“Talking. What d'you think?”
“Talking about what?”
“Talking.”
“He'll talk your head into the cheat,” Emma shrieked after him as he clumped away.
A month later Cabell came home with Harriet and James and found Emma wailing. Larry had cleared out.
“Where to?”
Emma did not know. He had gone off with Coyle two days before. “It's all because of the union and the books Coyle gave Larry to read, where it says that if the men turned round and murdered the bosses it would be the best for everybody.”
“Don't worry. He'll get tired of humping a bluey and come back,” Cabell said.
“Yes, he'll come back, the fool.”
“What d'you mean?”
“Have you forgotten the afternoon at the wood-block?”
Cabell remembered Larry's face behind the swinging axe and understood why Emma kept wailing, “I'd rather he died than came back.” He scoured the run, feeling an uneasy need to know where Larry was. Nobody had seen him.
“He's got bad blood in him, bad Surface blood,” Emma kept wailing. “He'll get in trouble.”
Cabell took his gun down and cleaned it.
They were jumpy times. People said that the boom was over, that what had happened in the Argentine would happen here. There would be unemployment, misery, and revolution. The unions had been building up fighting funds for fifteen prosperous years. Their newspapers said that the new shearing agreement was the squatters' effort to make up for losses in the recent panic—the thin edge of the bosses' wedge. It was time for a showdown.
Chapter Two: Fight for a Country
Cabell had been back at the Reach a month when the papers from Brisbane announced:
SHEARERS DECLARE WAR
UNIONISTS REPUDIATE NEW AGREEMENT
ARMED CAMP OF 1000 MEN AT BARCALDINE
GRAVE THREATS TO LIFE AND PROPERTY
A week later a posse of union shearers rode into the valley and pitched camp at the gates of the Reach. There were thirty or forty of them, all with rifles. They were on the government reserve so Cabell could not interfere with them. Custard went down to see what they were up to and discovered that Larry and Coyle were there, as well as Berry and Wagner and Goggs and Paddy Doolan, and a number of men who had been coming to the valley on and off for years.
Cabell was now almost ready for the shearing and waited only for men. But they did not offer themselves. Horsemen from the camp picketed the roads and herded in everybody who looked like a shearer or a shedhand on the way to work. Many of these had no union tickets but the unionists threatened to duck them in the river so they stayed in camp. At the end of a week two hundred tents were pitched along the road. Dugald McFarlane came over and threatened to have the law on Coyle if he stopped men shearing his sheep, but they hooted him and pelted him with cowdung and he rode away again. The manager from Narrow Gut did no better.
“They'll starve and manure the roadside before I ask them to work for me,” Cabell said and sent Custard to the telegraph station at Pyke's Crossing with a message telling his agent in Brisbane to get fifty nonunion men from New South Wales for the shearing at the Reach and Ningpo.
But next morning Sambo came in to say that some men wanted to talk to him at the gate. He went down and found Berry leading a small deputation.
“We're moderate men,” Berry said. “We don't want to make trouble if you'll meet us half-way.”
“Are you in the union?”
“Yes.”
“You can go to blazes then.”
“We're only asking a decent thing.”
“Leave the scum you're with and I'll talk to you.”
“A man can't leave his mates.”
“Then rot.”
“Have a care,” Berry said. “You'll drive peaceable men desperate. You've made an enemy of your own son.”
Cabell glanced across the road where a bigger group was standing around Coyle watching the deputation. He had already seen Larry's clumsy figure rising above the crowd and felt, without meeting them, his son's eyes fixed on his face with the sharp, malicious gaze of a man looking for somewhere to aim a blow. They brought back the feeling of uneasiness and he turned away as he muttered, “From this on he's no son of mine. I hope he gets what he deserves.”
The men jeered. “Save your breath, Berry,” Goggs shouted. “He's that stingy he'd skin a crow for its hide and boil it down for dripping.”
They laughed. They were enjoying the strike as a break in their wandering life. The beautiful summer day, their comradeship in a common cause, their easy success in holding up the shearing put them in a good mood—all except Coyle, who watched them with his soft, vicious eyes, saying nothing.
