Our Sunshine: Popular Penguins (5 page)

In the struggle he lands in the dust and the mare gallops away. I run to catch the horse and Hall tries to shoot me! Snaps four shots at me with his Colt – and misses. So I stop and stand the stillest of my life while he comes up, trembling, says I’m arrested, and cocks the gun again.

What can I do to stay alive but dummy, then jump at him, grab the gun with one hand and his collar with the other?

The problem is, do I hit him now? Pound him senseless, put in the boot? A little Beechworth stomp I learnt inside? Ha! I’m still on a bond from gaol, so if I hit him to save myself, I go back in – and my sureties lose their bond money. And if I don’t, he shoots me!

So I trip him, throw him in the dirt, keep tripping and throwing him until we’re across the street – about the spot where Mrs O’Brien’s hotel stands now. There’s a post-and-rail fence, and I throw the coward on it on his belly. I have to get his gun, so I straddle him and root both spurs into his thighs while he roars like a calf and shifts several yards of fence. And he’s still gripping his gun like grim death.

All the while he’s yelling and soon two blacksmiths and five other gawpers jump in to help him. I still can’t fight them back and break my bond. They get ropes and tie my hands and feet. Hall pistol-whips me so hard across the head that when my mother comes for me, she tracks us across the street and into the cells by my blood trail in the dust.

It’s another yellow summer’s day when I’m loaded in the cart for court, in irons, and roped to the seat for good measure. Three years’ hard labour for feloniously receiving a horse. Only eighteen months for Wright, who stole it, and for Hall a cash reward from the local squatters for putting us away.

N
O
, M
R
C
URNOW
, I was never convicted of actual stealing, though thanks for asking. But I have a confession for you. I wholesaled and retailed more horses than anyone in Victoria – except for Constable Flood. Flood used to claim all the stray horses listed in the
Police Gazette
. Sold most of them to the navvies on the railway line. One bay cob he stole and sold four times before the line was finished. Meanwhile he was gaoling selectors’ children just for petting squatters’ ponies. Arrested Dan aged five or six for riding one. Locked him up. Locked up my mother for complaining. Even the magistrate, a squatter himself, laughed that one out of court.

Ho-hum. Next question.

He shakes his head, tut-tuts in understanding. But his eyes, the set of his mouth, say otherwise. He thinks my reasons for embarking on this campaign are trivial.

Bloody schoolteachers.

S
our, spermy smells of gaol again and this time rotting seaweed too. This time, in irons, he’s in a road gang in the May Day Hills, then Pentridge, then a prison hulk, the
Sacramento
, anchored in Hobson’s Bay off Point Gellibrand. There goes his youth into the official particulars:
Height 5 feet 10 inches, weight 11 stone 4 pounds, sallow complexion, hazel eyes, dark brown hair, broad visage, low forehead, eyebrows meeting, first growth of a beard, age 15 years 9 months
.

Nine scars listed on his face, running north to south.

Sallow complexion! Low forehead! Eyebrows meeting! Strong evidence of his criminal nature, if not membership of the apes!

Those old fishy prison lags not put off by scars and fierce eyebrows give the boy a try. He can state that none of them succeeds. (Every prisoner claims that, but convicts can pick the truth. Something missing in the eyes thereafter gives it away, they say; the spark goes out.) Most of them he just glares at and says nothing. Those toadfish that keep trying, or gang up on him, he warns he’ll kill.

‘All day,’ he says, ‘I’m handling picks and bars and sledgehammers, and handy with them.’ He’s in a work party of trustees quarrying bluestone and building piers around the bay. ‘You won’t always be together,’ he says. ‘You’ll need to sleep sometime, and without dreaming of a crowbar through the skull.’

These gaol dregs are so dense you’ve got to get it across that you’re quite prepared to die yourself before they take the message in, before they understand the fact of that calm and tight-closed fury and give up.

But one afternoon behind the Newport breakwater, one lag’s so crazed he won’t. He pulls out two ugly things, one a gaol-made knife, grins another sickly grin and makes another stab. The boy just shrugs and quickly moves. In fact, he doesn’t need a pick or hammer with all the man’s got on his mind. He takes one cut on the elbow, whips a spiky branch of kelp across the straining face and the lag trips on his own dropped pants and without fuss has his jewels stamped in the sand.

