by Tom Keneally
The last reach, from Tasmania along the east coast of New South Wales, would ironically have had the power to revive Jane, and we grieved profoundly she had not lingered to acquaint herself with it. It was autumn – brighter than an English summer – on that great coastline of yellow sands and surf and whales and headlands, and if no one sailed up it without doubt, no one did so without optimism. It seemed to promise that the normal rules were cancelled here.
Up the hill from the seaport of Sydney stood the ample three-storey Treasury, in a street named O’Connell to honour the Irish statesman, a friend of O’Meara. Our residence sat above it. ‘I’ll live above the shop, like a grocer should,’ said my father. His task was to be treasurer to the entire colony, as large as half of Russia, and to receive its incomes from customs and land taxes and other sources. He had been allotted two clerks, young Englishmen, one of whom, Harrison, had been on the Hibernia, and who, to be fair, kept the books very much in order. A third, an Irish gentleman named Croke, was a convict with the same oval features as O’Meara. Indeed, Croke was permitted to dress as a gentleman and had little doubt he was one.
We lived in a fine, healthy set of apartments where at that time of year it was normal to cast the windows open and let the sparkle and breeze of the harbour in. When one took to the streets it was normal to pass British convicts who were members of the governor’s felling gangs, whose aim was to clear the country of trees, either working up hillsides like one great tree-eating insect, or moving about the city on messages. These visible felons were called canaries, because their convict uniform always contained yellow, which stood out brightly in the street and against the background of the bush.
Let me say that the contrast was not lost on us Balcombes – this hugest island of the earth as the place of exile for small criminals, as the smallest of islands had been exile for the largest criminal or saint or hero or child or intellect of history.
Some of the convicts matched the beetle-browed, ape-like images in the London illustrated papers, but there were also fine-looking youths, and robust men though generally given to dram-drinking. Everywhere were Irish felon women in mob caps with dudeens or clay pipes clamped between their gums and squawking in the Irish tongue. The freedom of passage many of these figures enjoyed in the town (freedom somewhat in advance of that enjoyed by Fanny Bertrand on the island) had citizens of New South Wales angered, for here there were Tories and Whigs too, and I never came to terms with Tories, since all the denial and spite and suspicion of the earth seemed to be their anthem. In any case, the relative freedom of prisoners was one of the subjects that came up at dinners when early in our colonial careers we were invited widely to them.
We were invited to dinner both by the progressive news paper editors and evangelists, and by the larger Tory landholders and free merchants who valued their immaculate origins. For all wanted to hear about St Helena and the Emperor, and were only slightly disappointed to discover that we had left the island before the man’s death.
Billy Balcombe was a good citizen of the colony, founding the Turf Club along with others, endowing a grammar school, and all the rest. But we should have known that we had to choose, that our tales of the island would not be sufficient to appease either the Democrats, some of them the children of convicts – one the child of a highwayman surgeon named Wentworth – and the Exclusives, those settlers untainted by the judgement of any British courts. Because the other question was land, as ever, and how title would be granted to it. Nearly all the unredeemed massiveness of the place belonged to the Crown, though the Crown’s citizens, being robust people, were going out and taking it from the natives, and acquiring such wealth that they could actually buy their own men in the Imperial Parliament.
So to be seen as the governor’s man, as a servant of Governor Tom Brisbane, a Scotsman who loved the stars and brought his own astronomical equipment from Scotland with him, and who believed in such supposedly crazed concepts as granting of full rights to Catholics, was to be cut out of the company of the Exclusive part of the New South Wales polity. And yet, joining the Sydney Turf Club, my father was not considered of the strident Democrat party either, since as a servant of government, he could not be full-throated on these matters, as much as the principle that a child of a convict should have equality with the child of a gentleman was one that sang to his imagination.
My daughter had a convict nurse, as reasonable a girl as many a yamstock, and was invited to parties and picnics. Bessie was a solemn little creature, as Jane would have been, employed on the endless endeavour to solve the earth’s mathematics. But she was quick to laughter, and I was proud of her since she combined the best of myself and Jane. In a colony of taints, however, a taint of irregularity still attached to me. I could not pass myself off as a widow. I could say that my husband was vanished and could be presumed dead, but the stories were otherwise. New South Wales was a vast island, vaster a thousand times over than the island, and yet gossip rang around the sandstone walls that contained the town.
We assumed that our halcyon past would reassert itself anew even after it had been cancelled by so many bitter, restrictive years. My father had believed that he would hold the sort of companionable dinners in Sydney that he had in the island, but the gift for that had somehow been bullied out of him. His conviviality was no longer of the same order as it had once been. It was made edgy by what he had discovered of the world. My mother could tell it, and, barely recovered from Jane’s loss, she lacked certainty and became shrill. Her face became lined with sadness and bewilderment and the loss of a kind of certainty about how to express herself.
