And what did Ballandella think of it all?
No one ever asked. She appeared to enjoy the attention and the company of her new family, even if she was a bit intimidated by the governess at first. She saw very little of Alice and Winnie and spent most of her time in the nursery, schoolroom and gardens with Grace, Anna and Isobel. It soon became obvious that it was Isobel she liked most of all.
The Macleods’ good friend Mrs Palmer dropped by regularly to learn how ‘the little black girl’ was faring. ‘does she not get lonely at times, poor thing?’ she asked her hostess over tea and cakes one afternoon in early June. ‘Surely she must pine for her own kind?’
‘I don’t believe so, Mrs P.,’ said Winnie. ‘She is such a sunny soul.’
Mrs Palmer had thoughtfully brought one of her delicious homemade plum cakes, a favourite with the Macleod girls. Ballandella’s sweet tooth was a subject of affectionate teasing at Grangemouth and she, Isobel, Anna and Grace had swooped on Mrs Palmer’s gift like a swarm of wasps on a gooseberry pot. They now sat about the drawing room, cups and plates delicately balanced on their knees. The adults continued their discussion, seemingly oblivious to Ballandella’s presence. Isobel stole a quick glance at her new friend, absorbed in picking the plums out of Mrs Palmer’s cake with her fork.
‘Not that there are many natives left around here these days,’ observed Mrs Palmer with a sad nod of her head. ‘Most of the Sydney blacks died, of course, in the first year from the smallpox. Very sad business. You could hear men and women wailing for days on end.’
Winnie shot a quick look at her girls, worried that this topic was unsuitable for their young ears, but everyone was preoccupied with their cake and tea. Mrs Palmer liked to tell stories of her early years in the colony when she and her husband, John, the commissary-general under Governor Phillip, had started a farm in the valley beneath Woolloomooloo Hill. Sadly, John’s overfondness for parties and luxury had driven him into bankruptcy and forced Mrs Palmer into more modest accommodation.
‘Even so, one still saw blacks everywhere back then,’ she said. ‘They wandered the streets, half-naked, and turned up in our backyards and gardens to sell their fish in exchange for rum and tobacco. Up in the domain you often saw the women fishing at dusk in Woolloomooloo Bay. And now and then tribes from far and wide gathered down in Hyde Park for their “revenge” spearings, a grisly spectacle that drew huge crowds.’
Mrs Palmer told them that Governor Macquarie had banned these vulgar ’entertainments’ as unfit for his new civil order. Instead he tried to civilise the Aborigines of Sydney with a small fishing village and farm, called Elizabeth Town, near the beach at Elizabeth Bay. Here, under the guidance of an expert gardener, it was hoped the natives would learn the virtues of agricultural labour. ‘I remember families took their carriages out to the bay on a Sunday afternoon to watch the black farmers at their honest toil.’ The farm disappeared before Governor Darling granted the Rosemount estate to his Colonial Secretary.
‘Now, of course, there are only a few small settlements left,’ she said wistfully as Winnie refreshed her cup. ‘Some gunyas in the domain and around Woolloomooloo Bay. And the camps at Rushcutters, Rose Bay and Botany Bay. The last of a dying breed.’
Isobel had certainly seen blacks around these bays and even, now and then, on the Hill. There was that old crippled fellow Billy, ‘Chief of the Rose Bay Tribe’ and nicknamed ‘Ricketty dick’ for his lame gait, who sat on the side of New South Head Road, wrapped in his blanket in all weathers, collecting the ‘toll’ as white folks’ carriages rattled past on their way to Watsons Bay. In the evening, she sometimes saw the women in their fishing canoes out on Elizabeth Bay or heard the men walking along the beach, hawking their mussels and prawns.
Major Macleod had his own views on ‘the dying breed’. Like Governor Macquarie, he had a strong faith in the blacks’ adaptability to the white man’s ways (‘such nimbleness of mind, such sharpness of observation!’), which he hoped may yet prove their salvation. It was inevitable, if regrettable, that their customary existence would disappear. Their only future lay in the protection of British law. Thanks to his travels inland, the Major had seen first hand the natives’ knowledge of country, and skills as fishermen, hunters, food-gatherers and trackers. Acknowledging this native expertise, the Surveyor-General made every effort to record indigenous names on his maps for mountains, valleys, creeks and waterholes.
