The Opal Dragonfly

by Julian Leatherdale

  But she had found love—true, bountiful, impregnable, steadfast love—and that was more than compensation. despite all the trials and shocks of the recent past, Isobel felt she had escaped her family’s disapproval and the legacy of their shame. She had come through so many troubles and had at last found the refuge she had craved, a place where she was loved simply for who she was. She was happy.

  Isobel barely gave a thought to the grand dinners at Rosemount, the riches of her father’s house, the parties and suppers and dances that had once been her life’s endless round. These seemed now as insubstantial as dreams, gossamer visions that belonged to another time, fading away already to memories. She ate more simply now, slept in a smaller room in a far more modest house, did not hanker after new ribbons for her bonnets or a silk shawl or a pair of new gloves. She gave up all dance, music and language lessons except, of course, her art lessons under Charles’s tutelage. She did not drop her calling card at grand houses or pay her respects to well-bred ladies or hold afternoon or morning teas or attend society lunches. Her only connection to her immediate past was her attendance at church every Sunday (seated at the back, well away from Augustus and Grace) and fulfilment of her promise to join Aunt Louisa’s fancywork circle for the annual bazaar. She marvelled at how easily she had cast off the husk of her old life and adapted to this happier, simpler existence.

  Her reward was that life with Charles was exciting, even if, sometimes, challenging and confronting. Fascinated by what he called ‘the faces of the street’, Charles would bring home human strays, men and women he found in pubs, taverns and alleyways to be subjects for his portraits. He told Isobel that their features spoke to him of ‘spiritual suffering and beauty’. If they were poor, homeless or simply drunk, he would pay them for their time with food or beer, or, if he had any to spare, a florin or two. ‘Rembrandt did the same. He had a keen eye for faces.’

  He even encouraged his wife to join him in the studio to sketch or paint these complete strangers. Sometimes it was just their face. At other times it was their whole torso, undraped to reveal bare arms and shoulders, muscled chests, gnarled hands and mottled feet. Even naked breasts. Isobel was shocked at first, struggling to overcome her habitual gentility. But once inside the hallowed space of the studio, she quashed her self-conscious modesty. Charles explained that these sketches were not for public display. They were executed purely for the pleasure of observation and a means for instruction and experiment. Isobel became less inhibited and her timidity gave way to unbridled enthusiasm.

  Little by little, she learned from Charles that Art transcended the bread-and-butter demands of the market and good taste. She began to see that, for him and his circle of friends and acolytes, it was a calling, a way of life, a pilgrimage. Charles continued to encourage and nurture Isobel’s talents and teach her new ways of seeing, new techniques of execution. He introduced her to his bohemian circle, one by one so as not to intimidate her, and, to her delight, she felt accepted and taken seriously. Her work was admired, discussed, reflected upon alongside her husband’s and the work of others. She became known and hailed as ‘Madame Libellule’, Lady dragonfly, and signed her work as such.

  One evening, Charles came home, rubbing his hands with glee. He summoned Isobel to the parlour. ‘Someone has just bought your latest study of Woolloomooloo Bay for his own private collection. You will never guess who.’

  Isobel looked at him in amazement. ‘Who?’ He grinned. ‘Charles! Tell me! Who?’

  Charles’s grin grew even wider. ‘None other than Mr George French Angas, that’s who!’ At a salon at the Royal Hotel that evening, Charles had shown the artist his wife’s most recent pen-and-wash study of the bay. ‘The man slapped down five pounds on the spot. “It is exquisite and I must have it,” he declared. “Tell the talented lady, we must meet.”’

  Far from being diminished or threatened by the recognition of his wife’s talent, Charles was excited. This excitement assumed a new dimension late one afternoon when he arrived home to discover Isobel in the studio, working at her canvas and so totally lost in concentration that she did not even hear his approach.

  The day had been exceptionally warm. Even with the windows thrown open, the air in the studio was stifling. Tired of persistent drops of perspiration running down her face and trickling along her limbs and hands, Isobel had shed her normal skirt and blouse. In a moment of impulsive and devil-may-care daring, she had borrowed a pair of Charles’s work trousers and an old cotton shirt. She had also tied up her thick hair and tucked it under a battered canvas hat. Now she could apply her brush and control each stroke without fear of her fingers slipping or of being blinded momentarily, blinking away droplets of sweat.

