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by Larissa Behrendt

  Even though Sonny had lived through the hard times of the 1920s and the rural recession, the 1929 stock-market crash that, all the way from New York, made headlines in Australian newspapers and heralded the Great Depression, he could never understand the connection between bankers in America and work on the land, other than to reason that if white people lost money, it was bad for him too.

  The Depression saw the flourishing of shanty towns, many of them mixed, as dispossessed and destitute white people were forced into the circumstances usually reserved for Aborigines; fringe camps continued to develop as the only alternative to the regimented life on the reserves. Sonny gravitated to the fringe camps in the rare periods he could sustain himself away from the reserve. With so many white men looking for work, Aboriginal men like Sonny had no chance of employment, and the law said they were ineligible for the dole from the Relief Board. On the reserve, men had to work two days for no pay to get rations. This food was worth 3/6 (35c) per week. The dole was 5/9 (58c) per week, rising to 7/— (70c) in 1936, and a white man did not have to work for it. Sonny was too dark-skinned to pass as white, so it was goodoo*, bundar, mutay and such that got him through the worst of these times. He could still get a penny for each rabbit skin and would follow dinewan tracks to find eggs, a delicacy that the old people enjoyed.

  * goodoo = cod

  In the years Sonny waited out the Depression, he came to admire William Ferguson, an Aboriginal shearer and unionist, who campaigned for full citizenship and equality for Aboriginal people. He also watched from afar as, in 1932, William Cooper established the Aborigines Advancement League urging representations in Parliament and self-suffi-ciency through the land. Sonny had been impotent when it came to asserting himself, just as he had been at that moment when Garibooli had been taken. He had never dared to live outside of his father’s warnings to be subservient to whitefellas who had the power of life and death over him. Maynard, Cooper and Ferguson offered him an alternative to this oppressive, soul-eating subservience. The dream of equality, of fairness, of justice, was something to think about as he was falling asleep, to the voice of Bessie Smith.

  I want every bit of it,

  Or none at all,

  ’Cause I don’t like it second hand.

  In searching for his sister, Sonny had made many inquiries with the Aborigines Protection Board and constantly sent letters that went unanswered, were returned, or were answered with form letters. One, dated 12 May 1920, said that Garibooli’s whereabouts were unknown; Garibooli would have been sixteen.

  Sonny persisted. Finally, in late 1929 a letter arrived, written from an unknown clerk who was either kind, forgetful or unfamiliar with departmental rules. “Parkes. With a Mr and Mrs Howard. Of Hill Street.” Garibooli would be twenty-six. Sonny knew that in all likelihood his sister would no longer be there, but in his heart he clung to his hopes. Sonny used all his hard-earned savings to go to his sister. To Parkes. With the Howards. Of Hill Street. He bought a jacket — second-hand but it looked almost new — on the way, just in case. Even if she wasn’t there, he reassured himself, perhaps there would be a clue as to where she was now.

  Sonny enjoyed the train trip, buoyed by his hopes and remembering the long, often futile, waiting in the tall grass, with Booli talking of where they could go, wondering where the train would take them. And now, with the gentle jolts and the rhythmic clicks, he was moving closer and closer to her. If she had gone to Parkes — with no answer coming for so long it was hard to place all his faith in the Protection Board letter — she would have travelled on this line. As he looked out over the swaying wheat fields, the farmsteads and the clusters of gum trees, he wondered how it would have looked when his sister saw it through much younger eyes. He knew that she would not have felt the creeping excitement of anticipation he felt as he travelled; he knew that she would have been petrified. He shuddered, too familiar with the pain of the loss and the fear of the unknown, all associated with that day and the men dressed in black in the black car. The gilas bursting through the treetops had warned him. They had been right to be fearful.

  He arrived at the tidy, white-painted train station and saw the big black letters: PARKES. His pocket nursed the letter as he looked along the streets for signs of her, imagining Garibooli’s girlish figure on the shop verandahs, her shape just as he remembered it. He easily found the street and the imposing house, its dominating posture. Sonny went around to the back door and knocked. An elderly woman, unable to answer his inquiry ("Just new,” she had kindly said), had gone to ask the mistress of the house.

