by Peter Watt
The gravedigger stopped to ease his sweating body for a moment. He leant on his shovel and stared with idle curiosity at the two elegantly dressed women weeping and laughing together a short distance from him. Must be Irish, he mused as he watched them. Only the Irish could find humour in death. Probably going to a wake after the funeral. Lucky devils! Then he continued to fill the open grave with earth as the two women walked slowly away, hand in hand.
SEVENTY
Patrick was awed by the sombre experience of standing in the cool gloom of the sacred place of the Nerambura and gazing at the ancient ochre paintings.
‘It is all I imagined,’ Catherine said softly as she stood beside her husband. ‘A place of infinite sadness and yet a wonderful memory of those poor lost people.’
‘Not all lost,’ Patrick said softly in the hallowed place. ‘I have heard that there is still one alive who would remember the rites that the Nerambura practised here before the time of my grandfather. An old warrior called Wallarie.’
‘Where is he now?’ Catherine asked with the amateur archaeologist's interest for a tangible link with the past.
‘No-one really seems to know but one hears rumours from the blackfellas that he has been seen wandering the land. Then he just disappears.’
‘That is sad,’ his wife sighed. ‘To be the last of his tribe and alone in our world.’
‘I think he is not alone,’ Patrick replied quietly. ‘I think he must live with the spirits of his people.’
‘Aha!’ she said mischievously. ‘Does the very practical heir to the Macintosh fortune believe in spirits, as I do?’
He turned to smile at his wife who in turn gazed up into his eyes with just the touch of a teasing smile. How beautiful she was, he thought with an overwhelming feeling of love. But she was not just only physically beautiful; she also had a strange spiritual beauty he knew he would love to the day that he died.
A year earlier Catherine had been an unexpected guest of his grandmother when he had arrived home from South Africa – and she had not left his life since. The marriage to a good Protestant young woman of the Church of Ireland had been acceptable to Lady Enid Macintosh. The girl had an impeccable bloodline, even if she were of Irish birth.
True to her promise to her daughter, Enid had related to Patrick all that had transpired over the years concerning her concealment of the truth. He had accepted the confession without rancour, as she had prayed he would. Too much had happened in his own life to allow him the privilege of judgment.
One day he intended to travel to Germany where he would meet with his mother and ask her forgiveness for his foolish denial of the love she had always held for him. A love he so desperately wanted, just as he had wanted the love of the beautiful Irish girl he thought he had lost. The relationship Catherine had with his father was never raised between them.
‘I think I understand how the old warrior feels from time to time,’ Patrick said seriously. ‘I experienced something similar when I was cut off from the army in the Sudan and was wandering in the wilderness. It is hard to explain.’
‘You need not try and explain,’ Catherine said gently. ‘Some things defy our attempts to find earthly words. But I think, for now, we should not intrude upon the sleep of the spirits who live here, my love. I think we should return to the homestead and indulge ourselves in the Camerons' wonderful hospitality.’
‘I think you are right,’ he replied. ‘But first, there is something we must do before we return to the homestead.’
Catherine nodded and held Patrick's hand as he bent to place the tiny stone icon in a slither of a crevice in the cave. They stepped back and Catherine smiled.
‘She belongs here,’ she said. ‘This place and the burial mound of the old Celtic kings have much in common. They are places of magic and memory. Even if they are times and worlds apart.’
Patrick swept his wife into his arms and kissed her passionately. She did not resist his embrace but responded with her own rising passion as he fumbled with her clothing until she stood naked in the cool gloom of the cave. In turn he quickly stripped his own clothes away and they lay on the musty earthen floor to make love.
At first their desire was a fast and violent explosion of passion, a coupling of two young animals. But this was followed by a slower, more tender love-making that lasted until the shadows fell in the cracks and crevices of the ancient range of hills and crept with a golden glow into the cave itself.
As Catherine lay sleepily in Patrick's arms on the musty earth she remembered another time and place – a Celtic hill on the other side of the world and an older man who came to the village with paint brushes and canvas. He had arrived with his battle scarred body and she had experienced both pain and joy in his arms.
It was strange, she mused as the golden rays of the sun illuminated the Aboriginal figures on the rock wall. She had been the link between the two men, father and son, and now she had loved them both in the sacred places of their birth. For Michael Duffy had been born in sight of the ancient Celtic burial mound and Patrick born in the shadow of the Nerambura hills. In her own way she loved both men. One now but a memory and the other a reality in her life. Could it be that a woman could love two men equally, but differently? That question, she knew, she could not share with her husband.
When Patrick stirred they dressed and walked out of the cave hand in hand to emerge on the hillside. They gazed across the vastness of the brigalow scrub plains at the setting sun.
