‘Have you ever employed a proper baker?’
‘Where would we get the money?’
‘Will you have a proper baker at the new place you talk about?’
‘I sincerely hope so.
‘Is it only on hope you base your plans, Doctor?’
Cobbity made a comical face. ‘Estimates, my dear, Estimates . . . it’s always Estimates first . . .’
‘And humanity last!’
‘Now . . . I say!’
‘I don’t mean to be offensive. I know what you’re all up against. But I think you’ve been up against it so long that it’s exhausting you . . .’
‘Hear, hear, hear!’ cried everybody crowded round, Tubby Turkney, Eddy McCusky, Cuthbert Cobbity.
She went on, spinning daintily on high heels as she spoke, so that she spoke to each of them, giving them all that same dark rosy black-eyed amorous look which held them spellbound. ‘I happen to have a proper baker I can put straight into the kitchen . . .’
‘Who’s going to pay him?’ asked Cobbity.
‘It’s a she . . . already employed in this place . . . handling dirty linen in the laundry. Nelly Ah Loy. She was baker on the station she came from.’
Cobbity and McCusky turned on Tub, who cringed. ‘No one told me she was a baker . . .’
Cobbity said to Alfie, ‘There you are . . . we’ve got our baker for the next place!’
‘What about now?’
‘That’s up to you . . . and Tub, here.’
‘She can’t make good bread with that flour, though, can she.’
‘I don’t know . . . I’m not a cooking expert.’
‘Well, I do know. We’ll need new flour.’
There was a gasp all round. But new flour they got, from a Chinese wholesaler down town, enough to last till the next steamer came in with more as Government Stores, about which a memo had been sent in ordering that it be inspected before shipment. There was also new rice, new oatmeal, stuff for making cakes and custards, dried fruit, canned full-cream milk, butter. The Coburg Islanders were kicked out of the kitchen, and their places taken by women from the Adult Halfcaste Home. No one got paid. But everybody began to be better fed; and that was enough, at least for the time. The only scoffer was Vi Turkney, who said it wouldn’t last. But one evening, with a bit too much whisky in her and much too much about Alfie Candlemas from Tub, she broke down and cried, ‘After all my years of trying . . . and along comes a chit of a thing with a pretty face and . . . oh, oh, oh, ah!’
In the Government Gazette published that day, as supplement to the Port Palmeston Times, there appeared under the heading of Appointments: Aelfrieda Tripconny Candlemas, as Protector of Aborigines. The ladies of the community were scoffing, saying: What a name to go to bed with! But the gentlemen were saying: Yes . . . but what a gal . . . phwee-phew!
So far the Candlemases were taking little or no part in the social life of the town. For one thing they were unable to do the proper thing in the matter of routine entertaining, having not yet been allotted Government quarters, the house they lived in being a little old cottage in that run-down locality shared by those two semi-sharers Kitty Wyndeyer and Fay McFee; for another, Alfie, busy as a little bee from dawn to dark for seven days a week, was worn out of nights, so much so that often she fell asleep soon after the meal they always had sent round to them from a Chinese restaurant; for a third they would not be much interested in the frivolous sociality of the community they were part of; and then, despite the male appreciation of Alfie as a female, resentment was already being expressed by both sexes concerning what they called Spoiling the Black Bastards: ‘If you want to live on the fat of the land for nothing, black your face and go up and live at the Compound. You won’t be able to do anything with the BB’s soon.’ It was a fact that halfcaste maids were becoming more difficult to get, now that good food was available for only a token of work and no bullying; and there were always the boys of the Kerosene to provide a bit of money, which didn’t have to go into Government Trust for niggardly doling out by Mick Cusky. First of the white ladies to suffer in this regard were those who should have been the last, Mesdames Cobbity and McCusky, who could do no better now out of Tub Turkney, than to have him say he’d see what he could do, and Vi, who told them even shortly, that it was now out of her hands and that they’d best ask their husbands, with the inference that it was these who had brought the situation about. Each of the ladies, in asking their husbands said something like: ‘That woman’s making a fool of you.’ They had to be content, like the common herd, with the service of what they called Gins, meaning full-blood black women. They weren’t above calling any woman of Aboriginal blood a Gin. But it was mostly reserved for use in insult: ‘You clumsy dirty Gin!’ Halfcaste women could be deeply hurt by it, but not the blacks, who were used to it simply as a name for a woman of their kind. Of course the word really meant simply woman in classic Greek, gyn, of very ancient usage, without malicious intent, like nigger, simply being from the Latin, niger, black. It was perhaps as well that the whites were as poorly educated as they were, despite their airs, since it must have cramped their style badly to know that they were using classical words as insults.
