Land of Golden Wattle

by J. H. Fletcher

  Let’s hope nobody kills themselves, she thought. Or anyone else. Life was complicated enough without that.

  It had been a massive turn out, which she supposed was a compliment of sorts; despite what she’d told Tamara she knew most people hadn’t come just for the grub. All those she’d expected had made it plus a number she hadn’t: even the premier had rocked up in a car half a mile long. That had been a surprise: they’d been at daggers drawn for years and he was up to his ears in trouble over the proposed damming of the Franklin. No doubt he’d expect to make a speech; pollies always did. Well, let him. It would do no harm and most wouldn’t listen anyway. He had a driver, which was as well, the way he was tipping it down.

  There were some absentees too; she and Wilmot Gladstone had known each other for ever and she’d been looking forward to shooting the breeze with him but Wilmot had carked it a couple of weeks back. Soon there’d be none of her old mates left, the only ones who knew what she was on about when she started reminiscing about the old days. Giles hadn’t pitched either. Bec had expected nothing else but felt it, all the same. A real disappointment he’d turned out to be, but he was still her son. Secretly she’d been hoping he would make the effort but you couldn’t have everything and there was no end of others there to wish her well.

  Tables had been set up on the lawn at the back of the house. They were piled high with food: a dozen types of salad plus cold chicken, cold lobsters, cold ham, some fancy fish mayonnaise, scallops in a sweet and sour sauce. That was a sign of the times, Bec thought; in her young days no one would have been game to eat anything as foreign as sweet and sour sauce. Most wouldn’t have heard of it.

  The traditionalists were catered for too. On the far side of the lawn a chef in a white hat was barbecuing steaks, chops, prawns, whatever took people’s fancy, the smoke and smell greasing the air most enticingly. There was a cheese table: cheeses of every type you could think of, which was as it should be, seeing the family had a controlling interest in the biggest cheese factory on the island. As for the booze… they could have started a bottle shop with the booze.

  I’ll be interested to see how much this lot has set us back, Bec thought. Lucky the price of wool was holding up.

  Back in the house the din was building. Rupe Gillespie had Doug Harness in a corner and was getting stuck in, something about genetic crops, but Rupe would argue with a stump, given the chance.

  ‘It’s the way of the future,’ Rupe was saying.

  Yeah, right.

  There’d been a time when Bec would have drunk one for one with the boys and thought nothing of it but those days were past. Feeling a need for air she went out on to the deck. She stood at the rail and looked over in time to see a car turn off the highway and begin the winding climb up to the house. A few minutes later she heard sounds from the living room – a shifting of chairs and clearing of throats – that told her the speech-making was about to start. She thought she’d better go back inside; that way she could at least pretend she was listening to all the nonsense.

  No doubt the premier had thought to start the ball rolling but Tamara beat him to it. She sat on the edge of the table, everyone crowding in to listen.

  ‘This family of mine,’ she said, ‘goes back over one and a half centuries. When Emma Tregellas arrived Sir George Arthur was lieutenant governor and there were corpses hanging from the gallows on Hunter’s Island. Later generations helped build the family fortune –’

  She’d do better to keep off that subject, Bec thought. Not everyone loves us for being rich.

  ‘We are here today to celebrate Bec Hampton’s eighty-fifth birthday,’ Tamara was saying. ‘My grandmother was born in the closing years of the nineteenth century, in a world very different from today –’

  Bec accepted that she had to stay and smile modestly but it was harder than she’d expected. With increasing exasperation she thought how everyone talked of the old as though the fact of survival made them objects of reverence. It was foolish; surviving did not make people especially wise or brave or anything much. All they had done was not die. Nothing to make a fuss about.

  There was applause; Bec realised she had missed most of what Tamara had said. No matter; all well meaning, no doubt, but embarrassing, too. Better not to have heard.

