The Tree In Changing Light

by Roger McDonald

  Picture Phil Cheney leaning over the farm gate getting his points across, casting those narrowed but watchful eyes around for the pile of tyres or the stack of timber that waits to feed the advancing fire that will surely come one day across the paddock and sweep towards the house and sheds, looking for fuel to spark, making embers to drive into the vulnerable spots that human nature stubbornly denies are a problem.

  ‘The best way to convince someone they’ve got to clean up is to invite them to drop a match on the ground on a day of high fire danger—when there’s no wind, though. They’re usually surprised.’

  Perhaps this is why McArthur chose Cheney, because of Phil’s laconic affinity with people who know the land as he does himself—from the bush-worker and tree-planter perspectives, the forester-perspective of one trained in an era when the connection between those who used the land and those who most vocally cared for the land was closer than it is now.

  Every year in Australia people are caught in apparently inescapable situations and tragically burnt to death. People burnt saving their houses. In their cars. Firefighters on bush tracks finding no way back, none forward, and the tanker incinerated. Firefighters huddled on a slope on a day of no wind, in a season of low fire danger, trapped.

  ‘It shouldn’t happen,’ says Phil. ‘It needn’t happen.’

  I asked him if he was confident of getting out of any fire-danger situation facing him, even the most extreme.

  ‘Yes—always.

  ‘But,’ he added, ‘I read the signs earlier and get the hell out of there if I have to.’

  ‘The only wood in the story of Rosie was coffin

  wood, but the tree was there in the reaching out of

  her life. Her journey wasn’t finished, her story wasn’t

  told all through …’

  I WAS the cook, and what I noticed was that Rosie hardly ever ate anything. At breakfast she was never there, except at the last moment, grabbing a piece of cold toast or a lump of congealed egg and even then explaining it wasn’t for her, it was for her friend, Louella, who needed looking after. Then she’d run from the shearers’ quarters to the shed, five hundred metres and sometimes farther, getting there just in time to grab a broom at seven-thirty start and get started.

  They said she was the best rouseabout that ever was, that singlehanded, picking up the fleeces, running them down to the classing table, women like Rosie had set an example to men in this country, who considered rousing a job for any old blow-in. Back in New Zealand they started as babies slung in baskets over the wool tables as their mothers worked. Here they lived wild. They were uprooted and it wasn’t their place.

  The times I tried conversation with Rosie she’d lower her eyes and make an escape. At twenty-nine she had a shearer ex-husband and two eight-year-old daughters back in New Zealand being looked after by the family. She had a look about her that said this time in Australia wasn’t her work time, it was her life time, her party time come what may. If anyone was telling her own story by the way she lived it was Rosie.

  ‘The trouble with you Kiwis,’ I heard an Australian woman once yell, ‘is that you consider every fucking night party night, whereas us Aussies, we’re more sensible, we just do it once a week, and otherwise we just have a few quiet ones before tea.’

  Nights of sitting on the hot steps of inland huts passing round a joint, or gathering around a fire of pine offcuts in the drizzle down south, passing round the bottle. Bailey’s Irish Cream was Rosie’s favourite, she settled into it with Louella, a smooth, foamy, sweet romantic mixture with a green landscape on the label unlike the red rocky places around Broken Hill, where Rosie worked mostly.

  One thing I heard Rosie say. Another I learned later. She said, ‘I love this country, but I don’t want to be buried here if I die here. I want my body taken home.’ What I learned later was that she’d said she didn’t want to live past thirty. The only wood in the story of Rosie was coffin wood, but the tree was there in the reaching out of her life.

  Rosie fell in love with Calvin, a young man who was built like a shipping container, who shuffled when he walked, spoke hardly at all to anyone, and was nicknamed The Terminator. He was a slow worker, a learner, a member of the team through family obligation. Back home his uncle was a famous Maori orator. Rosie sat on Calvin’s knee and ran her fingers through his hair; she picked clothes for him for the Night Train nightclub, togging him out in Country Road, the Beau Brummel of the pool table and the back lane punch up.

