Cry of the Curlew: The Frontier Series 1

by Peter Watt

  ‘Oh, look!’ Kate exclaimed. A huge flock of wild ducks rose with a rapid beat of wings from a lagoon adjoining the river and flew towards the flat grass-covered plains interspersed with tea-tree. ‘Isn’t it beautiful?’ she said in an awed voice, as she gazed over the river at the scenery of the hills. Her husband grudgingly admitted that there was beauty in the country, although he would have preferred to be looking over the dirty rooftops of Sydney’s mean streets.

  ‘Certainly is handsome country,’ Luke echoed for Kate’s sake.

  ‘Is the town far away?’ she asked, her eyes wide with excitement.

  ‘Not far,’ he answered. ‘Just a bit up the river.’

  ‘I think then, Kate,’ Kevin said as he steered his wife by the elbow away from the American, ‘that you and I should go below and prepare ourselves to go ashore. We might see you in Rockhampton some time, Mister Tracy,’ he added without conviction.

  ‘Could do, Mister O’Keefe,’ Luke replied, tipping his hat politely at Kate. He stared after her as she walked away with her husband. ‘It was good making your acquaintance, Missus O’Keefe. I hope all goes well for you.’ Luke had seen something in her eyes that had worried him. He had seen the same thing before in other places and other times in the north. He wondered if O’Keefe knew his wife was a very sick woman. She had the beginnings of the fever. Still, Missus O’Keefe was not his concern. She had a husband to look after her, he thought, as he shrugged and turned to stare at the ragged range of forest-covered hills.

  A drifting log slammed into the bow of the little paddle-steamer but she took the knock and ploughed on. Soon the frontier township of Rockhampton came into view as Luke had promised Kate it would.

  A colourful crowd of frontier people thronged the river bank for the arrival of the Princess Adelaide. Bearded Kennedy men flirted with the few single women who came ashore and prosperous landowners vied for immigrants to work as shepherds on their leases.

  Women seeking work were eagerly snapped up as domestic help for the families who could afford them, and busy customs men worked dutifully to ensure that taxes were extracted for goods shipped between the colonies, while the Royal Mail was dispatched to Rockhampton’s post office to supply news-hungry citizens with precious letters from ‘home’. A handful of Aboriginals, wearing ragged and discarded European clothing, watched through rheumy eyes the new wave of white invaders disembarking.

  Kevin and Kate came ashore amid the bustle and the first impression Kate had of Rockhampton was the stifling heat which hit her like the opening of a furnace door. Heavy clothes, that were fashionable in the cooler climes of Sydney, were inappropriate for the town located just above the Tropic of Capricorn.

  O’Keefe went back to ensure their luggage was safely unloaded, and when Kate moved away from the cooling breezes wafting off the water she suddenly felt very ill.

  A man was frying a steak on a long-handled shovel over a makeshift fire on the river bank and the overpowering queasy smell of the meat frying in its own fat made her feel even more nauseous. She moved away from the frying steak, then experienced an unpleasant unbalanced feeling, as if she were walking on air. The shimmer of the early morning sun off the river seemed to melt red before her eyes then explode into a shower of black sparks. She felt disembodied and sensed herself falling down a long tunnel towards a voice. Strong hands caught her as she sank into the ground in a swooning faint.

  Luke had decided to follow the O’Keefes off the jetty. It was apparent that her husband did not know the signs of fever or he would not have left his wife alone. The American prospector had kept close to Kate when her husband left her to supervise the unloading of their luggage, and he was close enough to catch her when he saw her sway.

  ‘O’Keefe! Over here!’ he bellowed and O’Keefe pushed his way through a small crowd of people who had congregated around Luke holding the pregnant young woman in his arms. The women in the gathered throng clucked sympathetically and the men voiced the need to get the young woman to a doctor. Luke lowered Kate gently to the ground and held her head in his lap.

  ‘What happened?’ Kevin frantically asked when he reached his wife’s side.

  ‘She’s got the fever,’ Luke answered. ‘We have to get her somewhere out of the sun and fetch a doctor quick.’