  There was a movement at the back of the crowd as three latecomers edged their way into the room. Bec glanced casually across at them, then looked again. The woman she didn’t know or the youth with her; the man she did. Giles had turned up for his mother’s birthday party after all.

  Their eyes met across the mob and her heart sank. She knew that look. Instinct warned that the woman’s presence did not auger well. Giles had come not to celebrate her birthday but to make trouble.

  The premier said his piece, mercifully short, pretending a friendship with Bec they’d never had.

  Tamara was at Bec’s shoulder. ‘Who is she?’

  ‘No idea.’

  ‘I don’t like the look of it,’ Tamara said.

  No more did Bec but it was foolish to prejudge. ‘Let’s wait and see what your dad has to say for himself.’

  Bec had been against holding the party at all but had to admit it had gone well, despite her concerns about Giles. The food looked like wolves had been at it; the liquor the guests had put away could have floated a battleship; there’d been a couple of punchups, nothing serious; one of the teenagers had apparently been planning a striptease until her dad took her in his horny hand; by the time they were through even the chooks were drunk. A really great time. But even as the last guests weaved their unsteady way down the hill it was clear that Giles and his companions had taken root.

  He and Bec had exchanged nods; they had said how you going but that had been the limit of their conversation. No doubt that was about to change.

  Tamara was supervising the clearing up. Her expression showed nothing but Bec knew her granddaughter too well to be fooled. Even across the room she could sense the nerve ends vibrating under Tamara’s skin.

  To take her mind off her own unanswered questions Bec decided to lend a hand in the clearing up. It was more a gesture than anything else; there were clear physical limits to what you could do when you were eighty-five. At least it gave her the chance to check out the woman Giles had brought with him.

  She was youngish, probably no more than forty. Giles was nearly sixty-seven. She was tall and thin, with dark hair and eyes. A pricey black dress and spike heels. Quite striking in a take-no-prisoners kind of way. The way she was looking around, Bec had the feeling she was putting a price on everything.

  Later, when the wreckage had been cleared, Giles introduced his companions.

  ‘Raine Armitage and her son Jaeger Lardner.’

  So Raine Armitage had been married before.

  Smiles and inclined heads; they were most gracious to one another but might have been in the trenches of World War I; the machine guns were muzzled for now but Bec took note of Giles’s know-all smile and knew it was only a reprieve.

  Whatever it was, they weren’t going to hear anything that night. He yawned elaborately and said it had been a long day and they were exhausted. There were important things they had to discuss but they could wait for the morning.

  Bec had never been prepared to play his mind games and was not about to start now.

  ‘The bed’s made up in your room,’ she said. ‘I’ve asked Kate to get things ready in two of the spare rooms.’

  ‘Too kind,’ Raine said.

  Bec bowed her head. Lady Muck on the hoof, she thought. ‘My pleasure,’ she said.

  ‘What does Dad want?’ Tamara said after the others had gone.

  ‘We’ll find out tomorrow,’ Bec said.

  ‘Why couldn’t he tell us now?’

  ‘Because he’s trying to wind us up.’

  Tamara looked at Bec admiringly. ‘Doesn’t seem to have worked with you.’

  ‘I’m too old to be wound up,’ Bec said.

  Yet half an hour later s
he saw something that might have exasperated her had she permitted it. She was crossing the darkened hall on her way to bed when she saw Raine slip silently across the landing and into Giles’s bedroom.

  She listened. At first all was quiet, then she heard laughter. Later she heard other sounds, at first barely audible, then louder.

  The sounds told her nothing she hadn’t already assumed, that Giles and this Raine Armitage were an item and that Raine’s presence represented a complication in what she had already guessed would be a difficult situation. She had never been an eavesdropper yet found herself unable to move. She heard the creaking of bedsprings, sounds like pain becoming steadily more urgent. A crescendo of sounds, like a horse galloping. A split-second’s silence broken by a woman’s triumphant cry.

