Paper Daisies (37 page)

Berylda

I
look up and down the platform of Katoomba Station, my heart racing crazily with every emotion. This is the first time I have been out in the world on my own, since – shush. It's high holiday season and there are people everywhere – half of Sydney has come up to the mountains to retreat from the humidity; the other half is waiting for the train, for friends to join them – and I am so jangled and raw I imagine they can all hear my thoughts.

The whistle blows and I jump; I see the steam from the engine puffing around the curve of the tracks from Leura, and Flo is nearly here. A screech of the brakes, a surge of summer hats and parasols. And she
is
here, running up the platform towards me. She is impossible to miss, wearing that great big splashy hat she got from the Grace Brothers sale – which would seem to have happened several lifetimes ago. Has it only been six weeks? Yes. And, massed with extravagantly pink and yellow roses, this hat is even more hideous than I remember. It is marvellous and I am up on my toes, waving. My whole being is a grin – bracing for the impact.

‘Bryl! Happy twentieth century, comrade!' All ringlets swinging under that ridiculous awning of tulle.

I can barely reply, wiping tears from my eyes – of happiness. Everything is possible and promising in her sparkling green eyes. ‘God, it's good to see you.' I squeeze her tight.

‘You too, duckie.' She just about squeezes the breath out of me back, and barely takes one herself before hoisting me along with her: ‘You'll never guess what happened to me these holidays – utterly, deliriously shocking. I've been dying – just
dying
– to tell you.'

I can't stop laughing – with relief. My knees are shaking with this relief. I signal to Buckley, over by the ticket window, to pick up Flo's bags and call to him through the crowd: ‘We'll walk through the town – see you at the house.'

He tips his hat over a nod; he smiles at me – at last. What does he smile at? My release? My return to myself? I am returning. I am. Every atom trembles and glistens with the excitement of it.

‘I've had a proposal.' Flo strides on, out of the station. ‘A proposal of the marriage type.'

‘What – from a boy? You have not,' I say to her, and I am shocked. ‘What sort of brave boy is that?'

‘Not a boy exactly. A man.' She blushes: Flo McFee is blushing – I don't believe it. ‘Lawrence Moverley,' she says. ‘Believe it. Larry – he went to school with Bruce.' Her eldest brother. ‘He called in on us at Woy Woy. Stockbroker – he's awfully nice. Not quite as progressive as Old Mac might choose for me. I scandalised him by swimming overarm stroke and beating him in a race across the bay, as if the mixed bathing in broad daylight wasn't enough to do him in, and then dear old Dad scandalised him some more by insisting I beat him at downing a pint of beer. Poor Larry didn't know if he was Arthur or Martha by the end of his visit. But I'm thinking about it, Bryl – I'm seriously considering it.'

‘Are you? Why?' I am having trouble understanding this turn in any way; the Flo I know is far too blue-stocking for any such thing. She swims at the beach in blithe contempt of anti-sea-bathing decrees, never mind in mixed company; she doesn't do anything by the book. Except her studies. ‘Will he let you continue at Law?'

‘Oh yes, I should think so.' She nods assuredly. ‘Most definitely. Bruce and Chas and Hoddy all agree that he's desperately in love with me – Larry would do anything I told him to. And he's thoroughly petrified of Old Mac. He's also got family in San Francisco and mentioned the possibility of one day relocating across the Pacific – something to do with the gold trade. “Would it be attractive to you to travel to California at some time in the future?” he asked me, and I said, “Would it what!” Bryl – don't you see? Women can practise law in California. They might not have the vote, but they can darn well practise freely at their professions. They can even bathe in the ocean at times of their choosing – wearing bangles and bows, if they wish.' She winks, all vim and mischief. ‘It could all work out for me fabulously well. Besides, I like Larry – he's good and kind. A safe pair of hands, I suppose you might say. That's not very romantic, though, is it?'

‘Oh I don't know,' I say, feeling Ben's hand holding mine, as if he is here with me, because he is. ‘Safe can be a very romantic word,' I tell Flo. ‘Safety is a very precious thing.' And I blush, for all that safety means to me, for all that I can never tell Flo.

