by Kim Kelly
And I’m as quickly distracted by a spectacular ironbark up ahead, to prove the point. An old specimen, massive canopy spread wide above the road, its rough, furrowed bark glowing red out of blue-black, like some yet to be discovered source of light. Outstanding thing. At least I think it’s an ironbark. What species is it, I wonder –
‘Whoa! Whoa there, fellers!’ Buckley shouts out to us from behind.
I turn and the old man is waving for us to stop, and as we do I am rather pleasantly caught between this probable ironbark and the Jones girls drawing near.
‘What a place to be,’ I say. It is astounding that I am here.
And Cos replies: ‘You could try not looking so obviously blithered for her.’
That just as suddenly triggers panic. ‘Do I look stupid?’ I ask him, my pulse jumping at the idea of having to talk to her again, any second.
‘No, not stupid.’ Cos shakes his head slowly, eyes closed in sufferance; oh how I annoy him. ‘Just don’t be so –’
‘Whoa, Sally!’
They are here; Buckley is pulling the buggy up level with us, and I am making a good effort not to grin too directly at the girls. Not to look too obviously blithered, whatever that means. Berylda is not looking at me anyway; she is fishing about for something in her pocket. Keep your eyes on the old man; he’s pointing up the road.
‘House past the church, a way up on the right – that’s the Kings’ place,’ he says. ‘You’ll see the sign for the teashop, see if we can get a pot of jam there for the ladies.’
‘Never mind if we don’t get any,’ the sister says behind him, leaning forward to touch the old man on the shoulder, smiling at me and at Cos as she does so. Her smile is luminescent; there is something ethereal about her, something that is as enchanted as I feel. ‘We have plenty of honey for our bread, and a whole great load of fruitcake.’
‘We do, yes,’ Berylda Jones says, impatiently, looking down at her watch, and then up at the road. ‘We won’t be stopping long, whatever the case.’
The frown determined to be on with the journey; the sister releases a small sigh at it, perhaps of impatience too, but of a different sort. And I wonder at Berylda again. She seems anxious to get away – still – when we are well away. What is worrying her? What is this sense of conflict that seems to shade her? Or perhaps, like Cos, she simply doesn’t enjoy the travelling. I don’t know her to say. Anything. I simply want her to look at me again. I follow her gaze up the road. What does she see? From where we are stopped, you wouldn’t know there was a church or a house anywhere nearby. Not even an abandoned fence post makes its presence known; only that big red ironbark making the yellow box look a little disheartened around it. It’s lonely country, I suppose, in a human sense. Not everyone is at home in the bush, are they. But there is something lonely about Berylda Jones. Something in her that I recognise, even if as yet I don’t know what it is.
‘Git up, Sal.’ Buckley’s off with the buggy, and she is gone before I can look back at her again. But as we follow now, the bush makes its fun with my assumptions as it makes fun of us all: beyond the last stretches of the ironbark boughs, only a few yards away, a drive appears through the yellow box, opening to a clearing on which sits a small timber chapel, not thirty feet long, with a couple of carts gathered outside it and a group of little girls running around ahead of the service, flitting about like cabbage moths, white ribbons amongst the waist-high feather-grass. It will be a special Federation service, most likely, and they’ll be getting it out of the way early before the concert and some games and far too much jam and cake. A backblocks church on a public holiday, the same scene playing at Jericho, playing out across all the colonies, that is a kind of unwritten federation in itself, of God and sunshine, jam and cake.
‘Jesus bloody James and John, I feel like wombat shit,’ Cos picks up where he left off. ‘Wombat shit under the shoe of Old Roger.’ And I do have some sympathy for him now as I look over at him: he really is suffering from last night, sweating with it.
‘Here.’ I reach back into my satchel for my water bottle and pass it across to him. ‘Get that into you.’
