Whipbird

by Robert Drewe

  No charge eventuated for me. A borderline escape from a fifty-lashes regimental flogging. But as I said, no charge. Lucky for me I was acting under orders. No one ever said of me, ‘Under fire, he cowardly turned tail and ran away.’ But...Where I do struggle with memories is my first battle. My initial enemy engagement. Just after I stepped ashore in Australia, ten years before the Maori Wars. The miners’ revolt at the Eureka Stockade. And not an actual enemy among them.

  Fresh and raw, this skirmish jumps into mind every Sunday as I limp past the Lalor mansion on my way to Mass at St Ignatius. Fifty years on, it still rankles. Aches more than sitting down on those Maori shotgun slugs.

  Will you look at that! I tell myself. Whereas my family’s succession of Richmond houses in Rowena Parade, Lennox Street, Mary Street, Swan Street, Charles Street, Chestnut Street and Charlotte Street have always been rented four-room cottages frayed by the rough-and-tumble of children, that other Irishman, the ex-rebel and his family, presided over a fucking palace. Peter Lalor, leader of the Ballarat rebels, became a wealthy member of parliament. The Government Speaker! Whereas Conor Cleary. . .

  There’s another matter I left out of my speech. Killing an Irishman that day. The thunder of guns and screams was over so quick. I fired – I had to eventually fire – and I saw this one boy drop. Thin sunburned face. Ginger hair sticking out of his hat. Muddy ragged pants. Possum-skin waistcoat. In all the smoky turmoil at the Stockade I saw him fall.

  Just wounded maybe. Lying low until the shooting, and then the bayoneting, finally stopped. I’ve hung on to that belief for fifty years. Fervently wished it so. Prayed even. That I missed the ginger boy. More than likely. I too was an undersized lad scared witless and my weapon was heavy.

  16

  Suddenly Sly spoke, a dry croak rasping from the depths of the her-ringbone overcoat. Then his head moved slowly from side to side. ‘I heard a voice in my head just now,’ he said. ‘I was looking at a crow but it wasn’t a crow I heard. A sad singsong voice like a person.’

  What was this? Willow looked across at him. His voice wasn’t like his normal one. From lack of use it was as rusty and harsh as a crow’s. Was he actually initiating a conversation? Starting an everyday chat? She felt her pulse race.

  ‘Maybe it was a person, Dad,’ she said. ‘Someone making another whipbird call to take the piss out of Uncle Hugh.’

  He shrugged into his coat collar and fell silent again.

  ‘But there are lots of crows here today,’ she said encouragingly. ‘Sneaky shrewd things, hanging about and scrounging food. They’re very intelligent. There are ducks here too, swimming in the creek. And swamphens, I noticed, with their Darth Vader heads. I’m not sure what noise swamphens make. A sort of squawk, I suppose.’

  Why was she gabbling on about crows and swamphens, like chatting to a five-year-old? Her father stared blankly at her. She could’ve been talking Swahili. If she didn’t know better she’d think he was stoned. At least there was no more of that. Well, yes, there was. But these drugs were sanctioned, official, part of his treatment. Hard to tell what torpor was what.

  Wildly and hopefully, Willow glanced around the vineyard. ‘There’s a flock of crows over there. A murder of crows. That’s what a mob of crows is called, isn’t it? A murder?’ Jesus, she was gabbling again.

  Her father blinked slowly. He was staring away from the crowd into a gravelly gap between a row of vines, his face intent, as if listening. Hair and beard strands blowing about. Alligator boots propped heel-to-heel together, his hands hanging straight down at his sides. A child’s stick-figure drawing of an old man. Who was only forty-seven.

  She’d lost him again.

  ‘But you’re probably right,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t put it past crows to try to talk like a person or quack like a duck if there was something in it for them.’

  No expression. The wind still worried at his hair. She pulled his collar up around his neck. How scrawny the back of his neck looked, all crisscrossed with wrinkles. You could play noughts-and-crosses on his skin. The coat swam on him.

  ‘Oh, Dad,’ she sighed. ‘Tell me if you hear a crow talk like a person again.’

  Then a second later she cried out, in love and anger, ‘Fuck you, Dad! I’m over it! When are you going to stop being dead?’ No reaction. She turned away and wiped her eyes, breathing deeply.

