Bettany's Book (25 page)

It was a common enough tale of New South Wales, that a settler might travel west with two ticket-of-leave men, who could give him his quietus, take all, and go bushranging. Yet I had every confidence that this was not the plan with Long and Clancy. After less than a day in Long’s company, I would have entrusted him with my life. He seemed a universe removed from the unreliable Goldspink, and I discovered why in the stableyard at the George Inn that dusk, when I had a discussion with him concerning terms of employment. An overseer was entitled to £20 a year. But Long told me, ‘Sir, I have no use for such a sum in the deep countryside. If you pay me £10 per annum, and give me 10 per centum of the increase on the cattle when I receive my conditional pardon … perhaps that would satisfy Your Honour.’

I told him that the arrangement was very welcome to me. Since the entire enterprise must be financed, in terms of all the necessities of sheep-raising and cattle-farming, by myself and Charlie, I knew that ten per cent of increase on the cattle – the cattle being entirely a secondary matter to me – was a more welcome formula than £10 expended now. I saw too that it gave Long a motivation for industry, and in a modest sense, my partner, with an interest in what was to my benefit.

‘Consider that the arrangement,’ I told him.

But to move my livestock inland, I would need more fellows than Long and Clancy.

Such was the demand for labour in New South Wales that all the men who had been with Long at the stables of the George were now vanished, employed by farmers. Long suggested that we visit the police magistrate, because he knew there were still men who had been waiting at the Parramatta depot for the bench of magistrates to release the money they had earned as prisoners.

So we went back to the police magistrate at his office, which was located on the same patch of saffron clay as the depot. He knew or, at least, suspected that though any men I took with me were to be marked down as working in the Goulburn region, I was actually taking them to work a previously ungrazed country far beyond the limits. He led Long
and myself to a barracks on the west of the clay square. Here, in a long room, a number of male convicts selected for assignment or else holders of tickets for the first time were sitting on their berths, most of them dressed in dungarees and red flannel shirts, or in some cases in sheepskin jackets as protection from the brisk morning. Only a few wore the canary yellow fabric of their servitude. Their faces were full of a dull inexpectancy and even passivity, and I was pleased Long was with me to read these leathered features, and penetrate their take-me-or-bloody-leave-me air.

‘These fellows are the ones who have “Nothing Recorded” on their sheets,’ the police magistrate told us, indicating a group of men in a corner marked with a large A. ‘That is, they are members of the “well-behaved” category. I try not to pass on bad fruit to people who need reliable labour, particularly since you say you will be at a great distance and there will be no authorities to help you.’

At the magistrate’s order a ragged line of men was formed. One was a freckled, wizened gentleman who held a dusty copy of
The Edinburgh Review
in his hand. I asked him his name and he told me, ‘Shegog, mister,’ and squinted at me. I wondered what to make of this fellow who carried his own entertainment with him.

The magistrate consulted a roll of paper. ‘Stole tobacco to the value of 30 shillings.’

‘He might do, sir,’ said Long.

A big, watchful man next attracted my attention. His name was O’Dallow, it seemed, and I think that even then I imagined that his crime might have been a technical or a protest one. The magistrate informed me that he had hamstrung a cow. ‘So you have experience of livestock,’ I remarked.

‘I do,’ said O’Dallow, ‘working for Mr Clench of Myall Brush.’

‘And hamstringing a cow in Ireland.’

‘That was … That
houghing
, as we call it, was a matter between a tithe proctor and myself, sir.’ He did not pretend to too much virtue. He did not plead his case. Long spoke to him in Irish and then turned to enlighten me.

‘He says it was his own cow, sir. He houghed it to stop the proctor taking it off. All I can say is I’ve seen that sort of thing, Mr Bettany.’

O’Dallow seemed unwilling to be described as having committed a justifiable crime. ‘But tell me, sir,’ he said. ‘Would a man have a waler to ride in your employment?’

