Reaching Tin River

by Thea Astley

  And off we soar, a perfect halftone apart:

  Guten Abend, gute Nacht,

  Mit Rosen bedacht,

  Mit Näglein besteckt,

  Schlüpf unter die Deck:

  Morgen früh, wenn Gott will,

  Wirst du wieder geweckt.

  And it was funny.

  Halfway through these dissonances laughter overcomes me and I roll round on the nasty little bed while mother pleads between splutters, “Second stanza, Belle. Second.” And we rally for Guten Abend, gute Nacht, von Englein bewacht.

  I am captivated by rebellion. We move on to Schubert’s “An die Musik” and I am waiting for the banging on the wall to start but Bonnie says, “They think we’re in tune, darling. They love it.”

  The egotism of our behavior! I confess to these things wondering if here lies some explanation of my later obsessions, my attitudes.

  We perform a bracket of the most heart-tearing airs we can think of, pause for composure in the now electrified quiet of the Billabong Hotel, and then I say, inspired, “Let’s do ‘The Rustle of Spring.’ No words. Just ‘ah.’”

  The suggestion switches mother off.

  “No,” she says firmly. “No.”

  “Why not?” Can the rest of the corridor hear us arguing?

  “I don’t like to.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s … special. To me.”

  “Oh God,” I cry, “do you know I once made a list of …”

  “Bedtime,” mother says firmly.

  At breakfast, if the other residents appear to look obliquely at us, mother is unaware and is loud and cheerful, ignoring Mr. Forestry Inspector who is so cool I feel we might perhaps have to be re-introduced. I have no idea what Bonnie does all day while I am teaching. She has a stack of cheap thrillers she is working her way through. She goes for walks out towards the re-afforestation area. I discover later that, as well, she has been giving lunchtime bangaways on the bar piano to the delight of the timber workers and the displaced-star resentment of Mrs. Moody. “Your mother,” Mrs. Moody begins once as we pass in the downstairs hall. And then she sails off leaving the matter unfinished.

  In bed at night we talk, deciding not to repeat our musical delights, and Bonnie tells me she has become absorbed in the philosophies of alternative life-styles. She is going beyond alternative. The news reaches me in little jets as if this creaky conversational tap is rusty from non-use. My grandparents have sold Perjury Plains at last and bought a unit on the Gold Coast and there is now nowhere for any of us to take refuge. Bonnie has decided to move out of Villa Marina. An obscene profit has been made on the sheep run and money tossed lightly left and right to mother and aunt. A small investment has been made for me. “Marie,” she says, between more sniffles, “is planning to buy a terrace house in inner Melbourne” and she herself is toying with the idea of another expensive city slum in Brisbane.

  After these facts settle, I realize a lot has been solved.

  On the afternoon I farewell mother on the rail-motor, I announce firmly that I have no intention of remaining in the teaching profession.

  “But what?” Bonnie shouts through the open window of the now moving train.

  “Anything,” I yell back, but she is out of earshot.

  I’m misleading her. Already I had decided, even before I knew of my inheritance, and had written away, taken the first steps, applying for a librarian traineeship in a municipal library in Brisbane. As I think about it, I pray briefly, clenching my hosanna-ing hands.

  “If that’s what you want, dear,” Bonnie says doubtfully when we catch up with each other in Brisbane. “It all sounds very intellectual.”

  I scream with laughter.

  IV

  In Brisbane we try sharing an elderly house in Spring Hill.

  Bonnie’s eccentricities are fired by the constant flow of dropouts moving north. Is there some alternative culture map marked with a cross, for a ragtag crusade who look as if they have stepped straight across the thirteenth century and the Alps, nose us out, dump their backpacks and make ungrateful use of us for days on end. Guitars prop themselves against living-room chairs, occupy divans, get underfoot in hallways. The kitchen is alive with the sound of vegetables being chopped. “Vegans,” mother explains cryptically. “Self-sufficiency,” she chants like a mantra. Except we’re the suppliers!

  What about the drums, the gigs, the old-timers pining for their evenings of fox-trots, two-steps and jazz waltzes?

  Bonnie purses lips and massacres zucchini.

