by Alex Miller
Mathew and Trace watched him; wondering, perhaps, what it was that they were to receive from him, from the generation of their fathers and mothers: little more than coded signals, the mystery of how things had come to stand the way they stood. They stared at him, waiting, as if they imagined he must know the decipherment of the code and would choose to disclose it to them. An elder wisdom. But Bo smoked his cigarette and sucked his tea from the lip of his mug and squinted into the fire and said nothing. Then he looked up into the expectant gaze of young Mathew Hearn, and there was a truculence in his eyes that made the young man look away as if he had been challenged.
When Annabelle left them later Bo was dozing under a tree, his hat tipped over his eyes, boots crossed at the ankles, three mugs of tea and the fruitcake all eaten, a chewed cigarette butt extinguished between his nicotined fingers. Annabelle watched him sleeping. He seemed to hold a key to all their fates. But it seemed also that they must wait for it. He would not be hurried. Perhaps he did not even know he held such a key and was untroubled by his possession of it. She did not think she was being entirely fanciful. Too many aspects of her past and present life were linked in him for her to dismiss her thought as fantasy. She was prepared, rather, to believe it the perception of intuition, that delicate mode of thought in which the spirit of fantasy is partner to the certainty of an inner logic. She stood up. Arner was still sitting motionless against the casuarina, sleeping or watching, it was hard to tell which, maybe waiting for the day of atonement. Mathew and Trace sitting cross-legged across from each other on the rock, feeding sticks into the embers of their fire and conversing in low voices, looking up at each other or gazing into the coals, as if they hoped to glimpse in this communion with fire the pathway to their future; or perhaps they did glimpse it.
Annabelle made her way among the festooned rivergums to the couch grass flat where Mathew’s mare grazed. She walked back up the track through the ribbon grass. A thin blue smoke drifted from the kitchen chimney and already the track through the grass seemed their own well-trodden pad. She took some frozen steaks and sausages out of the freezer in the back of Arner’s truck and set them to defrost on a plate in the kitchen and she fed the range fire with pieces of wood. She cleaned up the kitchen some more then went and stood in the doorway, looking through the collapsing pergola at the side door of the main house, grasshoppers snipping around in the dry weeds and grass. The day was hot and still now on the dorsal of the rise. Isolated white clouds standing sentinel above the distant blue of the ranges. She decided to explore the main house.
She went around the tangle of the collapsing pergola and tried the house door. It stuck. She kicked it and it gave an inch. She put her shoulder to it and scraped it back. Feeling like a thief, and a little that her entry into the house might in some subtle manner betray her allegiance with Bo, she stepped over the threshold. She was in a small vestibule. Men’s battered hats and stiff wet-weather gear hanging from pegs like the blackened skins of carcasses, old boots and a broken whip coiled to one side on the floor. A set of spurs. The floor was stone flags split from the river. A layer of desiccated gumleaves and pale shoots of ribbon grass, a drift of black bead-droppings left by possums or rats or other small creatures. A brown-painted door facing her. She tried the handle. The door opened into a dimlit passage, a breath of cool air on her face. Doors leading off to right and left. The first door to the right was open. She stepped along the passage and stood in the open doorway looking in. A dining table in the centre of the room, the light coming from two French windows, an impression of sunlit shrubbery and European trees through the gaping shutters out beyond the verandah, as if there were a tended garden there. The brownstained timber ceiling sagging in the centre of the room above the table, the grooved ceiling boards split and gaping, straw and grass and leaves and other debris poking through and coned onto the table below, like the dribblings of an hourglass. The silence of the long departed dead. Deep and unbroken until this moment of her entry, as if she were a tomb robber and would inherit their curse. The Bigges of Ranna Station. A vanished race, Bo had said, slipping the irony in among the Hearns like a slim stiletto. She had never met the Bigges, but theirs had been a name of substance often mentioned by her parents when she was a child. They had been people of her own class.