His head, I’m sure, is splitting, and not only from the grog – I don’t think he’s been conscious this early in the day since the housemaster at school used to belt him awake every morning for his limber-up. It wouldn’t be eight o’clock yet, I don’t think. My own headache has disappeared, probably with the pleasure of being out here, but I won’t tell him that. Cos drains the bottle, hands it back and slouches into silence. I wonder if I might leave him at this teashop when we get there …
It’s only another quarter mile on before we come to the next clearing, the next gate, and an old weatherboard that’s seen some more prosperous days. Its greying timbers, half-stripped of their white paint by sun and wind, look so tired of holding themselves upright they might sink back into the bush if you blink again. A faded sign across the front gable says:
KING WONG LEE
FINEST TEAS
QUALITY MEALS
In red letters six inches high. A restaurant, unfortunately misplaced, or bypassed. A Chinaman’s gamble not paid off.
Cos groans. Not likely there is even a quick hair of the dog at this establishment.
There’s a tap, though, by the water tank, and I’m about to jump down to refill my bottle when a woman appears on the verandah, and some warning in her stance stops me. Surprisingly, she is white, not Oriental, and aged as the house, hair wild and grey, like the bird’s nest forest around us, and her apron grimed. She waddles up her scrappy path of broken brick and bindy-eye, and she’s waving – but not waving us off. She’s greeting the old man Buckley, calling out: ‘Roo! Hey, Roo! Happy New Year’s to you! Roo Buckley, fancy you turnin’ up here today. What’s goin’ on, hey?’
‘Happy New Year’s to you too, Jessie.’ The old man takes his hat off to her; old acquaintances. He says: ‘Taking the Misses Jones to the Hill, love. Excursioning – with some visitors.’ He brushes away slow, red bushflies with the brim of his hat by way of introduction to us. ‘We’re after a pot of jam, you got any?’
‘Only plum left,’ she says, and then she looks directly at me, face as pinched as her words as she looks me up and down: ‘It’ll be a shilling.’
It’ll be highway robbery. Still, it won’t be tinned stuff, I suppose. Real jam, probably made from her own plums somewhere in the yard. She continues to stare at me for a moment, rather unsettlingly, as though waiting on my shilling. All right, I suppose; I dig into my coin pocket for the money, only to find that she’s turned away, gone back into the house. I look over at the buggy, at the girls; they are whispering to each other, looking up at the house, and then, only half a moment later, the old woman is coming out to us again, holding a tin of Perfection Preserves in her hand, its label almost as faded as the sign on the gable.
‘Naturally,’ Cos groans again at the well-aged, three-penny tin of jam, and so does the leather as he shifts in the saddle.
She steps up to him and says: ‘Not good enough for you up there on your high horse, is it, mister?’ and even Cos is stunned mute by the outburst.
‘Now, Jess, it’s all good.’ Buckley is quick to step down from the vehicle to her, taking the jam tin from her and pushing the shilling into her palm.
But she won’t be pacified now. She turns around to the buggy behind her, shaking her finger up at Berylda: ‘Girlie, you tell that uncle of yours and all his mates around town, it’s good enough for you – right?’
Who are you to shake your finger, you cranky old witch? I might say something to pacify her myself, but that Berylda seems unmoved by it. She looks down at the woman with that inscrutable stare of hers; withering. And then she smiles as quickly at her; that smirk, sardonic, under a nod: ‘You are quite right, Mrs King, your jam is good enough for anyone. I shall tell my uncle exactly that.’ Then the frown as quick again, concerned, a
s she queries: ‘And how is Mr King?’
‘Oh. Well, you know. He’d be better if he could ever get his licence back.’ The woman’s words are spat out no less tersely but her whole face wrinkles around the answer like an old rag. Some terrible misfortune has occurred here, it would seem, to make her a crank.
‘What licence?’ Cos asks her, hearing the sound of some injustice too; always an ear for a sad story, bless him.
