The Dickens Boy

by Tom Keneally

  ‘But if that’s so, Tom, you tell him yourself,’ I replied.

  ‘Yes, but what a gift if you, the child of the great man, said it. In any case, if I told him, I would get stuck with the eloquence.’

  A handsome young dark boy, perhaps my own age, with sullen eyes and willing hands, took my saddle off me and bore it away to a rack. Then he turned and placed his limpid, huge eyes on me and said, ‘I brush him down, boss.’

  ‘Good Coutts,’ I whispered to the mare before I headed off. ‘Good Coutts.’

  I carried my fairly heavy saddlebags on my shoulder, knowing it was no good waiting around for a porter here.

  A tall man in shirtsleeves had emerged from the storeroom while we’d been unsaddling.

  ‘Hoop-la,’ he said resonantly as he came towards us. ‘The boys from Fremmel’s. Hello there, Maurice,’ he said before turning to me and saying, ‘I’m Willy Suttor. Which one are you, sonny?’

  ‘Edward Bulwer Lytton Dickens, sir,’ I replied. ‘Sixteen years of age for five more days.’

  ‘Oh dear Lord,’ he roared, ‘you’ve not even gone to the homestead yet?’

  ‘Not yet, sir. I wished to say a proper goodbye to Maurice, who has been very accommodating with me on the ride.’

  ‘Well, that is splendid of you, but you’ll see him at dinner. And me, for that matter. A gala evening at the Bonney brothers!’ His accent was a well-modulated Australian and the vowels as flat as the Momba landscape. He wasn’t, like me, a ‘new chum’, a ‘Pommy’, the half-contemptuous terms the Australians reserved for newcomers. ‘Dear me, we’ve all taken a vow not to mention your father to you, since you must be sick of everyone doing that first off. But I have to say, young Dickens, it’s astounding that you are the closest thing to the great magician himself! The dazzling civiliser of rough men like me! In the remotest huts he brings us to noble tears and evokes a sensibility we did not know we possessed. And, by heaven, you are flesh of his flesh, blood of his blood. We are delighted and a little discombobulated to have you here. But enough, I have already broken the pledge, but I shall be well behaved tonight. You should present yourself to Mr Frederic Bonney, who is in a fever to greet you and has been pacing the veranda and drinking nervous tea. If you hang around here, Maurice will have you unloading the wagon!’

  Suttor then turned his gleaming eyes on Maurice, saying, ‘I take it you have broached the subject . . .?’

  ‘No . . . No, there was not an opportunity . . .’ Maurice replied, dropping his gaze.

  ‘Oh well, up to you, old boy!’ said Willy in a low, apologetic voice.

  As they both looked at me, I said, ‘The blacksmith, Tom Larkin, who came with us, is a child of Papist convicts. He asked me to pass on his thanks to you.’

  ‘When I was young, I was of radical bent,’ said Willy, who still seemed a youngish man in any case.

  I said then that if they would forgive me I would go and introduce myself at the homestead. When I told Maurice I would come and fetch my valise from his dray, Suttor said, ‘No, no. I’ll get one of our young clodhoppers to deliver it. Also your saddle bags. Least we can do!’

  As I walked toward the homestead I felt a sudden nervousness. The last Momba test now awaited, which was whether the Bonney brothers showed any malign echo of McGaw. The main house backed on to a stand of trees by a creek and was a little fortress-like, with a wing at either end, between which the veranda ran. It stood amongst a scatter of mulga trees and possessed no sentimental attempt to sport a trellised garden or the affectation of roses.

  The veranda boards were pretty close to the ground, and as I approached I heard the sound of boots, before a sturdy little man with a trimmed moustache wearing a suit and a white pith helmet presented himself at the top of the stairs.

  ‘Ah,’ he said, stopping there. ‘A good journey, Mr Dickens?’

  I told him yes and gave credit to Maurice and the new Momba blacksmith.

  ‘Quite,’ he said. ‘Welcome to Momba. Must be deuced strange, but if you stay here a while it will become the entire world. Please just follow me, young Dickens.’

  He was not quite as talkative as Suttor, and clearly English-born, with a quite pleasant Midlands edge to his deep voice. He was also quite young, with boyishly plump cheeks. After showing me to my bedroom (a little too like the one on McGaw’s station) he suggested I refresh myself and indicated the bath.

