by Peter Hawes
A hilarious short story about Mrs WC Wentworth and her intentions to buy New Zealand.
Stuck in the dry desert of Single Tree Gully, Australia, in 1840, Mrs Wentworth dreams of a place deluged with rain. An island to own, and rain. The pigeon post brings word from her husband that he has negotiated with some Maori chiefs to purchase the isle on which she has set her heart. However, politics intervenes …
Pigeon Post
Peter Hawes
Whop whop, whop-whop-whop whop; whop, whop-whop. Whopwhop whooopppp. (Silence) Cack. Gergadoodle, gergoolally gooeroo coo.
That was an OHMS pigeon landing on the single branch of the single tree in Single Tree Gully, inner NSW. Somewhere. On January 13th.
The bird sat in the tree that diurnally waited to distil the single drop of water from weekly pigeon cacks. ‘Why do I have to live in the same latitude as the Sudan?’ thought the benighted mulga — slowly, for it must conserve the energy provided by scarce H2O — ‘Elsewhere I could have been a eucalypt. Though,’ it reconsidered, ‘at least I’m better off than those pathetically desperate xerophytic shrubs driving roots down dozens of feet, in search of aquifers that aren’t there.’
Whereas the pigeon was. Usually on a Thursday. And sometimes a Monday as well, if there had been Political Developments in Sydney in which Mr WC Wentworth feels Mrs WC Wentworth might be interested. Or should be. Or he wanted her to be. The pigeons came, they shat, the liquid was withdrawn by osmosis and thus the mulga branch survived. For the pigeons to sit on.
‘Nosepeg! Wrench the leg off that fucking pigeon and bring me the mail!’
That was Mrs WC Wentworth in accents as harsh as her skin and broad as her buttocks. Her name was actually Sarah, née Cox, but this was 1840, when Sarahs were female husbands, known, in this case as Mrs William Charles Wentworth. She was known to her husband as Mrs Wentworth and she referred to him as Mr Wentworth (although in her mind she saw the whoring, squandrous bastard as WC, in the cloacal sense of the word). But to assume that these distantly formal honorifics were the only proof of married statehood would be quite wrong, for between them they had devised three sons and seven daughters. All of whom had departed for ‘the bright lights’. The lights, it seems, of a trillion billion stars blazing down to a mid-point over Single Tree Gully did not qualify, to photo-phallic youth, as bright.
Mrs WC Wentworth was born in 1805, on Norfolk Island, to Francis and Frances Cox, who had in common not just Christian names but also occupation. Both were petty thieves, caught and sent to the penal colonies by outraged British Justice.
Norfolk Island — presently available in travel-package form; eight days of revelry on white sands bordering harmonious lagoons and o’erlooked by stately Norfolk pines: $6500. It was even cheaper in 1800; just take a Sunday sidle down Rotten Row, pick a few pocket watches and kerchiefs, get caught, then four months later feel the warmth of paradise beneath your leg-irons.
Well, maybe that’s a bit idealistic — you can only see the turquoise waters and the eponymous pines through crannies in the stonework of your cell — and the sand, although pristinely white, is being insinuated into your cell on the soles of ants’ feet so big they can fit ten grains on each foot. But, swear eternal fidelity and usually after about seven years you can walk through the portals and start practising it.
Sarah’s folks had. And here she was.
She had met WC Wentworth in Sydney, 1828, when he took her case against one Captain John Payne for breach of promise. Or, as many would unkindly murmur, repair of breach of sanity. For, frankly, Mrs WC Wentworth was a formidable case for the unmarried state: buttocks like crates, a waist so profound it was spelt differently, breasts like Magyar helmets, a large head badly wallpapered in faded olive skin — all upheld on legs seemingly designed by the locomotivist Mr George Stevenson. But somewhere, God knows, she was possessed of a secret place which, by friction, lubrication and willpower, could be softened from resistant and bulky clays into yielding mud. The Wentworths had after all, as aforementioned, ten children.
BOOM!
Oh. That was Nosepeg murdering the exhausted mail pigeon. He did it with a Caribbean shotgun, fat as a blunderbuss, that he perennially filled to the top with shot, and let rip. If only the bird-brained pigeons of the Royal Mail would realise Nosepeg could only aim upwards — that if he fired down, or even horizontally at them as they perched, say, on the mysterious black stump next to the mulga tree instead of up on the single branch, all his fucking pellets would have fallen out the barrel.
