As you know, I was later deeply ashamed to see you, the Major’s brave daughter, witness our contest of arms and risk her own life for love of her father. I was glad then that I had decided to keep Topar’s story secret. Was that the right decision? I still do not know.
I lay out these grim facts before you and leave it in your hands to decide the right course. Burn this letter and your father’s journals and say no more about it. Or have the truth published and let posterity be the judge. I urge neither course but trust you will find the answer in your heart and conscience.
Your admiring and obedient servant etc. & etc.,
Simon W. Davidson
Secrets within secrets.
The images this letter conjured made Isobel’s temples throb and bile rise into her throat in her horrified disgust. Putting the letter aside, she hung her head and wept with shame to think of the violence that had been visited upon this poor woman and her child. Rape, shooting, murder. What were these men not capable of? Isobel’s hand cradled the unborn child she carried as her horror shook her to her core, her body racked with tremors of fear and waves of nausea.
Isobel had learned in a more general way that the frontier had brought white settlers and blacks into conflict but, like so many other people in Sydney, she had turned a deaf ear to such stories. Others, far from feeling guilty about such atrocities, had vociferously demanded the extermination of these ‘depraved savages’ and called for the proper protection of farms and stations. Isobel was also ashamed that she knew nothing of her father’s private torments. He had faced all these challenges alone without the knowledge or sympathy of his wife or children. It was his duty, of course. ‘Just be grateful, my dear, that you were not born a man,’ her mother had said, all those years ago, when Isobel had asked about her father’s ‘troubles’.
Nothing excused the convict’s devilish and murderous behaviour, and nothing excused the lies that covered it up. Nothing excused the violence that had then issued from those lies that begat, in turn, yet more lies. What did her father actually know of these events? Isobel wondered. She could not say. But the fact that he had kept Mr Davidson’s letter, slipped inside his journal, suggested he wanted the truth to come out. did he feel responsible? Was that why he had left this trail for Isobel to follow?
Isobel recalled then her conversation with her father in the garden at Rosemount so long ago, when she had sought his blessing for her courtship. He had made a confession even then. ‘I too am not without regrets. I too have made mistakes. Terrible mistakes.’
With this new letter from Mr Davidson, Isobel could feel all the old comfortable certainties of her life slipping away. ‘My father was made a Knight of the Realm because he is good at drawing maps.’ She had happily applauded her father’s heroic explorations and mapmaking and road-building that had opened up the country for occupation. She had never spared a thought for the real cost of this settlement, in blood and sorrow and death. She had played with little Ballandella in the gardens at Grangemouth, Isobel’s much-loved home, and never stopped to consider how this girl and so many like her had lost their homes.
Yet it seemed her father knew the cost of what men like him had done in the name of civilisation and progress. In the journal for his fourth and last expedition, Isobel had come across this passage: ‘We cannot occupy the land without producing a change fully as great to the Aborigines as that which took place on Man’s fall and expulsion from Eden.’
Was this something to be proud of?
Isobel knew how it felt to be expelled from the Eden of her home at Woolloomooloo Hill, but that fall from grace was nothing compared with the bloody extirpation that Ballandella’s tribe and many others had experienced at the hands of men who followed in the wake of her father’s exploration, on his roads and with his maps.
To Isobel, knowing the truth seemed to bring nothing but regrets.
Aunt Louisa’s harsh moralising had trumped her Christian compassion and charity. In her final letter to her wayward niece, she expressed her regretful disbelief, and disappointment in ‘one for whom I had such high hopes and deep affections’. She enclosed twenty-five pounds (paying off the debt her aunt felt she owed Isobel for the Botanic Gardens painting, and thereby neatly cutting all ties of obligation). Her one other concession to kindness was to recommend Isobel to the Benevolent Asylum, which had a ‘lying-in’ wing devoted to the care of deserted and widowed mothers with infants.