  ‘Do tell me if you need anything at all,’ he urged me. Then he inhaled and added, ‘We are proud you’ve come to throw in your destiny with us.’

  As he walked away I pondered on how he had done the job servants did in England, the showing to the room, the information about the bath, the offer of help. My father’s son, I was interested in this new version of man: master and servant in the one body – a combination required by the place we were in. The guvnor always put stress on the fact his grandparents had both been servants, his grandmother, Elizabeth, a maid for one Lady Blandford and his grandfather, William Dickens, an old manservant to Lord Crewe, and later made valet. That was as far as the Dickens were allowed to go in those days, the guvnor claimed. He said we must, being now gentlemen by the utter accident of his talent, see the human face in servants and waiters, in porters and boatmen.

  A male cook, a ravaged-looking man, later came to my door with tea, which I welcomed. ‘Courtney, Mr Dickens,’ he said a little wearily. ‘And I reckon the dinner’ll be on the table by a quarter to seven. That sweet with you, Mr Dickens?’

  I told him it was very sweet.

  As he turned to go he shook his head, chuckling to himself. ‘Little Nell,’ he said, as if remembering. ‘Little Nell. Can’t believe it. Bawled my mongrel eyes out! Kill a person in a book, and they live forever, like!’

  Here was a haggard cook who had read a book I’d never opened. He was clearly not part of the compact not to mention my father.

  5

  I left a film of red dust in the bottom of the bath. In my new role as desert servant, I washed and rubbed it away. Then I dressed in my slightly crumpled morning suit of modern cut. Even if it evoked knowing smiles that said ‘a newcomer’, I felt I owed it to my fellow diners to wear it. By now I could hear an exchange of male voices from the dining room and walked towards it resolutely. Inside, Maurice, in a fresh shirt, moleskins and cleaned boots, had been pressed into the business of offering sherry or brandy and water as an appetiser. Suttor, pretty much the way we had seen him in the store but with a canvas jacket and no tie, was drinking brandy. The noblesse oblige of running sheep on more than two thousand square miles of earth had put the Bonney brothers, both ‘bosses’ of Momba, in suits like the habitual worn-in one Frederic Bonney had been wearing on the veranda.

  Mr Edward Bonney was older, stockier and more matter-of-fact than his brother. He spoke economically with an accent that hinted of Staffordshire, where their father, a clergyman, had run a grammar school. It was an uncle of theirs who had come to Australia, caught the sheep bug and made his fortune, returning to England a self-made man, to pass his leaseholds to his nephews, who had the look of made men. I meant to become as they were, and thought it would be a fine thing to be the owner, like them, of two hundred thousand beasts.

  For the moment, I was welcomed by every voice in the room and questioned about my colonial experience to this point. Then we sat down and drank a sturdy, beefy soup served by Courtney, whose nickname was Squeaker. Squeaker was clearly named to honour his near total silence. He occupied his silence as other men occupied their boundary rider’s huts, and never wanted to confide in anyone or excuse or invite praise for his cooking. I am left to say little about a man with such an interesting surname except that he was very competent. After the soup he presented us with a roast mutton leg, à la Momba, which the elder Bonney carved up and served. During this, Frederic began to talk to me about the oddity of what we were all doing and hoping for at Momba.

  ‘There is no way your English family can understand what you will go through here. Everyone here knows,
but it is beyond the understanding of the best-intentioned scribe of colonial items in magazines and periodicals. Over there to the east, just to begin, there is a waterhole which is sadly drying up at the moment, but may be redeemed for us by autumn rains. It is in fact a river course, the Paroo. I’d say it’s a channel, for it prefers to flow underground. That is an oddity, first off.’

  There was assent around the table.

  ‘No one quite describes this country as graphically as Frederic,’ said Willy Suttor. ‘He is of course a writer . . .’

  Frederic smiled shyly. ‘Notes on ethnography, and thus only a shadow writer.’

  ‘He is the authority on the natives of the Paroo-cum-Darling,’ said Edward with some dry pride. ‘It is in his nature to be such.’

  ‘Seconded,’ cried Willy. ‘It is his nature. Anything to say in support of the motion, Maurice?’

  ‘Nothing to say yet, Mr Suttor,’ said Maurice, almost as a warning. ‘I will choose my time, thank you.’

