Poor Fellow My Country

by Xavier Herbert

  The verandah ended at what, judging by its equipment, was an animal hospital, empty just now. He went halfway along, to enter a door and a passage by which a few steps brought him to a door on the left leading into a spacious laboratory. He entered here and set down his boxes. Here also was a small hospital, for humans, just a screened-off corner with a couple of beds and bedside lockers. He left, to follow the passage through almost to the glazed front door, to turn again left into a large room that would serve as office, lounge, and library. He went to a telephone on the wall, cranked, listened, spoke: ‘How’s it for a feed? I’m starving. Good. As soon as I get the dust off I’ll be over.’

  A cross passage took him nearly the western length of the place, past storerooms and a couple of bedrooms, to a well-equipped bathroom. He stripped, showered, shaved. Then to a bedroom to change into fresh light khaki. He returned to the middle passage, this time to go out through the front door. The space between annexe and house was simply gravelled with quartz and planted with clothes-lines. He crossed. The rear entrance, under a porch, was two fly-screen doors in width, one of which was opened to receive him, by the creamy chocolate hand of a plumpish woman of about forty, clad in a bright floral dress with a red ribbon in wavy brown hair and barefoot. Her lovely symmetrical soft features were bright with smiling. Jeremy gave his ruddy cheek for a peck.

  Two young black girls were at the roaring range watching. Their teeth flashed at his nod. He sniffed the atmosphere of the kitchen: ‘Smells good.’ The woman asked, ‘You like tomato cocktail?’

  He smacked his lips. They went through the kitchen to swing-doors that brought them into a large dining-room with a view through eastern windows. A large table was set at one end for two. Through here and out by way of a hanging bamboo curtain, into a spacious lounge-room that occupied half of the downstairs space, except for a panelled corner on the western side, from which a fine stairway ran aloft. Through open windows and trellises and vines restricted view could be had on three sides. There was the big front gate, in the high mesh fence, the bush beyond.

  They moved to a sort of cosy corner on the eastern side, where under the windows was concentrated most of the furniture of the place. While he seated himself in a deep partially upholstered rattan chair, she went to a mahogany ice-box. She fetched out a silver jug, set it up on a silver tray with silver mugs, brought it to a low table before him. When she gave him a cup, he sniffed, murmuring, ‘The old familiar juice.’

  Seating herself with her own drink, she asked, ‘Too early?’

  ‘Never too early for an old soak like me. To your bright eyes, Nan, darling!’

  They were bright eyes, too, that looked over the silver cup, like brown agates shining through limpid water.

  2

  I

  It was a fact that the Beatrice River Races constituted the social event of the year in those parts; the term Social meaning not simply the getting together of people, but that the occasion was something also favoured by those who thought themselves better than others, the Socialites, so-called, who hereabouts comprised the squattocracy and the gentry of the Government Service Senior Officers, lately augmented by the Military aristocracy being established along with the building of the Garrison in Port Palmeston. Doubtless the occasion was much improved by this quality of class distinction, even though the common herd might be limited merely to witnessing the strutting of their betters, since at least it brightened an otherwise mostly unlively existence; and deep down in Australians generally there must linger something of the ancestral Forelock Puller, else surely all forms of inequality in a nation calling itself a Commonwealth would have been done away with long ago, instead of being perpetuated as from the beginning of settlement.

  Every big station in the land held its annual race meeting; but these were mere baronial concessions to serfs, handed down from the pioneering days, mere breaks in the otherwise ceaseless grind of the handling of stock during what was called The Season, the period between April and September. The difference in the case of the Beatrice River Meeting was that it signalled the end of the Season, that is apart from its social significance, and now considering this in its exacter sense of human congregation. It was through the Beatrice River Races that Bushies and Townies came to mingle in circumstances that enabled them to speak to themselves as Northerners, to join in ways comprehensible to all, the excitement of the race track, the bonhomie of the booze, the fraternal cavorting on the dance floor after the clod-hopping style of their forebears, the fun of sporting in the true old-fashioned sense of the term, by racing in sacks, chasing greased pigs, vying in tugs-of-war. Even the Blackfellow was permitted almost to rub shoulders with the Whitefellow.

