The Unforgiving Shore

by Gil Hogg

  After jovial greetings and frivolous mention of Sydney’s perfect weather, Marchmont launched his opening question without humour. “What are my chances, Max?”

  Haldane slipped his jacket off to reveal a faultlessly laundered and starched white shirt, which provided a backdrop for his flaming silk tie, florid complexion and helmet of swept-back, steel-coloured hair. He wasn’t to be hurried, flanked by two of his partners and numerous legal assistants. Sophie thought that for just a fraction of a second, he gave his client the kind of supercilious look which suggested that laymen always asked these simplistic and unanswerable questions; but he quickly covered this with a thoughtful frown.

  “It’s a difficult case, John,” he said, his eyelids fluttering.

  Marchmont’s opaque blue eyes watched the performance expressionlessly, the lawyer’s plump paws moving limply in the air to express the inexpressible, his mouth forming words but not uttering them. “Very difficult,” he said at last, decisively.

  “I know already it’s a bloody difficult case! You don’t have to tell me that, Max. But it wasn’t so difficult last summer. Routine, you said. I told you Travis & Co would have problems about getting a road to the site. You said you knew somebody who could make sure they did have trouble. A formality, you said. You got your friend Barry Clavell on to it. You asked me to get Clavell a job when he retired from government and I did. But Travis got his damned road.”

  “Barry delivered, John, as far as possible. Access isn’t Travis’s problem, or ours. A lot of things have happened since this first came up. We’ve done a lot of work…”

  “And charged a fortune for it. And now I hear it’s a difficult case! Do you realise that if I lose this action I have to write off maybe a hundred million US dollars? I may be able to flog off the mining equipment we’ve ordered, but this is a fleabite compared to loss of the Mirabilly mine. What’s it worth? Nobody knows. Conservatively ten billion dollars over a decade, more likely twice that.”

  “I’m well aware of that,” Haldane said, making it sound as though the magnitude of the loss wasn’t of first importance.

  Curtis Lefain, the southern gentleman, winced at the bluntness. “Gentlemen, we’re all on the same side. Let’s say we all have a lot to lose.”

  Lefain didn’t add that if the case was lost Argo, Paul Travis’s company, would take MCM over, but everybody around the table knew it. Marchmont was fighting for his reputation as the Herald had suggested.

  “I understand how serious it is, John,” Haldane said. “It’s serious for Travis too. They’ve staked all their chips on winning the boundary claim. Let me tell you the story as I now understand it.”

  Haldane leaned his beefy body back in his chair. He smoothed his already sleek hair, loosened his tie and lit a small Dutch cigar with an acrid smell. Marchmont waited, slightly red-cheeked, impatient with his ponderous adviser.

  Haldane started with a name Sophie had heard the first time she visited Mirabilly, Captain Heron. Heron, who founded the station, had lived on the Hill in the 1850s and was buried, with his wife and some of his sons, in the cemetery in the red cedar grove on the east side of the Hill. Sophie could remember walking through the ruins of Heron’s house, built of stone to last a thousand years but now roofless and windowless, a frame for creepers and vines and a talking point for guests viewing the cemetery and the orchard.

  “When Heron obtained his grant from the New South Wales government, the eastern boundary of Mirabilly was hard up against a no-man’s land which became a native reserve. The boundary between the two was the line of the Gudijingi Creek.

  “The Gudijingi was and is described as a creek, but at times it’s more like a river. It runs through deep gorges, over falls, heading north, down across the savannah and grasslands to lose itself in the floodplains and swamps near the Gulf of Carpentaria.”

  “This is a geography lesson?” Marchmont interrupted.

  “No John, the river was an obvious feature to use as a boundary and no doubt Heron and the surveyors of those days preferred it to notional lines across hundreds of miles of desert and scrub.

  “But there was a peculiarity about the Gudijingi. Many years before 1850 the creek had forked for about thirty miles and then joined up again. So there’s a long strip, four or five miles wide, call it an island, between the two watercourses. On that island is the Mirabilly mine.”

