This dream did not leave her for months. And then one morning, quite by accident, she saw a picture in the newspaper of St Matthew’s Anglican Church in Windsor, with its shingled, copper-domed spire more like a lighthouse than a church tower. ‘That’s it!’ she cried. ‘That’s where I have to go!’
By this time, my mother had turned forty, her hair beginning to grey, her body to settle into a stocky, almost mannish frame, made strong and muscular by many hours of hard work. Long gone was the aristocratic girl of her youth. After a life of such suffering, she was not a woman easily defied. And so, with great reluctance, her loyal companion Sarah agreed to go on a wild goose chase to the town of Windsor by the Hawkesbury River.
Why on earth are we here? thought Sarah as she and Clara entered the grounds of St Matthew’s on a sultry summer’s afternoon. The red brick of the church glowed in the late afternoon light. Rain clouds flocked overhead and the sky was ruddy and bruised. Without any clear thought as to why, Clara felt herself trembling. The cemetery around the church was empty except for a lone figure, head bowed in front of a headstone ten yards away. Slowly, as if sleepwalking, Clara approached her. Sarah tarried by the church portico.
The figure was a woman, her head covered in a long, shapeless cloak. Clara thought it odd that someone should be dressed so warmly on such a hot day. The woman turned towards her and Clara saw her dark skin. An Aborigine.
‘Isobel,’ the woman greeted her.
Clara thought she might faint from shock. The black woman’s face was lined and worn, her hair almost completely turned to grey. But there was no mistaking who it was.
Ballandella. Isobel’s childhood playmate.
‘I have been dreaming about you, Isobel,’ she said.
Isobel did not know what to do. She felt her child-self stirring inside her and an insane impulse to skip across the cemetery lawn and embrace her friend. Isobel’s heart was so full she barely knew what to say. So many memories overwhelmed her.
‘Ballandella,’ she said, feeling the familiar word in her mouth after so long. Where had she been all this time? Isobel had written many letters to her old playmate care of Mr Nicholson’s farm in the Hawkesbury but to no avail. Ballandella never replied. There were stories she’d married an Aboriginal man there, that they had children. Isobel had promised herself to write one last letter to Ballandella after reading her father’s journals, to find out what Ballandella had seen, what she knew. But somehow that letter never got written.
‘I have been dreaming about you,’ said Ballandella again. Her eyes fixed on the opal dragonfly that Isobel wore pinned at her breast. Isobel had felt compelled to wear it to this mysterious meeting. ‘I have been dreaming about that dragonfly. My mother told me the story. I only met her once after your father took me away. But she told me the story.’
‘What story?’
In the distance, lightning flickered through the dark, roiling clouds. Silently. A fresh wind got up and snatched at Ballandella’s long cloak.
‘The story of how your father came by the opals. did you never stop to wonder, Izzie? did you never think to ask him where he got them?’ Ballandella gave her a baleful look. Isobel’s soul withered a little under that gaze.
‘I—I—well, no.’
‘You know all those clever maps your papa made, Izzie, all those roads he built? did you know they followed the walking tracks used by us blackfellas? Think about it, Izzie. He used native guides. They took him the only way they could, one day’s ride between waterholes. Makes sense. Whitefellas would’ve died otherwise. They took him the traditional ways, our routes that go all over the country. Plenty of water and good hunting in the right season. The routes we blackfellas used for trade, for ceremony, for walkabout.’
Isobel had never thought of this. It did make perfect sense.
‘So that’s how your father found these opals. Sacred stones. For ceremony. The black one from up north in Yuwaalaraay and Gamilaraay country. The white one from near my country, Barkindji and Ngiyampaa country. So how do you think he got them?’
Isobel was at a loss for words. She had a feeling the answer was not going to be flattering to her father. ‘A gift?’
‘No, not a gift. When your father’s men killed that woman and her child by the riverbank, they found something. The man who was with that woman, he carried these stones. He was carrying them to a ceremony. When they shot at him, he dropped them as he fled.’
Ballandella looked to the horizon. The rain clouds were coming fast. ‘didn’t your papa ever tell you what happened?’
‘No.’
