The Shiralee Read online

  The Shiralee

  D’Arcy Niland

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  The swagman crawls across the plain;

  The drought it prowls beside him,

  A hundred miles from rim to rim,

  And a shadow-stick to guide him.

  The crow speaks from the broken branch,

  And he replies, delirious;

  But in the dark he drinks the dew,

  Beneath the stare of Sirius,

  And from his shoulder drops the swag,

  The shiralee, the tether,

  That through the cruel, stumbling day,

  Drove all his bones together.

  The load too heavy to be borne –

  He cursed it in the swelter,

  But now unrolls with humble hands

  And lies within its shelter.

  From The Ballad of the Shiralee

  by Ruth Park

  There was a man who had a cross and his name was Macauley. He put Australia at his feet, he said, in the only way he knew how. His boots spun the dust from its roads and his body waded its streams. The black lines on the map, and the red, they knew him well. He built his fires in a thousand places and slept on the banks of rivers. The grass grew over his tracks, but he knew where they were when he came again.

  He had two swags, one of them with legs and a cabbage-tree hat, and that one was the main difference between him and others who take to the road, following the sun for their bread and butter. Some have dogs. Some have horses. Some have women. And they have them as mates and companions, or for this reason and that, all of some use. But with Macauley it was this way: he had a child and the only reason he had it was because he was stuck with it.

  They’ll tell you he took that child from the city when it was only three and a half and went into the backblocks and carried it on his shoulder, under his arm, and in a sugar-bag that swung as a balance to his bluey. And that’s the truth. He still did it, for the kid was only six months older; though not so much – for it had been broken into walking and Macauley in desperate resignation had shaped his travelling time and means to suit it. They saw him coming into town with the child asleep in his arms, or thrown up with its head on his shoulder, bobbing with the rhythm of the walk, dead to the world. They saw it trudging beside him, the two of them such a contrast in size it made you laugh.

  Wherever Macauley went the child went with him. It was his real swag. The one he carried on his back was a mere nothing. That swag when he hoisted it and strapped it about his thick shoulders stayed put and gave him no trouble. He didn’t have to cook a feed for it. He didn’t have to make an extra shake-down. If he put it on the ground it didn’t walk away. He didn’t have to wash it and comb its hair. It never had to have its buttons done up. It was never the burden to slow him down.

  The mood was on Macauley again that day. There was nothing doing at Bellatta. He came out of the store and stood in the shade of the verandah, rolling a smoke. He was a man of thirty-five, built like a cenotaph, squat and solid. He had ridges on his forehead like a row of sleepers, a brassy look, and a wide hat that put evening on his face while the rest of him was in sunshine. His hands were huge.

  Shouldering the swag, he stepped off the verandah and squinted back towards the dark cave of the store.

  ‘Hey, you, come on,’ he called as a man might call a dog.

  The kid dawdled out, quickened its pace when it saw he had already set out on the road, and caught up to him.

  ‘Look what the man gave me, dad.’

  Macauley glanced down at the brown-paper twist full of lollies, hard, desiccated, and flavourless from long incarceration in the hazy showcase; and from there to the glossy dark-brown eyes and the one ball-shaped cheek.

  ‘Want one?’

  ‘They’ll rot your guts,’ Macauley said.

  The child dropped back. At first glance it was hard to be sure of the sex. The stubby boots, the blue overalls, and the khaki shirt were a boy’s. So, too, in a way, was the walk. In a little while Macauley heard the voice from some distance behind him, ‘Wait for me, dad.’

  He stopped. He sighed. Slowly, irritably, he turned.

  He saw the slow fumble with buttons, then the figure squatting, and standing up all in an exasperating process of slow motion that maddened him.

  ‘Hurry up,’ he yelled.

  ‘I can see the grass coming up already, dad.’

  He didn’t miss the excitement in the voice; it only annoyed him all the more with its time-wasting futility.

  ‘I’m going.’

