by Kim Kelly
Those who do live here are fed on jingo-jangle still: chests outthrust now that we’re a little empire in ourselves, having been apportioned the entire former German colony of New Guinea, as a lookout post against the Yellow Peril perhaps, and now that we’re a fully paid-up-in-blood member of the soon to be inaugurated League of Nations. I can still see the Troll’s words swimming before my eyes after his triumphant return from the Paris Peace Conference: Paradise is there for those who are willing to enter in. Let us not range ourselves under the banner of intolerance. Men have gone into the pit of hell to save for us the title deeds of Australia and of liberty. Australia is free and will remain free. Too many mines of hypocrisy in that snippet of mind-boggling cant. While his signature is on documents that say Germany should be pulverised into poverty and humiliation with reparations and embargos and occupation forever and ever amen; not a very tolerant way to treat the vanquished. Why should every German have to pay for the sins of a few? While their kaiser’s skipped off to stay with friends in Holland, to recover from his embarrassment. Hear, hear to the stripping of arms, but it’s only the losers who’ve been stripped. While winners strut: just look at Joe Cook — Sir Joe Cook these days, thank you very much. Not bad for a Lithgow coal worker.
Look at mine, and smile up through my centre: no slavery going on here in our paradise, is there, except for the endeavours of this little muse to please her master. I’d do anything, absolutely anything for you. Just as well it’s a reciprocal arrangement. He flashes back a grin before he’s busy again.
I stare out at the orchard: the apple trees are a little droopy in the heat. I imagine for a moment that they are sorrowful, gazing as they do at Odysseus’s prow, sailing away from Calypso, who’ll wait there forever, for all the justice that never comes. What did she want from the gods? If you can stay awake through Homer and Critical Studies to find her you’d think she was a temptress, a sorceress, a shallow device to keep the hero from his destiny; but I think she simply didn’t want the father of her children to return to war and the world of men. I can understand that; I can hear her say: Aren’t I enough to stay at home for? Stay safe for? Use all my magic to make it so; and fail. I don’t have to ask why Sarah calls this place Calypso. Bereft in acquiescence but still defiant.
Daniel says: ‘Stop frowning, France. Look at me just as you were before.’
Cracks me: thanks Kookaburra, thanks Leprechaun, thanks everyone.
SEVEN
AUGUST 1920
FRANCINE
There is to be a wedding. Of course. Today, in the first week of August, as if the powers that control our destiny had to complete a six-year plan to the precise second, in accordance with the laws of romance.
Barely dawn, I wake, as I so often do, to the sound of grunting coming from the back verandah: darlingest at his morning ritual of self-administered physical punishment. Then footsteps down the hall, Clem’s; he says to Achilles: ‘You’re still a maniac, I see.’
Daniel says between grunts: ‘Nothing wrong with being fit.’
Clem says, in his sleepy way: ‘There’s fit, mate, and then there’s heart failure.’
Daniel has to stop then, to laugh. ‘You saying I’ve got a mental problem?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘You might be right, Foley.’
‘I am right, sir.’
‘All right, I’ll come quietly. Make yourself useful and put the stove on, will you. Anyone’d think you were getting married today.’
Shoop, shoop, shoop, razor on strop. Shave. Wash. Clean teeth. Clump, clump, clump, clump, shaking the floorboards with bare feet up the hall, with that lean to the right that Doctor Nichols thinks is heading towards a limp, could do with an X-ray, but which Daniel says just means his favourite quack is missing his best customer, and here he is, showing full benefits of Almighty Toothbrush.
He says to me, donning his collarless best: ‘What are you looking at.’ And he knows very well. No time for that, though: got to get up, get four boys washed, fed, watered, combed, toothbrushed and shirts tucked in. Very special boys, all of them.
Specialest today, though, is Clem. As we pile into the Cadillac he looks as I imagine he might have done that day he dropped the roll of wire on Daniel. Setting off for the proper job, terrified. No manufactured terror going on here today; just the most terrifying thing of all: love. Whack.
