‘Easy old boy,’ Clem says. He guides it down the chute to the pen below.
‘Nice job, mate,’ Harry says, rubbing his fingers through the wool. ‘You got a reach on you like a sick dog, Clem.’ And the others laugh. ‘It’s bloody marvellous.’
Clem looks up and smiles at Harry, wipes his face with the dirty towel hanging on a nail behind him. Then he sees Rose. She feels her neck burn.
*
The team works in sheds all around Hope Valley and Rose drives Harry’s old red Holden ute to deliver morning tea, lunch, afternoon tea. If the shed’s more than half an hour away, she leaves for the whole day and when she arrives, Harry will have a fire smouldering and she’ll hoist the camp oven, filled to the brim, on top until lunchtime. She likes those days of a new shed, when she’s free to wander along the fences or pick up sheep tracks or follow creek lines through a gully. Sometimes she takes Dog to a dam and he chases wild geese. In the end though, she finds herself heading back to the shed early, helping pen-up, throwing a fleece—some chaotic shadow of a sheep she sends flying onto the table. Harry shows her how to sort wool: the white from the dark, the grimy dags shoved underneath. She sweeps the boards and listens to the ABC struggling to be heard over the machines and the banter of the men.
Harry Smithson treats her like a daughter and the other men are decent and polite. Their interest in her work before Hope Valley, and their gentle teasing, cocoon her. By the time she’s been there three months, she knows that she is lucky. She’s heard the men talk about other shearing teams who drink and brawl and refuse to have a sheila in the shed. They leave sheep with blood trailing down their legs, only interested in getting the job done quickly.
And Clem. His wide shoulders arching, the muscles flexing. He finishes two sheep to the other men’s one, and not once does Rose see him nick a sheep’s skin with the blade. Jock’s notorious for that and Clem, keeping a close eye on him, often catches one of Jock’s sheep and stitches a cut above its eye or a tear under its throat, Rose watching him loop a needle threaded with string through the milky skin. Clem! Jock always yells. Yer a shearer for Christ’s sake, not a bloody doctor! But Clem just laughs, hangs his needle back over his toolbox and goes clattering through the doors of the pen, ready to start again. Rose loses herself in the drone of the machinery, the sticky stench of sheep shit and grime, the men’s easy talk and the rhythmic movement of Clem, gliding his handpiece through creamed wool.
*
In spring, Rose isn’t surprised to see Clem loping towards her on the last day at a shed near Claytonville. She’s loading the camp oven, bits of lamb and stew slopping down the sides, onto the back of the Holden.
‘Rose,’ Clem calls out, running a hand over his hair, slick with sweat. Tiny specks of wool cling to his whiskers. ‘I was wondering if you’d like to go to tea tonight? The Bottom pub does a great pork roast.’
Rose looks at him. About bloody time, she thinks. ‘Sure, Clem, that’d be lovely.’
‘Really?’ he says. He shoves his shaking hands in his pockets. ‘Okay then. Great. I’ll pick you up at seven?’
‘Seven’s fine.’ She steps closer to him, brushes a soft hand over his chin. ‘And Clem,’ she says, smiling, ‘you might want to shave.’ Flecks of wool float down toward his shoulder, and she laughs, walking back to the shed to get the rest of the food.
She takes her time getting ready that night and chooses a dress with crimson flowers that falls in soft folds from her belly to just below her knees. She clinches the waist with a thin gold belt. She washes and dries her curls and wears them loose around her face. Pat and Harry have gone to Perth for the weekend and Rose welcomes the solitude. Ready early, she sits on the front steps, the two red kelpies at her feet, the three of them waiting. She watches the sky turn from blue to mauve, then the clouds becoming deep pink fingers reaching over the orchard. She thinks about Clem. She sees him at the end of a run after he’s put the handpiece down, dripping with sweat, skin glistening, a look of contentment and quiet pride spreading over his face. His blue eyes clear and shining. His skin, tanned from summer work. She likes the way the men gravitate towards him, listen carefully, laugh at his jokes.
