Paw took his first long drink of tea then opened his envelope. He lifted out a page of writing, though there was something else in the envelope too. Paw began to read aloud.
‘To Mr Donovan, Esquire
Care of Cobb & Co
Goulburn
New South Wales
From Picklewood
Ridge’s Lane
Goulburn
New South Wales
‘Dear Mr Donovan,
‘I hope you and your son are as well as this leaves me, my dear wife Violet, our son, Patrick, and our new daughter. We have called her Leeanne, and she is as bonny as her mother and her Godmother. We are well settled now in our own home, and would deem it an honour if you would care to dine with us, if ever you are in Goulburn. A photograph of all of us would be a fine thing.
‘Until that might happen my dear wife and I thought you might like this small gift as a souvenir of a night we will all remember, and for which you and your son will always have my most grateful thanks.
‘I remain,
Yours most sincerely,
Horace Pickle, Esquire
Photographer’
Paw pulled a photograph from the envelope and held it up so they could all see it.
Jem gazed at the image. The black or brown and white of a normal photograph had been specially tinted, so the colours weren’t quite right, the women’s cheeks too pink, their dresses too vivid. But the happiness shone even brighter.
Two women sat side by side. One held a toddler in one arm, dressed in a blue and white sailor suit and cap, and a baby in a pink shawl in the other. The other woman, her dark hair now piled up on her head and held with combs, nursed a baby in an embroidered shawl. The camera had caught the women smiling at each other.
Behind them stood two men, both in dark suits and embroidered waistcoats, their top hats vying for glossiness and size.
‘Miss Lee has had a baby!’ exclaimed Juanita.
‘Except she isn’t Miss Lee now. Mr Pickle didn’t even tell us her married name.’
‘Or if they are friends now. Maybe she and her husband just came down to Goulburn to get a photograph of their baby.’
‘Mrs Pickle called her new baby Leeanne, and the letter mentioned a Godmother. Look at their faces,’ said Aunt Carmel quietly. ‘There are photographers in Sydney, but Lee Chou and her husband came all the way to Goulburn for this. You changed many lives when you took up the reins that night, Jem, and not just ours.’
‘Open the other letter!’ urged Juanita.
Jem hesitated. He knew what it probably would say, and yet . . .
‘It’s addressed to Jem,’ said Paw quietly. ‘Why don’t you read it privately, son, then tell us if you want to share it.’
Aunt Carmel nodded.
There was a place Jem liked to go — a giant rock behind the house, with a smooth top where you could lie and watch the mist roll up from the sea like an old man’s beard or contemplate the Patricks munching under the quince trees.
He paused at the base of the rock. The black snake that shared the rock sometimes stared down at him, its tongue tasting the air, then slithered off, fast.
Jem had seen that snake last year, too, a little smaller, the red skin on its belly a little duller. It must have shed its skin this spring, as snakes did as they grew bigger. But this was a clever, wary serpent, who knew a snake could live with humans as long as it vanished and became a stick instead of rearing up and scaring them.
Jem clambered up, feeling the rock’s warmth against his skin. He thought of Aunt Carmel saying, ‘The rocks are the right shape.’ This was not the country of his parents’ birth, but it was his, and its rocks felt the right shape to him too. He breathed in air like gum-leaf silk, with just a touch of horse, and that was right as well.
He opened his letter.
O’Halloran’s Hotel
San Francisco
Dear Jem,
I have not written to you before because I had no need of further books, as I had taken a tidy little library with me. But if you would be so good, please send a little reading matter to Frank Gardiner, to Francis Christie and to John Smith at the above address. Twenty or so books for each of us each month till the year’s end should be enough to refresh our libraries.
Bank drafts of twenty guineas each, thought Jem, not quite big enough to cause comment, and sent from as many different banks as he could too, so no one ever questioned why a boy would send three people in America so much money.