Clem is a Christmas- and Easter-only Mick, and since the law says you’ve got to get married somewhere, it falls to Father Hurley to do the honours. He’s more than a bit special too, my old friend the priest, smiling in his weary eyes at this collection of Ackerman atheists and Lewis Methodists, I suspect because he simply loves marrying people. I think he’d marry Hindus if a pair asked him to. Dodgy Catholicism aside, this pairing-up is the highest sacrament, however it’s cobbled together. I wouldn’t take back a second of our marriage, not even the horrible times, and you couldn’t get much more cobbled together than ours; good heavens, we married the day the world declared war on itself, and we’ve never celebrated an anniversary. Maybe we should from now on. There’s only one prayer for today, and that’s that Mim and Clem have what we have for as long as they both shall live: completeness of their union; a love that’s stronger than anything else.
And here she comes. I can hear Clem breathing, or trying to, steadily, from where I’m standing. I can hear his heart beating, I’m sure. She is breathtaking. She is already crying, trying not to; so am I. With this incredible blessing.
The children do not move; not a shirt needing to be tucked or a plait minus its ribbon. They are awed as they watch their mother marry this lovely gentle man who was all alone and never will be again, who is about to take them all to live in Mudgee. He’s found a bigger house, with a paddock for the horses. Mudgee’s not very far away, we’ll see them once a month or so, but after today Harry and Charlie won’t live with us and the wrench is already terrible.
Daniel’s lost in the brickwork, determined not to look at anyone; clearly he feels the same way. I try to think of something funny to stop these blasted tears. Did you know that Monash, our most celebrated general — who won the war and all that — is the son of Prussian Jews? Real name: Monasch. Kept that quiet, didn’t they. What a difference the dropping of one little letter makes. That tickles. And did you know that Matilda’s real Jolly Swagman was a German shearer called Frenchy Hoffmeister who drowned himself on Dagworth Station in far-flung North Queensland? And there I’d been thinking it was all a jingly whimsy Mr Patterson wrote for the Billy Tea Company. I’d also thought that Matilda was his sweetheart — not his swag. And now I’ve got the giggles. Badly. Stop it, Francy. Think of something sobering: that’s easy. The complication I’ll have to tell Daniel about, soon, mental problem or not. Maybe tonight. Can’t have a wedding, or any other kind of accident without a complication, can we.
Focus on Sarah, the most serene person here; what’s she thinking? I think I can guess: she’ll be sad to see them all go, but glad to have her peace and quiet back. Hmn.
DANIEL
She’s put the boys to bed, and now she’s tucked up under a blanket on the sofa, reading about wage cases. That’s what you do after a wedding, don’t you, if you’re Francine; book’s almost as big as she is. I’ve just come in from a long walk, been thinking that it’s a good thing Clem loves his rugby and won’t let Harry and Charlie let it go; rugby league, though: don’t tell Evan. She looks up at me with her specs on, since she needs them for reading now. We should get the electricity put on out here one day too, so she doesn’t go blind squinting under the kero lights, especially since more than half of next year’s contracts will go off to make the stuff.
She says: ‘D’you know, if the Arbitration Court ever hears another sufficient wage case, I’m going to make a scandalous submission to it, on the advantage of collectivisation.’
Really. Good for you. She’s got a point, though: after more than a year of failed strikes here and there and all over the place, workers are travelli
ng backwards. The economy is nowhere near as bad as the government keeps insisting it is; we’re doing well enough, we’ll be free of the debt by the end of next year, unless coal goes out of fashion overnight; a few are even planning debts of their own to buy their houses off us; the profit share is keeping everyone’s head well above — well, except for those who couldn’t float if you paid for their swimming lessons. But everywhere else most are too hungry and too desperate to hang onto the jobs they have to argue about wages and conditions. And whoever you are, don’t ask about the disgrace that is the new beaut soldiers’ rural settlement plan: granting city blokes Crown Scrub beyond the back blocks of Woop Woop, where no one can hear them at all. Fair go? Or maybe equitable distribution of population? I doubt that.
Got to say that I’m far more interested at this point in time in the bit of France’s breast I can see and hopeful we’ll be off to bed shortly.
I say, of her inevitable submission to the court: ‘You do that. Meantime, there’s a local issue that needs your attendance. Very local one.’
Bell. Beautiful.
Except she’s biting her lip now; she’s got something else to say. She’s looking at my boots like she’s waiting for them to say something first.
I’m looking at the apple cores, three of them, on the little table beside the sofa: seditious thoughts have increased her appetite, as if she didn’t eat enough round at Mum’s today. I think I know what she’s going to tell me, and though I can’t say the thought fills me with a sense of calm, she treats me too carefully sometimes. I’m not that mad. Come on, out with it.
