Tears of the Moon (12 page)

Back near her camp small fires were lit and
allowed to smoke to keep insects away, while a large cooking fire blazed in a ring of stones. When it had died down the fire was scraped to one side and the fish and shellfish were buried in the hot sand and covered over with ash and hot embers to cook. Olivia watched from a distance, marvelling at their self-sufficiency and skill. How interested Conrad would be in this, she thought, and with a pang realised it was the first time she’d thought of him for many hours.

She sat by her own small fire in front of her shelter not wishing to intrude, for she had noticed their etiquette involved periods of simply sitting and observing. When the time was deemed appropriate, it was the young girl who shyly approached and gestured for her to join the others.

The men had finished eating by the time the sun began to dip into the sea. Sitting to one side, they regarded Olivia with clinical detachment. She was handed the seafood and ate hungrily. How could she ever repay these people? She just hoped they would stay around until Conrad returned. She had no doubt he would turn up safely. He simply had to, she told herself. So she sat with the baby in her lap and watched and listened as the group talked. She suspected they were part of a bigger group who were some distance away as she noticed food was put to one side to be taken with them.

Olivia gave them a grateful smile and indicated the food was good. They nodded with satisfaction. They obviously understood how ill-equipped, mentally as well as physically, she was to survive alone
here, and for the first time it fleetingly occurred to Olivia that these people were actually playing host in their own land. Was she, Olivia thought, on land already owned?

Her thoughts were pushed aside when the baby began whimpering. Turning away from the men, she went to put it to her breast, then thought how silly it was to be modest when everybody else was virtually naked. So she ignored her feelings and watched the infant suckle greedily.

At sunset they doused the fire, collected their tools and weapons and the women followed the men into the bush. Only the young girl gave Olivia a backward glance.

Olivia realised the smaller smudge fires of the Aborigines had indeed kept the marauding mosquitoes and sandflies at bay, so she copied them and lit two smaller fires from her campfire, putting the same leaves on them. The pungent smoke was effective and Olivia crawled into her rough brush shelter and curled up to sleep with the baby beside her.

In the morning Olivia found she was following a basic routine just as if she was in a house. She took the baby to the sea and cautiously bathed him in the ocean, returning to the camp to sponge off the salt with fresh water. She felt full of energy, delighted in her placid baby and knew in her heart Conrad was on his way. She tidied her camp, found it too hard to identify and unpack whatever container held baby items, so she ripped a petticoat and made diapers and cotton wraps for him. Then, settling the baby in the
Aboriginal sling, she set off along the beach. Olivia found she enjoyed the exercise and was amazed at her ability to be up and about after giving birth, rather than languishing in bed sipping consommé as would have been the expected routine in London.

She found some shells, including a magnificent trochus, wiggled her bare feet in the wet sand as she’d seen the tribal women do, and to her delight collected a half dozen small mussel-like shellfish.

When she returned to her camp several men were at the water’s edge setting off on what she assumed was a fishing expedition. One man pushed off in a small dugout wooden canoe while two others balanced precariously on mangrove log rafts. They were carrying nets and spears. One of the men she recognised from the previous evening lifted an arm in acknowledgement and pointed at her shelter. When Olivia reached it she found a curved and smoothed piece of bark with a soft hide lining it and she realised it was meant to be a baby cradle. Delighted with this gift, she lay the baby in it and he rested comfortably, staring trustingly at her. How right the white man she’d encountered on the beach had been in telling her to make friends with these people. She and Conrad had read the writings of early explorers who described the natives as primitive barbarians. While they could be seen as primitive and their lifestyle simplistic compared to the trappings of Olivia’s civilised world, sitting here she began to consider that maybe they had evolved a system which best suited their needs.

