At the approach to Mount Rumney many of us alighted and walked up the hill to save the horses, and it being by then a most beautiful day, we continued on foot down the other side, where the road curved and wound through a forest of tall eucalpyts. Sunshine dappled down into the summer-dry dusty undergrowth, two or three wooden huts became visible in parched clearings, and a bird was shouting ‘because-of-it’, ‘because-of it’, ‘because-of-it’ in the canopy. When we reached the bottom of the valley it was only a mile further to the baiting halt for breakfast at the Horseshoe Inn near the Cam Bridge. Here the baby ate a quantity of its parents’ porridge and bacon and eggs, with bread-and-milk, sips of ale and weak tea. It was pensive by the time we resumed our seats, the little fringed eyelids drooping, and as soon as the coach moved off, it fell asleep. The child’s father drew out a Courier, which he folded and gave to his wife. Cradling the sleeping infant across her lap and one arm, she read an article aloud in a slow, halting manner. It was about the whaleboat escapees.
‘They are taken, then?’ someone asked.
No, still at large. This was about a letter just come in from an isolated sawyers’ and shipbuilders’ camp at Port Davey on the rugged west coast. It had taken six weeks to reach Hobarton. The bolters had raided this camp and another at Macquarie Harbour. They had seized food, tobacco, guns, clothing-slops and rum, but had paid for what they took and used great courtesy, offering no threats.
‘Ah! Paid, aargh!’ cried the farmer, adding in broad country tones that, ‘There mun be folks a-helpin’ they.’
The escapees had rowed thousands of miles, read his wife laboriously, avoiding search vessels by dragging their boat ashore each night into the bush, or so it was thought. At first they had gone south and west, but now they must have doubled back, because the two most recent sightings were on the east coast. At Mr Webber’s place on the Schouten Islands, they had rowed in bold as brass and professed to be in search of the runaways!
‘Why, the larky divvils,’ cried the farmer admiringly, slapping his knee.
A supposed ‘officer’, addressed by the others as ‘Sir’ and smartly turned out in a brown petersham coat, white duck trousers and stove-pipe hat (Walker!), had been carried out of the boat across the muddy landing-place by two of his crew. He had even questioned Mr Webber’s men! But at Captain Hepburn’s property further round the Schoutens, a man had recognised them and fired his musket. One of the felons—it was not known which—screamed and fell from the boat, but was hauled back in by his friends. All this was four weeks ago. Where were they now, the newspaper asked.
‘Winter on the way,’ said the old lady with the cat. ‘They’ll drown or starve or die of cold.’
An animated discussion ensued as the coach rocked along the side of the valley while I stared out the window at the shining strip of water below us, like a narrow silver lake with hills rising beyond. This inlet came to an end at last, and we turned across the bottom of the valley and rattled between bone-dry hills into the English greenery of the village. Richmond was the second largest town in the island then, with a windmill, a prison, and seven public houses along its main street. The largest was the Richmond Arms, where Polly and Liddy were waiting for me in a pony-cart with an aboriginal stable-boy called Worra at the reins, but Polly insisted on driving. She had grown tall and tomboyish. Liddy was thin and tiny still, but a new bloom of health gave her a fragile prettiness.
We trotted through the village, crossed the handsome sandstone bridge over the Coal River, and passed the tiny Catholic Church. The dusty road ran between bleached fields dotted with haystacks. A mile or so further on, ‘Kenton’ revealed itself gradually as an imposing square of sandstone two storeys high, half-hidden by the English trees in front, and a hamlet of barns, sheds, huts and cottages at the back. As we drove into the yard a yapping, barking, baying din began. Mr Gregson’s hunting-pack—shut in the barn, said Polly.
Everything was in a state of bustle remarkable even for the hospitable Chesneys. The smell of roasting meat, ubiquitous in the colony, choked the air indoors. The kitchen thrummed with heat. Bess Chesney greeted me with affectionate distraction, shooed drowsy late-summer flies and ushered me into the drawing room, where several women sat perspiring and talking. The room seemed crowded with extra chairs. Louisa was fanning herself. The nursemaid had put baby Thea to sleep upstairs, she said. Flies tried persistently to settle on humid flesh, and buzzed at the windows. Augusta Drewitt sat with Mrs Parry, who gave me her cheek to kiss and said I was in better looks than six months ago. Julia, the wife of the Chesneys’ surviving son William, was too fashionably dressed and too tightly laced for the occasion, her face beetroot with heat.
