Our Sunshine: Popular Penguins (8 page)

He can’t risk swimming the horses so they bring them along a spongy length of bank to Bungowannah, to take the punt across. But their appearance – four armed, washed-out and wary horsemen on dog-tired mounts, and with laden packhorses – plus their apparent intention to make a border crossing in dangerous weather, attracts the attention of a middle-aged woman coming towards them in a pony trap. Despite the rain she gives them a close scrutiny, and the urgent way she trots her ponies up after she passes arouses his suspicions.

‘Split up and we’ll meet a mile back downriver,’ he tells the others.

He guesses right about the informer. Only by tethering the horses among some field hacks in a muddy paddock and hiding in a lagoon do they escape the six-man police patrol that clatters down to the punt twenty minutes later.

So they spend three hours up to their necks in muddy water while the patrol splashes officiously back and forth along the bank. The police are uniformed and well-armed and their noisy orders carry over the water. There is much bold swearing and gesticulating in their oilskins and checking of guns and dispersing and trotting off through the puddles and then regrouping. Perhaps they intend their voices to carry. Down in the lagoon the feeling is that the police will never make up their minds, also that some of them might be keener to keep the gang at a safe distance than to catch them. Up to their chins in ooze, they’re grateful it’s late October, with a hint of humidity in the north wind. Anyway, it’s not much colder and wetter than being out in the weather. So they hide among the flotsam – well camouflaged too, with the four of them all soon as wrinkled and clay-stained as swamp-gum roots – until the patrol eventually rides off at dusk.

In the scummy eddies of the lagoon, platoons of ibises stride and peck and big groggy fish bob by. When they trudge out of the water at nightfall Dan and Steve scoop up two Murray cod each in their arms. These fish are monsters, three feet long. Gills full of muck, they’re too stunned and soggy to fight or swim away.

‘What do you want those bloody whales for?’ the leader complains. ‘We’re nearly drowned and travelling light anyway.’

They’re all shivering and waterlogged, but with silt clogging his eyebrows and browning his cheek-fuzz and downy moustache, his brother looks like some nappy water rat. Still he’s beside himself, grinning while his teeth chatter. ‘These cod are a delicacy,’ Dans says, as proud as if he’s caught them after a two-hour tussle. ‘And getting rarer in the river with all the new steamboats churning about. They’ll make a great meal on the other side.’

He feels like a weary parent, suddenly a generation older than this adolescent. And for that reason unable to refuse him. So, lugging cod, they squelch back to the horses, heave their bodies up, and ride back to the punt. It’s unguarded now but resting on the bottom since the police have holed it. The fact starts sinking in that this exercise is more than just a search. It’s a full-scale offensive. War has been declared.

‘Forget New South Wales,’ he says. They turn around and ride all night, cod thudding on their saddles, on side roads and stock tracks back into Victoria. They let the horses take their own pace, stopping only at dawn for food and shelter. Since his days on the prison hulk he doesn’t eat fish, and after a close look at their cloudy eyes Joe, too, decides he needs only a warming whisky. So Dan and Steve polish off a half-grilled cod or two and aren’t too sick.

Joe’s old haunts are nearest. After three nights’ hard riding they cross the range to Sebastopol, where his old friend Aaron Sherritt lives. At this stage of his life Aaron is still a bachelor living in a slab hut on his parents’ farm. Joe insists it’s a safe house and that the Sherritts are no lovers of the police.

‘The Sherritts aren’t Catholics – Old Man Sherritt’s a fucking Orangeman!’ Dan says.

‘Relax,’ Joe says. ‘John Sherritt’s always before the courts for some bastardry or other. Anyway, Aaron’s engaged to my sister. Jesus, you know he’s an old mate of all of you boys.’

The Sherritts take them in. Their hut is like a musty cave – no windows, and the only light and air comes through the open doors. Of course Aaron is keen to drink and sing and play his banjo but they’re so bushed they just roll up in their dank blankets under Old Man Sherritt’s prized portrait of Queen Victoria. This is before she’s made proclamations to have them killed, but even now she’s looking down her nose at them, those puffy little cod eyes following them around the tiny room like Jesus’ moist spaniel ones did from the wall above Mother’s bed.

