From the first summer he arrived in Victoria, Niall had begun to understand what his future might be. Its landscapes agreed with him. There was little here of England and all he remembered of that country. There was nothing like Van Diemen’s Land either, which could be like England with its endless green and icy winter ground. Summer in some parts here could be blistering, when every parched mile lay down before him. In England he could never get the cold out of him. In Victoria summer warmth ran over him like water.
On first landing in the colony in 1846 he journeyed to the far west for labouring work. He saw land gone the colour of straw, everything humming with shimmering heat, crusty topsoil blowing away in swirling, choking tornadoes of dust. What was left on the ground was so thin that had he dug down a few inches he might have expected to find bones. To him there was an ancient beauty about it, everything the opposite of what he had known and so more interesting for it. And in Victoria, at least, he was one place removed from the circumstances that had brought him to Australia.
Near the western boundary of the colony, he took the first job he was offered. The approach came from a couple originally planning to run cattle but who soon had to settle for sheep.
‘What brought you out this far?’ was his first question to them.
‘I might ask the same about you,’ came the wife’s swift reply.
Henry and Amy Nightingale were a personable pair, even if Henry could be taciturn and sometimes a ditherer, never knowing whether he should try planting this or that crop, or which fences might need repairing first. The labourers working for them, who came and usually went in the dead of night, soon learnt it was the wife they should go to for their instructions. She was quite a few years younger than her husband, sparking speculation among them as to how such a dour, indecisive man could end up with such a lively, assured woman. It was the money, they usually decided, Henry’s wealth in all that land.
Sheep and wool sales took Henry away for stretches at a time and Niall was often brought up to the homestead to manage any slaughtering of animals or other unpleasant and heavy work Amy couldn’t manage herself. He liked to hang about the property, listening to her talk. The Nightingales’ years of isolation had gradually eroded the conventions and habits of towns and cities and their lives were fashioned more by informality than by what others thought. It showed in Amy herself, a woman oblivious to the easy way her dress blew against her when she stood leaning barefoot against the railing of the house’s verandah in the evenings, when her carefree laughter was lost among the settling of parrots in nearby scrub. Her skin shone nut-brown and she kept her straight, dusty-coloured hair tied back casually with a black ribbon. Niall could sometimes see beads of perspiration caught in the loose strands on her neck.
Amy revelled in the surprises cast by nature around her, drawing Niall’s attention to the glory of a furious red sunset or timid yellow flowers sprouting from sand. He sometimes noticed her running her hands across the rough bark of trees or over a dog’s belly as it twisted on its back in the sand.
One roiling summer’s evening when Niall returned to the homestead to collect a ration of tea and flour he’d forgotten on the Nightingales’ verandah, finding no one about, he walked around the side of the house to alert someone that he had been. Everything was dead with heat, the air trembling with it. Unusually, none of the dogs rushed to welcome him. He heard the shuffle of his own feet over the sandy earth.
As he came closer to a window he instinctively slowed, carefully advancing one step after the other. He thought he heard a murmur. Stopping noiselessly a yard away, he craned his neck and peered through the window to see Amy lying naked on her bed, her face away from him. Restive with the heat, she drew one knee up, settled her arms behind her head, her breasts brown as her arms. For mesmerising seconds Niall was transfixed, all time stilled, until she broke the glassy silence by unexpectedly calling out to her husband and sullenly turning her head towards the window.
Niall flinched and crouched, not sure whether he’d been seen as he scuttled away.
The next day he’d come back for something, drawn to the homestead, to find Henry and Amy standing with arms entwined, she leaning into her husband before noticing Niall approaching. And it was then with his embarrassed smile and Amy grinning back at him that he felt a stinging longing for what he knew he would never have here.
She stayed a magnet for him, an irresistible lure the other workers teased him about.
During one of Henry’s absences, when they were speaking of children, she said to him, ‘Come with me. I want to show you this.’