Well, they didn’t, and that’s evolution for you, I suppose. Sheesh.
It wasn’t so cruel. The poor birds would never have got back to Sydney anyway. No food to sustain them, to boost their strength for the return journey — they’d have been dead as dodos by the time they arrived home. Trouble was, Nosepeg’s trumpet-barrelled gun blew every yielding part of them, breast, thighs, giblets, etc, to kingdom come. Useless. Mrs WC Wentworth had once fricasseed scattered body parts but gave up one day after two mouthfuls and bellowed: ‘If I eat much more of this pigeon I’ll die of fucking malnutrition!’ Since then she had habitually given the husks to Nosepeg’s gin to make sinew and gristle soup.
Mr WC Wentworth, by the way, had looked mildly over his spoon and replied: ‘Without pigeons you would never have known Oliver Twist asked for more.’
And he was right; the book had arrived, two pages — a left and a right — at a time, over a period of three years. Oliver Twist and her copy of Certain Aspects of Post-Lyellian Geography were her only company when Mr WC Wentworth was (continually) away.
Nosepeg, a sort of animated fright wreathed in flies that he never bothered to brush away, had padded silently into the withdrawing room with a tissue of writing in one hand and a sticky garland of feathers in the other. His voice — first evidence of his presence, though barely above a whisper (there are no sounds to compete with in the desert) — had mildly startled her. How did they move like that? The standard answer to that and all Aboriginal issues was usually: ‘They are at one with Nature.’ But that much Nature? She appraised him — eyes set so deep they must be touching his brain, gap from the ceremonially bashed-out front tooth, pink mottles amidst his blackness where he had rolled in his sleep into his fire. The appraisal was a fond one. She had often watched Nosepeg sitting in the ten-inch-wide shade of the mulga tree, manufacturing spears. He was always in its shade, yet not once did he move perceptibly. In the course of the day he circumnavigated the mulga, on his arse. (On other days she had seen him circle the tree but this time to avoid the shadow. On these occasions he wore lizard guts on his head. As the offal heated it sweated oil down his neck and back, making him invulnerable to mosquitoes, scorpions, heat and cold.)
Now he held out the tiny, airy epistle. ‘Not much lettering this one, Misses.’
Misses. She knew he thought of Mrs as either the plural of maidens or several things that had not hit their targets. Did he see her as a double virgin? A boomerang that had failed to make contact?
‘Thank you, Nosepeg. Now take those feather fellas home for wife cookee.’ Home: a two-foot-high windbreak of spinifex, three bed-holes scooped from the sand with small fireplaces between. Chattels: a grinding stone, a wooden coolamon for carrying water or babies, and a dozen stick spears.
Nosepeg padded out. His buttocks, the buttocks that could circle trees, ironically enough, didn’t move as he walked. They were naked except for the thong of the pubis-cloth she had demanded he wear. She had provided him with material and fortunately he was proud enough of the gingham pouch not to have discarded it within days. Ah yes, those buttocks; the engine room she called them.
He was right, the letter was brief. But it pleased her beyond measure. ‘I’ve bought you your island. WCW.’
; There was an island she had read about in her book of post-Lyellian geography; strong westerly winds swept over this island, bringing incessant rain — 200 to 240 inches of it a year! Gentle Jesu! Two hundred and forty inches a year! Here, in the bleached, cracking Outback of spinifex, gravelhills, twigs of desert oak, a mysterious black stump and a one-armed mulga tree in a state of arrested development, it was an inch every 240 years! Blazing redness; limitless vistas of tangerine infertility — it was likely that Nosepeg had no conception that soil could be blacker than he was, for he would have to walk eastward three hundred miles to the fertile coastlands to see it. Oh, the three hundred miles was easy, he could walk it in five days — but his long walks were always to the west, into the desert.
She had been reading at night, by the reeking glow of a whale-oil lamp when she came across the account of this island where it rained nearly every day. Now she put down the book and walked across the crepitating floor — which once, perhaps, had been the trunk above the black stump — to the window screen.
