A River Town (19 page)

Everywhere, members of the Farmer’s Union wearing blue ribbons to show their high calling as owners of cattle and growers of corn. Feeders of swine as well. Willing now to discuss the form in which boys were to be sent to the cannon, to the bullet, or—even more likely—to the fevers of the encampment. One little louse, after all, more potent than a sniper. One tiny and impartial louse.

Ernie Malcolm came in from the edge of the stage. Treasurer.

At five past eight Baylor got up and called for silence and read some unintelligible minutes, which someone on the floor moved the acceptance of. Ernie Malcolm presented a financial statement and tendered various minor bills for settlement. Then Chance rose and initiated the debate on the major item of that evening’s agenda. Speaking first, moustache jutting and gleaming with wax, a hand hooked on a watch chain, easy command of the gift of oratory.

“The underpinning proposition of our existence is that we live in a robust dominion of British citizens, in a smiling land whose safety is dependent on the British fleet and on British military force. Thus, if the centre of the Empire is under threat, we are by that fact ourselves under threat. Britain stands between our smiling society and the prospect of our becoming a mongrelised province of Asia. For that reason it behoves us to help Britain in every season of her distress.”

A tall dairy farmer named Borger stood up and asked whether it were possible for Australia to depend on itself for safety?

Though there were catcalls, Mr. Chance himself seemed neither affronted nor threatened by Borger’s interjection.

“Sir, I believe the answer is obvious. We are six fledgling colonies, just now contemplating a unity of self-defence. We are dependent
upon the protection of the parent. But like a maturing child, we are able to come to the mother’s defence.”

Borger would not sit down, even though people groaned. Tim thought him in a way an admirable but dangerous fellow. Like Uncle Johnny, his own
political
uncle from Glenlara, a Shea family secret. Uncle Johnny was Fenian “Centre”—they said at his trial in Tim’s infancy—for the whole of Cork. Denied absolution by most priests. Broke his aging mother, whom Tim remembered from funerals and weddings in the old days. Uncle Johnny harried in the newspapers. Stuck by his ideas, like Borger, and was shipped on the last convict ship to Western Australia. Ultimately pardoned, the last Tim had heard of him. Johnny named in his honour and having the same dangerous edge. Uncle Johnny now old and living in California somewhere, according to old Jerry Shea. A soul like Borger’s. A soul Tim didn’t want to have.

“Great Britain took it into its head to commit aggression against the Boers of the Transvaal, purely for the sake of British gold mining interests there. And look at it—an army so pathetic, generals so pathetic, they can’t get within coo-ee of their goal.”

There were now cries of “Fenian!” and “Papist bastard!” But despite the accusations of being fatally Irish, Borger was native-born of the Macleay and had the accent to go with it.

“This war is being fought for gold, and for Jewish gold interests! Read the
Bulletin
and have the scales fall from your eyes. I tell you!”

Borger pursed his lips and sat down in a welter of hisses.

Old Billy Thurmond, owner of a model farm at Pola Creek, and a scientific sort of farmer, was on his feet with an Antrim voice which Tim thought of as being capable of ripping through ice and disintegrating glaciers.

“There you have, Mr. Chairman, the basis, the living reason for a black list for pro-Boer sympathisers. Borger’s not the sole one. There are others too in this hall.”

A native Australian voice took it up, the vowels slung like wet washing on a droopy, lazy line. “Botha the Boer’s down there on the river, Billy, in the bilges on
Burrawong
, waiting for word from Borger. He’s shitting himself they’re going to send the boys from Hickey’s Creek.”

Laughter. Joyful laughter. And safe to join in. Great mockers, the Australians. One of their graces. Billy Thurmond held out the fingers of both his hands before him crookedly. “Don’t you worry about that,” he yelled, nodding. What he knew, he knew. He cast his eyes around the hall and they lay a second at a time on all those likely to agree with Borger. The old man’s gaze hung, of course, on Tim amongst others.

“Go to buggery,” Tim muttered under his breath.

Tim saw Ernie Malcolm rise immaculate from the Treasurer’s chair, a man with a clean domestic and civil plate.

“Mr. Chairman,” Ernie said. His medallions glittered on his watch fob, each one of them a token of community service. You had to admire the bugger, and Tim did. Would there be a timetable of fětes for Kitty to attend and Tim to stand aside from without fellows like him?