‘You sound like you know what you're talking about.' She leans in conspiratorially. ‘What's going on? What have you been up to on your break? Come on – out with it.'

‘Oh, this and that.' I flutter a hand dismissively over the idea that I could possibly have been up to anything whatsoever, and I tell her the only truth I may: ‘I might have met a man myself. A man called Ben. Ben Wilberry – you'll meet him in a few days.'

‘Wilberry?' Now Flo is shocked. ‘As in the Wilberrys of Queensland?'

‘Hm.'

‘No!' She is scandalised.

‘Yes.'

‘Really,' she says, intrigued and suspicious. ‘But aren't they Anti-Socialist Protectionists?'

‘Ben's not.' I smile with my best secrets. ‘He's not like anyone. He's good and kind and just himself.
And
he's a vegetarian.'

‘No!'

‘Yes.' I laugh, but the sound is too loud. I hear it cut through the bustle of Katoomba Street, clattering along the verandah poles and through the spokes of cartwheels. How dare I pretend that Ben is mine; and yet he is. ‘I'll tell you all about him when we get to the house,' I say to Flo, and I look away, down the steep decent towards Echo Point, out across the cracks and crags of the mountaintops that pave forever. Where do I begin?

‘Oh dear,' Flo sighs beside me, tucking my hand under her arm. ‘But I do go on and on, don't I? I haven't even given you the slightest commiseration in respect of your uncle – I'm so sorry to have heard. When you wrote of the circumstances of your change of address –'

‘It's all right,' I tell the mountaintops some truth again. ‘We weren't very close. He didn't much care for Greta and me.' My voice is not steady but all the same it's surprisingly easy to say.

‘Oh.' She shrugs. ‘Well it's a strange one that wouldn't care for you.'

‘Strange. Yes. He was.'

And Flo McFee is not the slightest bit interested in discussing the subject further. As we reach the bottom of the hill, the pines of Katoomba towering above us and all the little miners' cottages that dot the way to the cliff edge – to home, almost there – Flo resumes her whirl of news and views.

‘You can't have everything you wish for tied up in a neat bow, can you?' she muses as we walk on. ‘Or certainly not all at once, as you would want it. I'm beginning to learn something about compromise, I think, comrade. Speaking of such, Old Mac doesn't think the legislation
for the New South Wales Women's Vote will go through this year at all – they're going to leave it to occur in conjunction with the Federal Act, and that won't be until next year in all likelihood. Ooooh, but this makes me itch. Why do the wheels have to turn so slowly for us? Still, we'll be ahead of Melbourne most probably, and our full enfranchisement must come – it will come. It's simply inevitable.
Even
in Melbourne.'

‘It will be if you have any say in it.' I nudge her playfully, but I don't share anything like her certainty. It took Federation itself a decade to come from Sir Henry Parkes's call for it and it could all unravel at any moment. Even if we do get the vote it can be snatched away as quickly, and will be if and when it suits the men who decide how we should live our lives. Still, I tell Flo, and I almost believe it too: ‘One day, you will make a run for parliament. One day, you will be our first female prime minister.'

‘Heavens, I'll take that wish for my own,' she says up into the furthest boughs of the pines, and she's already writing her acceptance speech.

I look up too. How many times I have looked into these pines from the train and felt only cool, dark dread in the sight of them. Huge, looming black monsters of loss. But now they stand at the entrance to my sanctuary, love and memory whispering through every needle on the breeze.

The rusty gate squeaks as I lift the latch.

‘Oh my word! Is this the house?' Flo squeaks in reply. ‘How very beautiful – I'm so glad I overdressed.'

The ivy is rampant right up to the front door and there are jungles of blackberry and jasmine strangling every camellia, engulfing entire flowerbeds, but its wide weatherboards are still a merry white against all the deep greens of the garden, its portico posts still gorgeously turned –
Just like your mother's ankles,
Papa used to wink.

Greta waves from the bay window of the front parlour. She is up on a ladder, curtain rod in hand. Prince is leaping up and down below her, his silly face bobbing over the high sill, ears flapping. He still can't believe he's allowed inside.