I have enjoyed my time here, but the life of a publican does not seem to suit me. There are too many old friends who arrive believing past acquaintance means free bed and drinks for life. It at last occurred to me that a man who has lived many lives — the boy, the bushranger, the shopkeeper, the prisoner and even Mr Smith — might have one more life ahead of him. Perhaps it is time for Mr Smith to appear again and Frank Gardiner to vanish. Books would help.
I hope life has been as good to you as you deserve, for without you there’d be no Frank Gardiner, nor what might come, either.
I heard a yarn at the bar the other day, from a bloke who knew a bloke who’d heard the story in Australia and, knowing I came from there, thought I’d like to hear it.
It was about a boy, scarcely out of baby clothes, who took the reins when his father was crushed by a team of stampeding horses. That boy drove the Cobb & Co coach all that foggy night through mud up to the axles, and across flooded rivers, and when he was held up by a bushranger just said, ‘Sir, I need to get my pa to hospital,’ and kept on driving. I think there might have been a mob of ferocious natives who attacked the coach too, or maybe they were Chinese miners or even flying wombats.
I asked if they knew the boy’s name, but the bloke shook his head. ‘They just call him the boy from Cobb & Co,’ he said.
So you’ve become a legend, lad. If you’ll take my advice — when someone ever tells you the story (by then they may have added an earthquake that night too) just smile, and don’t let on it was you, because one day you might want to be someone quite different from ‘the boy from Cobb & Co’.
Maybe next time someone tells you about that fabled bushranger, Frank Gardiner, you’ll remember how stories grow, and how sometimes we can slip away from our own story and make another too.
I hope the books will help you to whatever life you choose, lad. Wherever you go, for all the time that’s left me, know you have the good wishes and the gratitude somewhere in the world of,
Your humble servant,
John Smith
Jem put the letter down. How many lives had Mr Smith had already?
The breeze fluttered at the letter’s pages. He hoped the bushranger could at last find happiness and peace.
But Jem was no bushranger, to slip on a new identity like a change of clothes. His life now was not a new one. It had grown from all he and Paw had done before. Jem was like the black snake, who cast off its old skin just to show the same skin, brighter and a little bigger, underneath.
Jem smiled, picked up the letter and slid off the rock to go and read it to his family. Tonight there’d be a yarn from Paw, perhaps, about the Red Indians called the Hidatsa, or Aunt Carmel would tell them how the ants would predict rain or fire, like her aunties had taught her.
And one day, if someone whispered the words ‘Red Indian’, Jem would take it proudly on the chin, and if they muttered ‘native’ at Juanita, he’d say he was proud of that, too.
Because Jem Donovan had done the impossible, and when you’ve done that once you know it is worth doing the impossible again. Jem Donovan would always be the boy from Cobb & Co.
AUTHOR’S NOTES
This book is fiction except where it isn’t.
Cobb & Co and its Braidwood–Goulburn route are true. Frank Gardiner was a bushranger and was released on the condition that he left the colony, just as is written in this book, though the truth of much of his story may never be known.
Frank Gardiner went to great lengths to hide his ide
ntity many times; nor is it known if his treasure was ever found (see page 207). Jem, his paw and the other characters are not based on any particular person, but are a combination of people who lived at that time, in that way, and did those sorts of things. Once again I have used a story from my childhood, vaguely remembered, about a boy who drove a Cobb & Co coach after his father was injured in an accident.
THE TERMS IN THIS BOOK
When Paw uses the terms ‘native’ or ‘Red Indian’ in this book, he means no disrespect. They were simply the words that were used in relatively polite conversation back then, instead of far greater insults. These days we would refer to the native American nation Jem’s grandmother came from, or the nation of Juanita’s ancestors too, but it would be almost a hundred years after this book was set before this would happen. I hope you will excuse me for writing those terms, as well as for the characters’ attitudes to Miss Lee Chou, and the language used to describe her.
