The Light Horseman's Daughter

by David Crookes

  ‘What the hell is going on here?’ the auctioneer shouted.

  The advancing rider didn’t reply. When he reached the crowd it parted to allow him and his companions through. When he reached the wagon he swung his mount to face the crowd.

  ‘I am Lieutenant Charles Parson, retired,’ he called out in a deep cultured voice ‘And these gentlemen,’ he gestured with his free hand to his companions on the ground, ‘are Sergeant William Jones and Corporal Michael Parry. Each of us had the honor of serving overseas in the Great War with the Australian Light Horse in a squadron commanded by the late Captain Jack McKenna, the dispossessed owner of this property.’

  Another loud murmur ran through the crowd. Emma and Braithewaite turned to each other in surprise.

  ‘And we are here today,’ Snakeoil continued, ‘to say a few words on behalf of Captain McKenna who, as some of you may be aware, was shot to death at this place, his honorable and decent life brutally snuffed out long before his time.’ Snakeoil’s loud voice rose with the fervor of an impassioned evangelist. ‘And his death was not at the hands of the Huns or the Turks on some foreign battlefield, but at the hands of his own countrymen who, in their ungodly pursuit of the filthy lucre, that awful root of all evil, watched this gallant soldier’s blood pump from his veins onto the very dirt on which you are now standing.’

  There was another rumble of consternation from the crowd. Some of the onlookers even glanced down at the ground around them, as if expecting to see some bloody evidence of Snakeoil’s impassioned revelation.

  The crowd fell silent again.

  Snakeoil seized the moment.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen. Captain McKenna was a courageous man, a true patriot, a third generation Australian who swiftly answered his country’s call in her hour of need. In the Great War, Captain Jack McKenna carried Australia’s banner proudly to North Africa. He and his comrades in the Light Horse fought fiercely in those distant, war-torn lands to ensure the well-being of Australia and the families they left behind. Many young men died in pursuit of that noble cause, including Jack McKenna’s three brothers.’

  Snakeoil paused for a few moments. His eyes raked through the crowd.

  ‘Now,’ his voice rose again. ‘Are there any among you who would seek to profit from the death of such a man? Are there any among you who would deny what remains of the McKenna family a fair price for their property and the worldly goods that Jack McKenna’s murderers are offering up for sale today?’

  The crowd remained silent.

  ‘Well, is there?’ Snakeoil shouted. He rose to his full height in the stirrups, his service .303 rifle in his hand.

  Several people began to drift away towards their parked vehicles.

  Snakeoil lowered himself back into the saddle. As he did, he swayed unsteadily from side to side. His imbalance didn’t go unnoticed by Gerald Braithewaite. He turned to Emma. ‘Good God,’ he said in amazement. ‘The man’s drunk as a lord.’

  Engines coughed to life in many of the parked vehicles and several of them began to pull away.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, please don’t leave.’ the auctioneer pleaded, trying to stem the exodus.

  ‘Let the vultures go,’ Snakeoil roared. ‘There will be no bones picked here today.’ He reached into his tunic with his free hand and pulled out a hip flask and raised it to his mouth. He wrenched the stopper out with his teeth and took a long swallow.

  Now that it was obvious the armed horseman was drunk and quite likely dangerous, everyone dispersed and the auctioneer scrambled down from the wagon. Only Emma and Braithewaite remained where they were as Harmony and Mike Parry moved to get a grip on the waler’s bridle. One of the departing vehicles backfired loudly, startling the old horse into rearing up. As Snakeoil tumbled, his old .303 hit the ground before him and the loud crack of the gunshot rang out.

  The sound accelerated the exodus from Yallambee and sent the auctioneer and his assistants scurrying into the house seeking cover. In minutes, the auction site was all but deserted. The only sign of the crowd which had filled the yard earlier was a mile-long dust cloud hanging over the road leading up to the ridge.

  Mike Parry eventually grabbed the waler’s bridle and led him towards the truck parked on the rise. Snakeoil, his moment of oratory glory over, lurched along behind the old waler, drunk and disheveled, his immaculate uniform now soiled with dirt and stained with spilt whiskey.