‘Jumping Jezebels,' Flo exclaims, looking down to her right at the path that snakes towards the low wall at the cliff, pointing out at the vista. ‘You've got the Three Sisters in your front yard.'

‘We do.' I am all grin again. ‘And in a moment we shall be three sisters having tea on the terrace.'

I hunt about for the key in my pocket. I jiggle it into the door and feel the click as the metal gives: the liberty that is so dear to me. Greta shouting out down the hall: ‘Hello! Hello!'

I look over my shoulder at Flo and my heart is racing crazily again: because I am home. Finally, home.

My spirit flies out across the gorge and back to me.

Ben

E
ven the wire grass is battling to hang on in this paddock, set just off the tablelands where the hills become plains. It's been turned over exclusively to sheep now for twenty-five years or more, with plans to soon put it all under wheat. But I am here, Mama. I made it.

I look around her old family selection, which once was the Trentons' and now is the Bentleys', and the pair of them combined have just about completed the destruction of whatever indigenous ecology was here before them. Even the creek seems to be drying off at this point – exhausted – exposing the roots of the native sandalwood scrub on the banks: thirsty.

Jack snorts: What did you bring us out here for?

That's a very good question.

But there's a lonely old tree up ahead, just the other side of the creek. It looks like a bimble box, with its slender trunk and vertical branches, the high sun playing glassy on the leaves. It reminds me of Mama, of riding out to the billabongs of the Jordan with her; making mud pies out there as a boy, making her smile. I'll go and pay my respects and then let's call it a day – let's call it three days with Berylda in Katoomba instead of two, making her smile. I will when I tell her I left her for nothing but a brief chat with a bimble box. There really is little else here. Sheep bleat at me as I walk through them, dimly annoyed at the interruption; they are saying: That's right, we ate every last daisy that ever was in this place, and they were delicious.

The tree is not a bimble box, though, I see as I get closer; we're possibly too far south to see them here anyway. I think it's just a young ghost gum then, tall but not yet filled out, the shine on the leaves just a trick of the light. I walk across the creek for a closer look at the bark to identify it, and the water is deeper than it appears – I'm soaked up past the knees at halfway. But when I get to the opposite bank, I see under the dappled shade of the tree, a cluster of low woody stipes – greenish-brown. You could easily mistake them for a twiggy hand of gum leaves fallen from above; I could easily have trodden on it.

The leaves are long, lanceolate and few; the flocculence almost prickly to the touch. Three plants – no, four. The bracts are russet globes, still shut tight yet. One's about to go, though – and I can just see the first of the rays are red. This is it. These are Mama's everlastings.

I look around at Jack and laugh.

This bloom will be fully opened come the morning.

Author Note

Paper Daisies
, like all of my novels so far, is a fiction inspired by the history of the country I call home, a quest to uncover what threads of the past remain woven through our present. This time there was one great cracking spark that set this particular quest in train: Prime Minister Julia Gillard's now infamous misogyny speech, delivered in October 2012, and the various reactions to it. In some shock at the most critical interpretations of the speech, namely that Gillard was cynically ‘playing the gender card' and that there was no substance to the issues she raised, I began writing this novel, and what began as an exploration of what misogyny means quickly evolved into expression of the grief that sexual denigration, control and abuse causes, and an allegory of how it has not only affected me personally but also the lives of many women I love.

In real life, for the women I know, being raped and otherwise brutalised, terrorised and sneered at for another's gratification is not as pleasure-inducing as some fashionable contemporary erotic literature would have us believe, and my quest for some truth about the sickness that is misogyny became more urgent as the legal cases surrounding the murders of Jill Meagher, Lisa Harnum and Allison Baden-Clay unfolded across my writing days. And amongst all of this, when a schoolgirl in Pakistan, Malala Yousafzai, was shot in the head for campaigning for female education in her country, some commentators in this country pointed at her assailants, the Taliban, and cried: ‘See look, real misogynists! We don't have any misogynists here!' Of course not.

But one of the quieter and more insidious reasonable-sounding attitudes coming from the sisterhood today is that we don't need feminism in this country because women have all of the opportunities they need. The ignorance of this view chills me. We only have the opportunities we have as women
because
of feminism, and by the support of good men who believe in the benefits of sexual equality – men who still predominantly control our world.