  I return home each day to a house always in flux. My center is no center. I am tired to death of strangers with user-friendly names like Stream, Sunlight, Moth, Shark. It’s like living in a Longfellow ballad.

  “We don’t need this.” Bonnie is heaving out the electric cooker. “Food tastes better cooked in the open.”

  “Here? Spring Hill? This minuscule yard?”

  “We can try.”

  “But when it rains?”

  She refuses to hear.

  The washing machine goes next. This unsettles the transients. I find mother rubbing sheets in an iron tub she has bought at some disposal store or found on a tip. What she would really like is to be haunching by a filthy stream beating the clothing on rocks.

  “God, but this is what women wept to be rid of!”

  “It’s the fusion of hands and fabric. The vitality of the body moving into the garments.”

  Where does she hear this stuff?

  “Oh rubbish, Bon. Twaddle. Absolute twaddle.”

  “You know it all, don’t you?” mother says sourly. “You won’t even give another idea a chance. You’re so conservative. Fancy me having a conservative daughter.”

  It’s always the way: zanies, geniuses, whatever, breed down to the norm. There is an element of truth in the rumor that Euclid’s son couldn’t plot a paddyfield.

  Her bed went next. Actually it went to a couple called Dreamboat and Wimps. Bonnie took to sleeping on a pallet on the floor. The good earth vibrations. Karma. Propped up by innersprings, swathed in drip-dry cotton, I can feel only guilt on my eight-inch mattress. Bonnie’s satisfied snoring is enough to keep me awake.

  She develops a dog. It’s a vegetarian dog it discovers to its horror and when its hair starts to drop out all over the house, Bonnie assiduously collects the combings and shed-dings, skilled from training in the woolsheds at Drenchings, and starts weaving small objects like table mats, egg cosies, and milk-jug covers. Red-setter place mats quite put me off eating. I begin having dinner in town. I have no center. “Never waste,” Bonnie says with puritan virtue regarding the products of mange. She eyes me crossly. She haunts flea markets and late Friday night sellouts, rescuing bruised mangoes and exhausted cabbages from beneath the wheels of trucks then throws parties for twenty that are stacked with a new bumming breed of young.

  Where does she meet them? Where do Stream Sunlight Moth and Shark come from?

  They move in, eat, sleep a day or two, and move on.

  I am the stranger in need of a center.

  “Are you trying to save money?” I ask desperately. “Look, I’m earning enough for both of us. Grandma left you loaded. You don’t have to do this.”

  Bonnie is having the power cut off next week and is gloating over a job lot of kerosene lamps dim with ancient grime it will take her weeks to remove.

  “You’ve forgotten slush lamps,” I say bitterly watching her hands caress, almost erotically, the smeared glass chimneys. “Just a saucer of oil and a bootlace.”

  “Don’t be like that, Belle,” mother says. “Anyway, tampons are more effective than bootlaces, I believe. It’s the world’s energy I’m trying to conserve. And it stops me brooding.”

  Brooding?

  “Over Marie. Over the fun we used to have. I do miss her.”

  Aunt Marie had met a retired dredge-boat master during a weekend holiday on Phillip Island and wrote brief ecstasy notes less informative than telegrams hinting at marriage. Bonnie
was in a state of panic. “She’ll never come back. Never. It’s over. All over. Fancy doing it twice!”

  “You’ve got me,” I suggest. But she doesn’t hear.

  If I am unable to comfort her, it is not through lack of effort even though I am aware there will be no reciprocal balm for I have my own work eccentrics to deal with and the gethsemane of home each evening in a house full of strangers (I include my mother) who barely acknowledge I am there—“Who’s that?” I once heard one of them ask Bonnie, nodding in my direction. I couldn’t bear to wait for her answer—a steady diet of raw vegetables and an almost bald red-setter are beginning to affect my health.

  In the aftermath of Christmas festivities where we rioted on celery juice, I decide to move out. Going upstairs to bed I discover Dreamboat and Wimps who have come back for the party copulating on my bed. “Out!” I say. “Out!” “What’s bugging you?” they ask. “What’s really bugging you? Why don’t you join us?” “You appear to have done that for yourselves,” I say coldly.