  When I came back after a year Rosie had a baby, Rewa. Calvin was the father. People were amazed that a perfectly healthy child, with smoky brown skin and rose-petal lips had survived the rigours of Rosie’s lifestyle. Rosie, it emerged, was a fine embroiderer; she had made all the shawls and bedcovers for Rewa herself. Calvin cradled Rewa on his forearms, trudging around the yard cooing and chuckling. In this yard in Broken Hill they had a hangi, the red hot stones sparkling in the dry air, the plain food cooked in the ground-oven drawing the mates in from all around before they dispersed again. Coming together and splitting apart was the pattern.

  It must have been like this for Rosie: her journey wasn’t finished, her story wasn’t told all through—there were places still to go, sheds to be worked, parties to be played out, right down to the last lonely cassette on the ghetto blaster as the sun came up. Calvin meanwhile flipped his lid. He gained an impression that a pharmacist had something against his child because he demanded payment for a prescription before handing it over. So Calvin took the truck belonging to Harold, his teetotaller cousin and leader of the team, his protector, and rammed the truck through the plate glass window of the pharmacy, then drove down to Victoria somewhere until he ran out of steam.

  During the year Calvin spent in Bathurst Gaol, Rosie started living with another man, Bonzer. She didn’t want a permanent arrangement but Bonzer did. They used to argue about it. I hadn’t met Bonzer in the time I was cook, but I’d heard about him; he was one of the old team from Kiwi, one of the central personalities, a sweet man said the women, a good bloke said the men. When Calvin came out of gaol he used to follow Rosie and Bonzer around like a puppy dog.

  What happened next in the pattern of those lives, which seemed to follow the pattern of the stars, needed an agent of change, a tragic instigator, and it seemed to me that when the time came for an explosion it would be Calvin who would play that part. But Harold became exasperated with Calvin’s hopelessness. Station owners were saying they didn’t want Calvin on their land. Harold took Calvin to the airport and the mates frog-marched him across the tarmac and onto the plane for the first leg of his ride back to New Zealand.

  So it was just Bonzer and Rosie that day at the Silverton Hotel. A Saturday. Lots of drinking by midafternoon, culminating in an argument, a fight. She couldn’t live with him and she couldn’t live without him; what was he, dim not to understand? Rosie said there was no way she’d ride back into town with Bonzer, no, leave it, so she set off to walk, twenty-five kilometres, enraging Bonzer with her stubbornness. He set off after her, cruising past in his old Holden station wagon, and then farther up the road turning around, getting up speed, who knows what Bonzer was thinking, wipe her off the map, obliterate her argumentative strength, her power of having the last word, for everything that he, Bonzer lacked.

  I heard the news on ABC radio the next day. Maori shearer kills de facto. A few hours later Harold rang, this was just terrible, the worst thing in a life of travail. He described what had happened, Rosie after she’d been dragged along under the Holden. She was his best worker, his confidante, he couldn’t believe all this. ‘You wouldn’t think,’ he sighed, ‘that a small woman like that would do so much damage to a vehicle.’ They were flying the body back to New Zealand, Bonzer was in the lockup, no bail, he wanted to kill himself. There was to be an autopsy at Glebe morgue, I was living at Glebe, so here they all were a day later in Sydney. I met them at the airport and brought them over to sort things out, two house-filling uncles and Harold with
two-year-old Rewa on his knee, and a room at the Rooftop Motel that by the end of the week would be sleeping six. Rewa kept looking around in a dazed fashion for Rosie, who had taken her everywhere, almost everywhere, and she tugged at Harold’s knee and called him ‘Mum’.