THE HIDATSA
Jem’s parents were like many who chose to hide unorthodox marriages by coming to Australia. In the days before telephones, compulsory electoral rolls or even street maps for many places, Australia was a convenient place to begin a new life away from any gossip about your old one.
Jem’s father would have married his mother in about 1861, or at the beginning of the American Civil War. It was a time when the Hidatsa of Upper Missouri were being forced from their lands, exploited by government-appointed Indian agents and fur traders, and attacked by the neighbouring Sioux. Many Hidatsa children were forcibly taken to schools like the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania or the Hampton Institute in Virginia, forced to wear uniforms and take colonial names, and punished if they used their own language. Often young people ran away from the schools or the menial jobs they were sent to after the little ‘schooling’ they received. Although it is not in the story, Jem’s father might have met, helped and fallen in love with one such runaway.
But 1861 in America was not a good time and place to have a Hidatsa wife, especially with opposition from his family — nor might Jem’s father have wished to be caught up in the American Civil War. There were, however, excellent opportunities in Australia with Cobb & Co for a man who was skilled with a team of horses.
FRANK GARDINER
Frank Gardiner was born in Scotland in 1830 as Francis Christie. In 1834 the family settled on a property at Boro near Goulburn, in the colony of New South Wales. In 1850 young Francis Christie became a horse thief in Victoria and was convicted several times. By March 1854 he was back in New South Wales as Francis Clarke. He was sentenced at Goulburn on two charges of horse stealing. He broke his parole or ticket-of-leave and became ‘Frank Gardiner’, also known as ‘The Darkie’, and graduated from stealing horses to highway robbery.
In June 1862, Gardiner and Ben Hall (who also hoped to escape his life of bushranging by going to the United States of America) and a group of other bushrangers held up the Lachlan Gold Escort, possibly the largest gold robbery in Australian history. The gold, coins and bank notes were worth about £14,000, or about $15 million in today’s money.
Though much was recovered when police caught some of the gang, enough vanished to become the basis of a legend. There is a tale that two of Gardiner’s nephews came over from America and were hunting the gold in 1912, and many other tales too.
Two people have whispered to me the (different) places where the gold is definitely buried, though they didn’t tell me why they didn’t go and get it themselves. I’ve even searched one of the locations and am pretty sure there is no gold cached there, nor anywhere near there where it might be buried or hidden. (I won’t say where that is, not because I think there is treasure there, but because it’s the habitat of endangered species who don’t need treasure hunters digging up their home.)
But some years ago, a friend who shall also remain nameless (as Frank Gardiner advises, it is good to be discreet when talking about treasure) was doing up an old cottage in an unnamed location, and found twenty-six gold watches papered into the plaster wall, as well as a quantity of gold coins.
The clichéd thing to do with a chest full of stolen treasure is to bury it, or hide it under rocks, but it is actually much easier to place it in a wall cavity, especially in the days when walls were sometimes merely many layers of paper glued onto a wooden frame, then covered with home-made whitewash. You could hide a treasure in a night.
Gardiner escaped to Queensland with Ben Hall’s sister-in-law, Kate or Kitty Brown. They became Mr and Mrs Frank Christie and kept a general store at Apis Creek near Rockhampton. Gardiner was eventually recognised and reported to the New South Wales police, who captured him with the help of the Queensland Native Police — possibly illegally, as Queensland was a different colony, with its own laws, and back then there was no ‘nation of Australia’. Gardiner had thought he was safe, but as he says in this book, once the police had him back in New South Wales there was no escaping a trial.
Gardiner was found ‘not guilty’ of ‘attempt to kill’, but sentenced to thirty-two years of hard labour for theft. After ten years and many appeals by his sisters, he was released on the condition that he immediately leave New South Wales and Australia. He sailed for Hong Kong and then to California. He owned one hotel, then sold it and bought another, both near the docks, and well known to Australians trying their luck in the United States of America or returning Americans who’d prospected for gold in Australia.
