Bettany's Book (61 page)

‘He is armed too,’ the Reverend Howie commented.

The minister did not dwell on that point, but I felt I must offer the normal defence. ‘Of course he is armed, Reverend Howie. If not, there is some risk he would be studded with spears like a porcupine, and whether it is his own fallible nature which caused it would not be the question, for he would be equally dead as any virtuous man. Yet he has the strictest orders to fire over heads first – the men know very well I am particular on that point.’

I sounded to myself like a temporiser, an evader. The Reverend Howie said, ‘But you told me that you gave Durra an illustration of a white man punished for shooting a black. Would that happen if your shepherd down there killed a black now?’

‘Why of course.’

‘But not if it were an accidental discharge, as in the case of the child Hector’s mother.’

‘In the absence of other authorities I must use my own judgement, which I hope is not morally deficient.’

‘One wonders whether people such as Durra understood these subtleties from the treaty of pictures.’

I exchanged glances with Long, who seemed rather to favour this pale clergyman.

Long had heard a circumstantial story of a disaster, which he had not shared with me until now. Why? Perhaps he thought until the Protector appeared that there was no suitable, no useful ear to pour it into. He had abstained from writing to his family for seven years, since his family, like the Ngarigo impasse, could not be mended. But now, I wondered, having seen him take Bernard off on afternoon rides, whether he was hoping to mend himself with her, and at the same time mend the Ngarigo through the sudden apparition of Reverend Howie. Under both these lights, he had an aspect more that of a rival than of my pastoral intimate.

Progress in the steeper country was hard, and we had no native tracker with us – we would have needed to send as far as Michelago for one. Nonetheless it was as if Long knew infallibly where to take us. It was high up along a ridge marked by red gums, where some force – who could say in view of what we were about to see that it was God? – had placed a majestic thicket of huge standing boulders. We could see these stones from quite a way off, and scattered over them, for all the world
like the petals of Sydney’s frangipani trees, were fragments of white. Beyond the boulders the earth dropped away to the west to become a brown limitless plain, and innocently I thought, surely there is pasture over there, in that flatness!

None of this mattered now, since it had become apparent to me what the frangipani white meant, settled there like ridges and patches of snow. We rode closer but were in no hurry. Some of these white remains represented to us the places where amidst the great boulders people had in their terror sought sanctuary from some wild onset. Others were thrown wide. The wind keened around our ears, and took up a new pitch, in case we did not understand this was a vicious place. As we reached the first heap of bone, Reverend Howie slipped with a groan out of his saddle.

‘Dear merciful God!’ he said. He seemed robbed of all competence, but then he told us, ‘Gentlemen, let us all count skulls. That will be easiest in the circumstances.’

The rest of us, pleased to have been given a task, jumped from our horses and began functionally wading into the shelter of the standing stones, counting skulls large and small, O’Dallow now and then crying to Long, ‘What do you ever make it now? I think I make it twenty-seven.’

So we continued to step and count amongst the dead. Long cried, ‘Mr Bettany, there is something here.’

I joined him, moving gingerly amongst the thigh bones and fibia, the occasional shattered ribcage where a ball had found a heart. There was a punctured skull holding loosely in its widened mouth a tarnished silver-plated plaque which read dimly ‘Durra, King of the Ngarigu’ (the engraver in Goulburn having mistaken my ‘o’ for a ‘u’), ‘Chief of Nugan Ganway’. It seemed they had shot him and then, mocking him and me at once, stuffed his insignia in his teeth.

I found Howie beside me, blinking down at the awful terror here, frozen – so to speak – in the bone. ‘Long tells me there is a stockman named Morpeth who witnessed this. He is a time-served labourer in Goulburn now. He may swear an affidavit.’

‘My God. How does Long know these things?’

‘It is his gravitas,’ sighed Howie. It appeared that Morpeth, who was then Treloar’s man, told Long when they met by accident on the plain, looking for lost stock one day during the last winter. ‘If I were a man like Morpeth, shamed and condemned and far from home, and if I saw
this happen, I too would speak to a fellow like Long. He has the air of a confessor.’

I acknowledged the truth of this amongst the shards of bone.

‘An affidavit will be very important. Morpeth may not want to betray his comrades when it comes down to it.’