His voice was strong but with an adenoidal timbre. From it, you could bet he was a snorer. There he would lie beside darkly well-ordered Mrs. Malcolm snorting like a mastiff with a bone.

“We are an equestrian nation,” said Ernie. “From childhood we think nothing of travelling huge distances on horseback.”

Kempsey to Comara and back, like Constable Hanney.

“There would be no better form for our boys to make their entry onto the world’s scene than as mounted cavalry. I would like to move a motion that a light cavalry regiment be raised from the Macleay. Its fibre would far outshine that of recruits drawn from the slums of Birmingham or Manchester.”

Ernie’s wide-set eyes shone. He was pre-awarding the medals and preparing his speech for the
Argus
, the
Chronicle
, the
Sydney Morning Herald
.

“I move too, that the Macleay’s willingness to recruit such a body of men be communicated, if necessary by a delegation of citizens, to Sir William Lyne, Premier of New South Wales.”

“Seconded!” shouted Billy Thurmond. There was a lot of applause and a few whistles which could have stood for votes either way. But the clapping was a sign that you never went wrong congratulating Australians on their horsemanship.

In the mêlée of general approval for Ernie’s gallantry, the tall Scot Dr. Erson had risen to his feet.

“I would like to inform the company that my brother-in-law, who is a surgeon to a company of Natal mounted gentlemen …”

This unfinished sentence itself brought a round of cheers for the popular physician’s brother, who was no doubt a charming, sportive bloke like Erson himself.

“He informs me, gentlemen, that irregular formations do well against the Boer. Men who can dismount to take shelter, then mount again quickly and be in pursuit. Marksmanship a premium, horsemanship essential. How do you describe these sorts of men? You describe them as mounted bushmen. With the greatest respect to our treasurer, Mr. Malcolm, I urge that the motion be amended and that the Premier be informed of our willingness to enlist a battalion of mounted bushmen.”

“Exactly, exactly!” men were crying.

“Well why not send bloody both?” remarked a tie-less satirical young farmer at Tim’s side. “And a bloody navy as well.”

Tim noticed with a pulse of excitement that the Offhand was amongst those who had risen now and had their arm up. There seemed to be a reluctance in dapper M. M. Chance as, knowing the press could not safely be ignored, he gestured towards the journalist. Sad to see the Offhand’s flushed face and purple gills. Tuberculosis, liquor or both. Would have made a British statesman if not for the drink.

“Sir,” said the Offhand in his cockneyish accent, redeemed a little by oratory lessons in an Anglican school of divinity. “Sir, I take both Mr. Ernie Malcolm’s point about young Australians spending their childhood on horseback, and likewise Dr. Erson’s observation that an irregular horse unit would best suit the moral temperament of the young men of Northern New South Wales. We would first, of course, need to find foreign horses for them, since there aren’t enough up-to-scratch military horses in the Macleay.”

There was a stutter of laughter. The Offhand raised his eyes to the ceiling and smiled with charming, lax lips. “I ask, what is the most common relationship between man and horse in this valley? What is the most universal competence and trade which the men of the Macleay demonstrate?”

There were cries of, “Boozing!” or, “Gin jockeying.”

Oh the black camps. The mineral spirits drunk there! Who rode out there stealthily on horseback to beget on the black gins the half-white little bastards of Greenhill or Burnt Bridge? The gin jockeys.

The Offhand picked up again in the lee of everyone’s hilarity.

“The men of this valley are above all hauliers and carters. The men of this valley, above all, know how to grease an axle, and how to get a wagon out of a bog. The men of this valley are not easily defeated by dust or mud, like—to quote Mr. Malcolm—the children of the slums of Manchester and Birmingham. I believe that we can raise from the Macleay a transportation unit unparalleled in the Empire. And since the armies of Generals Buller and Roberts and French are faced above all with this problem—the problem of supply, and problems of hygienic facilities—let the Macleay come to the party with the finest company of wagoneers imaginable under any dispensation!”

The Offhand held his arms out as if to invite applause, yet there was utter silence in the hall.