‘Your father found these stones on his men when they came back. Came back from murdering a woman and child. He said, “Give me the stones.” Such lovely stones. They make people want them, they are so lovely. And he agreed to keep silent about their murder, didn’t he, Izzie? That was his promise to them.’
Isobel began to cry. Secrets within secrets within secrets. This was unbearable to hear. Her mother’s gift was a blood sacrifice, not a love token. To buy her father’s silence. To cover up the great shame of his expedition. To save his name.
‘This is the story everyone knows on the darling,’ said Ballandella. ‘It is time for you to make amends, Isobel.’
‘Oh, Ballandella, please. Please forgive me. Here, here take it.’ She began to unpin the opal dragonfly from her blouse. Raindrops were falling, fat and silvery. The lightning forked over their heads and the sky growled.
‘Too late for that, Isobel. You whitefellas took ’em and made ’em yours. Took ’em out of the ground, took ’em out of our country. Made ’em into something else, eh?’
‘So what should I do?’ Isobel was weeping now.
‘Tell the truth, Izzie. Tell the truth like your father wants you to. That’s what you have to do now.’
‘Come on, it’s going to pour!’ Clara heard Sarah calling out and looked back over her shoulder.
‘Coming!’ Isobel cried.
When she turned back again, Ballandella was gone.
The lightning illuminated the newly laid headstone by which she stood. She looked on the inscription:
May she rest in peace
Ballandella
Born 1834—Died 1874
Chapter 41
ENDINGS
1905
It was Sarah who finally told me the story of the trip to Windsor. Just before she died. ‘Your mother was as white as a sheet, she was, and trembling,’ she told me. ‘I’d never seen nothing like it. She told me the whole tale. Not straight away for fear I’d think she was mad as a meat axe!’ Clara never said a word to me about it. Never has.
I heard that a few years back some kangaroo hunters stumbled on opals at White Cliffs in Barkindji country. Men went mad and staked their claims in desert as barren as the moon and so hot they lived in holes underground like rabbits. Later, a boundary rider found black opals at Lightning Ridge and started an opal boom as crazy as the gold rushes years before. The world got a taste for Australian opals and the miners came to dig up the sacred stones from this opal-hearted country.
When she got back from Windsor that day, Isobel had made up her mind. She took some of her father’s field journals off the bookshelf and wrapped them up in cloth and string. I was recruited to accompany her a week later when we took an omnibus into the city. There we entered the huge warehouse owned by Mr George Robertson, a bookseller from Melbourne. I was not a keen reader back then but even I was impressed by the immense variety and volume of books of all kinds on shelves stretching from floor to ceiling and in erratic piles all over the floor. The vast space had that peculiar musty smell composed of mouldy book leather, yellowing paper, dust, and the multiple dried-out corpses of insects.
My mother approached the young fellow at the front counter and asked to speak with the manager. ‘Can I ask what it is about?’ he asked.
‘I have some rare books I wish to sell,’ said Mother and placed her package on the counter.
The sallow youth lo
oked mildly interested. ‘Well, Mr Robertson is in the back office if you want to speak with him.’
‘Very well,’ said my mother, clearing a lump in her throat.
Mr Robertson was a friendly chap and eagerly inspected the contents of Mother’s package. ‘So you are Sir Angus Macleod’s daughter, if you don’t mind my asking?’
Mother blushed slightly. ‘That’s right. He bequeathed the full set of his field journals to me. And his sketchbooks.’
Mr Robertson looked especially interested at that point. ‘There are more journals? And sketchbooks?’
‘Yes, sir. There are.’
‘I think there is someone you should meet. He should be somewhere among all these books. He comes here nearly every day.’
Mr Robertson smiled and asked Mother and I to wait while he disappeared into one of the gloomy aisles. About five minutes later he returned followed by a pale-faced gentleman in well-cut but slightly shabby clothes, his lush beard neatly combed as was the lick of dark hair over his high, glistening brow. To me his eyes appeared piercingly bright but not unkind, accompanied by a delicate, uncertain smile. Overall, his face conveyed a mild, almost shy, expression.
