Becoming Billy Dare (14 page)

Paddy opened his mouth to reply and then hesitated. ‘You catching flies?' asked Jim, laughing at Paddy's expression.

Violet laughed too. Even though she had never questioned him, not even when Sonny ran away, Paddy could see the relief in her face now they were out of the bush and in the company of other people. Violet looked from the shearers to Paddy, waiting anxiously for his response.

‘I'll be glad of the work,' said Paddy.

The men packed up camp, doused the coals of the fire and hitched their swags across their shoulders. The sun rose bright and hot as they followed the track south-west. Soon the scrub thinned and opened out into wide, flat paddocks. They rounded a bend in the road and everyone stopped, gazing at the wide paddock to their left.

‘Blimey,' said Tom. ‘What a bloody mess.'

The soil was dry and dusty, the ground riven with holes and every few feet, rabbit carcasses lay limp and twisted, their bodies shrunken in the sunlight.

Violet went up to the fence and stared at the carcasses with a blank expression.

‘Here, come away from there, Vi,' said Paddy, taking her hand and drawing her back. ‘Don't look.'

‘The rabbits, the drought, the squatters, and those crooked bankers down Melbourne way. The whole bloody country's going to the dogs,' said Tom, shaking his head in disgust. ‘It's buggered.'

‘You should have gone off with old Bill Lane,' said Jim. ‘Gone off to Paraguay and made a new Australia.'

‘Shut up, will ya,' growled Tom. ‘I would have gone with him, if the missus would have come.'

‘Where's Paraguay?' asked Paddy.

‘South America,' said Tom. ‘William Lane, he was a great bloke. Fought real hard for the shearers' union up Queensland way. When the government and the pastoralists got together and broke the back of our strike, well, Lane reckoned the country was buggered. Got a shipload of shearers and their families and his mates and set off for South America.'

‘Making a new Australia,' said Jim. ‘Poor buggers. Some of them have come home and a sorry tale they're telling.'

‘Some of them are still there, sticking it out,' argued Tom. ‘Pack of pikers, the ones that gave up. Lane was right about this bloody country.'

‘Don't listen to him, Paddy,' said Jim. ‘Sure these are hard times but it's not such a bad place. Reckon I'd rather be here than back in Scotland where my old man came from.'

Then he started to whistle and before long, the whistle had turned into a song. Paddy was surprised when Violet joined in. She knew all the words.

You may sing of the Shamrock, the Thistle, the Rose,
Or the three in a bunch if you will;
But I know of a country that gathered all those,
I love the great land where the Waratah grows,
And the wattle blooms on a hill
…

Reluctantly, Tom joined in too. Finally, Paddy picked up the chorus and sang along with them as they passed by the field of dead rabbits.

18
Gunyah Station

It took two days to reach Gunyah Station, a collection of stone and corrugated-iron buildings sprawled in the fold of a golden rise of hills. Apart from a small stand of gums near the buildings, there was not another tree for miles around.

A crowd of twenty men and boys were gathered in the dusty yard outside the station. Jim and Tom seemed to know half of them by name. Paddy edged closer as Jim argued with the boss.

‘I reckon he'll make a good worker. You could use another boardboy, couldn't ya? He'd make a fine broomie or tar boy.'

‘What about the girl? This isn't an orphanage, Jim,' said Mr Gordon, looking disapprovingly at Violet.

‘Sir, she's no trouble, really,' said Paddy, interrupting. Mr Gordon ignored him.

‘The Sisters of the Good Shepherd have an orphanage down in Bendigo,' said Mr Gordon. ‘If we take her into the police or the hospital, they'll send her down there.'

Paddy blanched. He had to think fast. ‘Please sir, it's only till the shearing's finished. I'm taking her down to Melbourne, to our aunt.'

Mr Gordon grunted. ‘But what is she meant to do in the meantime? We can't have her getting underfoot.'

‘What about Mary?' asked Jim. ‘She still the station cook? She's got a couple of piccaninnies, don't she? Couldn't the kid run around with her lot until we're done?'

Mr Gordon looked at Paddy sharply. ‘A lot of folk wouldn't think it right, a white girl running around with a bunch of blacks.'