  The little girl came running after him. She walked in his shadow, head down, stalking it, intent on keeping it under her stepping feet. She got tired of that, got abreast of Macauley, and pushed her hand into his. He clasped it gently, though unresponsively, aware of its stickiness, letting her bear the responsibility of keeping it there.

  ‘Where are we going, dad?’

  ‘Nowhere.’

  ‘What are we walking for then?’

  He didn’t answer.

  ‘If people walk they must be going somewhere. We must be going somewhere, too. Aren’t we?’ She shook his hand, ruffling his silence. ‘Aren’t we?’

  ‘For God’s sake, stop gabbling,’ he snapped. ‘Can’t you see I’m trying to think? What have you got to be yapping all the time for? You give a man a pain.’

  ‘Have you got a headache?’

  ‘I sure have.’

  ‘You want me to rub it for you?’

  ‘It’s all right,’ he said gruffly. ‘Just stop nagging, and it’ll go away.’

  She bobbed along at Macauley’s side. He glanced down. All he saw was the large straw hat and each boot coming successively into view beneath it. It was like walking with a mushroom. He had worked it out from observation that she had to take three steps to equal his one. He slackened his pace with deliberate imperceptibility. He didn’t want her to discover that it was a voluntary concession. That would have embarrassed him. Further, she was shrewd enough to latch on to the weakness, adopting it as a habit and profiting from it when necessary. The idea was to force it into her understanding that she had to toe the line. There was no compromise, let alone subversion.

  The silence didn’t last long.

  ‘I know where we’re going,’ she said.

  Macauley made no response.

  ‘We’re going to see our mother.’ She announced it with the triumph of having achieved a solution to a puzzle that had been whiffling round in her own head. ‘Aren’t we?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I think we are,’ she persisted.

  ‘Why do you keep asking? What’s the matter with your nut? I told you we’re not going back there.’

  ‘Why aren’t we?’

  ‘You don’t want to see your mother,’ he said. ‘She’s no good to you, never has been.’

  ‘No,’ the kid agreed, with the emphatic, unfeeling articulation of a parrot, ‘she’s a silly old mother. She beats kids when they wet the bed and locks them in the lavvy when they eat all the cakes.’

  ‘You forget about your mother,’ he said.

  How long did it take a kid to forget its mother, he wondered. That depended on the age of the child, and the younger it was the sooner it forgot, they said. Well, this kid was only four, and six months had gone since it took its last look at the old woman. Yet the questions still came, and the name still leapt to her lips. But what did she remember? Macauley couldn’t be sure. He couldn’t be sure whether the child remembered the form and shape of the woman, the dark cropped hair, the brown eyes: a pair of slippers trudging about the kitchen; hands turning the pages of a magazine, and sulky red lips with a cigarette between them; a cretonne apron hanging on the line in the poky backyard; a shopping bag stuffed to the craw and s
pilling out vegetables. Maybe it was the voice, often high-pitched, often harsh: maybe it was the smell of the gas stove, of garments drying before the open oven; the sight of wallpaper uncurled by the damp, stained with a mildewy pattern of its own, hanging from the walls; maybe it was the rattle of the windows and the whistle of draughts under the door, the jangle of the brass knobs on the bedposts every time the sleeper turned on the canoe-shaped mattress; and maybe it was the holy picture on the bedroom wall, The Light of the World, Christ crowned and the face flooded with the yellow glow of the lantern he carried; or the framed motto, Home is Love, hanging lopsided over the smoke-stained canisters on the kitchen shelf. But perhaps it was none of these things. Neither the entire vision of the woman, nor any of the images and figments. Perhaps it was no more than the memory of association, indefinite as a dream, a wisp of experience hanging in the mind.

  They were walking across the Gallatherha Plains in the black-soil country, and Macauley foresaw a long dismal journey. The road was anything but smooth walking: it was caked hard and lumpy, making their feet feel uneven as though they were walking on stubble. There was nothing to see beyond them or about them but a vast wide-open space, without tree or habitation, nothing but endless flat plain. There was little feed. The black earth was a lurry of cracks, streaked and forked here and there like flashes of petrified lightning, and over its surface for mile on desolate mile was the brown decay of thistles.