  Kate was just barely conscious and she mumbled incoherently that she would be well . . . if she could take her clothes off and sit under a waterfall. Luke could see as well as hear that she was already delirious.

  ‘You get a dray,’ he ordered brusquely, ‘so we can find a doctor.’ O’Keefe seemed lost to know what to do, but the tough American was decisive and he rightly felt that it was better that he remained with Kate. At least he had recognised she was sick.

  O’Keefe moved away as a sympathetic group of bearded bushmen helped Luke carry Kate along the river bank. They found the horse dray whose driver had been press-ganged into service with threats and bribes from O’Keefe.

  Gently the men laid Kate in the rear of the dray. O’Keefe sat in the back to cradle his wife’s head in his lap while Luke took a seat beside the driver. She tried to mumble reassurances to her anxious husband but a bilious attack suddenly came on and she turned her head to vomit.

  ‘Does Solomon Cohen still have a store here?’ Luke asked the grizzled dray driver, who scratched at his straggly beard and stared at the young woman being sick in his dray.

  ‘Youse mean the Jew?’ he asked.

  ‘Yeah, that’s him,’ Luke answered.

  ‘Yep. You want to go there?’ the driver asked obtusely.

  ‘That’s why I asked,’ Luke growled.

  The driver gave the order to walk on and the big draughthorse lurched forward. The dray rumbled along a deeply rutted street bouncing the passengers uncomfortably around in the back. On either side of the primitive road were the stumps of trees and gangs of men sweating profusely as they rooted them out of the ground. Luke gave only a cursory glance at the new shops and houses that had sprung up since he was last in Rockhampton. His primary concern was to get the very ill young woman to a place where she could receive medical help.

  When the dray reached Solomon’s store, Luke was surprised at how his slab and bark hut had turned into a reasonably neat shop of sawn timber walls and shingle roof. The shop even had a verandah at the front from which various articles, such as pots and pans, dangled on display from hooks and had also expanded to include living quarters with glass windows. It was obvious that Solomon Cohen had done well since the gold rush.

  The Jewish storekeeper was sweeping the verandah with a straw broom when the dray came to a stop in front of his store. He paused in his work and immediately recognised Luke, who had leapt from the dray to the roadway. Solomon broke into a broad welcoming smile as he dropped the broom and threw open his arms to the tall American striding towards him.

  ‘Mister Tracy, my friend,’ he said joyfully, hugging the American. ‘So you would be visiting me and Judith. Oi, what a wonderful surprise to see you again.’ Solomon was clean-shaven and wore spectacles on the tip of his nose. He was dressed in an expensive pair of suit trousers and wore a waistcoat over a clean white shirt. He was short in stature and, at thirty-nine years of age, the little man bore the scars of the lash of the convict cat-o’-nine-tails.

  In his youth, his crime had been forging bank notes in London and his sentence had been transportation to the colony of New South Wales. But forging was not the only skill he had and he soon proved a valuable asset to the penal authorities with his ability to keep meticulous records for less-learned men. Upon his release as a ticket-of-leave man, he was joined by Judith, who had defied her family to follow the one she loved across the ocean to the land so far away. With her natural astuteness in business dealings, they were soon able to build their future out of a loan long repaid and that business was obviously booming as Luke could see.

  With suitable sounds of sympathy, Solomon directed the two men to lift Kate down from the dray and carry her into the store
to a stack of soft cloth bales. Solomon disappeared into the back and when Kate was comfortably settled, Luke took her husband aside to quietly suggest that he should go back with the dray and fetch a doctor. The dray driver would know where to find one in town and then he should go to the jetty to supervise the unloading of the luggage they had brought with them while the doctor saw to Kate.

  Kevin hesitated, torn between being with his wife, and watching over all that they had brought with them from the south. Judith Cohen appeared from the rear of the store and with quiet competence assessed the situation. She ordered the men to take Kate through to a spare room and Kevin decided that his young wife was in good hands. He left with the dray to carry out the American’s instructions.

  Judith quietly issued orders to Luke and Solomon; cold water to be fetched, clean sheets and privacy for Kate. The woman, who moved carefully around her patient, had dark flashing eyes reflecting her ancestral Spanish blood. Her long raven hair was tied back from her olive-complexioned face, which always seemed to be in a state of perpetual calm. Although she was not pretty, she had a strange beauty in the tranquillity of her spirit that seemed to envelop those around her.