Glen View would always be Macintosh, Patrick thought, as he took in the view of the harsh but beautiful land. He had sworn his oath to his grandmother on the matter. His Aunt Kate would just have to accept that Glen View would never be hers; the property held just as much sentimental value to the Macintoshes as it did to the Duffys and she would have to accept that he was the link, fated to join the two families together, despite the bitterness that lay between them. Times had changed and the past was gone. Surely the curse had run its course?
They walked down the old path that had been trodden by thousands of bare feet and then by the boots of the new arrivals to the land. Behind them the hills sighed as a gentle breeze played amongst the tough clinging scrub of the rocks. The heart of the old volcano continued to beat within the stone core of the hill, whispering a warning to Patrick Duffy.
But Patrick did not hear the voices of the ancestor spirits. Only Wallarie could have understood their ancient words.
EPILOGUE
‘That all happened a long time ago when I was A young. Now you know how many whitefellas I killed.’ (Wallarie chuckles.)
‘But what can the police do to an old blackfella? The Native Mounted Police are gone. The government man got rid of the bloody buggers around the time you got a thing called Federation … Or it might have been when you got a twentieth century.
‘You want to know how I got to sit under this bumbil tree on Glen View to tell you more about the two whitefella families? Some whitefella surveyors found Luke Tracy's bones up in the Gulf Country a couple of years back. They gave Missus Tracy a book he had written some words in and she read it every day, tracing the words with her fingers.
‘You want to know about this pastor fellow I knew? Well, old Pastor Werner and his missus let me stay on their mission station up north. I think that time, when I went up north, was after cousin Peter Duffy was killed. I don't remember when that was. But it was a long time ago, before you whitefellas had that big tribal war over in some place called Europe.’ (A silence as the blind old warrior reflects on something sad.)
‘The pastor and his missus are gone to their Dreaming now. They got sick when the big fever came after the whitefella war. They were good people and I don't think the pastor would have liked this German fella, Hitler, I hear you whitefellas talking about.
‘How did I get to Glen View? That is a long story and I can feel the sun going to sleep on my face.
‘That means old Wallarie must go to sleep by the fire. But, if you come back in the morning
with some ‘baccy for my pipe, I might tell you what happened to the Duffys and Macintoshes.’ (Wallarie chuckles again and stares with unseeing eyes into the setting sun.)
‘Long time ago they think that the blackfella curse go away.
‘But they were wrong.’
AUTHOR'S NOTE
The three central themes portrayed in this novel are all firmly based in historical fact.
The New South Wales military expedition to the Suakin Campaign saw an organised body of troops represent an Australian colony in one of the many British colonial wars of the nineteenth century. I have attempted to reconstruct the events surrounding the Tommy Cornstalks' advance on the Sudanese village of Tamai from K.S. Inglis' comprehensive account The Rehearsal. Needless to say, Captain Patrick Duffy's adventures in that campaign are purely fictional.
The guerilla war waged by the Kalkadoon warriors, who inhabited the territory in the Cloncurry district of central North Queensland, was one of the little known and heroic attempts by an Aboriginal tribe to quell the advance of white settlement. But they were not alone and many surrounding tribes of that region also bravely resisted the annexation of their lands. I have used author's licence to move the war from the early 1880s to midway through that decade for dramatic reasons of paralleling two colonial wars.
It should be noted that there is some conflict in accounts about whether the Kalkadoon made a final stand or were dispersed as a result of an ongoing campaign. I have portrayed something in the middle of the conflicting accounts.
Another interesting note on the warriors of central Queensland is their very different tactics – compared to other Australian tribal groupings – used in fighting their war on the frontier. To the reader interested in their culture most information can be found under the library search of Australian Aboriginal Tribes – Kalkadoon.
In my story Gordon James is a fictional character, and in no way does his character bear any resemblance to the real historical commander of the punitive expedition, Lieutenant Urqhart of the Native Mounted Police.
The covert German operation to annex the northern half of New Guinea and surrounding islands did actually occur in Sydney at the time portrayed in this novel. A good source of information on the subject can be found in Stewart Firth's book New Guinea Under the Germans. I have used licence to place the fictional intrepid English agent Horace Brown, and his somewhat reluctant ally the Irish mercenary Michael Duffy, at the centre of events. Needless to say the character of Count Manfred von Fellmann is also fictional. The actual covert operation which sailed from Sydney eventuated in German success. Its repercussions would be felt less than thirty years later when the first Australian troops to be killed in the Great War would die fighting German troops in German occupied Pacific islands and not at Gallipoli as many Australians would believe.
As for the colour and stories of the Queensland frontier I continue to thank Glenville Pike and Hector Holthouse whose books I recommend to any reader with an interest in Australia's northern frontier of the nineteenth century.
For the intrepid tourist, I can assure you that the spirit of Wallarie still roams the brigalow plains and camps by the lily covered billabongs of outback Queensland.