by David Vernon
On the first anniversary of my father’s death I stood at the foot of his grave and read through the deed for a family trust in his name, to ensure that no descendant of Seaman First Class Herb McNally, late of the R.N. ever went without an education — no matter what the financial state of the family.
Historical note: During the early 1950s William John O’Meally murdered Constable George Howell — the Victoria Police Association still gives an annual George Howell memorial scholarship. O’Meally did escape and when caught he was officially flogged at Pentridge Gaol. As far as I know there is no record of who carried out the flogging. The story is what may well have happened.
Frank Stubbs was born during World War 2, the only child of a soldier. His life has encompassed a great many activities from shooting kangaroos in Central Australia to running his own building supply company in Melbourne. When he was a boy Frank’s family used a horse and buggy as a means of transport, yet during his life he saw man walk on the moon and he regularly uses a computer during everyday life. As a writer Frank believes that his boyhood in Victorian country towns gives him a unique perspective from which to write. The Stringybark Anthology, The Bridge, is named after one of his stories.
A Bouquet of Lettuces
— Beverley Lello
The horse had struggled repeatedly to extricate itself from a track that was nothing more than a sticky bog. It was willing but the weight on the cart was too much and finally Father yelled, “That’s it. The bloody piano has to go.” Mother didn’t say anything just watched as they unloaded it, all the men grunting and cursing.
Edward, my baby brother, thought it was a great joke. He gurgled and waved his hands but I felt mother’s sadness seep in under my skin. I’ll never forget the sound of the keys as it hit the ground, mournful and strangled. It swayed for a minute and the men, out of some kind of respect I suppose, put one last effort into keeping it upright. Then we just turned and went on.
Mother never looked back, but I did. It just sat there on the side of the boggy track. We’d seen some kangaroos earlier in the day and I could imagine them coming upon it later, sniffing curiously and then cropping the grass around the pedals as if it was just another species of tree.
Mother never mentioned the piano again but I know she played it in her head. I could always tell when she was thinking in music. Our life wasn’t easy either. There was the mud and cold in winter and the dust and heat in summer. We came to the flats in 1854; father and his three brothers were after the alluvial gold. It wasn’t just picking nuggets up off the ground though. They had to work hard to get at it: divert the creeks, move huge rocks, or break them up, and sift through small mountains of stones.
Mother worked hard too, cooking on an open fire outside the tent in summer and winter, boiling up big tubs of water and trying to wash the mud out of the men’s clothes. Sometimes I helped, sometimes I went to school; and sometimes a gang of us just roamed around the diggings. Father didn’t have much time for us but he still kept his eye on what we were up to.
“You stay away from those Chinamen.” He’d say that almost every day as if they were some kind of demons. Naturally this made us curious. We could see they were different with their long glossy pigtails and the funny way they had of carrying the stones in baskets dangling from a wooden board across their shoulders. They had their own camps well away from the white diggers. They grew their own vegetables, too, and that’s how I got to meet one of them.
In a way it was Mother to blame for the trouble. “I’m sick to death of potatoes and pumpkin. What I’d give for something green and leafy.” She stirred the mutton stew more vigorously.
I’d been past the Chinese camp lots of times and I’d seen rows of leafy things growing there. Mother had been looking so down I decided we had to have some. There’s no way I would steal them. We might have lived rough but mother and father had raised me properly with good Christian values. We went to church on Sunday and Uncle Thomas was always quoting the Bible so I knew ‘thou shalt not steal’. I opened my money box and found two farthings and a half-penny and when mother sent me on an errand the next day, I went directly to the Chinese camp.
I found out later his name was Ah Wu but that day we never exchanged a word. I held out my pennies and I pointed to the lettuce, because that’s what it turned out to be, and Ah Wu nodded, picked two and tied them together with string. He shook his head at the money but I dropped it on the ground anyway and turned and ran. I’d never been up close to one of them before and his looks scared me, and fascinated me a bit too — those slant eyes and sallow skin. Father’s skin had looked like that when he had the fever but this Chinaman didn’t look sick, and he had a very big smile.