St John came in and repeated to us the story of the escapees from the Courier. It was still not known which one had been shot, he said, his beautiful face troubled. The Eliza had sailed to the Schoutens as soon as the latest news came in, but Walker may have managed to get up to the islands, the Kent Group. It would be difficult to locate them there. They could live on fish, sea birds, game, and stores left by sealers, perhaps.
At the evening meal Mr Chesney was exuberant, teasing the young ladies, tickling the babies, urging the older children to excesses of pudding and laughter. They had been overexcited all day, said Julia Chesney indulgently, ever since they’d watched the pigs killed this morning. Mr Bergman had not arrived.
At dawn next day the weather was cooler but bright. The men rode out towards the dry paddocks: Chesney and Gregson in hunting pink, the others in more motley attire. Gregson blared tantivvies on his hunting-horn, the dogs ran yelping and sniffing. When they were gone the women dawdled over breakfast with the children, or made prolonged toilettes, while a few of us gathered to receive Mrs Chesney’s orders. Late in the morning Augusta and I were setting a children’s table for luncheon outdoors in the kitchen yard when the pony-cart came back, too fast, with men on horseback behind, dust billowing round them. A pile of soft grey bodies of kangaroos filled half the bed of the cart, blotched with dark blood and clots of flies, and beside them Mr Chesney lay insensible, his head on the knees of his son William. He had suffered an apoplexy and fallen from his horse.
In the first horrified awkwardness people waited solemnly for news. Dr Coverdale was attending Chesney. No one liked to begin the meal although the men had not eaten since sunrise and the smell of savoury meat was everywhere. At last, after questioning glances, nods and murmurs, the children were fed, adults ate quickly in unnatural quiet, and the guests departed. I would have gone too, but Bess Chesney held my hand and for twenty-four hours did little but weep. After that she set about dragging her husband back from the brink of death with the Lord’s help. She watched night and day at his bedside, letting me take only a few hours when she could no longer keep her eyes open. She read the New Testament aloud to him although he gave no sign of hearing, beginning with the feeding of the five thousand—something she thought would interest him—and going on to the other miracles. Withered arms restored, the woman with an issue of blood ten years, lepers, multitudes leaping up in health and thanksgiving.
‘There is so much in the Bible about healing the sick,’ she said in astonishment. ‘Why do clergymen make so little of this and so much of sin?’ she asked St John, who visited ‘Kenton’ every day. He replied, ‘We are all in need of forgiveness.’ She looked puzzled.
When there was nothing further I could do to help on these days, I went down to the river to draw. It was pleasant there, partly open, partly shaded under dun-coloured native trees or the lime-green willows. St John came that way one morning, riding Aislabie’s horse to the Chesneys’: every young girl’s dream of a handsome stranger approaching on horseback. He dismounted and led the pretty chestnut as we walked back together. All his talk was of the escapees again, Walker and Dido in particular. He told me his opinions had changed under the influence of his acquaintance with them, and with Booth, Point Puer and Port Arthur. He now believed transportation was indefensible. He was corresponding wi
th Maconochie, and had recently met with others leading the anti-transportation movement here. Together they were writing to England to urge their views.
After a week Chesney began to groan and stir. The weather turned cooler as winter approached. St John and Louisa returned to Hobarton and Robert McLeod called, in Richmond on yet another visit to Mrs Ross and her children. Nearly a year into her widowhood, Mrs Ross had opened the proposed school at her house, ‘Carrington’, about four miles distant on the other side of Richmond. She had five pupils but needed more. McLeod had persuaded William and Julia Chesney to send their eldest girls as weekly boarders; now he wanted Mrs Chesney to send Polly and also Liddy, who could help with the infants to pay her way.
