The Wicked Boy (33 page)

Smith had a dairy herd at a farm between Glenreagh and Nana Glen, villages in the Orara Valley. His first wife had died in 1920 and his second had left him in 1926 after three years of marriage. Smith hired Bertha to cook and clean for him and to look after his three-year-old daughter, Elizabeth. Bertha soon became her employer's lover and in 1929 she also became the mother of his next child.

In the year of the baby's birth, Charles Mulville's neighbours on Woodford Island sent word to Bertha that her husband was seriously ill with influenza, and Bertha despatched the ten-year-old Harry to tend to him. Within a few days of Harry's arrival, Charles developed pneumonia. He died in his son's arms, aged sixty-eight, and was buried alongside Harry's brother Percy in the Catholic cemetery. Harry returned to Nana Glen. A few months later
Smith's marriage was dissolved
and he and Bertha were able to marry.

Harold Smith was born in 1874 into
a well-known and well-to-do family
in the north of New South Wales, but he had not made a success of himself. Since being
declared bankrupt in 1898
he had scratched a living as a horseman and share-farmer. A hard-drinking man, ‘Tiger' Smith often sat at the dinner table with a horse whip and was quick to strike his stepchildren. He attributed his short temper to the effects of gassing in the war. In fact,
he had served for only five months
, all of which were spent in training or long-range patrolling with the 5th Light Horse in Egypt; he was invalided home with rheumatism in September 1916, having seen no combat. He had been aggressive before the war, in any case: in 1899 he had been
convicted of assaulting a man
with whom he had argued about a horse.

As the eldest boy, Harry bore the brunt of his stepfather's rage. One of Harry's jobs was to hold Smith's tools for him while he sharpened their blades. If he did not keep the tool's handle steady, Smith would raise his steel file and smack him on the head.

The Smiths' next-door neighbour was Robert Coombes, now in his mid-forties.
Robert had settled in Nana Glen
on his return from the Western Front. He may have chosen the district at the suggestion of Herbert Morrow, a Nana Glen farmer who had served with him in the 4th Division and who in 1918 had come back to Australia on the same ship. Robert's fellow bandsman and stretcher-bearer Casimir Collopy, a veteran of both the 13th and 45th Battalions, also farmed in this part of New South Wales. Robert lived in a rickety two-room house, next to which he grazed seven or eight cows and tended a plot of vegetables. He and Smith were both tenants of a farmer called Isaac Cundy.

Robert's house faced the dirt road that ran north from Nana Glen to the larger village of Glenreagh. Just across the track was a bright sweep of grazing pasture, stretching down to a line of trees along the Orara river. A range of wooded hills rose in the distance, separating the valley from the ocean. Behind the house was
the dense web of the bush
: the blackbutt and bloodwood trees, blue gum, bottlebrush, wattle and ironbark, twined with vines and creepers. Kookaburras and white cockatoos cackled and shrieked in the trees, giant frogs rasped in the river and creeks. The climate was mild, the temperatures rarely dropping below freezing point even in winter. In the warm, wet summers, the breeze carried a tang of camphor and gum.

The region around the Orara
river had been inhabited by whites since the 1860s: first the timber-getters, who felled the much-prized red cedars, and then the gold-miners, who sunk shafts into the reefs near the river and panned for nuggets in the creeks. The gold mines had become unprofitable by the 1920s, but the timber business was still going strong. The local men used cross-cut saws, axes and wedges to chop down mammoth gums and white mahoganies. They sliced them into long logs and tethered them to teams of bullocks, which dragged their loads through the bush to the saw mills. Some of the land cleared by loggers had been claimed by banana growers and dairy farmers.

Robert milked the cows each day. He roped the cattle into sheds, pumped their milk into buckets by hand, skimmed off the cream with a separator and decanted it into cans.
The cans were collected
by a truck from the Orara Co-Op Dairy Society and delivered to the district town of Grafton, thirty-five miles north of Nana Glen. On the cream truck's return trip, the driver dropped off the empty cans along with supplies from Grafton. There were a handful of shops in Nana Glen itself: a bakery, a butcher, a general store, a post office, a combined billiards room and hairdresser, a pie shop, a saddlery. Robert bought tobacco with which to roll himself cigarettes.