I came home proudly carrying my lettuce bouquet imagining how mother would smile and hug me and how everyone would laugh when I told them about throwing the coins on the ground, but father was there, and somehow the story just stumbled out. Mother just looked stricken.
“We’re not eating any of that Chink food,” Father said. “I told you to stay away from those Chinese parasites. Didn’t you listen to me? Fetch me the strap, Mother.”
The lettuces were tossed on the garbage heap where they went limp and yellow and finally rotted in with the other scraps, and I couldn’t sit down for a week. Then something happened that made us all forget about green vegetables.
Mother was busy getting the men’s breakfast. “Amy, could you get Edward out of bed. I can’t think why he’s sleeping this long.” She pointed her wooden spoon in the direction of the makeshift curtain we used to divide the mattresses from the dining table. At first I thought the small rumpled mound was the sleeping Edward but as I reached out my hand I realised it was nothing more than blankets bunched into the shape of a small person.
“He’s not here.”
“Call him. He must be outside playing.”
I called as I walked. “Edward! Edward!” I paused to listen but the only sounds were the distant shouts of working men, the thwacking of an axe and magpies warbling. “He might have gone to the Boyd’s. I’ll go and look.”
He wasn’t there. No-one had seen him. Mother didn’t panic straight away but there was urgency in her voice. “Go down to where your father is digging. Tell him Edward has disappeared. I’ll keep asking here.”
Uncle Thomas told us later about the search. A dank winter mist had bleached the colour out of the bush; child sized shrubs lurked at the edge of the track; a promise of a path ended in a tangle of fallen branches. They wandered in circles and saw trees they thought they’d passed just minutes before. They were cold, wet and exhausted. Men, used to being driven daily by hope and dreams of riches, began to despair.
They came back long after dark and sat hunched on the stools around the fire and mother told them how all the women had helped. They’d searched in every tent and shack on the flats, called out his name along the creek, tried not to imagine what could lie beneath the surface of the tumbling water.
“He’s out there,” she said. Her voice chilled the men into silence. Then the fire crackled and broke the spell.
“Did you women look in the Chinese camp?” Uncle Thomas stood up, poised for action.
“He wouldn’t go there. He knows how I feel about that,” said father.
“Amy didn’t take too much notice of you, did she?” Uncle Thomas had been even angrier than father about my excursion to the Chinese camp.
“We’ll look there.” And they were gone. I righted the stool Uncle Thomas had kicked over as he left. I thought of the lettuce and Father’s strap.
Mother and I stayed by the fire, standing rigid like sentries waiting for an enemy that we hadn’t seen yet. We heard angry shouting in the distance and some startled cries. I felt my backside throb through my petticoats. Then, just as I turned to put more wood on the fire, I saw Ah Wu with Edward in his arms, a white limp ghost. On seeing mother, he reached out his small hand and said, “I got lost. China found me. I couldn’t find any.”
“You silly boy. What were you looking for?” Mother had scooped him from the Chinaman’s arms and pressed him close. Her voice was lost in the tangle of his hair.
“I wanted to find you some of those green leaves. You looked so sad when father threw them away.”
The men eventually returned. Of course they didn’t find Edward at the Chinese camp though they did quite a bit of damage looking. Mother told the story she’d pieced together from Edward’s fragments, a jigsaw puzzle that would always have a few lost pieces. As Father listened, the anger which had made his face taut and tight, dissipated, leaving his jaw and cheeks slack. I think he wept a little although mother shooed me away and sent me to bed so I couldn’t see properly.
Father stopped saying, “Stay away from that Chinamen’s camp.” When we found two lettuces on the washstand a few days later he didn’t object and ate just as much as everyone else.
Later, when we built our first house at Allan’s Flat, Ah Wu used to deliver our vegetables. The Chinese camp had become a market garden by then and he’d deliver his produce in two baskets hanging from the pole across his shoulders, the same way he’d carried the stones. Edward would run out and try and carry the baskets, just like Ah Wu. He would usually fall over and they would both roll around laughing. I guess Ah Wu was lonely; there were never any Chinese women with their men. Most of the men eventually went home: I think Ah Wu stayed because of Edward.
