Freedom's Land (13 page)

‘We’d have tipped her clothes out on the ground and left her to do what she wanted.’

‘Good idea,’ another said. ‘We’re ready to start pegging out the first lot of whites. Come and get yours, everyone. The ones that are left will be hers and if she isn’t back in time . . .’ She grinned at them and pointed her index finger downwards.

When they’d all taken their dripping washing, they worked in pairs to wring it as best they could, since no clothes wringers had been thought necessary by the people equipping the camps. They were left with a small pile of clothes.

‘She hasn’t come back,’ Pam said.

‘No.’

For a moment all hung in the balance, but they looked round and saw the wall of the Grenvilles’ tent move slightly.

‘I’ll do it.’ Pam tipped the white underwear out on the ground and went to peg out her own family’s clothes.

When Gil passed by, he saw the pile of wet clothes on the ground and looked at it in puzzlement. Just then Susan came sauntering out of her tent. He saw one of the group of women nudge another and they all paused to watch.

Susan stopped, stared down at the wet clothes, then let out a shriek. ‘Who did this?’

‘We all did,’ Norah said quickly.

‘You’ve dirtied my clothes again.’

Pam stepped forward. ‘Oh, dear. Well, you weren’t around –
again!
– and we needed to use the washing tub for something else.’

‘We’re fed up with you nipping off and avoiding the work,’ another woman said.

The others nodded agreement.

Susan stared from one angry face to another, but saw no hint of softness in them. Sobbing loudly, she picked up the clothes and turned to look for a bucket.

Gil had seen this sort of rough justice before and didn’t blame the women. In circumstances like these, everyone had to pull their weight. And even then, some hard-working people were beaten down by the random harshness of life. He saw Susan put the clothes in a bucket and start towards the creek, so called out, ‘If you’re intending to rinse them, make sure you do it downstream from where we get our drinking water. I’m sure you don’t want muddy water to drink.’

She scowled in his direction, then glared at the women again. ‘Think you’re clever, don’t you? Well, you’re fools. You’ll grow old before your time in this horrible place. I’ll find a way out of it one day, see if I don’t, and then I’ll laugh whenever I think of you. Yes, I’ll laugh at you for the rest of my life.’

She was not only lazy but a fool to antagonise them, Gil decided. No wonder her husband was so grumpy all the time. Anyone would be, married to her. He doubted that pair would ever fit in here. When he turned, he saw Bert watching from the group of men, but he made no attempt to help his wife, only turned back to hammer the next lot of nails in with unnecessary force.

Gil had been keeping a closer eye on all the group members than they realised, not saying anything, trying to size them up. There was another fellow who wasn’t strong. Poor sod did his best, you had to give him that, but he soon got out of breath. Gil doubted he’d make it here. He’d seen the same sort of thing among the farmers he’d grown up with. If you were physically weak, you just couldn’t put in the hard work necessary to make a living.

By nightfall the stores humpy was finished. It was twenty feet by twelve, and had corrugated iron walls and roof, with the gables open to the elements for ventilation and light. There were no windows and the door consisted of a piece of corrugated iron hanging on loops of wire fixed to the doorposts. Inside there was a head height partition across the middle, also made of corrugated iron. Such huts could be erected quickly but weren’t meant for permanent homes.

Everyone had come to inspect it, falling silent as they saw how small it was. Wives muttered to husbands, children hung around the edges of the group, feeling the unhappy currents.

‘I know it’s small,’ Gil said, ‘but it’ll keep off the rain in the winter and shelter you at night. If all the other families were here, we’d have to put two families in each. As it is, you can have a full humpy each.’

‘This isn’t – the farmhouse they promised us, is it?’ one man asked.

‘No. Those are proper wooden houses with four rooms and a veranda front and back. But it’ll take time to get them built and for the moment we can put these up quickly and at least give you better shelter than a tent. When it rains in winter it sometimes buckets down, and nearly all the rain falls during the winter months. It’s different from where you come from.’

