The Ballad of Desmond Kale (53 page)

He gave the woman over to them for her supper, just shoved her towards Martha and Meg to be accommodated, not pausing to give her name, only to say, ‘Ungry'.

Her name was Anne Kemp, as she straightly told them when
Moreno and Rankine were gone from the firelight to the back of the waggon to deal with Moreno's problem.

Poor thing, she was frightened in the bush. A huge resoundingly empty cold hostile dark dungeon without walls, it did seem to her, so soon off a convict ship and chafed sore from sitting up behind Moreno on a nag when she had never ridden aback a horse before. Artie Josephs stared at her slain with love, jolted from a romantic headspin over pretty girls of whom there were three in the camp that he cared for, but this one could be had for a coin. Solly saw his brother's knees tremble as he tried holding his tin plate of stew in his lap, and wondered why his brother was frightened of her so.

Meg made sure the woman was politely received, but she did not think she would ever like her. Martha, whose own apprenticeship to crime was in a brothel, where many girls died young, thought more charitably how fresh air might kill the poor commercial darlink if she didn't get rigged up in a blanket — it was too exciting altogether for someone who lived on excitements of brutal kinds. Later she thought, ‘My Arfur could do worse than fall in love with a whore so long as she keeps her hands off of him.'

 

It was the last chorus of the last verse of a ballad with the words of the last lines flying over them in a flock of birds, in a torrent of shooting stars, in a handful of gritty dust thrown in their eyes when they hadn't known such a night was coming upon them, hadn't known finality was in the air with the ashes and sparks of so many campfires whisking around their ears crackling promise. Away out where they were going Kale was retreated to the banks of a billabong with twenty-seven remaining ewes from so many hundred, and two greatly horned rams, being all that was left to him after the
rest were speared. Biddy Magee was terrified over the bands preying on them, worn thin from excitement when Clumpsy M'Carty appeared with a black man, Piper, who was able to speak to the attackers and persuade them off. They set to work building fences and yards where Rankine in two months would find them. There was a tin whistle Kale carried in his belt, and sometimes called his best rams to him, because they knew, when he played, there was the feast of their appetites among the ewes he picked for them. There was a ram lamb to be born from these last joinings and he was the one, called Supreme Matchless, that Blaise Cribb would send word of to Bramley. In the stud books down two hundred years and more he would be known as the Abraham.

 

Tom Rankine stood in the shadows of a waggon. He listened standing slightly stooped and considering, cupping a hand to his good ear to what Moreno told him in his low rumble. How getting away from Sydney with his womans he slowed only to find a priests, and paid the priests ten sovereigns to marry thems — how they were followed, but Moreno lost the tail when they got to Labans Vales to gather some last belongings. Lloyd Thomases wanted the womans from him, but Moreno would kill the convicts commissioners if he touched her.

‘She stays with us, then,' said Rankine. Martha would see to her, and keep her from sight.

‘All rights,' groaned Moreno.

‘Anything else, Paolo?'

Moreno said there was something else. As they'd rode into the trees past Labans Vales homestead paddock from the other ends of the track there was a column of dust and they waited. It was a
sheeps man new to the country and the sheeps man's assigned convict servant and two boys riding with them. Moreno in his pride of stewardship went back to greet them. The two mens knew him. One from a long time ago in another country, the other more recently, and back from the grave.

Rankine had no need to ask which sheep man it was, which assigned convict it was, knowing very well it was his stepbrother, Cribb, with Matthew Stanton and their party of settlers chasing up, which Moreno then confirmed at prouder length, when he saw Rankine wasn't annoyed — more relieved to be told of it — telling how Stanton was the convict servant now and young Mrs Cribbs the new owner of Labans Vales, she was pleased to the care given on her Labans Vales by a Spaniard.

 

Leah Josephs thought she was dreaming, as she bent over to the ground, collected tin dishes from a pile, and slid them into a soapy tub where she scrubbed them with a rag. It was in the corner of her eye, on the dark side away from the lantern that she saw him. Incredulous, she was, over the satiny jacket and pair of red-piped trousers that whisked past her, seeming to carry a pair of fathomless eyes in a little bunched cloud of night-time disturbance.