He admired the natives in others ways too. It had become his habit on expeditions to sketch as he sat by the campfire after a long day in the saddle. These sketches included portraits of tribesmen and women, individuals and groups. He confessed his envy of these ‘children of nature’ for their state of grace. While some natives bore ritual scars or the disfiguring marks of smallpox, the Major was particularly struck by the muscular strength and beauty of their bodies, unencumbered by clothes and so eloquently fluid in dancing, running, tracking prey. He had personally witnessed two corroborees and wrote in his journal how he found these dances more enjoyable than anything he had witnessed at Covent Garden.
Some days when Isobel and her little friend were playing together on the lawn, she would look up and catch the Major staring at them from his study window with such a pensive expression that she wondered what her father was thinking.
Though slowed a little by her limp, Ballandella loved their rambles through the wooded estate at Grangemouth. She was transfixed by the insects, plants and birds so unlike those she knew at home and befriended the four cocker spaniels who soon became her hopelessly devoted companions. The two girls spent hours together, skipping stones across the ponds, searching for anthills, wombat burrows and echidna tracks, or digging for grubs and picking seeds off the wattle bushes and shoots from the she-oaks.
Isobel had started out assuming an air of haughty superiority as Ballandella’s tutor, delighted to have someone lower in the family pecking order she could boss around. But this regime was short-lived. Not only did Ballandella put little Isobel to shame with how fast she learned English words and manners, she undertook to teach Isobel a thing or two about her own world. These other lessons were conducted in secret, out in the gardens or on the back stairs, well out of earshot of the governess. Isobel was an eager student.
‘Widyu-ndhu yuwin ngulung?’ Ballandella said at the start of each ‘class’, asking Isobel her name. ‘Yoowingaddy Isobel,’ her pupil mumbled bashfully in response. Poor Ballandella. How she bit her lip to keep from laughing at Isobel’s mangling of her mother tongue! Then, unable to control herself any longer, she fell about and howled until tears rolled down her cheeks. Isobel swallowed her pride and joined in.
Like a mirror image of the black girl’s progress, Isobel slowly mastered a few words of Ballandella’s language. She was now called ‘Mingaan’ (older sister) while Ballandella became ‘Minhi’ (younger sister). On their rambles through the estate, Isobel learned new names for horse (Yarraman), frog (Gulaanga), butterfly (Budyabudya) and snake (Gadi). She loved the feel of these strange words in her mouth.
Ballandella also drew pictures to show Isobel where she had once lived. Isobel thought these did not look so very different from the marks on her father’s maps; in place of gridlines and compass points, meandering rivers and tear-drop lakes, there were dark dots, empty circles, spirals, crosses, arrows and wavy lines to represent the mountains, campsites, bird tracks, waterholes and stars.
Most of all Isobel looked forward to Ballendella’s storytelling. After they had eaten supper, washed their faces, brushed their hair and said their prayers, the governess would sing the girls a lullaby and extinguish the lamps. It was then that the Aboriginal girl crept out of her bed and into Isobel’s room. Here, under cover of night, she whispered tales of her ancestors who strode across the land and sky, fighting, hunting, seeking food, shelter or revenge.
One of Isobel’s favourites was the story of the young Goanna woman who bravely went in search of the Goanna men’s jealously guarded reservoir of sweet water. S
he prised open their secret rock-hole in the mountains with her yam stick and released a mighty flood that became the Murrumbidya river. Ballandella warned her that, while some bush spirits were kind and helpful, Wahn the tricky Crow could never be trusted and was despised by most of the animal ancestors.
Against the odds (and, no doubt, against the unspoken rules), Isobel and Ballandella fumbled their way towards a friendship that they did their best to keep secret. But how else could this little girl become one of them if they did not become friends?
Everything appeared to be progressing according to the Major’s fondest hopes, with the native girl’s social and intellectual development thoroughly documented in his notebooks. That was until the day in July when Isobel, fiercely precocious for a girl of only five-and-a-half, had her ‘very clever idea’ and recruited two of her siblings to execute it.
