Our Sunshine: Popular Penguins (11 page)

‘Ned will have a child,’ he announced, ‘but none for Dan.’ And, his flare gradually fading, his father described for them a vision of a little girl, long-haired and pretty, swimming in a quiet creek, and she immediately appeared to him too, and he knew that this was his child-to-be. But a dark mass rose abruptly from below the creek’s surface, spreading and growing around this paddling child with her straight, streaming hair, and the mass engulfed her and she was gone.

M
AYBE
I dwell too much on dreams. They say the trouble with the Irish was that they relied too much on dreams and not enough on men and gunpowder. Whereas the English were shy on dreams as usual but had plenty of the other.

Well, we’ve got them all.

I have something to say
.

I have something to say.

At this stage, ladies and gentlemen, we might remind Mr Curnow to consider that tonight in the Glenrowan Inn, in the warmth and hospitality of the parlour of Ann Jones’s pub, he is privileged to be a witness to history. And how many schoolteachers, Mr Curnow, dream of that?

Any moment, when that train arrives from Benalla, the order of things in this country will explode to smithereens and be changed forever. Call it the opening blow.

Eh, Mr Curnow? Mr Stanistreet? And you, of course, Constable Bracken? Won’t you join us, gentlemen, in charging your glasses and drinking to the new Australia?

Thank you, Mr Curnow. My spirits exactly. Joe, Dan, please assist Mr Bracken to join the toast. Blast him to his feet if necessary. And then to Kingdom Come.

That’s better.

N
OW
I’
M
in full flight, the bloody cockatoo won’t stop chattering. Old misty-eyed Martin Cherry and his mates are starting up again: Ned, Ned, he’s saying your name. Who could tell in all that squawking? Now it’s woken up Mrs Reardon’s kids. Fixing its warty eye on me, shrewd as a witch. Tongue like a .44 bullet peeping out. The only word I can make out is
bastard
. Grizzling children and drunken fawning smiles everywhere I look.

Jesus, I’ve got to depend on these people?

Steve picks up my mood – and the cockatoo. He stuffs it in its cage, covers the cage with a coat. Cherry and his mates grumble, the bird flutters but wisely goes quiet.

I
have something to say! My friends and Messrs Curnow, Stanistreet and Bracken, your attention please!

Is that a noise? No.

I have an announcement, penned in the quiet of a recent hideout, that I wish to read. Lying low in caves, eating uncooked food, being tracked by blacks and hunted by police, gives you words and aims and concentrates your mind. Listen close and spread the warning wide.

Ahem
.

A Statement on Treachery, with Consideration to Recent Events.

By the light that shines, this is my warning:

Being pegged on an ant bed with your belly opened, fat stripped out, rendered and poured, boiling, down your throat, will seem the coolest of all pleasantries compared to that pleasure of pleasures I will give persons taking blood money from the police.

Fair notice to my enemies. (You know who you are.) Sell out your property, leave the State, give ten pounds of every hundred to the widow and orphan fund.

Neglect this warning and the consequences shall be a thousand times worse than Drought and Grasshopper Plague and Rust in the Wheat.

I am a widow’s son outlawed, and my orders Must Be Obeyed.

While God gives me strength to pull a trigger, if my people don’t get justice and the innocent aren’t released from prison, I’ll revenge everything of the human race.

It will pay the Government to give those selectors who are suffering in innocence their justice and liberty. If not, I will open the eyes not only of the police and the people but also the whole British Army. There will be no peace while the police are empowered to arrest a man and refuse him land because of his associates or utterances. I warn the authorities: beware your railroads.
And your coppers and your banks!

Because the police spies are afraid – or ashamed – to wear their uniforms, so every man’s life is in danger from me. As I was outlawed without cause, and cannot be held in worse regard, and as I can only die once, I seek revenge for the evil name given to me and my relations.

Horrible disasters shall follow if Fitzpatrick’s lies are not righted. Fitzpatrick shall be the cause of greater slaughter to the rising generation than St Patrick was to the snakes and frogs in Ireland.