  Catching a glimpse of herself in the cheval glass, she startled at the memory of her disguise on the morning of the fateful duel over two years ago. But this was different, Isobel told herself. This was not pretence or subterfuge; it was, rather, a blurring of the separate spheres, a rising above sex. Here she was, an unashamed female artist dressed in the garb of her male counterparts, unapologetically crossing into their forbidden territory of the epic and the sublime. Her first landscape in oils! This was the true nature of her transgression: as an artist, Isobel chose not to be defined by her sex, knowing that her creativity flowed from a sensuality and a spirit that transcended male and female.

  Charles entered the room and gasped. Isobel turned and smiled at him. ‘Madame Libellule!’ he sighed and took her in his arms. ‘A living flash of light indeed!’ He kissed her deeply then, and, with their mutual passions ignited, they stumbled towards the bedroom. Thus ensued such sweet, rough, untrammelled bliss! The ardour of their first love-making in the hot, blood-red light of a dust storm had returned, doubled and redoubled. There was no more that Isobel could ask for: her life was near perfection.

  In this way, married life continued as a source of daily surprise and gratification. But like any artist’s precarious existence, it was not without its trials. While he still received commissions, Charles had not yet managed to find a secure teaching position with a wealthy family. While gold lined the pockets of some families, the huge drain of labour and customers to the goldfields was still playing havoc with Sydney’s economy. Money was not always in steady supply.

  One morning over breakfast, Charles asked Isobel if there was any news of the legal proceedings in the probate court. As there was now no communication between Isobel and Grace, it was Aunt Louisa who had told her that Joseph had filed a long list of objections to his father’s will. ‘Augustus says cases like these have been known to drag on for years. We can only hope for a speedy resolution,’ said her aunt. Apart from the sentimental articles Papa had bequeathed and some small sums of money advanced on the will, the rest of the Major’s estate could not be settled on his heirs until all these matters were reconciled in law. Isobel debated with herself whether to tell Charles the bad news but decided that it was better it came from her than elsewhere.

  He nodded gravely. ‘I am sorry to hear that,’ he said. A touch coldly, she thought. Isobel felt the sharp prickle of resentment. She wanted Charles to reassure her that this was of no consequence to the happiness of their marriage. Was she being peevish?

  Despite this shortage of cash, Isobel’s life felt bright and peaceful most days. Just like the glittering green waters of Woolloomooloo Bay in the autumn sunshine that warmed her face as she stood listening to her much-loved harbour. Fears for the future might still lurk beneath this calm, sunny surface and perhaps more storm clouds of discontent hovered out on the horizon. But for now, Isobel decided to take pleasure in the quotidian loveliness of her new life.

  Every day she entered her studio, her father’s field journals sat accusingly on the bookshelf beckoning to her: I leave this true record in your hands. You will know what to do. But truthfully, she felt no inclination to open her father’s books. despite pleas from poor Aunt Louisa for her and Grace to ‘make peace’, Isobel wanted to shut the door on Rosemount and
her family and all its sad history. Was she being selfish? Her life with Charles was her one bid for happiness and she did not want to taint or imperil it with memories of the past.

  She missed her father, of course, but her feelings were not solely those of grief and regret. At times her thoughts about him had tended in another direction. If it was not for her father’s stubbornness, Joseph would not be contesting the will and stopping his siblings from now claiming their inheritance. It was her father’s pride that had led to the duel and Isobel’s fall from grace, the trigger for much of the bitterness that followed. It was her father’s vanity and overweening confidence in his boomerang-screw scheme that had drained the family coffers. It was Father’s refusal to heed advice that led to him catching the chill that killed him. The more she thought about her father in this light, the longer the list of her resentments grew.

  In this dark mood, Isobel even thought about tossing all her father’s field journals into the fireplace in the same way she was tempted to cast Winnie’s opal dragonfly into the sea. Why was she, Isobel, chosen to be the keeper of her family’s secrets while Grace got to be the mistress of Rosemount? Why on earth would she want to have these stinking albatrosses hanging about her neck? Better to throw the past away, cast it off, bury it, forget it all. Make a fresh start.