‘His minin’ licence, his licence for his prospect,’ the old woman says, surprising us again, and she explains, with the weariness of one who’s done so many times, to anyone who’ll listen: ‘They took it off him, the coppers. Seven year ago. A trumped-up legality, it was. ’Cause he’s a Chinaman is what it really was, and them company mines don’t want the competition nowadays from them that just want to work hard. Don’t want no one gettin’ rich but the company bosses. Kick the Chinaman out, that’ll solve the problems of the world, that will. All his spare money he put in the Duramana school, my husband did, in the church here too, and in our teashop that woulda brung some more life to the place, make it a proper village, make some money for everyone – what’s he get for it? A slap in the face. Now all he’s got is the ope – and that’s all you’d have too, if you had his troubles.’
Opium. Poor bugger.
‘That’s some bad luck.’ Cos nods and he couldn’t be more sincere. This woman’s husband has had his livelihood unfairly revoked by the authorities and now he’s doing away with himself, slowly. ‘I’m very sorry to hear that,’ he tells her, and he is sorry, personally: it’s rife in the cane fields his family owns, the evil ope, not unknown for blackbirded Kanakas to do away with themselves quite deliberately by it, for want of going home to their islands. Opium was also the big excuse behind the Protection Act against the blacks – its full name being the Aboriginal Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act. Apparently opium has been responsible for the black race dying out. Strangely enough, in all my travels, I’ve never seen a black on the ope. It is evil.
But the woman ignores Cos’s understanding; her anger returned, pointing her finger at Berylda again. ‘All ’cause of your White Australia, this is. Now you’re gunna make that the law as well and kick him back to Kwantung? Over my dead body, you will. You tell that uncle of yours, I put a curse on him. I put a curse on your White Australia. It doesn’t exist. Never has. Never will. You tell your Mr Howell that.’
Berylda holds the woman’s gaze again; and she nods with something more than sympathy; a kindness, an assurance. ‘Oh, I’ll tell him, Mrs King. Don’t doubt it. I’ll tell him that for you.’
Oh how I want to know this girl, this woman, Berylda Jones. This strength, this thread in her that holds her back so straight. I want her to look at me. Now. She doesn’t. She keeps her eyes on the tragic old woman; watches her go back into her house, slamming the door shut on it all.
‘They’ve had a hard time,’ Buckley says, getting back up into the buggy, as though it might need explaining for us. He says to me: ‘Keep up ahead now. You’ll see the fork. Take it to the left. That’ll be the Track.’
‘Can barely contain my excitement,’ Cos mutters under his breath as I tell the old man: ‘Righteo.’
As we turn back for the gate, I look behind me for Berylda again but still she doesn’t see me: she’s looking down once more, at her watch, and when she looks up, she looks only at the road.
Berylda
‘Mrs King knows something of the devil then, doesn’t she?’ Greta says as the wheels crunch out onto the gravel once more. She speaks up through the boughs of the trees, to the sky, her own prayer that someone should know something of what he does.
‘She would know him by reputation anyway,’ I suppose. ‘His opinions would be hard to miss through the district now, I’m sure.’
‘I hope he doesn’t get into the government.’ My sister sends up another wish, but hushed and obscured, so that Buckley cannot guess what we are talking about. ‘I hope every miner despises him.’
‘If they really knew what he stood for – cutting all their wages and seeing children back at the coalface instead of at school – they would parade him through the streets for a thief and string him up. I think you can be certain of that.’ I bump her shoulder with mine, and we share a smile, of a sweeter wish: our little holiday is working already, and Greta is unfolding something of her own feelings with the road.
‘Do you remember how furious Papa was, about what happened to Mr King?’ She unfolds into memory now, to that last time we were all together here. ‘Under these very same trees we passed.’ Gret looks up into their leaves again. ‘We must have come this way, mustn’t we?’
