by Barbara Wood
What was this, a dream or another buried memory, or both? Joanna wondered. Why had her mother cared enough to write it down?
Hugh was saying: "As nearly as I can judge, the Dreamtime, or the Dreaming, is what the Aborigines call the distant past, when the first people walked the earth and sang everything into creation. Their spirituality is very earthbound. From the earth we come, by the earth we are sustained, and when we die, to the earth we return. To wound the earth is to wound ourselves. That's why the Aborigines never developed farming or mining or anything that altered the environment in any way. They were not just part of nature, they were nature."
"Mr. Westbrook," Joanna said, "do they have the power to put a curse on someone? Can they destroy someone that way?"
"Let me just say that they have a certain power, and they certainly might put a curse on someone. But I'm not sure it would matter, unless that person believed that it did."
"Then the way to be safe is simply not to believe in it?"
A spark suddenly exploded in the fire and shot up into the sky.
"You don't really believe there is a curse on you, do you?" Hugh said quietly.
"I don't know," she said. "I know it must sound terribly farfetched. But I have to find out. Mr. Westbrook, we saw Aborigines begging in Melbourne, and we have seen them on the road since. Are there any left who still live the way they used to? The way they did even thirty-five years ago?"
"You want to know if the Aborigines at Karra Karra still have the power that's frightening you."
"Might they still be there?"
Struck by her intensity, Hugh said, "I believe, Miss Drury, that the Aborigines who live in the outback practice the old ways. But they are many miles from here, deep in the interior, which is a great big inhospitable desert. How they live today is anyone's guess. There are probably over a million square miles that remain to be explored. There could be all kinds of things out there that we don't know about." He smiled and said, "But I don't think you're cursed, Miss Drury. I really don't."
She looked up at the sky, at the unfamiliar stars, and wondered if Karra Karra was near or far, and whether she was going to find it, and how, and when. And she thought of her mother, tormented and fearful all her life, finally believing she was being stalked by some terrible Unknown, and succumbing in the end to a lingering death at a young age. Joanna's throat tightened, and she suddenly felt afraid and alone.
When Westbrook saw how the firelight glowed on her face, the tension in her posture, he thought she looked very young and very beautiful. He searched for something to say, then began to recite softly:
"Behold the cheery campfire,
A light of glitter and gleams,
And the camping ground so crowded
With tents and men and teams;
And weary jests are driven
And the favorite songs are sung,
And harmony is given
Through strength of heart and lung."
Joanna looked at him and smiled. "That was lovely," she said. "Who wrote it?"
"I did. It's something I do to pass the time as I'm watching over sheep."
Their eyes held across the dying campfire, and then Joanna looked away. She reached for her shawl and drew it around her shoulders. "Are autumn evenings always this chilly here?"
"This isn't autumn, it's spring."
"Oh yes, of course. I'd forgotten. It's strange to think of October as springtime ..."
"Don't worry, Miss Drury," Hugh said. "We'll find some answers for you. After all, we made a bargain. Pretty soon we'll be at Merinda, and we can start working on your problem then. In the meantime, I don't believe in curses or the Rainbow Serpent, so you're safe with me."
FOUR
F
OR AS FAR AS YOU CAN SEE," HUGH SAID, "ALL THIS IS MERINDA." Joanna was spellbound; it was as if she were gazing out over a sea of green, fertile pastures, gently rising and falling beneath the cloudless sky. A fresh wind blew, snapping her skirt and the brim of Hugh's hat. Overhead, a wedge-tailed eagle rode air currents, and in the distance smoky mountains rose up, their summits curiously curved like a row of waves, as if the mountains had once been an ocean rolling to shore, but were now frozen in stone.
"Merinda's only five thousand sheep on seven thousand acres now, but it will grow," Hugh said.
"Why is your station called Merinda, Mr. Westbrook?"
"Merinda is the Aboriginal name for this place. It means 'beautiful woman.'"
"Was it named for a beautiful woman, do you know?"
