Brian Penton Page 8

  “A proper pigsty,” Jack Berry called it, glancing round a little more fastidiously than usual and sniffing the clothes soaked in sweat and the yoke of wool, dogs, a near-by latrine, and odds and ends of garbage left lying about by men bound to the place only for a season of backbreaking toil. “Damned if I'd stable my nag in it.”

  “Neither would Cabell,” Joe Goggs said. “See the new stables he's building up there? Cement floor bloody sight cleaner'n this table.” Snowy Wagner, a hulking, sprawling, good-natured brute of a man with a big blond beard and hazy blue eyes inherited from some south German peasant ancestor, shouted through a mouthful of pumpkin, “Cabell's not the worst. What you ought to see's them planter blokes down the coast—the way they treat their kanakas. Wouldn't ask them to bog in the places they give a white man to sleep in. Seen a boss give a black bastard a lift when he'd passed me by.”

  “Whatya expect?” Goggs said. “Coons is cheap. They'd knacker us white bushmen if they got the chance and let them Chows and Jimmy Tannas breed like rabbits.”

  “And this Cabell, he's the king-pin of the lot, you ask me,” Greasy Bill said through whiskers rat-tailed with soot and sweat. “Mean as a dunnekin rat.”

  “Greasier'n you, Bill,” Goggs said. “He's that greasy your eyes slide off him.”

  “Yesty seen him sool the dogs on old Ike, the hawker,” Bill told them, “because he had a bag of flour to sell. Three bob for a fourpenny bar of soap and two pound ten for a bag of flour that wouldn't be worth a quid in the Crossing—that what he's hittin' yous blokes up.”

  “Yes, that's not right,” Berry said. “It's not honest.”

  “He ought to be took to law,” Goggs said. “It's against the constitution.”

  “He is the law,” Wagner said. “Ever heard of a shearer who was a J.P. or a member of parliament? And dingo don't eat dingo.”

  Goggs banged his pannikin down. “So ought we. Ain't there more shearers'n bosses. We oughta strike. He'd soon come running after us when he seen the grass filling his wool with seed.”

  “He'd come running after you all right, with a troop of mounted Johns. That's how he'd come.”

  “You can't put twenty thousand bushmen in jail,” Goggs said. “We'd soon run the squatters and bosses out the country. You should've been down the Eureka like I was. We showed 'em something then.” He jerked his face at them as he spoke, like a dog snapping at the air. It was one of those shoddy, plebeian faces that seem to have been jerrybuilt from odds and ends—eyes too small for the nose, one cheekbone higher than the other, ears uneven and outsized for the small bullet head, which bristled with closely shorn hair of a nondescript colour, like wire. He had a mongrel shifty gaze and his voice a formless, mongrel tone as though words were not so important for the ideas they conveyed as for the savage tone in them. He looked a nasty customer, snipping at the air with the razor-sharp blades of his shears, not a simple yokel at all, but the child of centuries of ill-nourished growth in the back alleys of a great city.

  Berry glanced at him and frowned. “That's mad talk,” he said.

  “It's only talk,” Wagner said. “Shearers ain't fighters. Being ringer and dodging putting shears on the last wrinkled cobbler in the pen—that's all interests them.”

  “You think it's mad, do you,” Jerry Coyle said. Sitting apart at the end of the table with a book propped up before him he looked at Berry over a half-eaten mutton chop smoking on his knife. “Is it mad to stop somebody robbing you?”

  “I can look after my rights without any Eureka stockades, if that's what you mean.”