He saw Susan frown and open her mouth. Bert jabbed her in the ribs to stop her. Gil didn’t give anyone else time to comment but turned to ask the men to carry the perishable stores inside. Once the food was under cover, he felt a lot happier.

Pete would be sleeping in a corner of the store room but Gil intended to keep one of the tents for himself to be going on with. He didn’t want to sleep with others.

He was so disgusted by how this was being done by the Board, he’d seriously considered giving up the job – only these people truly needed him and his skills desperately.

That thought made something hard inside him soften a little, just a little.

Four days later, by working from dawn to dusk, they’d erected a humpy on each block, again drawing lots as the fairest method of deciding which would be built first. People moved into them one by one. The floors were bare earth, wind and insects moved in and out of the open gables easily, the makeshift doors rattled and had gaps around them – yet the humpies were a big improvement on the tents. He suggested they build lean-to kitchens, using green timber they cleared from their blocks and when they got wood-burning stoves, they put them into the humpies for heating.

There was as much timber as they could use. They’d have to saw it into planks and slabs themselves, but it came free at least. He’d get a saw pit dug on the camp ground for them all to use.

Norah and Andrew were the last family to move in, because once again, they’d not been lucky in the draw. She hoped this wasn’t an omen.

They set to work to arrange their new home, unpacking anything useful and shutting the rest back in the trunks. They had stretcher beds now, to keep them off the ground and since there hadn’t been time to put the dividing wall up and they’d wanted to move in, they used the trunks to separate two areas, making a smaller space where the children could sleep and a bigger one for the grown-ups, which was also the living area during the day, when they stood the stretcher beds upright against the walls.

‘When our crates arrive, we’ll be much better fixed,’ Andrew said. ‘I don’t know what’s holding them up. They came into Australia on the ship at the same time as us, didn’t they?’

There were a lot of people saying the same thing. Why hadn’t their possessions been delivered? No one except Susan Grenville blamed Gil for that, but then she blamed everything on others and seemed to target people quite impartially. You had to feel sorry for her, the poor woman was so desperately unhappy, so out of place here.

For all they had such primitive facilities, Norah was delighted to have moved into the humpy. She was not only able to undress behind a screen made of branches, but to have a proper wash all over, and made sure the children did the same before they went to bed. She shivered as she put on her nightie and got quickly into bed.

Andrew took her place behind the screen and she could hear the water they’d had to share splashing as he too washed himself thoroughly.

When he came out, dressed in his pyjamas, he smelled of soap. He looked ruefully at the two stretcher beds and bent to caress her hair with his hand. ‘You’ve got beautiful hair.’

He trailed his finger down her cheek and her body responded. Hesitantly, she reached out to grasp his hand.

‘Frustrating, isn’t it?’ he whispered.

‘Yes, very.’ It was more than time they became man and wife.

Janie suddenly began to cry and call, ‘Mummy! Mummy!’

Norah and Andrew both froze, and he muttered a curse.

‘What’s the matter, darling?’

‘I’m frightened. It’s dark and I don’t like this horrible place.’ She began to sob.

Jack raised his head to shout, ‘Shut up! You woke me up again, you stupid girl.’

That made Janie sob even more loudly.

‘I’ll have to settle her,’ Norah said. ‘If I don’t, she’ll make herself sick crying. She’s always been frightened of the dark.’

Andrew sighed and got into his own stretcher bed.

It seemed a long time before Janie went to sleep and when Norah crept back to her own bed, Andrew too was asleep, his breathing deep and even, so they couldn’t even continue their whispered conversation, which she’d been enjoying.

It was a long time before she could get to sleep. Her body felt unsatisfied, and her emotions did too. She’d enjoyed being held close, wanted to be a proper wife to him. She still didn’t feel as if she knew Andrew as well as she’d like, because he kept his thoughts to himself, but what she knew, she liked.

She hoped he liked her too. Well, at least now she was more than certain he wanted her and that was one worry put to rest. You never really knew a man till you’d shared his bed.