‘I have five or six store horses,’ I told him. ‘Those who ride well can ride them. The others will travel by foot or wagon.’

‘I adore to work cattle, sir,’ he darkly told me, more like a lament than an expression of taste.

I felt in me the inappropriate impulses of improvement, to let the space of Nugan Ganway amend this man. This was something I had from my father, and I understood its peril. I wanted to be more like Mr Finlay and Charlie Batchelor, who were not burdened by delusions about the redemption of man.

In startlingly quick time, with help from Long and the magistrate, I chose another eight men, making selections on the flimsiest grounds. This was the nature of employment in New South Wales. The value of my choices could only be proven by living with the service of these fellows over time.

The sight of Long droving my cattle away from the saleyards gave me a pang. They looked so lowly I was pleased that Charlie Batchelor was not there to see what my stewardship had produced. Clancy called from his wagon, ‘They’ll look a heap better, Mr Bettany, after a week’s grazing on those limestone plains.’

I looked at my men, most in the new red flannel shirts, striped pants and boots which I had bought them at an outfitters in Parramatta, but distinguished by their coats of all marsupial and livestock background, from the kangaroo to the Merino. They had their lag reticence, their determination not to appear too earnest, too clever, too orderly, too respectful or too alacritous. They were of the whole cloth of the convict system. Would they stand by me?

Assisted by the three sheepdogs we had acquired, I followed our sheep on Hobbes, putting the Leicesters behind in the especial care of sullen but intelligent O’Dallow and one other man. These sheepdogs were splendid, glossy creatures named Boxer, Brutus and Bet, and it was hoped that Bet the bitch would provide litters of future dogs for Nugan Ganway.

As we passed through the town of Liverpool, I saw from my position in the rear, and with a recurrence of self-doubt, that ticket-of-leave men waiting outside the courthouse in yellow smocks and dungarees jokily took their hats off to mark our passage, finding in our herd of cattle a metaphor for a funeral. My men, who included the quasi-scholarly
Shegog travelling on foot with a bag of journals, cried dark curses back. I was pleased to note the proprietorial affront with which Shegog cried, ‘To hell with the lot of you. We’re driving the beasts casual and easy, and we’ll be lords of flocks when you bastards are still begging for a dram.’

And while I kept fearing to see some old heifer the stock agent had managed to slip into our numbers fall over dead, the cattle kept on with that bovine tenacity which is part of the endearing quality of the shorthorn beast.

Our conversations on that first droving journey were delightful. When Long spelled me at the rear of the flock, I rode by the wagon and asked Clancy about New York, which I had read of in the
Illustrated London News
as the coming place of the New World.

‘Oh,’ he told me, ‘it is the devil’s own port. A narrow and stinking place, Mr Bettany, and into the toe of the city is packed the worst of humankind. No tide fails to wash up a murdered corpse or the bodies of strangled babes.’

‘But that is what critics say of Sydney,’ I protested.

‘True enough. But in Sydney a fellow could blame the System.’ He hammered his chest. ‘Fellows like myself are counted to be fallen and have no pretence of manners. But where does a fellow look to find the blame for what New York is? They are a fast crew, let me tell you!’

I did not disclose either to Long or Clancy the news that my own father had been a member of a secret and illegal society in his youth, but perhaps the information was already there, tacit in the manner in which we conversed on that first journey. My demeanour, whether activated by some sort of vanity or not, consisted of this: behold, I do not dismiss any man!

As we came to the little town of Picton, a curricle coach pulled away from the hotel and I saw two ladies inside. I had promised the men ale in Picton, so we turned the herd off onto the common, heavily grazed as it was. Ordering the ale from the owner in the taproom, I mentioned that by the look of the carriage which just passed down the road, he had had guests of quality.