She led him to the rear of the house where a lemon tree and an orange tree grew. Beneath the orange tree was a rectangle of smooth white stones, each stone burnished by tumbling river water hundreds of miles away.
‘We don’t believe in religion,’ she told him. ‘We buried our child here.’
She stood reverentially, her hands clasped in front of her. ‘It’s why I will never leave this place.’
The seasons passed and Niall mended fences that left splinters in his palms as he learnt to do any kind of work Henry Nightingale needed, and he mulled over Van Diemen’s Land and the things he could and should have done there. Once when he was busy shoeing his horse Amy wandered over and said, ‘You know, Niall, nothing is keeping you from leaving here. There will be things you want to do that you should.’
‘I’m all right,’ he answered. ‘There’s plenty for me to do here.’
But in the end it was the unpredictability of the country itself that took him away.
One February afternoon the wind picked up from the west.
‘Dust storm,’ Henry muttered as he stared in that direction. ‘Better shut up everything inside.’
Niall stood with the Nightingales and Tom and Merv, two other workers hired for the summer, watching the dust storm rolling towards them. But as they made sure the house windows were shut tight, the outbuilding doors latched, the colour of the storm darkened and deepened so they looked at each other in puzzlement.
A whiff of smoke carried to them on the wind.
They scrambled the horses into the homestead block, Amy using a switch of willow to corral two bustling white goats into her vegetable garden.
Within minutes kangaroos were bounding wildly past both sides of the house, jack-knifing in their fright, clouds of parrots screeching overhead. Sooty gusts of ash and spark blew ahead of the fire, the sky blackening into early night.
Every bucket, every container they had was filled from the near-empty house dam and set beside the house in readiness. They doused blankets with water and draped them over their heads.
‘We should be safe here if we keep our wits about us,’ Niall told them. ‘The house will give us shelter.’
Behind the building, behind the clearing, in the scrub behind the yards where sheep were rounded up, came a fierce crackling of undergrowth warming, igniting, exploding, the sky burning red.
Henry stood frozen, not knowing what to do.
Tom panicked. ‘We can’t stay here! Fire’s coming now! We have to run for it!’
‘Don’t! Here is safest! If you run the fire’ll catch you before you get fifty yards!’ Niall shot back.
‘We have to go!’ Tom pleaded with them. ‘We can’t stay here! Can’t you see?’
The fire began bellowing its own rage, a hot grey snow of burnt leaf and cinder swirling around them.
‘Get ready with the buckets!’ Niall yelled. ‘Anything you see catches alight, throw water at it! Then fill again!’
‘We can’t stay here!’ Tom screamed. ‘We’ll be burnt alive!’
Niall tried to grab Tom as the worker wrestled himself away, catching an arm but not able to hang on. It felt to him later as though Tom had slipped from some great height, like he was falling down and down. Fire rolled over the house, a great wall of flame passing over and swallowing him, the heat and deafening noise of the firestorm blowing out windows at the back of the building, choking them
as they pressed their backs, sagging against the protection of the house, barely able to breathe.
Niall’s blood roared as the storm swept by them.
They stared blankly at each other, hearts still pounding, and in the end it was Niall who went to find Tom. They later buried him a short distance away, wrapping wet bandages of torn linen over their own burns after mopping up the fire around the house with wet hessian sacks. At the back of the house Niall surprised Amy by the charred, twisted branches of her citrus trees as she bent down to turn over each burnt stone marking her child’s grave.
Most of the animals save several horses were consumed by the inferno and the house stood scarred in the blackened landscape. There was no longer any income or work to be had, and within days, Merv, the other labourer, was gone. Niall was also sent on his way by Amy, who said, ‘All the better for you anyway’, as she leant forward to kiss him on his cheek, the touch of her aching in him every day he rode further and further east.
26
Grey, greasy weather slouched in again through the late afternoon, darkness draping its oily skin over the diggings.