It was here in the last week of August that Isobel gave birth, with the help of two midwives, to a healthy baby girl. She named her Winifred, after her mother, of course, and cried with a piquant mix of joy and sadness to behold this beautiful infant and think how much her namesake would have adored her. So little she was and so late had she arrived in the story of Isobel’s fading life as the youngest daughter of Sir Angus Hutton Macleod! As she held the newborn in her arms, Isobel knew that this Winnie would grow up in a very different world from that of Grangemouth and Rosemount. That world had already begun to assume the soft, blurred edges of memory, almost of myth.
In the asylum she was allotted a bed for the first three months of motherhood. In the lying-in wing, Isobel nursed little Winnie. The staff came and went, tending to their charges, in the long, gloomy dormitory with its high windows and rows and rows of iron beds and cots. Soon she would be expected to help with the washing and cleaning of sheets and blankets, and the cooking in the asylum kitchen. When they were fit enough, all the women here were expected to work to earn their keep. There was to be no special exemption for Isobel.
It was intimidating, verging on terrifying, at first. Isobel had never experienced such a close crush of other humans in one room; she was overwhelmed by the heat of so much flesh. Most of all, she was oppressed by the noise and the smells: the high-pitched wailing of babies, the rough, raucous talk of the women with their slack-mouthed laughter and swearing, the stale odour of sweat, the fug of foul breath, and stink of sour breastmilk, vomit and urine. Isobel’s body tried to shut itself away from all this, stopping up her ears and nose, while her mind pretended it was all a passing nightmare that would be gone by morning. But it wasn’t. This was her new life. Little by little she would readjust.
Everyone had a sad story to tell here: deserted, widowed, raped, beaten, convicted for being drunk, slatternly, unemployed, vagrant, sick, destitute. Isobel’s fall and expulsion from her Eden counted for little among so many stories of injustice and woe. She would be lucky to find a sympathetic ear for her tale of misery. Isobel could not hide what she was: an educated middle-class woman fallen on hard times. There were those who seemed to take exception to her presence as if she was taking charity away from the real ‘deserving poor’.
‘Well, it’s alright for some, ain’t it?’ whined a young woman with broken teeth and a hard, lean face, too used to pain and hunger. ‘Loads of jam and puddin’ all her life, nice silk and linen dresses, plenty of wood on the fire in winter, big ’ouse and all the pretty things she could ever want. And just ’cause her family can’t be bothered to bail her out when she’s got one in the oven, she takes a bed from one of us poor starving bitches!’
To Isobel’s surprise, two other women leapt to her spirited defence. ‘Ah, shuddup and quit ya jabberin’. It’s not ’er fault! I betcha she was one of those ladies ’oo made fancywork to keep this place goin’, didn’t ya love?’
Isobel nodded. ‘Yes, I worked on the bazaar last year to raise funds.’
‘See, I told ya so. So why shouldn’t she get a bed here like the rest of us when times are tough? don’cha listen to Mary here, she’s a nasty old mollisher, that one!’
One morning, Isobel saw a new face in the bed opposite. A young woman, careworn, exhausted, her hair as dry as straw and skin all tanned by the harsh sun. She seemed strangely familiar, a face from long ago. She held a newborn bub in her arms and sang to it.
Isobel came over and introduced herself. ‘My name is Isobel. I have a feeling we have met before.’
The w
oman looked up, wide-eyed and amazed. ‘We have indeed, Miss. I’m Sarah. I used to work at Rosemount as a housemaid.’
Isobel almost broke down and cried to find a familiar face from her past in this friendless, unhappy place. She admired Sarah’s pretty little girl—Polly—and asked what had befallen her and James since they last saw each other the night before the Major’s duel. Sarah hesitated at first but once she began to talk, she seemed glad to unburden herself.
‘Well, as you probably know, Miss, James and I tied the knot at St Martin’s and headed out for Sofala with grand plans for our future. When we got there, there was this sea of tents as far as you could see; tens of thousands of us. I’d never imagined anything like it! So we stumped up thirty shillings for our monthly licence and staked our claim. James and his brother Caleb worked on the diggings every day but most of the easy pickings on the river was all gone by the time we got there. And the mining companies had moved in to dig for the deeper gold.’ Sarah sighed, her face tinged with deep sorrow.