  And though the hours could go by the scene would not change. Time and place, and only time altered here.

  Macauley kept his eyes ahead, sensing rather than seeing or hearing the small lap-dog beside him.

  And he was thinking of this one and that one and of many things. He was thinking of a girl he used to know, and the way he saw her was like a picture on a postcard: with a cherry in her white teeth poised on a smile. He was thinking of the long man in the silk-lined overcoat and a face as black as an old billycan.

  The one was Lily Harper: her father was an alderman, a church-warden, and the butcher down the street; her mother was all satin and silk and a parasol for Sunday, and Lily, she was just the rancy-tancy one for the refinement and culture. But they had no drawbacks that evening in the orchard. Her hair was like a copper coin. There was enough of it to stuff a sofa, all done up in bronzy braids and tied with a green ribbon. He undid it, and she let him, and it lay on the ground like a corolla, and her face was the centrepiece of it. She was so ripe, yet untried, aching for him.

  Yet afterwards he heard her sniffling.

  What’s up now?

  You know you shouldn’t have.

  What about you?

  You’re awful, she said. Just downright awful.

  He looked at her and his eyes narrowed with quick anger.

  You know, we’ve got a name for you.

  What?

  I wouldn’t mention it.

  Is that nice?

  Nice or not, that’s what you are. What the hell are you trying to give me? You’re not blubbering because this happened. It’s for something else. What? Come out with it.

  She flared.

  You think you’re smart. Just because you come from Sydney, and just because you’ve travelled a bit, you think you’re a man of the world. You think you know everything; just bursting with wisdom and knowledge. You think you can say anything to a girl. You think by being brutally frank you’re honest. You mistake crudity for forthrightness. You wouldn’t know tact or gentleness if you met them.

  Now you’re talking like a King’s Cross queenie. Listen. I don’t think I’m smart, and I don’t kid myself I’m a man of the world. I haven’t travelled. Not yet. This dump is the first I’ve ever been to outside the Smoke. I’ve never been away from home before. But, by God, by the time I’m twenty-five those things you say will be true of me.

  Huh!

  Huh all you like, but you’ll see. I’ll be eighteen tomorrow. Give me seven years and I’ll show you. Yeah, look me up then and we’ll see who eats their words.

  You’re rough and vulgar; you’re nothing but a hoodlum. I’m absolutely stupid to have anything to do with you. You haven’t any ambition. Any aspirations. You care about nobody but yourself – you’re just eaten up with selfishness. You’re good for nothing.

  He was beginning to be amused.

  Oh, I don’t know about that. There are some things I’m pretty good at. In fact, I’d say I was a bloody first-rate performer.

  You’ve been here a month. You’ve had three jobs and stuck to none of them. My father offered to apprentice you, but you turned that down, too. There’s nothing worthwhile in you, that’s all.

  Hell, why don’t you dig a hole right there and put me in it! I might as well be buried for all the use I am as far as you’re concerned.

  I thought, well – I thought there might have been some future for both of us together, but I can see it would never work out. I like you, but I can get over that. But I could never get over all the unhappiness that would come about if I married you, or that will come about if I have anything more to do with you.

  Marriage! What the blazes! Where’d you get the idea I was going to put the bit and bridle on you? God Almighty, I would be a bonehead. Tie myself down to one filly for life when I can have the pick of them from every paddock in Australia.

  That’s exactly what I mean – there’s no life for a woman with you.

  For a minute he was angry; then he shrugged his shoulders and grinned.

  Anyway, how did all this start? We come out here, and it’s nice, everything; I’m happy, you’re happy; I get to giving you the best that money can buy buckshee, and you act as though you wouldn’t mind paying for it, anyway. Then, bang, you start bashing the living daylights out of me. You sheilas pick the most peculiar times to have the guts-ache.