Through the scrabbling of myriad light-struck insects on the window screen, Mrs WC Wentworth looked at the stars. There they were. And the planets. Planets! She disapproved of planets. Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus — with Earth at number three! Would God have put his greatest creation in third place? And now this sacrilegious talk of yet another planet; that the orbit of Uranus was subjected to irregularities that could only be caused by Mr Newton’s gravity upon its cycle. Had God spent valuable time on the first day on yet another planet? Never!
Stoutly Wesleyan Mrs WC Wentworth drew the line at Uranus. Six and no more! She conceded that these six lifeless planets could easily be material discarded by a celestial potter as He laboured at his major work. Let them be acknowledged, but let Physics end at their boundary. Beyond was Firmament; 100 per cent Firmament, fixed in firmamental spirituality for ever.
She refocused from the heavens, set her gaze on the congeries of insects on the screen. Squash one and you got a viscous liquid of often startling colour. Liquid. ‘Between you pestiferous little beasties’, she said aloud, ‘and the Firmament, there’s no liquid. From the outside of my screen until the gates of heaven, there’s not a drop of fucking water.’
So why was she here, in this unspeakable land when Sydney was only three weeks away? One reason was the very cause her pompous unfaithful husband stentoriously fought for in the House and through the columns of his newspaper — that the ‘exclusives’ would never admit into society the emancipists. And she was such a one. Criminal connections. Freed by British Justice into highly publicised caste of ‘emancipated criminal’. She was a drawback to the ambitions of Mr WC Wentworth. Mr WC Wentworth could have hobnobbed with the most aristocratic of exclusives if he’d chosen — because no one as yet knew that he too was the offspring of convicts.
Another reason she was here was that she loved it. The desert might look ghastly by day but it was beautiful by night. Emptiness became fullness; there was no impediment in any direction to the perfect half-globe of the sky. The only landmark was the horizon. Above it, her Firmament. You could see God’s house from here.
And the last reason? — well, let’s face it, the place made her filthy rich. Mr WC Wentworth had bequeathed it to her as a reverse dowry before he realised parakelia flourished here. Flourished? In the desert? Yes, parakelia was the most succulent of succulents — you could wash your hands in it, drink it, nourish pasture, thrive cattle on it. She put thousands of pounds from cattle proceeds into the financial institutions of Sydney each year, and more precious to her than lucre was the envy her wealth caused amid the exclusives. What richer circumstance for one whose parents were sent in chains to a far-flung prison for combined thefts of about a shilling.
The connubial relations of Mr and Mrs WC Wentworth could have been described as ordinary — if they had taken place between, say, consenting occupants of a walrus colony. For Mr WC Wentworth was also of grand size.
Intercourse proceeded in a manner passers-by would describe as ‘tectonic’ in nature; and always in the proscribed missionary position that Nosepeg had recently eschewed with a frank declaration: ‘Too big-fat for me reaching; I know shortcut.’ And thus had Mrs WC Wentworth been introduced to the little doggie position. Somehow she knew it was a highly unchristian act although she had never heard it condemned, because to do so was to admit knowledge of it, which raised further questions. Consequently it remained a cross-racial activity, resulting in immense orgasms, whilst God-blessed, semi-penetrative connubial intercourse produced nothing but children.
A wheezing, fat-slopping bout of Christian intercourse had just ensued and now the recently vacated Mrs WC Wentworth lay on her back next to Mr WC Wentworth, breathing heavily.
When capable of sustained speech she said: ‘I want to buy an island. I need you to make the arrangements.’
‘Any particular island?’ he replies.
‘Where there are 240 inches of rain a year.’
‘Would you want to live on this island?’
‘No. I would just like to know it was mine. And it was being rained on every day.’
‘Preposterous. You have the best and deepest well within a thousand square miles and you have your damned parakelia. What more water do you want?’
‘I don’t want water, I want rain.’ Her reason did admittedly sound a little thin, but it was profound. ‘I want water that comes down, not up, that is not squeezed out of plants. I want rain. If you will arrange it, I will buy it.’
‘You will buy rain? I think you are mad, Mrs Wentworth. Let’s hear no more about it.’