  Harmony walked over to Emma and Braithewaite. With his eye lowered and clutching his hat in front of him he said softly: ‘I’m Harmony Jones, miss. My friends and I were just trying to help. In the war, your father was our friend as well as our commanding officer. We all looked up to him, especially the lieutenant.’ Harmony raised his head. ‘Forgive him if you can, miss. Snakeoil, I mean the lieutenant, never touched a drop in the Light Horse, not even in the thick of the fighting and the killing and the bloody futility of it all. The grog came later, when he came home and tried to forget.’

  ‘There’s nothing to forgive, Mr Jones,’ Emma said. ‘I know now why you were at my father’s funeral. But may I ask you…’ Emma paused and covered her mouth as swirling dust from an unexpected wind gust enveloped them. Above them, the sun had vanished behind a black leaden sky. ‘May I ask you,’ Emma continued as the dust subsided, ‘what was it you sprinkled over my father’s coffin that day?’

  ‘It was a part of this place, miss. It was a bag of dirt from Yallambee. The captain took it to the war with him. He gave it to me one night before he led us on a raid near Gaza. He said he had a bad feeling and should he fall, I was to see to it that that soil entered his grave ahead of any foreign dirt. He said that way he could be buried on Yallambee.’

  Emma said. ‘Fortunately, his premonition was wrong, Mr Jones.’

  ‘Not entirely, miss. Most of our squadron was annihilated on that raid, including the son of Mr Braithewaite here. There were only a few survivors besides the Captain, Lieutenant Parsons, Mike Parry and me. I lost my eye and was separated from the others when they sent me to a field hospital. I kept that little bag of dirt with me ever since.’

  Another wind gust raised the dust again Now the air was markedly cooler.

  ‘They wouldn’t let me bury him here you know, Mr Jones. So your bag of dirt did serve its purpose. It was my father’s link with his home. Yallambee is an Aboriginal word for dwell or stay. My great grandfather gave this place that name when he stopped his wagon here after overlanding from New England.’

  A large single raindrop plopped onto the brim of the hat in Harmony’s hands, staining the dry felt. More big raindrops began to fall. As they intensified, they made a muffled, slapping sound as they pounded into the parched earth. Soon it was raining hard.

  Half an hour later, as Braithewaite and Emma drove back to Augathella, it was hard to see the road ahead through the deluge.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The heavy rain continued for almost a week, inundating south-east Queensland. The run-off surged down deep dry gullies and parched riverbeds, overflowing creeks and filling billabongs. But eventually the rain eased, and the sun came out again and the cracked, crusty face of the outback took on a new complexion.

  Bright green shoots of lush new grass pushed their way upward through soft, pliable ground, where only days before, parched roots lay exposed to the blazing sun, grazed down below the surface by ravenous livestock during the long drought. Long vanished fauna, suddenly reappeared as if by magic and the sight and sounds of wildlife returned to the bush.

  The rains were hailed as God’s answer to the prayers of the Queensland outback. But ironically, they only added to the misery of the hungry and homeless families, huddled under windswept, rain-lashed tents in the camps of the unemployed in public parks around Brisbane, the state’s capital.

  Always fearful of communists inciting civil disorder, the authorities kept the camps under close police surveillance and only issued sustenance rations to single men once at any given location, thereby ensuring the most dangerou
s troublemakers were always kept on the move. Many residents of homes near the camps complained they were unsanitary eyesores, harboring dole bludgers and dangerous deadbeats and demanded they be closed.

  The police preferred to control the situation by having several smaller camps rather than a huge concentration of unemployed people in any one place. But the newly formed Queensland Unemployment Workers Movement called for a single large facility providing better conditions and adhering to strict health regulations. They proposed it be set up on a large tract of picturesque, but isolated land, high up on Mount Cootha overlooking the city. The union felt so strongly about their proposal that Bill Travis, a well know champion of the unemployed in Sydney was asked to come up to Brisbane to canvass support for it.