  Judith was eight years younger than Solomon and the pair were an unlikely couple at first appearance – Judith tall and serious, Solomon short and jolly – but Luke knew the odd-matched couple loved each other with a passion present in their subtle glances and discreet touches.

  When Judith had settled Kate behind the store, Solomon guided Luke from the room. In the store, they could wait for the doctor. Surrounded by every possible item required on the Australian frontier, Luke sat on a barrel of molasses while Solomon poured him a tumbler of thick raw rum. There was a lot of catching up to do between the two men as it had been four years since their last meeting.

  ‘And how is it that you are not married, my friend,’ Solomon inquired lightly, ‘with a family around you?’

  ‘I was,’ Luke replied sadly as he sipped gingerly at the raw spirit and Solomon knew he should not pursue the question. He tactfully changed the subject.

  ‘And such a pretty girl as you have brought to us, Luke,’ he said. ‘I gather she is the wife of the young man you sent to get the doctor.’

  ‘Yeah. His name is O’Keefe,’ Luke said, staring into his glass of rum. ‘The young woman is the daughter of a man I once knew back at Ballarat. Good fellow. Big Irishman who fought with us at the stockade. I thought he was a dead man when I last saw him. He was holding off a parcel of redcoats with a pike then. Missus O’Keefe says he is working round these parts as a teamster.’

  ‘What is his name?’ Solomon asked. ‘I know most of the teamsters in the Kennedy.’

  ‘Patrick Duffy,’ Luke answered, as he tried another sip of the raw spirit.

  The little storekeeper looked sharply at his friend. ‘There was a Patrick Duffy . . . a bullocky . . . who was speared by the blacks out at Glen View late last year. A big fellow who had a brother who owns a pub in Sydney,’ he said as he frowned and leaned forward with his face almost in Luke’s. ‘The young lady obviously does not know of her father’s death.’

  ‘Jesus, no. I don’t think she does,’ Luke said, shaking his head sadly. This was sure not the time to tell her.

  NINETEEN

  The wedge-tailed eagle spread its massive expanse of wings and was swept skywards on a thermal. Perched on a rocky outcrop, Tom Duffy watched the great bird seemingly hover in the high blue yonder.

  Then suddenly the undisputed master of the Australian skies plummeted towards the scrub in a lethally precise dive and Tom was vaguely aware that he was holding his breath as the bird disappeared from his vision below the summit of the hill.

  Tom loved the big eagles as they had always represented a majestic independence and freedom to the young teamster as he plodded the dusty plains of outback Australia. The eagles were not constrained by flooded rivers and creeks as were the bullockies. Nor by the steep slopes of hills and thick, sometimes impenetrable scrub. They could go where they wished with no natural enemies to fear.

  Tom was once again inside the European frontier. But had Wallarie’s decision to return to his traditional lands been wise? They were in mortal danger of discovery as the distant smoke of the white man’s fires crept closer each day.

  On their trek to their traditional lands, the Nerambura had come across the ever-increasing signs of the presence of the white man: tracks of horses and sheep, empty meat tins and the ashes of fireplaces made by the roving shepherds as they moved their flocks to fresher pastures to graze.

  But even more disturbing than the signs that the white man left were the footprints of Aboriginals now working for the squatter. Wallarie knew that they were of a black people from another place who posed a deadly threat to the Nerambura survivors, as they had the perceptive eyes the white man lacked. Eyes to see the Nerambura moving through the lands that had once been their traditional home.

  When they had finally reached Darambal country, the two elders had gone to the sacred cave to daub the paintings of the final act in the broken existence of the Nerambura clan. They had painted, with mixtures of coloured earths and resin as adhesive, the figure of a man on a horse and the stick figures of black people standing defiantly with spears poised. But it was more of a wistful representation of how the old men would have liked to remember the last moments of their people. Death had come so quickly that few warriors had been able to resist the terrible onslaught.