However, the Candlemases might have made friends quickly enough and even of a sort that might have suited them, had it not been for Frank’s shrewd judgment that it would not be politic in the circumstances to accept them. There were the people of The Palmeston Progressive: Rollo Ramstones, the Editor, who claimed to have known Si Tripconny in his political fighting days and to have seen Alfie alongside him on several platforms as a little girl, and now wanted to do a special article on Old Si with mention of what his fighting daughter was doing for the underdog — and Fay McFee, wanting to do a Pen Portrait of Alfie. Frank knew enough about the feud between the Local Government set-up and their critics to realise that, whatever his Enchanted One’s enchantment of Cobbity and Co., involvement with what were called the Bolshies would bring the fairy castle she was building tumbling down. One had only to watch him watching her in her enthusiasm to realise that it wasn’t a bit what his darling was doing that interested him as her joy in doing it. An article did appear in The Progressive about Silas Tripconny, but with a slighting reference to his daughter as having joined the ranks of the Government nobs. Fay was put off her Pen Portrait with a promise of something lively to come. Instead Alfie was taken up by The Times, which referred to her efforts as Preliminary to the Institution of the Plans the Government had in Hand in the Matter of Aboriginal Affairs for Later in the Year.
Frank was even careful in their dealings with Jeremy Delacy and his Anthropologists, Cootes and Ferris. These three were back in town from a trip down country in search of anthropological data and interpreters with which to strengthen the interference they planned in the case of The King against Cock-Eye Bob when it came up, as listed, after Easter, only a couple of weeks away. They had done the trip by air, as in fact the Anthropologists had done that from the South, Mr Ferris being also an airman and having some arrangement with the German Junkers Company to demonstrate their aircraft in Australia. Frank’s caution cost Alfie a private flight with Ferris, and himself probably with pain of so deeply disappointing her as obviously he had. But he insisted on the unwisdom of the association at the moment. Apart from the team’s being regarded as natural enemies by Cobbity and Co., there was the fact that Fergus Ferris, as waggish a young fellow as his mate, Cootes, was ponderous, had already antagonised McCusky by making a fool of him in a pub in town. There could well have been an element of protection of his darling from a bit of a lad in Frank’s holding young Fergus off her, because that was what the fellow was for a certainty. It was he who had brought the others to the Candlesmases, having heard what the boys were saying about Alfie in town, and being one for the ladies. He had made the first approach to her at the Compound, calling on the evident pretence of being interested in her school. He’d tried to get to see her kitchen, too, and would have, but for being barred by Turk
ney. There was that strict rule that no one was allowed on the Reserve without the express permission of the Protector, otherwise Prosecution According to the Law. Even an attempt at wheedling Cobbity on the phone by Alfie herself didn’t work. When she said it was because Ferris was an Anthropologist that she wanted to get him in, he snapped, ‘They’re just the buggers we want to keep out.’
‘But why?’ she asked.
‘Because they want to undo everything I’ve spent all these years doing. They want to get a look at that place to use in evidence against me. It isn’t mine. I inherited it. I’m just about to disburden myself of it. Least of all people I’d like to help cruel things for me is you . . . sweetheart!’ He said the last word almost with a sigh, as if it had been squeezed out in spite of him and not as one of the common appellations of the day. It silenced her.
Fergus Ferris’s response to the rebuff was a split-lip grin: ‘I’ll get in there, sweetheart, you’ll see . . . and I won’t be Prosecuted According to the Law.’ It was a very different sounding sweetheart; still there was no doubt about his interest in her.
