The Clay Dreaming

by Ed Hillyer

  Neither one made mention of Monday’s events.

  Other than to buy in fresh provisions and a newspaper, his dutiful daughter seemed reluctant to leave him alone for too long, yet by morning’s end Lambert all but insisted she go to the library.

  Returned to the British Museum, Sarah made straight for the manuscript. Halfway across the Reading-room she thought better of it. Without breaking her stride she overshot its place of concealment, performing a neat circuit of the outer catalogue stand. From this central vantage point, she discreetly searched the room. Benjamin J. Jeffery, the junior clerk, was nowhere to be seen.

  Sarah placed herself within direct sight of the manuscript. It remained precisely where she had left it. She did not take it up. Instead, she selected a seat where the accommodation was least crowded, and made for the section of open shelves designated Geography, Voyages, & Travels.

  She had been foolish enough to imagine they all walked the same path – Druce as the author of the manuscript; she, its narrator; and Brippoki, their keen listener. Wherever it was they might have been going, their roads had since separated. The figure of Druce, advancing, had cast Brippoki into the shade. Yet Druce was long dead, whilst Brippoki was alive – alive and in the flesh and night by night presenting himself in her parlour; and just as suddenly gone – as mysterious to her as when he had first appeared.

  The world that she knew was the world of books.

  Sarah resolved to read whatever material she could find on the continent of Australia and its Aboriginal inhabitants. She would go up among the mountains of that country.

  She primed her pens and jotted down quick notes as she read.

  Surrounded on three sides by vast oceans, for thousands of years the continent of Australia had remained uncharted, its very existence held in doubt. The buccaneer William Dampier became the first Englishman to visit those far-flung shores, washed up on the north coast in 1688. It had taken the deliberate efforts of Captain Cook to circumnavigate and definitively chart the nether land.

  A full century after Dampier, the First Fleet of eleven ships sailed from Portsmouth and Gravesend, establishing the first British settlement at Port Jackson, a few miles north of Cook’s landfall at Botany Bay. Church services were compulsory for convicts and emancipists – almost half of the new populace. Not long after it was built, the new chapel mysteriously burnt down.

  The Second Fleet, much more diseased and unfortunate than the First, arrived in June of 1790 – and Druce only two years after, a deportee. Even unto the present day the disagreeable practice continued. Luddites, food rioters, Chartists, and not least agitators for Irish independence, a total in excess of 160,000 souls had been transported there as convicts, almost a fifth of them women.

  According to the Reverend G. Strickland, writing in The Australian Pastor, a European population of less than 80,000 in 1840 had increased fourfold by 1851. Since that time the discovery of gold had provoked considerable rush and fever, exponential numbers of Europeans travelling to Australia in hope of making their fortune.

  What, then, of the original inhabitants? Histories of the colony were presented as the history of the country: Sarah found almost as little mention of the natives there as in the manuscript.

  Dampier, the first Englishman to meet with the Aborigines, reacted with disgust. Virtually the only remarks passed regarding them in his New Voyage Round the World were disparagements. ‘The Inhabitants of this Country are the miserablest People in the World,’ he wrote. ‘Setting aside their Humane Shape, they differ but little from Brutes.’ He thought the unknown land the most barren place on God’s earth.

  In the April of 1770, Captain Cook had witnessed evidence of occupancy. In addition to hollowed logs, and bark huts, steps had been carved into the trees for climbing them. He himself cut an inscription into a gum tree, raised the flag, and claimed the territory for England, calling it ‘New South Wales’. Cook reported the natives few in number. They were primitives who went ‘quite Naked’, living in caves and hollows in the rock, having no proper place of abode. Nomads, knowing nothing of cultivation, they wandered from place to place in small parties in search of food.

  The men and women of the First Fleet expressed less charitable opinions. Not only primitive, the Aboriginals were ‘ugly’, and ‘stupid’, ‘the most wretched of the human race’, ‘the most miserable of God’s creatures’, ‘the most miserable of the human form under heaven’ – and so on, and no more. James Dredge, a Wesleyan, testified to the awful predominance amongst them of ‘sins of the most obscene and revolting description’, without revealing what they could be; proof nevertheless that they were without God in the world, ‘entirely lost to all oral and spiritual perception’.