  Four special trains were provided for those able and willing to pack into any kind of railway vehicle, all kinds having to be used owing to the limited resources of the Railways Department. As the journeys both from Town and from the Head of the Road and back by rail were about the booziest part of the festival, few were fussy about how they made them. Many also came by road in motor vehicles, and a few even by aeroplane, because the Flying Doctor was always in attendance and brought someone along with him, and aircraft were becoming common enough in the land for there to be one or two others likely to drop in. But the horse was still the main means of transport for the bushies, even those of the squatter caste. It was only down South where they whisked racehorses about from meeting to meeting on wheels. Here even the champions walked the bush-tracks, some over considerable distances. Drovers done droving for the season came in with their plants of horses, prads and packs. Ringers rode their fancy mounts. Even some of the blacks were mounted, if only on beasts given over to them for the occasion so that they might ride in the Blackboys’ Races. The rest of the blacks walked. But then, they had been walking since the Dream Time.

  After all, if only nominally, it was the carnival of the horse. For this occasion that animal ceased to be a mere accessory to man’s perpetual harassment of the unhappy bovine, to resume that relationship which is one of the few graces of this world given largely to depredation between species, namely the friendship of one species with another, most graceful of all being that between a noble horse and a man worthy of him.

  The Carnival was timed for early September, when with cessation of the sou’easters that had battered and chilled the land since June, it was warming up again, and when the working of stock was at an end, which is to say the mustering for branding and culling, the putting out to breeding or fattening, the turn-off, or delivery to the drovers for taking to the distant markets. Beatrice River Races were the climax to it all, the pay-off, the reward. Pretty well everyone concerned with stock worked to see that the event took place to time. A date was fixed by the Committee and advertised far and wide.

  Originally the date had depended on when the season ended. That was before Vaiseys took over. Since then it had been rather that the end of the season was fixed by that date; as if Lord Alfred Vaisey, in his financial wisdom, had seen it as means to more efficient working of his properties and further profit in reducing wages bills, since the common workers were employed only during those six months. If this were indeed the case, His Lordship might be asked to confirm it (if anyone were game to do so) because he would be blessing the event this year with his noble presence.

  There was always a patron to give the baronial touch to it beloved by the squattocracy. To have the proceedings headed merely by the Chairman of Committees, who was always the Beatrice River Regional Manager for Vaiseys, was not enough. Several English lordlings, a couple even endowed with the Vice-regality of Governor General of the so-called Commonwealth of Australia, had served as patrons. In a pinch for patronage there was always His Honour the Administrator of the local Government set-up, First Gentleman of the Land, in fact, but when all was said and done, only a satrap compared with titled outsiders. But even these anointed ones faded into insignificance before the patronage of Lord Vaisey himself. He had done the job once before; only once, because
that was just as many times as he had bothered to come this far to see how his dominions fared, so easy was it to dominate those who ran them for him; only once, a fact that might encourage some to think of him as an outsider also, but for the illogic of so dubbing one who held all the country worth a damn and had in his pocket every citizen of similar worth by what would be called Decent Standards. Perhaps the way the local conservative newspaper, The Port Palmeston Times, reported the announcement of his coming: ‘This is wonderful news’, summed up the feelings of all those worth that damn. Even the comparatively radical paper, The Palmeston Progressive, mostly ready to belittle or berate anything that didn’t conform with Labor politics, printed the news with no more adverse comment than: ‘As no mention is made of a Lady Vaisey, presumably His Lordship is in that marital state which has been described as In Between Wives.’ Lord Alfred was known as a much-married man.