  Lydia Howard had, through curiosity, come to look at him. She peered into his face, drinking him in. “I’m sorry,” she said sharply, “but I have no idea where she is. She left here years ago. Must be almost eight and nine years by now. And she never let us know where she went.”

  “Do you know anyone who might…?” he started to ask.

  “No,” she cut him off. “No, I don’t. I don’t know anyone who would.”

  She remained unmoved by the visible disappointment of the man before her, noticed his hands clinging to the folded letter in his hand, relishing the crumbling face with its obvious similarities to another who still haunted her.

  The trail was cold. Sonny trudged back to the station. He crushed the letter in his hand, pressing it hard as if it could capture the deep disappointment he felt. Even though he had thought that Booli would have moved on by now, it still came as a blow to find her gone. And he had at least expected to find a clue, the next piece of the puzzle. The stony face of Mrs Howard showed him how cold the trail was. He stopped at the Chinaman’s shop to buy some bread and cheese. He looked around at the crowded shelves, the tins and bottles, crates and sacks. He was going to ask the man who wrapped his food and took the last of his money if he had known Garibooli, but he knew if he mentioned his sister’s name at that moment he would break open and not be able to control his tears. Sonny waited at the platform for five hours and caught the train home.

  He didn’t stop looking or hoping that Garibooli would return. He continued to dream that they were never apart. In the songs that filled his head, he continued to find expression for the voids he felt but could not describe.

  I ain’t got nobody

  Nobody

  Ain’t nobody,

  Cares for me.

  Lydia Howard had never forgotten Elizabeth. She did not need to be reminded by the man who looked like an older, darker, masculine version of her young, now departed, house maid on the back doorstep. Even when the body of Elizabeth Brecht lay buried under the frozen earth of Lithgow, more than twenty years after she had been in the house, she would be a shadow in Lydia’s thoughts.

  As the years passed, Lydia developed an all-consuming animosity towards the young girl, still youthfully svelte and freshly beautiful in her aging mind. Lydia had tried to conceive over and over again; each time her body proved stubbornly unyielding. The girl’s pregnancy had told her that the barrenness was hers. And Edward had known this too. The knowledge burned inside her. Gripped by her rage she imagined her hands around Elizabeth’s unblemished coffee-col-oured throat, squeezing the girl as though she were plump fruit, until all her life-juices had gone.

  So Lydia Howard, infertile, had lied to the man with those same eyes, same jaw-line, same curves of the lips, saying she knew nothing. Nothing of Elizabeth, of Grigor Brecht, or of the train ride they made to Lithgow. There was no one from that past in her house now to judge the heartlessness of her action.

  Miss Frances Grainger was now Mrs Bill Harstead. She cheerfully announced her departure to Mrs Howard, her bags already packed and knowing that there was a dinner party to prepare for that very evening. Frances married a veteran of the Passchendaele and Somme. She had five children, all boys, including an Edward, a Bernard, and a Harold, to substitute for, though never replace, what had been taken from her in the Great War.

  Solicitors tracked her down. She had run from the debts of her family, believing them to be po
or. Her parents had been frugal and were constantly denying the family things that they claimed they could not afford. Their assets would not have amounted to much, but a wealthy aunt, her mother’s sister, had also died in the influenza epidemic just after the war ended.

  “Sorry, but with the confusion of the war …” her Aunt’s lawyers had told her. The war: interrupter of lives. Her own sufferings seemed just part of the sacrifice, part of the effort, and not comparable to the sacrifice her brothers and beloved fiance had made.

  Miss Grainger, as Mrs Harstead, ensured that her tables were set properly and decorated in accordance with the latest fashion of the day; she insisted that her sons display impeccable manners. The movements and mannerisms of the secretly despised Lydia Howard were now the models for her household and conduct. The servants were supervised with a sharp eye and a sharper tongue. Rather than teaching compassion, her own experience as housekeeper gave Frances an insight into the way in which the girls under her command might avoid hard work. The introduction of so many modern conveniences — everything was becoming electric now — made work for maids and cooks so much easier than it was during her time at the Howards’. She resented the ease such mechanical advances allowed and was suspicious of the idleness they invited.