Eight balloon-backed chairs were set around the sides of the table, a stately carver at either end. A long sideboard with a tall oil lamp, the long-necked globe intact. The black grate of an ornate Victorian hearth. Above the hearth, suspended from a brass length of picture-rail, an oil painting of highland cattle grazing hills of purple heather, no sign of habitations. An unfenced pastureland of infinite extent. The pastoralist’s dream. In the far corner of the room beside the French window the neat round entrance of a well-used rabbit burrow, the pale soil spilled across the threadbare rug, the smooth trodden pad of the rabbits, a careless scattering of their droppings. Annabelle did not cross the threshold. There was the close acidic smell of animals and chaff. She turned and tried the door facing across the passage.
The door opened on to a twin of the dining room. Two French windows facing the back verandah. Through the windows she recognised the silhouette of a squatter’s chair, identical to her grandfather’s old chair on the verandah at Zamia Street. A low table beside it. Out beyond the wildgrown garden the riverflat and then the dark line of giant rivergums and casuarinas. In the corner of the room between the window and the fireplace, an upright piano. An oak pedestal desk angled half-towards the French doors, half-towards a wall of books. Annabelle went in and stood in front of the books. She reached and tugged at a volume, Chambers Information for the People. The spine cracked and a piece came away in her hand. Beneath the spine the exposed galleries of termites, like a pale wound, the pallid bodies of the insects dripping to the floor. She brushed her hand along the books. They were mortared firmly into place by termite workings. No one was ever going to read any of these books again. It was a façade of spines, gilt lettering glittering in the half-light. She leaned to read the titles: Noble Thoughts in Noble Language, Southgate; Village Tales, Miss Mitford. A set of uniformly bound volumes, The Essays of Thomas Carlyle; Beeton’s Shilling Bible Dictionary; Essays Civil and Moral, Bacon; N.S.W. Royal Commission, Conservation of Water, 1886. Beside this an imposing volume, a blind-stamped gilt harp on the spine, The Administration of Ireland. E. V. Lucas’ The Open Road, a little book for wayfarers. W. G. Spence’s Australia’s Awakening set like a solid green brick between the slim grey covers of A Guide Book for Prospectors in New South Wales and the faded cerise cloth of Curran’s Geology of Sydney. She carefully tried to prise out a small volume, Yabba Yabba, stories and verses of Australia. A piece of the book broke away in her fingers like dry biscuit. She crumbled it, the pale flakes drifting to the floor.
She heard Bo clear his throat and spit, then his step in the passage. ‘You in there, Annabellebeck?’
‘In here,’ she called.
Bo came in and stood with her, looking around the room. ‘Old Nellie always was a great lady,’ he said. ‘What d’you think this room would have been used for?’
‘The master’s study, I’d say.’
‘Old George Bigges.’
‘And his father’s before him, I should think. How on earth did they get all this stuff down here? That piano must weigh a ton.’
‘Everything that’s down here that wasn’t down here before the Bigges come must have been brought in by that road we come in by. Strapped to a bullock dray. There was no other way in them days and still isn’t except around by Mount Cauley. And this didn’t come by that road. They thought nothing of it them old folks. They’d be on the road for a year or more.’ He gestured at an upholstered divan with a footstool. ‘Them famous generations of Nellie’s she was always telling me and Dougald about would have humped all this stuff up with them from Victoria when they first settled here. Maybe brought it from England before that too. They was always well-to-do people, them Bigges. They come up here inte
nding to live like princes, not beggars.’
They looked at the room. Annabelle said, ‘It’s incredible.’ She turned to him, ‘This doesn’t surprise you, does it?’
Bo said, ‘I don’t see what’s surprising about it. Them Bigges never knew they was gonna die out so quickly. They thought they was founding a whole new civilisation. But they’re gone. All them grand people are gone. They’d be sorry to see this.’ He nodded at the shelves. ‘These books any good to you?’
Annabelle said, ‘What an incredible vision it must have seemed to them then.’
Bo said drily, ‘Yeah.’
She reached and stopped him from attempting to remove a book. ‘It’ll break off,’ she cautioned him. ‘This whole thing’s a termite nest.’
He looked again and laughed. ‘That’s it!’ he said. ‘Them old white ants appreciates a good book.’
‘I’m going to record it,’ Annabelle said. ‘Room by room. Every item. All these titles. Everything.’ She looked at him. ‘What do you think?’