  I’d been a writer trying to fill a need, to match my own barely understood story with the story of other lives, to claim a wider story as my own. This was where I met the Kiwis before I ever visited New Zealand. I’d been at shed cut-out parties where photos were taken, addresses exchanged, promises made to meet up again and never to forget the family feeling that developed in those rough, tumbledown places. When Rosie’s scant belongings were dumped on the living room floor and Harold started blithely sorting through her diaries and photo albums, I saw what she’d been after, the thing that made life so cheap, but so fierce. It was there in the story she told about herself in photo after photo, in the captions denoting friendship and wildness and calm reflective standing to one side. From the back of the most recent album an article I’d written fell out, with a photo I’d taken of Rosie sweeping with a plastic broom. It was a proud memento.

  ‘When her body is taken back to the marai,’ said Harold, ‘people will get up and say what a wonderful person she was, then they will say that if she had never left New Zealand this wouldn’t have happened, and then they’ll blame me.’ He pulled a long face. All things came around again and there was no escaping them. ‘She was a Ratana,’ said Harold when we went to the New Zealand High Commission and they asked her religion.

  ‘What’s that?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s a Maori religion where people do whatever they like, they drink, swear, fornicate, and then they say their prayers like there’s no tomorrow.’ He shook his head in bewilderment. ‘It doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘A tree could just as easily be a vine or an evolved grass such

  as wheat or lupins in the definition of the ceremony …’

  WHATEVER THE season—and it was mostly dusty and hot up there, in the north-western corner of New South Wales—the orchardist Joe Joseph wore a dark blue suit and a frayed white shirt buttoned to the collar. His small, sharp-featured face (pointed like a bush mouse’s under a cloth cap) was tanned, but with a jaundiced sheen underneath. On his feet instead of boots he wore leather sandals.

  Joe’s hands shook as he rolled a cigarette. They tremored selecting fruit from the tray of the old Dodge, pressing oranges, figs and grapes into the baskets of customers. When he came to the Anglican rectory—where my childhood friend Boyd Spackman lived—payment was waived unless the Spackmans chose to bless him with what they could afford. That was the way Joe expressed himself and did business. This was many years ago, of course.

  Joe Joseph had war neurosis but rarely spoke of his experiences. While being marched across Europe, so people said, his band of fellow captives was bombed by the Allies, but with a wife and baby he made an escape. The Second World War was an adventure in the minds of boys in the 1950s, and Joe’s story of walking through a forest and meeting some Americans who gave them gum, which made them sick, seemed tame to Boyd Spackman; nothing compared with dogfights over the Channel and prisoner of war stunts.

  After arriving in Sydney and staying in the migrant camp at Fairfield the Josephs had ventured as far inland as the railway line permitted—to our town of galvanised iron roofs baking in the sun. It was a place where even white kids, the least deprived, went to school barefooted, in hand-me-down clothes, with ringworm and rickets and other poverty ill-nesses. Everyone said that Joe had struck it lucky in coming there. Two miles out was a block of land with house and sheds standing empty beside the Darling River. Boyd was proud of that river, part of the longest inland waterway system in the world, where he went fishing for Murray cod, bird-nesting and chasing bog-eye lizards. But when Joe and his family saw the Darling they wept over a chain of muddy waterholes. Then Joe got to work.

  He seemed too frail to be running an orchard, doing the work of digging, weeding and barrowing, picking and packing without the assistance of tractor or rotary hoe and with only limited seasonal labour. All he had was a draught horse left by the man who had abandoned the block before him, a rusty set of harrows, a hauling sledge consisting of ironbark stays and lengths of railway line for skids. There was also his daughter Leah to help.

  She worked in the packing shed and around the house. Her mother had gone back to Sydney. The plan was that Leah would join her when she finished primary school while Joe stayed on and sent money down. For Leah, aged ten, Sydney Girls’ High was already picked out, the date set (a year off) when she would sit the selective exam, and even a career was chosen for her in the distant future—she would become a doctor.

  Leah sat with Boyd in fifth class and although he strove to beat her in every kind of test except arithmetic (where he conceded defeat) she easily managed to sail past him. When the teacher placed the class against the back wall for spelling bees and general knowledge quizzes it was always Leah left standing alone at the end, after they’d battled it out over committee, committed, their, there, they’re, and they’d fielded questions about the location and length of river systems and Australian primary products listed in order of importance. When it came to apple and pear exports the class gave a cheer and Leah gave a curtsy.