  ‘Forgive me,’ said Willy before turning to Frederic. ‘Well then, Fred, give us your famous ruminations on the sheep, if you would.’

  ‘Indeed, I have often asked who has ever told a story about a sheep?’ Frederic said. ‘Dogs, especially sheep dogs, have their library of tales; horses perhaps even more so. Bulls have a section of tales, even heifers. And as for calves . . . Then pigs and particularly piglets. The sheep, our chief beast here at Momba, has no volumes of humanising tales apart from the story of the Golden Fleece Jason sought from the golden ram Chrysomallos, who is sadly lacking amongst our flocks. Apart from Jason, all else is manuals of sheep breeding. Now, my brother is an excellent breeder, but he has never been moved to poetry by a sheep. Or even by a ram. And yet . . . they are our staple, they are the animals of our dreams.’

  He was, I thought, the philosopher of wool-breeding, but he had not finished yet.

  ‘Sometimes at the stations further in towards the coast you will get an orphan lamb, and the station children will feed it on a bottle. But children are a luxury who have not yet come our way. Yet by far the richest man in Australia today is a baron of sheep, a role we aspire to but cannot claim, not even with all our square miles. And this baron has named not one sheep except for tracking and breeding purposes, as well as listing the rams in his stock book. And when drought strikes . . . well, there may be more profit in killing and boiling down sheep by the ton than cropping their wool. For the truth is we lack in these colonies sufficient mouths to eat the tens of thousands of sheep we stock.’

  This awesome idea hung in the air and the other parties to this great sheep proposition looked at me as if I might have brought an answer with me.

  ‘So it’s wool we breed our merino sheep for,’ said Edward. ‘And they happen to give us the best wool in the world. Ewe, ram, wether – they exist to have their fleece taken off once yearly – an exercise that takes a good shearer five minutes for each creature. That’s our Golden Fleece and the reward we all seek. A suitably high wool price in London.’

  ‘But how curious,’ Frederic chimed in, ‘that we should have the Spanish merino breed, and that it happens to be exactly the right breed for wool-yielding in this country. How remarkable that the big, robust English sheep with their coarse wool should be out-fleeced – if that is a term –’

  Willy cried, ‘Permit it, permit it, for truth’s sake! It suits!’

  ‘. . . should be out-fleeced by the smaller, robust merino whose wool is so fine and so desirable in the mills of Britain!’

  They began to discuss then how the merino came to be here, in these giant pastures of Momba. Willy Suttor, as station historian, related that Farmer George, George III, was interested in them and, during one of his periods of sanity, bought merino ewes for his gardens at Kew through the Spanish ambassador, in exchange for two creamy coach horses Mrs Ambassador desired. But how to get a merino ram?

  ‘Oh, I think I know that one,’ supplied Maurice. ‘The ram was smuggled by English spies from Spain all the way to Hamburg and on a ship to England.’

  Willy nodded. ‘In defiance, mind you . . . in defiance of the Spanish king!’

  ‘I think that story might be a romantic fiction,’ said Edward. ‘For one thing, the Saxons had the merino, and the Americans have merino relatives in Vermont.’

  ‘Ah,’ protested Willy, ‘let us have our deluded tales, Edward!’

  And then, said Frederic, taking up the tale, an officer of the New South Wales garrison named John Macarthur, who’d been sent back to England for wounding his superior officer in a duel, bought merino rams in a dispersal sale of the Royal flock at Kew and, after evading punishment for the duel, brought them back to Australia. And when the Blue Mountains outside Sydney were crossed . . . well, we had then the phenomenon by which merino fleece, in the hinterland of Australia, was worth more than gold. At least sometimes. In fact, frequently. Except . . . except for drought.

  ‘But when has there been such a golden marriage between a continent and a species of sheep?’ asked the poetic Willy Suttor, ‘and . . . and . . . between a species of sheep and the great British wool manufactories. People speak of angelic choirs. Well, the consonances of all this are like the harmonies of an angelic choir.’

  ‘Well said, Willy!’ agreed Frederic.

  My heart seemed to expand with the breadth of the vision these men were conjuring for me. I felt one in the noble fraternity of the fleece, and these were the men I had hoped to come amongst.

