The Dickens Boy

by Tom Keneally

  ‘Its interior height was a hundred and twenty-eight feet, and I’m willing to solicit from you a more difficult question, concerning, for example, the square yardage of glass used in its construction. No, sir? You do not bite on that? Then ask me another unrelated question.’

  ‘Tell me, if you will, the names of the builders of the new London Bridge.’

  ‘Jolliffe and Banks of Merstham in Surrey.’

  And so we went on for a while – Sparrow answering all manner of questions including the number of rivets in the Great Eastern.

  Fascinated, I asked him what happened if he did not know something, for after all no man could know everything. He told me that since his childhood his father had him sitting down learning the Penny Cyclopaedia and the Imperial Gazetteer of England and Wales and had told him that if he knew enough about the major monuments of the kingdom to be right most of the time, his occasional error, even if noticed, would be forgiven. A woman worked with him – a girl called Mariella, who was eighteen years old when she began. Sometimes he would seem to be stumped by the answer and Mariella would whisper it in his ear, to the hilarity of the audience. At other times she would convey written questions from the crowd to him which he might put away for a moment, and as the crowd protested, implying that he did have someone backstage, he would groan and tell them the answer anyhow, seeming reluctant about it, and Mariella would confirm the answer by knowingly shaking her head. They were engaged and married. He respected her with a holy respect, he said, and he knew her parents, who were comedians. On Sparrow and Mariella’s honeymoon, when she was just twenty-one, they were persuaded to visit India and perform. Sadly, Mariella died there of some sort of brain swelling that took her away in three or four days.

  And now, in his hut in the Barrier Ranges, melancholy recurred. Finishing his pannikin of rum, he said he had no stomach for performing, ‘Except for your brother.’

  We were interrupted at this stage by a mannerly knock at the door from Cultay. Alfred and Sparrow went to meet him and there was a muttered conversation in which I heard Cultay say, ‘The ochre men going tomorrow.’

  ‘And they are happy?’ asked Alfred.

  ‘They are happy.’

  ‘You’re a wonder, Cultay.’

  But I doubt any of us had any idea how Cultay’s authority had appeased the Cooper’s Creek men, and by what means he’d allayed any danger from them. In mid-afternoon in baking heat we began the ride back to Corona where, as promised, at the end of this day of unlikely performances, Hayward charmingly sang his doggerel.

  Near the old Fly Market, not a long time ago,

  An old maid lived a life of woe;

  She was past forty-three, and her face was tan,

  When she fell in love with the dogs’ meat man.

  Yankee doodle, doodle dandy,

  Turn right round in the bottom of the gangy,

  An Injun puddin’ and a pumpkin pie,

  Lord! how they made the whiskey fly.

  I was not cheered. I found Sparrow tale had enhanced my puzzlement and melancholy. The question of whether I could spend time with Alfred and be safe from an assault on memory and respect worried me. He wanted me to join him in pity for the two of us, to number ourselves amongst exiles, and to condemn the guvnor. And he wanted that to happen when he was least in his senses – when he was drunk. I knew in my blood I could not allow him to do it.

  And yet he had given me Sparrow as a gift. Playfully, just like the guvnor. At Momba we’d had the wounded sage, Staples, and the Lord of Stammerers. At Corona, they had the omniscient wizard. Was every boundary rider in Australia an escapee from strange and soured talent?

  On the ride home I daydreamed in the saddle and used the remainder of Cultay’s gum. The weather had grown cooler for our return. It was as if Cultay had parlayed the sun as well. My thoughts were on everything in my father that contradicted the callous transporter; the man who Alfred wanted me to believe in when he was drunk. I cursed myself for not having been quick-witted enough to remind Alfred of our father as the lord of revels. We’d had such endless, exorbitant fun at Gad’s Hill between Christmas and Twelfth Night, which was Charley’s birthday. The house was always full of guests and the guvnor even rented a nearby cottage for the bachelors.