When you married for convenience, it was even more difficult. Not only did they both have children, but Janie remained stubbornly hostile towards her stepfather and new brothers. That had to stop. But how to stop it had Norah baffled. She didn’t want to treat the child harshly. Janie’d had to face a lot of unhappiness in the past few years, losing her father then her beloved granddad.

But others had lost people they loved and they got on with things.

Norah was still agonising about whether she was being too soft with her daughter when she fell asleep. She woke to find the next stretcher bed empty and sunlight pouring into the humpy through the open gable.

Work fell into a routine, with the men doing the various tasks needed to set things up, like improving the track, clearing more land and preparing for the cows which would soon be arriving. They had to build milking sheds on each block, but he said that could wait a bit, as only simple three-sided sheds were needed in a place with no snow or ice. The main thing was to clear the land for pastures.

Andrew started building a lean-to kitchen in his spare time, often working by lantern light. For this, he used rough planks and slabs that he and Freddie Dawson combined to saw themselves from trees felled on their blocks. They’d found some clay and Andrew used it like plaster to cover the timber walls near the cooking stove, which he’d bought at the store.

He made a rough bench for Norah to work on and two narrow shelves above it to store their supplies.

‘Not the best of kitchens,’ he said when he’d finished.

‘I can work just fine in here.’ She kept her voice cheerful, knowing he’d run himself ragged to provide this for her.

Gil was very insistent on them taking every precaution possible to prevent setting fire to all the wood that was around, not only the lean-tos, but the bush itself. He gave them a talk about how quickly fires could spread through the bush, how people stood no chance out in the open because they couldn’t outrun a fire. A wooden house could be alight in a matter of minutes, burned to the ground in an hour.

They were to keep the land near their houses and sheds cleared of dry vegetation or fallen timber in the hopes that if a fire went through their block, they had some hope of saving their buildings – and possibly their lives.

They were all very solemn after his first talk, and no one complained when he repeated his warnings at regular intervals.

‘He’s a good fellow, Gil is,’ Andrew said to Norah one day. ‘If we didn’t have him, we’d have been in a lot of trouble, because things are so different here. You’d think they’d put some Australian families in with the English ones, wouldn’t you?’

‘We’ll just have to learn quickly, like we did about our shoes.’ They were all used now to shaking their shoes in the morning before they put them on, to make sure no insects had crept inside, especially scorpions or poisonous spiders.

Gil would have echoed that sentiment. He was trying desperately to teach his group as much as he could in the shortest possible time. He’d never talked so much in his life and his idea of bliss at the moment was to sit silently in the late evening, staring into a fire and not saying a word.

Except for himself and Pete, all the families were from England and simply didn’t understand some of the things that might be dangerous here. He was forever explaining this, that and the other, forever hearing the words, ‘Gil, can you just—’

Since there were no schools and wouldn’t be for a while, he’d roped in the older children and women to help whenever they were free, which wasn’t often for the women, if they wanted to keep their families clean and well fed. It was hard work managing a household, washing or washing up outside in a tub set on rough planks nailed over upright pieces of log set in the ground.

They had to fetch water from the well or the creek if there was one on the block. No windmills had arrived yet to pump water up from wells. The Boyds had a dry block; the luckier ones had part of the creek running through. The duty of fetching water was assigned to older children, if there were any, and woe betide them if they stirred up the bottom of the creek and brought cloudy water back. People needed several buckets and had frugally made more from square kerosene cans or big jam cans. They used anything that would serve and didn’t cost anything, hanging two cans at the ends of a sturdy pole so that two lads supporting the middle could carry them more easily.

Gil suggested they dig wells on dry blocks and showed them the best places. For the first time, Andrew found a job hard to face. He hated the penned in feeling of standing at the bottom of a hole shovelling muck into buckets that another man pulled up and emptied, praying the sides didn’t fall in on him before they could wall them up with wood. But you couldn’t ask another man to do that for you.