Just Relations

by Rodney Hall

  For the rest, autumn changes nothing at Main Ridge. The whistling eagles have flown elsewhere to escape the coming cold. The last hot day is filled with a milky haze and stifling dampness: the people hang about, thinking of each other as locals, lethargic, waiting … till the rain begins, rain created slowly for the first time in creation, an ache in the air, the drops pattering independent, the land and its creatures gasping at a witnessed miracle, staring like lovers towards the banking clouds and the rainbow with its companion standing up straight on the earth, dissolved in the rush of a downpour. So the drought breaks and storms pass leaving a fresh chill in the air. Miners rug themselves as warmly as they can at night and wear blankets for ponchos in the early morning when they squat along the creek swilling pebbles in their sluicing pans, splitting quartz with little picks or winching mullock by the bucketload from their miserable hand-cut shafts. The travelling teacher begins calling once a month, teaching in the open and sleeping among the books in his canvas-hooded four-wheeler with red spokes and TRAVELLING SCHOOL DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC INSTRUCTION on the side. Young Whitey discovers a way to the waterfall and proposes a plan for irrigation. Nothing comes of the plan, but by way of consoling him they begin to speak of the discovery as Whitey’s Waterfall.

  So winter invades with unmerciful thoroughness. The Dead Reef is nothing but heaps of rusted iron pipes now and half a dozen shacks lived in by those families determined to stay (Swans and Brinsmeads among them), diggers who are already mutating back into farmers, spending their days cutting fenceposts, wiring their properties ready for the spring, and initiating secret practices of incest to revenge themselves on the society they came from. Old Michael Brinsmead and his son set their horses to drag timbers by chain up to the crest of the hill and measure the ground for a homestead big as a palace, the wings of the house to stand round courtyards and overlook a squad of lesser buildings for use by some clan of serfs to come. The patterns of this doomed community are already set. While across the valley a girl-child, born crippled, is a sign of permanence for a cripple must have a home and can’t be carted round the country willynilly, nor make her own way on crutches.