  Something Mama had told me once – in her admiration for the man who had broken with her – was that one night during the summer when he was courting her, Mama, Aunt Georgie and their mother were half-expecting a call from the guvnor, when a Franco-Spanish matelot jumped through the French windows, performed a hornpipe in front of the amazed and affrighted ladies and, after a while, vaulted into the garden again. Then, a few seconds later, the guvnor presented himself properly dressed via the front door. It was he who had impersonated the matelot. The lord of illusion! He was like that. The generous impulses of humour rose in him and he obeyed them thoroughly, costuming himself for the amusement of others.

  There’d been exuberant fun too when he tried magic after he and Mr Forster bought out the entire stock in trade of a conjurer. Some of the tricks allowed him to conjure the watches of the company into tea caddies, cause coins to fly from one pocket to another, and make handkerchiefs seem to burn while not burning them. I remember a doll that he would make appear and disappear, and give messages to the children. That was my favourite. He’d taught Mamie the tricks as well.

  The guvnor always gave up work for the week of Christmas, and we’d go for long walks down into the woods of Cobham House. Then, when we got back, there were games of proverbs and charades and the guessing game Dumb Crambo. One year when we were going to do charades with costumes he decided to invite an audience, and afterwards served mulled wine to the neighbours who had watched and applauded. Then there was the time, two or three years back, when he organised some field sports on courses laid out by flags in the open grounds behind the house and invited all the neighbours to take part in the contests. He bade the landlord of the Sir John Falstaff down on our corner to have a drinking booth on the ground, and the sport didn’t finish until darkness fell. He gave a speech at dusk and the people who were there that day behaved with absolute propriety and departed leaving no mess behind as a token of their respect for him. That’s what Alfred did not speak enough of – how adored the guvnor was!

  One Christmas when we were isolated by snow, he’d set the bachelors of the party to work assembling the Swiss chalet the actor Fechter had given him, which he would ultimately favour to work in. As I helped the young men I felt important, and my father winked at me. Yet this generous host and game player, this cultivator of surprise and wonder in children, was submerged by the grim and punishing father Alfred seemed determined to have me believe in.

  25

  At the end of summer, when I’d been at Momba the better part of a year and was approaching my eighteenth birthday, a Belgian priest by the name of Father Charisse arrived at the station on a scraggy gelding. He was a skeletal man, wearing a dusty white habit and sandals, who drank wine hungrily and enjoyed his mutton dinner as he told us about the crimes of slave dealers on the island of Zanzibar, where he’d been sent by his order of monks. He recounted how the archbishop of Sydney had asked the superior of Father Charisse’s order to send an apostle to the Australian natives, and he’d come from Zanzibar to Sydney by way of Louvain in Belgium.

  It was fascinating for me to converse with a Papist, and to see a man of enlightenment like Fred Bonney allow him to pitch his tent by the Paakantji camp. My father would have said that native people would be ill-served by Papism, that it was a matter of barbarism speaking to barbarism. But Fred Bonney was probably impressed by the man’s goodwill, as well as by his broad knowledge of the Aboriginal peoples’ religion and of what had befallen the Paakantji, in particular since settlers had brought livestock to the Paroo.

  ‘I have seen homesteads which are fortified positions,’ Father Charisse told us. ‘The white visitors have no intention to yield up the land again to the natives.’

  ‘I
ndeed,’ said Fred, whose own best intentions towards the Paakantji did not include the yielding up of Momba.

  ‘And whether the natives attack the newcomers, or extend gestures of cooperation,’ said the monk, ‘they can still be misused or slaughtered.’

  ‘Is it not inevitable that men will use the scriptures in Genesis to justify their seizure, Father?’ asked Edward Bonney. ‘I do not agree, but I’ve heard Jehovah’s exhortation to humanity to make the earth fruitful in Genesis cited in the churches of the pastoralists.’

  ‘There is no structure of law to cover what prevails in Australia,’ said Fred. ‘Not when it comes to the natives. It suits me to say so, you will no doubt say, but it is also true. Thus, I try to make Momba a haven for the natives. I am sensible of the fact that Edward and I, as young Dickens will in turn, are making our fortunes here. It’s only fair for us to provide the natives with asylum.’

  ‘You would agree, however, Mr Bonney, that justice endows them with the land?’ said Father Charisse.