When Clem’s ute comes rattling over the cattle grid and pulls up at the house, Rose stands and tries to calm the butterflies. Clem opens the ute door and walks to her, a bunch of white daisies in one hand. He’s clean shaven, his brown face smooth, his shoulders wider in a blue checked shirt.
‘Evening,’ he says, pushing the daisies into her hands. Some still have the roots attached, and dirt falls down her dress. ‘For you. I wanted roses but Mum’s have finished.’ He’s nervous, speaks quickly: ‘So I nicked these when she wasn’t looking.’
Rose laughs. ‘They’re beautiful, Clem,’ she says. ‘Thank you.’
No one’s brought her flowers before.
At the pub they sit on green vinyl chairs and eat roast pork with crackling, the juice dribbling down their chins. They drink lemon squash and talk incessantly. People stop by their table to talk to Clem and, Rose knows, to eye her more closely. Loud voices and laughter spill in from the public bar and Rose is surprised at how many people live in Hope Valley. When Clem drives her home, an orange crescent moon hangs high over the hill above the orchard. The land is still. Clem cuts the engine and turns to her. He slides along the bench seat and cups her chin in both hands. His calloused fingers brush her skin, and he bends to kiss her softly, just once.
‘Thanks for coming out tonight, Rose,’ he murmurs.
‘You can come in,’ she whispers. ‘Harry and Pat are in the city.’
His breath catches, his blue eyes intense. ‘No,’ he says. ‘No, I better be going home.’
She feels her cheeks burning.
‘Rose,’ he says. ‘You’re the most wonderful girl I’ve ever met. But I won’t rush this.’ He kisses her cheek, looks at her again, then slips back across the seat, undoes the door and walks around to her side of the ute. Opening the door, he reaches for her hand. ‘Plus,’ he says, ‘Dog’s waiting up for me.’ Then his voice lowers, serious now: ‘And if I stay any longer, I know I won’t leave till Sunday.’
The last thing Rose sees, as Clem drives slowly down the hill, is a hand waving through the window. She stands in the warmth of the night, moths flickering around her, and knows that he’ll soon be back.
1970
At twenty-six years of age, Valerie Carter knows she wants to bring the Good Lord to others, and that teaching the local kids at Saint Xavier’s in Cairns is no longer enough.
At the river north of town where the crabs slurp and clack in the mud, she thinks of New Guinea, that wild place they talk about at Mass, trying to rally donations and charitable souls for a mission of mercy to Port Moresby. Straining to look over the mudflats, she imagines she can see the faint outline of another land. She remembers, when she was eight, a nun from New Guinea visiting her convent school, showing small square photographs in black and white of children praying outside a bush hut surrounded by jungle, and some little nut had gripped the insides of her, embedded, grew and grew: one day, she would go.
It seems her parents can’t wait to get rid of her, their only daughter who, save for one boy a few years ago, never gives any indication she’ll marry and have a family. A trip to New Guinea sounds like a good option. It will sort her out, she overhears them say in bed one night, let her see how good her life is. They prattle on about diseases and the natives, and rumblings from Canberra about Australia soon leaving the place to its own devices. They know of one man from Mareeba, Thomas Finnegan, who works in advertising or sales in Moresby: he’s sent his family home already and is expected later in the year himself. But Father O’Grady assures them all that Val will be safe; the place they are going is just outside Port Moresby and has a high barbed wire fence around it.
‘Plus,’ he says, conspiratorially, ‘I carry a gun.’
Val leaves in November with her calf-length crisp white skirts and floral blouses, economy of
conversation and the love of God.
In December she sends a letter with Father O’Grady. She wants to stay. The people need her. She is happy. Of course her parents will think it won’t last; they’ll be saying she hardly knows how to boil an egg, how on earth can she survive in the jungle?
‘Like a duck to water, up there, your daughter,’ she imagines Father O’Grady saying. ‘You can be very, very proud.’
