Jessica

by Bryce Courtenay

  ‘Do we honestly believe that children can recover from such an experience? That every child in that Girls’ Home will not believe that the same could happen to them? That they won’t be filled with terror so that their minds are forever numbed? Your Honour, my client, Mrs Simpson, loves her children and wishes them to grow up as decent and caring human beings. The Aborigines’ Protection Board has placed them in a position of terror and anxiety where they believe their very lives are threatened.

  ‘No democratic government, no matter how callous, can stand by and allow this to happen, to condone the control of children through fear, no matter how rigorously the statutes which control the right to steal children from their mothers are written into the law of the land.

  ‘As long as there are good men and women on this earth, as long as freedom prevails in our land, we will be judged on how we regard our children. How we treat those who cannot defend themselves. A child is not a half-caste, or a quadroon or an octoroon, or white or black, it is a small heart that can be made to trust and love or one that can be made to beat in terror and fear. Colour or breed or race doesn’t change this. We do. We control this love or we create the fear.

  ‘i ask this court to release my client’s children from this bondage of terror. Your Honour, I don’t believe it is necessary to bring yet another witness to the stand to prove what I believe has already been proved. The authority entrusted by the government to undertake the task of caring for half-caste children is patently unable to adequately undertake for their welfare.’ Runche pauses and looks about him. ‘I rest my case, Your Honour.’

  The judge turns to Francis Codlington. ‘I now ask the counsel for the defence to make its reply.’

  Codlington paces the court grim-faced, then he looks up. ‘Your Honour, what a shame that my learned colleague did not make his concluding speech in front of a jury. Why, I confess myself almost in tears, such mawkish sentimentality is wasted on so few of us. I do not propose to bring any witnesses into this court. I do not even propose to cross-question those witnesses my learned colleague has produced in an attempt to confuse the matter in hand with quite another. However, the law of this land remains inviolable, aloof from the cheapening of emotions. It is the will of the majority of the people and it is the wise counsel of the elders of our land — those men who have been chosen by us to carry out our wishes.

  I shall put my trust in it and only it.’

  Codlington pauses. ‘I am appalled by my learned colleague’s imputation that it is the wish of our people to persecute the children of this glorious land, whether they be white, black or brindle. It is precisely because we care about our children that we do not wish them to be harmed by an environment of drunkenness, malnutrition, sexual and physical abuse. The law will not tolerate this happening to our children regardless of their colour.

  ‘Now, it is common knowledge that for the most part the half-caste children of this land live in squalor, with disease and malnutrition their constant companions. Their parents do not have the sensibilities the white race enjoy and are quite devoid of responsibility. If we allow their children to come under their influence we will end with a race of wild people who put us all in danger. The half-breed has a dozen children to the single child of the full-blood and the handful of children in a white family. They simply breed like flies without regard for how they will feed the fruit of their pernicious loins. If we allow them to remain on the outskirts of society, on the fringes of our towns and cities, we will soon be overrun by this tide of human vermin. We must find a solution and this we have done.

  ‘The solution is a fair and honest one — it is even a generous one. We will take their children, these misbegotten children, and assimilate them into the white society. In this way we will give them every opportunity to succeed in life and we will have the satisfaction of knowing that they have been well fed, housed and educated at our expense in the hope that they will adopt Christian ways and live decent and honest lives. That they will marry white men and women and, in the long run, breed a race of people as white as any on God’s glorious earth.

  ‘Do we honestly believe that we can afford the process of selecting these children by giving their mothers and fathers — that is, if the father may even be found — the benefit of the doubt? What shall we do — examine the parents and if they obtain a pass-mark allow them to keep their children? It is far better to spread a wide net and to gather in a few innocents while bagging a majority of the guilty. The law is not infallible, it will make mistakes, but are they not affordable in the light of the splendid consequences planned for the mixed-blood children of this land?’

  Codlington turns to Justice Blackall. ‘Your Honour, I rest my case and put my trust in the laws of this land. They have made the British people the greatest on earth and it is a marvel that we are prepared to share the bounty of our civilisation with people of a lesser one so that their children might benefit.’

  Codlington seems well pleased with himself. Runche has not interrupted with a host of pernicious objections so that the flow of his oratory and, he tells himself, his damned fine common sense have been allowed to prevail. The day in court, which on several occasions looked blighted and where he has been wrong-footed by a man whose reputation as a drunk is only slightly less notorious than his reputation for incompetence, has been rescued by his own acuity. Codlington believes that, by relying on the solid foundations of the law and his belief and trust in the system, he has once again got himself out of the deep water into the murmuring shallows.

  Justice Blackall gives notice that he will give his verdict at half past four and retires to his chambers.

  Jessica is a bundle of nerves and Mary remains silent. There is too much resting on the outcome for her even to hope and she sits on the park bench outside the courthouse in a state of numbness.