  ‘That it is really theirs is self-evident,’ said Fred politely, while Edward raised his eyebrows but said nothing.

  ‘And there will come a time when that fact of ownership is reflected in the laws . . .’

  ‘And when the law is made,’ Fred asserted, ‘I shall obey it.’

  ‘But in the meantime,’ said the priest, ‘the situation weighs upon us and I cry out for wisdom.’

  ‘We pray too,’ said Edward. ‘Our father is an Anglican priest. But in what sense can they be said to have a conventional title to the land?’

  ‘In every sense, I would say,’ declared Father Charisse.

  Fred smiled that shy but seraphic smile he had. ‘It is not obvious to all lawmakers, or even to ministers of religion.’

  The priest looked at me, half-smiling. ‘And to you, Mr Dickens?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I told the priest, a little panicked. ‘They understand the country. Is that the same as owning it?’ I was not comfortable and wanted to make a point of my ignorance. ‘They seem to think it is somehow theirs, and they are not evil,’ I struggled to add.

  The priest adopted the kind of oratorical pose I was familiar with from people who wanted to recite my father’s work back to me. But, I thought, surely not. For he is a foreigner.

  I was wrong, for he continued, saying, ‘Remember what Mrs Boffin said in Our Mutual Friend about the indignities inflicted upon the poor in workhouses.’

  Do I never read how they are put off, put off, put off – how they are grudged, grudged, grudged the shelter, or the doctor, or the drop of physic, or the bit of bread? Do I never read how they grow heartsick of it and give it up, after having let themselves drop so low, and how they after all die out for want of help? Then I say, I hope I can die as well as another, and I’ll die without that disgrace.

  Absolutely impossible my Lords and Gentlemen and Honourable Boards, by any stretch of legislative wisdom to set these perverse people right in their logic?

  He dropped his hands and adopted a more conversational posture. ‘Such a writer as your father is not far from God, Mr Dickens, and in fact, the Spirit who breatheth where he listeth is not far from the soul of such a man as your father!’

  ‘Yes,’ said Fred, nodding, the boyish smile in place, and without literary affectation. ‘Our Mutual Friend must be very close to my favourite.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Father Charisse, ‘the Jew Riah, and Jenny Wren.’

  ‘And Bella Wilfer,’ said Fred.

  I remained silent, for though I was the son of the true maker of all these fabled beings, I was caught in the middle of the kindly barrage of cherished names I had not yet encountered.

  ‘Do you know of a man commonly called Barrakoon?’ the priest asked Fred with such suddenness that I thought they were still discussing characters from Father’s novels.

  ‘Why, yes,’ said Fred. ‘He has often camped on Momba. Normally in the north, around Lake Peery.’

  ‘I believe he tries to persuade his clansmen against working on stations,’ the priest observed.

  ‘Yes,’ said Fred with a broad grin, as if Barrakoon was an eccentric he had affection for – which may very well have been the truth. ‘He is a purist. He will not use flour or drink tea because he thinks they will cause him to submit. Some of the people in our camp would know him well because some of them go and spend time with him, rather like a retreat to a monastery.’

  ‘And it sounds as if one were to find him,’ said the monk, ‘it would be in the north?’

  Fred nodded and added that sometimes the old man crossed into Queensland.

  Edward said, ‘There are no boundaries with these people. Tribal boundaries perhaps. Colonial boundaries? They don’t understand the concept.’

  Fred seemed genuinely amused. ‘The Queensland troopers and the South Australians too – they suffer from the same problem. And they behave much worse than our colonial police in New South Wales.’

  ‘Who are a mere two hundred and fifty miles to the south,’ said Edward.

  ‘Indeed,’ Fred admitted. ‘Not conveniently placed for our purposes.’

  ‘That might be a good thing,’ said the monk. ‘Police are a blunt tool, wherever they’re from.’

  ‘Welcome when essential, though,’ challenged Edward.

  The priest said nothing at first. ‘The lack of police has put you to the trouble of being just men. In the matter of ochre . . .’