‘Record it for what?’ he asked sceptically.
‘It’s enormously significant.’
‘It’s just the old Bigges place.’
She said steadily, ‘It’s important.’ She could feel them disagreeing.
‘Who to? A bushfire’ll come through here one of these days and all this’ll be white ashes by morning. You’ll see them little green shoots of black wattle poking up through the ashes within a month.’
‘Remember what Susan said when we were having dinner in the servo at Bowen? She said the way to save the Ranna Valley from being dammed would be if we found a site of national importance down here. Something to get the attention of the Council on Monuments and Sites, she said. Do you remember?’
Bo said, ‘Yes, I do remember. But I don’t think the Bigges’ old place was what Susan had in mind.’
‘She’s never been down here. She didn’t know about any of this. Everything’s here,’ Annabelle said, looking around the room. ‘From the beginning. This library’s intact.’ About to say something more, she hesitated . . .
He looked at her. ‘What?’ he asked.
She said carefully, ‘In these cultural surveys I believe the Burra Charter rates early European remains as just as significant as Indigenous remains.’
‘That’s politics,’ he said, dismissing the idea. ‘Anyway, this don’t seem intact to me. I don’t rate books you can’t read intact. You ask Arner his opinion. That boy likes to read.’
‘The titles are all here. It might be a unique record.’
Bo took out his tobacco and began to roll a smoke. ‘It’s just the past,’ he said. ‘This stuff ’s all done with.’ He licked the paper down, his gaze sliding over her as he bent and lit the smoke, examining her, maybe wondering about her and learning something of her he had not understood before. He dropped the lighted match on the floor without shaking it, just as he had at Burranbah in front of the mine man, like a provocation to fire, watching the small yellow flame gutter and die among the desiccated rubbish, a curl of blue smoke rising from the blackened matchend. He sucked his teeth and looked her straight in the eyes, ‘If you want to record all this stuff, you do it. It’s a spooky old place and I don’t like it. I’m only telling you what I think.’ He turned to leave.
She said, ‘Bo!’
He waited, calm and relaxed against her rising anger.
‘Don’t go off like this. Please! We can talk about the idea, can’t we? It’s not so stupid, is it?’
‘If you’ve got something you want to do, you go ahead and do it. I’m not going to try stopping you. But I’m not doing it.’
She tried to keep her voice reasonable and calm like his, but her throat was tight with emotion. She wondered, as she spoke, if she were risking his dislike. ‘What about the stone labyrinths at the head of Verbena Creek that you told me about? The playgrounds of the old people? You want to preserve them, don’t you? The memory of them. They’re the past, aren’t they?’
‘That’s different.’
‘No it isn’t.’
He looked at her for some seconds, considering her, as if he was wondering whether it was worth trying to convince her. ‘That stone ground isn’t the past. Them stones are there for the future too. They don’t mean no less to me and Dougald than they meant to Grandma in her day, and to her grandma before that. Them stones don’t mean no less to the Jangga people today than they meant the day they was put there.’
‘And when was that?’ She wished she could let it go, but she couldn’t. It was always the same. If she were pushed she dug in her heels. Steven would walk away at this point. She was dismayed to realise that this was what Bo wanted to do.
‘We don’t need a date for when them stones was put there,’ Bo said evenly. ‘Dates don’t prove nothing.’ He gestured around the room. ‘This place is all dead and dried up. You can see that just looking at it. Being a bit sad looking don’t mean it’s worth keeping. Them white ants are doing the job here now. It’s dead wood to them little fellers. This is finished. Its days are over. The Bigges aren’t coming back for their stuff.’
‘In its way, this is no different to the playgrounds,’ she insisted.
‘It’s different and you know it’s different.’
‘No I don’t.’
He drew on his cigarette and examined it. ‘I’m not going to argue with you.’ His voice was calm and easy. ‘But them playgrounds is different to this stuff, and I’m telling you they’re different, and if you don’t believe me then I’m sorry but that don’t change the way I know it to be.’ He made to go then stopped again and gestured at the floor. ‘You watch out for them old man brown snakes in here. I seen a shed skin back there in the hall. These old places are full of furry little creatures them browns love to hunt. It’s just like Christmas dinner for them snakes getting inside a house.’ He turned and stepped out of the room and was gone.