  Haldane placed his cigar carefully in the ashtray and raised both hands as he approached his climax. “The question is, which branch of the Gudijingi did Captain Heron and the officials of the state of New South Wales set as the boundary? If the eastern, where the creek flows now, the mine is part of Mirabilly Station. And the Mirabilly managers have always treated the land as theirs. If the western branch was intended, Mirabilly Station ends there, on the western line and the mine is on native land.”

  Marchmont appeared to be half-bored with a story he had heard in a variety of tellings over recent months. He was silent when Haldane had finished. Sophie knew it was hard for Marchmont to reconcile that his own business future and some of his personal wealth was in issue, as a result of what a few, possibly ill-trained and perhaps drunken surveyors, did in the outback a century and a half ago.

  “Interesting speculations, Max,” he said, “but surely as occupiers we have a title?”

  “Not to mine native land, if it is native land.”

  Haldane heaved himself up and looked significantly at his partners. “John, old mate, don’t get down about it yet. We’re working on it, and of course we’ve had a re-survey.”

  “What does it show?” Marchmont snapped.

  “On balance it does not reconcile with what we treat and regard as the boundary. It’s against us.”

  “Christ, man! You mean Travis is right?”

  Haldane held up his large hand cautiously. “As a preliminary view, yes. The old charts, measured strictly, support the Mirabilly boundary being on the west, but there are a lot of inaccuracies in the surveying…”

  Marchmont brushed away Haldane’s further words with a gesture. “What I want to know, is how Travis and his friends knew this. I mean, we’re talking about land that has always been part of Mirabilly. We’re proposing to invest a fortune in a venture on our own land. And we find somebody else has already started to mine! We’re one of the most expert mining companies in the world. You’re telling me that a stockman’s kid, who’s still got dust in his ears, can come out of the desert and take it all away. How did he know what nobody else knew? I’m paying for the smartest advisers in the world and the son of a jackaroo tops the lot of you!”

  There was silence around the table; it was a criticism which seeped beyond the lawyers to the finance and engineering advisers.

  “John, I understand how you see the Argo people, but…” Haldane began.

  “John, it won’t get us anywhere to blame people,” Curtis Lefain said gently, inclining his head of white curls. “This is a question of property law.”

  Then Haldane spoke with the dispassion of a solicitor who has many other substantial clients and who is neither hurt or even greatly concerned if one of them is annoyed by his performance.

  “Yeah,” he drawled. “I’ve been thinking about that. How did Travis know? He sure as hell didn’t know what was in the old deeds, unless he’s some kind of antiquary and that doesn’t sound like him. I reckon he learned from the Aborigine Trustees. They’ve always regarded this land as theirs…”

  “They say that about the whole continent,” Marchmont said derisively.

  “Not in the same way,” Haldane persisted. “They say this is sacred land. Their tjuringas, sacred stones, are buried there. As a kid on Mirabilly, Travis would have heard this from the Aborigines on the place. They probably told him about the two branches of the Gudijingi. It’s the sort of story that’s handed down through the years. Travis could have heard enough from locals to think about checking up on the boundary line. It wasn’t a problem to the managers at Mirabilly. They weren’t bein
g told to get off native land. They wouldn’t have been interested if you told them. They just went on grazing the land up to the eastern river boundary.”

  Sophie remembered going with Paul Travis to the cave near the east ridge and their odd conversation about spirits, although it had been more than ten years before. It was a private memory; nothing that would aid this discussion, nothing she felt obliged to reveal.

  Marchmont accepted Haldane’s explanation grudgingly. “When Travis came to the Grange over a year ago with his so-called proposition, he must have known about this. He gave me some cock-eyed stuff about checking the boundaries. He must have known I’d tell him to get lost. I mean, the bloody nerve!”

  Sophie remembered that Paul Travis had actually explained that the river boundary had changed, but there was no point in reminding Marchmont in this company.