  “YOU can look after your rights.” Coyle tore a mouthful of meat off the chop and chewed it slowly. They waited respectfully for him to speak again. A shrewd-head, they thought him. He could quote pages of Tolstoy and Marx and Donnelley and Winwood Reade, trailed a packhorse-load of books from shed to shed across eastern Australia. But although they respected him, somehow they did not like him. He was not one of the mob, had no mate, was never seen in the bush shanties knocking down his cheque, and never took part in sentimental interludes of song and dance around the concertina at night. His face was lean, ascetic, his eyes grey and without depth. Their gaze stopped just short of you in a cock-eyed sort of way. He seemed to be thinking hard about something all the time—about what you could not guess, for behind those eyes and toneless voice his personality was evasive. “You can't get to the guts of Jerry Coyle,” they said. Like Goggs he was no simple child of the bush. He had fine features and small fine hands. “Dead spit of his old man.” Years ago old Jimmy Coyle was hanged for robbing a bank and going back to hack the teller's head off with an axe. An old lag who had been transported at the age of eighteen for rioting in Dublin, where he was a student. A red-hot Tipperary man. Well, there was no hot blood in Jerry, they said. He was as cold as a lizard—went to see his old man hanged!

  He fed the rest of his chop to the dogs sniffing round the men's heels. “You're no better set up to get your rights from Cabell and his like than an abo is,” he told Berry. “They own the land—they took it before you were born. So they own the parliament. Therefore they own the law. You're just a wage slave. You want to walk out of here now, but you can't. You're leg-ironed.”

  “What's to stop me?”

  “Starvation.”

  “Well, a man's got to work.”

  “Sure. For himself and society? Or for some greedy big bug who just had the luck to get here first and collar the land? As long as he's got that you haven't even got the right to work—except when he says.”

  “That's right,” Goggs said. “We ought to strike and burn them all out.”

  “We will strike—one day,” Coyle said “when you get the brains to know what to strike for.” He went across to his bunk, littered with papers and books, and brought back a big volume. “That's Karl Marx. Read it and you'll understand that it isn't only Cabell who's responsible for you being a half-starved cocky on a stony ridge, but a whole society of Cabells. Landgrabbers and Capitalists. And behind them all the gunboats of England.”

  Berry pushed the book away. “Gunboats,” he said contemptuously.

  “Sure. Who d'you think owns this country?”

  “The squatters, you just said.”

  “And what're the squatters? The deputies of English money-lenders. That's where all this dough's coming from that Cabell is spending on fences and stables. There's too much money in England since the Germans began milking the French and got capital for themselves to drive the English out of the world markets, so the English are putting their spare rhino in here. That's why I say gunboats. A few shearers with sparrow guns ain't enough. We'll need every man armed to win a war.”

  “War!” Berry snorted.

  “And then what?” Wagner said. “It'll be all rosy till you and me start being bosses and the bosses start being shearers.”

  “It won't be like that at all,” Coyle said. “That's the English way. There's a history behind that—a long history of aristocrats and serfs. So we've got to drive the English right out of here and do it our way.”

  “What's YOUR way?”

  “Not MY way—the Australian way. That's the way we eat here out of a common dish. The way the lags used to share a bit of rotten meat with a bloke that had none. The way a man goes into the bush with his mate and they stick together.”

  “To hell with your schemes,” Berry said with increasing irritability. “I want to own my own land.”

  “All right. But to-morrow you'll be thinking my way. Wait till they bring in a few more Chows and kanakas and immigrants to cut down your cheques.”

  “There's getting too many dagoes and new-chums in this country, that's a cert,” Wagner admitted.

  “Just wait a bit then and they'll bring in more. Like they took shanty Irish into England. Then you'll see the triangle back in the streets and another hanging judge on the bench.”

  “Not in this country, by Christ,” Goggs said.

  “You've forgot how this country began,”
Coyle said. “Ain't we the sons of men and women it happened to. I saw the scars on my old man's back. So did you, Goggs. And Cabell's one of them that helped to put 'em there. He was an overseer where my old man was a lag. The sort who'd do anything to a man. Because he's an aristocrat, an English aristocrat—that is a bloke born with a right to look down on you like dirt. Don't you see—that's his guts. Getting the land isn't enough. We've got to get rid of everybody with that aristocratic superior guts before you can have the proper mateship, like there was between lags, between diggers, and between two men in the bush.”

