Bettany's Book (28 page)

They seemed to have concluded that we were harmless, which did not please Long, with his hunger for eventual herds.

It is October and my first shearing! Consider this: shepherds, hut-keepers, Clancy, O’Dallow all standing in a line in the stream – some of them are waist-deep, in waters not always kindly or dependable. And with Boxer, Brutus, Bet and myself harrying them, the sheep race across, going from soap-filled hand to soap-filled hand. Tar and other substances, including
New South Wales’s infamous Bathurst burrs, adhere to the wool despite the best work of my men. That is not our business. Let the buyer clean the wool after he has bought it and given us our reward!

Soon all the sheep stand, drying in the sun, in the stockyards by the shearing shed, which we have erected from the timbers cut for us by the absconders. O’Dallow and Long show the men how to sharpen their shears on holystone – we do not have the luxury of a honing wheel.

Immediately after the wool-washing in the river, for which I rewarded each man with two glasses of rum to keep any chill out, we sat at a great outdoor fire, dining as ever on mutton and damper. I let their chatter wash over me, their teasing peculiarities of which I had no knowledge, and I felt that glorious sense that life was both very simple and gloriously complicated. Above us, threads of smoke marked out the places where the moth-eaters were. But they were a mere chorus to our preparations for taking the fleece.

The next morning, when I came out of the little two-room homestead hut, I saw the least welcome inhabitants of the region, the absconders in their eternal layers of skins, approaching. One of their horses, a grey, moved lazily, but the other was of daintier dimensions and, by comparison, danced across the frost-seared pasture.

‘We saw the washing going on,’ the Captain told me (though I am determined never to call him by such a ridiculous name). ‘Do you wish for two sets of hands?’

‘I have adequate hands.’

Rowan said, ‘Well maybe. If youse want to be still shearing at Christmas!’

I wondered what Christmas was to him, and what kind of Yules he had spent.

‘We are at your call,’ he continued. ‘A pound a day for the two of us and four glasses of rum. It’s the normal thing.’

I called Long and we stood aside for a moment. They waited without anxiety, surveying countryside they might have thought of as their own.

‘They want a pound a day for two of them,’ I told him. ‘It’s similar to their log-splitting. But where would they spend it?’

Long nodded, for he knew. ‘Oh sir, they creep to shebeens and into certain western towns. If they prove incompetent, which I much doubt they will, for they are country lads, then, sir, you can send them away. God knows we need every hand.’

Long’s advice in this as in everything else would never betray me, yet
I did wonder if he saw himself in those lost men, saw a mirror of his own want, his crime and his anger in them. I expect that he believed one thing divided him from Captain Rowan. He had a promise of five per cent of our cattle. And he had not had the lash.

‘As long as they work,’ I said, yielding to sin and lawlessness in the gathering of the fleece, as I had earlier in the building of huts. I was getting used to such arrangements.

I did not want for models of how I should behave during the shearing of the flock. I had seen Mr Batchelor and my father march up and down the boards between the pens where men cut the wool with, if one was lucky, gliding motions of the shears. Many times I had heard my father calling amused instructions and, seeing the shears bite flesh here and there, cry with a whimsy which might have sounded worse to the men than tyranny, ‘Jimmy, are you shearing or do you want to extract the gall bladder by way of surgery!’ My father had been a great generator of good humour on the boards at Ross, as I tried to be here, though seeking to be sometimes masterly like Mr Batchelor. The absconders were the fastest workers, though they moved the shears with broad gestures and sometimes cut the sheep, barely pausing for Shegog to apply tar to the cut. Whatever I said by way of good humour to other men, I did not extend it to Rowan and Tadgh.

Long and I took the fleeces on a bench, then O’Dallow, Clancy, Long and I laid them in, one above another, head to tail, tail to head, head to tail, in a wool press of cut planks and logs, using all our weight to push down on the log which acted as lever and lowering the great boulder bound to it by rope onto the rectangular press. This earth which had known nothing but fire and stillness thus produced its first wool.