  *

  A passenger train shuddered to a halt at the South Brisbane Station. The doors of the carriages swung open and weary travelers, many of whom had endured a long, slow ride and several train changes since leaving Sydney two days earlier, stepped out onto the platform.

  Bill Travis, a tall, lean young man in his late twenties was one of the last to alight. He wore a well-worn suit and carried an old, brown suitcase. As he made for the platform exit he favored his right leg, the price he would pay for the rest of his life for defying authority.

  In early 1929, at the start of the Depression, coal miners in New South Wales’ Hunter Valley were locked out for refusing to take pay cuts. Bill found himself on the dole—eight shillings a week instead of the basic wage of over four pounds. The collieries remained closed and the miners lived in poverty for a almost a year. Then the government announced it would re-open the mines using non-union labor. The unionists were goaded into action.

  The worst demonstration was at the Rothbury colliery. Bill Travis was in the first wave of nearly ten thousand unionists who converged on the mine, trying to stop non-unionists from working. Things got out of hand. At first the police rained batons down on the heads of the unionists. The miners started throwing stones. The police retaliated by opening fire with their revolvers. One miner was shot dead and scores of others were wounded. Bill Travis was shot in the leg.

  Although the miners lost the battle at Rothbury and went back to work for less pay and worked fewer hours, Bill became a martyr. Suddenly the working-class and the unemployed had a hero, a symbol of hope. His picture was in all the newspapers, lying on the ground holding his bleeding leg with a policeman standing over him, gun in hand.

  Since then, blacklisted by the collieries and forced to live on the dole, Bill committed himself to the causes of the poor. But his ability to unite and incite the unemployed angered the authorities who, bereft of ideas to combat the Depression and fearful of a total breakdown in law and order, branded him a seditious communist and subjected him to constant harassment.

  In 1930, Bill travelled to Perth to help organize a march of unemployed people on Canberra. The Western Australian government, in a rare display of bureaucratic nous, got rid of the problem by providing the marchers with free, one-way railway passes to the town of Norseman on the edge of the Nullarbor Plain. Stuck out in the desert in sweltering heat, hundreds of miles from anywhere, the noble but hopelessly under-financed cause quickly withered and died. Bill was determined to be more wary in Brisbane.

  Bill handed his ticket to an inspector at a small window above the turnstile in the ticket office. When he passed through into the main station hall, a scruffy barefoot youth ran over to him.

  ‘Mr Travis?

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m Tim Bennett. My father’s George Bennett of the Unemployed Worker Movement. He was coming to meet the train but the police raided the camps at dawn this morning looking for you. Dad said the coppers are going to arrest you, sling you in jail and throw away the key. He said you must get out of Queensland right away.’ The boy looked anxiously over his shoulder. ‘Go quickly, Mr Travis. I think I may have been followed.’

  Suddenly the big doors leading out onto Roma Street burst open and uniformed policemen poured into the station hall. But before they had a chance to scrutinize all the travelers inside, Tim Bennett casually ambled off, whistling as he went. And Bill quickly turned around and hurried back to the train platforms, deftly ducking down under the turnstile as he passed by the ticket inspector’s window. Minutes later, he slipped unnoticed onto an outbound train just as it was pulling away.

  *

  Emma was glad when at last the weather cleared. Any more rain would have made the roads in the district impassable and played havoc with the rural rail schedules.

  The night before she was to take the boys to Hope Farm, she stayed up until midnight mending tears, sewing on buttons and darning socks. At dawn the next morning the boys put on their old boarding school uniforms, then sat down to a good breakfast while Emma made sandwiches for the long day ahead.

  Kathleen woke earlier than usual; she seemed to realize that something unusual was going on. When the boys kissed their mother goodbye at her bedside, Kathleen’s eyes welled with tears. She raised her hand and gently touched each boy on the cheek. It was the only emotion Kathleen had shown since the shooting.

  Gerald Braithewaite had insisted he drive them to the Charleville railway station. Emma accepted, glad not to impose on the Coltranes any more than necessary. When Braithewaite arrived just after dawn, only Laura came out of the house to see Emma and the boys off.