  So winter brings houses, a crop of ugly wooden mushrooms at Main Ridge, tuberous and mullock heap houses, houses like forest accidents and upturned carts. Tent by tent the canvas dwindles and those who stay stake out gardens, put down stumps for a foundation, raise the floor, the walls, expend energy on the pitch of the roof and devise prop-out window-flaps. The traditional rivalries for gold are still evident but now there is also domestic rivalry, the pride of homebuilders. Granny Collins buys a dark brocade curtain splendid enough for Queen Victoria’s own drawingroom and hangs it on a melaleuca rod hammered to the slab-timber wall of her shack. The hillsides of forest trees are ringbarked to clear the land for pasture, tree by tree the ring-barking work goes forward, the sap dies and leaves fall, bark flakes away and white twigs are blown off by the wind, the trees stand as simplified skeletons, now and then crashing down with a dry splintering thud, while grass invades their territory and sheep and cattle wander in, minds heavy with mythology, to eat the grass. Though it is only a few years since they murdered an indiscriminate sampling of Chinese diggers to teach them what’s what, the locals now subscribe generously to an appeal for funds to finance a Christian mission to China. A rifle club is formed, with the intention of setting out each season in pursuit of quail. The digging of gardens is undertaken almost as furiously as the digging of claims, manure being collected by the cartload, and seeds ordered. Mr Ian McTaggart, discovering he hasn’t the temperament for leadership, devotes his life in recluse to designing a garden of concentric circles so as to be in harmony with the celestial bodies and draw on their power, the last of all gardens, the very antipodes of Eden. And overlooking the lesser structures of the new town a commodious two-storey public house is raised amid general admiration, a hotel named The Mountain in competition with the mountain itself; the visit of a band of Baptist missionaries is denounced by the publican within a week of the opening, denounced from the upstairs porch of his palatial establishment with enough dignity for the Pope. The town’s women grow strong and handsome with clear eyes and independent manners, the men grow cruel as nature. The women have sweet breath, the man have thick beards and low brows. The women laugh like the nobility and move in their easy manner. The primeval men seem overpowered and knotted up in their own muscle, sinews binding them with vines and creepers, their eyes are the eyes of innocent creatures turned savage by bewilderment. Life’s refinements are being lost! becomes the catchcry of the vigilantes for British Values. In consequence a cricket team is convened, players assemble and swing the bat, make nice points and speak politely to the umpire (a McAloon with one eye and the only man sure of the rules); but having no rival team to play, the cricketers embark on a course of civilizing the natives from a Koorie encampment on the plateau beyond the mountain … till eleven earnest fellows with mobile expressions magnifying every fluctuation of their fortunes, decked in linen pants and cotton shirts, flailing the imported willow bats with plenty of enthusiasm, come to the true faith of empire calling the holy name of Howzat! as to the manner born. A wives’ floral society conducts meetings exactly as if this were Cheltenham or Durban. And a power struggle between the Lang ladies and the McTaggart ladies brings the downfall of the Country Women’s Association branch which votes itself out of existence at a meeting stacked by visitors from the staging-town down in the valley. The Mountain Hotel flourishes as a great establishment, guests arriving, the rooms occupied, a continuous jostle, management decisions, cooks and maids in a flurry and money changing hands. An impressive majority of miners and their families vote for the belief that they are camped on a mountain of solid gold. The State Government discusses building a railway as far as Yalgoona; and the Whitey’s Fall house of assembly has plenty to say on this score. But foreign capital is not impressed, it looks like an ordinary mountain to them, so the loans fall through and the project is shelved. The search does not stop. Sulkies and dogcarts line the street, even the hermit prospectors are drawn by the excellent beer at the Mountain Hotel and the blazing fire on a cold night. A variety of shops now cluster along both sides of the street, including a tobacconist with his insignia of a black boy skirted and crowned with tobacco leaves. There is even a public streetlamp (fuelled by paraffin oil) set up to illuminate the hazardous homeward journey of late drinkers leaving the Mountain long after they were expected for supper. Houses now dot the surrounding hills. The bullock-dray arrives each fortnight so that this scarcely feels like the outback any more. Flares smoke and flicker in their brackets at night as the dray creaks to a standstill garlanded with the breath of the animals. People with hurricane lanterns mill round the sweating beasts whose great eyes gaze frightened and wide at the half-seen threatening activity. Walter Schramm the publican, filled with the pride of office, gives young Annie Lang a pat on the bottom as a compliment but she dongs him a beauty so you can hear it through all the noise, everybody cheers and goes on with the unloading in a better humour than ever. And shopkeepers stack their shelves with goods from the Sydney marketplace at goldfield prices. The bullock driver known as Uncle (though he can’t be more than twenty) has fallen so far in love with Annie that he builds a house for her, she having nobody, being the black sheep of her family as she is, a prospector on her own account. And as it happens, this is the last house built there. The town itself is officially named Whitey’s Fall in error, due to a drunken brawl involving the government survey man. Then a School of Arts is mooted by the leading families and someone is fool enough to call for a forum to discuss the idea, so they pass a motion and an architect is invited to submit plans, which he does, from Melbourne, but when the citizens are told how much the hall will cost two committee-men resign, another has a stroke, the plans are declared a scandal, the architect sues them for his fee, ten percent of the estimated cost, and wins his case, the crown officers who eventually wend their timorous way up to the town to
enforce this decision are met with a hail of stones and abuse, so they rethink the bounds of duty and retreat into a campaign of threatening letters which remain unopened and unread in a sack nailed to the side of Mr Michael Brinsmead’s dignified desk (to be passed down, in due course, to succeeding oldest inhabitants as a public treasure). The locals set about designing their School of Arts themselves, seventy feet long by thirty feet wide; then work begins, all voluntary, and the haphazard drawings translate themselves surprisingly into a stumpy lightless block of a place without a back door, so to avoid too many steps at the back on account of the steep fall of the land a hole is sawn in the east wall, masked by a trellis, and a side door fitted, to everybody’s satisfaction it seems by the lack of complaints. The opening of the School of Arts is a gala occasion, a Christmas fete. The crippled McAloon girl, Edith, is regularly paraded in fancydress, her wheelchair loaded with bows and flowers, decked out as a centrepiece to all festivities, so that she discovers her vocation, and in every family photograph album are to be found snapshots of the relations smiling down at Edith or Edith smiling up at them. Occasionally the Yalgoona railhead debate is revived and lapses. A petition earnestly prays for the Post Master-General to open a Postal Receiving Office at Whitey’s Fall Provisional School; yet the bullocky rages drunkenly through town swearing that the post will be the end of independence, the incursion of an indolent British monarchy into their private affairs, and that the school itself cannot be justified either. But they have a vision, these are services the people want and they get them. So then the town appears on printed maps of New South Wales.