‘Ladies, may I introduce Mr David Scott Mitchell,’ said Mr Robertson. ‘He is one of the most scholarly, well-informed book collectors in the city if not the whole country. He has already amassed many thousands of books pertaining to the history of the colony. I suspect he will be interested in what you have brought me today.’
‘May I?’ asked the mild gentleman, taking a lorgnette from his vest pocket, tethered there by a long cord. He approached the stack of field journals with an air of reverence, opening the first volume with the fingertips of his right hand as if touching something both sacred and fragile.
Mr Mitchell then turned the pages for several minutes in a rapt silence. He picked up the second and third volumes and did the same. The only sound that could be heard in the giant warehouse of books was the fluttering of pigeon wings somewhere high above us and the odd cough and splutter of men hidden away in the depths of the store.
‘I am a deep admirer of all your father’s works,’ he said at last. ‘His maps, his published journals, his treatises on many subjects. He is simply one of the most important figures in the history of the colony, Miss Macleod.’
‘I am Mrs Woodhouse now. But I thank you for your kind words,’ said Mother. I could tell she was fighting back tears.
‘You say you have more of these journals?’ asked Mr Mitchell.
‘I do indeed, sir. A complete set for all four of his expeditions. I also have most of his sketchbooks beginning from his time as a soldier in Spain.’
Mr Mitchell gave an explosive gasp of wonder. ‘Well, well, well!’ He could not disguise his joy, which replaced his shyness with an expression of boyish glee. ‘I believe I must pay you a visit, Mrs Woodhouse, if you would be so kind.’
‘I promise you that Mr Mitchell will remunerate you handsomely, Mrs Woodhouse,’ smiled Mr Robertson with an expansive gesture. ‘He is very particular in that regard, a most ethical and scrupulous fellow. My only regret, of course, is that I have done myself out of a tidy profit. But there are higher things at stake, are there not, Mr Mitchell?’
‘Indeed there are.’ Mr Mitchell handed my mother his card and they agreed on a suitable time and date for his visit. He noted her address in his little black pocketbook.
Mr Mitchell kept his promise and came to our humble abode in Woolloomooloo about a week later. With her habitual gentility, my mother scrubbed and tidied the house to a sparkling cleanness not witnessed in a long time and set the stack of journals and sketchbooks on the parlour table as if arranging a vase of cut flowers. I noticed that Mother double-checked a particular envelope (addressed to her father) was properly tucked into the back of one of the volumes, securing it with a dressmaker’s pin to make sure it did not slip out.
Mr Mitchell did not bother to hide his delight at these treasures. ‘Mrs Woodhouse, you have made this bibliophile a very happy man, I can reassure you. I promise you these will be looked after as lovingly as if they were my own family’s precious heirlooms. I hope that my collection may provide future generations with a comprehensive picture of the development of this fine colony of ours. And who knows? Maybe even a public library one day where any man or woman may freely study and learn the story of where they have come from and the place where they now live.’
‘Are you interested in art at all, Mr Mitchell?’ my mother asked.
I thought Mr Mitchell might faint on the spot when Mother brought out the private sketchbooks belonging to her first husband, Mr Charles Probius. The scholarly gentleman’s face became flushed as he leafed through these candid pictures of men and women, so closely observed and masterfully executed.
‘I can see no reason why these should not be seen now,’ Mother explained. ‘Most of these people will have died, I expect. And they are so beautiful!’ With a touch of pride, she pointed out several that were her own work.
‘You…you are Madame Libellule?’ asked Mr Mitchell. Mother smiled and nodded. Mr Mitchell bowed his head in a nod of sincere respect. ‘I have several of your pen and wash studies and two watercolours. I hope you are still painting, Ma’am?’
‘A little, now and then.’
That afternoon visit by Mr Mitchell changed my mother’s life in many important ways. She seemed more happy and carefree than she ever had before that day, as if she had fulfilled some promise to herself, some burdensome task that she had resolved to finish. ‘My father can now rest in peace,’ she said to me one day. ‘The truth will out.’ And that is all she would say on the subject, dismissing my questions with an enigmatic smile.
