Clement plans a race through half of Bassett
Few children from St Boniface’s school live in Leslie Street. Hardly any of the boys in Clement’s grade know where he lives. The two or three who have played in his yard have never noticed among the untrimmed shrubs the signs that promise that an event which once took place in a far distant shape like an amphitheatre, so that the crowds who watched it could study each of the thousands of stages in its elaborate unfolding, may one day be revealed to the people of Bassett. The people who walk up and down Leslie Street thinking of places like Melbourne or America or England far away past the low stony hills that enclose their city have seen nothing in all the quiet length of that strip of worn bitumen edged with gravel and fallen gum-nuts and leading only to other even quieter streets of gravel and dust to suggest that one day there might be flags and pennants hanging from its gate-posts and coloured arrows painted on its tar for days before the start of a great race which is open to every boy at St Boniface’s school and for which there are no handicaps, so that more than a hundred milling boys have to form two ragged lines across the width of Lucknow Street outside the school gate to start. Nor are they prepared for the sight of hundreds of girls from the school, together with nuns and lady teachers, perhaps a thousand parents and relatives of the boys competing, and crowds of men, women and children from the houses along the way who might gather to watch the race under every tree along Lucknow Street, Cordwainer Street or McCracken’s Road. But when Clement’s father brings home one afternoon from the mental asylum where he works a big ledger with dozens of unused pages at the back, the boy rules up the book ready for the day when the largest crowd that has ever been seen in that part of Bassett gathers near the corner of McCracken’s Road and Leslie Street to see the leading bunch, gasping at the end of their journey of almost a mile, wheel around the last corner and force themselves to sprint the last hundred yards up the slow hill to the finishing tape that stretches from the front gate of 42 Leslie Street to the gum-tree across the street. Men with cameras will wait at short intervals along every street. The films that they take will be combined afterwards to show clearly the position of every competitor at every point of the race. The complete film will be projected in slow motion on a large screen so that a group of specially trained artists can prepare hundreds of coloured sketches and diagrams which will be printed in a book about the race. Anyone reading the book will be able to spend days or weeks following the progress of any one of the competitors from a place of obscurity to one that seemed to promise success and then through the ordeal of the last few hundred yards, when at different moments it seemed likely that now one and then another and then again still another might go on to win if only he did not falter and in a few strides doom himself to a failure that was all the harder to endure because of the triumph that had seemed briefly within his reach, from a prominent place that seemed to assure him of a leading part in the great final battle slowly back until even the most loyal watcher had to admit that all his early hopes were of even less worth than the hopes of the plodding few whose dogged runs took them at the finish only as far forward as the middle of the field, or from the most despised of all positions to one that was scarcely noticed at the end but still gave a wry pleasure to a discerning watcher because it placed him forever ahead of a few who in the exhilarating run towards the first corner had seemed assured of so much more than him.
A gypsy visits the Killeatons
When Augustine arrives home at the house in Leslie Street his wife and son notice at once that he has no crayfish wrapped in newspaper under his arm and no cake of chocolate bulging his coat pocket. They know better than to bother him with questions about the races. He sits alone at the table eating a small part of the meal that has been kept in the oven for him. He chews his food with the slow rhythmical movements that he sometimes tries to teach to his son because they promote a regular loose bowel action. There is a knock at the front door. The sound startles the family because they have so few visitors. Sometimes Augustine promises his wife that when they can afford a decent house and some respectable furniture he will invite some friends home every Sunday. Then his wife asks him what friends is he talking about because he admits himself that most of the racing men he mixes with can’t get through the day without making pigs of themselves on beer, that some of them are not good-living men, and that even the good Catholic racing men are mostly paying off their own homes and would only turn up their noses at the Killeatons’ shabby rented place. The knock sounds again. Clement’s mother takes off her greasy apron and goes to answer the knock. At the kitchen door she turns and makes a face at Clement to warn him against peeping at the visitor like an ignorant slum kid. Mrs Killeaton comes back to the kitchen and whispers to her husband that the man at the door is foreign-looking but doesn’t seem a bad type and says he has tramped all day around Bassett selling medicines and health drinks to support his wife and children. She asks her husband should she buy a small bottle of something because she feels sorry for the man. Augustine asks in a loud voice – how much is the stuff? She says – only a shilling for a small bottle. Augustine says, loudly and cheerfully so that the man at the door will hear – we’ve lost so much lately that a shilling can’t make much difference to us. He gives his wife a coin, and she goes back to the front door. She brings back a small brown bottle whose yellow label has only the words Guaranteed Worm Mixture Best For Children Take One Spoon After Meals Or At Other Time. She opens the bottle and sniffs at it, then pours the milky liquid into the sink. She turns on the tap to wash every drop down the plug-hole. Then she carries the bottle and its lid outside to the rubbish tin. When she comes back she washes her hands carefully with sand-soap, peering down into the drain where the worm mixture has gone. Augustine says – I suppose you’ve got to feel