find anyone to your liking? I shall give the blackguard the most thorough warnings when he is upright once more.’

  ‘And warnings will suffice?’ I asked.