There is one historical fact here, though, of which Australians can be justly proud. Contrary to my Berylda Jones's doubts, Australian women received the right to vote in federal elections and to stand for office the following year, in June 1902. It took nineteen attempts for the legislation to be passed, and decades of work by the suffragists to see it happen; this franchise bill also excluded Aboriginal and all non-White people from voting, and not all states granted the women's vote at that time, but the bill was still a world leader, second only to New Zealand in the granting of universal, national suffrage. Women in the United Kingdom wouldn't win the right to vote in their general elections until 1928.

Sadly, though, it seems to me that we are only ever a breath away from returning to a time where the rights of women are secondary to those of men, or nonexistent. It remains a fact that a majority of women are economically and physically more vulnerable than men. It remains a fact, too, that a woman is most likely to be raped or otherwise physically abused or murdered by someone she knows, most often her partner or a close family member or friend, and that the abuse will most likely go unreported. According to White Ribbon research, in 2013 forty percent of Australian women over the age of fifteen had experienced an incident of physical or sexual violence; currently, on average, one woman per week is killed by a male partner, or ex-partner. Given this, it seems to me that it can never be wrong to talk about violence against women, or their denigration, or the challenges they face simply by being women in our society. It can never be wrong to ‘play the gender card', or ‘the race card', or ‘the victim card', or whatever card the bullies want to wave about contemptuously at anyone who criticises them. Justice is a whole house made of cards, and it is one we all live very much inside. We have to maintain it wisely and carefully, for all our sakes.

But
Paper Daisies
is, I must stress, fiction. In real life, I would never condone a resort to murder for any reason. Such murders of violent bullies occur of course, and women are still occasionally gaoled for them, but I've only killed some demons here, an exercise I highly recommend to anyone seeking restitution where no other kind but the imaginary might be found.

I must stress, too, that all of the characters in this novel are also fictional. There was no such Queensland Minister for Agriculture called John Wilberry; and nor was anyone called Alec Howell treasurer of the Liberal League, or member of the Free Trade Party, or District Surgeon of Bathurst Hospital. As for the mythical daisies that Ben finds along the way, they are inventions for him alone – but then again, perhaps they are still waiting to be found.

I would like to acknowledge here the invaluable treasure that is the Australian literature collection of the Mary Elizabeth Byrnes Memorial Library, Orange. It is wonderful to have such an incredible resource sitting in the middle of the New South Wales Central West, not far from where I live. And of course, as libraries go, I can't do anything or go anywhere without Trove, the National Library of Australia's database of newspapers, books and photographs.

The quotes at the beginning of each of the parts are all taken from Friedrich Nietzsche's experimental novel,
Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for All and None
,
first published in English in 1896 – and of which the
Sydney Morning Herald
's review of 1899 declared,
‘
everyone to his taste'. And the Louisa Lawson quote that opens the novel is from
her 1911 poem, ‘The Mount of Achievement', sourced from Elaine Zinkham's essay, ‘Louisa Albury Lawson', which appears in
A Bright and Fiery Troop: Australian Women Writers of the Nineteenth Century
, edited by Debra Adelaide
,
1988 – because I could not find any reference to this poem anywhere else. If this is not a prime example of our neglect of the literary heritage of our women writers, I don't know what is. Louisa Lawson was hardly a nobody – she was editor of
The Dawn
,
a well-known contemporary poet and journalist in her own right, and the mother of our beloved Henry. Without her, and other women of her calibre, Australian women would not have won the vote so soon, and would not have had a voice in print much beyond baking recipes and knitting patterns.

Finally, as always, I owe an inexpressible debt of gratitude to Selwa Anthony, my agent, and the angel who told me to lose myself to this work precisely when I needed to hear those words. To Cate Paterson also, publishing director at Pan Macmillan, who embraced this story from the very first and helped me to strengthen its sinews; to editors Emma Rafferty and Julia Stiles for wrangling my words where they needed it. And, last but never least, to my muse de bloke, my perennial hero and gentlest giant, Dean Brownlee: you are the best random stranger I ever met.