The Exiles

by Christina Baker Kline

  “She don’t like fellas,” Olive said. “Too bad fer ye.”

  “She liked some kind of fella,” the lantern holder said, to general laughter.

  “And look where it got her,” Olive said.

  With one guard in front and two behind, the prisoners trooped across the courtyard, up another set of stairs, and down the wide corridor with its hissing oil lamps to the matron’s quarters. The matron, sitting behind her oak desk, appeared in no better mood than she’d been on the night Evangeline arrived. When she saw Evangeline she frowned. “You’re too thin,” she said accusingly, as if Evangeline had capriciously decided to lose weight. “Would be a pity to lose the child.”

  “Prolly be better off,” a guard said.

  “She probably would be.” The matron sighed. Peering at the ledger, she ran a line through Evangeline’s name.

  When the prisoners were discharged, the guards led the shuffling procession down the stairs, moving slowly so they wouldn’t tumble like dominoes. As she stood outside the tall black gates, Evangeline felt like a bear emerging from a cave, blinking into the early morning light.

  The sky overhead was the warm white of fresh muslin, the leaves of the elms lining the street lily-pad green. A spray of birds rose, confetti-like, from a tree. It was an ordinary day in the city: a flower monger setting up his stall, horses and buggies clattering down Bailey Street, men in black waistcoats and top hats striding along the sidewalk, a boy calling in a high, thin voice, “Pork pies! Hot cross buns!”

  Two ladies were strolling arm in arm, one in walnut brocaded satin, the other in a watery blue silk, both tightly corseted, with puffed upper sleeves that tapered fashionably to the wrist. Their parasols were ornamental, their bonnets tied with velvet bows. The one in blue caught sight of the manacled female prisoners and stopped in her tracks. Lifting a gloved hand to her mouth, she whispered in the other lady’s ear. The two of them turned abruptly in the opposite direction.

  Evangeline looked down at her heavy chains and burlap apron. She must seem a specter to them, she realized—barely human.

  As she stood with the guards and the other prisoners near the street, a carriage with boarded-up windows, drawn by two black horses, clip-clopped to a stop in front of them. Half shoving, half lifting each woman, one of the guards managed to load them inside, where they sat across from each other, two by two, on rough wooden planks. When the guard closed the door and locked it, the interior was pitch dark. Springs wheezed as he took his place beside the driver. Evangeline strained to hear their voices but couldn’t make out what they were saying.

  The crack of a whip, the whinny of a horse. The carriage jolted forward.

  It was stuffy inside the carriage. As the wheels creaked along the cobblestones, Olive bumping against her at every turn, Evangeline felt a bead of perspiration slide from her forehead to the tip of her nose. In an absentminded gesture that had become a habit, she found the edge of Cecil’s handkerchief under her dress with her fingertips. Sitting on the hard plank in the dark, she listened for clues. Finally, the caw-caws of seagulls, men yelling in the distance, the air sharp with brine: they must be near the water. The slaving ship. Her heart began to thump.

  Mathinna

  We make no pompous display of Philanthropy. The Government must remove the natives—if not, they will be hunted down like wild beasts and destroyed!

  —The Colonial Times (Tasmania), December 1, 1826

  Flinders Island, Australia, 1840

  The early morning air was cool, with a steady rain. Under a weeping pine, Mathinna pulled the wallaby skin around her shoulders and gazed out at the hairy brown ferns and the cloud gardens of moss hanging above, listening to the shirring rain and the chirping crickets. Fingering the delicate shells on the necklace looped twice around her neck, she thought about her predicament. She wasn’t frightened of being alone in the forest, despite the tiger snakes that hid under logs and the venomous black spiders in their invisible webs. She feared more what awaited her back at the settlement.

  Before Mathinna was born, Wanganip had told her, Mathinna’s sister, Teanic, had been yanked out of her father’s arms by British settlers attempting to capture him. Teanic was sent to the Queen’s Orphan School near Hobart Town and they never saw her again. It was rumored that she died of influenza at the age of eight, but the Palawa had never been told that directly.

  Mathinna did not want to be kidnapped like her sister.

