Illywhacker (3 page)

And what newcomer, seeing the hamper, the car, the excitement of the hostess’s eyes, would understand why Phoebe’s lips were so pale and eyes so dull?

Jack McGrath was a man who was happiest without a collar. He preferred his trousers a size too large and his boots loosely laced. You might confuse the roll of his walk with that of a sailor’s, but you have not made the study of walks I have—this was not a sailor’s walk, it was the walk of a man who has covered twenty thousand dusty miles beside his bullock teams. He had drunk champagne from metal pannikins and called it “Gentleman’s Grog”. He had slept beneath his wagon and on top of it. He had hidden his gold in a hollowed-out yoke and drunk from dams that held more mud than water. He had, before he became a rich man, eaten a picturesque array of animals, reptiles, and birds. But he was not, not in any way, upset by his wife’s restrictions in regard to picnics. “It was as if,” Phoebe said later, “he was
proud
of the whole nonsense mother went on with, as if it suggested some height of gentility and femininity few women might hope to attain. I don’t think he ever saw how bleak the picnic spots were. All he could see was an advertisement for the sensitivity of his wife’s beautiful skin. He was very proud of her.”

Good dear Jack would never understand why anyone would slight his wife. He could not see that there was any difference
between a picnic and having a drink with old A.D. (which he did often enough) in Finch’s Railway Hotel. He would never learn the difference between having a drink with a man and sharing a feed with his family. You never met a man who seemed to make so few social distinctions. He would have anyone to his house who would come—bishops and rabbit-ohs, limping ex-servicemen and flash characters from the racetrack. They brought him presents or took him down, told lies or their true life stories and he stamped his foot and filled their glasses and took them for joy-rides in the Hispano Suiza. He was one of the worst drivers I ever met. He had no feel for machinery at all. (In all the years I sold cars to cockies I only met three men who were worse, and one of them killed himself on that narrow bridge at Parwan North.)

It’s a strange thing that men who could handle animals with great feeling and sensitivity (and Jack was one of them) suddenly turned into clumsy oafs the minute they got behind the wheel.

There he goes—out the driveway, Molly sitting rigidly in the front, Phoebe hiding behind a wide-brimmed black hat in the back. They lurch on to Eastern Avenue. Jack rides the clutch. The engine roars. He grates it into second before he has sufficient revs and then shudders along beside the beach, heading north towards the brass tap at Balliang East.

To the McGraths’ neighbours the style of departure proved everything, i.e., that he had no right to own such a car. He had no right to be in Western Avenue at all or, for that matter, to send his daughter to the Hermitage. He had built an ugly yellow-brick garage to house his flashy auto, and offered his filthy hen eggs across the fence, holding them out in a hat whose sweaty felt radiated an offensive intimacy.

But as Jack drove north he gave not a thought to the effect of grating gears on neighbours’ ears. He held the wheel so tight his burly arms would later ache. He called this ache “arthritis” but it was caused by hanging on too hard. His wife suffered similar aches and pains which, although occurring in different places, were caused by the same fearfulness. Only when they were past the cable trams, the Sunday jinkers and the T Models did the older McGraths relax a little.

It was a hot day and the wind was dry. Phoebe sat in the back and reduced the landscape to its most pleasing essentials. She half shut her eyes and allowed her eyelashes to strain out that which was not to her taste. She removed those piles of hard
volcanic rocks, those monuments to the endless work of young soldier settlers. She eliminated those lonely treeless farmhouses with the sun beating on their shining gal-iron roofs. She abracadabra’ed the sheep with their daggy backsides. She turned those endless miles of sheep and wheat into something the men who farmed it would never recognize. All she retained was the cobalt blue sky above a plain of shimmering gold. You couldn’t make a quid in one of Phoebe’s landscapes.

She loved the hot dry wind. She liked speed.

“Drive fast,” she demanded. “Oh please, Mother, let him.”

Did Jack want to drive fast? I doubt it. As for Molly, I know she didn’t. But they knew also that this was what a Hispano Suiza was for.

“All right,” Molly commanded, “drive fast, as far as the saltpans.”