  Officially the shivoo lasted four days. That there was also an unofficial time was due to the fact that most of the country people had to arrive a couple of days earlier to set up camp and weren’t in such a hurry to leave. Officially it began on a Wednesday, with a formal opening and some minor racing. The racing proper took place on Thursday and Friday, with the Cup Race on Friday. There would be a dance of sorts each night, then the Cup Ball on Friday night with presentation of the Cup. Saturday was Sports Day, part of the sport being the Blackboys’ Races, which naturally could not be included with the official events. It all ended in a grand booze up on Saturday night. On Sunday, somehow the trains departed for their destinations with those with civilised responsibilities. Most of these travellers slept out their journeys. It said much for the stamina of the train crews that they always managed to get their passengers through without mishap, seeing that they, too, indulged along with the rest.

  As accommodation in so small a township was of necessity very limited, camping, in the bush sense of sleeping and eating anywhere, was the order of the day. The bush people, used to attending several race meetings in a year, had more or less well organised camps, with claims pegged out, as it were, along the river bank, which is to say the Dry Season bank, down on the couch grass and soft sand under the big trees and right beside the lime-sweet flowing stream. The sapling timber and other material used for the structures that made up the average camp would be kept stored somewhere between meetings. Entire station staffs camped thus — the whites, of course. If they were Vaisey people and what is known as Socially Acceptable, the Boss and his lady would stay at the Big House of Beatrice River Station, biggest of the Big Houses of the land, as guests of the virtual mistress, Mrs Rhoda Eaton, the former Mrs Jeremy Delacy. The big wigs from Town would also be her guests.

  Less important gentry were accommodated at the Princess Beatrice Hotel, owned by one Shamus Finnucane, better known (but behind his back since he was a man of considerable power) as old Shame-on-us. The hotel was specially constructed to meet the annual demand, upon which its business largely depended. Still lesser ones camped either in the vehicles that had brought them by rail or road, or, becoming indifferent to comfort or propriety or both, just dropped down anywhere. It really didn’t matter where you slept, except from the point of view of propriety. At that time of year the weather was perfect.

  It has been said that black and white were brought by the festivities almost to the point of rubbing shoulders. However, this was confined to the Racecourse, where everybody, other than the elite who occupied the little grandstand, needs must mingle. (Of course more than shoulder-rubbing took place between the races, since it was only by means of prostitution that most of the blacks could get the wherewithal to take part in the festival; but this was, of necessity, furtive, and to respectable people non-existent.) As regards camping there was a definite line of demarcation, which was the space between the two means of crossing the river: the concrete causeway down in the Dry Season bed, called the Crossing, and the high steel girder railway bridge a couple of hundred yards upstream. Whites camped above the crossing, blacks below; for the obvious reason that both had to use the water, and it was unthinkable that anyone with a white skin could use it after a blackfellow. Anyway, it was the accepted mode of water usage of the country. Blacks’ camps were always downstream from the homesteads. When black and white stockmen travelling together stopped to drink at running water, the former always retired discreetly a little way on the downside; or if the drinking were done at waterhole or tank or out of a water-bag or pack-canteen, the blackfellow must use his own pannikin or pint-pot, which usually he kept strapped to his saddle.

  In the circumstances, it was proper that the Lily Lagoons people, being non-white save for that single one they called Mullaka, should camp downstream. What would not be considered proper was the fact that the head of the household should camp along with his mob of savages and in a manner surely calculated to offend those with any sense of true values. In fact the Lily Lagoons camp was above all the rest of those downstream, which would classify it as being uncontaminated by anything but its own self. The trouble was that it was by far the best appointed camp on the river, a showpiece even, with its striped awnings, electric lighting and refrigeration, the best of picnic-type furnishings. It was right beside the Crossing, where everybody passing to and fro, as everybody of any dignity must, because the Racecourse was over the other side, must take a look at it, unless deliberately ignore it, and taking the compulsive look meant seeing boongs lounging about in style that — that was surely little short of sacrilegious!