‘Harriet?’ he said. ‘I have mentioned to Susan Ross that when Mrs Chesney can spare you, you might give drawing lessons once a week while you are here. Mrs Ross cannot offer a wage at present, of course . . .’
As he rode away Mrs Chesney said, ‘I always believed on the ship he had an interest in you . . . but now I wonder if it’s Mrs Ross he thinks of? A widow with a little property. He has her interests much at heart, it seems. But it would need a brave man to take on thirteen stepchildren.’
Two weeks later, in the middle of May, Chesney opened both eyes and tried to speak, but he could make only gargling sounds and slumped back in frustration. For several days he tried, then retreated into furious silence. He no longer looked at us, but glared at the door in the wall opposite the bed as though he hoped the angel of death would come through and take him. I contemplated this wall too, on nights when I sat with him. Mrs Chesney allowed herself some rest now he was out of danger.
This room was not the Chesneys’ bedchamber but a second parlour on the ground floor. It was to be a library eventually, but had neither bookcases nor books at present. The invalid had been carried here from the cart, and kept there to save running up and down stairs. The walls were distempered in palest duck-egg greenish-blue, which under the yellow lamplight took on the glow of a dawn or twilight sky in a painted landscape. ‘Watchet’, came to my mind, a country word used by my grandmother’s maid, Sukie, for a certain colour of early morning light in spring. Now faint irregularities in the plasterwork suggested trees to me, and a cottage, and I was seized by a desire to draw on the wall. A fresco, like the ones I had seen in Italian Churches on our wedding journey. When I said this jokingly to Mrs Chesney she said, ‘Why not? It might amuse Chesney.’ He would take no interest in anything else. The walls would be papered in time, in any case. Or it could be painted over.
I could not use colours over such a large area, and therefore decided it must be a sepia brush-drawing with washes of tint: a pastoral prospect in the manner of last century. Why not ‘Kenton’ itself, as seen from the approach along the carriage drive?
Chesney’s angry good eye followed my hand as the house formed in the centre. On the right I put a graceful sapling to frame the scene, life size, floor to ceiling, as though growing in the room. Fields on the left showed distant cows and sheep, and a sheen of river in Chinese white.
Mrs Chesney watched her husband watching. ‘Oh look, Chesney! Harriet has caught the very shape of that hill behind us.’
Mr Chesney tried to shout. Woolna . . . walnut. I had not put in the second of the two walnut trees he’d planted beside the house twenty years ago.
I was working at it one afternoon when Mrs Chesney brought Gus Bergman in. He raised his eyebrows in mock astonishment.
‘Van Diemen’s Land as seen from a hill outside Rome? After Claude? Extraordinary. Everyone will be wanting one.’
It was astute; and sarcastic. Or not? This was the first time we had met since the proposal, and I was more agitated than I had expected to be. I smiled but could think of nothing to say. A short, awkward silence ensued, broken by Bess Chesney repeating the news Bergman had brought: Eliza was safely delivered of a boy, to be named Franklin Tasman Gould. Mother and child were both in excellent health. Bergman refused Mrs Chesney’s offers of hospitality; she must excuse him, he was in haste.
He bowed to me and smiled and rode away, leaving me also a letter from John Gould, which I assumed would contain the same message—but when I opened it I found it concerned a change in their plans. Eliza and the child being so well, John Gould had decided to return to South Australia for another month or so, before returning here to collect his wife and sons. Only then would they go on to Sydney, at some uncertain date.
I was disappointed. I had been looking forward to travelling with the Goulds to Sydney, but when a longer, regretful note came a few days later from Eliza, I replied that it was a shame, but could not be helped. We would have longer together in Hobart, where I would soon see her and baby Franklin, and in a year or so we would be in London, working, which was the chief thing. I then wrote again to Quigley’s lodging-house in Sydney, explaining the change of plans and saying I would now wait for them in Hobart.
On the day I finished the mural, letting the scene fade out across the wall, Chesney made a grumbling roar. Lifting a shaking left hand, he waved it limply at the adjoining wall.