So my parents were unsure hosts. They depended on me to play the piano, and nothing could compensate for the absence of Jane’s tender and forgiving conversation. Our younger boys, unhappy at their grammar school in Sydney, were surly, though William, who had a post in the surveyor’s office, was of an equable frame of mind. The friendship with Saxe Bannister, which might have flourished through the connection of Jane, eroded over time, and he was discontented anyhow in his stipend, and tended to complain of the governor and dine with the Exclusives. He had found there was precious little private work for him to do, even if the Colonial Office had made a big fuss about how he would be able to take clients as well as doing the government’s work. He was coming under the spell, both by political temper and desire for better things, of families such as the Macarthurs, their son Hannibal, who clearly thought my father an odd fish and a radical, and may even have warned Bannister against being associated with him.
It was clear in hindsight that my father did not bring to the management of the colony’s finances the calm enthusiasm he might once have done, before the turmoils brought on by OGF and Name and Nature. Sir Thomas Brisbane gave him latitude, however, and was often himself accused of being more interested in stargazing than administration – this was a jibe of the Exclusive party, in any case, who had friends in the House of Commons. The starry Scotsman was complained of and ultimately replaced. A new, strenuous soldier named General Darling, a scientific Tory, not without resemblances to Name and Nature, arrived, and immediately enquired into all government departments, and chastised my father in terms that became the subject of rumours.
The Treasury of New South Wales was a most eccentric institution. From merchants and leaseholders in remoter regions arrived the requisite payments. Some of the currency my father received on the government’s behalf, land rents and customs duties included, was sterling, but some was refashioned Spanish dollars, stamped by the colonial mint to make legal tender. For more than a year the safe that contained the incomings of the revenue of the colony was located in my parents’ bedroom, an oddity that made the entire Balcombe ménage look stranger than it should have. In fact, I believe, the long years of demi-disgrace and the injustice of the government blocking my father’s access to his own assets meant that though he had great competence, he could not take the matter of colonial revenue seriously. So he had been using the Colonial Tr
easury, for example, to discount merchants’ bills, charging a modest share of the commission for doing so for himself, according to practice, and remitting the residue of the bill, when it was at last paid, into colonial revenue.
It was the board of the Bank of New South Wales who complained about him, because they thought that discounting bills should be their business, and that he should not compete in these matters. These were ironically the people who were most akin to him, the emancipists, convicts, children thereof, supporters, founders of a bank that came to dominate colonial business.
Darling himself was the last gasp of fierce Tory-dom, before the long Tory reign of England ended, a reign that had helped mark our destinies on the island and had, before ceasing, sent Darling to New South Wales.
Curiously it was Croke who was most faithful to my father, and on whom he relied most – a man transported and apparently redeemed by the experience, after being sentenced for issuing false invoices from an architecture office in Dublin, with the design of having clients pay more than his employer knew they were, he inevitably pocketing the modest difference. I liked Croke. He never made a palaver of his loyalty, he just applied himself. He took the sacraments of his church, which in his case seemed a further certificate of his honesty, and he intended to marry a Sydney school-teacher when his conditional pardon was issued. I’m sure they live now in Antipodean serenity with their Australian children.
As judges and newspaper editors fought with Darling about his imperious manners – he seemed to be a colonial Charles I – my father grew more dropsical, his limbs puffing up with fluid, his ankles bloating. Yes, drinking was a problem, yet more because it no longer pumped the machine of his nature but abraded and clogged it.
Between the town and the Brickfields, where the cemetery and the brick ovens were located, was the town of the natives, where the people who had lived in their own state of nature before the penal settlement began occupied small huts and shanties or slept in the open by fires. All the town worthies were agreed that liquor was a chief peril for these people, but someone must have collaborated with them for profit, for they seemed to acquire it with ease. They were stately men and women, these former possessors of New South Wales, and their stateliness was not entirely taken away by the habit of some of their men who wore a top hat and a jacket and nothing below it. Some of the women wore convict skirts and were bare-breasted, and yet were often healthy-looking, except for those who were the portion claimed by raw brandy, and the poor souls we generally did not see much of, who were poxed, and in whom, as innocent creatures, the pox flared more heinously than it did in any Briton. They and, of course, the convicts were the lesser class of humans in our polity, the people of whom we in our arrogance expected less, though the convicts seemed to think that their station was at least superior to that of the indigenes.
My father took eccentrically to showing a powerful interest in the two despised groups, convicts and Aboriginals. He would stop convict men, the more prognathous the better, or women, the more toothless and dudeen-sucking, and want to know where they were from, and was earnestly interested in what had earned them this place at the Earth’s end.
It became clear that my father considered himself just one more transportee, one of Britain’s rejected, and was trying to find some certainty of definition for that rejection by quizzing his fellows. At home he was distracted, if not plaintively pretending to fulfil the role of paterfamilias. One night, when he had drunk considerably, he declared that he was entitled to accommodate his friends at the Bank of New South Wales and to negotiate bills, for had not they (the British government) taken everything from him – a job, the flow of assets, a daughter.
‘I am merely taking what the Tories owe me,’ he proclaimed.
My mother argued, ‘Dear, this might prove to be a dangerous attitude to take.’