When all the sheep were shorn and turned out of the yards, I stood again by a fire with shepherds and hut-keepers and overseer, drinking tea and rum, and felt the weight and friction of my European nature against this lovely place, and praised its divinities.

My Merinos yielded an average of five pounds of fleece each at Nugan Ganway’s first shearing, as did Charlie’s sheep, which were looked after by the party to the east of the homestead. Mr Finlay’s Leicesters gave more – over six pounds per sheep – but even in its greasy form, lying on the dirt floor of the shearing shed, I could see how superior the Merino wool stood with its greater crimp and density.

Over 1700 pounds of wool was thus pressed and stored in wool packs, which were in turn manhandled and levered onto the wagon. It made a
tall, beetling mass, tethered with rope, but looked insecure and fragile as human prosperity. The bullocks, which had had an easeful winter, would draw the fleece to market. I had decided I would travel with Clancy and conduct the negotiations myself, confidently leaving Long to manage the men. I had promised him that during the summer we would muster in our cattle, and assess his promised percentage of the natural increase on them. I could tell from his smouldering delight at my calculations that he had a peasant hunger to own livestock, and that, on the hoof, it would ever be perfectly acceptable to him. With such visions in his head, he would be a more exacting master than I needed to be.

As for flocks, there now seemed no reason why Nugan Ganway should not provide pasture for some 20 000 sheep. I relished these figures.

T
HE
S
ARAH DOCUMENTS WOULD RESOUND
with Prim. She would see that she too was in a sort of Female Factory, confined – more broadly and benignly than Sarah Bernard – by consent and affection, but mostly by fear of leaving the Sudan and going home. By the time she came to read the Bernard letters and the Bettany transcripts she was conscious of having chosen, two years past, her Sudanese exile over all else and of having slighted her sister. In late 1987 she had received a faxed wedding invitation from Dimp. At the time, Prim had recently returned from Adi Hamit, where with Sherif, Erwit and two Khartoum nurses, and the help of the resident clinic sister Therese and the midwife Abuk, she has used Sherif’s questionnaire to ask Dinka women about the health of their families. From the answers, Sherif had calculated the Crude Death Rate and Infant Mortality Rate and other indices of need, and Prim had sent a copy of the final analysis of the survey to Dimp, expecting her to be reassured and somehow reconciled by it.

Instead, the reply was full of Dimp’s own compelling business, though she thanked Prim for the report from Adi Hamit. ‘What a place! My little sister right there! Sometimes I wish I was with you, my clever, brave, unselfish sis, making a filmed record perhaps.’ But she passed quickly to the real news.

Well, I can’t be. The annulment is at last through, and Bren is free in conscience to marry me, which is set to occur next February. I can’t express the happiness of this. To be his wife seems an extraordinary kind
of reward – at the end of such a wait, too. Come and share my happiness. You’re overdue for leave. Couldn’t you come … please? Why not bring this Sherif fellow you’re so keen on? You’re so scant with details on the poor bugger! You just don’t satisfy the obvious questionings of your prurient sister. Let me see the bloke in person, and draw my own conclusions. Just think, he’d shake Sydney up! Why don’t you just settle here? Come home. You can swamp any memory of the Auger business by having a handsome African lover and being the most beautiful couple in Sydney.

We’re talking about the last weekend of February, Saturday the 24th. We’ll be married by a Jesuit at St Canice’s, but without some of the florid touches of big church weddings. I’m ringing round restaurants to find which ones are available for that weekend. If you and Sherif came – that would be the star act!

As for Bren, he’s as enthusiastic as a great loutish dog, and he’s going round sniffing out houses. There’s one at Double Bay, right on the harbour, above a little beach – Seven Shillings Beach. This house which, if he buys it will turn out to be the fanciest abode this poor blowsy body has known, is a sort of opulent Californian adobe expansion of what was once a plain old Federation two-storey. It has three enormous sundecks above the water! Does that enrage you adequately?

So can you come back for the wedding, if not forever?