If I had robbed, plundered, ravished and murdered everyone I met, my character could not have been painted blacker. But my conscience is as clear as the snow in Peru.

A sweet goodbye from Edward Kelly, a Forced Outlaw.

T
HANK YOU
, thank you, thank you –
How did that go over, Joe?
– Drinks all round, Mrs Jones. And please nail this epistle over the mantelpiece.

‘Jane! … Now I want a moment’s peace to talk to this elegant young lady.’

– If I were game I could just say that.

Or, ‘Jane, come outside and take the air with me. Don’t you think it smells of jungle?’

Jesus, in gaol all my wild-oat years! Never kissed or touched a woman younger than me. Face so shyly blushed and smooth. So strange and sisterly, seems wrong, but no. I think I’d prefer this less blatant hunger, a mouse’s earhole for a change. No more eyes lined with shrewdness, drink and compromise. Those sinews and soft muscles working visibly. She flows, and every move’s a dance.

Liquid moves, fresh eyes, shining hair, clear spittle on her tongue, pink gums. This changes things. Jane Jones.

T
O
J
ANE
(while sauntering, taking the air) I’ll quietly ask:
Did you like the part about the ant bed? It came to me while hiding in a cave in the Wombat Ranges. And from an adventure yarn I borrowed from Scott, the Euroa bank manager. (Plus a few other things!) This Apache tribe liked torturing white settlers with ants. They’d stake them out on ant beds in the desert sun. They didn’t care to learn their secrets, they just fancied the idea.

Have you heard of that before? With all the ants we’ve got I think it would work well here.
Ha, ha
.

Lying low like we are now, having to live in caves, you can’t help watching ants. (
I’ll go on in this vein
.) You learn small creatures’ lives. Eventually you can read rocks and soils like books. I’ve watched gravel fade, dust settle into crust and the second-by-second variations in the shadows. I’ve seen drips of water turn to stone that defied gravity and reason and assumed the shapes of lacy shawls and giant rashers of bacon. My buttocks (
pardon me
) can clock the different temperature changes in granite and sandstone. True, I can forecast the weather with my arse. (
Whoops!
) I’ve seen a hundred shades of lichen, the different moisture grades of moss. I’ve lived so quiet in limestone caves that owls and bats ignored me and spiders were impressed with my calm spiderness.

I’ve turned blood-red with cave mud until I looked like some underground formation. I’ve drunk groundwater so full of iron I pissed red. I’ve
been
a bloody rock.

I’ve spent a day watching a caterpillar die. Fell from a gumtree onto the rock beside me and I flicked it into a patch of sun among some sugar ants. I could’ve pushed it into the safety of shade or under a leaf but I was curious about its fate among ants. Well, they were in a frenzy in a second. Do you know that an ant kills a grub like a lion kills an antelope? Jumps on its back and bites it on the neck. Well, this grub twirled and spun in agony, and finally spiralled away into a pile of leaves. But here a new tribe of bigger ants were hunting. They were delighted with their luck but those other ants scurried in a bewildered way. Couldn’t get over it. Where’s our lovely grub gone?

Sorry for the caterpillar? Funny question. Maybe.
But not enough to save it
.

You know ants panic when a storm is coming? They up stakes and shift their camp. Friday night, the night before Aaron died, they swarmed into our blankets so we knew we were in for a storm. It struck quickly – hailstones like eggs, lightning, fierce winds. Branches splintered and trees toppled over us, roots and all. You could say the ants forecast Aaron getting it.

What do you want to know about that for? A sweet one like you. You knew Aaron? He didn’t miss many around here. And now he’s got a widow even younger than you.

Well, if you really want to know …

W
E LIKED
the idea of a full moon. So it had to be Saturday 26th June, this weekend. The timing was important. Aaron had to die early in the evening. The rails couldn’t be torn up until after the last passenger train passed through Glenrowan at 9 p.m. We expected the police to reach Beechworth with the news of Aaron later than night, and Hare’s police special to pass through here this morning, Sunday, the 27th.

That was the plan. Stage One. Well, it’s nearly midnight, Sunday. So where is it, Jane? Tell me why it isn’t here.