  Moishe wonders if they have got it all wrong. Maybe they should have fought the case along similar lines to the magistrate’s hearing at Narrandera, he worries. The logic he had used there was irrefutable and he had felt at the time that had the magistrate possessed the power to release Mary’s children he would have done so. Codlington’s stonewalling had been impressive and Moishe knows that it was an accurate summation of the prevailing opinion of white Australians. Had they taken a wrong turn in trying to prove that the government institution, with the power of the law behind it, was abusing its power? Governments are not prone to censure their own instrumentalities, he knows only too well, and especially if the work of those instrumentalities is approved by a majority of the people.

  Runche for his part feels weary and he would sell his soul for a bottle of claret. He has been preoccupied with the case for nearly two years and he has lost the vanity that makes a barrister believe he can win against the odds. It has only been Jessica’s burning desire for justice that has kept him going. He’s always known that they’d only get one chance, that they would make history or disappear entirely. Runche now tells himself that David very seldom triumphs against Goliath and that they’ve probably used the wrong tactic — that they should have brought the case of Millie Carter to trial and by winning it perhaps exposed the Aborigines’ Protection Board more effectively and thereafter petitioned for a change in the law. How tired he is, how weary of it all — his bones ache, his mind is empty and he thinks only of the oblivion promised in a bottle of cheap claret.

  The court is reconvened at half past four to hear Justice Blackall read his verdict. He is careful to sum up both cases and it is clear to Moishe and Runche that the judge has clearly seen what it is they have attempted to do. Jessica and Mary are lost in the tedium of his words until finally he brings down his gavel.

  ‘I have made my decision in favour of the plaintiff, Mrs Mary Simpson. I instruct that her two children, Polly and Sarah, at present under the jurisdiction of the Aborigines’ Protection Board and in the care of the Cootamundra Domestic Training Home for Aboriginal Girls, be returned to th
eir mother. I am quite sure in my mind that Mrs Simpson’s two girls stand a better chance of living fulfilled and useful lives without the State controlling their destinies. I direct that the whereabouts of Mrs Simpson’s two youngest daughters be made known to her and that she be allowed to make the decision as to whether they will be returned to her or will remain with their foster parents.’ Justice Blackall pauses. ‘We are responsible for the administration of the laws of the land, but we seldom question whether the laws of the land are responsible. It is not sufficient that we accept every law without equivocation simply because we are its custodians. We of the law are accustomed to arguing the smallest points of jurisprudence while often neglecting to see its glaring deficiencies. The law must be based on the charitable behaviour of people rather than making people behave according to the law. Laws should be based on natural justice and not on punitive reaction, on enlightenment and not on our fear. As a judge I am charged to uphold it. As a human being I have only this last to say.’ Justice Blackall looks about him. ‘As long as history shall prevail, the love of a mother for her child cannot be replaced by an institution which will give the child a full belly and an empty heart.’ Justice Blackall brings down his gavel. ‘This court is now in recess.’

  Richard Runche turns to Jessica, takes her hand and, squeezing it, he says, ‘Jessica Bergman, my dear, you have made history.’

  Jessica turns tearfully and hugs Mary, though inwardly she mourns for her own lost child, for her precious Joey. ‘We’ve done it, Mary, we’ve done it!’ she sobs.

  THE FINAL CHAPTER

  The year is 1929 and the New York Stock Exchange has collapsed and plunged the world into the beginning of the Great Depression.

  It is also the year that Richard Runche KC doesn’t wake up one cloudless morning in mid-March. The old man is usually up at dawn for a wash by the side of the creek, whereupon it is his habit to light the fire outside the hut and put the billy on to boil. He’d make a mug of strong, dark tea sweetened with honey, just the way Jessica likes it, and then he’d wake her up.

  Jessica wakes this bright day to find the light too sharp for the hour she usually rises. The hut is stifling with the sun baking down onto the tin roof. She lies for a moment feeling confused, curious that Runche hasn’t woken her with her usual cup of tea. She dresses hurriedly and comes outside to find the lanky Englishman lying in his bed under the lean-to on his back with his hands folded across his chest and his legs stuck straight out. He looks for all the world like an ageing knight laid out in a great medieval cathedral. Jessica reaches down and touches his calm face and knows the instant she does that he is dead.

  Mary arrives later in the morning and, taking turns to dig the grave, Jessica and Mary bury Richard Runche next to Billy Simple’s gravestone and not far from one of Runche’s beloved beehives.

  The barrister born into the English nobility, whose ancestors, since the time of the crusades, have lain in the same quiet churchyard in the village of Cerne Abbas in Dorset, now lies forever beside a quiet stream under the shade of a giant river gum. Here is no green and pleasant ancestral grave, no murmuring brook or dark shade of oak. This is a landscape beautiful only to those who know that beauty must be hard-won in the mind and the eye as well as in the heart. It is a harsh, new beauty with very little antecedent poetry to till and seed the white man’s imagination. A landscape that must be viewed with an Aboriginal eye to see its colours and patterns and cunning shifts in perspective. The whitefella eye is still a long, long way from seeing this land’s dreaming and the whitefella’s heart is not yet fully opened to the high and ancient antipodean sky.