Frankly it was not the ideal time to have raised the issue; Mr WC Wentworth had had his way and his member would remain in an oyster-like state for the rest of the night. But Mrs WC Wentworth had another string to her bow — making it the only bow in Australia. She used it now, by riposting that if her island was not purchased she would tell the media by fast pigeon — perhaps even Mr Wentworth’s own paper The Australian — that his father had been an English highway robber before becoming a distinguished Australian landowner and medical practitioner.
With some heat Mr WC Wentworth reminded his wife that while his father had been charged with the said crime he had been found not guilty. In fact, to put the matter beyond all dispute he had four times been charged with highway robbery and acquitted on each occasion! Four hundred per cent innocent!
Then, vowed Mrs WC Wentworth, she would tell the media and perhaps The Australian that his mother had been convicted at the Stafford Assizes in July of 1788, for stealing ‘wearing apparel’ and consigned, as had her own mother, to Norfolk Island.
It was a powerful threat and, in oaths, Mr Wentworth agreed. Thus the pigeon informed her, on 13 January 1840, that she possessed her island: ‘I and my business partners C Brown, R Campbell (tertius), Jones and Unwin engaged with five prestigious Maori chiefs who were visiting Sydney, and from this consortium, led by one Tuhawaiki, we bought, for £200, twenty million acres of the South Island of New Zealand — known as the Mainland and which, I know, is the abysmally rain-ridden isle upon which you have set your heart.’
She rejoiced — several times with Nosepeg — until the 29th inst when a pigeon from Mr WC Wentworth informed her that she had not in fact acquired her island after all.
By return pigeon (one of her own, for as mentioned above, pigeon post was of necessity one way) she asked how this curious switch in fortune had come about, and Mr WC Wentworth replied that politics had intervened. Governor Gipps had proclaimed the boundaries of New South Wales to have been extended to include any land acquired by sovereignty within New Zealand. All purchases from chiefs or tribes after 14 January 1840 were now void.
Grimly she marched across the dead land of Single Tree Gully to Nosepeg’s shelter. He was not there. ‘Hunting,’ said his wife. ‘Back tonight. I tell him you want butter his bollard?’
‘No, I want him to accompany me to Sydney. But what the hell, I’ll butter his bollard
anyway.’
‘How far is Sydney?’ she asked him later.
‘Ooo, plenty cigarette,’ said Nosepeg, replacing his gingham pubis-cloth over his buttered bollard.
That meant at least eleven cartons of cigarettes, ten fingers plus every other number after ten. A long way.
Next day they set out, she on horseback, Nosepeg on foot. ‘More faster walk,’ he explained. ‘I know how ride you, but not horse.’
You’d certainly put the steed through its paces if you did, she thought and twenty-one days later they were east of the Blue Mountains which Mr WC Wentworth and party had been the first to cross in 1813. She liveried the horses, told Nosepeg to go and find a bridge to sleep under, then entered the New Albion Hotel at which Mr WC Wentworth had a permanent suite.
He was not pleased either to see her or with the nature of her mission. ‘I will not get you an audience with the Governor: he’s a very busy man. He hasn’t time to argue the toss all day with you over a damp, damnable island. If you want rain, come here — Sydney gets rain.’
‘You know I can’t live here. I don’t like cities.’ (Because there was, indeed, another reason for her love of Single Tree Gully.)
‘You and your wretched manure phobia!’ bellowed Mr WC Wentworth.
‘It’s quite true!’ she replied, equally emphatically. ‘Mr Lyell says that by 1860 every major city will be under ten feet of manure.’
‘Preposterous!’
‘Anyway, I don’t need an audience with the Governor, I just need a copy of his proclamation. And the use of one of your parliamentary journalists to keep me abreast of its repercussions. I will then communicate with the Governor by post.’
And she did.
Dear Governor; A deputation of five Maori chiefs met with you on 31 January to discuss the sale of their lands. You told them there was to be a declaration of sovereignty and you would give them ten pounds each if they did not sign over their land to anyone but the Crown. They agreed. You then back-dated the proclamation of sovereignty to January 14, knowing my husband was to have talks with the five chiefs in mid-January. In my view you are guilty of both bribery and perverting a commercial transaction.