  Bill Harstead was still living the Great War. He had returned home thin, very nervous, suffering the effects of four years of lost sleep, and tormented by the discovery of an intestinal worm he had caught from drinking the water while fighting in the war. None of this legacy had been evident in lines on maps or names like Gallipolli and Ypres. Somehow, Frances found a macabre comfort in Bill’s inability to let the war go. His nightmares woke her but his screams reminded her that the war was not forgotten.

  And each cross, the driven stake of tidewood,

  Bears the last signature of men,

  Written with such perplexity, with such bewildered pity,

  The words choke as they begin —

  ’Unknown seaman’— the ghostly pencil

  Wavers and fades, the purple drips

  The breath of the wet season has washed their inscriptions

  As blue as drowned men’s lips.

  It was only as the country plunged into another war — again against the Huns — that she questioned what all the waste was for. She hated anything that made her feel as though her brothers and fiance, the one she still loved most, had died in vain, and despised everything that their absence made her feel vulnerable to. Even amidst the upper-mid-dle-class luxury she was now living in were evocations of the loss that still filled her heart.

  14

  1946

  FOUR YEARS TO THE DAY after Elizabeth died, twenty-six- year-old Neil O’Reilly arrived in Venice.

  Little Euroke, the lost son, had been adopted into a family in Gladesville, Sydney, as Neil Padric O’Reilly. He had grown up believing that he was Irish, a dark Celt — black hair and light, tanned skin. He had two other (adopted) siblings: a younger brother, Patrick, and a sister, Katie.

  Neil loved the mystery of his salt-of-the-earth Irishman father who seemed to smell of history, a musty rot-ting-wood-and-lichen scent. His greeting of “Well, son” would cause Neil rippling pride. Neil would sit on a stool at the foot of his father’s chair, his eyes wide, as his father talked of their Irish island home, a land once called Hibernia floating on the other side of the world. Even when Patrick and Katie would sit with them, Neil would make sure he sat closest to his father. His mother, a patient, slender woman with straight blonde hair cut with a fringe, folded washing or ironed clothes looking over and smiling as her husband told his stories to their brood.

  In medieval Ireland, his father had told him, a bard was part of a respected profession, a literary tradition, strictly trained and serving the Prince. He read tales to Neil from old Irish books — The Cattle Raid of Cooley, The Speckled Book, The Yellow Book of Lecan, The Book of Ballymote and The Book of Invasions. Passions and lusts had been faithfully recorded in each old tome and preserved within the walls of the monastery by the monks whose work during the dark ages had been responsible for preserving European histories and literatures within their portable libraries. The poets, his father told him, had plotted revenge on the monks who, for a time, had eclipsed them. Even when Neil couldn’t understand the words, he loved the music of the language, the rolling sound of Gaelic names on his father’s fluid tongue: Giolla Brighde MacNamee, Gofraidh Fionn O’Dalaigh, Eibhlin Dubh O’Connell, Eilean Ni Chuilleanain. Each name evoked a presence as mysteriously ephemeral as his father seemed to be during the storytelling.

  His father’s tales conjured for Neil a mystical land of mythical ancestors. They also brought home to him the contentment and sanctuary his mother and father gave him, Patrick and Katie. They nourished within Neil a sense of place and a sense of self: real, in Gladesville, and imaginary, in the green velvet land at the end of the sea.

  As his father handed down his Irish tales, reading from William Wilde’s Irish Popular Superstitions and the fairy tales of Oscar Wilde, Neil developed a sense of justice and fairness. Through these stories, Neil learnt that there was a moral to everything:

  So the swallow flew over the great city, and saw the rich making merry in their beautiful houses, while the beggars were sitting at the gates. He flew into dark lanes, and saw the white faces of starving children looking out listlessly at the black streets. Under the archway of a bridge, two little boys were lying in one another’s arms to try and keep themselves warm. “How hungry we are,” they said. “You must not lie here,” shouted the watchman, and they wandered out into the rain.