  ‘You mustn’t suffer on Dad’s behalf,’ Lulu constantly advised her. Tough-minded, tough-talking Lulu was a person of the shape-up-or-ship-out school. The buck-up, pull-your-finger-out-and-get-on-with-it crowd. Her way or the highway. Despite the New Age, alternative, metaphorical poncho she wrapped around herself, Lulu wasn’t the most empathetic of daughters. She shook her head in wary scepticism at their father’s condition, inferred that his being ‘dead’ was a pretence, a sham, and left the caring role to her younger sister.

  ‘He’s a shrewd bugger. Poor me. He just wants sympathy,’ Lulu said. ‘He’s like those lazy animals who pretend to be dead. Just because the brown snake lying coiled and motionless at the bottom of the swimming pool looks dead doesn’t mean it is. It never is. It’s biding its time. It’s waiting to be saved.’

  ‘What do you know about Cotard’s Syndrome?’ Willow said. ‘Or cleaning animals from the pool, for that matter?’

  ‘What do you know about having a paid job?’ Lulu retorted, smugly, heading off to Coastal Collectables.

  Fishing out creatures from the swimming pool was a daily chore for Willow. The last vestige of Sly’s successful years, the pool was a 15-metre, pueblo-style model of stained terracotta bricks and sand-blasted cement, through lack of maintenance crumbling at the edges.

  The younger Sly had hankered after the pool of an entertainment celebrity. What a blast to have a proper Californian rock star’s pool in Mullumbimby, New South Wales. A pool fit to entertain record producers and starlets and visiting American showbiz personalities should they happen to stop by for a bourbon and a spliff. Oh, the pool parties he anticipated, the famous libidinous and nude partying bodies it would refresh and accommodate! This seldom eventuated; nevertheless their mother hated it.

  ‘It’s tacky and better suited to an ageing New Mexico motel,’ Tania reckoned. ‘One with pink garden flamingos and a half-hour guest turnover.’ During the marriage break-up, she’d add, ‘I guess you’re familiar with that sort of establishment.’

  But Lulu was correct about the pool’s ability to attract and trap wildlife, and she was also right about the floating bugs, reptiles and amphibians that played possum once they fell in. To conserve their strength, she presumed, or maybe in the hope their luck would miraculously change. The only creatures that didn’t play possum were possums. The possums Willow sometimes found in the pool of a morning were always genuinely dead, and as they floated on their backs, limbs akimbo and their genitals exposed, they were vulnerably reminiscent of little drowned boys.

  The trap was the pool edge’s overhanging terracotta lip. So any possum, snake, frog, cane toad, rat, bee, bull ant, wasp, moth, spider or lizard that fell in couldn’t climb out again. At the deep end Willow made an escape ramp out of an old polystyrene bodyboard, but most of the stupid creatures didn’t see the way out.

  The thing is, she’d say to herself, as she scooped out even a modest morning’s haul of several frogs and spiders, a dozen bull ants and a lizard or three, Dad likes the pool.

  Well, she presumed he did. As a Cotard’s corpse, Sly didn’t swim, of course, but when she finished with the scoop net he’d sit on the edge, his long-nailed yellowish feet trailing in the now-pristine water, his trouser cuffs soaked, staring calmly over its surface to the bordering palms and bamboos and the sun rising over the distant lemon-myrtle and macadamia plantations, and look almost normal. Well, like a meditative half-normal person mesmerised by a creature-free chlorinated water surface and the clatter of an ageing filter system.

  During the last rainy summer the biggest pool invader she’d encountered was the Common Eastern Froglet. The re
cord number of these little striped frogs that she scooped out of the pool, after a particularly stormy night, was twenty-seven. And the fastest hauling-off of a drowned and scooped-out frog by the hundreds of tiny meat ants that inhabited the pool patio, from go to whoa, was ninety minutes.

  All the ants left behind was a faint froggy tracery, like the chalked outline of a minute murder victim. To Willow there was also something strangely human, a pleading gesture, about a dead frog on its back, its fingered hands reaching for the sky.

  That image made her take stock. She was keeping tabs on dead frogs? Thinking deeply about drowned possums? Possums that didn’t play possum? She thought, I’m spending way too much time with a crazy person.

  17

  What he did say in his retirement speech – self-mockery always went over well in Barracks yarns – was how he’d looked the perfect image of the smart young soldier.