She and Conrad were about to travel to what they
believed was free territory, a lapsed leasehold bought from the government in Perth. They had a dream of clearing the land, building a home, planting crops, raising livestock. The dream did not include the Aborigines or the vagaries of nature in an alien land. It did not acknowledge the chance of failure or the possibility that all trace of their presence could be obliterated as easily as footprints in the sands of the north-west dunes. Yet already the land was perplexing Olivia. It seemed so terribly harsh. The Aborigines, she observed, lived with it, flowing along to where the food, shelter and friends were. They seemed—her thoughts struggled for the right word—comfortable. Yes. That was it, comfortable with the land.

Olivia sighed. It seemed too big an issue about which she knew very little, but she resolved to learn what she could and wished she could speak the local language. Sitting peacefully in the shade by her child, she watched the men paddle along the shore over the patterns of light on the moving surface of the water. She heard the call of strange birds, felt the humid breeze lift a strand of hair, and absorbed the rhythm of the place while she stoically waited for the return of her husband. She felt no need for anything further in her life at this moment. The sense of oneness was calming and she wondered why she’d never experienced it before in her life.

Some distance north, a small white schooner drew into the sandy shallow water of a tiny island close to the mainland where sandy bays and inlets were a
rich trepang hunting ground. The island was two kilometres long and half a kilometre wide but the main beach was a hive of activity. A small fleet of
praus
from the Dutch East Indies, a scattering of huts and the smoke of many fires along the beach gave the island a settled air. John Tyndall, master of the sailing schooner
Shamrock
, grinned as he took in the scene and with a practised efficiency lowered the mainsail, then held the bow into the wind. His Malay crew hand, Ahmed, stood by the anchor chain as the boat drifted towards the shore. When it was calculated to be close enough that they could row ashore in a minute at low tide, Ahmed hit the securing pin with a hammer and the anchor chain rattled over the side with a clatter that set the seagulls on the beach shrieking into the air. Tyndall relaxed at the tiller and once again scanned the shore, recognising some of the boats. This was the life, he reflected. A tropical paradise, more or less, and a chance to do a little business. The problem however, was that it was indeed a little business and John Tyndall yearned to do big business.

He found life full of surprises, delighted in its unpredictability and had decided there was no such thing as coincidences in this world. It was all a matter of recognising a passing possibility of a new direction and boldly grabbing it. As soon as you settled on a plan, those so-called coincidences fell into your path. He was told he had the luck of the Irish, he always said it was a matter of ‘jumping off the cliff, knowing without a shadow of a doubt, you’d fly!’

John Tyndall sometimes marvelled at where life had led him with its joys, sadness and adventures. Apprenticed to a Belfast shipwright the sea had always been in his blood. He’d gone to sea on trawlers as a boy. Being a bright lad, he had learned quickly and had graduated to working on windjammers crossing the Atlantic where he earned his Second Mate’s certificate. He was never short of female attention but Tyndall, despite his sea roving life, was shy in his flirtations and hesitant about any serious involvement—which had made him a sitting duck for the ambitions of pretty Amy O’Reilly. She worked as a serving girl in a boarding house and what she lacked in formal education she made up for in streetwise survival tactics and a deep ambition to make something of her life. John Tyndall with his good looks, cheerful disposition and blossoming career presented a chance to break away. She contrived to cross his path and, as she planned, he found her charms and beauty irresistible. Before he knew it, at twenty Tyndall found himself with a pregnant wife who urged him to improve and change their circumstances. He snatched the opportunity to sail to Australia to find what opportunities existed.

Upon his arrival in Sydney, he obtained work immediately with a shipwright in Balmain and sent his first substantial savings home to Amy, advising her he was going to sea again, on a whaler, as he could make more money that way.

Amy was not impressed with his description of Sydney or their prospects for the moment and began to rethink her situation. Unbeknownst to Tyndall, she
used the money he had sent her to travel to London to look for work and be ready to join Tyndall on his return. When Tyndall’s second draft of money arrived at their Belfast home, Amy’s drunken father with whom they had lived, had promptly cashed it and spent it on booze. Shortly afterwards he received a letter from his daughter lamenting that she had lost the child she had been expecting some time previously and was in a bad state, as conditions in London were tough due to an epidemic. She asked if more money had come from Tyndall. Her father sent her a note denying any money or letters had come and saying that he was upset to hear of her miscarriage.