  After Wanganip died, Mathinna’s stepfather, Palle, had done his best to comfort her. With one arm around her as they sat near the crackling campfire, he told her stories about the Palawa gods, so different from the one they were now forced to worship. The two main deities were brothers descended from the sun and the moon. Moinee made the land and rivers. Droemerdene lived in the sky, having taken the form of a star. He crafted the first human from a kangaroo, fashioning knee joints so the man could rest and removing the cumbersome tail.

  Since the first Palawa was created, Palle told her, they had walked many miles a day. Lean and fit and small of stature, they roamed from the bush to the sea and to the top of the mountains, carrying their food and tools and eating utensils in bags woven from grass. Smeared with a layer of seal grease to protect them from the wind and cold, they hunted kangaroo and wallaby and other beasts with spears honed with stone knives and with wooden clubs called waddies. From campsite to campsite they carried water in kelp vessels and smoldering coals in baskets made of bark. They ate abalone and oysters and used the sharp edges of leftover shells to cut meat.

  Long ago, their country had extended across what were now the waters of the Bass Strait, but one day the rising sea sliced the island from the continent. Ever since, the Palawa had lived on Lutruwita in splendid isolation. There was usually enough to eat; the water was fresh and wildlife plentiful. They built domed huts out of tree bark and twisted wide strands of bark into canoes. They crafted long necklaces, like those Mathinna’s mother made, from vivid green Mariner shells the size of baby teeth and wore ceremonial red ochre in their hair. Many tribesmen wore raised scars shaped like suns and moons on their shoulders and arms and torsos, carved into their skin and filled with powdered charcoal. Their stories, spoken and sung, were passed from one generation to the next.

  Unlike the British, Palle said, spitting on the ground with contempt, the Palawa did not need brick structures or constricting costumes or muskets to feel content. They coveted nothing and stole nothing. There were twelve nations, each containing half a dozen clans, each with a different language, and there was no word for property in any of them. The land was simply part of who they were.

  Or perhaps more accurately, he said, they were part of the land.

  It had been two hundred years since the first white men came to their shores—strange-looking creatures with freakishly pale skin, like white worms or ghosts out of legends. They appeared as soft as oysters, but the spears they carried roared with fire. For many years the only white people hardy enough to remain through the winter were the whalers and sealers, many of whom were so crude and vicious they seemed to the Palawa half man, half beast. Even so, over time, a bartering system developed. The Palawa traded crawfish and muttonbirds and kangaroo skins for white sugar, tea, tobacco, and rum—vile substances that took root in their brains and stomachs, Palle told Mathinna, fueling cravings and dependence.

  Since the day the invaders arrived on—and named—Van Diemen’s Land, they were as relentless as a rising tide. They seized the land and pushed the Palawa farther and farther into the mountains. The grasslands and open bush, their kangaroo and wallaby hunting grounds, became grazing pastures for sheep, penned in by fences. The Palawa loathed these stupid bleating animals that clogged their routes and pathways. They refused to eat their stinking meat and burned the fences that impeded their movements. Fearing the shepherds who had no qualms about killing them when they came near, they fought back the only way they could, with ambush and subterfuge.

  A decade before Mathinna was
born, the so-called Black War decimated the tribes. The white men, the Palawa realized too late, were devoid of morality. They lied while smiling at you and thought nothing of luring you into traps. The Palawa fought in vain with rocks and spears and waddies against roving parties of convicts and settlers who had been officially authorized by the British government to capture or kill any natives on sight. These men roamed the island with kangaroo dogs, hunting the Palawa for sport. As the Palawa continued to elude them, their tactics became more cunning. They camouflaged steel traps with eucalyptus leaves. They bound the men to trees and used them for target practice. They raped and enslaved Palawa women, infecting them with diseases that left them barren. They burned them with brands and dashed the brains of their children on the rocks.

  When most of the Palawa had been killed off, the remaining few were rounded up and brought to Flinders. Here, they were forced into stiff British clothes with needless buttons and shoes that cramped their feet. The red ochre was scrubbed from their hair, which was clipped short, in the British style. They were made to sit in the dark chapel and listen to sermons about a hell they’d never imagined and moral instruction they didn’t need, singing hymns that promised salvation in exchange for suffering.