The substantial sum of money that Mr Mitchell—a man of considerable means—gave her that day was deposited in a bank account, the first my mother had ever opened in her own name. The first twenty years of her marriage to my father were filled with many episodes of genuine happiness but our household struggled to make ends meet. The next twenty years or so would be much kinder financially. Mercifully the handsome deposit in Clara’s account increased over the years and was not lost in the bank crashes of 1891. Instead it enabled Clara to buy a modest flat after her poor husband, Tobias, died in the plague year of 1900. She still lives there now, as you know.
The other blessing of that visit was that Mr Mitchell spread the word about my mother’s reputation as an artist. Within the year she had collectors knocking at her door to look at what she was working on. All this helped us as a family as well. Mother gave up her fancywork on consignment and took up her brushes and colours. ‘My Charles would be proud of me, I think,’ she sighed the first time she sent her canvases off to the framers for a small exhibition. ‘It is a shame he is not here to see his handiwork.’
It’s funny to think how stories end. My mother—born as Isobel and reborn as Clara—was a fine young lady, an educated and cultured daughter of a rich colonial family. It was painful for her to leave all that behind. To fall rather than to rise: now, that is a much harder fate to bear than the reverse. To adapt and survive in such a new, alien world must have taken more courage than I can ever imagine. She knew that nobody in Woolloomooloo would feel sorry for her. She was marked out by the way she spoke, the words she used, the way she walked, everything about her. The dragonfly Lady.
‘I crossed a chasm and had to change,’ she told me once. ‘But that chasm was as nothing compared to the one my friend Ballandella had to cross. And she survived despite the terrible price she had to pay.’
Clara could not bring herself to part with her beloved dragonfly, her only link to her past. Instead she gave it to me as a wedding gift when I married your father. I was so moved, knowing how much this brooch meant to her. ‘don’t give it to Mr Levy, the pawnbroker,’ she smiled when she handed it over. I was forgiven, at last.
I have the dreams now. Have had them for years. Such strange and powerful dreams. I shall not burden you with the details, my loves. S
uffice to say, I foresaw your births, my beautiful daughters. I foresaw Tobias’s death. And your own father’s, God bless him. I did not always understand the dreams. But I got so used to them I could not imagine life without them. And just like Clara, the dragonfly and its visions made me feel close to my mother.
The depression of 1891 came on like the giant rolling wave in one of Clara’s dreams when she was a young woman. It wiped away much of Grace and Augustus’s wealth. By then they had passed Rosemount to their daughter, Olympia, and her husband, Mr Oswell. They too had their fortune decimated and, in a scramble for cash to pay off their debts, cut up the last few portions of Rosemount’s grand estate and sold them.
It’s funny to think how stories end. The great house of my mother’s childhood now stands all by itself on a little island, not much bigger than the house itself. The Oswells demolished the service wing at the back and threw a high wall around the house for privacy with a small garden, a fountain and a square of lawn. This had once been the largest estate on Woolloomooloo Hill. Now it’s no more than a tiny block of land in the middle of busy roads and sidestreets.
Poor old Rosemount. Like a dusty diamond in a pile of dull pebbles, alone and aloof, hemmed in by cottages and terraces. Today, there’s only a handful of the villas and mansions left that had been built for Governor Darling’s ‘vision splendid’. Mother thinks this is such a funny ending. The horse-drawn carts and the trams still find it a hard grind going up William Street with its ridiculous incline to the top of Woolloomooloo Hill, all thanks to that stubborn man who defied your great-grandfather, Sir Angus Hutton Macleod. Such a clever fellow! They called the crossroads there Queens Cross for a while, in honour of Her Majesty’s Jubilee, and then just this year gave it a new name, Kings Cross. Looks like it might stick.
It’s funny to think how stories end. Clara’s story—Isobel’s story—has come around in nearly a full circle. Rosemount Hall went up for sale a few years back and the new owner, a keen art collector, didn’t know what to do with the old place. He stored some of his private collection in the back rooms (Bunnys, Longstaffs and Lamberts) and let many of the rooms out for a peppercorn rent as studios to some of his favourite artists, mostly young men.
The Opal Dragonfly Page 46