“Come, sirs,” he cried. “Men languish for want of bandage and biscuit and bullet! I refer you to the figures for deaths from camp fever. A single set of de-lousing equipment carried to the front by wagon would itself save hundreds of lives. In that sense, one Macleay Valley haulier would be worth a battalion. Given our already-expressed debt to, our dependence upon Britain Our Mother, would we not wish to make the most effective contribution? Or would we prefer merely to make the one which suits our municipal vanity?”

M. M. Chance said evenly, “Sir, Offhand, we are all used to your notorious sense of caprice.”

Offhand however was being careful to show no sign of any caprice at all. “Mr. Chance, if you consider the skills which are invested daily in bringing down to Kempsey the large timber from Kookaburra, and likewise all the daily cleverness which goes into the delivery of cream to the dairy co-operatives, then I’m sure that like me you would be struck by a seamless admiration for the craft of haulage as exercised in the Macleay.”

“I think we may be looking for a more directly martial expression,” Mr. Chance admitted.

Tim’s long, thin moustache, falling in fronds over his lips due to recent growth, was a good veil to smile behind. And so he did smile. Bravo to blazes, Offhand!

Meanwhile, old Thurmond’s patriarchal stance and the curious sense that his red-grey beard was on fire with the force of vision meant he was certain to be called on to thunder yet again. And Mr. Chance, to stop him from combusting on the spot, pointed to him

“I’m dead against this Casual fellow’s proposal …” said Mr. Thurmond.

Men hooted, and Billy corrected himself.

“… All right, Offhand then. I don’t read his rag. But I think you are too kind to him by far, Mr. Chance. Damn him is what I say! Damn the power of his column! I stick by the mounted bushmen resolution which I seconded earlier, and I add to it a second wing, which I shall back with an immediate donation of five pounds.”

He took a scarlet five pound note from his fob pocket, where he must have already placed it in readiness for this scene, and held it extended between his first two fingers for all the room to see …

“I have long been of the opinion too readily dismissed by your committee that every member of this meeting be asked to take the following oath.
That as a loyal subject of Her Majesty, I support without equivocation the aims of the British Empire in Southern Africa, including the extinction of all Boer pretensions of sovereignty in Transvaal and Orange Free State. So help me God.
”

“Is that a motion?” asked Mr. Chance, in whose nature good sense and not frenzy was so dominant, and who seemed shocked by Billy Thurmond’s fervour.

“That is a motion, sir. It is a voluntary oath, but we know what to make of those who will not take it.”

“Yes,” the farmer Borger called out in his urgent accent. “We’ll know that they’re honest men, careful about swearing oaths at the drop of a bloody hat!”

A loud furore, ranging from whistles to groans to some applause! In a baritone voice Chance demanded and slowly got a
little control back, and could at last speak. “Yours will need to be a separate motion, Mr. Thurmond. At the moment we are considering the matter of the Macleay contingent.”

Tim understood he should have foreseen the direction of the meeting: That there would be a publicly observed vote. Those who did not raise their hands would be counted and listed by people like Billy. There a philo-Boer. There a disloyalist. There an Empire-hater. Bloody awful for a man’s business, such a perception. Yet how in hell’s name could you vote casually for the death of the young?

Though he was willing to risk being poor for the sake of everyone thinking him openhanded, he didn’t want to risk it for the sake of politics.

But when the motion was put, Tim sat with both hands planted on his knees. Make of it what you bloody want, old Billy. Chance counted the room and said, “A majority, I believe.” But not sweeping. Sir William Lyne would not be able to be told that the Macleay was unanimous in its militant intentions. Chance enclosed his jaw with his hand, and then took it away, his moustache flattened a little.

The Offhand called, “I think many men would have committed themselves to the fray, Mr. Chance. But not necessarily others.”

“Thank you, Offhand. Is that intended to be a comfort or a reproach?”

The Offhand didn’t answer, but nodded ambiguously, approving of Mr. Chance’s subtlety. A great fellow, the Offhand. Crafty defender of small men, of complicated thought.

Though now Billy Thurmond was enraged in a new way, far above his average level of rancour.

“In view of this disgusting display, Mr. Chairman, I suggest that loyal members of the community be placed at the doors to administer the oath to the members of this meeting.”

Borger yelled. “Men placed on doors? Haven’t you heard of
habeas corpus
, you silly old bugger?”