Not the Same Sky (28 page)

‘Not now,’ Oscar said.

And Joy didn’t know what to say to that.

She was warm, clean, aired, smiled at, but confused. She had a pool here too, but sat mostly in the foyer watching a glass internal lift go up and down, stopping at all floors. She watched people getting in and out and marvelled to herself about the festooned lights at the top and the bottom. When it was at the far floors and she craned her neck to look, it could have been the dissect of a Swiss roll cake. A man came and joined her. He wanted to talk, just a little, she let him, just a little. She was not ready yet to be drawn from her lift watching. She excused herself, swam, slept and got herself ready for the last leg of the journey. She felt prepared now.

Joy stood to attention for as long as possible during the circling and the banking into Sydney, which was clearly even more beautiful than all the calendars put together. She was met at the airport by Simon, who did not want to talk about her amazement at what she’d just seen from the air. He got her and her bags to his car. She bumped into trolleys and people. They were delighted that she’d come, he said, ‘You don’t come to see us often enough,’ he said, as if Joy might indeed be his relative and had just proven herself remiss again in familial geographic duty. He had a plan worked out for her, but in the meantime he would bring her to the lodgings he had found for her, a friend’s empty house. She would be able to sleep her journey off in peace and he would collect her in the morning.

CHAPTER 34

It seemed a peculiar thing to Simon, to have to explain his interest in these girls. He had found out about his own possible link a number of years ago, and although it was hard to verify, he was fairly sure. It was only an outsider who would have expected an explanation. Here, in Australia, many people were quietly picking up bits and pieces of history, always with wonderment. But delight often became frustrated because the gems were always attached to somewhere else. You couldn’t polish a thing off and know it. Its beginning was always from far away. As well as that, accidental history was so unsettling. What if the grandfather of the man who had organised the theatre tour of 1906 had not been caught? Caught at what? Doesn’t matter. Caught. What if the other grandfathers had all made it home safely to the cottage second and third from the end of the lane? What if the women had bucked at the boat and refused to come? What if it had been the French who had started the first penal colony in south-west Australia, as they had indeed intended? You wouldn’t be here at all. Or you’d be quarter Corsican. But then you wouldn’t be you.

And what of the people who were here forever, whose history this really was, who would always know more of here than you, who could never be caught up with? How could your few hundred years matter? Would you not have to add it on? Would they let you? And what did that make you? Could this stream of yours, this history you were trying to tie up, die out completely, become eventually an interesting exotica in the whole?

At what point does the wonderment vanish? The faint-hearted changed the conversation, but did not question why others still dug. They, too, had been there. They had simply seen something in the gap of their history that made them turn away, for the sake of week-to-week, year-to-year, survival.

Simon collected Joy the next morning. He was cheerful and delighted to have her here, though she was by now furious with jetlag and wondering if she had made a mistake by doing the two stopovers. Or would it have been worse if she hadn’t? She was consumed by the length of time she had been in the air, and now understood the logic of ships. Simon brought her to the Records Office on Globe Street—he thought she would enjoy it, and she hoped only that she wouldn’t fall asleep. A young man hurried from behind his desk and beamed with enthusiasm. He loved it when people came to him. He could spread out his knowledge of his subject, throw it out to them like a Turkish salesman with the best carpet in the bazaar, or a fiddler with the best tune. He loved to tell them that when he was sorting the papers, trying to separate these particular girls from all the others, he had discovered that his great-great-grandmother was one of them. He was amazed. His hair was so red, his freckles so prominent, dotted in such a precise line across his face, it was almost laughable. Surely not that amazed?

‘Well, I knew I had Irish in me.’

‘Never,’ Joy smiled.

‘But not one of those girls. Although if you take the number of them and the scarcity of single white men here at the time, and the number of children they had with the number of husbands they had, they’re at the top of a lot of us.’

‘The number of husbands?’ Joy said, making a question out of it.

‘They weren’t afraid to marry again.’

He thought they married much older men to perhaps replace their fathers—only a theory, mind you—and had children with them. And when they died, married again and had more children. And maybe even a third time. He led her to the papers.

‘Half of them married older Protestant Englishmen. I suppose they were mostly available. Or maybe it’s because they had no one to tell them not to. I don’t know.’

‘Half of them?’ Joy said.

‘Oh no, I mean a lot. I wouldn’t have the exact numbers. It’s hard to be sure with all the name changes.’

He handed her the boxes, pulled a chair out for her and walked to the door where he stood as if to attention to what he had found and what Joy might find in the papers.

It was these papers that fed articles, books and essays—upright detached essays, examining everything from court appearances to the prevalence of spontaneous symphysiotomies at birth, the babies having grown stronger than the weak pelvises of the girl starved at a crucial bone-making time of her life. There were good stories too—stories of success, outward success at least. Children becoming educated, maybe to be what their mothers had wanted to be but couldn’t. The young man came back.

‘Of course, we’ll never know what they actually felt, what was in their hearts.’ And he thumped his heart dramatically, as if there was no one else in the room with him. ‘No, we can’t measure that.’

Simon and Joy returned to the heat outside and went to visit Hyde Park Barracks. Joy got the occasional glimpse of what she thought might have been extraordinary sights—surely that couldn’t have been the top of the bridge she had just seen. Standing on the quay, walking towards the Opera House on the right, the Harbour Bridge on the left, she found it almost impossible to believe she was there. At that moment the vista flaring around her rattled every one of her senses. What genius had made an already beautiful place even more so? How could anyone distract themselves long enough to add an adornment to this harbour? Mentioning it seemed pointless. Simon hurried her along as if knowing that the surfeit of beauty might distract her. He wanted her to see the plan for the memorial and to show her what it might be possible for her to do. They detoured through the Botanic Gardens.