Inspired by Mrs Palmer’s talk of a settlement of blacks there, Isobel proposed to lead her two fellow explorers, Anna and Joseph, and her native guide, Ballandella, on an expedition to Rushcutters Bay. In the weeks following Mrs Palmer’s visit she and her siblings began to draw up their plans. With the kind of courage and stealth that she hoped her father would admire (in retrospect, presumably) she and Joseph stole into Papa’s study one afternoon and borrowed a local map and an old compass.
The night before their party was due to depart, the children secretly packed their supplies: two water bottles, a bag of apples and mandarins, five fish-paste sandwiches, two slices of fruitcake, candles, matches, pannikins, a picnic rug and a rucksack. Joseph and Anna would carry most of these provisions strapped to their shoulders. As the expeditionary leader, Isobel carried the compass and the map as well as several specimen bottles for anything unusual they encountered along the way. Ballandella was to be the tracker, decoding the prints of interesting fauna, and the interpreter once they reached the Rushcutters Bay ‘tribe’. While Isobel suspected her brother and sister considered the whole thing a bit of a lark, she was determined to take it seriously.
The party slipped away shortly after lunch when the governess had retired for a short nap and the children were released into the gardens to play. They were all sworn to secrecy and made their excuses to their other siblings about their absences for the next hour or so. Joseph met the girls behind the tallowwood at the end of the drive and they set forth.
The expedition encountered few difficulties for the first stage of its journey as they cut through the scrub to avoid being spotted by anyone on the road. The wind got up about half past three and they sheltered for a while in a grove of red gums, eating their provisions and discussing their plans. The wind was strengthening and picking up a lot of dust but they decided to push on for another forty minutes or so before taking another rest, hidden from view in a hedge.
‘do you think they know we’ve gone by now?’ asked Anna, her face puckered with anxiety.
Joseph reassured her it was still too early to worry. ‘We’ll be back before sunset. We can just say we were picking blackberries in the gully and lost track of time.’
‘This way,’ Isobel pointed. The brave explorers made sure there was no one coming and crossed the deep rutted stretch of Darlinghurst Road. On the far side, they climbed over a low drystone wall and walked into Mr Thomas West’s thickly wooded Barcom Glen estate.
The party struggled on for at least another hour through the rough scrub and tightly packed trees as the sky grew dark with swollen grey clouds, the wind now rising to a new pitch and its cargo of dust growing thicker. Even dauntless Isobel began to lose heart as they thrashed through the prickly undergrowth in the failing light, the churning red dust caking their hair and plugging their ears and nostrils.
A sudden deafening crack brought rain descending in torrents. ‘I want to go home now,’ declared Anna, starting to sob.
Ballandella laughed at her. ‘Big baby. Cry baby,’ she hooted, tracing pretend tears down her own cheeks.
‘Hey, that’s not nice!’ shouted Joseph. ‘You bloody savage,’ he added haughtily. Ballandella must have understood his tone if not his words and her nostrils flared.
‘I go now. Leave you babies here. Bye-bye.’
‘No, no, please don’t go!’ cried Isobel, genuinely frightened for the first time. She was not confident about her map-reading skills and, to be honest, had been relying on Ballandella’s sense of direction. The black girl started to walk away. Joseph headed off in the other direction. Isobel’s expedition was almost certainly lost and starting to split apart. She did not know what to do. ‘Please, come back, Ballandella. Where are you going, Joseph?’
It was then that Isobel saw smoke rising in the distance between the trees and heard people chanting.
‘Secret blackfella business. We gotta go!’ yelled Ballandella.
Among the trees ahead they saw a face coming at them, fast. A black face with long, matted hair and features screwed into a scowl of such fury as to strike terror into the stoutest heart. Out of its mouth came a guttural flood of angry words accompanied by arms with clenched fists whirling like the blades of the windmills on the Hill.
‘We not wanted here,’ said Ballandella urgently.
‘What’s he saying?’ asked Isobel.
The Aboriginal girl shrugged, looking at Isobel as if she was mad. ‘don’t know. Just look at him face, willya?’
And then a pebble pinged through the air and struck Joseph on the arm. ‘Black bastard!’ he shouted. ‘I’ll get him.’