And Mother? After Edward was returned to her she seemed to open up to life. Father never found much gold but in the end he scraped enough out of the ground for us to buy some farmland and build a house. Then the day came that provided an end for mother’s story.
“Mother, come look. Come see what Father has brought home.” Edward, a sturdy twelve years, was breathless after his run from the gate.
“What is it? Another gadget for the dairy?” Mother and I emerged from the kitchen, hot and bothered from making jam.
“Just come and see.” Edward tugged at our hands and we allowed ourselves to be pulled across the verandah, enjoying the breeze on our flushed faces.
We saw the cart as we walked over the rise. Father had closed the gate and climbed back up and was urging the horse forward. It struggled against the weight in the cart, a square, bulky object covered in canvas. The sound of a piano, its muffled keys plucking at the breeze, released mother’s smile. She took my hand and squeezed it.
“I suppose this means I have to take piano lessons now,” I said.
Historical note: A Bouquet of Lettuces is inspired by the place where I live. Yackandandah is an old gold mining town and the ‘flats’ along the creek were where the alluvial gold was extracted. The Chinese comprised twenty percent of the population. Many prospectors fell in love with the area and stayed well after the gold rushes were over. My characters, and this story, are a product of my imagination.
Beverley Lello has always enjoyed working with words and retirement has given her the opportunity to write. She lives on a bush block on the edge of Yackandandah and country town life and travelling are both inspirations for her writing. Several theatre companies have performed her short plays and she has recently been a finalist in the Short + Sweet festivals in Canberra and Melbourne. She has had two short stories published in Stringybark anthologies, The Umbrella’s Shade and Between Heaven and Hell and she was successful in winning the Albury City Short Story Competition in 2011.
Remembrance Day
— Julie Davies
Australia has always been a place for dreamers; where anything can come true, if only you’re game to give it a go. Like the rest of the ‘new world’, strangers came here to rebuild their lives in a land of open spaces and boundless opportunity, each generation advancing the dream a little further. In southern Queensland, the Condamine River fed rich volcanic soil and vast grasslands, home to myriad marsupials, birdlife, and the first Australians who had their own ‘dreaming’. The new settlers grazed sheep, their grandchildren ploughed the ground for crops until their grandchildren began breaking the precious land into smaller and smaller blocks for ‘tree changers’ like Marianne and Bob.
Marianne leads the boys down the steep slope toward the creek at the bottom of their Darling Downs hobby farm. The sun is warm in a vivid blue sky and their spirits are as high as the wispy, nimbus clouds racing them to their picnic spot.
“Hey, Matty, stop swinging that basket or we’ll have strawberry jam by the time we get there,” yells Bob to his energetic, twelve-year-old son.
Marianne has packed the hamper with two punnets of strawberries, a still-warm bacon and egg pie and some chocolate fudge from yesterday’s school fête. She is as excited as her children. For fifteen years she and Bob had dreamed of owning their own property one day and ‘one day’ has finally arrived. For them, the great Australian dream expanded from a brick house in the ‘burbs to forty acres where they can be self-sufficient, or as self-sufficient as a twenty-first century family can be.
They carefully wend their way through their neighbour’s sorghum crop to get to the best swimming hole. Shrieks pierce the air as Matty and Paul plunge down a narrow track worn by generations of feet and joyously throw themselves into the water. Bob looks anxiously over the edge to reassure himself the water isn’t flowing too fast for them, before retrieving the abandoned hamper.
He joins them in the muddy water for a few minutes, just enough to get wet and cool off, before returning to a narrow plateau formed aeons ago within the creek bank. Marianne is still standing on top, looking down at them. Bob spreads a couple of rugs on the grass and happily picks at the fudge as he unpacks the hamper.
“Come on love, come down,” he calls. Marianne makes no reply. Bob looks up at her and can see her tense stance. “What’s the matter?”