  It was exquisitely humiliating for Boyd to be beaten by a girl who’d arrived in infants school barely able to speak English. If Leah faltered during a quiz, as she rarely did, there was a sympathetic groan. At the moment of victory the teacher took her by the armpits and swung her onto his desk, where she stood taking hurrahs with a confident grin. Everybody was in love with her, although speaking for myself I barely remember her, or even Joe Joseph for that matter—I was three classes below Boyd and it was like another generation down there in infants.

  Whenever he could Boyd headed out along the river road to visit Leah, pelting along on his overlarge bicycle to make the most of daylight. In his memory there was usually nobody else, just him, though Leah had lots of friends. Our town had a rainfall of only six inches a year and in the months between intermittent storms the river road was rarely graded. Deep boggy ruts created by Joe’s truck were baked into year-old trenches making bike riding hazardous. Sometimes Boyd got there grazed and bruised, covered in dust, and with flat tyres from the burrs that littered the track sharper than carpet tacks. Flats, difficult to mend, were Boyd’s badges of devotion, in case Leah ever noticed. He remembered sitting on a fence post listening for the sound of the truck, his heart full and waiting for Leah and her father to return from the afternoon fruit run.

  One morning before daylight Rev Spackman took Boyd to the railway station to see homing pigeons released from wicker baskets for a race back to Sydney. Joe and Leah were there, loading boxes of fruit into a freight carriage, pausing for a minute to watch the pigeons rise into the sky. Every variety of fruit imaginable, fresh, dried, and candied, was bedded on strips of newspaper and wrapped in yellow tissue paper. There were seasonal grapes and figs, but also other fruits including small, sweet and slightly leathery-skinned apples, melon-sized oranges, wrinkled olives packed in salt, lemons, walnuts, almonds, pears, quinces, cherries, and even pomegranates. The consignment was obviously intended for a special occasion and Rev Spackman raised an eyebrow when he saw the addressee in Sydney. It was a man he called—with a broad wink—his fraternal colleague.

  Rev Spackman talked about Joe Joseph in affectionate but rather mysterious terms, said Boyd—using hints and circumlocutions as he did when talking about Masons or Roman Catholics. Eventually Boyd understood that Joe was a Jew and the ‘fraternal colleague’ a rabbi, the Jewish equivalent of a vicar. What Jews exactly meant to Boyd at that age he couldn’t remember. He couldn’t say what Jews exactly meant to his father either because he never asked him, but he believes his father saw Joe as something like a revered relic.

  Boyd was particularly sensitive to his father’s attitudes and experienced them in his imagination in a way that influenced hi
s life. As one who’d found Old Testament Hebrew challenging at Moore Theological College, Rev Spackman would have admired Joe’s facility in Hebrew script and Biblical lore, drilled since childhood in Poland. But because New Testament teaching painted Jews as forerunners of Christians in the same way as lungfish came before land mammals, a convinced Christian would have had no choice but to think that way too. Yet again, as a Low Church Anglican, Rev Spackman would have had the notion of the many paths to salvation.

  Did his father understand, though—Boyd asked many years later, when we met and swapped life stories in Bill and Toni’s café behind the Museum—that a Jew stayed a Jew whatever the misdeed, even if he denied his Jewishness? Even if he was an atheist? Christianity couldn’t match that level of acceptance with its hoops of faith and belief to be jumped through. Boyd told me that even back then he had a niggling conviction that Christianity was a fraud thrust on the world, and that something else would suit him better. Something that wouldn’t change the inner person whatever wind blew.

  So in his twenties it happened that Boyd underwent conversion at a small synagogue near Sydney University, where he worked as the specimen collector in the Department of Zoology. Since then he’d written a PhD, gone to Arizona, and now worked at the Australian Museum in the reptile department, from which he was about to retire at sixty. He’d never married and outside his work led a life of study and prayer, keeping to the many obligations of Orthodox Judaism.