  Haldane made a colder appraisal. “He walked you right into it, John. Our enquiries show he’s had an agreement with the Aborigine Trust for four years, subject to settlement of boundary rights. Rather than come at you directly with a claim of trespass, he’s pushed a road through and brought his machinery in, leaving you no option but to sue him for trespass and now…”

  “Don’t you tell me what he’s going to do!” Marchmont said, standing up and glaring. “Unless you want to go and work for him!”

  Haldane’s cheeks purpled; there was a spark in his bloodshot eyes. Marchmont recovered himself quickly and laughed as though the remark had been a joke. Curtis Lefain sighed. He didn’t like doing business like this.

  Haldane smoothed the moment over. “We’ve still got a lot of fight in us yet!”

  19

  The Mirabilly boundary dispute was due to be heard in a week’s time by the Aborigine Land Commissioner, a judge of the Northern Territory Supreme Court, in Darwin. John Marchmont had decided that Curtis Lefain and Sophie, with a few other key executives, would stay at Mirabilly in the Big House and join the rest of the group later at the Intercontinental in Darwin.

  However, Marchmont insisted on Sophie joining him on a flight in the Falcon jet to Townsville. He had been preoccupied with the case and not his usual urbane self since their first meeting with Max Haldane. He and Sophie had hardly spoken except on business. On the flight to Townsville he explained himself as they settled back in the spacious seats in the forward cabin.

  “I want to see the partner of this dead lawyer, Lucas, who acted for Ted Travis,” he said. “I want to try to get to the bottom of the rubbish you told me about Paul Travis being my son. The partner has promised to go through the firm’s deeds but he won’t deal with me on the telephone.”

  Sophie was surprised. Up to now, Marchmont had appeared to have the subject in a locked recess in his mind. “Good. I think you should make the enquiry,” she said. She already knew that he was confident that he was right. Paternity would have mattered to him if he had thought it was a real question, but he didn’t and never had. As far as he was concerned it was all malicious gossip and vindictiveness.

  As the Falcon cruised smoothly at 20,000 feet, Marchmont turned his head toward her. Intimacies about their lives were perhaps easier in that solitary cabin.

  “Do you realise that Ellen Colbert married after about two months of my departure from Mirabilly? A couple of months! I’d gone back to Britain to sort out the family business and she acted without a word. She never wrote a letter or even picked up a telephone. She got married to one of the stockmen. I’d been expecting her to come to London. I even left her with airline tickets. I tell you Sophie, I cared for Ellen and I was shocked at the time. I could hardly believe it.”

  “Maybe two months is a long time if you’re alone on Mirabilly. And couldn’t you have written to her or called her?”

  Marchmont’s glance had a quiver of unease. It was rare for Sophie to hear him speak of his emotions in anything but a facetious way. At this moment he had lost the patina of brightness which was like a mirror shell around him, reflecting every approach, admitting no penetration to what was underneath. He appeared now to be looking inward, far back across the years.

  “I’ll tell you,” he said quietly. “I loved your mother, but Ellen was my first love and I suppose you would say the love of my life. I’ve never stopped thinking of her, never stopped wanting her and never understood what happened between us. I went to London and got tied up with business. The next thing I learned is that she was married. Two months! It hurt. I had to assume she didn’t care for me as much as I cared for her.”

  “Perhaps she loved you but thought you’d deserted her.”

  “Two months? No. And don’t you think it’s a bit thick to suggest that her kid could be mine in these circumstances?”

  “She never suggested it, did she?”

  “No, for the obvious reason that it wasn’t true.”

  “Why? The child could be yours biologically. If she was just pregnant when you left she could have married another man and pretended the child was his. The story, I suppose the gossip, is that Ted Travis knew. That was said to be the deal he had with Ellen. Marriage to her in return for keeping quiet and bringing the child up as theirs. But he was worried about it and opened his heart to his lawyer.”

  “I know that is the story, but can’t you see why that couldn’t have happened?”

  “No, I can’t,” Sophie said uncertainly, wondering whether she had overlooked something stunningly obvious.