In the evenings, Robert often dined on dampers: pancakes of flour, salt and milk baked in the hot ashes of a fire. He ate vegetables from his plot and drank the milk produced by the cows. Occasionally, he killed a calf for its meat, sharing or trading the veal with neighbours. Nana Glen had no electricity or running water. Most villagers kept kerosene lamps to light their homes at night and they washed their clothes in metal tubs by the creek.

Robert had once hankered after romance and riches in far-off lands, but in New South Wales he made a life free of either. In Nana Glen he formed no close friendships with other men, courted no women, accrued no property. He seemed to have relinquished the desires for wealth and power that had animated him as a boy, along with the desires for sex and companionship that might have come to him as a man. His journey conformed only to the most innocent penny dreadful plot: that of the lad who flees the busy modern world for the rugged simplicity of the Australian bush. Instead of love and money, he had found peace and safety.

Robert became acquainted with Bertha and her children when they moved to the farm next to his in the late 1920s. He learnt that Bertha, a policeman's daughter, was born in East London in the 1880s and brought up in West Ham. Like Robert, she had emigrated to Australia early in 1914.

By 1930, the Smith family was under increasing financial strain. Harold was supporting six children: the baby he had with Bertha, the four children she had brought to the marriage, and his daughter Elizabeth. In the economic depression that had taken hold in Australia, work was scarce and the prices of dairy products were falling. Smith was running up a large debt at the general store in the neighbouring village of Glenreagh. To try to make ends meet, he killed most of his calves for their hides, and he took on a contract to build a dairy and a set of milking stalls at a farm twelve miles away. He left many of the tasks on the home farm to Harry.

Before milking Smith's half-dozen cows on winter mornings, Harry would warm his feet in a patch of grass on which a cow had lain overnight. Afterwards, he would often run barefoot the four miles to
Nana Glen public school
to make it in time for class; and run home again to do the afternoon's milking at the end of the school day. In the evenings, it fell to Harry to round up the calves and bring them close to home so that they would be safe from dingoes. If he couldn't find one of the calves in the bush, Smith was likely to beat him.

In the middle of 1930, Harold Smith's landlord Ike Cundy complained that the property was becoming overgrown with black wattle. He told Smith to cut the bush back. Harry helped Smith to fell the trees and stack them up for burning. They used an axe to chop the timber, and a brush hook – a scythe with a foot-long curved blade – to hack at the undergrowth. Harry was kept so busy with this work that he was hardly able to go to school at all.

When Cundy called round to inspect the land on 3 June 1930, Smith lost his temper and struck his sixty-eight-year-old landlord with a whip handle.
Cundy was injured
badly enough to need medical attention. He reported the assault to the police and threatened Smith with legal action.

Six days later, on Monday 9 June, Smith accused Harry of laziness and told him to get off the farm. Harry, now eleven, had been suffering from flu. When Smith found the boy still on the property in the afternoon, he attacked him, repeatedly hitting him with the handle of the brush hook and punching him in the face.

Harry was seriously injured
. On Thursday he took himself to the police station at Glenreagh, four miles north along the track that ran past their house, and reported to the officer on duty that his stepfather had beaten him. Police Constable Lawrence Freebody dressed the boy's wounds, then put him in a car and drove him back to the farm. Smith was at the table, eating, when the policeman came in with Harry. Bertha was also in the room.

‘This boy informs me that you assaulted him with a brush hook,' said Constable Freebody.

Smith carried on eating. ‘Yes,' he said.

Freebody removed the bandages from Harry's right arm and asked Smith if he had caused the injuries with his brush hook, as Harry claimed, and punched him in the face with his closed fist. Smith, recanting, admitted only to having spanked him with an open hand while they were both milking. The cow, he said, had then kicked the boy.

Freebody asked him if he had hunted Harry away from the farm that day.

‘Yes,' said Smith, ‘I told him he would have to get out as he would not work.'

Bertha interrupted to say that Harry was not unwell because he had been beaten, but because he had influenza.

Freebody told Smith that he would be charged with assault. He then drove Harry to the district hospital in Grafton. A doctor treated the severe cuts and bruises on the boy's right elbow, his right eye, his nose, his left cheek and his legs. Harry was kept in hospital for a week.

