The Whitest Flower

by Brendan Graham

Outside, they boarded the spring-cart, to which two hefty bullocks, a black and a brown, were harnessed. Lavelle took the reins and Coombes sat up front with him. Ellen, Annie, and the three younger women, sat bundled in the rear along with the remnants of their belongings.

  Ellen was eager for a sight of this unknown land. Maybe the night’s rest, food, and the new day’s light, would give her a different perspective of her surroundings.

  Although it was yet early, Port Adelaide was bustling. Men on horseback, sailors in twos and threes, looking the worse for the previous night’s wear, filled the morning. Dogs yelped in the road; large drays trundled along behind teams of bullocks. One dray in particular had them all agape – it was being drawn not by beasts of the fields but human beings! Harnessed to a cart containing two large wooden churns, were four flaxen-haired young women, all straining to take the load.

  ‘Those girls …?’ Ellen began incredulously.

  ‘Lutherans!’ Coombes replied as if that explained everything.

  ‘But …’ Ellen started again, unable to take her eyes from the four neatly-bonneted beasts of burden.

  ‘Lutherans, from Prussia,’ Coombes volunteered. ‘New migrants – persecuted at home, fled here for their religious freedom.’

  Ellen felt that, for some reason, Coombes did not want to discuss the Lutherans further. So she persisted.

  ‘Yes, but why do they do the work of animals?’

  ‘Well, ma’am,’ – it was Lavelle who replied this time – ‘they came here with nothing. In their own lands they were fined for their beliefs, and their goods seized. Anything they had left, they sold for the passage money to South Australia. Once here …’ Lavelle hesitated. ‘… they borrowed money to buy land.’

  Ellen saw Coombes give Lavelle a sharp look, but the man from Achill Island continued: ‘So, they work and pray, and pray and work, to develop the land, and no work is beneath them – or their womenfolk …’

  ‘Lavelle!’ Coombes cut across the younger man, and then turned back to Ellen. ‘You’ll learn plenty of the Lutherans, in due course. Where we’re headed, the place is overrun with them.’

  Coombes faced forward again, giving Lavelle a stern look in the process. Then he said, ‘Are we to grind, at snail’s pace, the whole route to Adelaide?’

  A question, Ellen knew, which had nothing whatsoever to do with the speed, or lack of it, of their journey.

  She twisted in her seat for one last look at the strong, serious-faced young women, seemingly undaunted and unashamed at their lowly task. She remembered her own journey, from Westport back into the mountains, drawing behind her a much lighter cart than these girls strained at. The weight, then, was not in the cart, but in her own heart, for the cargo she drew – her poor, wasted, lovely Michael. She crossed herself at the memory of that terrible journey.

  ‘Ar dheis Dé go raibh a anam,’ she whispered, asking into the great vastness of South Australia that his soul be at God’s right hand.

  She wondered about the God of this untamed land, this place at the bottom of the world. Which God ruled here, over men like Jasper Coombes? If any.

  And why did Coombes not want to talk about the Lutherans? Was he a landlord, in this place of never-ending land? With tenants as poor, dependent, and exploited as she and Michael had been? And what of the islandman – Lavelle: what was his relationship with Coombes? They seemed as unalike as night and day. Probably Coombes had some sort of hold over him. Already she could see her new employer was that kind of man.

  On they travelled over the bockedy road towards Adelaide. Though the dirt-track, for that was all it was, was unmade, it attracted a reasonable amount of traffic. Some travellers were on horseback; some walking, looking weary and footsore; some resting by the dusty roadside. Then there were the carts with bullocks. Even a coach – imported from Hobart in Tasmania, as Lavelle told them when it approached.

  The coach had big round wheels, the spokes showing signs of damage from the hard roads. The passengers’ faces, too, bore signs of wear and tear as they journeyed past them, jolted this way and that. The coach driver, a sombre-looking fellow, being both black-coated and black-hatted, spurred on his charges with the frequent touch of a long whip. Impervious to the terror he caused his passengers, he charioteered them onwards, maintaining a kind of stoic indifference all the while.