‘After Gainsborough’ this time, I decided with an inward smile: a family group. Mrs Chesney in her best blue sitting on a garden seat under a tree, with Natty, Polly and Liddy on the grass leaning against her knees. Mr Chesney standing behind, arms folded, gun propped beside him, and his spaniel (dear, mad, droopy old Porter) lying at his feet, as indeed the dog lay in the sick room. Julia Chesney and her husband in the background. Chesney was soon able to say slowly and thickly to servants and visitors that ‘it was a deal too flattering to him—not near handsome enough for Bess. But the house was like, very like’.
Mr Gregson, a regular visitor, said he would give me twenty guineas for two such paintings of his own house, ‘Restdown’, or ‘Risdon’, as people called it. Not on a wall, mind, but decently, on proper canvases. He was an amateur himself; his portrait of Mr Knopwood was considered a good likeness, but he wanted a professional view of his property to send Home to show his cousins how handsomely one might live here. I said that unfortunately there would be no opportunity. I was soon to leave the island.
At midwinter a Bonfire Night was held in a field by the river near the bridge. Tree trunks, dead for years from former clearing, were dragged by a team of cart-horses into a pile bigger than a cottage. The great pyre was lit before morning service on a bright cold Sunday, and by evening had burned into a red-black mountain of Hell Mouths, flaming caverns around which children played ‘chasings’ and shrilled and shouted in the dark.
While it was still light there was a pigeon-shoot, the prize a piece of silver plate. As it grew dark a huge orange moon rose from behind the hills, dwindling to a small, pale disc as it climbed high in the sky. The Church choir sang hymns, and later, at the supper tent, Mr Aislabie drank mulled wine in a teacup which he rested against his prominent corporation, saying with a sigh, ‘Fire and lights against the darkness. What pagans we are at heart! Were you expecting to see St John and Louisa, Harriet? They are not to come after all. Now the escapees are taken, Wallace wants to stay in Hobarton for the trial, which will take place speedily, no doubt.’
The runaways had been taken ten days before at Twofold Bay, between Port Phillip and Sydney, by mere chance. The New South Wales Revenue Cutter had put in there to mend a gaff rig, and seeing a battered whaleboat containing seven men, had grown suspicious. The escapees were now being returned to Hobarton.
‘Seven men? Were there not eight?’ I found myself sorry to hear of their capture and hoping that one—Mick Walker perhaps—might have evaded the pursuers.
‘According to the bolters’ story, one quarrelled with the rest and asked to be left on Flinders Island.’
‘Can St John do anything for them?’
‘Gregson doesn’t think so. He’s of the opinion they’ll hang, and I agree. Pour encourager les autres. Walker’s crew has not been violent, but the list of their crimes is long.’
Each time I spoke of
leaving, Bess found a reason why it must not be this week or next. At last I became anxious and insisted I could delay no longer; Anna and Quigley had said they would return in spring, and I had not yet seen Eliza and the baby. I must leave in the first week of August. On the twenty-eighth of July, George Chesney had another seizure and died later that night. Bess Chesney’s sorrow this time was of a low, intense, defeated kind, her tears silent and continuous. Dr Coverdale prescribed laudanum, which let her sleep a little, but she wanted Liddy or me with her, to listen to quavering stories about George, and to add names continually to the growing list of friends and acquaintances who must be sent funeral notices, letters and mourning cards.
As I moved up the aisle of St Luke’s in Richmond for the funeral service, I saw Gus Bergman in a pew ahead, among the large congregation. The line of his shoulders, the angled planes of his brown face, the loose dark curls—they sprang at me now like a white sail on a blue sea. I willed him to turn and give me a nod or some sign of friendliness or approval, but he was engrossed in reading the music of a hymnal. The Church was overflowing, and when the ceremony was over, a long column of walkers followed the funeral carriage and black-plumed horses as the coffin was taken down across the old wooden bridge to the graveside, which in Richmond is oddly placed on the other side of the river. Afterwards, while the family returned in carriages to ‘Kenton’, the rest of us began to walk back by the river path in small groups, and I looked for Bergman, but he was walking with Augusta Drewitt. They were deep in conversation and I was too proud to approach. Later at the wake, when our eyes met, I thought he was about to come across to me, but a gentleman claimed his attention and he turned away.
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