  The Palawa had been told that their time on Flinders would be temporary, that soon they’d be granted land of their own—or rather, given some of their own land back.

  It had been ten years. They were still waiting.

  The rain fell in sheets. It trickled down Mathinna’s neck, finding the gaps in her cape, soaking through her cotton dress to the skin. Deep in her chest she could feel a thickening, the beginnings of a cold. Her eyes were itchy with exhaustion and her stomach was empty. She could hunt for swans’ eggs, but that would mean heading into the open grasses. If she went to the beach in search of mussels, she’d be easy to spot from the ridge. Though she had never caught a muttonbird, she’d watched Palle do it: he dipped his hand inside a hole in the ground as wide as a large oyster shell, and if the air was cold, he pulled his hand out quickly; it might be a snake den—but if it was warm, it was probably a muttonbird nest. He’d reach in, grab the bird, and yank it out, twisting its neck to snap it.

  The problem was, Mathinna didn’t have fire. Even the hardiest elders, the ones who tore into the muttonbirds as soon as most of the sticky feathers were burned off, didn’t eat them raw.

  She gazed at the gum trees in the distance with bark as smooth and gray as wallaby bellies, and her eyes clouded with tears. She missed her pet, Waluka, an albino ringtail possum with pink ears she’d found abandoned and raised from birth. She missed the warmth of Palle’s arms.

  Her mouth watered at the thought of steaming oysters plucked from the coals.

  By the time she made her way back to the settlement, the rain had stopped. Some of the Palawa and a few missionaries were milling about, but there was no sign of the Franklins. Mathinna’s heart surged with hope. She slipped into the schoolroom, where a few children were learning their lessons. The schoolteacher looked up from his primer. He appeared to take no notice of her wet dress, the soiled wallaby skin, the frightened look in her eyes. He seemed unsurprised that she’d returned.

  “Mary,” he said, rising. “Come with me. They’ve been looking for you.”

  The Tasman Sea, 1840

  When the captain lifted her into the sloop, Mathinna looked back and saw her stepfather standing on the ridge, silhouetted against the sky, shading his eyes with his hand.

  “Palle!” she cried, waving.

  He raised his arm, his fingers outstretched.

  “Palle . . .” His figure blurred through her tears.

  “That’s enough, now,” the captain said.

  She sobbed quietly as he pulled anchor and readied the sail. Deep in her bones, she felt certain that she would never see her stepfather again. She watched his figure recede into the distance as the boat left its mooring and headed into the open ocean.

  Spitting on the deck, the captain said, “I was told to treat ye like a little lady. I’ll do what they say, but ye don’t look like any lady I ever saw.”

  Mathinna didn’t answer. She wiped her eyes with her hands.

  She’d never been out on the water before. Only the seafarers among the Palawa went out in canoes. She had not known to expect the gliding rises and sudden drops, the salty fizz in her nose, the hard brightness of the sun, the stomach-churning smell of fish innards rotting in a bucket.

  Her mouth filled with saliva. Her eyes watered. Before they even lost sight of Flinders, she was vomiting into a pail.

  “It’s in your head.” The captain tapped his temple. “Calm yourself.”

  When Mathinna had returned to the settlement, three days earlier, she was told that the Franklins were on their way back to Van Diemen’s Land. They’d left behind The Cormorant and its captain from their small fleet for the express purpose of ferrying her to Hobart Town. George Robinson’s wife, Maria, had helped her pack her meager belongings into an old steamer trunk for the trip: two plain, English-style cotton dresses, two sets of pantaloons, a bonnet, a pair of leather shoes. Mathinna made a nest of the wallaby-skin cape for Waluka in a rush basket Palle had woven for her, tucking three shell necklaces her mother had made beneath it.

  “Bringing a rodent to the governor’s residence hardly seems advisable,” Robinson said when he saw Waluka.

  “It’s a marsupial, George.” His wife pantomimed paws like a kangaroo. “It has a pouch. She raised it from birth; it’s quite tame.”