  The sky went on forever here, thought Ellen, and it needed to, to cover such a country. Yet this was only the Southland of Australia. Beyond this province was the northern region, and there must, by rights, also be a western and an eastern part. Her mind, accustomed to mountain, lake, and valley, could not encompass what she saw. This land seemed un-valleyed, unbounded, infinite. Scrub and gum trees, as Lavelle called them, stretched for miles and miles, broken only by the semblance of a village here and there. Now, and again, a farmhouse appeared on the horizon, solitary, except for a few cattle dotted around it. There were a number of wayside halting places along the route where they stopped – primarily, it seemed to Ellen, for the benefit of the bullocks. Whatever the reason, the women, numbed and bone-shaken, were only too glad to alight.

  ‘I’ve never done as much buck-leppin in me life!’ was Kitty’s way of describing the journey. ‘Twas better than any céilí at the crossroads, and not a note of music!’

  Kitty was good company and helped keep all their spirits up.

  Ellen took advantage of the stops to feed and bathe Annie. The journey had made the child hot, but she was a surprisingly good traveller.

  After miles of emptiness, they passed Hindmarsh – named, Coombes told them, after South Australia’s first Governor, John Hindmarsh. Ellen noted a flurry of growth: a flour mill, a tannery, and a brewery. But not until they had been on the road ten hours did they reach their final destination: Adelaide. Only when they crossed the River Torrens and entered the city itself did Ellen feel she had truly arrived in Australia.

  Adelaide, named for the consort of Queen Victoria’s predecessor, King William IV, had a name which seemed to fit this British colony. Ellen wondered how Barossa, where Coombes’ estate was, had come by its name. It didn’t sound at all English.

  Coombes, who had been remarkably quiet since the Lutheran episode, was now as gracious as could be.

  ‘Of course we could not have left the young ladies’ – he gestured towards Nora and Sarah – ‘to fall prey to malevolent influences in Port Adelaide. Nor can we now throw them upon the mercy of a strange city. I shall go and seek out this Mrs …?’

  ‘Hopskitch!’ interjected Kitty, rather pertly.

  ‘Yes – Mrs Hopskitch. And when everything is in order we will deliver Miss Sarah and Miss Nora safely to her. Then, in the morning, when we are all well rested, we will escort Mrs O’Malley and Miss Kath-I mean, Miss Kitty, to the Barossa.’

  Everything having been settled to his satisfaction, Coombes dropped them off at a boarding house in Morphett Street and then departed in search of Mrs Hopskitch – leaving them in no doubt that he would succeed in his errand.

  On his return, however, he announced: ‘I am afraid there is bad news!’

  They waited anxiously as he paced in front of them, hands behind his back.

  ‘I did, indeed, find the said Mrs Hopskitch, after much searching – although it seems she is known well in some quarters of the town,’ he added.

  Ellen wondered what Coombes was hinting at.

  ‘What did she say?’ Sarah Joyce asked, apprehension in her voice.

  ‘She said …’ Coombes bit his thin upper lip, as if not wanting to repeat Mrs Hopskitch’s news. But he did: ‘… that, having waited a number of days for news of your arrival, and hearing none, she had feared the worst. Either you had not travelled, or you had been … You had not completed the journey.’

  ‘Oh!’ the girls exclaimed, looking at each other.

  ‘What was she to do, being understaffed? I am afraid – there being many Irish girls arriving under this Orphans and Paupers Scheme instituted by Westminster …’ Before he s
aid it, Ellen knew – they all knew – what it was, he would say: ‘… Reluctantly, Mrs Hopskitch was forced to hire two other Irish girls.’

  ‘Oh!’ went Nora, again, hands to her face, aghast at the news.

  ‘What are we to do now, with no work, and nowhere to live, and no money to support ourselves?’ Sarah said, frightened, looking from one to the other of them.

  Ellen turned to Coombes, hoping for an answer to the plight of her two young travelling companions. He had one.

  ‘The news is not all melancholy …’ He gave the women a watery smile. ‘Mrs Hopskitch, in great distress at this situation, prevailed upon me to take you into my service, and transferred your indentureship to me.’

  The two girls burst into gasps of delight at this news, and Ellen watched Coombes’ smile widen at their show of gratitude.

  ‘Adelaide is not a goodly place for homeless young girls to wander about in – not a goodly place at all!’ he said. ‘But, no need to worry about that now!’