‘I’m not afraid of snakes,’ she called after him. It was not true. Snakes had always terrified her. She knew he had warned her, however, against an unpropitious sign more than against the venom of the king brown. She heard him spit as he cleared the vestibule. Her heart was beating hard and her throat was aching with tension. She could hear her father telling her, ‘You stick to your guns, Annie!’ She wanted to go after Bo and tell him she agreed with him and would be as happy as he would to see the old Bigges homestead burned to the ground. But it would be a lie. She cared about the remains of that old life and couldn’t bear to think it might be utterly lost to the future. She realised then that in the tension of the moment she had forgotten to ask Bo where George Bigges’ photographic plates might be stored. She wondered if she was making a mess of things. She stood by the bookshelves for some time not knowing what was the best thing to do, thinking hard about Bo and her feelings and what she was really doing down here at Ranna with him. But there were no answers. Nothing was clear. Could that be it, then? she wondered. Were their pasts too similar and yet too different for them to understand each other? Was he thinking of her now as a typical squatter’s daughter? Bigoted and racist? He was so utterly sure of himself, so certain of his values . . . But then she had thought of Steven in just this way. Wooden, she had called him. She could hear herself accusing him now, ‘You’re like a block of wood!’ Was it men, then? Their exasperating moral certainty? She closed her eyes and breathed. She rejected the idea. She had to reject it. It was repugnant to her. She hated to think she might ever become one of those women who saw the same qualities in all men and who were for ever barred from any trust or intimacy with them. She did not want to have reached the limit of her relationship with Bo. Not yet. She couldn’t bear the thought.
She felt horribly confused.
She had not felt so confused since she was a student.
She looked at the books again, bending to read the titles. The two volumes of Apuleius’ The Golden Ass shelved alongside the six volumes of Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire,
their calf spines intact, as if the grand old volumes could be taken from the shelves and their stories read again. She thought of Thomas Carlyle boasting of reading a volume of Gibbon a day for six days when he was a young man. Such scraps of knowledge would be utterly foreign to Bo’s mind. He would see no value in them. If she were pressed, she would not be able to explain their value to him for herself. But the value was there all the same. She was sure of it. It was a sense of things being linked, and of these links reaching back in time, perhaps even to her own origins. There was something precious about these seemingly insignificant connections. If you lost too many of them, surely you lost your sense of who you were. You lost your culture. She defended the precious little links in her mind against a charge of their insignificance. In doing this she recognised uneasily that she was also defending the cultural significance of the Ranna homestead as being equal to the significance of the playgrounds of the old Murri people. It disquieted her a little to find herself adopting such a position, as she was not convinced of its rightness. It was not a matter, however, of weighing the evidence dispassionately, but of responding to an emotion. Bo’s playgrounds might have a prior claim, but could she believe in them emotionally for herself? Her defence of Ranna was based on a gut feeling. It was a conviction she couldn’t deny through reasoned argument. Was it then, she wondered, nothing more than a prejudice? Is that what such gut feelings really were? Nothing but the irresistible force of prejudice? The kind of thing people get steamed up about. What might there be, she wondered, in Bo’s mind that would be just as foreign to her, just as prejudicial to her understanding, as her piece of Thomas Carlyle trivia would be to him? She could not imagine. But there would be things. She was sure of it. She was breathing hard, as if she had been running, her emotions charged. She tried one of the Gibbon volumes. It was cemented to its neighbours. Gibbon was a lost book. She straightened, doubting herself suddenly. Might the world not be just as well off without its memories of Edward Gibbon and Thomas Carlyle? She decided there could never be an answer to such a question. She just knew it would trouble her to turn her back on this house without doing something to help preserve it. Or at least to record its contents. If she did nothing the lost opportunity would haunt her. It would be as if a drowning person had cried out to her and she had ignored them and gone on her way. Besides, she was itching to pry into the lost lives of the Bigges. She turned to the desk and was on the point of opening one of the drawers when there was the sound of voices and footfalls approaching along the passage.