  “So, my son, what does this tell you?” would be the question at the end of every reading.

  “Well, Father, I think it means that the rich must try to help the poor.”

  “That’s right,” his father said, beaming at Neil. “That’s what it’s saying. It’s not right for some people to have lots of things and to give nothing to those who are poorer than them. It’s also not right for people who have been fortunate to have no feeling for those who don’t have as much as them.”

  As Neil grew older, his father would talk more and more about the legacy of oppression left by the English on their people: “How many years must you occupy something you have taken illegally before it becomes legitimate? And if it’ll be legitimate after, say, three hundred, four hundred years, why not make it legitimate from the start? Take the land now, kill the people now, legally and by force since it is going to be legal in four hundred years?”

  Neil did not know how to answer these questions, but came to understand that no answer was required from him.

  “During the famine,” his father would continue, “starving families would board themselves into their cabins so that their passing away wouldn’t be seen. One-quarter of the population disappeared. One-quarter. And it could have been prevented. That, my son, is murder. Calculated murder. Not that the British would own up to it in those terms.”

  “That’s like the story, isn’t it father? The one about the rich people in the houses and the beggars outside.” Neil would offer.

  “That’s right,” his father would say, patting Neil’s head with pride. “You know, after the famine, it was considered bad luck to speak Irish. How’s that for killing the spirit of a people? Never forget, my son, that it was Irish resources — our land, labour and blood — that helped to build up England. And this wealth was then used to oppress us. But it’s this suffering, my son, that creates people with strength and character.”

  “So the beggars at the gate are the ones with the character,” Neil would add, looking hopefully at his father.

  “The English,” his father would relate while he stroked his son’s head, “believed that everything Irish was inferior. So they tried to destroy it. They tried to destroy this culture” — his father was now clutching the book against his chest — “because, they said, it lacked richness. So the Irish poets began to write in the language of the oppressor. You can only imagine what
was lost.”

  His father looked at the book lovingly and then, shaking it in Neil’s direction, continued, “The bind for us Irish was that you were less than nothing if you were one of us, but if you tried to be anything like the English, they’d cut you down. Made people feel ashamed of who they were, it did.”

  “I’m not ashamed of being Irish,” Neil would beam. His father would look at him with a serious face, “No son, I can see you aren’t. But there’s others were. Look at Emily Bronte. Her Dad was an Irishman as well but he Frenchified their name. As if there’s less shame in being French than being Irish,” he scoffed. “Made it into Cambridge, became a bleeding Tory and an Anglican to boot. A traitor to his country, he was. They had a secret history, those Brontes, and they were ashamed of it. Just look at Wuthering Heights. That Heathcliff was Irish.”

  His father would thumb through the well-read pages of the faded leather book and read out the phrases that made his argument:

  "… I had a peep at a dirty ragged, black-haired child; big enough both towalkandtalk … yet, when it was set on its feet, it only stared round, and repeated over and over again some gibberish that no-one could understand.”

  "… all I could make out was a tale of his seeing it starving, and houseless, and as good as dumb in the streets of Liverpool…”

  “See, that’s the mystery of Heathcliff’s childhood. He’s Irish. Shiploads of Irish immigrants landed in Liverpool, dying in the cellars and warehouses around the docks. There were many children there, thin as sticks, dressed in rags. That ’gibberish that no-one could understand’ was Erse.”

  Neil would nod diligently in agreement. His father would move closer to him, the musty smell of well-fermented alcohol lurking between the two, and continue his nationalistic reflections.

  “But see how the ’dirty, ragged, black-haired child’ who spoke ’gibberish’ is labelled a savage and a demon. It’s suggested that he has a nature that cannot be tamed by kindness and this was simply a way of implying that he was Irish. See how the Lintons’ dogs are set on Heathcliff when he dares to venture upon the Grange. Some would say that Heathcliff bit the hand that fed him and that the moral of the story is that if you are kind to savages like the Irish they’ll not thank you. To my thinking, the moral would be that if you treat an Irishman like a dog, you’ll get what’s coming to you.”