  I rent myself a flat six miles away as the bus flies and after the prescribed amount of maternal weepies and protest, I know we are both relieved. In another year Bonnie will sell up her urban squalor and lease a miner’s acreage in the hills behind Kilcoy where she will be able, if she wants, to beat her drums to death. Nothing will be too difficult. Meanwhile I have enough to cope with: a head librarian who summons female myrmidons with a whistle and snap of the fingers, who knows the Dewey system by heart—every category—and refuses to listen to any proposed changes. A natural Luddite, computers are killing him. He furbishes his home with public gallery rejects, collects pigeon droppings and leaves them outside the building for mulch and carts the stuff off in sackfuls. Is there no end to this? It is like being back with mother.

  “He’s good for laughs,” the underlings excuse him in the common room at morning tea break.

  It should be laughable, maybe even lovable. I am beginning to worry about the validity of lovableness.

  I am working in archives with a permanent smell of dust in my nostrils, that delicate fragrance of old paper and bindings, and I have permanently swollen olfactory glands. But life is better. It’s better. And as two years roll by I pass my qualifying examinations, receive a small promotion and make a circle of friends, all librarians, who have a hair-shirt quality of endurance and a gentleness the public service has never been able to damp out.

  Like Seb.

  In the recesses of the library stacks it was my job that month that year to catalogue all journal articles and photographs of a forgotten railhead called Jericho Flats not far from Drenchings. It is situated west of one hundred and fifty and twenty-four degrees five minutes south. I am learning to be exact in these matters.

  “This is your country,” Seb, the section head says, smiling his lovely smile and observing my new hairdo.

  “But why? Why Drenchings?”

  Seb plaits fingers and makes his smile more piercingly sweet.

  “There’s been a great deal of mining exploration up that way. Oil. It’s possibly the biggest thing since Roma. Don’t you listen to your morning news?” But he asks nicely. I think this streaky beige nonsense suits me, kills the albino look, makes me less of a negative. And I am wearing a new dress as well, color of foxed leather.

  “There’ll be a great deal of interest. We want to forestall inquiry by getting as much on microfilm as possible. Well, not forestall—anticipate. Politicians, conservationists, corporate bodies. Then there’s the question of sacred sites. We have to be able to turn up something for them. The Opposition has already started buzzing around and National Heritage is interested. Even the locals will want data. Not, of course, that it will matter a damn if the government decides to go ahead. It’s money that matters in this corrupt State.”

  “But it’s all brown out there. It won’t interest the greenies.”

  “Then you know the actual place?” Seb asks, pressing his point.

  I have a smudged memory of picnic races twelve years before and Bonnie and Marie the star turn in a shearing shed streamered to kill, jammed with overdressed sweating dancers who were reeling drunkenly by midnight while I slept and woke, slept and woke, on a rug at the back of the stage. Grandma had forgotten to collect me and had driven home hours before. I was terrified to drop right off in case mother forgot me too.

  The memory silences me for the moment.

  There is a mass of material to be sifted: newspapers, old journals and notebooks, diaries and annotated photograph albums donated by the descendants of early settlers who find immortality in our recesses. The photograph albums engage my interest more than the yellowing pages of the Drenchings Weekly Dispatch, yet every now and then some obscure paragraph links itself to some faded photo and I feel the old Euclidean thrill as words and image achieve congruency.

  One dusty Tuesday afternoon my attention is gripped by the posed photograph of the Jericho Flats Joint Stock Bank staff, four men leaning importantly casual against the unlikely timber walls of a shacklet, sunlight sharpening the edges of the iron roof, two trees preserved at the eastern and western margins of the picture for draft enhancement, and the faces. The faces.

  There is an apparent sameness in the features of any group of people from a given social period. Fashions reduce. Yet these four men, despite the dark suits, the vests, the chokers of ties, the solemnity of whiskers, display a certain impudent confidence, particularly evident in the gentleman second from the right, who appears amused by the very flatness of the landscape. I turn the snapshot over and check the writing on the back. He is Mr. Gaden Lockyer, teller and clerk. The year is 1874.