‘It's only for a week or two, sir. And I'll watch out for her, when I'm not working.'

‘All right then. Mind you, you'll be paying food rations for the girl as well. This is a working station, not a charity. We can use an extra boy, but if you're slack, mark my words, the pair of you will be straight to the police.'

‘Yes sir,' said Paddy.

‘Take the girl around to the kitchen. We can't be having a little girl in the shearers' quarters. There's a room out back where she can sleep, so long as she doesn't make any trouble.'

Paddy took Violet by the hand and led her round the back of the homestead. Through the flywire screen, he could see a woman inside the kitchen. When she came to the back door, Paddy was startled to realise she really was an Aborigine. Paddy had seen some native people before. At the circus, Harry Sears would make them sit away from the white folk, though they paid the same money.

‘Mr Gordon said to ask, if you wouldn't mind, missus, could you keep an eye on Violet here while I'm helping with the shearing?'

Mary looked down at Violet and laughed. Violet was filthy. There'd been nowhere to wash her along the road. Her black hair stood out like a hedgehog's bristles. Mary sat her down at a bench in the kitchen and set a bowl of porridge before her. Violet ate it with alarming speed. She licked the bowl clean and sucked the remnants from her fingers. ‘I like it here,' she said to Paddy. ‘Is this our new home?'

‘For a little while,' said Paddy.

The shearers' hut had bark walls and a tin roof. The floors were dirt and there was a long table down the centre of the shed. Three tiers of bunks ran all the way around each wall. Paddy dropped his bedroll onto one of the bunks. After sleeping on the ground for months, a hessian sack filled with chaff felt like heaven.

The next morning Paddy woke to find Violet curled up like a possum at the end of his bed. He leapt up and threw the blanket over her, hoping no one had seen, then he took her outside and dropped her, yawning, on a bale of hay.

‘What do you think you're doing creeping into the bunkhouse in the middle of the night? Do you want to get us both in trouble?'

‘I was lonesome.'

Paddy ran his hands through his hair and groaned. ‘I reckon I'll be glad if the policeman came and took you away. I should tell the boss that the policeman can come and get you.'

‘You wouldn't do that,' said Violet confidently. He could never shake her faith him, even when he tried.

‘Violet! You go and wait in the kitchen with Mary. I'll come and see you at the end of the day.'

‘No,' she said, stamping her foot. ‘We have to stick together. You said.'

He glared at her and when she sullenly turned her back on him, he whacked her hard on the bottom.

‘Go on with you.'

Violet let out a little squeal and bolted.

The sun came up over the station and the shearers began to stir. Cook had a huge fire going under his camp oven and when he raised the lid, steam billowed into the cool morning air.

After breakfast, all the men and boys climbed into wagons and headed out to the shearing shed. Paddy was awestruck by the sea of sheep in the pens.

Jim was one of the fastest workers, a real gun shearer. As soon as a sheep came through from the catching pen, he'd have it on its back and his shears passed through the thick wool in one swift movement. With three cuts and a turn of his wrist, the whole of the fleece was off in a matter of minutes.

The activity in the shearing shed made the circus ring seem quiet in comparison. The air was thick with grease and dust. Paddy was assigned as a picker to five different shearers, and the work was hard and fast. When the shearers took off the fleeces, Paddy ran to gather them up and then threw them onto the skirting table where experienced wool-rollers would trim the fleeces and throw them in a bin for the classer to grade. Paddy then gathered up the remnant, the skirting, and took it to another table where the piece-pickers sorted it into grades. On top of all that, if one of the sheep was cut he had to run with the tar bucket so the shearer could daub the wound. Sometimes the shearer had to sew up the cut and Paddy would wait, holding the heavy tar bucket, while the needle curved in and out of the sheep's raw pink skin. The stench of tar seeped into him, until he felt as if he could taste nothing except tar and wool-fat in the back of his throat.

By mid-morning, Paddy's back and arms were aching and he was struggling to keep up. The fleeces were riddled with burrs and thorns that cut his hands. By the time the men stopped for smoko, the skin on his palms was raw and tender.

That evening, Paddy was so exhausted that he could barely eat the mutton stew that the cook served up for him. Even before the men had finished their meal, Paddy crawled into his bunk in clothes stiff with grease and dust, and instantly fell asleep.