  On the way to the station, Braithewaite said: ‘Victorian Mercantile have notified me that an offer was made to purchase Yallambee, lock, stock and barrel on the afternoon of the sale.’

  Emma was taken completely by surprise.

  ‘But that’s wonderful, Mr Braithewaite. Was it a good offer?’

  ‘I’m afraid it was considerably less than the amount owing to them, Emma.’

  Emma’s joy was short lived. ‘But they didn’t accept it, did they? I mean, what with the rain and everything.’

  ‘I’m afraid they did. As I said, it was a comprehensive offer for land, equipment, livestock and virtually everything else. They accepted it immediately.’

  ‘Do you know who the buyer is?’

  ‘Apparently some sort of an investment company. I’ve never heard of them before.’

  They drove on in silence. At the station in Charleville, Braithewaite went to buy their tickets while the boys took their bags out of the car. When he returned he gave Emma the tickets and said, ‘I’ll be here to pick you up the day after tomorrow.’

  Emma opened her purse and took out some money.

  Braithewaite waved a hand. ‘Let me pay for them.’

  ‘No, Mr Braithwaite. I still have almost thirty pounds. I’ve worked it all out carefully. I have enough money to take the boys to Hope Farm and to take Mother to Armidale.’

  Braithewaite sighed. ‘And after that?’

  ‘I’ll take one day at a time,’ Emma said pressing the money into the old man’s hand.

  A shrill whistle cut the stillness of the morning. Down the track, beyond the end of the platform, the train was approaching.

  *

  Emma knew Toowoomba well. Like her brothers, she had gone to boarding school there before her mother’s riding accident. But she never dreamt she would ever spend a night in The Sundowner, a grubby old hotel across the street from the railway station. Emma had decided to stay there because it would be cheap and the bus to Goombungee stopped outside the front door.

  The publican, a short, fat man in a sweat-stained vest, came out from behind the noisy public bar when Emma rang the bell in the foyer. He looked surprised to see two boys wearing the uniform of Toowoomba’s most exclusive boy’s school and a well-dressed young woman standing at the reception desk.

  ‘I’d like a room, please, for the three of us tonight, and just for myself tomorrow night.’

  The publican grinned. ‘This is some kind of a joke, is it, miss?

  ‘Not at all. We need accommodation and we don’t have a lot of money.’

  ‘The cheapest room is three shill
ings and sixpence,’ the publican said skeptically. ‘It’s right above the public bar and it’s noisy. And its only got a small double bed so you’ll need a cot. That’ll cost another shilling.’

  ‘We won’t need the cot. One of us will sleep on the floor,’ Emma said. She took seven shillings from her purse and put the money down on the desk.

  The publican scooped up the coins. As Emma signed the register, a tipsy patron lurched out of the bar and demanded the bartender return to draw more beer. The publican took a key from a hook on the wall and gave it to Emma. ‘Room 106, miss,’ he called out as he hurried away. ‘And be sure to bolt the door after you.’

  The room was dingy and smelled badly. A naked light bulb hung from a high ceiling over a tiny washstand. A sign on the inside of the door said water could be fetched from the lavatory at the end of the landing. One small window overlooked the street at the front of the pub and the noise from the bar reverberated up through worn linoleum on the floor.

  The boys sat down glumly on the old iron bed. Emma unwrapped the last of the sandwiches, but no one was hungry. She opened the suitcases, took out the boys’ pajamas and tossed them onto the bed. ‘You two sleep there,’ she said. ‘I’ll sleep on the floor.’

  Bruce and Jack chose to leave their clothes on and soon fell asleep in spite of the noise from the bar. Emma lay wide awake for hours on the floor on a dirty blanket she had taken off the bed. Eventually the bar closed and the last of the hotel patrons spilled out onto the street below the window and shuffled off into the night.

  A few minutes later there was a knock on the door. Emma opened it cautiously. The publican stood outside. He was holding a folded cot in his hands.

  ‘Here, miss,’ he said gruffly. ‘My wife sent me up with this. She said you were to have it and I wasn’t to charge you anything.’