  So that was Raine Armitage, Bec thought as she closed her bedroom door on the world. She and her son Jaeger Lardner. Giles had always insisted that only a man was capable of running Derwent. It was foolish; he’d never tried to run the place himself while Tamara had been doing it for years but, foolish or not, that had always been his opinion and as trustee and principal beneficiary of the family trust he could do more or less what he wanted with it.

  Bec’s clenched fingers were carving deep crescents in her palms’ soft flesh. Surely he could not intend to do that, she thought. But the facts were stark. Jaeger was Raine Armitage’s son and Raine was in Giles Penrose’s bed.

  Dear God.

  One thing on top of another. Tamara lay in bed, eyes watching the images that came and went in the darkness, and knew there would not be much sleep tonight.

  The people who had turned up with Tamara’s father, their presence unexplained: who were they and what were they doing? The arrogant way the woman had looked around – at the house and furniture, at Tamara herself – you’d have thought she owned the place and everyone in it. So yes, Raine Armitage and her son were part of the problem but only a part. Not even the most important part, either.

  When Bec had suggested she should go to the new Agfest show she’d had no inkling the sky was about to fall on her head. Now – meeting Grant after all these years – it had. The future was still cloudy but with willpower and good fortune it would be hers.

  1831

  ‘I declare our luck has turned at last,’ Ephraim said.

  ‘It will be interesting to inspect the land Sir George has given us,’ Emma said.

  The carriage, bellows top closed against the dust, drew to a stop at the top of the rise. To its right a hill thick with scrub rose steeply to a ridge sharp cut against a sky that was sapphire blue, hard and bright. The horses rested, mouthing their silver bits.

  Emma opened the door and stepped out into the sunlight. The soles of her boots crunched upon the surface of the gravel road that ran all the way north to Launceston. Behind them lay Oatlands, where they had stayed overnight, and fifty miles beyond that Hobart Town, which they had left two days before and where they had left Richard in the care of a nurse. Emma had grown fond of the little boy but had decided a trip like this would be too tiring for him.

  She used her parasol to fend off the sun’s ferocious rays and stared about her. Her up-tilted chin challenged the future as she examined the view: the road shimmering with heat as it wound down into the valley, the lush pastures broken by isolated stands of timber extending northwards to distant hills now shading blue in the early afternoon light.

  Ephraim, favouring his lame foot, had followed her more slowly out of the carriage and now stood at her side, sharing the moment. ‘I swear we have entered into glory,’ he said. ‘When Sir George dug in his heels I wondered if it would ever happen.’

  Emma smiled. ‘I am so pleased you managed to persuade him,’ she said.

  After eight months of marriage she had learnt what she could safely say to him and what she could not. The truth was that Ephraim’s discussions with Sir George Arthur had nothing to do with it because Sir George, stubborn as a post and mindful that the system of free land grants was coming to an end, would have rejected their application out of hand had not his wife, loyal to her friend, managed somehow to talk him round.

  It was possible their grant was the last one that would ever be issued under the old system, and knowing how close they’d come to missing out made Emma’s pleasure all the greater. It had also made her the more determined to see the land for herself.

  Ephraim had been against her making the trip – she was five months pregnant – but she would have none of it.

  ‘I am as strong as a horse,’ she said. ‘Surely you will not deprive me of the joy of seeing for myself the land that my dear husband has obtained for us?’

  For Ephraim Dark was the lord and master, at least in his own estimation, and she had no plans to correct the notion. So, having persuaded Ephraim it was his idea, she had succeeded in what she had been determined to do. And now there it was, all twenty thousand acres of it. Or approximately; the precise area would be known only when the land was surveyed and the deeds issued.

  ‘How considerate of you to let me see it with you for the first time together,’ she said. ‘I am delighted by the idea that we shall be landed gentry in our new land.’