He looked at Joanna and saw that in the sunlight her amber eyes darkened to a deep honey color. And the thought flashed into his mind that the beautiful woman was here, now. "No one knows," he said, "although there are legends. The story goes that a long time ago, perhaps in the Dreamtime, there was a young woman named Merinda. She was a song-woman, which meant she kept all the songs and songlines of her clan. Everybody in a clan knows some of the songs, but only a song-woman or a song-man knows all of them, because to know all of them is to possess the clan's power. The legend goes that one day a member of a rival clan across the river decided to steal Merinda's power, so that he could drive away her people and keep the good hunting and fishing grounds for himself. He kidnapped Merinda and tried to force her to tell him the songs. But she refused, and died without uttering a sound, leaving her people safe."
"Did that happen here?"
"According to the legend, she died somewhere in this area."
"What happened to the Aborigines who used to live here?" Joanna asked.
"They died off, mostly. When the first settlers arrived, the local natives thought that they were only passing through, that they were searching for their homeland.
But when the white men stayed and began pushing the Aborigines off their ancestral land, fighting broke out, and it was very bloody. If anything was stolen from a white man's farm, he and his neighbors would ride out and slaughter the first blacks they came upon, whether they were the guilty ones or not. And then the Aborigines would retaliate by burning the farm, murdering the white man's family, and destroying his stock. There was wholesale slaughter—entire tribes were massacred by white men who claimed to be defending their land. And then the natives who had managed to survive began to succumb to diseases their bodies had no immunity against—smallpox, measles, influenza. It's estimated that within the first few years after the convicts arrived, thousands of Aborigines died of illness alone."
In a short time, Hugh added, with their families and tribes broken up, the Aborigines began to lose their sense of unity, their culture. They started hanging around the settlements, expecting handouts. They developed a taste for alcohol. The children began to beg; the women became prostitutes.
"As a result," Hugh said, "the ancient knowledge is vanishing. With the breakup of the tribes, the young Aborigines have no way of learning the customs and laws of their ancestors. If this keeps up, then someday their culture will vanish altogether."
Joanna looked at the green pastures bordered by hedges and fences stretching to the base of the mountains, with stately old trees and tall eucalypts dotting the plain, and great flocks of sheep ebbing and flowing over the landscape. "It's hard to imagine that a place so beautiful as this," she murmured, "could have been the setting for tragedy." And then she wondered, did the Aborigines her mother perhaps once lived with suffer a similar fate?
"Where is your homestead, Mr. Westbrook?" she asked.
He pointed and said, "There, at the end of that road. Do you see the buildings through the trees?"
"Yes, I see them."
And all of a sudden, Adam, who was standing between them, cried, "Farm! A farm!"
Hugh and Joanna stared at him. "Why, Adam," Joanna said, taking him by the shoulders. "You spoke! You can talk!"
"Farm!" he said excitedly, pointing. "A farm!"
"Well, well," Hugh said. "Not a sound out of him in five days, and now all of a sudden—" He laughed. "I reckon the way to keep him talking
is to get him to the homestead."
Merinda's homeyard was enclosed by a collection of ramshackle buildings, which seemed to have been built with whatever materials were at hand—some of the structures were made of bush timber and weather boards; others, of stone—and they appeared to have been put up at various times, following no method or plan. The yard was filled with noisy industry, men on horseback shouting and whistling frightened sheep into pens, while sheepdogs raced back and forth yelping.
As Hugh drew the wagon to a halt, a man came riding up. "Thank God you're back, Hugh!" he said. "We've got some serious troub—" He looked at Joanna and stopped.
"This is Miss Drury, Bill," Hugh said, as he got down from the wagon. "She's going to take care of the boy for me. And this is Adam. What's the trouble?"
The man stared at Joanna for another moment, then said, "We've found a lice infestation among the wether flocks."
"But those animals were clean when I left!"
"There's no doubt about it, Hugh. The animals have the distinctive sores, and the wool has been affected."
"When did you discover it?"