  Jessica and Mary stand over the Englishman’s grave and say the Lord’s Prayer. Both cry a little, but not for long — they loved the old man too much for a bout of rag-sodden weeping. ‘Don’t cry for me when I’m gone, my dears, I should hate that,’ he once said as they sat around the fire one night.

  ‘Don’t worry, we won’t,’ Jessica had replied cheekily.

  ‘I’ll be cranky as hell—who’s gunna bring me tea in the mornin’?’

  Mary had laughed. ‘First thing that’s gunna happen, we’re gettin’ rid o’ them flamin’ beehives of yours. I been stung that often I couldn’t count that high, even with all the education you give me.’

  Now as they sit at the rough wooden table, weary from digging Runche’s grave and saying their farewells, Jessica sips a cup of tea. ‘Well, I know he died happy.

  He told me once that getting me outa the loony-bin, and getting back Polly and Sarah from Cootamundra, and fighting for Millie Carter and seeing the matron sent to prison for murdering her were the only good things he reckoned he’d ever done.’

  ‘He didn’t take no credit for it neither,’ Mary says.

  ‘He always said it was you give him the chance to be decent for once in his life.’

  ‘He was always decent, there wasn’t a bad bone in his body. He was born decent and he died decent,’ Jessica murmurs sadly.

  Mary laughs. ‘And givin’ up the grog — that was another good thing he did.’

  Jessica smiles, remembering. ‘Not that we gave the old bugger a chance to get back onto the sauce again. Even Rusty would have stopped him going into a pub if he’d tried.’

  ‘I never seen that done before. I never seen a drunk that’s as far gone as him, that’s got them DTs, who give up drinkin’. When we brought him back from Wagga, I truly thought you was mad. I was sure we was bringing back a dead whitefella we’d only have to take the trouble to bury.’ Mary seems to be thinking. ‘And he was right about Dulcie and Katie.’

  Jessica looks up, surprised. ‘I’ve never heard you say that before.’

  ‘Well I should have told him so,’ Mary says regretfully. Jessica thinks back to the time after the court case when they’d won, and the judge had ordered the Aborigines’ Protection Board to return Mary’s children. It had taken another year before the Board finally gave them the name of the foster parents with whom the baby Katie and little Dulcie had been placed. She remembers how they’d arrived at a nice house in Gosford belonging to Kevin and Doreen Blake, a childless couple who’d fostered Mary’s two youngest children. What they’d found were two happy, healthy children clinging to the skirts of a pretty white lady who was very close to tears. Dulcie and Katie were dressed in charming little white dresses with yellow socks pulled up to their chubby knees and little patent leather shoes and they both wore a bright yellow ribbon in their hair.

  Jessica recalls how Mary rushed up to them and how the two children had backed away from her, their eyes fearful, for of course neither of them recognised the strange dark woman coming at them with her arms wide open. What a crying match that had been. The two girls were howling and clinging to their white foster mother, who was also howling and clasping them tightly. Then Mary had started bawling, not knowing what to do, and even Kevin Blake sniffed into his handkerchief, about as useful as tits on a bull.

  Richard Runche, who’d brought the papers with him to reclaim Mary’s children, sat them all down and talked things out quietly with them. It was obvious that the Blakes loved Dulcie and Katie as if they were their own and that they were truly broken-hearted at the prospect of losing them. The barrister had finally taken Mary outside into the garden, where they remained talking for nearly an hour while the sobbing continued inside the house. When they returned, a still-sobbing Mary agreed that Kevin and Doreen Blake could keep her two youngest and that they had her permission to formally adopt them. Mary had never yet confided in Jessica what Richard Runche had said to her to make her change her mind.

  ‘Mary, it ain’t none of my business, but what did the old bloke say to you, you know, about Dulcie and Katie, when he took you into the garden that time?’

  Mary looks up from her mug of tea. ‘That a tough day, Jessie. We talked a lot there in that lovely garden and then the old bloke said something that I couldn’t find no answer to. He
said, “Mary, you can’t give more love than they’ve already got.’” Sudden tears well in Mary’s eyes as she remembers. ‘He was right, Jessie. Whitefella love is the same as blackfella love. Me kids were loved, that’s all a mother can ask for.’

  At first, after the death of Richard Runche, Jessica finds it difficult to settle down. The old bloke had become part of her life and he’d always been cheerful and busy enough with his beloved bees. The honey from his eight hives is now a Solly Goldberg delicacy and Jessica would send it out in a ten-gallon milk can along with her turkeys and Solly would bottle and label it.

  REDLANDS RIVER GUM HONEY

  ‘By gum, it’s good!’

  After his death Jessica gives the hives to Mary, who now has a small income from the turkeys and bees, even though the Great Depression is beginning to bite savagely and times are hard with thousands of Australian families thrown out of work. There are men on the roads again, carrying their swags and looking for a day’s or a week’s work in return for their tucker and a little tobacco.

  And even Solly has had to reduce his weekly order for turkeys. ‘Never mind my dear, we manage. A kosher turkey is blessed by God.’ Jessica has very few personal needs and her greatest use for money is saving up to put young Polly Simpson through teachers’ training college at Wagga Wagga when she’s old enough.