Bettany's Book (21 page)

Though I argued that Charlie was misjudging Mr Finlay, I could see that I had not had as unqualified a success as I had first thought.

‘Oh it’s typical of you and your type,’ Charlie suddenly raged. ‘Either
too perverse or too innocent! There is a flaw in the passions, that’s the problem, the founding disorder …’

But he would not say any more. For a second I wanted to do him damage and he could see it. And though he was a slighter man than me, he was agile, so that I believed later it was fear of hurting me further, rather than my rage, which caused him to stop. He certainly wore a regretful face.

‘Forgive me, Jonathan. I’ve overdone things.’ He shook his head. ‘A flaw in the passions … That is a description not of you but of your petulant friend.’

How could I hold a grievance against a fellow who apologised so handsomely?

‘The dreadful thing,’ he continued, ‘is that one cannot oppose him. His influence is too strong.’

I said simply, ‘I am going to the saleyards east of Parramatta to buy stock. I shall ensure your section of the flock and mine are Merino. I hope you will trust me to do a reasonable job.’

‘Of course, of course,’ he said, shaking his head, and making apologetic gestures with his hands, so we were friends again, though edgy. The air, as much as it sang with promise, was taut.

I mentioned an acquaintance of my father, a surgeon in Parramatta. I would depend on him to select me the correct overseer. ‘Mr Gonfleur has said I can fetch shepherds and hut-keepers from the Parramatta depot.’

‘My dear fellow, I trust you absolutely,’ said Charlie.

‘Then what, may I ask, are the details of your movements?’

‘Yass, and then I shall be back here within ten days. I intend to spend the early part of your setting up with you. Unlike Mr Finlay, I want to see this country which so excites you.’

And he smiled, and suddenly was crossing back towards me to shake my hand.

W
HEN SHE RECEIVED THE FIRST SECTION
of
Bettany’s Book
, Prim read it with a strange unease. Though she avoided returning to Australia, the idea of Dimp, happy and secure there, acted as a stabilising pole to what she thought of as her own rootless, intense life. But, knowing her sister better than anyone alive, and given that she had never fully liked D’Arcy,
she feared that Dimp’s happiness was somehow fragile and that her sister’s equilibrium, by some careless touch, could be destroyed. Some aspects of Dimp’s present enthusiasm spoke subtly to these misgivings.

AUSTFAM Headquarters
29th Ave East
New Extension
Khartoum
16 May 1989

Dearest Dimp,

A great pleasure to get back from an excursion of mine – to Nairobi in fact – and hear from you about Benedetto and these documents. I’m now re-reading that first section of Bettany’s more secret book. As for the Jewish great-granny, I agree with you: that is a novelty, and if I were younger I might find myself using it to alter my image of myself – even as an ego boost, to justify myself. You know the sort of thing: I carry persecuted blood, no wonder I was out of place in Sydney!

Now I don’t intend to use it like that. What good would it do me? What light would it cast? I can see you though, telling everyone about it – reiterating it. Especially to Bren. I wouldn’t be surprised if you started dividing the weekend between Mass with the Jesuits and the Bondi synagogue.

I admit what you sent me does read better than
Sheep Breeding and the Pastoral Life in New South Wales,
or whatever it’s called. But there’s something I feel have to warn you about. I know it’s boring, and I sound like a maiden aunt, but I must say it to you that you have a tendency to look for signs in the heavens, or signs anywhere. You mention ‘founding crimes’, and it’s a little thing, but it just sounds as if you might be getting yourself ready for something extreme. You use the phrase as if they’re crimes you might be bound to reproduce. You’re not.

Every person on earth has sixteen great-grandparents, including the one from which they get their name. We didn’t get what you insist on calling our beauty from this one woman, but from seven others as well. And similarly we didn’t get our souls from this one man and woman, even if we share their name – we got it from seven other men and seven other women as well. I know I already sound pompous, all this cautioning, especially since you’re the older sister, and it’s just a journal. But I don’t want you poring over it as if it’s some map of your own life. I feel it’s my younger sister’s duty to say this: ancestor worship is one of
the chief religions of the Sudan, but it is unnecessary to practise it in Double Bay.

Well, again I’m embarrassed to talk like this, but I can smell your worst ideas coming before you have them.

But I’ll give you I was engrossed at the first bundle of transcribed material. Here in good old Sudan, where the national grid is starting to go down regularly, or the hydro-electric station at the Rosieres Dam cuts out because of attacks from agents of the SPLA, I made sure to have a torch by my bed so that I could read it at a gulp.

I don’t intend to be influenced or haunted by it by day. There’s too much light here for that. And life is too busy. The Southern urchins we’ve all got used to meeting in the streets of Central Khartoum –
Shamassa,
they’re called, sunshine kids – have just been moved out of town to a stretch of wasteland beyond Omdurman, and Austfam are supplying two wells there, because there’s nothing otherwise. There’s a strong rumour that these kids are used as a blood bank for government soldiers wounded in the South. In any case, you can see that the sun and politics take away strength from us all here. Not what great-grandfather did!

In affection and well-placed suspicion,
Prim

P
RIM WAS CORRECT IN SURMISING THAT
from the first passage, Jonathan Bettany’s book engendered enthusiasm in Dimp. For her it was the authentic voice of Australian pastoral fervour, the joy, and in Bettany’s terms, the wonder, of taking and stocking pristine land. A new awareness of Australian history, by the time Benedetto handed the Bettany document to Dimp, was recasting the first graziers as heedless occupiers of tribal earth and dispossessors of the most ancient hunter–gatherer societies on earth. This new way of looking at Australian history, combined with the blandness of the way the whole business had been taught her as a schoolgirl on Sydney’s north shore, at first made Benedetto’s interest in old pastoralists seem very quaint.