He was a pretty boy, except for that suggestion of harelip concealed as near as possible under a largish fair moustache of the kind aeronautical types were just then making a kind of cult of. He was slight, with a dancer’s grace, with a fine pair of greenish-grey eyes that he used to as much effect in his dealings with Alfie as to make those roses keep blooming in her cheeks. When he offered to Take her for a Flip in his aircraft, to land on a marvellous salt-pan he knew Across That-a-way, jerking his lips Aboriginal-fashion across the harbour, the roses glowed. Perhaps the fact that she said what one would not expect of her, that she’d have to ask her husband, was as much in self-defence as Frank’s subsequent dissuasion of her doing so was not really a matter of being politic.
She got to know Jeremy through seeking a meeting with him. Fergus had told her about the school at Lily Lagoons and Jeremy’s theory that the education of Aborigines, full-blood or part, should follow the pattern of their ancient ways, that is that children should be permitted to pick up as they liked till puberty, then suddenly whipped into discipline by respect for their elders. She was excited by it, for the reason that so far her work in the school had been, as she thought, a complete failure. Half the school-time period she had spent with the children down on the Compound beach, trying to get into their heads what was in the Curriculum inherited from Miss Lilyponds, while they sported in the sea like young dugongs or went running miles after fleeing armies of crabs or listened to what King George told them about crocodile hunting down on the Queen Victoria River, or Peg-leg Queeny about preparing and cooking different kinds of bush tucker. Mrs Turkney had reported the matter privily to the Head Teacher at the State School, who had in turn complained to Dr Cobbity, who’d made a joke about it: ‘Have your fun with them while you can. When you get to the New Settlement there’ll be no sea to play around in . . . no more playing at school then. These kids have got to be equipped to take their place in our society . . . they’ve got to learn the value of money, the nature of contract . . . but have your fun now. Blow the State School. They didn’t want anything to do with it when we never had anyone. They can go jump in the harbour now we have.’
Jeremy came on Good Friday night, along with the Anthropologists and a load of liquor. In phoning him at his hotel, Alfie had said that although she wanted to talk seriously to him, she was also in something of a party mood and had heard he was something of a party man on occasions. Her own occasion, she said, was the fact that this was her first day off the job since she’d got it, her charges having been taken over for the day by the Mission people, for the purpose, as she put it: ‘Of celebrating the execution of one Jesus of Nazareth, a colonial trouble-maker in Imperial Roman times.’ Jeremy was stiffish on the phone to begin with; but that made him chuckle, and moved him to say that as she wanted it both ways, intelligent discussion with the party spirit, the spirit was brandy, and might he bring some?
Jeremy was jolly enough in the early stages of the party, too — as who could not help be with the constant intelligent clowning of young Fergus Ferris and so good-humoured a host as Frank Candlemas? Although Fergus couldn’t get more than snickers out of his mate, Fabian Cootes, whose academic dignity probably he had outraged too often already, Frank had Cootes quickly under the influence despite his quite small whisky nipping, giggling most of the while. The way Frank made it sound, there was no more entertaining job than that of a Health Inspector with a sense of humour. Already he had a score of funny stories about his experiences with the Chinese and Greeks of Port Palmeston with their utter lack of comprehension of Anglo-Saxon ideas on sanitation except as a means of harassing people who had lived so long with filth that they had no fear of it, until they anted-up the cumshaw. He told of one old Chinese woman who produced a ham and a live rooster even in Court to prevent her prosecution. But things changed somewhat as Alfie, not heeding Jeremy’s warning that, while brandy did not make one ordinarily drunk it still did the job, and drank too much too quickly, got into the bellicose state of drunkenness and took to fighting with him. Most likely the trouble between them began with his resistance to her trying to take possession of him and his obvious manoeuvring to fob her off on Fergus. Fergus was quite ready to flirt with her and in fact did at every opportunity to get her alone, as when she left the company in pursuit of her duties as hostess. Evidently Alfie was not used to failing to take possession of males of her species if she chose it. The thing flared up when she learnt, through his inquiry about Prindy, that the boy was his grandson, or as he put it to her annoyance, allegedly so. She charged him with repudiating the child. In vain did he try to point out that it was up to the child to claim him rather than vice versa, that the boy would do better growing up to understand the reality of his place in Australian society than having it hidden from him, that anyway, it was a matter for her colleagues Cobbity & Co. to decide According to the Law. She declared that his attitude to the Aboriginal Problem was negative, and all but called him a coward. Afterwards she became contrite, even got him away and wept a little on his breast. He spoilt it all for her by refusing to put his arms round her and in telling her that she had now reached the third stage of alcoholic indulgence, lachrimosity, and wouldn’t be long in reaching the third and last. He wouldn’t tell her what that was; so she asked Frank, and when he replied, ‘the comatose,’ she flounced out, and didn’t come back. Frank took it with good humour. Jeremy apologised for having caused it with that grand old trouble-maker for those not used to handling it, brandy.