  She knew Ephraim was delighted too. She had learnt to read his thoughts, not as an intrusion or because she didn’t trust him but as the first step towards the happy and fulfilling marriage she was determined they would have. She also knew Ephraim’s world was peopled by visions that gave him no rest; he held their future – the future of the dynasty they would create, of the land itself – in his heart and soul. She was as romantic as he but allowed herself to believe she was more aware of the practicalities than her husband, his mind constantly enflamed by his dreams.

  No matter, Emma thought. We shall work together. He will lead, I shall guide him and we shall be one.

  ‘Dark land,’ Ephraim said. ‘All of it ours, as far as the eye can see.’ He would have danced, had he been a dancing man.

  ‘Have you thought where the house should be?’ she asked.

  One of the stipulations of the grant system was that the owners of the land should live on it, to extend settlement into the wild places.

  ‘By the creek?’ he suggested, pointing to the valley bottom where a meandering waterway shone olive green between trees whose names Emma did not know.

  So much to learn, she thought happily. That too was a source of joy because knowledge was power. Power over the land, power over the future. So much to cram into one lifetime. She too might have danced, had the growing child not prevented her.

  ‘That would be a good place and handy to the water too. But I wonder…’

  He looked at her; he was coming to know her too, as it was right he should. ‘Wonder what?’

  ‘Let us climb to the top of the hill. We shall be able to see more clearly up there.’

  He looked dubiously at the ridge sailing high above them in a sea of blinding blue. ‘Perhaps you shouldn’t.’

  Stuff and nonsense, Emma thought but did not say. ‘I shall be careful.’ She returned to the carriage and took out the hatchet she had brought with her from Hobart Town. ‘Perhaps you will carry it for me,’ she said.

  ‘Why do we need this?’

  Emma smiled.

  It was hard going. The scrub was brittle, as dry as tinder, and the heat was ferocious; by the time she reached the summit Emma was dripping with sweat and bleeding from a scratch on the forehead that had been inflicted by a stubborn branch. But she stood at her husband’s side and looked at the land below, green and gold and russet-brown, with the grey of rock showing through the grass on the steeper slopes.

  Triumph flooded. Here at last was fulfilment of the dream that had sustained her on the night of her escape from Raedwald Hall and during the interminable-seeming voyage when all had felt lost. Here was triumph after the three years when courage alone had sustained her. Her life; her future; her husband; her child.

  ‘What is the exact acreage we own?’ Emma asked.

 
Ephraim was not to be tied to prosaic numbers. ‘The future,’ he said. ‘That’s what we own. I see the hillsides thick with our flocks, our warehouses full of bales of the finest merino wool to be shipped to England. In our ships, Emma! From our own ports!’

  ‘To develop our own ports where at the moment there is nothing but bush and forest,’ Emma said. ‘Will that not be vastly expensive?’

  ‘We have the money,’ he said.

  ‘But not unlimited money.’

  ‘We have the money. Do not concern yourself about that. I see vast forests, our own sawmills. I see cattle and horses. I see our sheltered valleys planted to apples… I see cider presses, wheat, potatoes… We shall be self-sufficient! You and I and our children will be kings and queens of all we survey –’

  ‘We shall need guns,’ she said.

  ‘Of course.’

  Guns would give them game for the pot. Guns would also protect them against bushrangers or other marauders. They would defend what was theirs. To the death, if needs be.

  The land was the fulfilment she had brought into being by the exercise of her will. Now they would build their big house up here on the ridge overlooking the vastness that was theirs. A house for them and for the generations to come. If only there was water. Water would confirm the rightness of her vision.

  She began to walk this way and that, head down and searching.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  Seeking the realisation of the dream.

  ‘Looking for water,’ she said.

  There was a gully and in the gully…

  ‘Come and see.’

  A strong flow of water.

  She crouched, cupping her hands, and drank. The water was cold and clear.

  ‘And sweet,’ Emma said.

  It was summer yet the flow was strong. In winter it would be a torrent.

  ‘This is the place,’ she said.

  She did not ask; the imperative was too strong for that. He was still holding the hatchet. She took hold of his arm and shook it gently.