The Forgotten World
Page 15
Suddenly the double doors of the hall flew open with a bang. We turned to see not Clyde Dundas but the imposing figure of the Premier of New South Wales. We all recognised him from his picture in the Sydney Morning Herald and the Katoomba Times, and some of us recalled him from the opening of the Geological Exhibition. He was a great big bear of a fellow with a frightful scowl.
Today he looked as if he had eaten something that didn’t agree with him, a baby perhaps.
Silence fell as Sir Henry Parkes marched, or rather sailed, on big feet down the centre aisle to the dais. His face was resplendent with snowy whiskers and a long mane of hair flowing down to his shoulders. But it was his dark eyes, atop that impressive frame, that made him look like a glowering obelisk, even when the teeth appeared through the beard in a smile. It was as if Moses himself had entered the room bearing bad tidings direct from God.
He mounted the podium and faced the crowd, which had suddenly transformed from a rabble into an attentive audience. It seemed as though he filled half the stage. ‘Gentlemen,’ he began. ‘My friend Mr Goyder of the Carrington Hotel told me you were meeting here this morning, and so I have taken it on myself to come and hear what agitates you. Forgive my intrusion, but it appears you are in need of a speaker.’
This was certainly unexpected. No one in the audience moved or spoke.
‘I am a great believer in brotherhood,’ Sir Henry continued. ‘I believe in the union and fraternity of workers. Indeed, in my previous careers as labourer and ivory turner I have seen with my own eyes the vulnerability of the individual. A lone man is buried under his own weight. We have all seen what can be achieved when we work together.’
‘Hear, hear,’ called William Garbutt.
‘I would go further. I would state with utmost confidence that your cause here today is representative of a greater yearning. That is, a union of all workers, of all citizens, in all states. That is what you stand for. A federation, if you will, of individual and heretofore disparate colonies into a united, collective, federated whole.’
Clancy burped loudly.
‘Let me elucidate. The time has come on this continent for a single Australian government. The time has come for us to grow up. Why is it that the kerosene shale you men mine here in Katoomba must be shipped to Italy, Italy of all places, to be refined into the very oil we burn in our lamps? Are we so infantile that we cannot do that for ourselves? I say we are not. We are not children. We are more than capable, more than ready to manage our own industry. To forge by the labour of our own hands our own destiny.’
He paused, perhaps for applause, then, seeing he was not in the parliament and there was none forthcoming, decided to carry on. ‘We currently have a national population of three and a half million people. The American populace numbered that many when they chose to form the commonwealth of their own United States. But theirs was a baptism of fire. Surely what the Americans achieved by war Australia can bring about by peace.’
At this there were cheers and a spattering of applause. No one disagreed with him. I began to wonder if this was what we had been summoned to hear. Dundas had never spoken about Italy. Clancy was picking splinters of wood from the pew, looking at the floor.
‘Why do I believe this is so important? Because dispersed as we currently are, we are like that individual worker, with no power to negotiate or strike an equitable bargain. We are vulnerable, vulnerable to attack. From rival business interests, from greedy employers. Attack, also, from the populous nations to our north. What am I talking about? I shall tell you. It is the diligence and ingenuity of the Chinaman that threatens the very fabric of white society. I know I am not alone in believing this. Australia is the only nation, the rightful nation to be sole mistress of the southern seas. We must, in short, be prepared to defend ourselves.’
Cheers. It seemed to be the thing to do.
Sir Henry went on. ‘I know that two-thirds of the mercantile class will already vote for me. There is no need to persuade them to my philosophy. They have the notion that although I am an unfit person for business – which is true – I am the fittest of all men for parliament.’
There was laughter. He had made a joke. Clancy had reclined so far that his neck was resting on the back of the pew, his eyes now on the ceiling.
‘But I say to you,’ his voice thundered, as from a pulpit, ‘here in this house of God, that I am not the puppet of their dunghill aristocracy. It is your opinion that I value, gentlemen. The opinion of good, honest working men like yourselves, who know what decisions need to be taken, who know what is the right thing to do. Think on this. I have taken enough of your time. I wish you well in your enterprise. Gentlemen, I thank you.’