Beth wakes early, showers and eats eggs for breakfast. She’s dressed in her best skirt and top, and as she hurries across the grass, glances up to see a teenage girl looking out from the kitchen window. Delilah. Beth waves but feels uneasy, knows she is being watched as she walks toward the gate. She finds the path at the back of their houses and winds through long grass—shoulder-high in places—to the school. She steps carefully on rotting planks, slippery with rain, that cross open drains, then negotiates a food garden encroaching on the path. Beans and tomatoes are staked to bamboo struts with brightly torn strips of fabric. A dog with its left ear red raw from fleas sniffs at her legs, and Beth hurries faster. Suddenly it yelps and vanishes into the jungle on the left. She walks past old basketball courts, the goal ring still standing, the wood from the backboard long gone and the bitumen buckled by tiny eruptions as plants force themselves up and up. It’s only nine in the morning and Beth’s shirt clings to her, sweat pooling between her breasts.
She walks through the gate and past the sign—Saint Mary’s Catholic School, Established 1960—and immediately sees Val on her knees, bum in the air in front of a tiny stone grotto housing Mary, swathed in blue robes, arms outstretched, head bowed serenely. Beth wonders if she should tiptoe past or wait, her own head bowed, but Val swivels round with a fistful of weeds, her hands black.
‘Just rooting out the evil,’ she says, and then, horrified, turns back to the grotto. ‘Sorry, Holy Mother.’
Beth stifles a laugh. ‘Hi Val.’
‘Morning Beth. Glad you found us okay.’
Beth surveys the blue brick buildings and hedges of pink, yellow and green crotons along the cement paths. There’s green grass at the centre of the school, and a flagpole with a faded PNG flag at its heart.
‘It’s a beautiful school, Val.’
‘It is,’ Val says, heaving herself up. ‘The best on the island. I know it looks nothing like Australian schools but you’ll see other schools here that’ll make you cry—broken louvres, dirt floors, three pencils to a class.’
Two small boys walk hand in hand across the grass, staring at Beth, frightened.
Val laughs. ‘Don’t worry, they’ll get used to you,’ she says.
*
Beth is introduced in all the classrooms, the students wide-eyed, enthralled. There must be thirty kids in each room, all standing tall in their maroon and black uniforms, chorusing, Good morning, Misis Beth, and may God bless you, dark faces looking up at her. She’s touched by their eagerness. Some of the braver ones return her smile, others nudge their neighbour or whisper behind cupped hands. Beth thanks them for welcoming her and they sit quietly on wooden benches as she tells them about Western Australia and some of the other places she’s been. So attentive, all of them, it surprises her. But when she visits the youngest children, those aged only five, they stare at their desks or hide their faces, and a boy near the window begins to cry. Ruth, a small, stout woman with blue-black tattoos criss-crossing her face, scoops up the boy and returns to the front of the room, but no amount of coaxing—or threats—can get the little ones to speak.
When Beth reassures the children that she doesn’t bite, they gasp and look at her, eyes wide with terror, and in that moment, she wishes she’d never left home.
‘Come back next week,’ Ruth says. ‘They are usually talking boxes ... no, no, chatter boxes.’
Beth tells herself they’ll get used to her. Isn’t that what Val had said?
And she would get used to the kids, if she cared about what was before her, and not what she’d left behind.
*
At lunch, Beth drinks thick Highlands coffee with the teachers in the staffroom, a bush hut out the back near the oval.
‘You go with Mr Reis,’ Val says as she rings the hand bell for the end of break.
Mr Reis, a bandy-legged, nuggetty man from the Highlands, takes her to the sports shed to see the old metal cricket stumps with paint peeling off, piles of deflated basketballs. A bag of fluorescent tennis balls and huge medicine balls remind Beth of 1980s Hope Valley.
‘They’re for our sports,’ Mr Reis says proudly. ‘All from Australia. Rotary men came last year and donated them. We are very good at sports here.’
He points out the cooking and sewing room, and they look through the louvres. Beth sees an old woman, grey hair frizzing from the overhead fan, peddling an ancient Singer, feeding checked fabric through the machine. She smiles widely as they pass.
‘Lapun meri. Longlong too,’ Mr Reis says under his breath, then: ‘She makes uniforms all day.’
