Mosquito Creek

by Robert Engwerda

  Presently they turned away from the river to head due north, the stench of the broad waterway disappearing behind them until their conveyance pulled up at a great, wide metal gate with a high brick wall running either side of it. Their father handed a note to two men in blue uniforms, who shouted to someone unseen, the wide gate swinging open at his command.

  Without being told he knew they had been admitted into a gaol. The hansom cab and its driver returned the way they had come as he and Terence and their father were led away by a grey-bearded fellow, through a narrow door leading to a stone stairway that they trod their way up heavily. At the top of it was a watchtower from which they could look out over the prison yard.

  ‘Just in the nick of time,’ their father remarked with evident satisfaction.

  Below them a gallows had been erected in the middle of the yard. A line of blue-uniformed warders stood before it, several bearing rifles. The one who seemed to be in charge had a pistol, waving it freely as if smarting for an opportunity to use it should the gallows fail to do their work.

  The prisoner meanwhile waited with head bowed at the foot of the small flight of steps leading to the terrible mechanism that would soon be his ending. At the pistol-carrying warder’s say-so the convict was led up the steps. Standing still and allowing the noose to be lifted over his head without complaint or opposition, it was hard to imagine the prisoner ever having had enough life in him to enact anything, never mind the crime of which he had been found guilty. The only time there was any indication of blood moving through his veins came when a rough, white cotton hood was about to be slipped over his face and a brief flash of panic came into his eyes, the most fleeting of glances skyward. No sooner was the hood pushed down completely over his head than the order came to release the trapdoor. There was a brief drop and struggle from the prisoner’s body, a tightening of rope while the weight on the end of it slowly turned one way and then back again as if nudged by an indifferent breeze.

  The line of warders watching cheered. The pistol-waving fellow clapped.

  In the watchtower their father turned to the men with him and said, ‘Richly deserved, I’m sure.’ They laughed.

  What else could be said to his father now? he thought. Would he still be there with his friends cheering the attempted execution of his own flesh and blood?

  I was sent away no better than if I were a convict. All those years punished, and punished more by silence than by anything else, because of knowing I was excluded from every normal family activity and every feeling that it was fair to think I was entitled to.

  Far away, even further now it seemed, a trooper was standing by the framework of his boat, wavering and asleep on his feet. The commissioner drew a deep breath and continued, raising his hat for a few moments to cool himself. It was unseasonably warm, he thought, remarkably so.

  He was conscious then of faintness in his head turning to dizziness. The ground seemed to go hard under his feet.

  From the time of his banishment on, whenever I would visit Grandfather in his room I was being there, but not being there. I was too young then to have stood in the way of things I hardly understood, but whenever I looked at Grandfather and he at me it was as though he barely recognised me. He would gaze at me just long enough to register my presence, which made me feel that I had somehow betrayed him, and then his glance would pass on, his mouth agape as if he were nothing more than a lunatic in an asylum. And how could anyone do such a thing to his own father, who was then an old man?

  The commissioner stopped again, stumbling on his heels and momentarily disoriented. Ahead of him haze rippled from the warming earth and when he glanced up from watching his feet pick over the ground he could see a boat swimming and settling through shimmer.

  I should have said something and I should have…

  His legs felt slippery like wet rope.

  When he felt them about to give way he collapsed to his haunches, still trying to hold fast to the point where the Victory was in sight. Heat buzzed in prickly flies about him as he swept them away with a hand. Nausea spun his thoughts.

  My ship. The rescue. Father, you will one day hear of this, and…

  His fingers dug into earth as he tried hanging on. His feet, his legs, his body, were no longer part of him.

  Around him a confusion of voices babbled in competition.

  ‘He’s fallen. Help him up!’

  ‘Can’t lift ’im. ’E’s too heavy. Who is it? Trap?’

  ‘Help me on this side.’

  ‘Is he shickered or somethin’?’

  ‘Over here!’

  ‘It’s ’im! What’s ’is name! Look!’

  ‘Who? Help me lift him, for God’s sake! I can’t shift him on my own.’

  ‘’Im! Stanley – the commissioner. Stanley!’

  ‘We’ve got to get him in the shade.’

  ‘Should leave ’im here for the troopers to shovel up.’

  ‘That’s it. Easy. Grab him on that side and we’ll turn him around.’

  ‘They wouldn’t do it for us.’

  ‘Must be the warm that’s got to him. Why would you wear a coat and hat when it’s like this? Beautiful day.’

  ‘That’s it. They come out here but can’t take it. Heat and country and everythin’. None of ’em can take it.’

  ‘None of anyone can take it. You right? Take him on that side and we’ll sit him in the shade. Over near that place. He’ll come round quick enough then.’

  25

  Niall watched absently as his troopers, including Smales, Santini and Lightbody, left for Mosquito Creek on horseback leading a long wagon loaded with every bit of rotten waste they could find: a foot-high stinking mound of flyblown green steer carcass scrounged from behind the butcher’s store, a pile of tins and general camp waste retrieved from a shallow shaft, a puddling tub full of vile slops from a grog shop and half a dozen buckets overflowing with human excrement that Santini said he had found at Smales’s house. Every last ounce of it was to be dumped on the camp side of the creek to discourage any further use of it as drinking water. They had also brought signs to be hammered to trees on the creek’s banks warning of the danger of drinking from it. Most of the sick had already been removed to Delaney’s farm and many others had left of their own accord, but a small number of diggers remained.