  When Coombes left them, Sarah and Nora were beside themselves with joy.

  ‘Now, we’ll all be together!’ said Sarah.

  ‘Isn’t it a great thing, surely?’ Nora chipped in.

  ‘Isn’t it a great fortune that we met with Mr Coombes?’ Sarah laughed, hugging Ellen.

  Ellen was not so sure. She waited until Annie was tucked up in her bed, asleep, then returned downstairs in search of Lavelle. There were answers she needed. Many answers – and she felt Lavelle held the key to them, if only he would tell her.

  She found him in the saloon, alone. He seemed glad to see her, and asked for news of Ireland and the Famine. And how she came to be here. On her telling of Michael’s death, and her children left behind in Tourmakeady, he offered his sympathies to her in a very heartfelt way, the sweep of his hair falling over his brow as he leaned forward, close to her. Unlike Coombes, he appeared to be completely sincere, interested in her story.

  For his part, Lavelle was fascinated by Ellen. Her obvious beauty aside, he detected a strength of character in her, an instinct for survival – something she would need in abundance if she was to last three years in this harsh, unyielding, country. He loved hearing her speak. Her voice had cadences to it – like music. It rose and fell, undulating with the telling of her story, yet it was always soft and clear: as easy on the ear as she was on the eye. He wanted her to go on talking all night.

  Ellen was more interested in getting him to do the talking.

  ‘How did you come to be here?’ she asked.

  ‘Well, I got in a spot of bother back home and they moved me out here – courtesy of Her Majesty’s Government.’

  ‘What happened?’

  Lavelle smiled, amused at her. Insistence fell so gently from those lips.

  ‘It was the proselytizers,’ he replied. ‘They came to Achill from England, wanting to save our souls with soup and sermons. To save the poor papish Irish from themselves and the wiles of the unholy Roman Catholic Church.’

  ‘And what was wrong with that?’

  ‘Nothing at all, but they divided the people on Achill. You were given food if you went over to their Church. Then, “the soupers” – the ones who changed over – took their children out of the Catholic schools and put them instead to be raised as Protestants. This caused much bitterness, and the local clergy were up in arms. “Soup for souls”, they called it, and soon half the island was against the other half. ’Twas a bad business indeed, this “taking the soup”.’

  ‘I can guess what side you were on!’ said Ellen, laughing.

  ‘Well, I wasn’t much for souperism or its doings. So, a few of us decided it would be a good idea to brighten things up a little on the island, and we lit a tinder to the soupers’ church at night. Oh, it made a great bonfire, entirely!’ Lavelle chuckled, seeming to enjoy the re-telling of his church-burning story.

  ‘Then, the Peelers came, and caught a few of us. They didn’t try us in Westport or Castlebar but shipped us off to London. Less chance of stirring up a riot over there, I suppose. The Magistrate said he wouldn’t return us to Ireland “for fear of inciting riotous behaviour among the local populace, permanently disposed, it seems, towards violence.” So New South Wales got us instead. Three more Irish rebels shipped out of harm’s way to Australia.’ Lavelle was proud to be part of the ‘ship ’em or swing ’em’ tradition by which the Crown dealt with the ‘Troubles’, and troublemakers, in Ireland.

  ‘It seems to me,’ said Ellen, ‘that religion is at the root of a lot of problems, wherever you go. What the people back home need is food, not foolishness. The Church is too busy saving souls instead of bodies. The bodies of old people, dying from the want of someone to wet their tongues. The bodies of children, stricken with every disease under God’s sun, and their poor mothers, dragging themselves along the ditches, trying to gather a few nettles here and there …’

  Lavelle looked at her. She was a firebrand, this woman. No wonder the landlord had wanted her out of Ireland. She’d torch a church, all right – or a landlord’s house, at that – if she was put to it.

  ‘You must have seen the worst of it.’

  ‘I didn’t see the half of it,’ she said, the anger rising in her. But she didn’t try to suppress it. She needed to speak out after so long cooped up with the thought of it in the foul hold of the Eliza Jane.