Jack tensed his great thick arms and gripped the wheel until his fingers ached. The Suiza’s eight cylinders responded to his large foot without reluctance and did not question (with the slightest hesitation or hiccup) whether he was man enough to manage it.

They made the wind rush faster for her. They made the flat dull land exciting. She drew down her eyelashes and thought of humming-birds’ wings. They spoilt her, of course. They flew across the saltpans at fifty miles an hour and didn’t even slow down.

There had been too many Germans in Jeparit. The minute the war was over Ernie Vogelnest sold up his farm there and moved away. It had been too hard to be with other Germans. It made the Australians afraid and then nasty. In 1917 there had been all the fuss when they found the dug-out on his property. They said German prisoners of war had been hiding there and he had been feeding them. The Jeparit paper as good as called him a liar. Well, maybe he had lied, and maybe he had not lied, but he was determined to live in a place where there were no other Germans and perhaps there was time yet—he would learn to speak so they could not know, to speak like his son.

When the war ended he bought this land at Balliang East. Not the best land in the world, but better than Jeparit. Five hundred
acres and, for an old man, he was working hard. There was another German twenty miles away, at Anakie, but he was happy with the land and the number of Germans.

They made fun of him at the shops at Bacchus Marsh when he went in for supplies, but at least no one said they were going to lynch him. When they said, “Ja, ja,” he grinned and ducked his head as if to say, “Ja, ja, I know.” Sometimes they cheated him, not much, just a little. He smiled. But now they had written things about him on his road, well, not his road, of course not (the road belonged to the Australian government) but the road that ran in front of his house. It was the soldier settlers, he supposed. They had painted an arrow with whitewash and written words, “Kaiser Bill, the silly dill”. He did not know what a dill was but it gave him a sick feeling in the stomach just the same. He had the feeling even now as he tried to remove the paint with turps, kneeling on the hot macadam.

He did not hear the Hispano Suiza until it was nearly on top of him. The wind was swinging around to the north-east and all he could hear was that bit of gal iron from the O’Hagens’ place: bang, bang, bang. Sometimes at night it kept him awake, but he did not like to ask the O’Hagens to shift it. He was a German and he wanted no trouble.

The horn blared and he jumped. He saw the car as the brakes squealed. He stood back from the road, his heart beating. The car then turned and lurched into the parking place in front of the Balliang East Hall which was opposite his house. He watched it. The people got out of the car and then passed out of sight behind the pine trees.

Ernest Vogelnest went back to his house. He climbed up on his tank stand from where he could see that the people in the big car were pretending to have a picnic.

It did not seem credible.

Phoebe could not believe her mother and father were not acting out a charade. They
must
know the A. D. Collinses would not come. They sat in the dead shadow of the pine trees. They had a good view of the rusted water tank lying on its side in O’Hagen’s paddock, and a collection of assorted rocks with a sheet of roofing iron lying across it. The north-easter occasionally picked up the
sheet of battered iron and then put it down again. They could also see an old rock fence, and, running parallel to it, a new barbed-wire fence. The paddock was half full of thistles, the white flowers from which drifted before the wind and one had lodged in Molly’s hair. Her eyes had pouches, and she had a tendency to jowliness but the hair was splendid, young hair, just like her daughter’s.

Molly talked on and on. She could not stop but her face was colouring and she started to complain about the heat.

Phoebe sat on the wooden steps of the Balliang East Hall, in front of its single door, beneath the peeling sign that read
BALLIANG EAST HALL
. 1912. She felt desolate.

“I wonder what has happened,” her mother said. “Unless there has been an accident.”

Phoebe sighed, just at a moment when the iron was not rattling and when everything, even the ewe caught in O’Hagen’s muddy dam a quarter of a mile away, became silent. And Jack, sitting twenty yards from his daughter, heard the sigh.

He was a plain man. He had a large, thick-necked, jut-jawed head. He had big square hands and a big square backside. “What you see,” people said of him, “is what you get.” But he understood his daughter’s sigh exactly. It slipped through his defences like a knife and made him feel small and foolish—Jumped-up Jack.

“Can’t you see?” he barked at his wife. “The snobs have cut us.”

It was at this moment, as Phoebe turned to avoid a painful scene, that she saw the aeroplane. It appeared, clear as day, between two branches of a pine.