On Friday 20 June, Harry was taken to give evidence against his stepfather at the children's court in Grafton.

Smith denied the assault. He said that he could not remember having told Freebody that he spanked Harry during the milking. ‘The cow kicked him down,' he said, ‘and I spanked him afterwards.' He admitted having hit Harry on the lower part of his body with an old axe handle that he had stuck on his brush hook, but insisted that the child's injuries had been caused by the cow trampling on him. Most of the time, said Smith, he and the lad got on well together.

Harry was then questioned by the magistrate. He said that he had been cutting bottlebrushes on 9 June when his stepfather, out of the blue and without saying a word, had started to beat him with the brush hook.

Bertha told the court that her son helped out on the farm and she believed that he always did his best but, of course, he was very young and had never lived on a farm before. Her husband was usually kind and considerate to all of her children, she added, and gave them everything he possibly could. She was eager to exculpate Smith, perhaps because she feared for her family's livelihood if he were convicted. But she acknowledged to the court that some of Harry's injuries were caused by his stepfather striking him with a brush hook.

The magistrate found Smith guilty of unlawful assault and fined him £5 with £7/7/6 in witness and medical expenses. He ordered him to deposit a further £20 with the court, which would be returned only if he remained on good behaviour for two years; the alternative was two months' imprisonment. The fine, said the magistrate, could be paid in instalments of £3 a month.

Upon learning what had happened to Harry, Robert Coombes decided to risk the careful, solitary life that he had created for himself: he offered to look after the boy.
Harold Smith moved with his family to Grafton
soon after his attacks on his landlord and his stepson. Harry stayed with Robert in Nana Glen.

Robert and Harry lived together in the house by the track. Though Harry helped out on the farm, Robert continued to milk the cows himself, and he made sure that Harry went back to school – he had been absent so long that
he had to re-enrol
at the end of June 1930. Sometimes Harry got a lift home in a neighbour's sulky or, to his delight, in one of the few cars in the village, such as Sam Green's Morris Cowley or Charles Wright's Chevy. In the afternoons, Robert helped him with his homework.

Towards the end of 1930, a bush fire spread across Ike Cundy's land, catching on the trees and dry grass and then on the hessian that clad Robert and Harry's house. The building and most of its contents were destroyed, including Robert's cornet and violin. His four military medals survived the blaze, though they were damaged by the fire and the ribbons were burnt away.

Robert and Harry slept in the cow stalls while they built themselves a shack, using the burnt iron from the old house as a roof. The owners of the farm across the road, the Playford family, gave them clothes and bedding to replace what they had lost, and at Christmas brought over cake, pudding and nuts.

The next year Robert found a new house on a small rise of land that belonged to Reginald Gill, an English-born farmer who lived about a mile south of Cundy's place. Gill's son ploughed the field so that they could plant a vegetable garden, and Robert agreed to give his landlord a quarter of his profits in return for the use of the house and land. At first the going was hard, as Robert and Harry had to fetch water for the garden from Coldwater Creek, a tributary of the Orara, and carry it several hundred yards up the hill in four-gallon kerosene cans. But Robert soon spotted a nice patch of flat land right by the creek and arranged with its owner to farm this plot while continuing to rent Gill's house.

Robert devoted himself to the garden. In the rich dark soil by the creek, he planted cauliflowers, cabbages, pumpkins, potatoes, tomatoes, cucumbers and peas. Most local families grew their own vegetables, but Robert's produce was so good that he was rarely short of customers. His peas and tomatoes were particularly fine. The O'Connells, who had a dairy farm in Nana Glen, used to send their eldest son down on a pony to buy Robert's tomatoes when the Catholic priest stopped by for lunch.

Harry hawked their vegetables around the neighbouring farms. At first he rode a bicycle, his wares thrown over his back in sugar sacks. Once a week or so he hitched a lift on the cream truck to Glenreagh, where he would sell vegetables until the truck came back through on its return trip. After a couple of years he and Robert acquired a brown mare, a sulky and harness so that Harry could drive himself up to Glenreagh with his goods. Harry supplemented the vegetables with fruit, buying watermelons and oranges from the Playfords to sell on at a profit. He also earned money by collecting mail from the post office and delivering it to neighbouring farms.