On a summer’s morning more than five years after we had arrived in Sydney, when I was away giving young colonials their music lessons, as I had been doing for the past three years, my father saw an Aboriginal with an engraved metal plate on his scarred chest proclaiming his kingship of the Broken Bay natives. This was a well-known man, very sage, very earnest, named Bungaree. While it sometimes seemed that my father sought out the more incoherent men and women to interview, Bungaree was said to possess great intelligence and coherence.
Billy Balcombe discoursed to polite Bungaree for an hour until the native was looking around, wanting to get on, an uncommon impulse in many of his kind, whose sense of time did not coincide with ours, though they could spot incipient madness as well as anyone. Very pleased after his conversation with Bungaree, my father went in to the clerks and to Croke, but when they asked him what Bungaree had said, he could not quite manage to tell them. And then, as if struck by intense recall and about to quote Bungaree’s exact account, he stood with a look of growing enlightenment on his face and fell to the floor. Over the coming days he suffered bewilderment, was tormented by gout and gastric fever both, and died, exhausted by life and bloody flux.
He was the Emperor’s final, fallen soldier and left in my map of the earth a similar vacancy to that left by OGF. But a vacancy whose edges lacerated me with remembered fragments of his jollity, hope and ultimate souring.
We bought a plot for him on the chief Anglican Church on the western ridge above the town, and all our resources, material and spiritual, seemed drained away. My father’s papers were in disorder and those of the Treasury would have been except for the clerks. Yet now we were under polite but definite notice to leave our habitation.
Tormented by her lost love and her anxiety that she had never been kindly enough to him, my mother needed to auction land-holdings my father had acquired. We had hoped at a minimum that once we settled all debts, Governor Darling would give us a further grant, a widow’s mite in the Antipodes. But he was determined we should not have it. My mother said that we must argue our case in London.
And we did. My mother, Bessie and I sailed back, but the boys chose to stay for the time being, addicted to the place, as I had been earlier to the island. I understood it. William had his eye on pastoral land to the south-west. The younger boys couldn’t wait to join him.
My little daughter remained robust on the voyage back to England. We spoke to Lord and Lady Holland, and applied to the office of the new secretary of state for the colonies. And thus our validity was recognised. Darling, or whosoever succeeded him, was ordered to consider our case compassionately, and we returned to the remote province with better hopes of a colonial living.
Could it ever match our hopes as enlarged by OGF? Could we ever be more than pensioned ghosts in the netherworld?
But Bessie, who had not been marred by earlier things, sang childhood’s songs earnestly under the Australian constellations, which shone for her without ambiguity. For she could savour any location without knowledge of what could, by comparison, belittle it or leach value from it. God be praised, she was the Balcombe who knew no better.
Some final notes on Betsy, the incompleteness of the account and remaining unnegotiable mysteries
Certainly on St Helena there were manifestations that could be most likely explained by obsessions, in the manner they have been. Mrs Balcombe and, less importantly, the strange General Gaspard Gourgaud and Dr O’Meara may have been defamed, in which case I can merely apologise to a fine woman and to the others. As for Albine, she took little trouble in concealing she was up for most adventures.
In the meantime, it is true that my present home, one the Balcombes occupied in the nineteenth century, New South Wales, a territory of exquisite weirdness and beauty, nearly went broke under William’s administration. It is hard to say because of it, since it would be difficult to excuse the collapse in London wool prices and thus Australian land prices in the late 1820s. On William’s death, his land grant of 2500 acres at a place named Bungonia, and his earlier purchase of 4000 further south in the Monaro, down towards Canberra, stocked with sheep and cattle bought in boom times
by loans from the Treasury itself (William Balcombe’s right hand endowing his left, without any other intervening authority), were handled by young William, his eldest son, barely twenty years old. William needed to manage assigned convict drovers and shepherds in rough country far from the nearest magistrate. By the time of his father’s death, the countryside was brown and deprived of grass, and of the two available Australian seasons, drought and flooding rains, drought held sway. As well, when the price of Australian wool fell in London, so did many of the plutocrats, free and convict-born.
William called the farm The Briars. Alex, the youngest Balcombe, spent time with him there, and they became accomplished horsemen. It is not within the purview of this novel, but William would sell this farm and then go gold-seeking in 1851 on the Turon River with his younger brother Thomas. There, William caught fever and died of it in 1852, and was buried in an unmarked grave with two others. Thomas, the middle brother, achieved some fame as an artist of animals, married and had three children, but suffered from mental disease and suicided in his Sydney house, Napoleon Cottage, in 1861.
It was Alex, the child who had fed laxatives to the Emperor, who now enjoyed a more pleasant existence, and after experience of the pastoral life with his brothers on the Molonglo, moved to the Port Phillip area, the future colony of Victoria or, as Baudin would have it, Terre Napoléon. He married, but left for a time his wife and young children to go and prospect for gold, before returning himself to the duller but surer regimen of a family man and a grazier. His pastoral station was on the eastern side of Port Phillip, and here he became a successful man, a magistrate and a patriarch, and built a homestead that he, too, called The Briars, now a museum.