sorry for chaps who have to travel round from door to door selling things. On Monday at St Boniface’s school some of the boys say that the gypsies have come to Bassett, that houses are being burgled and girls are being chased down lonely streets. That night Augustine reads aloud to his wife a story from the Bassett Standard telling how police have been called to intervene in domestic arguments at the Bassett camping ground, how several men believed to be gypsies have been convicted of being drunk and disorderly, and how police have warned residents of Bassett to take precautions against strangers selling doubtful goods or stealing poultry. Clement asks his father who the gypsies are and where they come from. Augustine tells him that long ago, before the time of Jesus, a tribe of people from a land that was probably Egypt were driven out of their true country and forced to wander through poor countries like Armenia and Transylvania until at last they scattered into little bands, each going in a different direction and wandering so far that after many years they no longer remembered the way back to their homeland but lived cheerfully in whichever country they found themselves, except that something still kept them from settling for long in any one town or city and compelled them to go from place to place travelling along little-used roads and grassy tracks because people often persecuted them. At last, after many centuries of travelling, a small band of gypsies reaches Australia. They spend their lives journeying between towns in the sunlit arc of country that stretches for more than a thousand miles, out of sight of Melbourne and Sydney and Brisbane, from inland Victoria to outback Queensland. Camped at sunset beside a grassy back road that approaches an isolated town from an unexpected direction, the gypsies stare across a landscape that no Australians have noticed because although people have lived there for years no one has looked out before from the gypsies’ vantage point. Pausing at corners where no signposts stand, the gypsies decide on a route that no one before has attempted. The country that they set out to cross is marked on hundreds of maps but their journeys are circuitous and unpredictable. Resting in the heat of the day somewhere between two roads that have been neglected for years because they run parallel to the main routes, the gypsies discover a tract of country, perhaps only ten miles wide and enclosed on
all sides by roads between towns, where the sound of the breeze in cypress boughs or the rattling together of grass-seeds reassures them that even on journeys within a populous land there are places as secluded as they could wish for. Their leader tells the gypsies that they can always expect to find, in corners of districts that Australians believe to be well known and thoroughly explored, sheltering places like the lonely thickets their people once found on the road away from Egypt.
The gypsies get Garry Broderick
Every afternoon half a dozen boys who live around McCracken’s Road saunter home from St Boniface’s school in a straggling group, stopping to drag down from the kurrajong trees pods of itchy powder that they poke down each other’s backs, slithering down the steep banks of the creek to piss across the wide drain at the bottom, and creeping through the dark drain beneath the embankment of the northern railway line where State-school boys are believed to take their girlfriends to a secret hide-out for rude games. Clement Killeaton would like to follow these boys home every night, but his mother has forbidden him to dawdle or to go out of his usual route. One morning he hears groups of boys in St Boniface’s yard whispering that the gypsies have got Garry Broderick, one of the boys who walks home with the McCracken’s Road gang. Their teacher tells them in school to say a little prayer for a special intention for someone in their own class. Broderick is missing from his desk. As soon as prayers are over a boy asks the nun whether Garry Broderick is dead. She puts on her stern face and says – little Garry will be back with us in a few days when he has recovered from a nasty experience that he had. In the yard at playtime Clement hears that Broderick was stabbed, that his clothes were torn off by a madman, and that he was tortured by the gypsies because he refused to say God was mad and to kiss a picture of the Devil. That afternoon Clement’s mother meets her son at the school gate. On the way home she tells him that sometimes men who are sick in their minds or very drunk sneak up on little children and do dreadful things to their bodies. Augustine promises his wife that he won’t go away to any more race-meetings until she feels brave enough to stay alone in the house again. Clement sees his parents whispering together over a certain page of the Bassett Standard. When he finds the page afterwards he sees that a column has been cut out and removed. At school next day several boys turn up with a column that they have cut from the Standard. Clement reads that a thirty-five year old labourer of no fixed address has been remanded without bail for trial on a serious charge involving a schoolboy. In their chasing and shooting games the boys call their enemies gypsies instead of Japs and Germans. That night Augustine announces that the police have been out to the camping ground and ordered all the gypsy families to leave and go where they like but never come back to Bassett as long as they live. Several days later Garry Broderick arrives at the door of the classroom. A priest stands beside him, holding the boy’s hand. While the children scramble to their feet and cry – good morning Father and God bless you Father, the nun leads Garry to his seat. He grins around at his friends. At playtime the nun patrolling the yard continually scatters the circle of boys that gathers around Broderick. Still grinning, he tells everyone that he has been talking to policemen every day, that his father is going to give him a shilling pocket money whenever he wants it from now on, and that a dirty gypsy is going to be put in jail for five years because of something that he (Broderick) saw him doing beside the creek. Another boy says that his father was working out near the camping ground the day before and saw a mob of gypsies going back north to where they belong and looking very ashamed of themselves.
