Bettany's Book (36 page)

Oh she is not a good talker – so says Pallmire of me when I will not converse well with the cooper. He says: A pretty countenance but a sour spirit. And I am standing there as the cooper questions whether this could be so when I see entering the front door of the George the Visiting Surgeon of the Factory Doctor Strope. He leads his wife who wears a bonnet. As he passes the door to the taproom his eyes light directly on
mine and I believe at once he sees all and chooses to ignore all. I see that in knowing of the hoarding of the Pallmires I know nothing which Doctor Strope does not know and does not join with the broad world in not wishing to know. And so he passes on to dinner with his lady.

If I am to punish the Pallmires I must go higher – to people who really do not know the character of the Pallmires and so might be surprised and shocked.

Who these heavenly creatures might however be is unknown as yet to your abased friend

Sarah

I
N POSSESSION

On my return to Nugan Ganway, at my first inspection of Shegog’s shepherd’s hut, I found a woman of the Moth people in residence, wearing a skirt of flour sacking and making with some skill a damper on a bed of coals in the open air. The Moth people were still in the region and had rented Shegog one of their women for tobacco and tea. Some such association must have produced the genius Felix.

As we rode up the native woman stood up watchfully, bending only occasionally to flip one-handedly the damper on the glowing coals. The eyes of this handsome anthracite woman were utterly vacant of scheming. For her sake I did not choose to yell commands into the smelly shambles of Shegog’s hut, but called out his name and invited him to appear.

I brought to the encounter with Shegog, who now presented himself, scratching, a body of settler wisdom which said that though there must be inevitable congress between shepherds and natives, to allow one’s drovers to keep a native woman indoors was likely to create small wars both amongst the felons, and between us and the natives. The Moth people, out of resentment or what they saw as a familial relationship with Shegog, might also feel themselves entitled to kill cattle or sheep. Nor did I want to find, littering the pastures of Nugan Ganway, the poisoned bodies of native women of whom shepherds had tired.

I took Shegog aside, intending to talk straight. The woman was continuing with her damper-making.

‘Is that woman
your
bushwife, Shegog, or is she a common convenience to you and the others?’

‘I am repelled by such an idea as “common convenience”,’ he told me.
I think you might call her my bushwife if you wished to use an overarching term. She is a splendid and unspoilt woman if – like all her sisters – a little rank. She is my Diana of the Australian wood.’

‘Under any system of mythology,’ I told him, ‘she represents great trouble for us. You are to send her away.’

He considered me and a tear broke out in one of his ill-assorted eyes.

‘Sir,’ he said, ‘this is not a lightly assumed affection.’

‘I’m sure you are a good man, Shegog. But you must send her away. Come with me and do it.’

Shegog looked dolefully down his nose and said, ‘Go, my darling. Go!’

It seemed to be settled. But a week later, I found yet another native woman in residence, asleep in the hut. Again a confrontation – I had Long forcibly drag Shegog out into the open by the shoulder, bony and thin as it was, and sit him on a log by the door. Was this his station or mine? I asked him. He was kind enough to concede that he believed it was mine. I felt that I must show my own authority now, not depend on Long. On the trodden earth outside his door, I flattened him with a blow which stung my hand. As the woman woke and began wailing, I was privately disturbed to see that my attack had pushed Shegog’s teeth into his lip and caused his mouth to bleed. He stood testing the injury philosophically, like a man who had suffered a thousand such blows and was only interested in placing it in its order in a table of remembered assaults.

‘If she is here when I next come,’ I told him, ‘I shall send you back to the magistrate with an evil report.’

‘It is not the same woman, you know. She simply looks the same to you, Mr Bettany. The natives plague us to take their women.’

‘And they want rations?’

‘Some of our flour ration,’ he conceded. ‘It is our ration, and we reason that if we feed them they hold off spearing the sheep.’

I said, ‘My Heaven, he should be a defending lawyer.’