  No crops, no houses, no clothes…and no religion either? Could Brippoki’s heritage really be as bereft as all that? This was not at all her impression. Sarah felt sure she knew better – that he knew better.

  Could he really be so different from the rest of his people?

  Still in search of her elusive quarry, Sarah consulted the journals of early explorers into the interior. The Reading-room maintained an impressive selection. Surely here she would find the Aboriginal natives worthy of more than passing mention.

  Major Sir Thomas Mitchell, surveyor-general for the colony of New South Wales, wrote of his journey, undertaken in 1836, across rivers and mountains no white man had ever seen. Passing into what subsequently became the crown colony of Victoria, he described a country wide open and ready to be possessed. From Mount Hope to rocky Pyramid Hill, its apex a single block of granite, he reported the view over the surrounding plains exceedingly beautiful. ‘Shining fresh and green in the light of a fine morning… A land so inviting, and still without inhabitants!’

  Bounded by the ocean, it was traversed by mighty rivers – the Murray, Glenelg, and Wimmera – and watered by innumerable streams.

  ‘I was,’ he wrote, ‘the first European to explore this Eden.’

  He named these rich and fertile pastures ‘Australia Felix’, and pronounced their potential for grazing unsurpassed. When Mitchell returned to Sydney with this news, it started a land rush. The following year he was rewarded with a knighthood.

  He related little of the Aborigines, other than to say that they were ‘friendly’.

  Sarah went to retrieve Druce’s manuscript. This time she maintained a steady course. If it were noticed at any time, and handed in or reported without its shelf-mark, the work would be lost to her. She preferred to have it in view, relocated among those same shelves where she had already spent the better part of her day, alongside books more suitable to its category. Perhaps then, even if seen, it might not otherwise call attention to itself for being out of place.

  Shelving Mitchell, cross-reference led her to Ludwig Leichhardt and his Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia. She liked the name because he had the same initials as her father.

  In 1844–45 Leichhardt had trekked some 3,000 miles, from Moreton Bay to Port Essington. His party of ten included: a lad of sixteen; ‘a prisoner of the Crown’, presumably emancipist; an American Negro; and, intriguingly, two Aboriginal native guides. Their trip started out in a manner light-hearted enough, a rousing rendition of ‘God Save the Queen’ delivered as they wound their way around the first bend. The further they ventured away from the ‘squatter’ (or colonist) settlements, however, the more the details came to resemble Druce’s experience.

  Life in the Australian Bush was assuredly one of hardship and privation: hunger, desperate thirst, afflicted bowels, the shortage of a ready water supply and brutal exposure to the elements. The vicissitudes of heat and cold, an extreme variation in ground temperature between night and day, enforced their own brand of punishment. Swarms of mosquitoes and flies clung to the sores on their fingers, to the lips and ears, and even to the corners of their eyes, while small black ants crept all over their bodies and bit severely, falling into soup and tea and covering their meat. Happily, this was but part of
an overabundance of wildlife in general: kangaroos and wallabies, brush turkeys, partridge and bronze-winged pigeons in particular were very numerous. A great many scenes of natural beauty also compensated for their sufferings. Rich in game, the open country was well grassed, simple river channels flowing between chains of lakes and lagoons where the huge flocks of ducks and pelicans were said to resemble islands of white lilies. Woodland was relatively scarce, where plumed cockatoos would precede them, swooping from tree to tree and filling the air with shrill cries. They shot them for the makings of a fine soup.

  One of the gentlemen scholars, a Mr Gilbert, returned from an exploratory ride having observed the sign of an anchor cut into a tree. This he supposed done by a shipwrecked sailor, or else a runaway convict from Moreton Bay, a former penal settlement.

  Sarah held fast to her fancy that, in some sense or other, they all of them followed in Druce’s footsteps. Left to her own devices, she had at first pictured him travelling through bucolic scenery much like Epping Forest. Only later had she modified her conception in the innocent terms of a toy-theatrical backdrop; an all-purpose jungle of lush, tropical undergrowth – what, as a small child, she had called ‘jumble’ – but without any sense of the heat and flies, the blinding glare of a too-bright sun, or the twisted trunks of trees and their sticky, shining leaves.