‘Life was hard at first, I can tell you: everything in short supply and overpriced, lots of sly grog, drinking and fighting, even on Sundays. And, of course, the flies, the rain, the cold and heat. Things settled down but it was the licence fees and the crooked “traps”—police, that is—and their “digger hunts” that really did for us! Poor James spent two nights in the lock-up for not having a licence, fined five pounds each time by the magistrate. Still, we battled on.’
Sarah’s eyes misted. ‘The final straw was that law they passed last year making everyone—diggers, shopkeepers, blacksmiths, doctors—every business on the goldfields pay their filthy thirty shillings a month.’ Her chin jutted aggressively ‘There was a big meeting, a thousand of us, up at Sofala to make our views known. This was all the doings of those rich squatters on the Council and, above all, that devil himself, Mr Wentworth—excuse my language, Miss. The next day things got ugly. They burned a dummy of Mr Wentworth and broke some windows. With a bit of luck, the Governor and his Colonial Secretary will back down.’
Isobel broke in. ‘So why are you here with Polly? Where’s James?’
Sarah’s face grew dark and tears coursed down her cheeks. ‘When things got bad, James took to the drink. He fought a lot with Caleb, who’d had enough and took off. After I fell pregnant with Pol, he began to gamble: cards, backgammon, anything. He was not my James anymore. He got into a terrible fight with a man he cheated. He was stabbed and died.’
‘Oh, Sarah!’ Isobel’s heart was pierced with pity. She had liked James, admired his spirit. And she felt indebted to him for sticking his neck out, refusing to abandon her at Lachlan Swamps. ‘I’ve come this far. I’m not leaving you alone now.’
Out of spite, Grace had dismissed Sarah and James the following morning without any references. Isobel did not blame herself then as James had made it clear he wanted to help her and that he and Sarah had cast their lot in with the westward torrent of gold-diggers. Even so, she felt wretched now, trying to pick apart her own liability in the fate of Sarah and James from their own bad luck. Whichever way she viewed it, she felt a compelling sense of debt to Sarah and her late husband. She wanted to make amends somehow.
Ever since Charles’s funeral and her quitting their house, Isobel had been forced to think about her future. She was without any friends, apart from the aged and ailing Mrs Palmer, whose time on this good earth could be counted in months, if not weeks. Isobel was also ‘skint’, as Mrs Pittman had explained to her and Aunt Louisa, with limited ready cash and no income, and no inheritance or financial help of any kind in the offing. As soon as she left the asylum she would have to find a way of earning money to feed herself and her child, a novel and intimidating prospect for a woman of her upbringing.
She entertained the idea of hiring herself out as a drawing teacher. The main obstacle was her tainted reputation and lack of references. Who would employ a fallen woman, so mired in scandal as Isobel, to teach their offspring? Thanks to the trial and the newspapers, not to mention all her previous unfortunate history, there were few wealthy families in Sydney who did not know her name. Maybe she would have to move to Melbourne and make a fresh start there as she had sometimes planned with Charles. But as a woman alone with a small child, she was condemned to be regarded with suspicion and looked down on as morally lax and untrustworthy. Maybe she should chop off all her hair and adopt the guise of a man again, like Rose de Freycinet and Rosa Bonheur, so she could restart her life and find well-paid work? There were women who did just that but Isobel feared she did not have the nerve to sustain such a life-changing transformation.
Sarah too had no references or prospects of work, nor did she have any family in Sydney. She was a single mother with a baby to feed, but young and strong like Isobel and possessed of many talents. They were two women alone in the world. Surely they could help each other? When Isobel told her own sad tale to Sarah, the young woman was deeply moved, and expressed the greatest sympathy for her former mistress’s plight. She had a good heart, did Sarah and, despite everything she had suffered, an indestructible faith in the future.
‘When we leave here, I have a house I rent in Woolloomooloo and a little money,’ said Isobel. ‘I would be grateful if you and Polly would consider moving in with me.’
‘As your maid?’ asked Sarah, her face brightening.
‘As my friend,’ said Isobel, giving the young woman’s shoulder an affectionate pat.