  ‘Picture me, boys – how splendidly militaristic I appeared in 1854 in my red coat and duck-white trousers. Hoisting my Enfield rifle-musket, later favoured, as we know, by both sides in the American Civil War for its accuracy, so the Yankees claimed, to 300 yards.

  ‘In the hands of an experienced infantryman anyway. But I was only fifteen, just off the boat, a skinny gingernut five feet five inches tall. And not too accurate with a rifle and fixed bayonet one foot longer than myself. Seriously, I couldn’t hit a shithouse door.’

  That made them laugh. Not his shooting inaccuracy – his contrasting appearance nowadays. He was still a gingernut, in his eyebrows and moustache anyway, and still a short-arse. But thanks to beer, hardly skinny. The same distance around as tall.

  Anyway, of the twenty-two or thirty-four or forty or sixty Ballarat miners who’d died, on the spot or later of their wounds (the numbers were always uncertain) there were other nationalities involved as well. The boy he pressed the trigger on mightn’t even have been Irish.

  Mulling over his retirement speech as he trimmed his moustache earlier that evening, he muttered, ‘Some things aren’t necessary to say in speeches.’

  Bridget was steaming his jacket and trousers with the kettle. Two grandchildren played in the laundry basket. Their son Patrick’s kids, little Monica and John. Interesting that the Cleary red hair had jumped Patrick and carried through to them.

  ‘Things like what?’ Bridget asked, her head down, steam around her face, her ebony Irish hair turning silver now. His second wife ironing away, lovingly getting the creases out. The trousers were a snug fit these days.

  ‘Ha! Good try, my darling girl.’

  On any subject other than his two battles, however, the gift-whiskey was making him garrulous as midnight approached, and bringing out the professional Paddy in large sentimental doses. Enunciating as clearly as the drink allowed, he spouted wisdom and memories with every sip. The accent came back. He was softening his vowels. Fifty years of talking and being Australian fell away.

  ‘Gentlemen, a lifetime’s experience has taught me that poverty and politics have a way of turning things upside down. Life’s confusing that way.’

  So the Irish rebel leader becomes a conservative politician. The hungry Irish boy serves the English overlords.

  ‘Christ, he’s off again,’ someone said. Gentlemen? Not shitkicking sergeants?

  The whiskey now helped him entertain a misty reflection of a long-ago bedtime, as much dream as reality, that he felt bound to impart. ‘Let me share my personal story with you boys.’

  ‘Try stopping him,’ another man sighed.

  ‘My name’s always been a puzzle to me,’ he told the retirement party. ‘Have I mentioned that Conor means “lover of hounds”? My mother told me that one bedtime back in Templemore.’

  He ignored the amiable grumbles. ‘Fuck, let him go,’ a bushy side-burned sergeant said. ‘It’s the old bugger’s big night. He’ll be gone tomorrow.’

  ‘Lover of hounds? News to me. I didn’t adore the local starved and scabrous mutts. “Rabies on legs”, Ma called them. Mind you, we had a lovely old spaniel called Toby. Ears soft as velvet.’

  ‘What about your cat?’ yelled a snaggle-toothed Geordie. ‘Keep us informed.’

  ‘What news of your bloody parrot?’ called another heckler.

  He ignored the joshing, took a further sip of Bushmills and raised himself to his full and serious height of five feet five inches. And an extra bit in his spit-polished shoes. ‘I kept on at her and she said my name was derived from “Conchobar”. Conchobar macNessa was the legendary king of Ulster – a redhead, too – who was born and died on the same day as our Lord. Ma told me this story with the Holy Mother face she put on whenever the church was discussed.

  ‘“Conchobar was in love with a beautiful lass called Deirdre. But she eloped with his nephew Naoise and his brothers. Conchobar was so black with fury he killed all his nephews and forced Deirdre to marry him. The poor girl was so unhappy she dashed her head against a rock and killed herself.”’

  ‘Jesus,’ someone muttered. ‘And this bloke’s your namesake?’

  ‘As she tucked me into bed I noticed tears welling in my mother’s eyes. “What else?” I asked her.’

  Conor was a well-oiled orator. ‘“Well,” Ma said, “In a savage battle a Connaught warrior hurled a rock at Conchobar’s head. He carried on bravely, but in his mighty rage on hearing of the crucifixion of our Lord he overexerted himself and his brain swelled and burst like a pig melon. Now go to sleep, maith an buachaill.”’