  Leichhardt and his party adapted to Bush life with admirable swiftness. To allay hunger they swallowed the bones and feet of a pigeon as well its sweet flesh, or the blunt tail and knobbly scales of a sleeping lizard. Lacking in provisions, their clothes and harness also wore away. Without flour, without salt, miserably clothed, all were yet in good health, showing how congenial the climate was, in fact, to the human constitution. As their basic comforts declined, so their desires became more easily satisfied. Necessity taught them economy.

  There was hope, then.

  In other respects they clung to the semblance of their former existence. At night they would stretch themselves on the ground, almost as naked as the natives. Leichhardt and his two blackfellows preferred to sleep out under the stars; the others insisted on erecting their tents. Mr Phillips planted blossoming lilies before his tent, in order that he might enjoy them during his short stay.

  How like Lambert, who, denied a garden, fashioned for himself a blooming windowbox.

  Aside from the neigh of a tethered horse, and the distant tinkle of a cowbell, the stillness of the moonlit night would gradually fall across the camp. A lone cricket might chirp along the waterholes, while the melancholy wail of the curlew issued from the neighbouring scrub. As the bright constellations wheeled silently overhead, the dying fire smouldered under a large pot in which their breakfast meat was simmering.

  And yet, night by night, the lonely travellers revisited the lands they had left behind: in their dreams, they returned home.

  By day, over the crest of each new hill or around the bend of a dry riverbed, the vista, ever expanding, opened up before them. Between waterhole, creek and lagoon stretched great wastes of sandstone and scrub, much of it bleak and intractable. In places the geology sounded truly alien: high basaltic plains pebble-dashed with white quartz and an iron-coloured conglomerate, or stripes of blue clay. Lumps of coal lay readily about, like lettuces or cabbage, ripe for the picking. The landscape was one of great contrasts, some parts swamp, and others desert. Following a few hours of rain, one might wholly transform into the other. Regions that appeared barren only lay fallow, ready and waiting to spring suddenly to life.

  Hollows lay across the dry plains, pockets of rich black soil – the sediment, she assumed, having built up over time. Filled with water by a sudden thunderstorm, the seeds of the grasses and herbs that lay dormant there would instantly germinate, covering over everything with their rapid and luxuriant growth, as if by enchantment. In spite of its strange character, noted Leichhardt, this country could be most beautiful, if only watered consistently.

  Sarah relished the image.

  In his Journal, Leichhardt described fully the many and varied species of fauna and flora his party encountered. At last she was able to conjure the far-off landscape as it really must have been, and she thought it more wonderful yet.

  In Leichhardt’s account, as with Druce’s manuscript, the Aborigines were conspicuous only by their absence. One time only was a lone figure observed, running at prodigious speed across moonlit plains in the distance.

  Remote columns of smoke might be sighted in the daytime, distant fires at night, but Leichhardt’s party only ever came across native camps that had been deserted. Trees appeared recently stripped of their bark, hives with the honey cut out. The ‘Blackfellows’ who never showed themselves were meantime acknowledged as holding the intruders under frequent observation. Sarah imagined this might also have been the case with Druce; the fugitive shadowed, that shadow unseen.

  In one region, large heaps of mussel-shells covered over the sloping riverbanks, indicating a sizeable population, and one spanning successive generations. The prevalence of kangaroo and emu bones over the scarcity of human remains suggested the practice among them of the burial of their dead.

  Sarah felt somewhat reassured: Brippoki’s people were not completely without ceremony.

  She read on deep into the afternoon, until her enthusiasm began to flag. So little mention was made of the Aborigines. Even the description of Leichhardt’s own native companions never went beyond the names ‘Harry Brown’ and ‘Charley’. And then, just at the point when she was about to give up, finally they made their appearance.