  Families still at Dead Reef, feeling deprived that Main Ridge has developed into the community of Whitey’s Fall, re-name their own place Wit’s End, declare themselves the local aristocracy and make much of their larger ideals and more firmly established sophistication. Indeed, Mr and Mrs Michael Brinsmead go so far as to claim royal descent on both sides of the family when traced far enough back. Really, as the mother declares, she should be heir to millions if there were any justice and Mr Brinsmead ought to be Lord Somebody of Somewhere with a country seat and more servants than you could whip in a month. Instead of which they have a kitchen table where the family affairs are conducted, an ancient desk for their papers, two children large and beautiful as gods who drift about in a perpetual dream they can’t be woken from, a rack of cumbersome overcoats caked with clay, rubber boots, also those less material effects: Brinsmead’s drunken rages, his rum fantasies, his artificial manners, and his wife’s incurable delusion that fate has dealt her an undeserved blow. Then comes the shock of young Sebastian finding gold he won’t say where, and whispering confidences to his sister, the two of them sneaking off in the dark to stake their claim together, not minding how their mother grovels on the floor, mouth working in a brilliantly simulated epilepsy; Felicia going to Sydney with her brother, the pair of them coming back eventually and moving into that shack among the enemy at the less salubrious end of Main Ridge or Whitey’s Fall as the officials insist on calling it. The very place where the Chinese joss-house used to be, as if you wouldn’t expect nightmares. No one knowing a single thing about their claim; them not seeming interested in the gold now by some strange quirk, not digging, nothing; growing more secretive more odd by the month. And a few years later, the accident of some government having a road bulldozed up the mountain to enter the town at their end and them finding themselves at the centre, opening the house as a general store and making it successful while others go out of business, so successful every five years they travel abroad, leaving for good some say, but always coming home after six months or nine, having appointed a deputy to keep the shop running and the funds (you may be sure) rolling in, travels to New Guinea and the Hebrides, weeks in Poona and nights at Raffles in Singapore, travels reportedly across the Arabian Desert to Aden and up the Congo to where Mr Stanley intruded on the retirement of Dr Livingstone, travels so exhausting that the time comes when poor Felicia at the age of sixty-one arriving home at night has to be carried into the singing grumbling shop covered in a pile of blankets, said to be sick and near her death with tropical fever. And each subsequent voyage ends the same till folks say: that’s what travel does for you, that’s the penalty for gadding about where civilized people have no business poking their noses.

  Now the paint is peeling from weatherboard walls. Uncle finds bullock driving doesn’t pay, feeling weary into the bargain, regrets he married the wrong woman and has no respect for his only son. Cars begin to make their appearance and call in for fuel and to restore the ravages of the climb before attempting the downward slope. Even the original mountain tracks change, the triple-ruts made by horsecarts (one rut for the horse, two for the cartwheels) imperceptibly becoming the double-ruts of motor vehicles. As for the main north-south highway snaking far below along the valley floor, it’s given a bitumen surface which appears either black or white according to the time of day. And each curve of that newly bulldozed road coiling down the mountain to meet it is echoed by the old hand-hewn road, faint and following a parallel course lower on the slope. The heart goes out of Uncle when his darling Annie marries one of the McTaggarts and leaves town to nurse in some ratbag Churchill war, reconciled with her wowser brother to make matters worse. Edith McAloon the decorated cripple has died and celebrations are not the same without her, no one to be paraded that you don’t see every day, the decorations appear trivial, and who can you smile at when you don’t quite know what to do next; most disturbing, the whole idea of her beribboned wheelchair comes to seem macabre, even shameful. A barber’s shop opens, Gents Haircuts, First Class, Tuesday and Friday. The diggers are despairing, packing away their pans and cradles, dismantling primitive machinery, putting off their charismatic characters as prospectors, accepting again the dun routine personalities of farmer, of labourer and tradesman. Their wives invest in bead-work table runners for when they might have a diningroom.