Cabell spat in the dust to end the talk, but Berry caught his sleeve. “We only want to live and let live,” he said.
“Who's stopping you?”
“It's not living when you can raddle a man's sheep and sack him on the spot and he can't leave without losing his money. That's not what we're in Australia for.”
“What about magny charter,” Goggs said, pushing out his lop-sided face. “That's the law for every British subject. Your agreement's ultra wirey.”
Cabell freed his arm. “You're a rabble. You want something for nothing. If you had the guts you could be as well off as me.”
They laughed again incredulously.
“I'll tell ye what,” Paddy Doolan shouted, wagging a black forefinger. “Nobody ought to have no more than a pound a week each, and that's how it's goin' to be for every son-of-a-gun after the strike.”
“Hear! Hear! That's right. Everybody ought to have a pound a week and no more.”
“Oho,” Cabell said, “and who's to pay the pound a week?”
They looked at Doolan, who looked anxiously at Coyle, who shrugged contemptuously and turned away. Doolan scratched his head. “I suppose ye pay yerself, don't ye?”
At this inadequate reply their simple faces clouded.
Cabell sniffed. “Where's your brains? You'll let these spielers from the union pull your legs right off. D'you think I got what I got sitting on my backside on the side of the road? No, I worked from sunrise to dark and half the night as well. I drove my wool to Brisbane on my lonesome when there wasn't any road to follow. I fought blackfellows. Bushfires nearly burnt me out. The dingoes killed my sheep. I nearly went off my nut with the loneliness. Other men tried to rob me. I forgot the taste of any kind of tucker except salt horse, or the feel of good linen on my back. And in time I got rich. You talk about YOUR country. Isn't it MY country too? Didn't I carve my home in it?”
They were silent when his passionate voice ceased.
Berry nodded. “Give us a fair thing and we'll start in shearing at once.”
“Ay,” Doolan said, his eyes moist, “it's a great pioneer ye've been. I'll say that. And many's the fine leg of mutton yer missus has slipped in my swag. I'll say that too, bless ye.”
“Well then.” Cabell could see that some of the men were beginning to waver—Doolan, weak and sentimental, Wagner, a big easy-going fellow who looked round to see what the others were doing, Berry, who was anxious to find a peaceful way out, and most of the men who were not unionists. They separated themselves from the group round Coyle and moved across to the gate. Cabell lifted the latch and threw it open. But Coyle turned snarling, “Scabs, are you? He soft-soaps you for five minutes and you go crawling off to sign his dirty agreement.” He shut the gate and sprang on to the post.
The word “scab” sent them back into the mob, but when he spoke again it was in his usual soft, dead monotone like a voice chanting. “You soon forget what you're fighting for. Not against raddling, as Berry says. Not for a few more bob a week. It's for the right to live in your own country. That's what. He wants freedom of contract—freedom to employ scabs from Italy and Germany and England and India and China. His country he calls it. It never was his country. England's his that's where he's always aimed to end up when he
'd sucked the marrow out of this.”
“That's right,” Goggs said. “Look how he's bred up his son in stiff cuffs a yard long. Not much Australian about him. Nor his daughter neither.”
Coyle looked at Cabell with his thin, vicious, sardonic wraith of a smile. “You ought to get a putty medal, loving Australia like you do. But don't make any mistake, mates. If we went with fire-sticks from Port Phillip to the Gulf and left the whole country in mourning we couldn't do it as much dirt as him and his squattocracy. Look at history. Was it workers who divided Poland? Was it workers who sold seats in the House of Commons? Was it Labour who drove your fathers and grandfathers out of Ireland and England and Scotland? Mates, you've got the blood of posterity in your hands now, and if you lose your nerve you'll be cursed till Kingdom Come. Do you want to see your women working in the paddocks like some of you seen in England? Do you want to see your kids stunted in mind and body like they are in the Black Country you've heard about? Well, get rid of him if you don't—him and his aristocratic guts that thinks everything he does to us is right.”