  “Well, my old man wasn't flogged,” Berry said. “He came of his own free will.”

  “He came because he couldn't stand it in England any more. He came because he was tired of the English way.”

  “The English way. Bah, you can't get your old man's back out of your head,” Berry said. “But that's finished. It's all different now.”

  “You think so?” Coyle rooted in his pocket and brought out a newspaper cutting. “Listen to this. 'A beautiful place is England—in a coal mine,'” he read. “'This is how a miner evidences it. ”I have to hew coal one foot ten inches to two feet thick lying on my side for hours, all but naked in some inches of water and a sort of shower bath from the roof, picking and shovelling as best I can. This is not the place to sit down and take lunch or dinner in, so we work on except for having a sup of cold tea or a bit of bread and water till it is time to leave the pit. And I have been in other mines so full of gas that the trail of the safety lamp left a blue flame behind as you moved the light. “' That's the England, home and beauty they're always cracking up,” Coyle said. “The place where they transported blokes to Australia for asking for just more than enough to buy dog's food for themselves and kids. The place where they passed an Act of Parliament that when a man left his work for three days he could be branded on the chest with the letter B, and if he ran away they branded S on his cheek with a red-hot iron. And afterwards when they formed unions they had to meet in the pitch dark and call each other by numbers instead of names so that the police pimps wouldn't know them.” He smiled a thin smile which tightened the skin on his face and sharpened his sharp features. “It wasn't much different from that a few years ago here and it won't be any different if the Cabells have their way. Because they're tying their Jew-gold bonds of Empire round this place and they'll make it another little England. And that's why we'll have to get rid of Cabell and England if we want to keep Australia.”

  Wagner laughed. “Stick your republics. Three meals a day—that's all I want.”

  But Berry flared up against Coyle's entranced gaze watching him closely. “The stink of the jailyard's on everything you say.”

  “Sure. Sure,” Coyle said quietly. “That's what I'm telling you.”

  “To hell with you then. It don't concern honest men.” He stood up to leave the table, wiped his hand roughly over his face, sat down again, and looked round in a dazed way at the company.

  Coyle took out his pipe and began to fill it. “Typhoid coming on, Jack? Must account for the rotten way you shore them hoggets this morning.” When the last flock, bleeding at the noses, had bolted through the gates and fled on jerky toy-legs back to its paddock, and the shearers had taken their cheques and departed, leaving the viscous silence of days as blank as the stare of the animal they rose and set upon to ebb once more about the homestead, Berry remained behind in the hut and sweated the flesh off his bones with typhoid. On the box beside his bunk was a plate of greasy, untasted food, a mug of water with two dead flies floating on it, and a candle in a rum bottle. Larry came in the evening and lit the candle. When Berry could talk Larry argued with him. “Wasn't it right what Coyle said? HIS shed made you sick, but will he make it up to you for the cheque you lost at Black Rock?”

  “It isn't right you talking about your old man that way,” Berry said.

  “It's the bad ideas Gursey put in your head when you were a kid.”

  “Gursey was right. He said I wasn't the same as my old man. I'm not. I feel it here.” He pounded the pit of his stomach with his fist. “I won't ever be a squatter. I'm on the men's side.”

  “No, no, one day you'll be a rich squatter.”

  “I'm damned if I will.”

  “He's your old man,” Berry said. “You can't go against your old man. It's not natural. I don't blame Coyle. His old man was a trouble-maker and a convict. It's in his blood. But you—I mean—I mean. . .”

  “I know what you mean,” Larry mumbled.

  He left next day because he was due at Boondarooba, fifty miles along the road to Pyke's Crossing, and could not afford to lose another thirty pounds. The same day Cabell returned from a trip to Brisbane with a pair of white Sumatran ponies, frisky and sleek like kittens, and a little rubber-tyred gig, enamelled, with yellow leather cushions. It had been a good season and he had bought Harriet a present. “Cost me fifty quid apiece,” Larry heard his father telling the child, boast-fully, anxiously, in an effort to rouse her from the indifference which hung upon her like the repellent starched petticoats.