  Behind the pretentiously titled structure—the name, Jericho Flats Joint Stock Bank has been painted roughly on a slab of ironbark—the lone and level sands do indeed stretch far away. (Shelley, you didn’t know the half of it!) Not that they are visible. But sensed. Through a powerful magnifying glass that at first seemed only to raise an unwanted stippling, Mr. Gaden Lockyer’s despair appears in the serif formed by his mouth, an upward quirk at one corner balancing a downward twitch at the other. Or a grace note.

  All wear hats. The heat! The heat!

  You know a dust-wind has just left the picture and that the rainwater tank half-seen at the rear of the building is three-quarters empty.

  He was, I decide, turning the photograph down to obliterate an inexplicable jab at the emotions, interesting rather than handsome. Coincidence intervenes and within the next hour, in a pioneer’s hardbound book of recollections, I find the photograph reproduced. The author is on the far left and moves me as little as his prose though I plow through it looking for further reference to the teller whose vital features compel me to contemplate here on this summer Tuesday the awful brevity of life, the temporality of the moment frozen in time on this moldering paper. That smile’s owner is gone forever. Gone? Really gone? Any more than Galileo, say, or Ozymandias are gone? Or Sinding? There’s a laugh.

  What did Mr. Gaden Lockyer, teller and clerk, think, say, feel?

  Over the months of research his face and name keep cropping up, his nimbus of importance tumescent. I am working through the larger newspapers published in coastal towns. In issue number twenty-three, volume eight, of the Mackay Gazette, the Joint Stock Bank of Australasia farewells him on page two. The town, the newspaper reports in violet phrases, will be deeply sorry to see Mr Gaden Lockyer give up the position of assistant bank manager that he has handled so capably for the last two years, following his transfer from Jericho Flats. Our loss, they write, will be farming’s gain, for Mr Lockyer has decided to take up a lease some fifty miles out, where he intends to raise cattle. The bank staff will miss his inspiring presence (I giggle between sneezes), the newspaper records, and as a token of their good fellowship over the years have presented him with a cowhide tobacco pouch handworked with his initials. Their warmest wishes would accompany him.

  Mr. Lockyer is photographed holding the pouch.

  Between forefinger a
nd thumb.

  There is more.

  At the farewell supper following the presentation, the Mackey Gazette reports, to my fascinated eye, that Mr. Gaden Lockyer, whose fine baritone has been much in demand at local soirées, delighted the guests by rendering a bracket of two numbers. “On Wings of Song” and the “Farewell” from Gounod’s Faust. Miss Emily Watson, from Spillaway Station, was a spirited accompaniste.

  His name graces district reports. Five years pass. There he is hectoring a gathering of graziers, and on another occasion I find him perched, quite some years older, on a makeshift rostrum outside a country School of Arts (where are you, mother?), haranguing a crowd before a state election. Everything in the picture appears makeshift. Someone in the mob has raised a fist that threatens near the crumbling margin. Mr. Lockyer must have missed out in his bid for political credence for a later issue of the Gazette reports that he had failed to win his seat by two hundred and three votes. “Sorry,” I find myself whispering. “Sorry.”

  It is another weekly broadsheet in a town not far east of Drenchings that brings him to light again. Ten years have passed for him. Three days for me.

  Mr Gaden Lockyer, the half-column reports, of Upper Walla, has been elected councillor for the Wallabilla Shire. Mr Lockyer, who was born in England, came to Australia with his parents in 1857 where his father took up a small selection in the Upper Dawson area. Subsequently the Lockyer family moved south where Mr Lockyer senior ran sheep on a property outside Condamine. Mr Gaden Lockyer was educated at the Condamine provisional school and a private boarding school in Brisbane. He is a family man interested in the problems of rural communities and actively involved in Labour politics. His wife is active in country women’s affairs and is well-known in Walla Shire for her work with the Walla Hospital Board.

  Mr Lockyer has two sons and one daughter.

  Married? Spliced?

  Have I missed the notice? No one has yet got me to the church on time.

  Piqued, I shelve all other work for two days and finally, in the social page of a Brisbane newspaper, run to earth a joyless photograph in a page of similarly joyless photos: Miss Betsy Boyett, long-facedly posed, the verticals of tulle veil paralleling the lines of her cheek, beside quirky-mouthed Mr. Lockyer.