  But something held her back.

  And then one afternoon, while Charles was still out meeting with a client and she would have normally sat down to write letters or make entries in her own journal, Isobel was overtaken by curiosity. She pulled the first field journal off the shelf and began to read. By her side she kept the published accounts as well (Aunt Louisa had given her a set, signed by the Major). These accounts were the more polished narrative that had been composed from the short entries recorded in the field journals. The immediate impressions. The ‘true record’ according to her father’s message, whatever that meant.

  Almost against her will, Isobel was drawn, little by little, into the story these daily journals told. Sometimes the entries were no more than dry observations of fact (the weather, distances covered, compass bearings, geographical features) recorded in terse, workmanlike prose. But at other times there were passages written in poetic and patriotic outbursts of strong feeling. ‘We had at length discovered a country ready for the immediate reception of civilised man, and fit to become eventually one of the great nations of the earth…Of this Eden it seemed I was the only Adam, and it was indeed a sort of paradise to me.’

  As she read, the familiar sounds of the street and the bay were dimmed almost to silence to be replaced with the clamour of bellowing bullocks, creaking drays, shouting men or the cheerful thunder of cockatoos breaking cover en masse with the promise of nearby water. Isobel’s view through the window was overwhelmed by the blinding haze of outback sunlight, clearing to a vista of parched red desert or distant purple hills or the more welcome prospect of a broad, snaking river with its lovely fringe of trees.

  Isobel was particularly impressed at her father’s physical toughness and courage as a young man. In charge of a team of surly, ill-bred convicts (all promised tickets of leave at expedition’s end) and with only an assistant surveyor for civilised companionship, the Major led his large, cumbersome party of horses, cattle, sheep, bullocks, wagons and handcarts, piled high with provisions, into rugged, inhospitable country, most of it unknown and uncharted. When it rained, the heavy wagons sank up to their axles in mud or became bogged in riverbeds. Trees were cut down to make improvised roads where none existed. Most days, the Major rode out ahead of the main party with his native guide to find water (the lack of which would spell certain death) and to scout for a safe campsite protected from attack by blacks and with adequate grass and a nearby river for the stock. Meanwhile, his assistant surveyor and the convicts used chains to make their measurements, surveying the landscape they traversed each day, while every night the Major checked these figures and recorded their progress.

  Isobel came to appreciate that the qualities that caused the Major such grief in public life—his stubbornness, his pride, his excessive confidence and conviction that he alone was always right—were exactly the qualities that served him well as an explorer.

  Apart from the privations of hunger, thirst and disease, Isobel was most struck by her father’s encounters with the natives. The Major would walk out alone ahead of the main party, unarmed and bearing only a green branch as an emblem of peace, to sit or kneel upon the ground in front of a stirred-up gathering of blacks, waving their spears and fists. Even with his guides (Jemmy or Mr Brown or Tackijally) there was no guarantee these encounters, without common language or custom, would end peacefully. As these men from vastly different worlds stared at each other across a chasm of mutual incomprehension, anything seemed possible. On his first expedition, two convicts accompanying the assistant surveyor, Mr Finch, had been killed by ‘murderous savages’ and their depot plundered. On the second expedition, the colonial botanist Mr Richard Cunningham, brother to the chief scientist at Kew Gardens, became lost in the bush. His body was later found, speared and horribly mutilated. It was not surprising that fear stalked the Major’s expeditions at every step.

  Whether motivated by theft or sheer savagery, these killings profoundly changed the Major’s attitude to the blacks from one of sincere admiration to disappointed rage. His generous notions about noble, cultured natives, estimable for their musical corroborees by firelight, their skilful hunting and knowledge of the country, their hospitality and willingness to help, were all but wiped out by these cold-blooded treacherous acts. Now the blacks’ invisible presence in the bush—signalled by notches in trees or voices in the dark or smoke in the sky—was the cause for anxiety and, at times, even terror.