In 1882 the newspapers reported that he had died, unable to pay his bills, but there were and remain many rumours that he had begun yet another new life, possibly with a rich American widow, or living in other parts of the United States of America. Other newspapers reported his death in Colorado in 1903. Many San Francisco records were lost in the great earthquakes and fires of 1906, so it is difficult to trace his later life and death — which is probably just what the man we still know as ‘Frank Gardiner’ would have wanted.
SENORITA RODRIQUES
When I was a girl in the 1950s and 60s there were no Indigenous students in any of the three schools I attended. There were, however, several students who were said to be Spanish or Indian — for example, from the subcontinent of India. Later, at university, when we needed holiday jobs to supplement our scholarships, some of my Indigenous friends would tell prospective employers their parents were from India, knowing that if they said they were ‘Aboriginal’ they wouldn’t get the job.
Carmel’s grandmother might have been one of the Allelluin of the Dhurga people of the Djuin/Yuin nation (spelling varies, as the sounds of Dhurga do not quite match the English alphabet), that extended from south of present-day Sydney almost to the Victorian border. Her home country would have centred on what is now known as the Araluen Valley which, not coincidentally, is where I live. By the time this book is set most of the local Indigenous people had been forced out by gold mining and the small farms that grew food for the miners, though a few remained. In the decades after Jem’s adventures, most would be taken prisoner down in a reserve on the coast, but some did quietly remain, as do their descendants.
My own ancestry is mixed. I may never know how mixed, as several branches of my family went to great lengths to hide what they regarded as skeletons in the cupboard, though I’m proud of those skeletons today. I have simply grown up as ‘Australian’, and a white one, though the skins of some of my ancestors were dark.
But what is ‘Australian’ has changed enormously in my lifetime. Coffee drinkers were suspiciously exotic in my childhood. Normal people drank tea, at least six strong cups of it each day. I didn’t meet a cup of coffee till I was fifteen, and even then it was instant. Eating on chairs out on the pavement? A young lady never ate in public! Eating Thai food? I still remember my school’s domestic science teacher (compulsory for all girls in Year 8) wondering, ‘How do you milk a coconut?’
The only history we learned in primary school was English history, with a short detour for the First Fleet and the ‘first’ cross
ing of the Blue Mountains, though the books were mostly wrong about both events. A few mentions of Europe were added to the curriculum in high school as a way to explain the build-up to World War I, which ‘we’ won, and Asia appeared even more briefly, and only in the context of western colonialism. The American continents, the Middle East, South-East Asia and all the rest of the world seemed not to have a history at all.
Takeaway meant fish and chips, or sweet and sour chicken for the adventurous. Our everyday meals now incorporate ingredients and techniques from a hundred nations and all that goes with them. After more than two hundred years, Dhurga is taught and spoken in local schools and the scandal caused when my Catholic grandfather married a Presbyterian woman and both families disowned them is something to smile at, not a tragedy.
And I stay, simply, ‘Australian’, whatever that might mean.
SHERWIN FLATS
At the time this book is set the village now known as Tarago was called Sherwin Flats. The village now known as Lake Bathurst was called Tarrago, and its school the Tarrago School. In 1884, however, the railway line was extended from Goulburn to what the authorities decided to call the ‘Tarrago’ and ‘Lake Bathurst’ stations, and Sherwin Flats became Tarago. The post offices and schools also changed their names. I don’t know any more about the mix-up, or why it was easier to change the names of three villages instead of the signs at two railway stations.
COBB & CO
I would never have written this book if I hadn’t known it would be read by Angela Marshall, experienced horsewoman and also steeped in the knowledge of the mechanics and running of Cobb & Co coaches, restored ones and new ones made to their pattern. Thankfully I had only made a few mistakes about the harnessing, the brake position, and the way an accident might have happened, but I owe Angela more gratitude than I can express. All mistakes that remain are mine, and the book has been revised several times since it passed her scrutiny.
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