‘Moru,' they called it — the whistling kite. From the dark side of their firelight as Rankine came back to their camp he heard it, and saw the crazy apparition wearing the regalia of a sea captain, making the sound of the kite with a set of fine-shaped lips. It was Titus Stanton struggled up from the bush to tell them that just below the jumbled cliff line, in the dark, Warren Inchcape sat with Paddy Lehane the bushranger scared with a broken leg and Warren wasn't going to leave him.

Rankine found men and set off following Titus by starlight.

A dismay lifted from Meg Inchcape's heart then. In worst extremes there was the shine of starlight. She had Rankine back from his sore trials, she had Warren back from his. Or would by morning.

 

Camped back a few miles from the duck mole reach because his guides were unable to find way by nightfall, Commissioner Lloyd Thomas was aggravated in almost every aspect of his thinking. He disliked being baulked, disliked the dry scratchy irritable native bush. Nothing had prepared him for it. He wasn't told. He pulled his blanket up to his chin and ordered his men to stay awake in watches. But he could not sleep very well under the ring of stars. Carried by the wind in the tops of the trees was a jaunty stupid tune bothering his brain. It caught in the hooks of hollow limbs and poked around like a probe in a broken tooth. A hooting, melancholy sighing, recalling a ballad peddler's tune on a dismal street corner. Bad not to bring a woman with him, either, as to have one would bring sleep. She could be passed into the convict camp in the morning, in exchange for female convict Kemp, who, because he could not have her, threatened to destroy him. In London it was possible to step out and get around and bring back a woman: whores and ballad singers, they occupied the night, and when it was a ballad it was the chorus that counted. How many choruses were there in a proper ballad on a subject — raced the restless brain of the convict commissioner — there's a set number of verses, eight all done, none of them under eight lines; and there's a chorus to every verse; and, if it's the right sort, eight choruses are very good, they'll sell the ballad.

Out in the same stretch of dark bush, in a second camp a few miles closer to the duck mole reach, lay master and servant, Blaise Cribb and Convict Matt. They were guided there by George Marsh's maps so absurdly out of date as to be insultingly, humiliatingly useless (as they barely needed referring to before a deep set of waggon ruts showed, and much knocked-down vegetation to guide along one's way). Near them lay Johnny Cribb and Barney Hardcastle, who both in the course of a few days' hard riding had acquired the affectations of colonial experience, hanging loose in the saddle as they chased kangaroos over fallen logs and cracked stockwhips longer than mythical snakes, only lacking so far some realer experience of dirt to toughen them. (That would come under a withering sky on salty claypans below the horizon; where they would, in years to come, become as hard, mean and unforgiving as the country sheep punched down from paradise over their lifetimes.) They snored their exhaustion out like a quartet of slumbering wombacks every side of the fire. Nothing woke Matt. Cribb flicked awake every few hours — he was nervous of the New South Wales bush as anyone new, but having looked over Laban Vale sheep for a day was amazed at their improvement in a country so exacting. He was content with so solid a man of experience as Matt Stanton at his side, to say what were wonders, and what were not. All was strange, all was queerly beautiful to Cribb if he didn't get a spear in his side some night. He knew when he got his hands on a flock he would shape something of them. In the night sky the unfamiliar constellations made their show, and he seemed to be able to gather ideals in his hands already and shape them. Getting the nose tight there, under the forehead scroll of wool, and the
horns snarled in tight so they would not get in the way of handling too much, but stay open to the blades; and getting the feel of a handful of wool as crimped leaves of gold must feel, when refined pure and leafy.

Cribb was getting to be an old man to be so much in love as he was. His love for Ivy would always be greater than hers — far greater as it was based on some kernel of need rather than necessity, and one day he would die, and she would go on, loving better than she knew how; then she would certainly remember most, that what she grew to feel for Cribb was a good enough love for the purpose it served, and better than that, for the life it gave back to her when she had lost nearly all.

Blaise Henry Cribb was eventually to be remembered as the greatest sheep shaper that walked this thin earth; the stud breeder's stud breeder of origin, he was going to be sent down to his grave marked for fame. Though where he died and was buried nobody would know. The other matter, apart from sheep, that Cribb rose in when he came to this country and began his dealing with it was forgiveness. It surprised him. May be there was no forgiveness in that earth for those who despoiled it, as Cribb was able to do, watching here a run blow away in dust, there a run scour to clay in a decade's only rainstorm; but forgiveness for his stepbrother, Tom Rankine, that was what came. It was already in him, done, finished, cleared out of his rancour when authorities told him the few facts of Rankine's hard expiation. And although they were to meet, within hours of dawn, they never talked about it, never needed to at all. Too much shame, but all of it lived to the full.

