by JH Fletcher
‘He said he was looking for work.’
‘None round here that I know of.’
‘It’s not right, is it?’
‘Na. But that’s life.’
And he would have turned away had she not pursued him.
‘Don’t you care? Is there nothing anyone can do?’
He stared at her as though puzzled that a person could ask such a question. Survival was what interested him, and everyone else he knew. As for the rest … Words.
‘Don’ reckon there is.’
‘But it’s —’
Your country, she had been about to say, but it was hers, too, now. Yet already she knew she would never be a true Australian. She could not swallow her anger. She had to protest, let it out.
‘You have no passion. None of you.’
Again the questing, thoughtful look. ‘Could be right.’
And he went to wash up, leaving her to vent her anger in a clatter of pots and pans.
5
Three years after their arrival Helena gave birth to a daughter. She stroked the downy head and thought how the child was the future, her offering both of defiance and submission to her husband and the land. She thought of her own faraway country and dead parents, of her cousin Guido and the aunt whom she had never liked but whom she could tolerate more easily now, enmity softened by time and distance. Aunt and cousin were doubly precious because they were all that remained of the family who had become lost to her in daily life, if never in heart and memory.
In their place she now had this child. At her insistence they named her Lucia, although to Ted and the scattering of other farmers who inhabited the area she became, inevitably, Lucy.
‘Lucy Fisher …’ Ted was delighted — you couldn’t get much more Aussie than that — while Helena kept her daughter’s true name inviolate in her heart.
Lucia, Lucia …
She watched the baby, thinking how, God willing, she would grow to become a woman. She might become famous or infamous. Might become anything or nothing. The future contained the threat and promise of all that might be, might not be. All was possible, now.
6
In later years Lucia, or Lucy, came to believe that the spirit of the mallee had entered into her even before her birth, perhaps when her father had entered her mother at the moment of her conception. In the blind, red months before memory, the unconscious awareness of the trees had flowed into her with the circulation of the blood, so that by birth she had become one with them and the mallee lands.
Without that awareness, she would have been a different being.
7
Even the coming of a baby made no difference to the remorseless cycle of the year.
For the settlers it started with the rains of April or May. Lanterns cast pools of pale light as the men — women and kids, too, where there were any — sat up late, pickling bags of seed in a solution of copper sulphate to protect it from smut. Hard bloody yakka and no error. Each bag had to be lifted into the solution and left for a minute before being hoicked out again, streaming blue rivers and as heavy as lead. Put it down, move on to the next one. The solution left blue puddles in the dirt.
Some blokes joked to their wives about it. ‘Blue blood, that’s what it is. We’ve joined the bloody aristocracy, girl.’
Right. It was the same joke, year after year, but better than a bunch of fives, which some favoured. Either way, if you spent five or six hours pickling, you knew all about it.
Each morning the men were up at four to harness the teams. At first light they were off, figures dark-shadowed against a pale sky promising heat. All through the day they worked, following the stump-jump drills as they seeded the slow acres, seeing through salt-circled eyes the ways of freedom they had chosen and that now had them by the throats. It didn’t do to think too much about it. Heads down, bums up: it was the only way.
Some bloke wrote an article about it in one of the papers. Talked about the stoic heroism of the settlers, the epic struggle against nature: whatever that was supposed to mean. Epic struggle against the pollies or the system that saw commodity prices fall while debt grew ever higher: they might have related to that. As it was …
‘Loada shit, you ask me.’
Then it was dusk. Back home through the gathering darkness, a quick wash, bite to eat, back to the pickling shed.
‘Brick short of a load, that’s us.’
Damn right.
By the time the seed was in the soil, the underground roots of the mallee were sending out fresh shoots. The men prowled the seeded acres like sentries looking for infiltrators. They went after the new growth with shoot hooks, cursing the bush for resisting them so stubbornly.
‘Don’ you worry, mate. Your time’s comin’.’
End of winter, August or thereabouts, the settlers got together to carry out the next phase of the war. A ten-foot roller on an offset linkage could clear ten acres a day. The horses’ necks bowed in the collars and the world was a concussion of shattering noise as the steel rollers smashed their way steadily onwards. By the time he got home a bloke was half deaf, with the felled timber left to dry like corpses in an unending battle.
‘Unending’s bloody right …’ Josh Conrad, the giant who was one of their closest neighbours, wiped his red and streaming face. ‘Turn your back five minutes and it’s growing again. Stand still a month, I reckon you’d not know you’d done anything at all.’
Not that there was any question of doing that.
October brought haymaking. The year was hotting up but the horses had to eat. Nowadays, where the cockies could afford to put in fences, there were sheep in the mallee and the hay might be needed for them, too, during the winter.
Some seasons there was bugger-all hay to harvest. The rabbits were another story. Some days, with all the shooting, the forest sounded like the Western Front but ammo didn’t come cheap and there was a limit to what a man could do.
Harvesting whatever the rabbits had left put paid to Christmas. Just another day for the cockie driving his team.