  ‘The Broad Street case,’ the doctor had said to Niall. ‘Do you know it?’

  ‘In London?’ he asked.

  ‘No, in Timbuktu. Of course London! Contaminated water, that’s the cause of cholera. If you can’t remove the people, remove the water.’

  The smell both preceded and trailed the troopers by several dozen yards, so they drew straws to determine who would drive the bullock train pulling the wagon while the rest of the party rode a safe distance ahead carrying the signs, the men fooling with them as though they were fans.

  After they’d departed Niall hurried to the stores where he and Sarah had agreed to meet and, on arriving there and walking the street, he found everything quiet. Most of the conversation he heard seemed to be of weather and how hopeful everyone was of the floodwaters slipping away quickly and people being able to get on with business. There wasn’t much talk on the cholera outbreak – the only ones concerned were those who had been affected – and interest in the rescue of the trapped diggers seemed to be fading. It would only be the boat slipping off into the water and splashing away in the next day or two that would restore some attention to the commissioner’s plan.

  A handful of customers were browsing Makepeace’s General Store, sizing up jars on shelves behind the counter. An old digger with a white beard down to his protruding belly and wearing a red serge shirt puzzled at the collected worth of coins in his palm, squinting at prices on jars and bottles on the shelves and then again at his coins. Others loitered about the shop, lifting and examining items, only half-interested in what was in their hands.

  As he waited for Sarah to arrive, Niall wandered the street with an eye on the stores and
another along the track anticipating her, wiping his hands on his trousers and nervous in a way he couldn’t help. Glancing into a shop window he was startled by her face staring back at him.

  She was at the door so quickly it gave him another jolt.

  ‘I wasn’t expecting you for at least another half hour,’ he explained.

  ‘I saw you through the window. I thought, who’s this shady character?’

  There was something quizzical in her smile and he wondered if she’d guessed about Van Diemen’s Land or already knew from someone else.

  ‘Just someone coming to see if you’d like to take the air, Sarah. Do you want to poke about the shops a bit longer or go for a walk?’ he asked.

  ‘Maybe a walk, thank you Niall,’ she said. ‘I came here earlier too and have bought what I needed.’ She lifted the brown calico bag she held in one hand. ‘Perhaps we should see this boat. I’ve heard it’s almost ready to take to the water.’

  ‘Would you like me to carry your bag?’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Did you ride in?’

  ‘It’s too far to walk.’ She smiled. ‘Yes, I’ve left my horse down the end of the shops with a boy.’

  They went along the street, past the stores and houses and the Catholic church. A cross sat on the church’s highest point and Niall remembered that when they’d first raised it and fixed it in place the applause was so loud any passing traveller might have thought some incalculable problem had finally been solved, or a lottery won.

  ‘Your parents …’ Niall said. ‘Were they all right about you coming here?’

  ‘My father didn’t want me to come but this time I dug my heels in.’

  She walked at quite a clip, he thought, even though she had to lift her skirts from time to time to keep them from dragging through sloppier ground. She wore a dress of rust-coloured red with a subtle cream frill at her wrists and no collar at her neck so the material sat flat on her shoulders. He marvelled again at the richness of her black hair, the grey of her eyes that drew him in.

  ‘I thought he might have come with you here,’ Niall said. ‘Or your mother.’

  Sarah laughed dismissively.

  ‘My mother wouldn’t lift a foot outside the house without Father being there. She’s a mouse.’

  ‘But your father, Sarah?’

  ‘I said I would buy these groceries then meet you to discuss what was happening at our place.’

  ‘I don’t want to hold you up then, or put you in an awkward position.’

  ‘That’s all right. We can go and have a look at the boat and talk on the way. It’s not far and then I’ll be back for my horse and off to the escarpment.’

  But for all she said, as they walked Niall noticed a nervousness in her, the way she kept turning her eyes from point to point, assessing every stranger walking near them as though she seemed to be on the watch for someone.

  They were soon clear of the streets and stores, Sarah waving hello to the boy minding her horse and quickly negotiating the main track snaking through the diggings. A passenger coach rattled by, all four spoked wheels heavily clogged with mud, showing that the passage south was still a slog.

  The pleasant day had everyone out and scurrying about though, making the most of the break in the weather. Two Chinese men, heads down, walked briskly past them.

  ‘That circus behind us, Niall,’ she said, ‘will you be going?’

  ‘I don’t have to, but I’ll be there. Entertainment is hard to come by here and they say this Row puts on a good show. But now I’m hearing …’ He hesitated. ‘Well, I hear there might be some kind of trouble there tonight.’

  ‘Among the miners?’

  He raised his arms, bemused.

  ‘There’s something funny going on,’ he allowed, ‘but I don’t know what it is.’