‘You get head bashed, more like.’ Ballandella grabbed his arm, pulling him away. ‘This fella bad one.’
The children dropped most of their provisions including the old compass and the rucksack and ran as fast as their legs could manage. The screaming man followed for a few more yards and then stopped, but the brave explorers kept running until they reached Mr West’s boundary wall. When the expedition finally found its way back to Grangemouth, the sun was long set and Ballandella was their leader. Isobel, Anna and Joseph tagged along in the dark, exhausted and miserable, dragging their blistered feet like dead weights. ‘How do you know where to go?’ asked Isobel humbly.
‘The stars, Izzie,’ Ballandella laughed. ‘Up there, look. Stars, eh?’
Their reception back home was a cacophony of relieved weeping from the women and angry shouting from the Major. All kinds of punishments were promised. At last the tempest of emotions subsided and the explorers were bathed, made to pray for forgiveness of their sins and put to bed with no supper.
There were sulky, mutinous looks exchanged between the siblings when Papa asked, ‘Whose idea was this escapade?’ But they had all agreed to share the blame and not accuse Isobel alone; the fact that they had been talked into it by their baby sister was too embarrassing to confess! Isobel did her best not to cry, setting her face like stone in defiance of her father’s temper, but in her heart she hid the true depths of her sorrow at having disappointed him. When the lamps were finally put out, Isobel filled the dark silence of her room with muffled sobs, her face buried in her pillows.
The following morning was a Saturday and she presented herself at her father’s study door to apologise. She knocked and let herself in. His mood had settled overnight.
‘Your idea, eh?’ he said, once she had made her confession. ‘An expedition. With Ballandella as your guide. I see. So, did you find what you were looking for?’
‘Not really.’
‘Often the way with expeditions,’ said the Major, supressing a smile. He should know. despite his reputed temper, he was exceptionally soft-hearted with his youngest daughter. Even at the age of four she had already shown an aptitude for drawing, and it pleased the Major to invite her into his study now and then to sit on his lap at his desk. He would bring out some of his treasures for her to admire and even sketch: fossil bones, reptile skeletons, a sea urchin (like a fragile pink pincushion), an emu egg the size of a small pumpkin and, from his mahogany specimen cabinets, trays of lepidoptera, wings pinned open in polychromatic splendour.
These visits were cherished memories for father and daughter.
The Major leaned down and looked Isobel square in the eye.
‘I understand why you did what you did, Miss Isobel Macleod. But your mother and I were frightened almost out of our wits yesterday. And poor Anna is still beside herself. You must promise me, right here and now, in the sight of Almighty God, you will never do anything like that ever again. do you understand me, young lady?’
She nodded solemnly. To seal the promise, the Major made her swear an oath on the family Bible, which he kept on the shelf behind his desk. ‘Now, off you go.’
That might have been the end of the whole matter had it not been for Winnie. When Isobel went in for breakfast, she was confronted with a petulant scowl from Anna (which was to be expected under the circumstances) and an angry frown from her sister Grace (which was not). What on earth had happened? It did not take long for Isobel to find out.
As they headed up the stairs to the schoolroom, Grace turned and hissed at her, ‘I hate you! I saw you go into his study just now. And I saw you come out, with that little smirk on your face. Papa’s little pet. His favourite!’
Isobel was at a loss for words. Grace’s face was twisted into a mask of hate unlike anything she had seen before. What had provoked this?
‘You get away with murder, you do! But not me! I’m to be punished thanks to you! Mama is furious with me for not keeping an eye on you stupid boobies. I don’t expect the black girl to know right from wrong but you three should know better! And I blame you, Isobel Macleod, most of all. For dreaming up the whole thing!’ ‘I did not! Who told you that?’ Isobel had only just made her confession to Papa. How could Grace possibly know this?
‘Shan’t tell!’ said Grace, but her eyes flicked in Anna’s direction. Anna blushed and whimpered a little. She had been easily intimidated by Winnie into surrendering the truth. Isobel later learned that Joseph too had succumbed to threats of punishment and betrayed her. Even so, the burden of responsibility for Isobel and Anna’s waywardness had fallen most heavily on their older sister Grace.
The Opal Dragonfly Page 6