A six-foot stripper could clear ten acres a day. Afterwards the winnowers were dragged into the paddocks to separate the grain. That was a beaut job, no error. Shovelling grain, straw, all the crap into the machine, shaking the tray by hand for hours on end until the grain separated, while all the time the gusting wind sent explosions of chaff dust to plaster sweat-streaming bodies. More dust than man, time you’d finished for the day. And the heat … Enough to crush skulls.
The chaff was kept for feed, the grain bagged. Some time in January the bags were hauled to the railway siding for pick-up. That job could be fun, too, with the trolleys bogging down every five minutes in the sandhills that were everywhere.
Come February there was ploughing ahead of the new season, and the time for burning.
A hot day with a stiff breeze was best to get the fire going. Of course there were risks. Let the fire get away and you had major dramas. Everyone cleared firebreaks to make things as safe as they could, tipped off their neighbours, too, so that blokes knew what was going on. Nearly everyone.
8
There’s some you’ve only got to look at to know they couldn’t knock the skin off a rice pudding. Merv Hunsdale was like that. What a dill. He’d made a mess of things from the day he’d moved in: from the day he was hatched, most likely. Tried to use an ordinary plough on his place, swore it was as good as a stump-jumper. With the ground full of mallee, how was that ever going to work? But Merv was as stubborn as he was stupid. Result? He buggered up his plough, had to beg, borrow and steal from his neighbours to get by.
Let fly at a rabbit with that old .22 of his, he’d be more likely to murder a tree.
It was a miracle he survived at all but, full quid or not, he was a decent enough cove in his way, and blokes used to give him the time of day when they saw him, like he was a friendly dog.
‘How ya goin’, Merv?’
Then came the day of the fire. A stinking hot day it was, with a wind
that kept changing its mind about the way it wanted to blow. Tricky weather, even if you weren’t a brick short of a load.
Seemed that Merv had hopped out of bed, saw the sort of day it was and lit up. No firebreaks, no word to a soul. By the time it had finished, that fire had gone through six sections, burned up Merv’s shack with all his furniture and whatever cash he’d got, and had destroyed the wooden platform of Josh Conrad’s windmill, thirty feet up in the air. If the wind hadn’t gone round, driving the flames back over the burned ground so that they ran out of fuel, it would have been even worse.
It left acres of burnt-out land and smouldering stumps. It was like hell come early, with a dozen blokes looking for Merv’s blood.
They couldn’t find him. People thought he must have done a runner but a week later his body was fished out of the Murray, twenty miles downstream. He’d been skating pretty close to the edge for years and most people thought that the fire, and knowing what a muck he’d made of his life generally, was what finally put him over. Perhaps; but one thing was sure: it needn’t have ended the way it did. He had no family to worry about but he did have a horse that had somehow survived the flames. He could have saddled up and ridden away. Could have walked, come to that. There was no reason for him to have gone anywhere near the river, which everyone knew was as dangerous as a snake in a rat hole along that stretch. Yet there he was. Fire or no fire, everyone in the district turned out for the funeral. A helluva way to die: lonely in mind as well as body, if the rumours were correct.
The local vicar had doubts about holding the funeral at all, whingeing on about suicide and consecrated ground until blokes put him right.
‘Accident, Reverend. That’s what it was. Terrible tragedy. Okay?’
So it was, however it had come about.
CHAPTER NINE
1
Ever since they had moved onto the section Helena had felt stifled. She was surrounded, not only by the silently watching mallee itself but by the frustration of knowing that she was not truly a part of the endeavours that she needed so much to share. It was a man’s world — she had grown up well aware of that — yet somehow she had hoped that the demands of the wilderness would change things. They had not. Very well. She would change them herself.
She begged a couple of chooks from a neighbour. She built a run, enclosed it in close-mesh wire fencing against snakes and wild dogs. She held the first still-warm eggs in her hands and felt herself alive once more. The first eggs she gave to her neighbour, to pay for the chooks.
‘No need for that.’
‘I’d rather pay, if it’s all the same to you.’
Her courtesy was out of place. She knew it was resented — to offer payment in this country was to refuse the hand of friendship — but could not help herself: it was the way she had been brought up to think, to speak.
‘I’ll bring more.’
‘Suit yourself.’
She saw there would be no more offers of assistance from that quarter but there was nothing to be done. She was as she was, and increasingly stubborn about it. In the meantime, the supply of eggs did wonders for their diet.
2
She’d had the chooks a year now.
Perhaps they were what made the difference, giving her a sense that, different or not, she had at last become part of the life that surrounded her. Whatever it was, there was certainly a change in the way she looked at the countryside. Before, she had seen only darkness, the unspoken threat of the wilderness. Now she saw it with new eyes.