  ‘Well, you won’t see me there whether I wanted to go or not,’ she said. ‘Father frowns on such things. Waste of money, he says. And I could never go on my own.’

  They picked their way around deep gouges where the wheels of carts and wagons had ploughed up the track.

  ‘I meant to ask you too,’ he said, changing the subject. ‘I’m curious about all those dolls at your place.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Well, just that there’s so many.’

  ‘Is that unusual?’

  He threw a sideways look at her as if she might be pulling his leg but it seemed she wasn’t.

  ‘Most people wouldn’t have a collection like that, I can tell you.’

  ‘They’re Mother’s. I can’t even remember how it all started. I think it began as a pastime that grew and grew. When something’s around you all the time you don’t think anything of it. I suppose you can get used to anything if you live with it long enough.’

  She glanced at him expectantly before dropping her eyes again.

  ‘Where did she get them from?’ he asked.

  ‘She didn’t. She made them all herself, or mostly. A few came from the stores. But every time father went into town he’d have to bring a little something back for her, a present. There was nothing else to do in the bush besides the usual work of the farm. He stopped bringing us things a long while ago now. But there was a time when in the evenings and sometimes early in the morning Mother would be working at her “little people”, as she called them. Every single one of them different too. Though they’re all boys.’

  ‘Why?’

  She stopped walking to catch her breath and Niall was grateful for the pause himself. She’d been taking them along at quite a pace.

  ‘I really don’t know. My sister and I, I suppose. No brothers.’

  ‘A few black ones too.’

  ‘I’m not sure about those,’ she said. ‘My mother barely says anything these days. It’s disappointment, I think. Disappointment that she couldn’t give Father a son. Disappointment that we’ve been dragged from one remote hideaway to the next, ending up in no place where a family can properly set down roots. Disappointment that whatever she thought might happen in her life hasn’t and now never will. Because a day just happens when you know things are never going to change.’

  They came closer to the heart of the goldfield where claims were more concentrated. Diggers were again busy with picks and shovels at the exposed gravel bed of a long-extinct course of the river, one of the few places the flood hadn’t been able to wash out.

  ‘Tell me, what will you do when this goldfield is finished, Niall?’

  ‘I won’t be staying here.’

  ‘Where would you go?’

  ‘I’m not sure yet. But whatever happens I always promised myself that when I had the money I’d make my own life. Maybe buy some land,’ he said. ‘When it’s ready you’ll go back to your farm again, I suppose.’

  She stared vacantly at diggers shovelling and bailing. Clay and dirt caked to their hats, their filthy clothes and long, grubby beards. Young lads with wheelbarrows ferried loads of muck to water.

  ‘I suppose I will.’ She looked away then. ‘It’s not what I’d choose to do, if I ever had a choice. But the farm it’s likely to be.’

  ‘Everyone has a choice.’

  ‘No they don’t. I don’t.’

  ‘There are things you’ve always got some say in,’ he said, ‘even when you think you might not have.’

  ‘For men, maybe. When you’re a woman it’s different.’

  They were silent a minute as they headed to where the boat was visible in the distance. Without meaning to they were walking closely, sometimes touching arms as they negotiated the dips and rises of the track.

  ‘What would you do if you didn’t go back to the farm?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Standing there, gazing towards the boat, she was momentarily lost. ‘I don’t know what I could do. I’ll have to think about it.’

  They continued through the wreckage of goldfields life, two young men heaving a cart laden with potatoes, brown onions and flour. White calico bags filled with dried beans dangled from the
rear.

  ‘New chums,’ Niall noted blankly.

  ‘My parents and Louise are heading to Beechworth in the morning,’ Sarah said.

  ‘And you’re going with them?’

  She shook her head. ‘No, it’s just for two days or so.’

  ‘What’s in Beechworth?’ he asked.

  ‘They’ll pick up some supplies and my father wants to do some banking. All these years he’s buried his money in tins around the house. Now he trusts no one to the point he’ll even go to the bank in Beechworth. When you first came to our house he thought you were after his treasure.’ She laughed wryly at the idea of it.

  ‘It’s a fair hike there just to put your money in the bank. Why doesn’t he do it here?’

  ‘Because here he’d be giving it to someone who will then go and put it in a bank somewhere else. Or maybe not, according to him. In Beechworth he puts it directly there himself.’

  ‘I’ve never heard of anyone yet who’s been done out of his bank money here.’

  ‘You haven’t come from where he’s come.’

  Niall’s gut tightened.

  ‘Anyway,’ she continued, ‘that’s where they’re off to. I think I might come here again in the morning.’ She looked at him uncertainly. ‘Will you be about?’

  ‘For sure.’

  ‘Or do you have to work?’

  ‘Tomorrow’s Sunday. It’s a day off for me so that’s fine.’

  ‘So I could see you then?’

  ‘That would be good.’

  And when he looked at her he was struck by a yearning similar to that he had on arriving in Victoria from Van Diemen’s Land, when he went to work for the Nightingales.

  ‘Well, here’s our salvation,’ Sarah announced drily as they laboured up a small rise to see the Victory close by, its red and black timbers shining in the sun. ‘The commissioner’s boat to rescue us from all our troubles.’