‘Jesus, what are they?’ Joy shouted. She pointed in alarm at black shapes hanging dead from the trees.

‘Oh, them,’ Simon said, ‘they’re just bats. They’re asleep.’

‘Right,’ Joy said.

By the time they arrived at the Barracks, she was already starting to burn.

They walked in through the door and what she felt most was relief at being able to escape the draining heat. She knew, surely, that this could not be the right feeling to be having. Simon tried to hurry her along to the room—‘their room’—but she said no, that she wished to read this, pointing to a display board in the permanent exhibition. Standing in the one spot would give her a moment to regain balance. And this is what she read. Once she had started she couldn’t stop.

Seven-thousand-and-twenty lashes equalled about one-hundred-and-eighty floggings.

Before 1830, mostly Barracks men were flogged on site. After 1830, the Barracks became the site for floggings of other government convicts. The new regulation lash designed by Superintendent Slade flogged about a thousand men here in 1833. Life became even harsher in the 1840s—tougher men and harder masters.

I was strapped spread-eagled on the triangle, my mates standing in front of me.

If a man shouted out through pain he was looked upon as a sandstone or crawler. While the flogger was fixing me up he said to me quietly, ‘Is there any hangings to it?’

Meaning had I anything to give him to lay the lash lightly.

‘Yes,’ I answered.

‘All right,’ he said and then buckled to his work.

The falls of the cat were enough to take my breath away and to draw my blood freely. In the cell I got one of my mates to wash my back drying it with a rough towel, removing clotted blood and applying cloths soaked in water.

A band of from ten to twenty were daily at one period marched into this yard to be flogged.

Joy moved slowly a few inches from the board, shocked by the words and pictures. The cruelty was made worse by the banality of the language. It would have been better to walk past.

Upstairs, the girls’ room seemed peaceful in contrast to the savagery of the descriptions on the stand. The white hammocks, in place now instead of beds, a foot or so apart, conjured up the gentle swinging of resting bodies. She had to remind herself of the fear and apprehension that would have been felt. Perhaps that was why the stand was placed where it was—so that the visitor would come to this room and regard it as a comparative sanctuary, not see young frightened girls hiding their sanitary rags under the floorboards, walking downstairs to stand like exhibits at a fair while prospective employers looked them over. Then walking back up again if they had been hired to collect their meagre belongings, and if not to fall on the suspended bed and wonder whether they would have been luckier today with that man who nearly chose them, or was there a kinder life to be given to them tomorrow? When Joy could bear the room no longer, she left.

This time she rushed past the flogging board and out into the scorching heat. Simon came after her.

‘And now let me show you the proposed memorial drawings,’ he said, either oblivious to her distress or determined to ignore it. The writing proclaimed that many of these women, here named, were refugees from The Great Irish Famine. No they weren’t, Joy thought. That suggests that they were taking refuge, shelter. They were virtual prisoners, girl slaves, she thought.

‘Peculiar word that, “great”, for a famine,’ she said, through jaws that were tightening.

The proposed memorial was tasteful. A part of the handsome stone wall was to be cut out and moved back, as if it was a stage curtain. In the drawing it seemed to stand respectfully to allow the insertion of a glass-like material. Names were to be etched into this glass—heartbreaking in their familiarity only because of where they were written and why. Joy would not have noticed them in her own graveyard. On the other side of the glass, a different set of names was to be carved out. Each set of names would run out to its outer line and then fade.

‘Obviously, some of them would have changed their names into English for the boat.’

‘Nothing like a name change to make you feel good,’ Simon joked.

Joy began to recite names from the souvenir booklet and to look for them on the glass.

‘What are you doing?’ Simon asked, alarmed.

‘I’m learning one name from each county off by heart.’

Slattery, Margaret, Dungarvan, County Waterford.

Moloney, Anne, Golden, County Tipperary

Dempsey, Celia, Kingstown, County Dublin

McDonnell, Rose, Killaid, County Armagh

Larkin, Sarah, Dora, County Offaly

McArdle, Issabella, Camlough, County Down

Callaghan, Biddy, Glaslough, County Monaghan

Tighe, Rose, Oldcastle, County Meath

Geoghegan, Mary, Athlone, County Westmeath

Keilly, Honora, Kanturk, County Cork

Bassett, Charlotte, Killmilling, County Wicklow

Murray, Bridget, Ardagh, County Longford

Burt, Sarah, Glen Nevis, County Antrim

Keefe, Alice, Ballilone, County Laois

Sharkey, Eliza, Omagh, County Tyrone

Hurley, Margaret, Gort, County Galway

Blundell, Maria, Naas, County Kildare

Briers, Ann, Isle and Burt, County Derry

McGrath, Bridget, Tullow, County Carlow

Roughan, Mary Ann, Scarrif, County Clare

Thornton, Mary, Ardee, County Louth

Patterson, Frances, Killishandra, County Cavan

Rafferty, Joy, Castlerea, County Roscommon

McGillicuddy, Ellen, Dingle, County Kerry

Brophy, Anastasia M., Johnstown, County Kilkenny

Shannon, Ellen, Ballingarry, County Limerick

Burke, Catherine, Ballinsloe, County Sligo

Haggerty, Mary, Ballina, County Mayo

Hogan, Rose, Mogul, County Leitrim

Carbary, Jane, Ballyshannon, County Donegal

McElroy, Mary Ann, Lisnaskea, County Fermanagh

Connolly, Elizabeth, Greig, County Wexford