As for Convict Matt, all through that night there came no dreams of demons or of anything else to be remembered in the morning from a hefty, unconsciously slumbering, melon-shaped
head. Matt's last thoughts before sleeping were: ‘Leave the furniture covered in drapes; keep the door of St Botolph's bolted. I love my wife, child, and granddaughter. The Spaniard's done well with my sheep. The redness Cribb finds is a fluked advantage, not in the wools but in the constitution.'

The Devil had come to him and showed a dirty finger. Get out of England, he said (twice). Someone said he was stupid as a sheep, some muttered Irishness: he'd flogged the curser. If he did have any sort of a dream, night after night, it was of a minister of God, bound in ropes and gagged, and of a convict, name of Matt, saying best leave him captive.

 

With their massed shaken tree branches and painted limbs in line the dancers made their corroboree. It was a pretty good rival to any ballad, that was ended but for one note of play. That night Titus got in the dance, with his glad rags off him. The firelight licked in a circle. Warren sat close to Meg, and Leah on the other side of him, feeding him the best, most succulent parts of the leftovers that she was able to dig out of the pot with her fingers. Lehane in sullen comfort was brought in on a two-pole stretcher bed clutching a bottle of rum to ease his pain, and handed to Mick Tornley to decide what to do with him, and when he was done with him, there was still Rankine to face.

Tomorrow, as promised by Rankine, Titus would be the white man's best hope, and ride with Rankine and Warren, and the whole big company of livestock and people negotiating their way through country of tribes less friendly than this one's — cheeky buggers, Titus would call them, and shoot some. They would find a country to run sheep on. Then Titus would go back east where he came
from, and like his grandfather, Mun'mow, live up along the creek somewhere, knowing what he knew.

The dancers took their branches and they danced kangaroos and emus bounding and striding, they danced lizards in the dust, and they danced the wind in the trees with all the boughs massed together and shivering from quick movements, it thrilled the watching crowd. Then they all went back to their camps for the night, ready for the morning.

In the morning when Rankine had his and Kale's pardon securely tucked in his pocket, he signalled the beginning of their march, and the mass of them creaked off through the trees raising dust.

I am particularly grateful to Richard Woldendorp and Charlie Massy for their interpretations of wool culture and allowing me to share in them; to Charlie Massy for a valued manuscript reading; to Rose Creswell and Jane Palfreyman for friendship and encouragement over many years; to Susie Fisher, with love, for unstinting support and inspiration always; and to Donal and Gavin McDonald, who started in wool when wool was king.

Further acknowledgement is made to the following authors, authorities, and individuals helpful to the construction of this novel:

D.B. Adams on sheep behaviour; Alan E.J. Andrews on early exploration; D.W.A. Baker on inland exploration; John and Gwen Bucknall on bush camps; Harold B. Carter and Sir Joseph Banks (and correspondents) on the origins of New Holland wools; George Caley on colonial natural history; J.E.B. Currey on George Caley; Margaret Cameron on wool appreciation and handling; Joy Damousi on convict women; Paul Feehan on wool books; Andrew Dowling on wool country; Jennie and Rob Fenwick on inland travel; John Fogarty on law disputes; Anne Gollan on colonial
cooking; J.S. Gunn on shearing words; Alexander Harris on colonial bush life; W.S. Hill-Reid on gentleman convicts; G.N. Hinch on sheep behaviour; Warwick Hirst on convict escapes; Robert Hughes on early convicts; Frankie Japanaga on Aboriginal life; Amanda Laugesen on convict words; J.J. Lynch on sheep behaviour; Colin McCrabb on working dogs; Tony Milner on history and fiction; Sir Thomas Mitchell on inland New South Wales before white men; Bruce Moore on Australian English; Bob Reece on Irish convicts; Stephen H. Roberts on the squatting age; John Ritchie on the Bigge Reports; Johnny Possum Tjapaltjari on Aboriginal life; Helena Valldejuli-Butler on Spanish usage; Sandy Yarwood on Samuel Marsden; Peter Yates on bush life; and William Youatt on sheep breeds, management, and diseases.