The premier stepped down from the podium. There was a burst of applause and the stamp of boot heels on the wooden floor. Sir Henry marched back down the aisle and swept out the double doors, his hair flying in the breeze of his own passage, as if he were leaving the pages of the Old Testament.
The applause died down. After a while a pew creaked. Left to our own devices, the meeting dwindled away without any real discussion as to why we were gathered there in the first place. It didn’t so much adjourn as crumble apart. There was no motion on which we could vote, certainly no resolution, no concluding words. We still didn’t know whose responsibility it was to shore up the goaf. Sir Henry had said we knew what was the right thing to do, yet no one had articulated what that might be. Had he said he’d been an ivory turner? What a strange thing to declare. And where was Dundas? I had the feeling that we had somehow been tricked.
We stepped out into the sunshine. The mist had lifted and the sun was out. Outside, vigorous, if disorganised, discussion was taking place all around. Clancy looked about at the various groupings to which he did not belong. Harv Selby and Billy Lynch also stood quietly by themselves, talking to no one. It seemed their time under the ground had drawn a perimeter around their membership among us. They knew something we did not. The aborted thing that I had sensed on the crumbled rock face was still there, or something like it, in their eyes.
It was unfortunate that Wei Sing chose that moment to wheel his barrow down the hill towards us. A number of the miners, fuelled on rhetoric, roughed him up a little, pulling his pigtail, spinning him in circles. They tipped over his cart, spilling his vegetables. Wei Sing cried out at them, but they took no notice. Onions rolled into the gutter, trodden underfoot. He struck out and someone knocked him to the ground. There was blood on his face. Three or four miners stood over him. I was horrified and yet speechless. They looked as though they were about to deliver him a good kicking when Clancy moved into their midst and said loudly, ‘Leave him.’
And because of Clancy’s new status as a survivor, they did. Wei Sing clambered to his feet. I was very proud of Clancy at that moment. Together we helped retrieve the vegetables. The laughter of the miners resumed.
It was hard for me to see how Wei Sing could threaten the very fabric of white society, scurrying after his fallen potatoes. Was this, as Parkes had said, what they knew was right? To do the bidding of the bigger fellow? The miners wandered off, some towards the Shepherd and Flock, others to the Centennial or the Biles Hotel. For once a Shady was not the brunt of the joke. The sky was bright and clear. The afternoon was ours.
After the extraordinary meeting I descended into the valley with Douglas and several of the other men. Clancy didn’t come with us, and I hoped he was all right. As we approached the settlement, stirring in its smoke, we saw three children, all Garbutts, dirty ragamuffins, emerging from the bush adjacent to Castle Head. One was Bunty Garbutt and the youngest was her sister Agnes, the waif who had been born with fifteen toes. She now skipped over the rocks with the other two, nimble as a nanny goat. The children were agitated, beckoning to us.
‘Mr Wilson, Mr Wilson.’
‘What is it, Bunty?’ asked Douglas.
‘We’ve found a sprite.’
‘A sprite, is it?’ He smiled.
‘Yes, a flying s
prite. In the bush.’
‘Is this a game now?’
‘It’s not a sprite,’ piped up Agnes, taking her thumb from her mouth. ‘It’s an angel.’
By the looks on their faces none of the men were happy to hear this news.
‘You’d best show us.’
We all followed the children off the rough track, clambering around green boulders into the shadows between the angophoras. We trailed them through their playground of moss-covered rocks and logs. They moved easily up the gradient of the talus slope towards the skirt of the escarpment. All around, man ferns grew taller than any man. Taller than three men. Turpentine trees and mountain ash loomed above us, and above them the monstrous cliffs. There were lichens and maidenhair and fishbone; what my mother called her church of ferns.
After a short climb the children stopped by a giant tree and pointed up. High above us, dangling from the swaying branches as if from a splay of witches’ fingers, as we knew there would be, was a corpse.