For the first time ever in this part of the country there was to be an entertainment at night. An extravaganza. Handbills were posted across the diggings, shoved into hands everywhere by a pair of enthusiastic boys and nailed to any tree, hut or post where space allowed. Starting Tonight, for One Week only at the Mosquito Creek Diggings, Entertainment of a Lifetime. Glories of Ancient Civilizations. Tropical Creatures. Serpents. Magicians. An Admiral’s Triumph. There were complaints about the entry price but Alfred Row had read the situation well, even if some corners had to be cut to ensure the first performance was staged tonight.
With day tucked away and an unsettled night falling quickly, diggers shuffled into coats and scarves, grabbing hats as afterthoughts against the newly falling rain as they made their way to various grog shops scattered about the diggings, intent on lubricating their bones. The miners packed in tight huddles and there was loud conversation and even louder demands for drinks. Cold cuts of mutton were carefully unwrapped from handkerchiefs and savoured with a drop of something nice, dogs incited to leap for scraps. Shickered for a shilling, plastered for a pound, squawked a sign in one drinking hole.
There was growing unease, however, as they mingled and quizzed each other on their respective situations. The weather had been bad for a long time. No one had ever seen a diggings in such poor shape. There was disease about, and the flood, and people were leaving in their droves. Someone had said there were good finds in some new place in New South Wales – although others said it was further north again – and they were thinking about heading there themselves.
‘All pitch in, eh?’ one digger proposed as money passed between them to make sure they were covered for the circus’s entry price, some scratching around for the last few pence while others dropped pound notes with a generosity born of the festive occasion. When everyone had had enough to drink, if that were ever possible, they stumbled and felt their way out of grog huts and headed in the general direction of the circus, sometimes detouring to collect someone sleeping in his tent, dragging and shaking him to his feet, sweeping him along in the human tide.
Niall Kennedy and Smales took positions near the entrance to the massive yellow-and-white striped tent. Ignoring the rain and craning his neck, Niall marvelled at the size of the canvas and the labour that had gone into setting it up. He then mentally checked off the diggers as they streamed by to bottleneck at the ticket stall. Many were carrying stone or glass grog bottles.
‘Medicinal,’ one digger nursing a drink announced as the sergeant cast a disapproving eye over him.
Niall was still trying to sort out what he’d heard about the commissioner taking a turn earlier in the day but knew he’d have to speak with Stanfield in the morning whatever state he was in. And what was going on at Delaney’s wasn’t right. You just couldn’t dispose of people the way he was doing. Another dozen or so sick miners had been taken off to the quarantine huts today, he heard, adding to the misery already there. Ugly rumours, founded on truth, were spreading.
At least the commissioner taking sick meant he wouldn’t have to worry about what might or might not happen tonight. He could relax for a bit.
The diggers were being surprisingly patient. And standing not far away from him, Niall could see Alfred Row tallying the numbers in his head. They were aiming for three nights, four if it was warranted. A full house such as they would clearly be getting tonight would cover everyone’s wages and costs. Every show on top of that would be cream.
‘Let’s go and see what we can find inside, get into the dry,’ the sergeant suggested to his constable.
‘We don’t have to buy a ticket, do we?’
To Niall, Smales had much in common with an inmate he’d shared a crowded lockup with immediately after his trial, the bloke forever going on about how it was everyone’s fault but his own that he was going to be sent away. According to the prisoner, he had done little more than ‘give a fellow a little tap on the head and take away some of his silver. And for that, fucking New South Wales!’
‘I think they’ll let us in,’ Niall said.
Once inside they could see the extent of the audience and the scope of Row’s imagination. Standing in one of the aisles that allowed easy entry to the centre of the arena, the two men had a good view of both crowd and performance area.