  ‘Not that I have not had problems,’ Willy admitted. ‘I am for now the Momba storekeeper. We are rewarded in earthly terms with giant cheques that come to us once a year. And sometimes our expenses . . . well, Mr Dickens, you saw the front fence here as you arrived. Fencing is an enterprise . . . that matches the expense of building a Pharaonic pyramid or a Salisbury Cathedral. And now I am fencing some hundreds of square miles of my own, and need ready cash. So I come here as storekeeper to keep a shop and overcharge even the distinguished Bonney brothers . . .’

  ‘My heaven, the beggar does so,’ said Edward, laughing. ‘Charges like . . . as the people say here . . . a wounded bull!’

  There was widespread agreement and merriment around the table.

  ‘I pass on only the costs already laid upon me by Maurice’s avaricious Uncle Fremmel,’ claimed Willy.

  ‘And he,’ said a smiling Maurice, ‘would tell you he passes on only the costs he incurs at the hands of the avaricious ferry captains on the river and bullock-drivers from the Bogan.’

  ‘Anyway, I shall have my fence,’ said Willy, beaming. ‘And I shall have dingo shooters to protect my sheep from those mad native dogs.’

  ‘Sir,’ I said to Frederic, ‘Mr Rusden tells me that you know the natives well.’

  ‘Who could know them really well, Mr Dickens?’ he replied rhetorically.

  ‘Plorn, please, sir. It’s what my father and family call me.’

  ‘Right,’ said Frederic, before pausing. Everyone, except perhaps Maurice, gazed at me as if adjusting to this unfamiliar label until Frederic continued on.

  ‘The natives are in any case a study of mine. These people along the river are named Paakantji. Many of them are my dear friends. Some work for us as drovers. They are very reliable drovers and, despite not having seen a horse until twenty-five years ago, are adept at riding. Their powers of communication with animals are remarkable. Yes, Plorn, I could say I’m an enthusiast for the Paakantji.’

  ‘Indeed Fred takes wet plate photographs of them,’ said Edward, as if he were uncomfortable with his brother’s previously stated enthusiasm.

  ‘That must be very difficult, Mr Bonney,’ I interjected.

  ‘It’s true that setting up the colloidal plate takes some practice,’ said Frederic. ‘But none of them are shy of the photographic apparatus itself. I have heard tales of Africans and Red Indians being flighty about the camera, but not the Paakantji.’

  ‘It’s because they trust you,’ said Edward as a compliment.

 
; ‘And when I ask them to be still, they are stiller than the grave, for however long – forty seconds perhaps, while the device captures their image. It is true, I hope, that they expect no malice from my brother and me.’

  ‘Not from you, anyhow, Fred,’ said Willy, as if there were unstated history to this. ‘You are like one of them.’

  Frederic beamed as if the concept were delightful and said, ‘No, their openness is a courtesy.’

  ‘They have baptised you into their tribe,’ Edward insisted a little too much like a criticism.

  ‘Again, as a courtesy. But the welcome thing is – from their long occupation of this Paroo Channel country – they know where every resource of water is.’

  ‘Oh, you have no heart, sir!’ said Willy Suttor in mock protest. ‘We are back where we began. Water and sheep equal stock food growing amongst the pebbles, and stock food equals fleece. That is all it is with Fred Bonney!’

  ‘Not quite all,’ said Frederic, smiling. They were each such good friends, knowing when to tease. ‘Indeed, I love the darks, I must confess. For both their loyalty and integrity.’

  ‘Mark that, Plorn!’ Willy admonished me. ‘There are men who consider the Aborigine a form of malign vermin. But that is not the Bonney gospel.’

  ‘I would hope not,’ said Frederic, stifling a yawn.

  It was ten o’clock already and no one had mentioned my father, I noted in amazement.

  As the party broke up, Maurice asked me if I’d like a settling stroll before sleeping. I thought the idea excellent so Maurice notified Willy, who was his host at the store, that he would be a little late, and in no time we were out in an encompassing dark pricked with various campfires. I heard a few shrill utterances from native women off in the circle of the blacks’ camp, which was more apparent now from their line of fires along the creek. The occasional female jokes and protests seemed from that direction of a different order from those of European women. I would have dearly loved to be party to their meaning. As we passed a drovers’ fire, a few late-retiring men were holding pannikins – rum and black tea had graced their evening. I could see Momba’s new, broad-faced, full-bearded blacksmith there.