  The spirit prevailing during the Races, from the moment the mob poured itself out of the trains (such being the way the alcoholic detrainments were described) on the Wednesday afternoon to that when, by those responsible for getting them home again, they were poured back on, was surely as near to Carnival, in its true sense of behaviour with riotous excess, as was possible in a community predominantly Anglo-Celtic; yet its functioning was directed by formalism that in the circumstances was scarcely credible. One might think that it began with the invasion of the township by the boozy mob off the first train, roaring up from the railway station to the hotel like a bacchanalian rout somewhat after three in the afternoon. But that was by no means so. It did not even do any such common or garden thing as begin: it was Inaugurated. First item on the printed program, under the heading Princess Beatrice River Racing Club, was Inaugural Luncheon of Committees. This took place at the Big House, in the great dining-room, with Martin Delacy, grave in his responsibilities as Chairman of Committees at the head of the table, and his lady mother, as President of the Social Subcommittee, at the foot. It was all very nicely done. A first-class meal from a kitchen run by the best cook in the country, Lim Yu, served by Chinese waiters brought from Palmeston for the occasion. (Normally the servants, except for Li Yu, were halfcaste women, all carefully culled and trained by Madam herself.) There was a short address in which Mr Chairman welcomed those who retained committee membership from the last occasion and greeted anyone newly invited to join for this, then declared proceedings inaugurated. After lunch the male company adjourned to one of the wide verandahs set up for the seeming essentials of Reading the Minutes of Last Meeting, Presenting Balance Sheet, Electing Office Bearers — those in favour say Aye, those against say No — carried unanimously! The Social Committee withdrew to Rhoda’s Drawing Room to do their stuff also in the interests of good behaviour in the midst of riot, or out of noblesse oblige, or just plain stuffiness, or whatever it was back of this compulsive formality.

  There were always new faces in Committee, even though it remained the same old stuff that was in debate, because there was always more for the Committee to do than it had numbers and time for, catering for low tastes while trying to get a swig or two from the flowing cup themselves. Strangers were always welcome, provided, of course, they were of the right kind. This time there were a couple of horse-faced and sheep-visaged young women, scions of southern squattocracy, visiting amongst their local kind, and a young jackaroo who was the son of a titled judge.
Another female newcomer was Mrs Betty Bishoff, wife of the stock inspector, a pretty bright little woman, not quaite the thing, since only of Junior Government Officer standing and giving herself away as common with her nervousness; still, it wouldn’t have been easy to ignore her and expect the best from her husband in his onerous office of Steward of the Course (his predecessor had happily been a bachelor) and there was always the Horseshoe Selling to fob off on the like of her, not a job for a lady who was particular whom she talked to.

  Golden Horseshoes were badges of a sort, made of gilded cardboard, really tokens of subscription to the cost of the shivoo, which otherwise was free. Only the very meanest failed to buy them, pricey though they were at five pounds a pop. But the incentive to subscribe was not merely a sense of the propriety of sharing, or boozy weakness in the face of the lady-seller’s blandishments. In fact the Horseshoes could prove to be the equivalent of pure gold for some buyers, because they also happened to be tokens in a lottery. Each was numbered; and there was at the Cup Ball on the Friday night a draw. There were several prizes, such as people of the bush would value: a radio set, a kerosene refrigerator, saddlery, stockwhips, all contributions from the big stations, which in effect meant Lord Vaisey — but best of all, a young horse, colt or filly, of such breeding as very likely to turn out to be a racing champion. If you’d rather have the cash, there were always plenty ready to buy. The very favourite for this year’s Cup, Rajah of Timor, had been won a couple of years back by a linesman working on the Overland Telegraph, and sold for a goodly sum to the man whose hopes were now pinned on him before all others who fancied him, Mr Percival Trotters, better known as Piggy, Vaisey manager of Alice River Downs.