  “A hundred quid for those fancy horses and he did poor Jack Berry out of half a dollar!” Larry was filled with pity for Berry and all his kind, cheated, like himself, by his father's greed. He was reading a book which Coyle had left with him—PROGRESS AND POVERTY, by Henry George. He would have made little of its long words if the hard, burning rage in his stomach had not illuminated it. How incontrovertibly right it made that rage seem.

  He did less brooding now. He liked to watch the bulls fighting when they came down to drink—the young bull and the old bull. The young bull was quicker, the old bull more wily. Their horns crashed and locked and they circled, head to head, thrashing the grass flat. The cows, knee deep in the stream, their images reflected on the slime-painted waters, lifted their heads and watched and bellowed.

  “War's the law of the system,” Coyle had told him. “War between squatters and shearers, men and bosses, young and old, fathers and sons, the bloody English way and our way.”

  The old bull manoeuvred the young bull till its feet were in the mud of the bank, then threw up its head and sent the young bull tail first into the water. The cows splashed up on to the bank and the old bull roared and cantered after them.

  “He'll try that once too often, that old bull,” Sambo said. “He's gettin' older 'n' weaker and the young'un's gettin' older 'n' stronger. One of these evenings soon he'll wonder what's hit him.”

  “Soon,” Larry thought, looking at the gates of the sunset, unbarred for some climactic advent. “Sooner than he expects.”

  And then, in a way which nobody expected, which is the way of life, came something to shatter the peace of the valley and the serene maturing of Cabell's designs and Larry's.

  Part II: Black Mountain

  Chapter One: The Dirtiest Trick

  One afternoon early in the summer of 1883 Cabell was lounging across the counter of Liam O'Connor's ironmongery store in Pyke's Crossing talking over the prospects of the season with the proprietor, whom he had watched grow from a tow-headed, pippin-faced child, crawling about the dirt floor of a lonely shepherd's hut across the Downs, into the prosperous burgess of a thriving town, no more than a single, tumbledown grog shanty at a river crossing when first he entered it thirty years before. Fencing-wire and rum had made its fortune and the fortunes of the two hundred and eighty O'Connors, wives and offspring, second and third generation, who owned every stick and stone and barrel along its one dusty street.

  True, there was a foreigner in the place, a wizened and infuriated Scotchman named David Kyle, who had entrenched himself behind the fly-blown window of a druggist's shop, at the promptings of some suicidal impulse, to flaunt a yard of yellow ribbon on every 12 July and declare, wherever there was an O'Connor within earshot, that he would never rest content till he had eaten a beefsteak off the Pope. To save him from the consequences of these demented challenges the physical strength of many combined O'Connors was often c
alled for. “We wouldn't have nothing happen to the boy,” said Danny, head of the tribe and owner of its chief asset, the Travellers' Rest, “for isn't he bound to marry an O'Connor one day and quit larkin' about. There ain't no one else to marry.” To which the Scotchman retorted by singing “Boyne Water” in a noteless voice of quavering fury.

  It was this voice, shrieking through the suffocating stasis of noon, which now roused Liam O'Connor from behind the counter and made him exclaim, “That's the damn Scotchman. He's been pickin' on them Irish again.” He grabbed an axehandle from the counter and hurried out of doors where fifty other round and freckled faces were blinking up and down the street, empty except for the horses tethered outside the Rest, and the Scotchman approaching on feet winged with dust plumes. People shouted after him. A man began to pursue him, and one or two women, with their aprons thrown over their heads against the sun. As he drew nearer his wild yodellings took form. “Gold!” he was shouting. “Gold!”

  Liam ran into the street with his axe-handle raised. “Stop or I'll brain ye, madman.”

  The Scotchman hesitated and his strength drained out. He collapsed panting into Liam's arms and goggled over Liam's shoulder at Cabell, still shouting “Gold! Gold!” in his punctured falsetto.