The woman crept out of the door with a kangaroo cloak about her shoulders and a length of burlap about her thighs. She stood by a tree looking anxious, and emitting a low continuous wail which I knew would increase in volume if we punished Shegog as he deserved. As in Van Diemen’s Land, the natives seemed a soft-hearted race.

I turned to Long. ‘How does Shegog meet so many natives? We have hardly seen any.’

But the hutkeeper had not yet finished educating us. ‘Let me tell you, Mr Bettany, they were back the day after I sent the other lubra off. You
see, it’s apparent they do not think we can be of any harm to their women. They think of us as phantoms, they think us chimeras. They have strict rules of congress amongst themselves, for they see themselves to be the sole true humans. But their estimation of us is that we don’t count. Thus fornication – if you’ll pardon the blunt abstract noun, Mr Bettany – fornication with a white man is not a violation to them, no more than a thought. Not even a thought. It is a dream. And for having the dream, she receives, Mr Bettany, some tea and flour.’

He shrugged and I looked at this too real and too alarmed native woman and wondered if all the phantoms of Shegog’s hut had shared her.

‘Oh you are a deep scoundrel,’ said Long. ‘You will keep your tea and flour and stop them spearing sheep both.’

‘I would love to accommodate that hopeful proposition, Mr Irishman,’ Shegog advised him. ‘But it might take cannons.’

Adopting peaceable gestures, I approached the woman. She was still and looked at me levelly.

‘Come,’ I told her. ‘Come with me.’ I led her by the wrist, as she made a slight, querulous
Oooh
sound in a silken voice and I beheld with a shock that she was beautiful. I felt the coarse delicacy of her lower arm. I was amazed and not a little confused to hear this woman’s utterance as all the more familiar for being so strange. I could not forgive, but I suddenly understood, Shegog’s interest in her.

I put her in the care of Long. She was quite content, it seemed, to stand while he took the rope he carried at his pommel and tied it firmly but not too severely around her waist. He attached the free end to his saddle. We would lead her home. We walked through the bright day, willing to lead our horses and be reflective. Attached to us by one strand of thin rope, the woman appeared not so much a captive but a companion, making no complaint but powerfully suffusing our thoughts. The woman-less nature of our lives had been made achingly clear. We had until that second thought it admirable. Now there was a chance we thought it regrettable. Yet though in the wilderness now christened Nugan Ganway I had known the stings of the flesh without which there is no virtue, I had no intention of taking a bushwife. What honour was there in it? Seduction with flour and tea leaves? Seduction by trade, of a woman who thought you no more than a provider of tobacco?

But I knew too that both Long and I were frightened that whoever spoke next might, unless very careful, reveal too severe a need.

I nonetheless took the risk. ‘Do you suppose Shegog and his shepherds used the poor woman communally?’

In his careful way, as if I were asking him to solve calculus, Long answered. ‘All I know, Mr Bettany, is that even if Shegog turned this girl away from the hut, his shepherds might outvote him. You see, some parsons and surgeons start encouraging the men to vote on sundry matters on the ships, as a means of improving their minds. And the fellows get the habit.’

And thus Athenian democracy is employed, I thought, to retain and abuse a native woman!

‘Well,’ I told him, delighted to overtop my inner unease with a show of appropriate authority, ‘I shall let them know they are all outvoted by me.’

I could very nearly hear pulleys and mechanisms of mind and soul grind in Long. ‘It seems, Mr Bettany, that if there happened to be a white woman here it would serve more than a single purpose.’ It was ‘pair-puss’ as Long said it in his hard Irish accent. ‘It would lift the minds of fellows and put the manners on them. For I do know a reliable woman at the Female Factory. Learned, virtuous and with reserve, as they say.’ ‘Rissairve’. I had never noticed nor been so reduced to petulance before by the way this good servant spoke his English. Nor was the distance, the chariness of ‘as they say’ welcome to me. I wanted to bark, ‘As
who
says?’