  “Because if I’d been the father she’d have told me immediately without a doubt. Isn’t it true? She had everything to gain. I was rich. At worst she’d have had support for herself and the child. At best, marriage. Yes, in all probability I’d have married her. Ellen wasn’t educated but by God she was smart. She’d have worked out what I’ve just said in a trice.”

  She noticed his hesitation on marriage. To Sophie, Marchmont’s view was solid and polished, lodged in his mind like a river stone, but like a river stone it was cold. She wasn’t so sure a woman would necessarily be that calculating.

  “John, you just said you’d have married Ellen in all probability. I guess she might have understood that as doubt on your part. You have to understand how a woman sees things. Money may be important but it’s never everything. Status isn’t everything. And maybe she wasn’t going to behave like any girl who gets pregnant. Maybe she was too proud.”

  “Balls!” Marchmont hissed and looked out distractedly at the brightness over the green carpet below. “Ellen never had ten cents of her own in her life.”

  “Uh-huh.” Sophie gave up. “So what are we doing here?”

  “Ah-ha! I want to find out for my own satisfaction why Paul Travis wants to ruin me.”

  “When you were outwitting Paul at the Grange, you told me it was just business. That’s what you said. Perhaps it’s just business for him. He sees an opportunity to make money and he takes it.”

  “I’ve been set up,” Marchmont said pompously.

  “Oh, come on, John. If you’d been Paul Travis, a hungry young guy on the make and you’d worked out that you could take the Mirabilly mine and the company trying to work it, you’d have done it and said it was only business.”

  Marchmont was adamant. “What you don’t understand Sophie is that the Marchmont interests aren’t another five and dime company started by a stockman’s kid from the back of beyond. It’s an institution, an empire, it has a history, it’s worth more than money.”

  “You’re changing the subject. We’re talking about Paul Travis’s motivation. Why should he care a prune about the old colonial empire of the Marchmonts?”

  Marchmont was angrily silent.

  Sophie wanted to say that maybe Marchmont was history and a stockman’s kid an inevitable successor, but she didn’t. She rang for the steward and asked for a glass of iced lime juice.

  *

  When the Falcon landed at Townsville they took a cab from the airport and found the ANZ Bank building on Barlinnie Street. Sophie left Marchmont to go into the lawyer’s offices on his own. S
he asked the cabbie to let her out in the main street. She bought a ticket to see the sharks in the aquarium and had an ice cream sundae. She liked the little she could see of the town; it was small-scale and colourful and safe. She tried to imagine what it would be like to be married to a man like Paul Travis and live here, quietly, on these unforgiving shores.

  Sophie met Marchmont an hour later, in the town centre, as they had arranged. He was expressionless. Instead of stopping for refreshment, they decided to have a snack on the plane and were soon in a cab heading for the airport.

  As soon as they settled in their seats on the aircraft Marchmont said with a triumphant gleam, “What you told me, Sophie, can’t be substantiated. Lucas, the lawyer, as I said, is dead. Struck off by the Law Society before he died. The fellow I saw has taken over all Lucas’s files and there’s nothing in them of the kind you mentioned. No notes of interview. There are routine files about the winding up of Travis’s father’s estate, sale of property etc. Nothing else. I think we’ve got a put up job here. Another bit of mischief by Travis.”

  “A DNA test?”

  Marchmont was quiet for a moment. “I don’t know how you can suggest that, Sophie. I should crawl to the man who wants to strip me and say, ‘I think I might be your father. What about a DNA test? I mean, would you mind, old chap?’”

  Sophie didn’t reply, but she believed what Paul Travis had told her.

  Soon they were airborne, flying west toward the Gulf of Carpentaria. They climbed over the Great Dividing Range and gradually they began to see more clearly the mangrove swamps of the Gulf and to the south the arid lands of the artesian basin.

  The aircraft flew over the Flinders and Leichhardt rivers which wind down from the Selwyn Range through the tropical rain forest, cypress and palms to the Gulf. After nearly four hours they began to lose height over the grey-brown soil of the Barkly Tablelands, the pasture country where Mirabilly bred its hardy cattle.