"About five days ago. Stringy Larry thinks the lice might have come in with those merinos you brought from New South Wales last month. But I'm not so sure. I inspected those animals myself, Hugh, and I'd swear they were clean. I can't imagine what's caused this."
Hugh signaled to a boy who was shoeing a horse in front of the stable. "How widespread is it?" he asked Bill.
"I can't tell yet. If we're lucky, it's only the wethers."
"That's still at least a fourth of the wool clip. What about the in-lamb ewes?"
"Stringy Larry and his men are inspecting them now."
Hugh mounted the horse the stable boy had brought up. "Is there any chance of salvaging the infected wool before the shearers get here?"
"I wouldn't bet on it."
Hugh turned to Joanna, who was still sitting in the wagon with Adam, and said, "This is Bill Lovell, my station manager. I'm sorry, Miss Drury, but I have to go and inspect the sheep with him. There's the house over there. You and Adam go ahead, and get settled in. I'll have a couple of the men bring your trunk inside. If you want something to eat, just ask Ping-Li in the cookhouse."
Joanna started to say something, but Hugh turned his horse and galloped out of the yard.
"Well, Adam," Joanna said, lifting him to the ground, "it looks as if—"
"Sheep!" he cried suddenly, pointing to a pen where some men were wrestling with a ram.
"Yes, Adam, sheep," she said, thrilled that he had spoken again, and anxious to keep him talking. "But those men won't want you getting in the way. Let's go and see the house, shall we?"
Holding Adam by the hand, Joanna walked across the yard toward the cabin Hugh had pointed out. As they walked past the stable, a young man in a leather apron stopped in the middle of shoeing a horse and stared. Another man crossing the yard glanced toward Joanna, looked away, and then suddenly stared back at her.
As they approached the cabin, which Joanna saw had been crudely made of logs and bark, Adam suddenly became animated. He pulled on her arm and pointed past the house, saying, "River! River!" She looked toward the trees beyond the north end of the yard, through which Hugh and the station manager had ridden, and she thought she glimpsed, through a wooded area, the flash of water.
"All right, Adam," she said, delighted that he suddenly seemed so happy. "Let's go and see what it's like."
They followed a path that wound behind the cabin, across a grassy field and into the distant woods. As they made their way through the trees and came into a clearing, Joanna looked around in wonder.
She and Adam had arrived at a place where a stream branched off the river and meandered into a large, placid pond. The air was filled with a symphony of sounds: water gurgling in the creek, a cool wind rustling the branches of acacias and eucalyptus, the whine and buzz of insects in the spring air. Joanna felt as if she were standing in Eden; there was beauty all around her. Majestic old Red River gums cast orange and white reflections on still water. Wattle trees were exploding in thousands of bright yellow flowers. A black-and-white honeyeater, its face streaked with brilliant blue feathers, was perched on a decayed branch, cocking its head from side to side.
Joanna thought: What a wonderful place.
She recalled a tea plantation in India she had once visited with her parents. The main house had been set apart from the work center of the plantation—far away and high on a hill, protected among trees and lush green grass. How unfortunate, she thought, that Merinda's house wasn't here, by the river, instead of in that noisy, muddy yard.
She heard a splash and, in the next instant, Adam broke away from her and ran to the pond. He dropped down to the ground and plunged his hands into the water.
Joanna hurried over. "Be careful," she said. But to her surprise, Adam was laughing. "Platypus!" he said, splashing his hands in the water.
Joanna looked at the boy in astonishment, as the laughter transformed him. There was a hint of color in his cheeks, and the shadows seemed to have faded from his eyes.
"Platypus!" he said again, as the mirror-like surface of the pond rippled, and out climbed a strange-looking animal that appeared to be a cross between a beaver and a duck.
Adam squealed and clapped his hands, and Joanna thought: This place is magic.
"Miss Drury! What are you doing?"
She turned and saw Hugh standing behind her, frowning. "We wanted to see the river," she said.