But I swallowed my spite. ‘I believe it may still be a little early. Although you claim for her some rare enough New South Wales qualities.’

‘It is of no concern,’ said Long. But I felt a moment’s inane smugness that he had in his way expressed a liking for this unknown, virtuous convict woman.

We could now see the smoke of two native fires on the ridge above us. Not wanting to aggrieve any sensitive native elders by treating their sister like a trussed, dragged slave, we made a casual approach to the area in which the Moth people were spending their Australian spring. The archaic trees and the great jumbles of huge stones large as houses we met as we ascended had the air about them not of a season but of centuries, and the woman who had caused such discontent in Long and myself began singing low but with a piercing, nasal intonation. When Long slipped the rope from her wrist she seemed content to wait with us. It was true. We were her phantasms. She might wake from us when she chose – at least she thought so.

‘And though they might think we’re nothing,’ said Long as if answering my thought, ‘yet they take the pox quick enough. There’s pox now amongst Docker’s shepherds. They have given it to some women. I warn our people.’

Sometimes he gave me important news in this tangential way. As ever his information seemed broader and superior to mine. I turned to the woman who stood as if waiting to be dismissed. She said something and laughed frankly. Long and I were thus at least amusing chimeras.

Now she turned away and began calling to unseen friends on the hill above. The air filled with shrieks, her own and those of other women. She was still near us though, as if everything on earth – staying, returning – was of equal value to her.

I thought of Horace and some of his apposite, remarkable lines.

‘
Mater saeva Cupidinum
…’

‘The savage goddess of amours, allied with wild freedom, returns me to desires which I thought were dead.’

In trying to rid ourselves of the young woman we shooed her ahead of us and so ourselves rose up the slope. I noticed that many of the harsher-barked trees around were covered with fat grey moths, often – it seemed – to a depth of three or four. These were the bogongs which had again, like last summer, begun invading our huts, and sat in layered torpor on many a yardpost. Above me, some native children, perhaps six-years-old to ten years, studiously ate from a tree, easefully plucking the moths away and devouring them like nougat. Seeing us, these children ran off to another source further up the slope, where they resumed eating with a glazed and sated contentment. Beyond them stood a group of older men, one so old that even in this warm air he was wrapped heavily in what seemed two kangaroo-skin cloaks. There were perhaps twenty men in his party. Some sat on the ground to watch us, others remained standing, but all their air was that of gentlemen in a country of plenty.

I led the woman up to the men and, using mime, gentle pushing and other gestures of rejection, I indicated that we did not want any more such generosity. Even as I worked at this, I was overtaken by a sense that I was involved in a futile lesson. It was not helped by the fact that some of the men exposed their robust crooked teeth and laughed at me. Meanwhile the woman skirted the men and vanished at the same casual pace at which we had brought her here.

To demonstrate to them that I was no chimera and would not vanish
from this country, I went to one of the many moth-encased tree trunks, peeled one plump, torpid insect off the surface of the mass, and without even plucking its wings, determinedly ate it whole. This act of small bravery proved far more pleasant than I expected. The moth tasted like a sweet nut, and I swallowed it without any hardship, and would have willingly taken another.

The elders hooted fraternally this time as if I had offered them a compliment. But had I proved my substantial nature so much as shown myself a clever manikin?

An adventure to bring in December! We needed to go into the mountains to muster our cattle which, left to range, wandered off into the range to the east, the one Goldspink and Treloar called the Tinderies. I will not rehearse here the joys and perils of such an experience. But we were rather short of men who could ride well. O’Dallow was a ferocious bush hussar. Sean Long too rode with a Celtic vigour. One of the newer men, named Presscart, though born to be a weaver rather than to the saddle, had somehow acquired the gift of riding in New South Wales. He was a personable fellow, a fresh-faced Englishman who had been tried in Shropshire for his part in helping to destroy a mill full of mechanical looms, which he had thought would take away the living of himself and his parents.