  He looked at her, expecting the start of a smile, hoping the storm had blown over, still not apprehending the cause of it, and careless reasoning it out, anyway. She was sitting with her knees up and her dress pulled over them down to her calves. Her hair hung down her back like a copper waterfall. There was a look of aloof contempt on her face which only succeeded in giving it an aspect of seductive insolence, a haughty light in her eyes which only seemed to him a dare to his virility. She was overpoweringly desirable again. The fresh, detailed memory of her lusciousness boiled his blood.

  You’re a lovely thing, he said, the words choking out in a tumescent flood, the uninhibited compliments of passion. You’re beautiful. I could eat you!

  He covered her face and hair and neck with rough kisses. But there was no response from her this time. She did not yield; neither did she struggle. She turned her face, her cheek on the earth, biting her lips, crying bitterly. Her arms were outflung, unmoving. Only her hands kept clenching and unclenching. He had no pity. The tumult of his zeal left no room for it. Only when the fervour died in its own consummation did he begin to doubt the worth of it, feeling little now that it was over, and subdued by her wretchedness.

  He didn’t know what to do or say. He moved away, allowing her her freedom. He stood up. She arose, brushing down her dress, and glaring at him with a look of shock and pain and horror as though she had stumbled on the lair of a fiend. It made him uncomfortable. And the discomfort made him angry.

  She turned and started to run through the orchard.

  That’s right, he yelled after her. Go home and blab in your old lady’s ear. Put me in with your old man. Tell him to come after me with his cleaver.

  He stood for a while brooding. There was a rustle like paper in the trees, a bend on the long grass. It seemed part of the reproachful sense of sordidness and unfairness. But no old man came with a cleaver. Not then or afterwards. Nothing happened. He did not see her again. He had one regret, but he didn’t know why he had it. He wished he could have left her thinking sadly and warmly of him; not thinking of him with rage and hate. He knew he would have felt better.

  ‘A man’s a bastard,’ Macauley said.

  The kid looked up. �
��What’d you say, dad?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he grunted.

  That was Lily Harper, and she was a lady; she was quality and it made a man feel good that once such quality had had a bit of time for him.

  And the other one he remembered, the one with the silk-lined overcoat, that was Tommy Goorianawa. He sat on a kerosene tin outside his humpy in the same town. He dozed in the sun with his hands on his lap and his chin on his chest. He was long and thin, and they called him the oracle of the north; he talked with all men on all subjects. He foretold droughts and floods and fires. They said he could read a man’s fate in the sound of his voice and the lines of his face. They put a piece in the paper about him every year, on his birthday, and they said: Tommy Goorianawa is eighty-four today. Or eighty-five, or eighty-six, or whatever his age was. And the townspeople, many of them would turn up with little gifts of food for him, and he would thank them all with a little speech of thanks that showed he was a man of rough but true education, keen intelligence and inborn politeness. It was a gentleman of the town who had given him the silk-lined overcoat, and he wore it all the time, for his bones were cold in summer and colder still in winter; and he wore it, too, with pride as though he had some title and it was the insignia of his state.

  He was nearly ninety when Macauley met him, and his head lifted at the sound of the approaching figure, and he called: What man is that? I do not know the footsteps.

  Macauley halted but ten yards away, staring. The smile of welcome was already on the man’s face. Rub that face and you’d get soot on your fingers, it was so black. The whiskers on the lean jaws were like snow-white splinters. Macauley gave his name.

  Sorry to bother you. Just wanted to fill the waterbag.

  Certainly. Give it to Nellie. She’ll fill it.

  A gin came to the door, one of the old man’s relatives, only half his age. Macauley gave her the bag with a nod. He was still looking at the man.

  Come here, boy. Come closer.

  Macauley ambled over, dropped the swag, and sat on it. He wanted to stare and he knew now that he could. He took a good searching look. The old man wore a rag cap covered with patches, and though its peak was pulled down it did not hide the sightless sockets. The eyes even were not eyes. They were slivers of jelly, dull, opaque, and grey as oysters.