When he comes off the hulk he’s just eighteen, six foot, with a beard. Double the scars. A quieter man who hates the smell and sight and motion of the sea. At least now he can imagine hell: a greasy winter shore bisected by a loamy rivermouth, a city’s slimy bay, froth-stained with tar and sawdust, phlegmy flotsam, puffy things with pecked-out eyes. And on the high-tide line, strings of smelly sea-grapes pretending to be rosaries.

Well, why not? He’s seen the sea as gaoler, molester, killer – and graveyard, too, for countless bloated cats and dogs, several cows, two drunkenly shotgunned sea lions, one pig and three people, one a street-girl still in her stays but minus her head. He’s jumped aside as four spooked Clydesdales bolted a dray of pitch and bluestone foundations off the end of the Gellibrand pier like it was a cartload of feathers. And seen them every day for a fortnight after, in frozen frenzied gallop down below, still in harness, crabs and toadfish politely diminishing them from the lips and nostrils backwards. Until a pack of tiger sharks with a taste for everything but the stone and iron wheel-trims cancelled the tableau in twenty minutes.

He’d face the gallows before doing it again.

S
he’s got a shock for me, she says, as I walk in the door. She’s marrying George.

George?

The baker. The American.

Well, she’s right. I’m shocked. Coyly asks me to be a witness. Everything’s so wrong, I squirm. I’ve just got out of gaol. Can’t I sit down first, have a drink, take my boots off? She’s a flickery version of herself, she’s lost her grip. She mixes frowns and giggles and holds up bolts of cloth for me to nod at. A wedding gown! She skids around the house, not finishing jobs, ignoring children, dabbing at her hair like she’s eighteen, not a widow.

George can get the cake for free!

He doesn’t much fancy the Pope, the groom announces, if it’s all the same to her, so they do the deed in Benalla according to the rites of the Primitive Methodists. Well, who’s ever heard of them?

Of course he doesn’t last the distance. Soon rides smiling down one Sunday morning to the hawker’s wagon for a new axe-head and forgets to bring it home, or himself with it. Children numbers nine and ten are his. George M. King was his full name, not the best advertisement for California, Protestants or the baking trade.

H
e hasn’t been as bone-and-muscle tired as this since she married King. For a month after the wedding he’d just kept drinking rum, more or less forgotten to eat, then woke one morning with a violent craving for the Diggers’ Special at the Bellevue Tearooms in Beechworth. The Pork De Luxe With Eggs. This feast was a legend in the district. Streaky bacon, fried pork steaks, smoked shoulder ham, a slab of brawn, a bottom stratum of boiled trotters, all neatly layered in a mound, grouted with navy beans and crested with four fried eggs so that the pierced yolks flowed down the hill.

He ate the lot before the eggs had dried into a trickle, stirred three sugars into his milky tea, barely made the street outside. Great rattling, gripping gurgles shook his bowels. Only nineteen and shitting sheets of water like an old cow in a lupin field.

In that month, spaces where his memory used to be were filled with sentimental confidences and pointless arguments, surprised strangers’ busted noses. Sometimes after blurry midnight flurries with seasoned barmaids by the Broken River, he woke alone with blistered eyelids to frightening crow calls in the high sun-glare and thought himself pecked blind and hollow.

That month he had to keep one eye closed to focus on what and whom he was doing. One eye closed against the savage sunshine, the scathing peacock, on the rare times he rode home.

Something had to happen, better or much worse. Maybe a tiger snake bite while sleeping out. A final drunken roll down the riverbank. Who’d have thought him lucky to be arrested for riding (while passed out) across a footpath? There were burrs in his hair, grass and piss stains on his pants when they took him in a cart, unconscious, over the Broken River to the Benalla police station. Here a Sergeant Whelan, who remembered him from other matters, was in charge. Whelan took three troopers, Constables Lonigan, Fitzpatrick and O’Dea, along next morning to escort him – now on his feet, just – across the road to court.

As if four men weren’t safeguard enough for one hungover youth, Fitzpatrick decided to handcuff him too. At this the prisoner stirred, swore loudly and lashed out. Fitzpatrick grabbed him by the throat and Lonigan the scrotum. Lonigan held on and on, and in this way they dragged him across the street and into the court.

