Dreaming of Amelia (53 page)

As she tells it, she'd the rope, and the tree chosen, and the rain was pounding down, and her heart, she said, was dead, and she'd only to take that one step, that final step — when she saw me running towards her.

Through the rain, she swears, there I was.

I was running with the rain streaming from my hair, and I was calling to her. She swears it. She says that I was calling something like, ‘Don't give up on me, I've not given up on you,' over and over, and her heart woke up again, and she sobbed with joy, and took the noose from around her neck, and ran into my arms. She said that I held her, and lifted her up off the ground, and we looked into one another's eyes —

And then she says, she was alone in the rain and I was nowhere to be seen.

But across the way she caught a glimpse of colour, in the storm shadow just beyond the barracks. Something made her run to that colour — and there I was on the ground, near dead.

That's when she shouted my name, and pinched my ear, and slapped my face.

And if that's not the most wonderful tale you ever heard, I don't know what you've been listening to.

We made the best of a bad case, and we petitioned the governor, and he gave us our pardons, and a plot of land of our own, and sure if Maggie and I haven't got a farm under way?

She's seen some terrible things has my Maggie, as have I, and she's suffered things she's not even shared with me yet. Sometimes the weight of her suffering stops her in her track, and her movements are those of an old woman. We're broken a little, the pair of us, is what I'm trying to say, but at least we're broken together.

And there's nights when we're warm and snug at home,
a good fire blazing in the hearth, and Maggie's young again, and moves about the room as nimbly as a cocksparrow. Then we talk of that strange, strange day when she saw me running towards her through the rain. She's thought and thought about the matter, she says, and has begun to fancy she had only been dreaming. But I remind her how we used to believe in the future — it's a great unfolding set of mysteries, I say, with chasms of wonder between. Then her eyes, they twinkle as keenly as the stars on a frosty night.

So there's an end to this letter, trusting it might cheer you to know that Maggie sends her love, as do I, and that your son, Tom, has a heart so full of joy it can hardly bear the weight of it.

With love,

Tom

www.myglasshouse.com/shadowgirl

TUESDAY 5 FEBRUARY

My Journey Home

Behind the red door,
blue glow
of dusk,
sharp rise
of telegraph poles,
and a splinter of
moon.

Three planes
fly
in uneasy formation,
they seem too fragile
to be up so high,
tentative
delicate —
the moon.

Had coffee
with
Toby
earlier.

He told us
a crazy story
about:
me
a ghost
a lunatic asylum
and
a letter.

We laughed
at him
and he laughed back,
it's a fine, fine splinter
of moon up
there
blowing shadows away
with
the planes.

Riley on his back
on my bed
studies a schedule
of surgery,
physio,
his broken hands.

the things you can repair
the things you can't

my mother on the phone
today
now that the truth
is the truth.

the things you can forgive
the things you can't

Riley says:
She should have come for you,
she should have put up
lost posters.

I'm still by the window
but when I hear those
words I feel
the sadness and
elation of
truth.

Riley keeps reading.

I think about Toby
and his theory.
The lunatic asylum
that's gone now,
the day that I tried to show
Riley and it wasn't
where it was,
the girl with the same
colour hair as my own.
I think, what
if I was talking
to a girl from the past,
what if I became her,
the girl from the past,
what if
Toby became Tom.

What if
we got a message across?

What if,
between us
Toby
Riley
Emily
Lydia
and I
changed history that day?

Then I'm laughing
hard
because
I think we did

and if we can change
things that have
already happened

if those planes can fly in
uneasy formation

if that splinter moon
can blow away the shadows

then anything,
anything at all.

Riley sits up,
puts the schedule down,
and he laughs too.

Although Tom is an invented character, he might have been any one of the young Irishmen who were transported to Australia for stealing sheep (or cattle or pigs) in times of great poverty in Ireland.

The story of the Castle Hill Uprising is based on actual historical events. Phillip Cunningham, a stonemason and Irish Rebel, was transported to Australia in a ship called the
Anne
in 1800. Tom's narration of the voyage of the
Anne
is based in part on actual events that took place on that voyage (including the attempted mutiny and punishments that followed), and in part on events that took place on other voyages to Australia from around that time.

Phillip Cunningham was sent out to the government farm at Castle Hill, and oversaw the building of a stone barracks in 1803. The barracks housed mainly Irish convicts, many of them political prisoners (or Rebels) who had been involved in insurgencies, or associated with ‘rebel groups', back home.

Along with another Irish convict, William Johnston, Phillip secretly planned an uprising, writing nothing down until the note that was intercepted. The uprising then proceeded in Castle Hill, more or less as Toby describes, culminating in the battle at which Phillip (and William) were tricked into coming forward, thinking that the rules of engagement would apply. The consequences, including the hanging of Phillip at the public store, and the random executions of every third man, were as Toby describes.

The history of the troubles in Ireland is very complicated, and both sides have been guilty of inflicting atrocities on innocent civilians. In the Castle Hill Uprising, however, the only civilian injured was the flogging man — a couple of convicts beat him up. There was almost no property damage, and there were no casualties amongst the soldiers.

In 1811, the stone barracks became Australia's first ‘lunatic asylum' — and there
was
an incident where inmates were sent out to chop wood, one using the opportunity to kill another. Like Tom, Maggie is an invented character — but there are stories of the wives and girlfriends of convicts getting themselves arrested so that they will be transported too; and one of the inhabitants of the Castle Hill Lunatic Asylum was a female Irish Rebel who was ‘sent mad' by her journey here.

In 1866, the barracks were demolished. Over time, buildings came and went from the site, and the exact location of the barracks was lost.

In 2006, archaeologists uncovered the foundations of the lost stone barracks in the Castle Hill Heritage Park.

Some of the books that Toby found most helpful in researching for his assignment (and that would give a more balanced and comprehensive account than he does) included: Lynette Ramsay Silver,
The Battle of Vinegar Hill, Australia's Irish Rebellion, 1804
(Doubleday, 1989); James G Symes,
The Castle Hill Rebellion of 1804
(A Hills District Historical Society Publication, 1979; reprinted with additions 1981; supplement added, 1982; revised with further additions, June 1990); Watkin Tench,
1788, Comprising A Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay and A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson
, edited and introduced by Tim Flannery (The Text Publishing Company, Melbourne,
1996; first published 1789 and 1793); Frank Crowley,
A Documentary History of Australia, Volume 1, Colonial Australia, 1788-1840
(Thomas Nelson Australia Pty Ltd, 1980); Trevor McClaughlin (editor),
Irish Women in Colonial Australia
(Allen & Unwin, 1998); Patricia Clarke and Dale Spender (ed),
Life Lines: Australian Women's Letters and Diaries 1788 to 1840
(Allen & Unwin, 1992);
Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry
, (ed. WB Yeats, 1888); Bill Wannan,
The Folklore of the Irish in Australia
(John Currey, O'Neil Publishers, 1980);
Journal of George Hall, 1802
(Journal kept by George Hall on board the ship
Coromandel
, London to Sydney, departing on 12 February 1802, arriving 13 June);
Memoirs of Joseph Holt, General of the Irish Rebels in 1798
, edited by T Crofton Croker (Henry Colburn, Publisher, London, 1838); William Noah,
Voyage to Sydney in the Ship Hillsborough, 1798–1799, and a Description of the Colony
(Library of Australian History, 1978).

Any errors are, of course, Toby's.