J
OE HAD
to be the executioner. Aaron was his schoolmate, his gaolmate, almost his brother-in-law. (I guess we were all that!) Police Agent Sherritt shopped us all to Hare, but it was worse for Joe. They were like brothers, comrades, all the rest. Chased girls together – and caught them too.

It takes a certain type of friendship to share a woman turnabout. A barmaid named Maggie who Joe was slipping out at night to see also caught Aaron out. When Aaron got married and still came bouncing round to see her, Maggie told him she didn’t go with married men. Cut him to the quick. This night she knocked him back again, and later in the evening caught him drinking with one of Hare’s detectives and glaring in her direction. While Aaron was out relieving himself the detective suddenly asked her about Joe, when she saw him and where. When Aaron came back and saw him questioning her his face went tight and sober and pale around the mouth. He looked like a man who’d made the mistake of his life, Maggie said.

I asked Joe whether it was hard shooting his oldest friend close up like that, in the face and chest.

He said it was easy once he knew for sure. Same as a kangaroo – no, the same as a steer. Someone else’s. The taste of blood came into his mouth then too, like he’d bitten his tongue. Warmish and sweet but without the pain.

What had made him angriest was when Aaron started putting on airs and graces with his police money and affecting an accent like a grazier’s. He forgot he was just some shitkicker’s son like us.

Yes, I guess he’s cold enough now to call him Judas. He offered to spy on us. Said he and Joe had been in crime together all their lives. Told Hare our plans, led him to our hideouts, wanted to get us shot or hanged. Take my word for it. Aaron had to go.

Jesus, wanting to be liked by both sides, giving secrets in order to be liked, taking money – how could that work? Hiding behind women’s and policemen’s skirts and still getting splattered like any soft-eyed roo shot by lamplight.

Aaron’s child-bride Mary took the murder very bad. Her mother too. They were both there at the shooting. The four troopers guarding Aaron were quite upset as well, if their muffled pleas from under the bed were any indication.

He and his father were always quarrelling over Aaron’s Catholic girlfriends – Joe’s sister Kate, my sister Kate too and finally Mary Barry that he married. Aaron didn’t share his old man’s Protestant beliefs, or his girls’ Catholic ones. Aaron believed only in the moment. Well, he’s had his.

B
UT THE
trouble with killing Aaron was that now he’d never know for sure why he’d done it.

Money was too simple. Their manner the day they rested in his hut at Sebastopol must have got his goat. Their new, no-bullshit, serious-outlaw air. They were stealing a lot of thunder these days and maybe Aaron wanted some limelight too. Plus the Maggie and Joe affair. Half-jealous over fame and sex and then Hare manipulating the rest. Putting ideas in his head. Telling him he was someone.

Just guesswork. But his mother had never trusted Aaron. She was a good judge of men’s characters, except when they were after her.

A
T NIGHT
she pads naked around the crowded, sleeping bodies, softly prowls the brushed-earth floor, the dark maze of the hut. Her wedding ring tings against the water dish, a knee creaks as she squats. A sloshing upward and fainter liquid pattering. Burning in the dark, his eyes feel they must be lighting up the room. His breaths whistle in his nose. It’s so quiet the towel rasps against her thighs; she must hear his raw eyes blinking. But she dries herself, then silence. For minutes she’s invisible, her outline fading in darkness, then she’s standing moonlit, motionless, at the window, staring out into the night. The layers of dark mystery now visible and triangle black on black. And then she starts suddenly –
Ohh!
– at something out there. Something looking in at her.

Her murmur brings a rattling snore from whatsis-name. His breath overtakes all air within the hut, his inside gases and sour skin a cloud from wall to roof to floor. Same age as me give or take a couple of years.

Always managing to flash it somehow. Sisters try to turn away, leave the room, but he’s onto that. Oh, Kate, Maggie, pass Daddy that towel/vest/shirt/boot/pair of long johns. Pardon old John Thomas, mind of his own, likes to see the light of day now and again. Don’t look at me like that, all churchy, we’re family now.

She’s sluiced you away, boyo! Wiped away your scum.