  Churches stand empty. The Wesleyan chapel falls down, the Church of England is bypassed by the parson on his fortnightly rounds, the Catholic Church barely has its roof nailed on before being abandoned, never to be consecrated. The population gathers for occasions at the public bar where Felicia guides them in a resurrection of the past. Exotic luxuries and violences rage in the mute bowed heads, all human endeavour (even Whitey’s Fall and Wit’s End even) are understood to have meaning. The Rememberers contemplating their pots of beer hold absolute sway in town and the longest-standing family feuds may be set aside in the interests of the service. So the closing of Mrs Ping’s schoolhouse and the enrolment of the few young children of the district at correspondence school is seen to be the work of destiny, a destiny remarkable for its rich heritage. Thus even the fading of those painted initials A.S. and A.L. framed by a heart high up on the School of Arts has meaning. The general decrepitude of the residents and their residences is respected. Thus the death of Mercy Ping becomes another occasion for exercising the power of Remembering so it can be accepted as fitting the jigsaw where nothing else would do; so that the disintegration of the British Empire itself is seen to depend for its meaning on Mercy’s fatal determination to save her cow further pain. The interconnections are essential. You cannot take away a single hair, a single leaf (that is to say, subtract it somehow utterly) without the entire fabric of the world collapsing. Into that hair-sized, leaf-sized void in the molecular fabric of the universe all else must disappear, including Mount Everest and the Pacific Ocean. Without Mrs Ping’s failure to save her cow Alice, the history of our peoples would be meaningless. So Mrs Collins and Mrs Collins, Miss McAloon and Mrs McAloon, Mrs Buddall, Mrs Buddall, Mrs Swan and Mrs McTaggart make Annie Lang’s grandniece welcome in their kitchen circle. So Felicia Brinsmead, hearing her shop groan miserable miserable, knows she has one terrible secret for which she must some day submit herself to society’s judgment. So Fido also has a secret to guard with vigilance if he is ever to have the satisfaction of revenge. So Mr Ian McTaggart takes charge of unexplaine
d letters still sealed in their government envelopes and keeps them safely in a drawer. So Billy Swan has found out something which puts a burden on his conscience and drives him to the general store like a stranger to ask for gelignite. So Uncle explores love again and settles down for a cup of tea when the Yalgoona police finally roar off with whatever information is required by law, and the motorist who drove Mercy to her death has walked out of the place in peace. So Tony trudges wearily downhill to work, still aching with the failure to experience anything religious, still embarrassed to recall the night he learnt to sing. So Mr Ping works at his trade, creating molten suns, a shell of the man the young Felicia once worshipped. So Sebastian greets each day as God’s revelation, every object as a thread in His design, a detail rich with the meaning of eternal purpose; even his paternity of Fido and his sister’s wicked delusions being there in the Almighty’s inscrutable project. So Jasper, heir of Walter Schramm, spares his customers the indignity of watching him drink his own assets to assuage the pain of being the victor in an argument of the blood. So the memory of Annie Lang’s violin is woken afresh by that instrument once more sending bony-kneed jigs skipping across the rain-soaked paddocks. So the ghost of the famous German band at the gala opening of the Mountain may flit into mind at a phrase from some Landler or Palatinate country dance in Vivien’s book Tyrolean Favourites. So the populace takes mute notice of such bad omens as the all-night electrical storm crackling along the rooftops in miraculous silence and dryness. So Bill Swan won’t rest at night and finds his days disturbed by suspicions and a debility he can’t locate, so he puts aside his mission and all but forgets his conscience, so he is bewitched and knows himself a lesser man. So he sweats it out digging post holes and repairing gates, patching his moralistic father’s property, believing it ought to be his own. So he wastes his Sundays burning through the tranquil countryside on his motorcycle, skimming round corners, causing the horizon to lift and sway at his touch like a gentle sea, revelling in the roar of throbbing metal, hot, thick rubbers in his hands, the dipping forward on the springs at a touch of brakes; the pathetic timidity of car drivers killing each other without the thrill of risk, wallowing along to death unruffled by wind, oblivious of rain, already in their coffins. So Billy one day turns off up the mountain track instead of heading home, bounces miserably along the rutted surface, stones popping from under his tyres, cuts the motor dead at Vivien’s gate and sits there, watching; pride forbidding him, absolutely, to make the next move.