The crowd murmured. Their good humour was gone now. He spoke to ancient grudges buried deep in the hearts of these sons of old lags, old chartists from England, old socialists from Germany, communists from France, carbonari from Italy, and refugees from the ugly hopelessness of industrial towns and starving villages. Their faces, powdered grey with the dust, turned towards Cabell.
He shouted against the palpable vibrations of their hostility, “He twists your tail and down you go. You'd believe him if he told you I put dingo poison in the legs of mutton I gave you, eh Doolan?”
“Sure, boss, you filled my tucker-bag more than once. I'll say that for ye. . .”
“A lousy leg of mutton!” Coyle said. “D'you know what Pope Gregory said? 'Let them know that the earth from which they sprung belongs to all men in common and therefore the fruits she brings forth must belong to all.' That's the words of the Pope.”
“Well, if the Pope said that,” Doolan said helplessly, “well, you wouldn't be asking a man to go against his religion, boss?”
“You better try and get it,” Cabell said laughing.
“That's all right you laughing,” Coyle said. “You'll sing a different tune when we come in six weeks' time and your sheep still unshorn.”
Cabell turned back to the house. “Next time you come you better bring a few shutters with you,” he sang out over his shoulder.
“What? Will you shoot?” Doolan asked nervously.
“My oath I'll shoot.”
Coyle nodded, satisfied. “There you are,” he said, with his eyes on Larry. “That's the kind of man you're up against. Now will you believe me a bullet's the only thing he understands?”
Larry watched his father's stiff back march up the slope to the homestead. On the veranda stood his mother with one hand shading her eyes against the sun—looking for him in the crowd, he knew. He raised his hand to wave but put it back in the pocket of his moleskins. What was the use? For the first time he realized that his old life in the valley, among the horses and cattle he knew and understood better than men, was finished for good, and he felt sad and savage. “A bullet's too good for him,” he thought, but as he looked at that back he felt doubtful and more savage, more sad.
Chapter Three: Utopists and Others
“Murder'S murder,” Berry said, breaking the tranced silence.
They looked at him with surprise and hostility.
“You shut your gob,” Goggs said. “It was you went bumming to Cabell.”
But his broad red face which they knew so well was unimpeachable. “I'll stay here till we eat grass, but I won't do murder.”
His voice had broken the spell Coyle put on them. The compact, grey anonymity of their uptilted faces changed into a dozen contradictory expressions of doubt, scorn, disapproval, despair, fear, and amusement, re-establishing their normal character of bushmen sardonic and aloof from leadership in an independence forged by a land whose unpredictable moods a man must generally face alone.
“It's not murder when you kill a mad dog,” Coyle said, lifting his voice, as he felt them slipping away.
“They mightn't call it murder either on my slab,” Wagner said. “Why should it be YOUR slab?”
“Why shouldn't it?” Wagner drawled down from six inches above the tallest head. “Even a bloody counter-jumping Saturday-afternoon militiaman couldn't miss me. Jesus, if I been saving myself up from dying of thirst and being overtook by bushfires to be stiffened by one of them city blokes it'd be hard.”
“There isn't a handful of traps or militiamen within a hundred miles,” Coyle said. “Before they could come we'd smash the railway and saw through the bridges and pull the telegraph down.”
“No, no,” Berry interjected. “That's mad talk. Violence ain't called for.”
“Ain't it? And what when he begins marching in scabs?”
“There's constitutional means if the strike fails,” Berry said, evasively. “Perhaps we could send a deputation to the politicians the squatters elect, d'you mean?”
“No, we could work to send men of our own kind. If we had a few shearers in parliament. . .”
“Ifs won't feed your mates' wives nor pay the instalment money on your farm at the end of the season if he wins.”
Berry hung his head.
The men began to argue. “What I reckon, there's enough gold and silver in the blessed place to give every one a pound a week for his life,” said Paddy Doolan, who had been thinking this seductive proposition over again and had seen through all the flaws at last. “I once heard a bloke say there was millions in Waterfall alone.”