They lie down to rest with the Sherritts’ eyes on them too. It’s only noon after all. Father and son are lunching at the table and well into the bottle they’ve been given. Aaron is singing some flattering made-up song about dead troopers and Stringybark Creek while Old Man Sherritt is munching lamb shanks and water biscuits with his whisky, cleaning his Enfields – a breechloader and an old muzzle-loading musket – and reminiscing about his days as a rip-roaring corporal in the Royal Irish Constabulary. In this ruckus their collie bitch scrapes her way indoors and towards the table. She’s dragging her hind legs along the rectangle of sunshine from the doorway; ticks have paralysed her and made her eyes gluey. She looks up through this slimy film at Sherritt senior, sighs and folds herself into three stiff sections – legs, body, head – at his feet.

Spitting biscuit crumbs, Old Man Sherritt booms, ‘Oh, we used these old boys, didn’t we?’ and pats his musket lovingly. The whisky’s already turned his cheeks all friendly. ‘When the British Army got their new breechloaders they passed over these old gadgets bloody quicksticks to the Royal Irish. Well, we got some Tykes with them anyhow.’

‘Olden days, Pop. Long gone,’ Aaron says, plunking on.

The leader clears his throat and opens an eye. ‘Joe?’ he murmurs.

‘Four tired Tykes right here, Mr Sherritt,’ Joe says. ‘But we’ve all got wide-awake Colts under our blankets.’

Sherritt blinks, and frowns as if something important has just occurred to him. ‘*Course they had their misfiring difficulties and slownesses,’ he goes on, laying the musket on the table with a rosy smile. ‘Otherwise we wouldn’t have taken such a shine to these,’ he says, picking up the other weapon, sighting along the barrel, putting it to the collie’s velvet ear and firing.

Immediately they’re at the table, stumbling in their socks and underwear, slipping in dog blood, unsure where to point their Colts. Aaron’s father is already resting the rifle across his knees and pinching his waxed moustache tips – orange from tobacco and already turned up smartly – into new assertive points.

‘Daddy, she might’ve got better!’ Aaron says.

‘We’ll never fucking know,’ says Old Man Sherritt, reaching for another shank.

They decline the Sherritts’ offer of overnight shelter and at dark they rouse themselves from the floor and ride across the flooded Oxley Plains with four new horses Aaron has picked up from the Mob, their other four as spares and two pack animals. Riding beyond their exhaustion, they move through Everton and Wangaratta after midnight and head up into the thickly forested hills and crevices of the Warby Ranges. The land is drier here, and safely rugged, safe enough for them to keep riding into the crisp morning.

In the thermals whistling kites soar in pairs, buoyant and easy, then drop, shrieking, after rabbits. Sun glances off the granite shelves where black snakes and copperheads have come out to bask in new skins. Dizzy in its glare, they climb higher into the hills, gritty eyes drawn every so often to those tall and isolated ghost gums topped by wedge-tailed eagles’ nests, boldly conspicuous platforms seven, eight feet across, with clear views of the surrounding territory. Rounding a bluff, they come upon one wedge-tail tearing at a dingo pup. Everyone stops, hands drop automatically to guns but, strangely, no one shoots. Then the day extends into a frozen moment of fierce defiance, a frowning standoff, before the eagle grips its meal and the party shakes off its self-consciousness – its leaden, human foreignness – and watches it start arrogantly into the sky. It trails long streamers of fur and entrails. Its claws grip without mercy but how admirable the languorous way its wing tips caress the air.

It’s now November, the favourite pale-yellow time of early summer, and they’re back in a place they know well and which is well aware of them.

F
or six weeks after Stringybark all this summery country becomes a black and white Inferno, and he the Devil.

From city desks and drawing boards come dramatic representations, in words and pictures, of the sombre ravines and precipices, the jagged crags and scars of the monster’s territory. This is Hell’s gaseous fire lifted holus-bolus from the depths and thrust into the tender and defenceless features of Victoria. And there in the centre of the holocaust stands Satan with his eyebrows meeting in the middle, eyeteeth glistening and shotgun smoking.

That is the view from Melbourne. Meanwhile Satan is drinking ale in a hammock in the hills with his shirt off and his eyes and ears open. He’s reading the papers and listening to cicadas.