‘Longlong?’
‘Bit crazy,’ he says.
Beth is taken to see the toilet blocks, water tanks and the garden shed, two incinerators down by the back fence and finally the library, a small building tacked on to the side of a classroom. It’s dim inside and the whir of the rickety fan is deafening. The librarian, a big woman with dyed burgundy hair, is sleeping with her head on the desk, spit dribbling onto an open book beneath her.
‘She’s from another island,’ Mr Reis shouts, as if this explains everything.
That afternoon, Beth sits at the back of Lena’s Year Eight class and the students sneak glances at her. Lena talks about the features of newspapers: byline, headline, photographs, captions. No questions asked, no hands raised to contribute. The kids—some look old enough to go to nightclubs—read their textbooks and take notes in silence, lead pencils scratching across the small lined exercise books, the kind Beth remembers using in primary school. She sees the kids watching the clock as the lesson drags on. Later, when Lena finally asks them a question, no one replies.
‘Do you see?’ she says, after class.
‘They won’t talk.’ The students know the answers, she says, but still they won’t say, except for a couple of girls—Hosannah and Nin—who she can always rely on to share ideas. Beth tells her about some of the classes she’s taught, where trying to get a response was like pulling hen’s teeth, but Lena looks perplexed. Then Beth figures she should change tack. At home, she would wait longer, observe more lessons before teaching someone else’s class, but she needs the distraction. Needs to focus on something.
‘Maybe we can try something different,’ she says. ‘What about I start the lesson tomorrow, Lena? Would that be okay?’
‘Yes, susa,’ she says. ‘I would like this.’
*
The next morning Beth walks into Lena’s class with a stack of newspapers she’s collected from Val’s house and the library. She sets them down on a table by the door and walks to the front of the class as Lena introduces her. All those dark faces looking up. She’s used to talking in front of close to a thousand students at assemblies in a hall with a polished floor, silk banners hung from the balconies and panoramic views of the Swan River, and here she is in front of fifteen kids in PNG: concrete floor, louvres and chipped walls, and she can feel the twitch in her legs. She’s nervous, all right, acutely aware of herself, how different she is. As she tells them about teaching in Australia, she can hear the wobble in her voice.
She takes a sharp, quick breath.
‘Right, let’s get started,’ she says. ‘How many of you read the newspaper?’
No response.
‘Okay ... whose family buys a newspaper? Maybe even once a week?’
Five hands go up.
‘Lucky we have these, then.’ Beth moves swiftly round the room, dropping one newspaper on each desk for two students to share. ‘Watch the clock,’ she says. ‘For ten minutes, just flick through your paper, read a few articles—that’s what the individu
al stories are called.’ She stops herself from saying immerse yourselves: definitely an Australian private school expression. ‘Discuss with your partner what you find interesting,’ she says.
The students pore over the Post Courier or The National and Beth keeps reminding them to talk, to share what they find. Soon, there’s the rustle of turning pages, the hum of whispers, pointing, the odd laugh.
Ten minutes later, Beth gets their attention and asks what they’ve discovered about their newspaper.
Silence.
She waits. She sees Lena standing by the front desk, arms crossed over her chest, scowling at the class.
‘Come on,’ says Beth. ‘I see you at lunch, you people can’t stop talking!’
A few titters from the girls at the back.
‘What did you find? Anything curious? Funny? Informative?’
Beth waits again. The quiet becomes uncomfortable.
‘Look, school is the same whether it’s Australia or PNG,’ she says, and as she speaks she’s hoping this is true. The kids stare at their desks. ‘You will learn more from each other than you will from any teacher,’ she says. ‘If I say nothing, you don’t learn, right? You can’t take me into your exams at the end of the semester.’ Most of the kids are looking up at her now. ‘You have to do the work—not Misis Lena, not some strange woman from Australia, and that means talking.’
She hates that she’s taken this line with them, that in the very first lesson she’s scolding them.
A girl at the back, hair clipped off her forehead, tentatively raises her hand.
‘Yes?’ says Beth.
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