‘Yes.’ I return with her too. Here. I remember. It was such a hot day, we were pestering Papa for a cold drink and he teased us that there was nowhere to stop along this road. What about that new place just opened, Harry, the Kings at Duramana? Mother suggested, and Papa said, Shush, Mother, do you always have to be so nice them? Referring to Gret and me. We giggled like the schoolgirls we were, anticipating that we would soon be sipping lemonades. But the teashop had the closed sign up when we arrived. Papa went inside to see if anyone was about and beg a special travellers’ favour, and when he came back out his smile had vanished into a grim blunt line. Mr King had just lost his final appeal case against the Crown a day or so before, over his diggings. The reef that had made his small fortune a few decades earlier had somehow become out of bounds; some sort of surveying error. And Papa was furious because he knew that a syndicate had already made an application for that same prospect. Furious at the forces of prejudice and avarice combined. They have clearly worn poor King Wong Lee down today.
‘One man’s penny should be as good as another’s, that’s what Papa said,’ Gret says up into the trees. ‘But it’s never that way, is it?’
‘No,’ I reply. ‘It’s not the way of the law. Nothing just about it, as far as I can understand.’ A Chinaman is not meant to have land or licences to it any more than a woman is. Although the law makes provisions that one might, too many other laws can prevent it; because it’s against the natural order of things – a racial point upon which all politicians agree. Perhaps the only point. A fistful of slander and lies. A Chinaman is a slippery fellow who goes panning down on the river, tries his luck, eats a few white babies and disappears. Wash your hands after you’ve touched any money that’s gone through his. That was about as much as we ever knew about that share of our own race, too. Not even Mother ever directly admitted to it – she would never say that dirty word: Chinese. Grandmother Pemberton, we knew, had been born in Hong Kong; her father, Louie Wing Tock, had come out in the first gold rush, when Grandmother was ten, first to Bendigo in Victoria and then north, following the finds, following prosperity. He was a bedtime story, a mystery with too few clues, a greengrocer whose bones were sent ‘home’ when he died, a traditional gentleman, a respectable businessman, and there was never a mention that we are Chinese too, where precisely ‘home’ might be, or what circumstance caused him to bring his small daughter alone to this place in 1853 – disguised as a boy. Along this very road: they would have travelled it too, at some time. I want to claim this road as mine. Ours.
‘We didn’t come this way going to the Hill, though, did we – it was on the way back,’ Gret says now, memories drifting into dreams. ‘Wasn’t it a lovely time, Ryl?’
‘It was. The loveliest.’ Dream: our last precious time with Mother and Papa. We rock inside their love, along our last road here, with them. Real: it was the third of December, 1895, a Tuesday, when they met us in Sydney, at school, at St Cat’s. I’d received the Junior Mathematics prize, and Mother and Papa had arrived especially in time for the end-of-year awards ceremony. Papa was so happy he was springing from foot to foot in the courtyard, grin chewing down on his pipe, as keen to be away from the school and off on our holiday as to see me applauded, while Greta was working very hard at pretending
not to care that I had won anything at all. Mother was a little bit sad around the edges of her smile: it was the first time we’d seen her since the news that Grandpa Pemberton had passed away, snuggled up in his sleep, earlier in the term, and we were going straight out to the grave at Gulgong first: snuggled up now as he was with Grandmother who had gone the year before. We’d stayed a few days there, at Mother’s family home, to see to Libby’s roses, neglected through Grandpa’s final bout of pneumonia and then her sudden honeymoon. The garden was overrun with them, Aunt Libby’s scarlet tea roses devouring the front steps of the house, and the dahlias around the verandah beds were overgrown with ryegrass, which we all set to pulling out. I got terribly sunburned along my arms doing it; Black as an old coolie, Mother scolded, placing roses in the vase of her parents’ headstone. Then we came down through Mudgee to the Hill, to that sweetest time of fizzy ginger beer and mermaid calliope tunes, so very happy all of us, stomach aching from too much laughter, and too many apricots. Fairy floss sticking to my teeth at a bustling, dusty fair somewhere there; chocolate ice cream dripping all down Greta’s new gloves. Papa had some business at Tambaroora then and when he came back he hired a well-sprung phaeton to bring us from the Hill to Bathurst, along this Bridle Track.
Here is the fork, the signpost to it now: