by David Vernon
Oliver came home for the Chinese New Year. At least that was one cultural influence he had understood. Everyone went home for New Year celebrations. He brought with him some Chinese tea and a tea set in a box. My mother appreciated those.
“They’re yours, Ma,” he said.
“They will be, eventually,” I smiled at him. “What is Shanghai like?”
“Exciting. Full of foreigners.”
“Foreigners like you?”
“Ah, they don’t class me as a foreigner. I’m all Chinese.”
“You were born here.”
“Yes, but they don’t recognise that.”
“I know. A bit dangerous if you don’t know the Chinese rules.”
“I’m OK.”
“You look too thin. Are you eating?”
“Like a horse. I’ve had some flu thing. Headaches and such things. The herbalist was very good, though.”
“You’ll be a proper Chinese yet,” I laughed. I was happy. I could feed him lots of good things while he was with us. He had other ideas.
“I’m going out later,” he said. “Look up my mates.”
“And your grandparents,” I said.
“Yeah, yeah.”
He looked in on them the day before he left to go back his job in Shanghai. We were all thankful for small mercies.
It was three months into the New Year and a phone call from Oliver’s Australian supervisor which set my alarm bells ringing.
“So you haven’t heard from him?”
“Should I have?”
“We think he’s in gaol.”
“You think or you know?”
“We think it likely. He’s told us about giving a few people some contract incentives.”
“Bribes, you mean?”
“Could be.”
“But he’s sick. We’ll have to get him home. Have you notified the Australian High Commission?”
“They don’t want to know. The Chinese say he’s Chinese and subject to their laws.”
“He was born here. So was I. He’s Australian.”
“But you know, Mrs. Young. He’s not really.”
“Of course he is. Tell them he’s sick and needs to come home.”
My words were more prophetic than even I had thought. He was eventually exchanged for some other political favours. He came home an articulated skeleton, gaunt, yellow and defeated.
“I want to take you to Beechworth cemetery,” I said.
“Thanks very much, Ma. I’m not ready for that yet.”
“It’s about Chinese culture in Australia. It’s not about you.”
But we never made it. He was too ill to travel and died. All his bright ideas, his high intellect, my hopes and joys died with him. My parents blamed me.
The bright red pillars weep with the chilly morning mists and I weep with them. Carved symbols look at me through their accusing tears. They are the symbols of a foreign culture, transplanted to a strange land. I hope that I have sent Oliver’s spirit heavenwards. He might find a home there.
Thea Biesheuvel is a writer, singer and President of a charity. She is mother to three boys, step-mother to two girls and grandmother to nine. She is a migrant from The Netherlands but has lived in rural Australia where many of her stories are set. She is currently Brisbane based. Her stories show an ever-growing fascination with people’s adaptation to a multi-cultural Australia. Thea’s first book, So Far, was published in late 2011 and she has previously been published in the Stringybark anthology, Between Heaven and Hell.
On Mercy, Justice and Redemption
— Frances Warren
These books, they speak to me of history, but not of life. History? History is just words, stories we need to make things neat and manageable. Stories designed to create meaning, because some deeper part of our selves recognizes that there is none. History doesn’t speak of life, it’s just… ideas.
History never speaks of a man like Mickey O’Connell, shipped over from the old country to the new, young and brash and strong. Red haired and full-o’-fire, a devil of a man, at least that’s what they said back home. History doesn’t mention Mickey’s knees, all busted out at 35 years of age. Joints fucked and crippled from twelve hour days spent panning. Days where time stretched out like a knife and all there was, was grit and pebbles and burning knees, numb fingers, relentless sun and flies so thick he feared they would run him mad. And after, when the light grew so dim that his eyes strained to tell quartz from mica and he wondered if he could make the walk back to the humpy. And when he did, he would bend a knee and try to find something to thank God for, because he was still a Catholic boy and Catholics hold their sons with guilt. And when he couldn’t find anything to give thanks for, he would pray for mercy instead. But mercy never came, because this is life, not history, and life knows nothing of mercy.
The humpy was damp and reeked of wood smoke and human shit. It was wet and cold in winter and unbearable in summer. It was here that Mickey learnt that a man could die while taking a shit, with his trousers round his ankles and all his dignity gone and no-one would give a damn, save to check his pockets for gold dust or money or even a cheap pocket watch. But history is never dysentery racing through a camp, ‘til every second man is doubled over, cramping and shitting blood and mucus and wondering if he might be the next to die. History is never shit and blood and grown men crying into stiff wool blankets that are full of lice and smell of urine and stale sweat. That’s only life, never history.
When the black fellas came to camp, selling kangaroo meat or furs or buying whiskey, Mickey found he hated them, though they did not speak to him and bowed their heads when he passed. He hated their black skin; that belonged in this alien place; and when his neck and arms blistered and peeled under the heat, they stood patient and easy and endless. Some deeper part of him saw that they belonged here in a way that he couldn’t, or wouldn’t and the resentment curdled his soul and he said, “Fucken animals,” and spat as they passed through camp, before disappearing back to wherever it was they hid from white man’s law and white man’s justice, which was no justice at all.
When Mickey heard of the 72 Kurnai people shot by Angus McMillan at Warrigal Creek, in revenge for an aboriginal killing Ronald Macallister, he shrugged. Bobby Travis had been there and spoke with quiet horror of broken children screaming and women being raped, before having their throats cut and, “It was murder, Mickey, plain and simple. Angus McMillan should hang for it.”
But Mickey just repeated, “Fucken animals,” and turned back to his meal. McMillan never hung, though he lead that and half a dozen other massacres: instead he died alone and without an inheritance on the bank of the Iguana Creek. It’s said, by history, that he discovered Gippsland. (History has a way of ignoring 40 000 years of native occupancy.) Now he has a school and several government buildings named after him, so, as it turns out, life has no justice or mercy and this is just life — no history to be found here.
Later, there were more women at the diggings, mothers and wives and whores and shop-keepers and diggers, as hard as any man. By then Mickey was already broken and drinking too much whiskey, the Irish virus, they call it and the whites of his eyes were yellowing with liver disease and he was 42 years old and dying, though he didn’t know it.
He saw a young woman. She was handsome, in a hard way, steel-eyed and dressed in men’s shirt and trousers and he was deep in his cups and half mad with hate and despair. He bailed her up against a wall, because he’d had too much to drink and was lonely and horny and he had had all the love and spirit and compassion and dignity crushed out of him. He held her there, while he fumbled with his cock and her shirt, pawing and bruising her breasts and is that history? Nah, rape is never history, not even attempted rape, because as it turns out that handsome, hard woman slid a knife into Mickey’s stomach, calm and cold as you please. He was not the first man to have tried to rape her (the first was her father; she was 13 years old) though he was the first she killed for it, but not the last.
And she walked into the night as Mickey’s lifeblood seeped into the dirt of a land that he despised. She told no-one, disappeared to other diggings, as fearful as a native, of white man’s justice. That’s life and sometimes it seems that there are not enough tears in the world for those of us who live it.
Mickey didn’t die right away. A stomach wound is a painful thing, but it takes a long time to die from such an injury. There were no doctors, no people who felt horror or sadness at a man’s death, at least not such a man as Mickey. He screamed before the end and he shat his bed roll and when death finally came, his pain had reached such heights that it could be considered a mercy, though not one I’d like to be shown. Maybe he didn’t deserve mercy, maybe such hatred and bitterness exempt a man from mercy.
Oh, but when he was a boy, how he loved, freely and without stint. He saved a dog’s life, when he was twelve, for no other reason than he could, pulling the awkward fragile thing from a swollen brown river under softer, dimmer skies, but a dog’s life is not of importance to anyone, except maybe the dog. But wait, his mother loved her red-headed lad, she called him Mickey Moo and poked his stomach ‘til he howled with laughter. To his youngest sister, Therese, he was a shining, gentle god and she loved her Mickey until the day she died. But hell, even these things don’t earn redemption here, can you see now? Life has little of redemption in it (though I’m told you may find some in history).
When Mickey O’Connell finally lay still and there was no more life in the red haired devil and his humpy smelt of blood and shit and death, his body rotted where it lay, for who had time to visit one more drunk Irish man on the diggings. His body was found eventually, though his death went largely unremarked and no-one cared enough to try and figure out the cause of death. The red-haired devil, who had once been full of life and hope and chasing dreams was given a pauper’s burial and no-one wept at all. But it’s still not history, not history at all, just another life sadly lacking in mercy, justice and redemption.
Frances Warren is a history teacher in country Victoria. On Mercy, Justice and Redemption is based within historical events in the Gippsland region, where she lives. There were a number of aboriginal massacres in the area and the men that orchestrated them really do have government buildings named after them, including Angus McMillan. Frances has been published in the Stringybark anthologies A Visit from the Duchess and The Heat Wave of ’76.
Fire
— Frank Stubbs
As the old leather-covered meerschaum pipe started to draw properly I allowed my mind to scan across the television coverage I had been watching. The lines of flames racing down the gentle grass covered slopes towards farm buildings. Clean, tidy well-spoken newsreaders standing in front of rear projection screens showing video coverage from helicopter mounted cameras. They fooled the viewers into believing that they were actually there. But once you’ve been there, you know. You don’t describe it to people, because you know that they’ll never understand. Being there was beyond pretense. I had been nine years old. The fire was like a flotilla of yachts racing down a sloping lake. Their sails were flames filled by the wind, driving them toward the finish line. My home! I closed my eyes privately reminiscing.
I felt his hand on my knee. As my eyes opened, I looked briefly at myself as a nine-year-old boy, and then glanced quickly across the back yard to see if the flames were still coming.
“Granddad, were you sleeping?”
“No Son, just remembering.”
“Can you tell me the story?”
The boy climbed up on the swing seat and curled up with his head on my lap, where he could smell the aromatic tobacco without breathing in the smoke.
“Well, Tim, when I was your age — exactly your age actually — we went to live on a small farm in a place called Monbulk up in the hills. My father tried to farm and go to work at the same time. I remember the first year; he borrowed a plough and planted peas. That was the year of the locust plague. Two days it took them. They stripped everything bare except the bracken.”
“What’s bracken?”
“Bracken’s a fern that grows as a weed in the hills and I had to pull it out to help my dad clear the land. I think that it’s the only thing that locusts don’t eat. It’s the hardest weed I ever had to pull, and it grows again while you look at it.”
I sat for a while smoking, wondering if the boy could possibly understand the life I had led at his age. No school, no toys or bikes, working on the property with my parents, just trying to survive. No car of course, a horse and buggy. I went on with the story.
“The second year mum decided that we should be a flower farm; we planted gladioli. That was the year the heavy rains came and the bulbs all rotted in the ground.” The boy looked up at me wide-eyed and eager to hear. “Now the third year, that was the year of the bush fires, dad was working at the Jam Factory. Mum and I were listening to the old battery radio. They said there were fires at the back of Emerald. We went outside and we could see the smoke coming from behind the hills. Mum told me to climb the tank-stand and keep a watch.” I paused for a moment.
“What’s a tank stand, Granddad?”
“Well, you see we only had tank water from the roof of the house, and because the tank was low to the ground there was no water-pressure for the taps. We had a small tank high up on a tank stand, and every morning I would pump water from the big tank up to the high tank so we would have enough pressure at the taps.”
Tim nodded to show he understood and I went on. “Standing on the top of the tank stand I could feel the hot North wind and see the smoke coming closer. After a while the rabbits and the wallabies started to run past the house, getting away from the fire, heading down to Menzies creek. When I first thought I could see the flames I called out to Mum. She was pretty upset; Dad was working at the jam factory and she didn’t know if he knew about the fire.” The boy sat up and stared at me in confusion.
“But Granddad, why didn’t she ring him?
“We didn’t have a phone. In those days only rich people had phones in their homes and mobile phones hadn’t been invented.” Tim looked at me long and hard. Much as he never doubted anything I told him, I think he found this a bit of a stretch.
“By the time I climbed down from the tank stand burning embers were starting to fall near the house. Mum told me to harness the horse. I knew how to do it, but I’d never really done it by myself before. I couldn’t see the flames from down on the ground, but the wind was carrying the embers over the scrub, down the hill towards the house. Mum had filled a bucket from the tank; she was rushing about with a wet potato bag trying to put out the spot fires as they started in the bracken. I was terrified and the horse was terrified. The horse was also bigger and stronger than I was. The buggy was facing the wall of the shed about forty metres away from the stable. I had to drag the buggy to the stable, then back the horse between the shafts, and fit the harness.”
“Why didn’t you lead the horse to the buggy, Granddad?”
“I was terrified that I wouldn’t be strong enough to control the horse and if it ran away I wouldn’t be able to get my mother away from the fire in time.”
“Did you really have a horse of your very own when you were a boy grand dad?” Tim was quite excited by the thought.
Well, yes, but it was the family horse. It pulled the dray to collect firewood, and the buggy to take us into the market, and, yes, I rode her. But, it wasn’t for fun. It was work.
“Go on, Granddad, the house didn’t burn down did it?”
“Well I’ll tell you, I suddenly felt the air getting hotter; I could feel the flames as well as the heat of the sun. The horse was frightened; she could hear the flames crackling. She started to rear and lunge. I can remember I wasn’t wearing any shoes so I had to avoid the embers on the ground and make sure the horse didn’t cripple me with its hooves. Just then I heard Dad’s motorbike. I was never so relieved to hear it, because I was never going to get that horse into the buggy in time. Mum was crying; Dad wa
s shouting and the fire was roaring. Dad cut the harness and let the horse run off. With Mum in the sidecar and me on the pillion seat, Dad just beat the fire onto the road.
We pulled into Ryan’s potato paddock just up the road. Old Man Ryan had a permit to take water from the creek for irrigation, so the potato paddock was green and wet. I stood on the pillion seat watching the fire. The flames went straight through the house, almost as if they didn’t notice it. After the fire, you couldn’t tell there had been a house there at all.
The youngster looked up at me in awe. “What did you do, Granddad?”
“I remember going back when it was over and standing where the house had been. All that was left were the lumps of glass where the windows had melted; even the roofing iron had gone. The sink was all twisted and black and the bath had split with the heat. There was the burned body of a wombat near the woodshed.
“Where did you live?”
“I think we must have rented a house while Dad had to work for years to pay off the bank for the cost of the house that burned down.”
The boy was wide eyed. “Gee.”
“So you see sometimes no matter how hard you try, things just don’t work out son.”
“Did the fire burn the bracken, Granddad?”
“Yes, totally.”
The boy smiled with satisfaction. I didn’t tell him that two days later the whole hillside was green with new bracken shoots.
The boy climbed down and I stood and rested my bad arm on his shoulder. In this fashion we walked through the back door into the family room. My son looked up from the news review program he was watching,
“The fires up in the hills look bad, Dad, didn’t your parents have a place up near there once?”
“Yeah, yeah, I reckon so.”
The boy smiled and looked up at me knowingly, I winked at him and we walked into the kitchen together for our evening mug of chocolate before his bedtime.