  ‘And I saw the wasted bodies of the fathers, too, tramping ten or twenty miles a day to food depots closed against them, only to be sent home, empty-handed and broken-hearted, to their families. Like as not, passed on the road by carts three times the size of the one you drive, bursting at the seams with every kind of food, all of it heading for ships to take it over to England.

  ‘Oh, yes – England sups while Ireland starves. And most of the priests and the bishops, of every persuasion – they sup too. While their flocks starve away on the roadsides!’

  ‘Take it easy, ma’am.’ Lavelle reached over and caught her by the arm, and she realized she was trembling with the enormity of it all. Always in the background, the thought of Michael, and her own flight. Like the bishops and the priests, she, too, had turned her back on her flock – her own children. Oh, God, how could she live with it? Out here, a world away from her three darlings, Patrick, Katie and Mary.

  ‘I should never have left them, never …’ Ellen’s voice trailed off in despair, and Lavelle caught her by the other arm.

  ‘Listen to me,’ he said firmly. ‘If you had stayed, you’d all be dead by now. This way, at least there’s some chance for you and the child … and some chance for you to return for the others.’

  At this, she turned away from him – tried to break his hold. She didn’t want to listen. But he continued, forcing her to hear him out.

  ‘From the story you tell, those Pakenhams just wanted you out of the way for a few years, until things settle back again. They won’t let anything happen to your children – they wouldn’t dare. They’ll be looking over their shoulder for this Shanafaraghaun man, afeared of what he’ll do if they break their word to you. And of what you might do to them on your return!’

  She looked into his eyes – blue and intense. He meant what he said.

  ‘No, what you had to do, Ellen Rua, was a hard thing, but it was the best thing – the only thing.’ His voice was comforting, assuring, trying to set her troubled mind at rest.

  She wasn’t shaking so much now. Lavelle’s words struck a chord: whatever she had done – stayed or left – she stood to lose her children. It was the devil’s choice for her, damned if she did and damned if she didn’t. She needed God, not the devil, on her side. But not the God of divisions, not the God who had the Catholics and Protestants at each other’s throats, and the Lutherans at their own. She needed a new God, a different God. The God of Australia.

  If there was one.

  They talked for hours, interrupted only when she slipped upstairs every so often to check on Annie. The child slept solidly. She was easy minding – her new country not se
eming to knock a faic out of her.

  Lavelle, recognizing a kindred spirit, opened up to her. Both were strangers in this strange land, bound together by a common language and history, and an uncertain future.

  He told her how, on arriving in Botany Bay along with the other deportees, he had been put to work clearing bushland just north of Sydney, on property owned by Coombes and a consortium of others. Coombes, it seemed, had been well-connected in London, frequenting the Covent Garden tea-gardens, and the gaming clubs – Crockford’s, his estate in the Barossa, was named after one of them.

  As Ellen listened, the links between Coombes and Pakenham began to emerge: the landlord’s ‘sojourns’ in London, the rumours of his debts to the banks and gaming clubs.

  Lavelle continued his story: ‘It seems that Coombes fell foul of the cards. Disgraced, and with huge debts, he fled to Australia, funded by some of his friends – including Sir Richard Pakenham.’

  It all fell into place for Ellen now. Coombes was not only a friend of Pakenham’s, but indebted to him. Pakenham, therefore, was calling in the debt by getting Coombes to take her into his charge, out here – out of the way – probably reluctantly.

  So, she could expect little favour from Jasper Coombes. She returned her attention to Lavelle as he described how his employer had realized that, with European immigrants pouring into Sydney, a killing could be made on the vast tracts of undeveloped land there held by the Aborigines.

  ‘Coombes and his associates swindled the local tribes out of thousands of acres. All for the price of a month’s supply of tobacco, trinkets, knives – and alcohol. Officially, the Crown, which itself seizes the land, doesn’t approve of that sort of thing, but generally turns a blind eye. The rights of the Aborigines – their traditional hunting grounds and sacred places – don’t count, even though they’ve lived here for tens of thousands of years. It all goes back to Captain Cook, the one who “discovered” Australia. He declared that the only inhabitants here were ‘flora and fauna’. They call it the “Captain Cook lie”,’ he told her.

  Ellen, shocked and fascinated by Lavelle’s story, encouraged him to continue.