  “It looks like a rat.”

  Maria put her hand on his arm. “This child is leaving behind everything she has ever known. What harm is there in letting her keep it?”

  Now, crouching down, Mathinna opened the basket. She pulled out one of the shell necklaces and draped it around her neck, then lifted Waluka onto her lap. With his milky skin, pink nose, and long talons he did look a bit like a rat, she supposed. In her lap he was limp, motionless, but she could feel his tiny heart skittering as she stroked his chest with the back of a finger.

  “I’m surprised they let ye bring that mangy thing,” the captain said.

  She ran a protective hand down Waluka’s back. “Mr. Robinson said I could.”

  “Ever eaten possum?”

  She shook her head.

  “Not bad,” the captain said. “Tastes like eucalyptus.”

  She couldn’t tell if he was joking.

  The sky was as gray as the flat stones in the cove. Waves glinted like shale. Spreading out his tattered map, the captain beckoned Mathinna over. He traced the coastline of a large landmass with his forefinger until he reached a narrow passage near the bottom. Tapping it, he said, “This is where we’re headed. Ten days’ journey.”

  It looked like nothing to her: jagged lines on a piece of paper. But as she examined the map, sounding out the names of towns and regions, she moved her own finger up the coastline, the reverse of their journey. Past Port Arthur, around tiny Maria Island, through Four Mile Creek and around Cape Barren Island, and finally back to Flinders, a speck in the ocean above the bulk of Van Diemen’s Land.

  Running a finger along the shells of her necklace, Mathinna remembered her mother placing it in her hands. “Every person you’ve ever cared about, and every place you’ve ever loved, is one of these shells. You’re the thread that ties them together,” she’d said, touching Mathinna’s cheek. “You carry the people and places you cherish with you. Remember that and you will never be lonely, child.”

  Mathinna wanted to believe it. She wasn’t sure it was true.

  The captain slept in fits and starts; at the slightest dip or flap of the sail he’d startle awake. She pretended not to notice when he moved behind a barrel to use the chamber pot or wash his armpits in a bucket. He was probably only in his midthirties, but to Mathinna he seemed ancient. He was coarse, but not unkind. His only task, he told her, was to deliver her safely to the governor, and by hook or by crook he would do that. Mainly he left her alone. Wh
en he wasn’t tending the mainsail or charting their course, he sat on one side of the boat, whittling naked women out of wood with a small curved knife, and she sat on the other, fingering the tiny green shells around her neck and playing with Waluka.

  Each morning the captain performed a checklist of tasks: recording barometer readings in a notebook, checking the sail for rips and tears, nailing down loose boards, splicing rope. He trailed a lure behind the boat and pulled in red-striped perch and jack mackerel and the occasional salmon. He’d stun the flopping fish before gutting it quickly with his carving knife, then make a fire in the cook box, a metal contraption with three sides on four sturdy legs, with a tray in the bottom for the fire and a grate on top.

  Mathinna had never eaten scale fish; the Palawa ate only shellfish. They laughed at the missionaries when they saw them picking tiny bones out of their teeth. But now her mouth watered at the smell of crackling skin and the sight of white flesh melting from the bone. “Try it,” the captain said one evening, catching her eye. He sliced off some chunks, dumped them on a pewter plate, and handed it to her. When she tried to pick up the chunks with her fingers, the fish separated into flat fleshy disks. She slipped them into her mouth one by one, marveling at the buttery flavor. He grinned. “Better’n hardtack, ain’t it?”

  The captain told her stories about his life—how he’d stolen rare coins to pay for medicine for his sick mother (or so he said), ending up on a convict ship to Van Diemen’s Land, where he did six years of hard labor at Port Arthur. When he mentioned he’d been a sealer, Mathinna’s heart thumped. But she hadn’t seen any sign of savagery.

  “Do you like . . . killing seals?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “It’s rough work. Dirty and cold. But I didn’t have much choice, din’ I? At least I knew I’d be paid for me labor. Anyway, I seen worse in prison. What people do to each other, ye wouldn’t believe.”