‘You know that old Scotch bastard in Goulburn?’ asked the publican – a typical New South Wales man, perhaps a former time-server, and very free with his language. You would not have found in Ross or any other town of Van Diemen’s Land a hotelier who referred to former guests or their connections so. ‘Finlay,’ he said, and before I could stand to a full
height and defend Mr Finlay, he was rattling on. ‘That was Mrs Finlay and a lady companion in the surrey there. Goes to Sydney every chance she gets. As you bloody would eh? Married to such a miserable old crank.’

‘Mr Finlay has been generous to me,’ I warned the man. ‘And Mrs Finlay has many preparations to make in Sydney. Her daughter is to study in Europe.’

He tossed his head and concentrated on the settling froth in the pots of ale. ‘If you sit on the verandah,’ he said, ‘I’ll deliver them to you. No harm was meant. All serene, my boy.’

I had intended the ale to be some kind of secular communion, to bring together the intentions of Long, the men and myself, to give my pastoral sergeants a sense of our corps. For the same reason I amazed the publican by ordering the men a table in the dining room. We would eat splendid the first afternoon of our joint careers! But letting Clancy near the public house was the first great error of the long drove to the great upper plain of Maneroo and Nugan Ganway. While Long and I and, in their own knot, the other men, were content to drink ale on the verandah, and later feast on lamb chops in the dining room, Clancy certainly had ale but also kept, by secret arrangement with the owner, a rum bottle in a back room, which he apparently visited frequently on a series of plausible excuses, including calls of nature. From the window at which Long and I ate our meat and potatoes we could see the quite extensive sight of my cattle and sheep grazing the broad common, and that, not the flitting presence of Clancy, absorbed my attention. Long himself kept his eye on our 2500 head, and on Boxer, Brutus and Bet, who lay in the dust contentedly and with a watchfulness of their own, rising authoritatively whenever any sheep violated the concept of the desirable compactness of the flock which these wonderful dogs carried in their heads.

Clancy had finished one clandestine bottle at the guzzle and had broached the second before Long and I read the signs, and that was mere seconds before he fell useless to the floor. Our other men ironically clapped and cheered this collapse. The publican entered the dining room and said jovially, ‘I thought it would be too much for him. It is overproof-to-blazes he has been swallowing.’

It was no use arguing with this amoral creature, but what should we do with sodden Clancy? Long got up from his chair, lifted the raving and bubbling Clancy over his shoulder, and went outside with him. He was promptly back, saying he had dumped Clancy in the wagon and,
seated again, he cleaned dust or the redolence of Clancy off his fingers by wiping them on the tail of the tablecloth.

‘Perhaps we should find another driver,’ I murmured to him.

‘It is my fault,’ said the Irishman. ‘Since didn’t I recommend the rascal? I would not tell you what should be done, sir. But how likely is it we could find anyone to your liking? I shall give the blackguard the most thorough warnings when he is upright once more.’

‘And warnings will suffice?’ I asked.

Long smiled and lowered his lean face. ‘It suffices when they are proper meted. In the meantime it’s the sad truth there are no perfect men here, Mr Bettany. All the perfect men are in Parliament.’

Long soon left the table again, and when I had settled the bill and brought the rest of the men out of the inn, we were arrested by a scream from the wagon. Long had the barely resuscitated Clancy naked at the tail of the cart and was beating him earnestly with a knout of rope. Clancy was not tethered but somehow knew that to move away would entail worse punishment. This was what Long meant by warnings and, remembering the magistrate’s advice that in the high plain Long and I would be the sole authority, I chose not to intervene for the moment. But presently, when he brought the knout crashing across Clancy’s jaw line, I moved up and ordered him to cease. He gave the grey and tottering Clancy his clothing back, and then stepped away, looked at me, blinking rage out of his eyes, and said, ‘We shall not be shamed or delayed further, Mr Bettany.’

I was pleased Long possessed such volatility, but flattered myself I didn’t. Perhaps it was in such excess of feeling that crime arose. If so, where was my father’s share? I had not seen it. It was hidden now beneath the restrained features of a Tasmanian sheep farmer and solicitor.

That night we slept amongst tall trees and a light frost settled as I profoundly rested.