  Tom had not been invited to attend the ceremony of the wall painting as he was not an initiated Nerambura warrior, although the old men had come to respect him. His standing had increased proportionally to the Nerambura language he had mastered and he was now included in their camp fire discussions.

  Tom stretched and yawned as he scratched at his unkempt beard and thought fleetingly of being in a barber’s chair back in Rockhampton. But the pleasant thought was rudely interrupted when he gazed out over the plains below. The smoke was closer this time, he mused. It was just a tiny grey wisp rising as a lazy thin column above the brigalow scrub. The fire of white men boiling a billy for a mug of tea.

  The previous day the smoke had been further north and Tom had felt very uneasy. If the unknown white men continued on their present course, then there was a chance that they might stumble on the camp site.

  The cooking fire made him think about a pannikin of salted beef stew, hot damper bread straight out of the ashes, washed down with a mug of sweet black tea. He felt his stomach growl at the memory of the European food he had once taken for granted. Or a leg of mutton roasting in a camp oven with . . .

  Just the slightest rustle . . . not even a noise.

  Hunting with Wallarie had honed Tom’s instincts and he had quickly learnt to interpret nature as a living storyteller. There was definitely someone behind him. A tiny lizard basking on a rock suddenly skittered away. Something, or someone, had frightened the lizard and Tom felt the tip of the spear prick his neck. ‘Too slow,’ came the teasing chuckle. ‘You are too slow.’

  Tom grinned. ‘I knew it was you,’ he replied in his broken Nerambura. ‘Otherwise I would have turned and shot you, Wallarie.’

  The warrior squatted beside him and peered out at the smoke on the horizon. ‘I would not have given you time to turn around. I would have put my spear through your neck before you moved,’ he said as he continued the friendly banter. ‘As I will all white men I meet,’ he added bitterly. His visit to the sacred cave had brought home to him the enormous loss that he had suffered in his lifetime; the eligible young women who would be wives were gone, as were the elders to pass on the stories to the young people. Who would he tell the stories to when he was an elder? All gone.

  He glanced sideways thoughtfully at his friend and remembered that the same white men who had slaughtered his people had also killed Tom’s father. The recollection reminded the Darambal warrior that they were bound together by the death of those most important in their lives.

  On the next sunset
, they would join the others at the camp site and bring meat. The women would now be digging for the edible tubers and gathering the grass seeds to be pounded into flour for cakes. But for now he was content to squat and gaze out at the rich green patches of grass that sprouted in the red soil of the Darambal lands.

  The smoke, rising from the camp fire that Tom had observed, eddied in a willy-willy and the little tornado-like column of air caused the two Glen View shepherds standing at the camp fire’s edge to duck their heads. They wheezed and coughed from the smoke and ash thrown up in their faces, while a younger shepherd squatting on his haunches nearby quickly snatched at his newly acquired cabbage-tree hat to prevent the wind carrying it away.

  When the willy-willy had whirled like a dervish dancer off into the scrub to wreak mischief elsewhere, the shepherd known as Monkey rubbed the grit and smoke from his eyes. He blinked and snarled at the older man beside him, ‘Don’t piss on the fire, you bastard.’

  ‘Why not, Monkey?’ Old Jimmy answered with a malicious grin. ‘We got to put it out before we leave.’ The men eyed each other like two dogs manoeuvring for dominance.

  ‘Cos me mug o’ tea is just there,’ Monkey snarled. ‘An’ I know where your bum-fuckin’ dick has been. I don’ want you pissing in me tea with it.’ His angry retort brought a howl of laughter from the younger shepherd who sat nearby watching the two older men locked head to head.

  The laughing shepherd had joined the Glen View workers early in the New Year after stepping off an immigrant ship from England. And when Young Joe had arrived at Glen View, he was soon regaled with tales of Old Jimmy’s preference for young Aboriginal boys. He had studiously avoided the old shepherd’s company ever since.

  The drunken bragging of the shepherds about their ‘battle’ with the Nerambura myalls had enthralled the impressionable young man. He had listened with rapt attention to the highly coloured tales of the courageous stand that they made against the massed ranks of painted warriors, who came in screaming and blood-curdling waves against them.