She stood and walked quickly to the road, her pale yellow silk scarf floating behind her. Ernest Vogelnest, still on the tank stand, called his wife to watch.

The aeroplane was completely silent. It hung there, its propeller lifeless. She could see the struts and crosswires between the two wide wings. The pilot was suspended in a cockpit between the wings. The craft was sandwiched in the cobalt sky like a dragonfly in amber. A magpie sang, its notes as clear as glass. The craft came lower, became bigger, and still there was not a sound from it. It seemed to fly towards her. It seemed it must fly straight into her. She did not flinch, and then it paused, hovered, dipped, and just before it came gently to rest against the fence of Vogelnest’s front paddock, she heard a voice utter two words.

“You cow,” I said.

The problem in that area is the rocks. It’s not what you’d call Bad Land. There are few trees. You can get down in almost any of these paddocks. But there are rocks, and that was what I was thinking about as I kicked the rudder bar, and shoved the stick over. Frigging rocks!

There was a lot of low-level turbulence over the ploughed land round Bald Hill, and the nor’easterly was starting to gust as I brought the Morris Farman around into it. I was cursing Mr Farman for only putting one magneto on an eight-cylinder engine when he should have used two. I cursed myself for buying the damn thing. I cursed the damn public who would no longer pay the sort of money they had for a joy ride. I used to get five pounds for half an hour above Melbourne, and then it dropped to two quid in Ballarat. And now the best I could get was four and tuppence ha’penny from a lanky cyclist who wanted to look at the gravel pits at Commaida from the air. Four and tuppence bloody ha’penny. It was all I had, that four and two pence ha’penny, including the four threepences with old plum pudding still stuck to them. I flew him for half an hour and he complained about the bumps. Bumps!

I had just enough benzine to make it to Barwon Common in Geelong. God knows what I was going to do. I forget. I would have had a scheme. I always had a scheme. But when the magneto went I was in a mess.

I owed the RAAF five hundred pounds for the plane and parts.

I owed the publican in Darnham over twenty pounds.

I owed Anderson’s in Bacchus Marsh another fifty pounds for building materials for the house I was building for me and that girl from the Co-op. It was a nice little house. It was one of the nicest little houses I ever built but she wouldn’t even walk in the front door when she saw how I used the wire netting and mud.

“It’s mud,” she said.

“It’ll outlast you,” I said.

“It’s not your land,” she said. “It’s Theo Craigie’s and you’re trespassing.”

I was thirty-three years old and nothing was working out. I
built a lovely kitchen table for that girl. She was broad and strong and she had a nice laugh. We were going to have babies but she thought I was a liar and I found the cyclist and got his four and tuppence ha’penny.

I knew the land around Balliang East. I had sold plenty of T Models and Dodges round that area, to the Blowbells, the McDonalds, the Jenszes, the Dugdales. So I knew the rocks.

When I saw the shining new roof of Vogelnest’s new house I decided to put it down in his front paddock. I was a bit high for it. I really should have put it down in O’Hagen’s. But no matter what the
Ballarat Courier Mail
wrote about me frightening cattle and causing them to break their legs, a cocky liked to have an aeroplane just like anybody else did. A cocky liked to have an aeroplane in his front paddock. It added distinction. I probably had a plan to stay there a while and sell them a car.

I was still thirty feet up and doing thirty knots when I was over his cow bails. I shoved the stick down and landed so hard I half winded myself. There would, just the same, have been no problem, but as I came to the fence the left wing skid hit a pile of small rocks and stopped it dead. I heard the skid tear off. The plane swung and the lower right wing hit the fence. The wing struts crumpled and the fabric ripped.

“You cow,” I said. I could have cried.

I sat there for a minute. When I jumped down I nearly landed on a snake. He was a long king brown, sliding through the grass as silky as 50 SAE motor oil as it pours from the can.

The snake was lucky, and I don’t mean that in the sense that snakes are said to be symbols of good fortune. I didn’t even know what a symbol was. It was lucky because it was worth five bob to Mr Chin—who rightly belongs in a later part of the story—he was a herbalist with a practice in Exhibition Street, Melbourne.