  Near to a river, the sound of a stone tomahawk was heard. Guided by the noise, Leichhardt and his party discovered three black women: two digging for roots, the third perched atop a gum tree. These emitted dreadful screams on seeing the strangers approach, and swung their sticks and beat the trees as if it were wild beasts they were attempting to frighten away. The two diggers immediately ran off, and nothing could induce the lady in the tree to descend.

  The next time they approached a native party, Leichhardt sensibly quit his mount. Horses were not indigenous to that country any more than the cattle they drove with them; even the wild Bush creatures did not know how to interpret them at first sight. And yet, despite precaution and their own superior numbers, the tribesmen fled as before. Blackfellows, it seemed, could not bear the sudden sight of a white man.

  The Aborigines appeared a gentle people. On one occasion when the white camp was surrounded, and might easily have been taken by force of arms, the trekkers kept them in good humour merely by replying to enquiries in respect of their true nature and intentions.

  And yet, as it turned out, the spirit of exploration was far from Leichhardt’s only motivator. Over the course of their travels he had gone about naming and claiming the natural landscape for his many sponsors and supporters. Commercial interests underwrote almost all of his botanical notes regarding the suitability of pastureland for cattle grazing, and ultimately settlement. He had been commissioned to assess the lie of the land with an eye to its future development.

  Leichhardt, in summation, confidently declared: ‘We shall not probably find a country better adapted for pastoral pursuits.’

  Fully aware of those who would come following in his footsteps, he proceeded in total ignorance of those who already walked the open country before them.

  The natives apparently considered that same loamy black soil most especially favoured for ploughing to be the work of an evil spirit, ‘Devil-devil land’. The fertile country they perceived to be under enchantment was seen – perhaps correctly – as their curse.

  Sarah felt queasy, a knot deep down in the pit of her stomach.

  When the natives suddenly attacked, she was almost ready to admit their actions justified. Following the swift and bloody death of Mr Gilbert, however, she felt the immediate sting of remorse. The spear that terminated the poor man’s existence entered the chest between the clavicle and the neck, but made so small a wound that, for some time, Leichhardt was una
ble to detect it.

  The colonial authorities equated the shock of the party’s sudden reappearance in Sydney ‘to what might be felt at seeing one who had risen from the tomb’. Few had expected them to survive their year-long trek through the interior – as indeed not all did. Thus, their adventurous spirits were commended among the land’s first conquerors, by whose ‘peaceful triumphs’ an empire had been added to the parent state.

  Sarah closed up the book, and returned it to the shelf.

  Four o’clock. Intent on preparing Lambert something extra special for his evening meal, she quit the library early.

  Moving to close the window, Sarah froze. The sill was still filled with crumbs.

  ‘No birds came today,’ said Lambert. ‘They sense…my mortality…come.’

  Sarah took what was merely the delayed end of Lambert’s sentence as an instruction. Moving obediently to his bedside, she laid a hand to his dear head. Very aware of the age in his face, she attempted to smooth out the creases. ‘I am sorry,’ she said, ‘that you don’t feel well.’

  ‘The machine is made to wear well,’ he said. ‘That it does not, is my own fault.’

  ‘No…oh, no.’ She lightly stroked his white hair. White. It had been grey before. Even that vestige of colour had gone out of it, and she had not even noticed.

  For a time they fell silent.

  ‘There was another report,’ announced Lambert. He reached across to retrieve the newspaper from where it had fallen. ‘The Australian Eleven…have played another engagement.’

  The relevant page was thrust into Sarah’s hand as if an urgent bulletin – and, in a way, it was.

  ‘Read it!’ he said.

  ‘“June eighth–ninth,”’ she read. ‘“Australian Eleven versus Sussex.”’

  ‘Not to me, you trout!’ chided Lambert. ‘Read it for yourself.’

  The fifth match of their tour already. The popularity of the team as both novelty and draw was undiminished: Hove played host to the largest number of persons ever seen on that ground at a cricket match. A galaxy of beauty and fashion, so the article read, had graced the subscribers’ marquees. Their scarlet shirts distinguished by coloured sashes, the Aboriginal team’s form was remarked muscular and full of vigour, although several were noted rather sluggish between wickets, which was felt surprising, given their energy in other respects.