On Easter Monday there was another Mission picnic for the Compound kids, Alfie took part in this after getting Dr Cobbity’s permission to hold it on Shelly Beach as a change from the Compound beach, which meant nothing to the kids as it had in the past. It was the same old thing, with Mr Tasker and the ginger beer and the harmonium, only no renegades like Miss Kitty Wyndeyer and David to liven things up. Bored after a while, Alfie went walking through the coconuts, and ran into Jumbo Delacy, lurking as usual on the outskirts of a picnic his family was included in. She spoke to him. He knew who she was, and responded in nothing like his usual surly manner with his betters, telling her that he’d heard what a good job she was doing with the kids. She was instantly interested in him when she heard his name, and soon knew much of his history of misfortune, according to Jumbo’s interpretation of it, including the last bit of it, which was his imminent dispossession of his last shred of dignity as a man and a Delacy, namely loss of his own home, about to be pulled down to make room for oil tanks the Shell Oil Company would soon be building on the site. Mention of the Shell Oil Company had even more electrifying effect on Alfie than the name of Delacy. Forgetting about the picnic, she went up with Jumbo to have a look at his doomed home and a peep at that eternally safe and sound one of his rich relations, one of whom, as Jumbo had made it sound, was that somehow specially irritating but rather attractive old man, Jeremy. Jumbo had told her that once he had lived with
his half-brother Jeremy, but had fallen out with him because Jeremy only wanted to use him to turn Lily Lagoons into a private park to live in like a squatter without doing any squatter work. He said, ‘He start what he call Euraustralia League . . . get all halfcaste come live dere . . . learn what he call Dignity o’ Race. We go all right. Da’s what we want. But how we goin’ ’o get rich like whiteman, eh? We wan’ ’o run stock. He won’t let us. We got to work, work, work . . . all-day bloody work, fixin’ up de lagoon so he can have plen’y duck and goose and ev’t ’ing shoot when he want. We soon wake up, we lot. He don’ care ’bout Aborigines. All he want’s dat big place . . . and people workin’ for him for nutching.’
‘The old-time Lord of the Manor and his serfs, eh?’ suggested Alfie.
‘Da’s it, Missus . . . da’s just it. So bugger him, I say.’ ‘
‘That’s what I say, too,’ declared Alfie, rosy with indignation. ‘The Delacys . . . what a mob! Living like lords . . . and leave one poor little boy in the Compound like in a waifs’ home . . . and you and your poor wife and children to be swept aside by the greatest greediest monster the world has ever known . . . the Shell Oil Company . . . my god!’
She went home to Frank full of it. Frank said he knew something about it, but understood that although Jumbo’s father, the Inspector, had provided the house for him, there was some doubt about his right to the land, that anyway, as he had heard things, Jumbo and his family would be better in quarters provided for them in the new Aboriginal Settlement when it was built.
‘But he doesn’t want to go to the Settlement!’ cried Alfie. ‘He says he wants to be free.’
Frank shrugged. ‘I suppose that’s up to your mates, Cobbity & Co.’
‘Don’t use that expression! I’m getting sick of it. It’s only people opposed to the reforms who use it. They make it sound like . . . like . . . well, something like Shell Oil!’
Poor Fellow My Country Page 50