After another ten years, she says: ‘Daniel.’
‘Yes, France?’
‘Magic’s on the loose again.’
‘What’s it done this time?’
‘Made me fruitful again,’ she says and she actually blushes with her plain happiness for it. What courage is that?
It really is impossible to describe this woman in words. And now that she’s told me, now that she’s looking at me like this, all I can think of is that this time I’ll get to paint her as she grows, with us, from the beginning.
Funkel, funkel kleiner Stern, danke, danke, danke schön. She is a star. Mine. Makes me want to get that first painting I did of her back; but Fanny’s off-loaded all that work I let him have with his mate, or the son of his mate anyway, who happens to be a patron of this Kunstakademie over there, wrote a few weeks ago when he got back, saying that they have a most appropriate home now, and I’m sure he has no idea of the cracking irony in that statement. Not even sure if he knows I’m a Kraut; maybe Dunc never told his father that bit. Somehow kunst sounds easier to me than ‘art’, or maybe more appropriately harder, but the invitation from this patron to come over and study gives me a kick of something like panic, not helped by the advice Mr Duncan sent without me asking: that you don’t turn an offer like that down, it’s the most prestigious academy in Germany if not Europe, according to him. I’ve never heard of it, unsurprisingly, and it’s a long way to go to school, isn’t it. Especially given the address: Dresden, of all places in the entire bloody world. Still couldn’t point to it on a map. What would I say to Mum about it? Haven’t even told France yet. Haven’t even seriously told myself. Fanny also sent along a cheque, as his mate insisted on something, and a fair bit more than Sweet Fuck All it was too: sent it straight back to Fanny for someone else’s poor bones. What else could I do with it? Jesus. I want to tell France, I know she’ll be hysterical for it, but not till I know what I want to do. And now she’s pregnant again … that’s timely, isn’t it. I can put it off for a good while longer.
Look at her. She’s still blushing, getting teary now. Stop looking at her, you idiot, and give her a kiss.
SIX MONTHS LATER
Dawn: Josie’s
‘What on earth?… Daniel? Oh dear … Are you all right?’
‘Yep.’
‘What happened?’
‘I slipped.’
‘Slipped?’
‘Off the roof.’
‘What were you doing on the roof?’
‘You don’t want to know.’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘There’s a rat, in under the chimney pot. Wanted to get it out before you got up.’
‘Did it bite you?’
‘No. It’s a dead one. Smelled it when I went to put the fire on.’
‘Did you get it?’
‘No. I slipped.’
‘You’re not all right, are you.’
‘No. It’s. twisted.’
‘Can you get up?’
‘Just give me a minute. Don’t blink at me like that. I’m already sorry.’
‘It’s not that, Daniel. It’s. pains have started.’
‘Awch. Fuck.’
‘Charming. I can drive … Sarah! Going into town!’
Dusk: Lithgow Hospital
‘Champion, France. He’s a beauty. What are you going to call him?’
‘Well, I’m not sure. But since this one looks just like you too, how about we call him Stupid Arse?’
‘Very funny.’
‘You are.’
‘Someone’s been having a lark, though.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, if I hadn’t fallen off the roof, then I’d have gone into work today, you’d have been at home with Mum, and I’d have missed this. Missed you.’
‘Aw, darlingest. What’s the verdict on your knee?’
‘Sore. Nichols’ll be laughing for the rest of his life, but I won’t be going anywhere in a hurry for a few weeks.’
‘Good. Lock you in your room for the duration.’
‘Hmn. All right. You’re the boss.’
‘And don’t you forget it.’
‘Never again, France.’
‘Hmn.’
‘Francine, I …’
‘Yes, Daniel?’
‘There’s something I should probably tell you …’
AUTHOR NOTE
Black Diamonds is fiction, a ballad of two spirits inspired by history, but not confined to it. In order to sing it freely, I invented Wattle Dell, and my omission of any reference to specific units or regiments in the AIF is deliberate. I made these decisions not only for freedom to tell the tale, but in order to avoid dishonouring the memories of those whose true stories ignited my imagination, including those of my forebears, both German and Irish.
This story is my celebration of my funny, beautiful country, with its quirks, imperfections and mistakes as I interpret them, and its deepest truth is its allegory, its love song, of my own fractured fairytale.
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