The flowers, so beautiful once she had taught herself to see them, marked the passage of the year. From another neighbour she learned their names: June’s Pink Burr Daisy, the brilliant red Noon Flowers of September, the aptly named Ice Plant that came a little later. There were the red bells of the correa, the banksia’s showy candles, the grevillea blossom with its multiple stamens like gigantic crimson insects; in spring, the airy tracery of flowering stringybark. She pointed out all these things to her child, hoping that she would absorb beauty as well as privation into her blood. Privation there certainly was. There were days when Helena’s heart was full of anguish that her child should be brought up in such a place, such circumstances, yet Lucy was a healthy child, growing and thriving despite all the odds. Mischievous, into everything, a flame amid the grass. With her dark brown hair blazing with red lights, her enormous eyes the colour of sapphire, she had the makings of a beautiful woman. Barring accidents. A mile away another child was bitten by a brown snake, was dead within the hour. It happened. Helena spoke to Ted about it.
‘What do we do?’
He scratched his head. ‘What can we do?’ Like the mallee itself, the snakes were a fact of life. ‘Just have to be careful, that’s all.’
‘How?’
But that Ted could not say.
Helena challenged him bitterly. ‘You don’t care.’
Ted did not answer. It wasn’t true but words, in the war against the unrelenting bush, were harder to find than ever. Once again he took refuge in the endless cycle of work.
3
The building of the school hall was a communal effort. No-one could say whose idea it had been but all agreed it was a worthwhile project. It would set them back close on two hundred quid, which was beyond their reach, but there was an election coming and, with luck, they’d be able to con the government into kicking in half.
It was important: not only because the kids needed an education, but because it showed faith that the soldier settlements were here to stay.
With its eye on the ballot box, the government agreed to put up fifty quid to get them going, another fifty when the hall was ready.
‘Reckon we can trust the bastards?’
The election would be over by the time they built it, so no-one was too confident of getting the full hundred, but if they wanted the hall there was no choice. So they said yes sir, no sir, grabbed the fifty and got stuck in.
They made the walls out of mixed stone and concrete, set in moulds and erected with the help of Josh Conrad’s kerosene-driven tractor, the first in the district. They fashioned joists from pine, used sheets of galvanised iron for the roof. By the time the last nail had been hammered home they’d got themselves a hall forty foot long by twenty wide, with a lean-to at the back.
They stood and looked at their work admiringly.
‘School? Big enough for an indoor footy match, just about.’
‘You never know how many kids we’ll end up with.’
‘You plannin’ to fill that, you’d better tell Pete to get back on the job, eh?’ Pete and his wife already had four, with another on the way.
Helena shook her head when Ted, in one of his rare bursts of conversation, passed on the remark to her.
‘In that tiny hut. I don’t know how they manage.’
Nor was she anxious to find out. The single child she had was enough for her.
4
Tractors and cultivators, seeders, binders, strippers, winnowers … There was no end to it. Blokes got in over their heads but no-one had any choice; without the machinery the work couldn’t be done.
‘Only sixty hours in a day, right?’
Sometimes it seemed like it.
‘A good hoick in prices, she’ll be sweet.’
That was right, too, but it didn’t happen. Instead prices fell, like water down the gurgler.
Two families, not far away, were wiped out and walked off.
‘On the wallaby with three young kids?’
‘It ain’t bloody right!’
No, it wasn’t, but government action was needed and none was forthcoming. Fingers were pointed but did no good. Blaming others, with whatever justification, achieved nothing for a man who had mortgaged his whole life, only to be mocked by dreams of a freedom that remained for ever beyond his reach.
5
Something happened, she never knew what. Overnight the chooks took sick and died. No-one could explain it. She wept for the foolish things but more for h
erself.
Ted was angry, not understanding what she was on about.
‘Bloody chooks, for God’s sake. That’s all they were.’
To Helena they had been a lot more than that.
‘We’ll get you some more.’
She had no heart for it. She saw that even in this she was alone. It crushed her.
One day she stopped him as he was going to wash.
‘Please …’
He looked at her, his face as expressionless as bone.
‘I want to help. I want to be part of you: in the farm, in our life here. In everything.’ That, she could say, but not what she really meant: I need to feel needed. That you still want me.
Not even to save life or marriage could she say that. From his lack of expression Ted might not have heard a word. Anger throbbed in her blood at the thought that she must implore him for what should be hers. ‘We were close once. We talked to each other. Now you have shut me out.’
Still he stared with his pale and unblinking eyes. At length, after what seemed like hours: ‘Dunno what you’re on about.’
He went to wash up. Helena looked after him, hands clenched.
6
Helena stood in the open doorway of the house, her eyes challenging the land. Everything in her life irked her: a country that would be for ever hostile, a husband who never spoke, the house itself.
All right, it was not the bag-and-pole shanty they’d started with but it was still the shabbiest shack in all this part of the mallee. She would have hated it, and the man who after seven years still thought no shame in making his wife and daughter live in it, had hatred served any purpose. She knew it never would; she had put hatred aside deliberately, as she had all emotion and softness in her nature and her life. In the beginning, in those distant days of courtship when the flight of gaudy aircraft across the dangerous skies of northern Italy had each day brought her both pride and terror, she had thought she could sustain with her love and strength the man whose weakness even then she had suspected.