Lamps, larger and more ornate than Niall had ever seen, hung from thick coils of rope above, running from one side of the tent to the other like lights festooning the rigging of a ship. By the flare of these lamps the sergeant could see Row had lined the inside of the big tent with material of an astonishing ochre-yellow colour, decorated with vines of extravagant olive twisting and turning their way from ground to top. Where the tent angled up and inward towards the apex it was painted a smothering sky blue. An errant catch of white cloud floated overhead, with here smudges of black doves beating wings as they flew away, and there sunlight streaming down to the arena in shafts of watery gold. The panoramic scene showed the final passing of day.
As he took it all in Niall marvelled at a painted scene set level with the top row of seating and breaking up the walled effect of the tent. The tent seemed to open and move outward with a narrow, rectangular pool filled with the most inviting blue water lapping at mosaic tiled surrounds, leading the observer outside and further beyond to a rich grove of fruit trees in the distance. Even from where he was standing Niall could make out the fallen, yellowing fruit of the last days of summer. A girl or goddess moved tantalisingly naked into the grove, casting a glance behind her as she disappeared into the trees.
To complete the impression of being inside some great Roman building, the arena itself was laid down with an expanse of canvas on which a cobbled street was drawn. The activity of previous shows had partially rubbed away the painted cobbles so they seemed even more dusty and worn.
‘Not bad,’ Smales said, wide-eyed, and Niall could only agree.
Casting looks further around Niall was startled by something opposite him.
In a newly constructed box on the top tier at the other side of the tent sat the commissioner, dressed resplendently in a white naval uniform and obvious for all to see, leaning slowly forward as he looked vacantly over the diggers below him.
‘I thought he wasn’t coming,’ Niall said, nudging Smales.
‘That’s what I heard too.’
‘Well he’s here, all right. In flesh and blood,’ Niall said quietly, and immediately began scanning the crowd around him.
Very quickly he noticed the giant Ramage and a number of his fellow troopers – four when he counted – in the seating close by the commissioner. None of them were wearing police uniforms.
‘You stay here,’ Niall told Smales. ‘Keep an eye out for any trouble. I’m going to find a spot over the other side. Make sure I can see you and you can see me.’
As Niall was speaking a gong began banging loud
ly and the crowd quickly fell quiet, even as the last customers started taking their seats.
While those latecomers scrambled to find their places, Niall pushed through to the centre ring before ducking back into an aisle closer to where the commissioner was.
Meanwhile, from somewhere behind the far set of stalls, a figure came breezing into the arena. Now dressed in a white flowing toga gathered by gold braiding at his waist, Alfred Row arrived to commence proceedings. Around his neck was a garland of ivy, gold rings heavy on every finger. As he took his time getting to the stage the crowd remained silent, many gawking about for what other astonishment might be in store for them. But Row, as if sensing their appetite had been whetted, merely held up a hand as he moved through, the slightest of waves suggesting all would happen in good time.
His audience stirred.
Niall took his bearings. From his position he could see only part of the commissioner’s box and just two of Stanfield’s troopers. What he had gained in proximity he had lost in his outlook over that group.
When he had made his way to the middle of the cobbled arena Row raised his arm again. It seemed to slip out of the toga, white and wizened like an old man’s. Whatever other costumes and disguises he might wear, he carried the clothing of a Roman emperor as if he had been born in it. There was even a delicate chain of white flowers on his head; the frailest of crowns.
Hushed, the audience listened attentively for what he was about to say.
‘Friends,’ Row announced in a calm but officious tone, ‘what you are about to see tonight will be a first in all the southern lands, if not the northern as well. A world first!’ he cried to loud cheers.
Another wave of his arm settled the crowd.
‘What we have in store for you tonight will stagger the senses, bamboozle the imagination and forfeit all reality. It will, in short, take you on a journey through time, to one of the great civilisations …’
As Row spoke he walked back on his heels, moving ever left so he completed a circuit of the arena as he addressed the audience, leaving no one excluded from his tale. He maintained eye contact with all, from the squatting diggers pushing back against the legs of those seated in the front rows to the latecomers standing and cramming up the aisles. Hundreds of pairs of eyes fixed on him.
Mosquito Creek Page 20