"Miss Drury, I'm afraid it's dangerous down here by the billabong, especially if you don't know your way through these woods."
"Billabong?" she said, looking around.
"Billabong. The Aborigines' word for a pond."
"Oh," said Joanna. Then, "This is a beautiful place."
"Yes, it is. I'm going to build the house here—we're standing approximately where the front door will be. The rest will go back as far as those ruins. But we haven't started on it yet."
"What will the house be like?" she asked, keeping an eye on Adam as he pulled off his shoes and socks and paddled at the edge of the water.
"I thought it should be Queensland style, but Pauline, the woman I'm going to marry, has her heart set on a house she saw in a magazine. She read a story about reconstruction in the American South, now that the war is over, and she fell in love with a picture of a large white-columned house called Willows Plantation, in the state of Georgia. Luckily, I was able to find an American architect in Melbourne who is familiar with the style."
"It sounds lovely," Joanna said. "You must be very excited."
"Yes," Hugh said. He stared at Joanna. There was something about the way the sunlight seemed to be gathering around her. She was still neat after five days of travel, although a few wisps of brown hair had escaped their pins. He realized he wanted to say something to her, but he didn't know what.
Joanna walked toward a cluster of waist-high rock walls, tumbled and broken. "What is this place?" she asked.
"Those are old ruins. People lived here many years ago, there was a settlement."
"Is this one of the sacred sites you told me about?"
"Maybe. We're not sure. Only the elders—the song-men—can look at a rock or a tree and determine whether it was created by a Dreamtime ancestor."
"If it were, would that make this place holy?"
"It depends on what you call a holy place. Aboriginal sacred sites are more than just holy places, Miss Drury. The Aborigines believe that everything that ever happened on a particular spot is still there, still happening. To disturb it would be to disturb the past."
"And that land over there," she said, pointing across the river. "Does that also belong to Merinda?"
"That's the start of Colin MacGregor's property," Hugh said. "It's called Kilmarnock, it's the next station over."
"It's all so green and lovely—" Joanna stopped and stared. There was a man standing among the trees a short distance away, silent and unmoving,
watching her. "Mr. Westbrook, who is that over there?"
Hugh looked through the trees. "That's Ezekiel. He's the old Aborigine I told you about. He works for me sometimes. He's one of the last of his generation. He remembers what it was like here before white men came. If you want to know anything about the legend of Merinda, he would be the one to ask."
Joanna stared at the old man standing on the bank of the river, looking as if he had just materialized out of the reddish-brown clay. He wore trousers and a shirt but no shoes, and his white hair and beard nearly reached his waist. He was too far away for her to see his eyes, but she could feel them on her.
She turned to Hugh and asked, "Why is he staring at me that way?"
"He isn't used to seeing a woman at Merinda. And we are standing very close to these ruins. He tends to be very protective of the old sites."
Joanna was struck by the old Aborigine's gaze, and the uneasy feeling it gave her.
Just then Adam came running up. "Look!" he cried, and he opened his hands and held out a grasshopper.
"Yes, isn't he a handsome fellow," Joanna said, turning her back on the man in the trees, and trying to shake off the strange feeling she had. "Can you say grasshopper for me, Adam?"
As Hugh watched Joanna, he thought of his youth in the outback, its solitary existence, where a man could go for weeks without encountering another soul. When he purchased Merinda, at the age of twenty, he had had no time for social life, he had thrown himself into building up the station. In all those years, he had known only the intimacy of such women as those who worked at a house in St. Kilda. And then Pauline had come into his life, a woman like no other he had ever known, and whose passionate kiss one rainy afternoon had awakened him.
Hugh looked at Joanna and thought how beautiful she looked, how capable she seemed, and yet how vulnerable, too. He thought of their past few days together on the road, and the nights at various camps, and he was startled to realize that he was mildly depressed to see their journey end.
He also realized that, after inspecting the sheep with Bill Lovell, instead of his first thought being of Pauline, of going over to Lismore where she was waiting for him, he had thought only of looking for Joanna.