He takes in all the rumours and ballyhoo. They’ve escaped to New South Wales, South Australia, America – no, the Cape of Good Hope. A Sydney shipmaster swears he sold them tickets to Cape Town. They plan to storm Pentridge prison and rescue his mother. He’s gathering an army of angry rural selectors and city workers to overthrow the government and found the Republic of Northern Victoria.
Is he, indeed?

And while he takes the dry and drowsy air, the press is lecturing the government and Chief Police Commissioner Standish on sparing no expense to run the murderers to earth, blah blah. In other words, Standish should pull his finger out and it wouldn’t hurt his men to do the same.

The papers abuse the police for creeping in tentative circles around the places they’d been spotted. First, Superintendent Nicolson had set out to catch them on the Murray riverbank, sending a party of troopers on ahead, then dispatching himself to the border by first-class train. (When he arrived, his cheerful blacktrackers reckoned they had only missed the gang by a fortnight.) Then, after two days’ cautious ruminating, Inspector Brooke Smith had led twenty-two troopers out from Wangaratta into the foothills of the ranges. But coming across a lame packhorse the gang had left behind (Brooke Smith saw its police brand – it was Lonigan’s horse, taken at Stringybark Creek), such unpleasant premonitions came to him that he’d ordered his men straight back to barracks.

So when a sighting is reported at the Sherritts’ hut at Sebastopol, Chief Commissioner Standish decides to stop this rot and – as soon as he’s fulfilled his social obligations at the Melbourne Cup – lead the troops himself. Maybe it was the association with a famous British victory.
His own Charge of Sebastopol!
To bolster his twenty police he even deputises thirty civilians, mostly wealthy squatters. But not all.

And so reports travel the other way as well, to the man in the hammock. Of the police and vigilantes riding through the night to the shack at Sebastopol. Of Chief Commissioner Standish watching from the brow of the hill, like the noblest general, while Nicolson leads the midnight charge recklessly down the slope, rampaging through the Sherritts’ rocky home paddock and through their marshy creek and up to their hut. Of Nicolson throwing himself off his horse and bursting through the door, bumping Constable Bracken, whose gun went off. Of all the other troopers and steamed-up amateurs, excited by the gunshot, crowding inside too, fifty armed panickers cramming into this twenty-by-twenty-foot hut, cursing and waving their rifles and trying to strike matches in the dark and overturning the Sherritts’ furniture and pulling blankets off their beds looking for outlaws.

And of there being no one there, not a dog to bark, not even a Sherritt. (The gang, of course, hadn’t been there for six or seven days.)

Of the police, frustrated but still fired up, then unsuccessfully raiding the Byrnes’ house and being sent packing by Joe’s indignant mother.

Of the Sherritts next morning marching up to the by now exhausted police party, the old man in high indignation, complaining of the attack on the home of such a loyal Queen’s man.

And of Aaron, in quite a different mood (appearing, according to observers, urbane and confident and affecting the rounded tones of the rural aristocracy), approaching the Chief Commissioner for a chat.

I
can’t hear myself think! Someone rouse Orlando and tell him the lion wants feeding. And stop his monkey doing that – there’s ladies and children present!

–
Did you hear what Dan here said? Monkey reminds him of Sir Redmond Barry when he goes at it hammer and tongs like that.

Hello, hello, listen up just a minute while I read out this cutting from the
Police Gazette
. This is a list of the field equipment issued to each trooper engaged in what the government likes to call the Hunt (exclusive of uniform and weaponry of course):

Two rugs, a rolled blanket, a spare undershirt and drawers, two pairs of socks, a valise, two shirt collars, a comforter, one cloth and one waterproof topcoat, leggings, a hammock, a sheet of waterproof, a tent 6 feet by 8 feet, books, a lantern, a bush knife, cutlery, cup and dishes, spare trousers, spurs and an air pillow.

Grog and food also not included. Or the strychnine, arsenic and bribe money. Or what I hear’s the newest anti-Kelly thrill: the cannons.

But, see, they’re all as snug as bugs in rugs. Just the ticket for comfy riding in the country on double pay, for seducing country girls, for moving up and down the railway line at a gentlemanly distance from the enemy. That way you don’t get to be another Kennedy.

Reckon they could all do with a bullet in their air pillows.

– Just top it up, thanks, Mrs Jones. Same again for everyone! No, I won’t join in the chorus – a little hoarse – you go ahead though
.

No more sherry for Judge Barry, he’s inflamed enough already.