Please make the arrangements if you can. We are, after all, sole close relatives to each other. Come home and be appalled by the way we live.

All my love,
Dimple D’Arcy-to-be

Prim knew her sister had every right to expect her to be at the wedding. Without her, Dimp would be able to muster to the nuptials only an aging uncle and aunt-in-law. Contrary to all reason though, Prim felt stampeded by the thought of Sydney. Could she go back there as a chummy, affectionate sister?

Out of shame she made a plane booking, but the thought of February still filled her with persistent terror. As it turned out, a severe malaria would come to her aid. Three months before the wedding, in December 1987, she felt an excruciating joint pain, an unprecedented headache, and her temperature mounted to 104 degrees. She was admitted on Sherif’s advice to the UN clinic in Khartoum and for five days suffered the most severe cerebral derangement in which the entire cosmos, from God
to her dead parents to Auger to the Pidanu sisters, pressed in on her for urgent discourse. Hence a micro-organism rescued her from the need to travel home for her sister’s wedding. When her temperature fell to normal levels she was extremely weak and bedridden for a further two weeks, during which it was not difficult to manoeuvre a number of doctors, including Sherif, into doubting the wisdom of her flying to Australia soon. In fact, by the wedding’s date she was robust again, and disquieted with being in her office in Khartoum. But the day passed, and Dimp was off on a honeymoon in Thailand to which any hankering she might have had earlier for blood relatives wasn’t relevant.

And Prim was busy. It was a time when the Sudanese military had withdrawn from direct civil government and permitted a new prime minister to be elected. It proved to be Sadiq el Mahdi, an urbane-looking man who wore a business suit rather than military or traditional garb. But that did not bring any change as regards the war in the South. It was still being fought, and refugees abounded, fallout from unrecorded village tragedies.

It was an easy time to forget her failing of Dimp. Fergal Stoner, not content to fall back on his renown as proclaimer of the Darfur famine, had devised a scheme by which food could be equitably distributed, by permission of the combatant parties, in both the North and South. He presented the gleaming logistics of his plan to EC headquarters in Brussels and to the new government of Sudan, which was resistant, seeing itself forced, by typically self-serving Western appeals to conscience, into talks with those it perceived as Southern terrorists.

For a while it had looked as if Stoner’s plan was stymied. Helene Codderby told Prim there was a chance Stoner would be sacked for over-reaching. ‘Darfur was famous, of course, but there’s a sense he talked the numbers up. And now the government suspects he’s had secret meetings here, in restaurants and rooms around the city, with rebel agents, you know, the SPLA.’

Some system of relief was clearly needed. Only a scatter of aircraft had been permitted to take aid south, and had been shot at by Southern rebels not involved in the preliminary negotiations. The Red Crescent had distributed some relief food by Nile barge, but its ministrations had been limited to a few towns. In the end economics helped Stoner. An expensive government end-it-all campaign in the South has been blunted in the marshes and along the bush tracks which were the South’s roads. With the nation’s debt still rising, the prime minister came under pressure from
the United States and the World Bank to settle the costly war. And if the South could be supplied with food, people would stay at home, and the government would not be burdened with masses of refugees.

Stoner called Prim in her office. ‘Had you heard about my scheme for the South being, you know, picked up?’

‘Congratulations. What’s it called? The Stoner Plan?’

‘Ha bloody ha! It’s called Operation Safety. A hopeful title, right?’

Prim worked on logistics at Stoner’s office in the New Extension, not far from her own office. Amongst other tasks she had to liaise with a UN official named Anwar, stationed in the Republic of Chad, over funding for a fleet of six Ilyushin transport planes he intended to bring to Khartoum. At last Prim assembled the funding for the charter from Australian, Canadian and Scandinavian NGOs operating in the Sudan, and a delighted Anwar told her it would be a mere few days before his Ilyushins, the UN logo freshly stencilled in lavender on their flanks, would land in Khartoum. They would be filled with rice, UN high protein biscuit, wheat and sorghum, and go south.