The Reverend Howie moved on and pointed out an infant ribcage, ineffably delicate, fallen atop adult remnants – a female pelvis, said Howie. It seemed that with satanic pride someone had felled Madonna and child with the one shot. I thought at once of Phoebe. I was forced to think of Bernard too. Since servants knew what masters didn’t, had Long confided to Bernard that this Golgotha stood here, high above Treloar’s, the wind scattering the murderous dust in Nugan Ganway’s direction?

Long had now paused in his search and, leaning against one of the largest boulders, had begun to smoke a clay pipe. I made my way with awkward delicacy, fearing to shatter some brittle remnant under my boot, towards him.

‘I must say I would have liked to have been told of this.’

‘Mr Bettany,’ he said, ‘I thought of it, but then Mrs Bettany was there …’

‘Well,’ I told him, ‘you showed too much fastidiousness. I mean, you must surely tell your master these things, for God’s sake.’

‘There was no one to do anything,’ he said in a near-whisper. ‘Not until yon parson came. Now there will be one of those Alfred-Davids from the man who saw it.’

‘So you keep me in ignorance of huge … of awful events … some official turns up and suspects I am hiding something, and shames me with what I haven’t heard!’

‘That wasn’t for a moment what I set out to do, Mr Bettany,’ Long assured me, standing upright and taking his pipe from his mouth. This was for him an apology.

I demanded he tell me about this Morpeth, and everything he himself, Long, knew of this place.

He began. ‘You wonder, sir, why Goldspink was moved away and beyond reach? Goldspink was moved beyond reach because of this. A stockman is easily replaced, but not a good overseer. The Protectors like that wee parson there were coming, and Goldspink did his best to assure there remained nothing to protect. The orders may have come from an altogether higher level of society than Goldspink. But I had a bone to pick with Goldspink and he was gone in a trice.’

‘Are you telling me, Sean, that Treloar ordered or connived at this monstrous business?’

But Long’s cautiousness entered. ‘Oh, that’s for surmising, Mr Bettany. But this fellow Morpeth hated what had happened amongst these boulders. He hated Goldspink, who had had a great deal of trouble with the Moth people as they crossed Mount Bulwa station. They subjected him to much aggravation because he subjected them to the same. He dreamed of a thunderclap, an end to the botheration. But the amusing bit is this, sir … Morpeth says Goldspink wasn’t here for it.’

Morpeth had told Long that at the end of the muster Goldspink had made a speech at the campfire about ‘settling the blacks for good’ now that they were coming north from Nugan Ganway at the end of the summer. He made sure there was rum aplenty available to his men.

As for the Ngarigo coming north, though they might descend to the plain to spear sheep at night or loan one of their syphilis-infected women to a hut-keeper for tea and baccy, on Mount Bulwa, because of past confrontations, they travelled high up the slopes, and out of sight. They would need to be hunted by Treloar’s men. A solid party of shepherds, stockmen and wagon-drivers, including Morpeth, set off to go to war against the Moth people and found a party of them here, amongst these natural high stones. There had been much drinking on the way to the site, Morpeth said, and bets were taken on particular shots as the people were chased and surrounded.

Shaking my head, I approached Howie. ‘I shall get some of my men up here to bury this.’

‘If you don’t mind,’ murmured Reverend Howie, ‘not until I have shown the police magistrate.’

I nodded, for the sight of the bones was his authority. He was the Protector.

I managed to tell Phoebe the tale of the massacre the day before we received a week-old copy of the
Goulburn Herald
, reporting it. Even with this horror weighing on it, my wayward mind was gravid with Bernard. My fascination with her was outbalanced by my disbelief that it should be so. She seemed – for no reason I could define – the most august of beings. Even though I asked myself what had Bernard done to match the deeds and gallantries of my wife, the convict woman sat undeservedly at the centre of my brain.

Thus, half-distracted, half-resentful of Bernard, I was contemplating taking out some men to perform a burial when the newspaper reported that six of Treloar’s men had been arrested. Goldspink was not one of them. Before the coroner, Mr Treloar had been vocal in defending Goldspink’s probity, had made an affidavit to that effect; and though there was a sense that the overseer had incited the men, he had not participated in the massacre of thirty men, women and children – all connected by kinship to Felix.