“How y'going to get your divvy if it's in Waterfall?” Wagner wanted to know.
“Eh? Suppose ye dig it out for yeself. No, no, that ain't right.” He fell back into deep thought.
“I agree with Berry,” said a wizened old man with china-clear eyes and a dribble of uneven beard stiff and stained with tobacco juice, like a dirty stalagmite. “Evolution's the best way to justice, not revolution.”
Coyle snorted. “If it took the monkey a couple of million years to become a man how long d'you think it'll take Rusty?”
“You don't understand the human heart, Coyle,” the old man said quickly, stuttering and jumbling all his words together nervously in his anxiety to make himself clear, before the sardonic disbelief which came into their eyes when they looked at him found words to jeer him down. “Look at me. I was more evil than he has ever been. I was a bully and a swaggerer. I debased men and women. . .”
“'Arf yer luck with the women, Budge,” Goggs said.
Budge waited till their laughter died, slipping his high, fine voice in under it like a knife which cut the guffaws from their lips and left the sound to wander bodiless across the echoing bush. “Yes, it was so. I was an officer, like my father and my grandfather before me. I was brought up to be a braggart and a violent bully. I spent money like water and never asked where it came from or cared about the souls who were brutalized in keeping my pockets full. But a day of reckoning came. I killed a man in cold blood, a good honest man. I insulted him and forced him to fight a duel with me and I shot him dead.”
“They oughta hanged you,” Goggs said indignantly. “That was straight-out murder.”
“Yes, my friend, but I had powerful relations. They got me out of the country and hushed it all up. After a year or two I could have gone back, but I had changed. I don't know what happened, but I saw all at once how stupid my life had been and the lives of all my kind, how stupid and cruel. I only wanted to escape from everything that reminded me of it. So I came here to a new country to work with my hands and perhaps build up something better.”
“You oughta joined the Salvation Army,” Coyle said.
“But it's possible, don't you see?” Budge said, turning his face around the circle of their aloof and bantering disregard like a weak candle-flame licking at a stone wall. “Men can change suddenly. The world can change.”
“Even dingoes?”
“Yes, you should read Fourier. Even tigers can change. Man lived in a Golden Age once. If they could change to being evil and unhappy why shouldn't they change to being decent and happy? Everybody wants to be decent and happy, but they don't know how. Even before the duel I was often disgusted with myself. But it seemed impossible that anything should change. 'I didn't make myself,' I used to say. 'It was ordained from the beginning.' But I was wrong. I did change.”
“And somebody stepped into your shoes and went on lining their pockets from the sweat of the poor bastards in your old man's mines, and the world went on as before.”
“Only because they hadn't learnt to understand as I'd learnt. They must be shown. This is a new, fresh soil where you can build up something because everybody isn't discouraged by seeing the castles and jails and battlefields which tell them how old evil is in the world. Look.” He picked up a handful of the road dust. “When I cut myself I rub this dirt on the cut and it heals it, because it is clean dirt, not like the dirt in the Old World, full of disease and evil, which kills you when it gets in a wound. Here there is none of man's filth in the soil. The Garden of Eden and the reign of love on earth would grow here again if we wished it.”
“Hear! Hear!” Berry said.
“You don't build anything with love,” Coyle said, “you only build with hate. When you hate, that is, till you feel as if you'd swallowed a coupla black snakes—that's when you want to build. You ought to be wearing a back-to-front collar—that's your line, Budge.”
The noisy argument broke out again. “If you want to know what I'd do. . .” “What that bloke Winwood Reade reckons. . .” “Tom Paine says. . .” and they straggled back to camp banging red fists into their soft shearers' palms, bellowing sarcastically at each other's plan for salving the pains of the world, and, with the assistance of strange geometrical designs drawn in the dust to assist the agonizing process of exposition, putting forth counter schemes and philosophies evolved from the works of Darwin and Spencer, Paine, Bellamy, and Mill which they had read by the light of camp-fires and slush lamps and pondered over in the long, day-dreaming hours of lonely wandering.
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