SIXTEEN
A dozen men from the village, some now with ropes, stood beneath the tree, looking skywards. The sun barely penetrated to the forest floor. Crusher Edwards was there, shading his eyes, even though there was nothing to shade them from. The Garbutt children had been taken back to their mother.
A throw ball attached to a string line by Abe Thornycroft was whirled and tossed high over a branch projecting above the one that held the corpse. It took several attempts to loop the line over a branch of the right thickness and height. It was a bleak business. The detail of everything was sharp and hard-edged; insects hovering in an angle of sunlight, a leaf chewed by ants.
A good rope was attached to the string line and hauled into the air like a snake charmer’s cobra. It followed the line, looped over the high branch and came down the other side. We looked around at each other. Crusher Edwards glanced about the group, cursed under his breath and summarily pointed at me. ‘Wilson. Up.’
William Garbutt said, ‘You can do it, lad.’
‘I’ll fall.’
‘You cannot fall.’
I didn’t necessarily agree. Falling was one of the things I felt particularly afraid of. I think I would rather have been buried alive in the Midnight Tunnel than be sent into the canopy on that rope, flimsy-looking to my eyes, to meet what was up there. Douglas laid his calming hand on my shoulder and I took a deep breath. I wished Clancy was here to do this ugly job; he would have monkeyed up it like, well, like Clancy. They tied one end of the rope securely about my waist and under my arms. With half a dozen men hauling on the other end I fairly walked up the trunk of the tree. It became a surprisingly simple matter, as it were, of sidestepping the branches and rising up towards the canopy; however, the rope bit deep into my stomach and around my middle.
All of a sudden I was level with the altitude of the body. Not so much cradled as clutched, it had been impaled on a splintered upward-pointing branch. My vision seemed to steam over. The sky began to spin above me. I clung to the swaying trunk. Up there the tree moved several feet in every direction according to the wind. The men below began yelling up instructions.
Hoisting my balance on the same lateral, using the rope as a mobile handhold, I was able to step away from the trunk and out along the branch. The ground was a dreadful way below, the faces staring up at me small as florins. However, the drop wasn’t as dreadful as what I approached. The chest was splayed open by the spear of the branch. There was a terrible rictus on the face, blackened with flies, snarling at the sky. The breeze blew and I had nothing but the rope to hold. I sat down astride the branch lest I fall and swing back to the rope’s vertical axis.
‘Easy does it, lad,’ Crusher Edwards called up to me.
The men belaying my weight kept the rope taut. I couldn’t look down at the ground, I felt I would be sick. There was no way to free him – or at least, it seemed to be a him.
‘Who is it?’ Garbutt called up.
‘I don’t know.’ I didn’t want to know. But I knew.
‘Can you cut the branch?’
‘I don’t have a saw,’ I called down.
Another rope was thrown up. The throw ball nearly knocked me off my perch. I looped it over a fork in the trunk above me and tied one end to the branch holding the body. I made the knot as thick as an orange. Then a saw was tied to my own rope, which I was able to haul up. It was a long and tremulous job to sit astride the very branch I had to saw through, with one hand clinging to my rope. As the saw bit through the wood and the branch began to crack and splinter, the body gave a little shudder as if it, too, were afraid to fall. The men below hauled on the second rope and took the weight.
Finally the saw was through and the other five or six men below were able to lower the branch with its morbid cargo down towards the dark earth. When it caught on a lower branch I had to wriggle the rope to free it from the snag. For a moment I felt my head spin to blackness, then soon after I felt myself swinging free and sailing lightly down through the branches as the men let the anchor rope holding me slide through their hands. Kicking out from the trunk I was able to float down like a spider on a thread of web.
The rope had scored a welt about my stomach like a little picket fence. The knot, which took a fair bit of undoing, had bruised me like a kick from a horse. I rubbed my flesh, watching the others. Some of them, old Salvationists like Garbutt, crossed themselves in the deep shade. One of them knelt to the blackened corpse, reached into the pocket of the weskit and pulled out the broken spectacles that, until recently, had been the property of Clyde Dundas.