With a student demeanour which could not have been bettered anywhere on earth, and despite the news of the massacre, which must have reached him, Felix came to the house, sometimes to read with Bernard, but increasingly to read in silence from my library of books and English illustrated papers. I felt that I must let him know that I had seen the bones of his people and was outraged by what I saw. So I sat him on our sofa by the bookcase. As I spoke, his eyes strayed to the book, and I had the sense this was not utter selfishness, but an instinct that in those pages was redemption. Almost to reassure him, I asked, ‘What is the capital city of Scotland?’

‘Edinburgh,’ he told me.

‘Well done,’ I said. ‘But then what does the Latin noun
drapeta
mean? Eh? Do you know?’

‘It means a runaway slave.’

‘And so would you use such a term for the father of Horace the great poet?’

‘Oh no,’ he said, ‘there is a world of difference. Horace’s father had undergone
manumissio
, the legal process of freeing.’

We were safely back in Horace’s world, his Sabine farm, the Roman pole to Nugan Ganway, and this conversation was a delight to me.

Not quite as delightful was a letter from Treloar, full of rage, saying amongst other things,

I urge you, Mr Bettany, to raise your objections at the treatment of my men with His supposed Excellency the Governor. Tell him that a war exists between us and all the Ngarigo, that their ideas and ours cannot live together and that they are the blight on our landscape. How many fine Englishmen or Scotsmen have had their lives taken by such as these – for whose eradication my men are now required to undergo the travesty of public trial? But oh no, His Excellency does not count their raids and injuries against us, only ours against them, as if they were his children.

Now do write, my good fellow, for my men did only what you yourself might have done. I cannot believe the effrontery of this blinking idiot Howie who has been so praised by some elements of this town, and now he has been rewarded in that the government has given him charge of a coastal region beyond the Tinderies where the vermin of the land can be attracted by flour, sugar and tobacco, with him as virtual bishop! Yes, in the region of Bombala, Howie will have his black parish and fiefdom! And I tell you that if ever any of my men are damaged by natives in the future, I shall bring in magistrates and border police and demand of them and of His futile Excellency that the sable miscreant be punished to the limit, to the full length of the rope, to the gate of hell! Do, do write. There can be sheep or there can be natives!

I replied to the effect that perhaps Mr Treloar, during our brief meetings, had misread my disposition. I was for humanity for the native and equal justice. Yes, the natives could be distressful but not to the point where I could condone their slaughter. I was very pleased Reverend Howie had been rewarded with a reservation to which he could attract the pitiable blacks. One of Treloar’s men, I said, had argued that he was pleased to shoot these natives since many of the women were poxed, and one had given the disease to him. But I knew the pox began not with natives but with white men, and the men themselves were the ultimate polluters, yet had murdered native women and children as if they were the source of the disease. I told him I was willing to meet him in Nugan Ganway, Goulburn, Sydney, depending on the pastoral season, to discuss matters of shared interest as graziers, amongst which I was willing to place the issue of some shared and humane policy towards the sable brethren.

Since I knew Treloar would not send a party to bury the bones, and since whenever I looked to the north-west I saw that horrific thicket of boulders all over again with my inner eye, I took a party of my own men and dug a pit into which went Durra and his brethren.

I was amazed to read that at the trial of his men, Mr Treloar declared on oath that he did not know where Goldspink was! No one challenged the assertion. At the time of the executions, I happened to be in Goulburn with my bullock driver Clancy. This was the town to which the condemned men were returned, and the execution, to which the tribes of the County of Argyle were invited, occurred in front of a new stone courthouse. Perhaps as many as one hundred Aboriginal men and women were present to see justice done, though one felt they had been
conscripted from around Goulburn. One did not feel that justice was exactly what was happening as the string of hapless condemned shepherds and hut-keepers were paraded before us that day, moving under the care of priests of two or three faiths, and in a mass, up to the long platform of the scaffold. When the trap was opened and that horrendous thud assaulted the air, the men fell mercifully from sight, but the natives wailed, as if it were their relatives who had fallen. There was a lot of Treloar-like muttering amongst the whites who had seen the event.