By this time he was sharp with pain and fury, snapped out of crapulence. His drink was hocussed, he insisted to the magistrates, to get him back in gaol. He was loud, alert, persuasive, and, surprisingly, let off with a fine.

But he wasn’t finished. On the courthouse steps he yelled a threat. Said he’d never shot a man yet but if he did, so help him God, Lonigan would be the first.

D
id you hear that down the back? The lady said what a pity,
ahem
, such a strapping young fellow should have become an outlaw and did I ever consider going straight?

Madam, I must say it’s not as cut and dried as that. Things flow over into other things. You don’t wake up one morning saying, I’ve seen the light, today I’ll toe the line, be the coppers’ boy. But you could say that in the mid-seventies I had two years of intense law abiding.

I worked as a timber feller for Saunders and Rule, cutting sleepers for the Wangaratta–Beechworth railway, then for another sawmiller, Heach and Dockendorf, in the Mansfield district, then back to S. and R. as sawmill overseer at Bourke’s Waterhole. When the sleeper contract ran out I went prospecting up the headwaters of the King River and found commercial gold on Bullock Creek. Then cut and shaped thirty cartloads of quarry stone – using my Point Gellibrand experience – for a squatter’s homestead.

Also had some honest paid fun, you’ll be pleased to hear, trick-riding around the country shows and boxing for fair purses. You’re speaking to the unbeaten heavyweight boxing champion of northeastern Victoria.

Thank you, thank you, very kind.

I
CAN
bend from the saddle at full gallop and snatch a lady’s handkerchief from the ground. I can stand and lie on the saddle at full gallop. I can jump fences kneeling on the horse’s back.

Beat Wild Wright in the yard of the Imperial Hotel, Beechworth, in 1874. Twenty rounds, bare-knuckle. Officially organised – timekeeper, seconds, referee. Wright six-one and fourteen stone, me one inch and two stone less. Knocked him out in the twentieth. Anyone can look it up. Teach him to lend me that postmaster’s mare.

Some women, not the youngest ones, like such shows. Like to see a strong younger man wounded but prevail, bending easily to snatch their handkerchiefs.

S
he packed a generous wicker basket; she’d been on many picnics. She laid a woollen rug on layers of pine needles and angled between two pine trees so the sun divided it. Explained that this way we’d be both warm and cool. Then she smoothed it, laying fingernails lightly on my wrist, my upper arm, in passing. Like a lorikeet’s claws, soft but serious. You knew they rested there only momentarily and could scratch if they wanted, but were grateful for the favour. She pecked at this, nibbled at that, peered at me intently from time to time with her face half slanting away to look at me better, like a brilliant rare bird on a stump.

‘All that cutting stone and so forth, no wonder you’re so hungry,’ she said. ‘Won’t it be a lovely house?’

I’ve always liked the sighing sound air makes in a pine tree, like wild women’s whispers. One side of her mouth turned up, the other down. A small mole above it got pursed up when she hummed opera.

‘Indeed,’ I said, unable now to imagine her ever indoors. I gulped down every foodstuff, couldn’t stop from eating.

Shapely lips started things. Then I did.

She dismissed the picnic with a wave. She brushed aside the bread and gammon and satsuma-plum jam, the sliced muskmelon, the lemon barley water, and lay back on the rug. The crickets paused, the breeze dropped dead. Never seen such sights in daylight. Never seen such keen foam down there before, and the colour on her cheeks and neck went pink, then scarlet, like those inland salt-lake parrots they sell in town. Lost in herself like younger women never are – a little pressure here, just there, oh, yes. Isn’t that a funny place to feel such sensations, the artery running smoothly into there, pumping like a honeyeater’s heart.

Little grass-ticks scurried up my legs and burrowed in my thighs and I let them. Sunshine on her alabaster belly and her birdcalls.

J
ESUS
,
PICNICKING
gives you an appetite. Buttering another crunchy bun and munching fast – crumbs exploding from my lips – I say, ‘It’s probably not the time to mention that I once took a thoroughbred or two of his. For his own good your husband ought to change his brand. I didn’t even need to burn it out and brand them again.’

Explained how easily I plucked the hairs and pricked the skin with iodine, made the C into a perfect Q for Quinn, my mother’s maiden name – and my rowdy relatives’. ‘Now they’re cantering happily in New South Wales. The horses, I mean.’