  ‘Ah yes,’ said Fred Bonney. ‘But you may be too kind in assessing us, Father. It is hard to be a peacemaker. You see, the Cooper’s Creek darks have not had to accommodate fleece enthusiasts like us. I’m not sure their area is even gazetted for lease. And they come down the Paroo channel each year to visit relatives and fetch back their ceremonial ochre, which is essential to them.’

  ‘Yes,’ the priest agreed solemnly. ‘It is their sacrament. Their bread and their wine. I see that.’

  ‘When they come through this area on their way to South Australia to get ochre I have let them know through one of my wise men here that they are free to take ochre from the hill by Lake Dick, and thus cause no problems further south.’

  ‘A gracious idea,’ said the monk.

  ‘Yes, but it did not serve,’ Fred told him. ‘Other people down in the south travel north to take ochre from Lake Dick. But the Cooper’s Creek people believe they must have ochre from over in the South Australian desert for their ceremonies. That, you see, is the ochre their ancestors used. Lake Dick won’t serve.’

  ‘It is complex,’ the priest admitted.

  ‘But they keep peace with us. I let them have their fill of lamb, which is wiser than opposing. If I treat them in terms of fair dealing, then they behave civilly to me, and on top of that I do not need to barricade the homestead.’

  I suppressed a yawn as the discussion continued, with Fred saying, ‘I have a weapon they fear.’

  The monk frowned, as if Fred were about to mention some armament and nominate its calibre.

  ‘I have a great Paakantji priest, as I said earlier. He has many spiritual sanctions he can employ, including the imposition of curses and ritual debts.’

  ‘Which of them is he?’ asked the priest.

  ‘Why, I sent him down at Christmas to Corona, to young Plorn’s brother, to ensure a peace there.’

  ‘Cultay?’ I murmured.

  ‘Yes,’ said Fred.

  The next morning I watched Father Charisse saying Mass at a table in the midst of the black stockmen’s camp. He was wearing his Romish vestments, and though I knew I should disapprove, they seemed to suit the shade beneath the vaults of river gums. I do not for a moment say that it was a Mass recited in the cathedral of nature. There was something about Australia and the Paakantji that didn’t offer these easy comparisons. Tom Larkin attended him as an acolyte and rang the bell when he needed to, but the dark stockmen’s women and children did not take much notice of him. The natives wandered past, treading softly – that being the extent of their reverence –
and regarded him with curiosity, not piety. The only two people to take Communion were the monk and Tom Larkin.

  I stayed a while out of mere politeness. Tom caught me afterwards and asked would I come at last to dinner at the hut he and his wife lived in, boasting that Father Charisse, of whom secretly I had now seen enough, would be there.

  The blacksmith’s marriage seemed to me like a kindly and loving business, however, and there was a certain fascination in that. Whenever I saw Mrs Larkin she strode the earth like a proprietor, and I suspected this was because she had Tom. How Maurice McArden’s image of gratified desire fitted into this connection I did not know, but the obvious picture was very gratifying. I told Tom I would come to dinner.

  I decided to write to my father, given that he was so implanted in my mind by the argument in Corona.

  ‘Dearest Father,’ I wrote.

  I know how busy you have been and so have sent most of my news for you in letters to Aunt Georgie. But Aunt Georgie too is not a great writer – even though she is a great friend and aunt to us all, of course – so she cannot be critical of my style as you are entitled to be. I should have written hah-hah! at the end of that sentence.

  I wanted you to know that Mr Bonney allowed me to ride all the way to Alfred’s station at Christmas time. Naturally, the conversation between me and Alfred turned to you and our desire never to disappoint you here in Australia, even if we might have done so already on occasion in England. It is only a few years since moving in small parties was a dangerous thing here, especially since the natives thought they might be able to make us leave the country. But now that they know we are staying they’ve settled into it with us and are making a genial fist of it. In any case, the owner here at Momba, Mr Bonney, who has great admiration for the people, had one of their most noble men to travel with me to Corona, knowing I would be safe in all respects with him, including of course not perishing, which an uninformed man could easily do in this area where it is so far between wells and bores, and where in the Christmas season many creeks lack water.