  As Isobel read her father’s private field journals for his second expedition, this time along the darling River, the atmosphere of foreboding became palpable. Encounters with the ‘Spitting Tribe’, as her father named them, grew ever more menacing as they communicated their displeasure by throwing dust, chanting war songs, and setting fire to the bush. They also boldly entered the expedition’s camp, pilfering supplies and jostling the men. When the Major’s expedition passed into Barkindji territory, the numbers of natives stalking the party swelled over several days and grew more vocal and restive, particularly those led by King Peter, chief of the Barkindji or ‘Fishing Tribe’ as the Major called them.

  Some months ago, Isobel had read her father’s published account of the tragedy that then occurred. On the very day the Major had decided to turn home, he heard a shot fired down by the river where five drivers were watering the bullocks. He quickly dispatched three men to investigate while he made preparations to defend the camp. More shooting was heard. An hour later, the men returned, one of them wounded and bleeding. They reported a quarrel had broken out over possession of an iron kettle with King Peter, who then struck a convict with his waddy. A second convict shot this man in the thigh, provoking an attack by a large group of blacks. In the melee that followed, a native woman, with a child on her back, was shot and killed, as well as a spearman who came to her defence. While the Major regretted the incident and felt ‘a painful sympathy’ for the orphaned child, he did not blame his men for defending themselves. despite this exoneration, he also wrote: ‘My honour and character were delivered over to convicts, on whom I could not always rely for humanity.’

  To Isobel’s surprise, this observation in the published version of this violent encounter was missing from her father’s field journal. And to her even greater astonishment, the field journal told an altogether different story from the one in the Major’s published narrative. In this other version, her father recorded that on their return to the main campsite, the convicts had told him that it was the native woman who had been the principal cause of the quarrel, arguing with the convict bullock drivers over an iron kettle. She had then called on King Peter, her chieftain, to attack the white men. In retaliation, she had been shot in the legs and lay, wounded and bleed
ing, by the water’s edge. It was then that one of the convicts killed her as she lay helplessly on the bank.

  Isobel dropped the journal to the floor, dizzy and sick with horror. She tried to banish this appalling image from her mind but could not. To murder a woman, a young mother, in cold blood: how could anyone be capable of such brutality? It could have been Ballandella’s mother shot there by the riverbank. Or Ballandella herself. This cruelty was monstrous beyond words. But what was almost as shocking to Isobel was that it was obvious her father had deliberately kept this atrocious murder secret.

  I leave this true record in your hands.

  Isobel struggled to breathe. Sweat dripped from her hairline and coursed down her neck. Though the casement was flung open, the room felt as if the glaring heat of the interior had invaded and now made her skin itch and ooze. She knew very well that her discomfort was more than physical: she felt soiled by this crime, the execution of which her own father could possibly be excused direct responsibility for but not its concealment.

  You will know what to do.

  What was she supposed to do? Make this knowledge public? Was that what her father hoped, so he could be judged posthumously? He was beyond punishment; such a revelation would hurt his children more than it could hurt him. She picked the journal up, determined to put it back on the shelf and never open it again. As she did so, an envelope that had been inserted beside the back cover dropped to the floor. With a feeling of dread, she opened it and read its contents:

  Major A. Macleod—Sir,

  I shall not mince words, sir, as you and I know the matter of which I write. Thanks to Mr Charles Sturt who recently follow’d in your footsteps down the Darling and heard the stories told by the local tribespeople there, I have learned the Truth of what occurred on your two previous expeditions through that territory. That Truth cannot be hidden any longer. I challenge you, sir, to make public the facts as you know them. There is no kind way to put this: you lied to the Governor and the Executive Council in your reports and in your official accounts. This is not the honourable conduct of a gentleman. Please understand that I have the greatest admiration for your record of service but this cannot stand unchalleng’d. You and I both know what bloody and unjust cruelty has been inflicted on the blacks of New South Wales in our merciless dispossession of their land. I am sure you would agree that the perpetrators of such acts of brutal violence must be held accountable. I sincerely hope that you will correct the public record regarding these tragic incidents. I would hate to have to press the matter further as we both know what that could mean for your tenure of office.