Augustine tells the story of Europe
Clement is curious to know the exact route that the gypsies followed to Australia. In an old National Geographic magazine that Augustine has brought home from the library of the Bassett Mental Hospital, under the heading By Iron Steed to the Black Sea: An American Girl Cycles Across Romania, a gypsy woman, swathed in greasy shawls against the wind and the forbidding skies and with her baby tied to her back, sets out along a gravel road that leads past uninviting marshy grass towards a cluster of shadowy forested mountains. The caption names the grey gravel the long long road of vagabondage. This road, like others that the gypsies must travel on through that land, which for all its strangeness is still miles from their homeland, passes first among steep hillsides where villages of houses roofed with hay brace themselves against the giddy slopes. Strange sheep with dark stringy hair instead of wool come home each evening to yards with crude brushwood fences. Clement asks his father about the barefooted dirty shepherds and the miserable dairy-farmers with their bony mongrel cows. Augustine tells him that, just as the boy suspected, these are not real farmers. They were following their useless animals out to their scanty pastures in the morning and driving them back to barns and folds at night for hundreds of years before the first bushmen were born in the snug little huts that their pioneer fathers hewed by hand from the towering Australian trees. While the pale peak-faced Europeans went on copying their ancestors’ methods of farming, tipping their caps to the local baron or grand-duke as he rode away from his turreted castle to spend the winter in Venice or Rome, and marrying their first cousins from the same village so that their stupidity and lassitude became thoroughly bred into their children, the bushmen of Australia were choosing great tracts of a land that had never been touched by a plough and crumbled like rich fruit-cake when they drove the corner posts of their boundary fences into it, droving overland the mobs of sturdy sheep and cattle that bred with zest under the proud gaze of their owners and filled the enormous properties with meaty full-blooded progeny, and devising for themselves, with only their native intelligence to guide them in a country that was hindered by no senseless traditions or customs, those farming methods that would make Australia the world’s greatest producer of wheat wool beef and milk, even though the Americans would always boast in their infuriating accent that they were the world’s best farmers. In countries where gloomy pine-shaded valleys recede endlessly back like the pages of calendars whose pictures are of mysterious scenes coloured in unhealthy greens and disturbing reds, the Europeans call themselves Catholics but know little of the mortification and self-discipline and resistance to persecution that are the marks of a true Catholic. Their cheerless cathedrals grow gradually empty of people while, in clearings where the clinking of parrots sounds instead of the jangling of green-encrusted bells, the little weatherboard churches built by the sweat and sacrifices of a few families of bushmen are crowded to their back porches on every Sunday of the year. Second- and third-generation Catholics go on felling trees and splitting posts and quarrying stone for their sprawling farmhouses that will stand for a century and more, glancing up for reassurance towards the broad yellow unbroken arcs of their horizons or the few ponderous golden leaves of their calendars, the last of whose pages may have been lifted quietly out of view not long before Clement first peered up behind his kitchen door and tried to understand why now instead of one great sun-coloured canopy that drooped for years at a time above his father’s journeys he could see only a few rows of sharply ruled squares that would soon be up-ended and put away, along with the vague outlines and sober colours of the religious scene above them, in a twilight that was already thick with layers of such things. Far away in grey shadows behind a stark wall of hills someone goes on turning the Europeans’ dreary pages so rapidly that a cold breeze begins to blow. Ghostly-white Jews in streets that the sunlight has never reached go on with their centuries-old task of wrapping gold coins in greasy cloth and mumbling to a God who was paid in full in blood two thousand years ago and has no more claim on the world. The servile peasants, who have spent too much time in the damp alleys and pestilential niches of their absurdly complex cathedrals when they might have been kneeling attentively on the bright slopes around the high altar assisting at Mass, begin too late to pray in earnest and speak truthfully to God. Advancing down the long long road to meet them is a war so terrible that not even a good Catholic can tell which side is right
and which is wrong. Soon only the windowless walls of churches and monasteries are left standing. Outrages are committed against the Blessed Sacrament and even against nuns. Thousands of innocent people suffer along with millions who have been heedless or guilty and deserve to suffer. Peace settles like dust on the rubble of stones and hills, but things are no better. In the valleys around the ruined towns the listless survivors of the war try in vain to feed themselves from the stunted cattle and hairy sheep and the cramped misty fields. In places with long harsh names people chew the gristle of dead rats. Before long, thousands of once-proud townsmen and farmers are lining up for parcels of nourishing food sent from the distant farms where the pioneers’ grandchildren have already doubled or trebled the yield of their land. Some of the Australian farmers have never even seen a Japanese bomber in all the sky above their properties. But far out in the silver and black maze behind the calendar-coloured stacks of National Geographics that have lain safely for years in a sturdy bookcase in the lounge-room of some comfortable home hundreds of miles inside the cliffs of the island continent of Australia, the gypsies are still travelling.
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