“Can’t you feel it?” she asks him.
“Feel what?” Bob replies.
“It feels… it feels…scary, sad, heavy; oh I don’t know. There’s something wrong here, something bad.”
“Aw, don’t be silly, love. Come on down.”
Marianne slowly picks her way down the track to the little plateau but when she reaches the picnic site, stands clutching her arms tightly, scowling. She won’t sit down.
“I don’t like this place. I’m scared! Get the boys out and let’s go home.”
Oh, this is ridiculous. There’s nothing wrong.” Bob’s getting impatient with Marianne now. He can’t understand why she’s making such a fuss. “We’re not bloody going back to the house. The boys have been looking forward to this all weekend. Sit down, will you?”
“No!” Marianne starts to cry, “Please, Bob, I can’t explain it. Just get the boys out and let’s go home.”
“Oh, for God’s sake…” Bob begins but Marianne turns and runs back up the track.
Two hours later, when Bob and the boys return home, Marianne is sitting on the back steps. “We have to sell this place,” she declares, a determined look on her tear-stained face. Bob and the boys look at her incredulously.
“What? We only just bought it,” snaps an exasperated Bob. He wonders what the hell is going on. They have worked toward this for years and now she wants to leave five minutes after moving in.
• • •
For ten thousand years Oolburri’s people have hunted and gathered in the fertile Condamine catchment, prospering in the good seasons and clinging on tenaciously in the bad. But none of the wisdom gained over millennia has prepared them for this sudden influx of squatters, freed convicts and other chancers, nor for the 100,000 sheep they have brought with them in the last two summers.
Oolburri sank into a squat beside the small fire she had lit on the plateau above the creek and dropped on a few twigs to keep it going while waiting for her man, Wayamba, to return with meat. She had been forced to walk quite a distance downstream to find enough fallen branches for cooking because the river redgums were being removed for huts and fence posts.
Wayamba’s mother had named him for the freshwater turtle that live in the mud
dy billabongs because he swam like one before he could walk, but even he hadn’t found many this season. Those strange animals with the hard feet the strangers had brought with them made a terrible mess of the banks of all the rivers and billabongs. Wayamba needed to catch as many turtles as possible to trade with the northern clans for bunya nuts at the big corroboree next moon. Oolburri didn’t know what they were going to do if they couldn’t get plenty of bunyas to store in hidey-holes along their walkabout track. The nuts only dropped from the massive pine trees in the mountains every three years, so it would be a long time before they could get any more. They were a good standby in the bad seasons when the creeks dried up, and the family’s main vegetable source with them, because the nuts kept for a long time.
“Oola, Pituri, get out of that water and do something useful. Find me some more sticks, eh?” she called to her two sons.
Oolburri reached behind her to the large pile of nardoo fern she had gathered and knocked off the plentiful spores onto the flat stone between her legs. Eventually she had enough to grind them into a paste. She dribbled water onto the grounds, occasionally tilting the bottom stone to drain it off. She knew she had to do this or they would eventually get sick. When she had enough, she shaped the mixture into four small, flat cakes, leaving them to dry.
She waited until dark but Wayamba didn’t return. The boys began making nuisances of themselves around the campsite, wanting food. She scolded and swiped at them with a branch but they wriggled out of her reach, shouting and laughing cheekily.
The nardoo cakes wouldn’t make a decent mouthful each, so Oolburri pulled out the bag of flour a kind squatter had given them when they passed by his hut that morning. She giggled as she looked at its whiteness, thinking the man looked like he had rolled in it. She mixed the flour with water and formed big pancakes, and built up the fire. Eventually, when Wayamba didn’t appear, she spread the pancakes on the hot stones and placed some waterlily roots in the embers. The boys were so hungry they grabbed the cakes from the stones as soon as they started to brown and flipped them from hand to hand, pulling off pieces with their teeth, noisily blowing away the heat before swallowing. She had trouble keeping a couple aside for Wayamba, in case he returned empty-handed.