Not one to miss an opportunity to better her circumstances, Amy teamed up with an elderly Scottish landowner and travelled north with him. With the loss of the child and a husband on the other side of the world she chose immediate comfort. In the meantime, during the flu epidemic in London, her boarding house was burned down and some people died. The local priest in London wrote to Amy’s father with the news of the fire and of Amy’s disappearance. He hoped she hadn’t been one of those who died in the epidemic. In a drunken state her father relayed the confused news to drinkers in the pub that Amy had died. That night staggering home, he fell into a pond and drowned. When Tyndall’s next letter arrived, the village postmaster returned it and wrote to inform him of the sad demise of Amy and her father.

Neither of them had close family so Tyndall had then turned his back on the old world.

Now, at twenty-five, he was a handsome bachelor in transition from adventurer to solid citizen of the north-west of Western Australia, a frontier that attracted the adventurer, but a developing area that appealed to his business instincts. He was respected and well liked among the waterfront people and merchants he serviced along the coast. He could drink his way through the night with a bunch of seafarers down by the wharf, then scrub up and next night be all charm, wit and tact at a dinner party given by one of the middle-class merchants with a daughter or two of marriageable age. The daughters of the rather limited upper class and very wealthy also eyed John Tyndall, but not with serious intentions. They were simply fascinated by his handsome looks, swaggering nature and the stories that were told in whispers about his past, stories more often based on fantasy than fact.

Tyndall felt no pull to cement his boots ashore. He loved the sea and his boat. He loved the freedom. He had dallied with dusky maidens on a score of islands from Tahiti to Thursday Island, but was yet to meet another woman of his own race to confuse his reasoning with any sort of love he had briefly experienced with the now forgotten Amy. He believed that out there, somewhere, was a woman of spirit, beauty and loyalty who was ready to match his spirited run at life. John Tyndall had his dream too. But in his philosophy, in love, as in war, it was every man (and woman) for himself.

The little temporary settlement on the island beach reminded Tyndall of the odd circumstances in
which he found the Hennessy woman on a beach some days ago. He grinned to himself. At least no one was going to pull a gun on him on
this
beach. She had guts, he reflected, but was she really strong enough to survive this rough and remote land? Like so many from the old country, she probably didn’t have a clue what lay ahead of her. Her husband was lucky to have such a pretty and plucky mate at his side. He hoped all went well for her and made a mental note to sail past the beach on his return to Cossack to see if there was any sign of the Hennessy camp.

A soft word from Ahmed snapped him out of his reverie and he prepared to go ashore.

This island had been used by the Macassan trepangers for several generations. The economy of many Sulawesi towns relied heavily on trepang, which was sold to the Chinese merchants. The men sailed from Ujung Pandang, blown in their
praus
on the north-west monsoon to the land they called Marege in about ten days. They had their regular routes and bases and some
praus
, manned by up to twenty men, ventured down to the Kimberley waters. They had long ago established trading and social rituals with the local tribespeople and each year returned home when the south-east trade winds began.

Aboriginal women were offered freely to the Macassan captains and many of these liaisons were re-forged each season. Children they fathered were absorbed into the extended Aboriginal families. Occasionally the Aboriginal brides who had been
taken away to Sulawesi and the other islands returned to visit.

Already the beach resembled a village. The praus and their wooden canoes were beached along the sand, portable bamboo smoke houses had been erected to dry the trepang, and men were busy at the lines of circular stone hearths stretched along the shore where iron cauldrons of the sea slugs were boiling before being dried. Piles of cut and dried mangrove wood, prepared on a previous visit, were heaped by the hearths. Several men sat pounding kaolin clay rock to make caulking paste for the boats. Crude thatched shelters were scattered under shady trees and at a large campfire sat Aboriginal elders from the nearby mainland and the leaders of the Macassans who were offering around their tobacco pipes.