But in her ancestor’s informal memoir she encountered the voice of a young man enchanted and enriched by the new world he entered and believed himself to be remaking. His was the wonderment of Adam before the Fall, and his innocence was a crucial part of the Australian record. The potent European dream of limitless livestock on limitless
pasture apparently realised in enormous New South Wales! Bettany’s discovery of Nugan Ganway engaged Dimp’s filmmaker’s passion in a way nothing else had since
Enzo Kangaroo
.

Along with Bettany’s journal, there were the letters of the literate Jewish convict woman, the Female Factory woman. These letters too Dimp began zealously to transcribe for her sister. For not only did she intend to use this material for her own purposes, she was not sure that Prim would deal with Bettany’s difficult handwriting, and knew she might use the narrowness of Sarah’s as an excuse not to read. In an attempt to find something more on this woman, Sarah Bernard, Dimp went to the New South Wales State Archives in Globe Street, a small alley down near the Quay, where she had sometimes saved Bren a few thousand dollars by researching the history of this or that mining lease.

She knew from the letters that Sarah Bernard had travelled to Australia on the ship
Whisper
. Dimp found from the microfiched muster for the ship that it had made an ocean transit of 130 days from Sheerness.
Whisper
’s Surgeon Superintendent, a man named Bugle, had written beside Sarah Bernard’s name a number of details: her place of trial, Manchester; her crime, ‘Stealing Clothing’, and her ship number, which was 97. She was marked as possessing ‘Reading and Writing’, and being ‘Married’. In the column headed ‘General Description’, he gave a summary of the appearance of this twenty-two-year-old on the eve of her first stepping ashore on the continent of Australia. She was: ‘5 ft 8 and 1/4 inches tall, dark complexioned, exceeding fair, eyes brown, no facial mark. Jagged scar between shoulder and upper left breast. Scar back of second finger left hand and back of right ankle.’

Dimp went through the list of all the women on board the
Whisper
– it came to nearly two hundred – and was somehow excited to discover that amongst all the red-faced, ‘plain’ and even ‘disagreeable’ females, there was an occasional ‘fair’, but no other ‘exceeding fair’. And since Bernard was also described as ‘dark complexioned’, ‘exceeding fair’ clearly did not mean blonde, but rather extremely beautiful, at least in Bugle’s eyes.

Excited by this touch of humanity in the system, even if it meant only a flicker of desire on the part of the surgeon, Dimp was enchanted to find that she could retrieve a forgotten convict woman’s looks at twenty-two from beyond that huge barrier of time. You couldn’t do that with free immigrants, she knew, since unlike Sarah Bernard, they had the freedom not to be defined.

Dimp looked up the report of Surgeon Superintendent Bugle – it was on microfilm copied from the Public Record Office in London. On all the long journey, Sarah Bernard had not consulted him. Women went or were taken to him with hysteria, pneumonia, catarrh, bloody dysentery and, occasionally, syphilis. Two of them died of scurvy and gastroenteritis, one perished of pneumonia, one of ‘a cerebral fever’, two of bloody dysentery. Surgeon Bugle, whose strong suit did not seem to have been gynaecological, mentioned no specifically female illnesses and wrote about his women as if they were male prisoners in petticoats. He complained that those who died on board had been too long held in English prisons beforehand. He did not want to be accused of any negligence himself.

The only Public Record Office document relating to the captain of
Whisper
was a letter from that gentleman dated March 3, 1837, and addressed to George Pulteney, Clerk of the Transport Board.

My Dear Pulteney,

I know you don’t have the supreme power you deserve with the Transport Board, but next time those gentlemen are all sitting around a table deciding how the business of taking women to Australia should be managed, and what the appropriate demeanour of all parties ought to be, perhaps you could point out the inadvisability of appointing Surgeon Superintendents who wish to run ships on evangelical and improving lines. I’ve had a most vexing journey, not in terms of the ship herself, though she’s a shallow-drafted little thing and swings about a lot.

But I am hugely vexed throughout by Surgeon Bugle’s management of the ship, and his unwillingness to listen to me, who have, someone should point out to him, made two previous such journeys. On
Nevis
and
Jerusalem,
good old Slattery the Surgeon Superintendent approached me before we left Sheerness and told me that he had always found it very suitable for the women to form associations with the sailors and unmarried garrison. The young women were thereby helped and protected, and their influence for good order on the prison deck was increased tenfold.

But Bugle comes aboard, declaring himself a Corresponding Member of the London Bible Society, for dear Jesus’s sake! He demands that I punish sailors who form associations with women on the prison deck! He’d rather chain the women than let them associate with my sailors, or the soldiers of the 40th. All very well, but this mode of proceeding creates its own toll in my opinion. On Slattery’s and my first voyage – on
Nevis
– only two deaths. On our second, only two. Bugle, trying to regulate even the passage of lewd sentiments between the crew and the women, limited exercise hours and put a strict limit to the number of mess orderlies on deck at the one time. And of course, outlawed dancing to musical instruments, a procedure which under Slattery kept the girls in good spirits and alleviated the lethargy of scurvy.