Little happened for some moments after that. My father put his arm around my shoulders. I shook it off. I felt sick to my gills. Not because of the dizzying height I had just descended from; now it seemed that the ground was swirling beneath my feet. It was like the solidity had vanished.
Everyone recalled Dundas’s absence from the meeting he himself had called. It was strange that an absence should now appear so vivid in our minds. The sun no longer glinted through the trees. The penumbra had gone out of it. William Garbutt untied the rope that had lowered the body and the branch. He laid some bracken over it to keep the flies off.
‘Jesus wept,’ said Crusher, and not a man there disagreed with him.
Things happened quickly after the grisly find of Dundas in the trees. The events that took place over the next few days are so burned into my memory, as with a hot wire, that it’s hard to credit how long ago they happened. I have often wondered if I had acted differently then perhaps things might not have followed the course they seemed set upon. But what would I have changed? And at what cost? Perhaps I would have done nothing differently.
Dundas was stored in the Aulds’ vegetable tunnel where the temperature was cooler. The last thing Crusher did was assign a party of miners to carry the body out, and thankfully I was excused from that duty. They would do it in two days, after Crusher had got the engine house and the funicular moving again. Dundas would keep in the Aulds’ vegetable tunnel. He wasn’t going anywhere, and Crusher wasn’t about to do him any great favours. There was speculation aplenty in the village as to what might have happened to Dundas, so much so that when Clancy did not return that night we did not set much store by it. He had no doubt gone to Ann’s.
But nor did Clancy turn up for his day shift the next morning. There was no one to work the tippler, so Crusher, short-handed, was furious. His meagre concern for Dundas had diminished during the night. Again everyone had a theory as to what had befallen him, but Crusher didn’t want to hear them. He was waiting for the police, trying to juggle his remaining men to their various tasks.
Late that afternoon news came down to Aulds’ store with the butcher. Strange news that we couldn’t properly fathom. It spread across the talus slope, into and out of the mine adits. All the chambermaids working at the Carrington Hotel had been sacked.
The police were involved. Why? Don’t know. What, I wondered, about the maid called Violet Kefford? All the maids, sacked.
‘Dundas is dead?’
Here I was thinking Clancy must have been right in the thick of it, and yet I knew more than him. The light from a couple of candle stubs flickered in the hut making our shadows dance. Douglas squinted at his stew, trying to distinguish the identity of sundry lumps. Clancy sniggered, and said Douglas was going blind like the ponies. A strange thing to say just after our talk of Dundas’s death.
‘I can see as well as you,’ said Douglas. He was sensitive about his sight.
‘How many fingers am I holding up?’ Clancy held up a closed fist.
‘Very funny. How many am I holding up?’ Douglas raised the shortened stump of his missing finger.
‘Well, can you see Emma’s moustache?’ Clancy shot back.
‘I beg your pardon,’ snapped Emma.
My father gave Clancy a soft cuff over the ear and called him a poon. All his life people seemed to have been giving Clancy a cuff over the ear. Then Douglas started in on his usual lecture. There was a good lifetime’s work to be had from the mine. Did Clancy not realise that? Clancy did not. If he, Clancy, got the sack from the company who else would give him a start in all Katoomba? Douglas had just about run out of favours with Crusher Edwards. And Byron couldn’t keep covering for his work.
‘Byron doesn’t cover for my work. Do you, Byron?’
I didn’t speak. I couldn’t understand why, having come out of the Midnight Tunnel together, they were now squabbling so. As he ate, Clancy smiled secretively to himself, and I knew his attitude would give our father the sterks. Douglas sat and scowled some more at the contents of his spoon before slurping it noisily. My mother slopped more stew into our bowls. She was hurt by the comment about her moustache, which was barely visible at all. There was silence for a while, apart from the music of spoons, before Clancy belched thunderously.