This Red Earth
Page 37
Red mud after Narromine and he pulls the jeep up at the pub. ‘It’s going to be rough from here – how you travelling, really?’
‘Good, really.’
He goes into the pub to ring Mrs Wells to check on the floodwaters there, and I walk up to the edge of the road, where the bitumen ends, red muddy puddle as far as I can see under a huge cobalt sky. I step into it and look down at my boots over my belly, my feet in this red earth, all my dreams coming true, the length and the breadth of the land we’ll be travelling, the two of us, then three. I’m going to see Albert Namatjira’s love trees for real. Somewhere. I’m going to meet a man called Tim Gottlieb one day at any rate. We’ll go up to Townsville at some point too, for Zoccoli mangoes off the tree, and for Rock to meet up with his friend Johno’s dad. And when we get into the desert, he’s going to teach me how to drive. A girl can’t not know how to, not out there.
I look up again and there’s an emu watching me from behind a fence, from a field beginning to sprout bright green paddock. He’s looking doubtful about the prospect of the fat lady taking the wheel, looking to bolt. But I’m not worried. Not a dot. We’ll all survive my learning to drive. My man can survive anything: he has a camp oven with bullet holes for vents to prove it, and I’ll get that story out of him one day too.
‘Bernie, look,’ he says now, and I turn around and look at him, walking towards me, holding out something in his hand. It’s a little flower, a tiny purple daisy, just like the ones in my hair comb. He says: ‘I haven’t seen one of these for a while.’
He puts it in my hand and tells me: ‘This is home.’
I pick it up and look at it, look into its centre, and in its sunburst of pollen I see it: the fragile and the indestructible. The little specks of stardust we truly are.
But enough, I love you, and that is all there is to say.
John Curtin, to Elsie, January 1942
AUTHOR NOTE
This Red Earth, like Black Diamonds before it, is a work of fiction, inspired by history and a fascination for my beautiful and sometimes baffling country, its rich veins of colour, contradiction and character.
Here, at the end of the ending, I would like to remember for a moment the real men and women abandoned by circumstance and bad planning on New Britain in 1942. Lark Force, as it was called, was the military garrison of around fourteen hundred men stationed on the island, comprised of both AIF of the 2/22nd battalion and Volunteer New Guinea Rifles militia. Attached to this garrison were six nurses. There was also an unknown number of civilian men on the island at the time of the Japanese invasion. Of the men, some were killed in initial attempts to defend Rabaul, and at least one hundred and thirty were tortured and massacred at Tol, on Wide Bay, for no apparent military purpose. Those taken prisoner – eight hundred and forty five AIF and two hundred and eight civilians – were unwittingly torpedoed by an American submarine en route to Japan, and all were lost. The casualty rate for Lark Force was the highest of any of the Allied forces during the war: ninety four percent of them were killed. Miraculously, though, all six nurses spent the duration of the war as prisoners in Tokyo and were returned to Australia at its conclusion.
On the home front, the Australian Women’s Land Army was never fully recognised with official honours for their contribution to the war effort. Without them, Australia, as well as about a million American GIs, wouldn’t have eaten too well.
Personally, I couldn’t do without the women in my life who help me write better and truer: Jody Lee, Selwa Anthony, Julia Stiles, Narelle Woodberry, thank you. I’m also forever grateful to the National Library of Australia for their incredible database of archive materials, Trove; I could not have written this novel, or happily lost time procrastinating, without this resource. And I wouldn’t have dreamed this dream at all without my wonderful, amazing real-life rock, Dean Brownlee.
About Kim Kelly
Kim Kelly lives in the Central West of New South Wales.
This Red Earth is her second novel.
Also by Kim Kelly
Black Diamonds
First published 2013 in Macmillan by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd
1 Market Street, Sydney 2000
Copyright © Kim Kelly 2013
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. This publication (or any part of it) may not be reproduced or transmitted, copied, stored, distributed or otherwise made available by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations), in any form (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical) or by any means (photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise) without prior written permission from the publisher.
This ebook may not include illustrations and/or photographs that may have been in the print edition.
National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data:
Kelly, Kim.
This red earth / Kim Kelly.
9781742612027
World War, 1939–1945’Fiction.
A823.4
EPUB format: 9781743287712
The characters and events in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Quotation from Dorothea Mackellar’s ‘Core of My Heart’ reproduced by arrangement with the Licensor, The Dorothea Mackellar Estate, c/- Curtis Brown (Aust) Pty Ltd
Typeset by Post Pre-press Australia
Cover design by Nada Backovic
Love talking about books?
Find Pan Macmillan Australia online to read more about all our books and to buy both print and ebooks. You will also find features, author interviews and news of any author events.