  His words now rose theatrically. ‘Sleep! How could I sleep, with all those rocks bashing out people’s brains? I’m a wee ginger specimen more confused than ever.’

  Conor wiped his eyes. Several sergeants, including the RSM, a usually savage Welshman named Taffy Wall, darkly hirsute of brow, ear and nostril, did the same. ‘The old bastard can tell a moving yarn.’

  Refreshed by another swig of Bushmills, Conor went on. ‘I don’t know about your mothers, boys, but when my ma sighed she was the spitting image of the picture over me and my brothers’ bed. The blue-skinned Our Lady with sad eyes, her head always tilted to one side and filled with child troubles of her own.’

  Another gulp of whiskey was needed. ‘That was my ma at bedtime. The goodnight peck on the lips – there were seven others to be tucked in – and she’d say, “Feicfidh mé thú amárach – I’ll see you tomorrow.” This night she said, “My pet, it just goes to show that even great and wise men are prone to mistakes now and then.”’

  ‘Too true,’ sighed RSM Taffy Wall.

  No one in the sergeants’ mess in Victoria Barracks in Melbourne, Australia wasn’t thinking of his own faraway mother by now. Her trials and grace and lifetime tribulations. Her hands soothing his brow. Her bedtime kisses in another time and place, far from this infant nation at the end of the earth, a novice federation only three years old.

  Not a man there was ashamed of sniffling either. They were in their cups, their cheeks glistening with drink and sentiment, and his lilting tones held them now.

  Conor composed himself for the end of his speech. ‘Like taking the Queen’s shilling, some Irishmen would say. But fifty years ago my weeping mother said to me, “Feicfidh mé thú amárach” and at the age of fifteen I sailed to Australia like all you fellows and I never saw Ma again.’

  Arms supporting each other, the sergeants swayed back and forth like Greek dancers, openly weeping.

  At the beginning of the failure of the potato crop, he was nine years old. By the time he left school three years later, the Great Famine was at its worst.

  His father Patrick rented a house in town and worked as a farm overseer for an English landlord, Sir Basil Prendiville, and Conor foresaw a similar future for himself. Scratching the Tipperary dirt for an absentee aristocrat, merely scraping by. Like Daniel and Gabriel, his two eldest brothers. The next two down, Paul and Eugene, had already given up on Templemore, and Tipperary, and Ireland, and left for Canada.

  For three years he laboured alongside Danny and Gabe. Then one wintr
y Sunday after church when the trees were lashing about and birds were blowing in the wind like rags, hungry young Conor saw a crow pecking at something outside the Richmond Barracks in Barrack Street. A foodstuff. He shooed off the crow and picked up a stale digestive biscuit. A nugget-hard, dry and discarded semi-biscuit, with the tooth marks and beak pecks of an English soldier and an Irish crow still in it.

  This was a district with a reputation for Irish unruliness. Since 1810 Templemore had contained the Barracks, a substantial English military establishment of 54 officers, 1500 men, 30 horses, a hospital for 80 patients, a separate fever hospital, a dispensary and a gaol that came in handy on Saturday nights.

  Here it was that the name and place of ‘Richmond’, as well as English digestive biscuits, entered Conor’s life. Despite its age and drab condition, the dusty second-hand biscuit was delicious (third-hand, if you counted the crow), and Conor wanted more of them.

  At the Richmond Barracks was garrisoned the 40th (Somerset) Regiment of Foot, its soldiers on hand to quell any local hunger-inspired disturbances. But with starvation weakening Templemore’s aggressive resolve, the necessity for the regiment’s Irish presence was becoming less urgent than in other unruly places. Such as the Australian colonies.

  In the rowdy new colony of Victoria, miners had discovered gold in huge quantities in Ballarat, 90 miles outside Melbourne. Catching the scent of riches even across oceans, a wild multitude of gold-seekers began flooding into the country.

  Soon irate colonists began inundating the editor of The Argus with letters lamenting the rapidly changing social conditions. History says that no one is more antagonistic to further immigration than an earlier wave of migrants. And it seemed to those prim letter-writing Victorian Victorians that every type of international desperado now threatened public stability: Irish drunkards, devious Asiatics, suave Continentals, truculent Negroes.