An hour before dawn, Paddy woke with a start. His body was still sore but it wasn't the physical pain that woke him. He had forgotten to visit Violet. He looked to the end of the bed. She wasn't there. He wanted to feel relieved but instead he had a tight, sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. He shouldn't have been so cross with her. Moonlight was seeping in through the cracks in the hut wall. Paddy swung his legs over the side of his bunk, ready to pull his boots on and set out to search for Violet. There was a squeal as his feet made contact with a small body curled up on the floor.

Paddy felt a swirl of emotions: relief, anger, and a secret pride in Violet's devotion. She looked like a kitten curled up in the ragged strip of blue blanket that she'd dragged from the homestead. He pulled on his boots and then scooped her up, awkwardly carrying her out of the shearers' shed.

At the back door of the homestead he set her on her feet. The kitchen was in darkness. Paddy wondered what to do. He didn't want to disturb Mr Gordon. What if Gordon said they had to leave? He had no idea where they would go next.

As the sky began to lighten, Mary arrived.

‘This little one giving you worry?' she said, reading Paddy's expression.

‘She doesn't want to sleep in the homestead and if they catch her in the shearers' hut, I'll lose my job,' said Paddy.

Mary listened thoughtfully. ‘You come along my place.'

Paddy followed her across the home paddock and over a small rise. On the other side of the hill, a small bark hut stood beneath a stand of gums. Inside, curled up on a pile of possum skin rugs, lay Mary's two children. In a minute, Violet was nestled down beside the other children.

Mary and Paddy walked back to the homestead together.

‘That little one, she talk about you all day,' said Mary. ‘You damn good brother, taking care of your sister.'

Paddy thought of Honor, his real sister. He hadn't even replied to the letter she'd written telling of their mother's death. He had barely thought of her since he'd set foot in Australia. But it was different with Violet. Even though she wasn't his sister, Violet needed him. And perhaps, in a way he couldn't explain, even to himself, he needed Violet.

19
Scribe

Sunday was a quiet day on Gunyah Station. A few of the shearers lay on their bunks with magazines or books. Others went rabbiting, or played cards and gambled away their future earnings with IOUs scribbled on scraps of paper.

In the morning, Paddy sat down beside Violet on a log outside the shearers' hut and wrote her name in the dusty soil with a stick.

‘When we get you to a real school, you'll be able to say you know your letters.'

He placed the stick in her hand and made her follow the outline of each letter.

Suddenly he found one of the shearers, Mac, standing over him. ‘You read and write, then?'

‘Yes.'

Mac withdrew a crumpled letter from the inside pocket of his jacket. Paddy smoothed the page out and scanned the looping handwriting.

‘Well, read it to me, boy,' said Mac.

Paddy frowned. The letter was very badly written with lots of words misspelt. Paddy read it out loud as best he could.

Dear Son,
It's two year and four months since last we heard your news and we have received no money from you. Your sister Elizabeth is not well. She can't get out to chapel but the nuns come to her. I have work at the mill but it is hard and we think of you and your prosperous life and hope you cannot forget your family here in Ireland. Your mam
.

Mac slumped low and put his face in his hands. ‘How can I answer that? The thing is, you do forget, when you're here and there's the sun and the work and the hope.'

‘I could help you write a reply,' said Paddy.

They settled down in the shearers' quarters. Men were playing cards at the other end of the table and they looked up with interest as Mac and Paddy began to work. When Paddy had finished, he read the letter back to Mac.

Dear Mother,
I received your welcome letter and write you these few lines to let you know that all is well with my wife Kate and myself and our little family
.

I hope it will be a consolation to you, Mother, that I am happy out here away from tyrannical landlords and Irish Bailiffs. Glorious it would appear to us if you all in Ireland were possessed of the same amount of freedom that we have out here and without which no people can be prosperous. I hope a change will take place soon. Things cannot continue as they have done and I pity the poor starving Children of Erin. I enclose five pounds which is every penny I can spare for the moment. Kate had another baby boy last Christmas and we've named him Daniel after Father. My youngsters are growing up well with pure Irish blood running in their veins and you'd be proud to see such sturdy-limbed boys
.