Sarah’s face broke into a smile and she blushed a little. ‘Why, thank you, Miss.’
‘Please, call me Isobel.’
WINNIE
Chapter 39
THE DRAGONFLY LADY
1905
I want to tell you about my mother. Your grandmother. You already know how she fell from grace, from the heights of Woolloomooloo Hill to the depths of Woolloomooloo Bay, not such a long way as the crow flies but nothing short of a chasm. How she renamed herself Clara to leave the past behind. But the story I want to tell is about how stubborn and brave she was. How, despite the odds, she managed to find contentment, and even happiness.
My father, as you know, was Tobias Woodhouse. A man married to the sea but devoted to his wife. Not an easy life for either of them. They met, quite by accident, at a Quakers’ meeting in Surry Hills, my mother’s first time there. Tobias was a midshipman then, nearly finished his apprenticeship and hoping to take his examination for lieutenant. He had decided to give up the grog and find the light. A mate had told him about the Quakers (‘good people and not too churchy’). Clara liked the look of him. Aged twenty-seven, he was three years older than her when they met and still had all his hair then, dark and wavy. But he was not too handsome; Clara had been cured of that. She joked that it was her love of uniforms that sealed the deal. ‘I always had a weakness for a man in uniform, goes back to my father. And my brother William, who was in the navy,’ she’d say.
When they met, she was living in a terrace in Woolloomooloo with her sister Sarah. Yes, great-aunt Sarah. Not her actual sister, of course, but it suited them both to be ‘sisters’ for the sake of the neighbours and to avoid any gossip. The same reason your grandmother changed her name. Here, this is a photo of me and Clara, both dressed up in our fanciest clothes. Little Winifred. Winnie. See how pretty I am, sitting on my mama’s knee. Black glossy hair, just like her. And this one is of Sarah and her girl, Polly. Yes, Aunty Pol. My cousin. Or at least that’s what we tell people. Isn’t she a beauty? Copper-red hair and such delicate, pale skin.
Until she met Tobias, life was very tough for Clara. ‘Not that it was all sunshine and roses after that,’ she’d tell us. She and Sarah did whatever they could to pay the rent and make ends meet. Sarah took in laundry, mended and made slop clothing. Clara did fancywork on consignment, supplying shops and bazaars with all manner of goods, crocheted, knitted and embroidered. Her first love was painting and she had such a good eye and nimble fingers, her fancywork was well regarded. But if it didn’t sell, well, she didn’t get
paid. She worked late into the night, stitching by the light of a candle to save money on oil.
She rarely talked about her Aunt Louisa, who she had lived with for two years before her first marriage. Louisa was her father’s sister, a Methodist do-gooder and a tough old bird who cut off her niece without a penny when Clara fell pregnant with me and her first husband died. Louisa died from an infected ulcer only a few years after that. But she did pass on one gift. ‘She taught me everything I know about fancywork. My bread and butter now!’ Clara would laugh to remember how much she had dreaded fancywork when she was younger. ‘Couldn’t stand all that fiddly stitching! And now it puts food on the table.’
She learned so many bitter lessons about what it was like on the other side of the street when her life changed. She found out that when the society ladies put on one of their fancywork bazaars to raise funds for charity, they flooded the market with so many fancy goods that hundreds of poor women like her, who worked on consignment, did not make a penny for weeks on end. ‘What a crazy, upside-down world!’ she’d say.
Six months after they met, Tobias and Clara got married. Tobias was happy to have Sarah and little Polly as part of his household. He was away at sea for long stretches and could see how much his wife and her ‘sister’ cherished each other’s companionship and shared the workload of keeping house. There were lots of families like that where we lived, with nine, ten, twelve people all crammed in together in a few small rooms.
Three years after my parents got hitched, along came my baby brother, Angus Hutton Woodhouse. Three adults and three children, with the addition of a boarder when the cash ran short, all living in one cramped, musty terrace house with a small yard out the back, a washshed and a dunny. The ceiling in the main bedroom sagged, mould bloomed on the kitchen wall, and the drains became blocked in the summer. But it was home.
The Opal Dragonfly Page 44