The Road to Gundagai (39 page)

‘They were glad to see him.’

‘I can imagine,’ said Miss Matilda dryly. ‘There are new wireless models coming out all the time. If the ones the Gibber’s Creek factory makes are superseded, they’ll all lose their jobs. We’re the only big employers around here. But Tommy was sketching a new valve or something last night. I had to remind him to come to bed. I can’t follow all those circuits and diagrams, but he seemed pleased with himself.’ She cast Blue a glance, then looked back at the road. ‘You woke him up.’

‘It’s having an elephant about the place,’ said Blue. ‘You can’t be depressed with an elephant in the home paddock.’

The car turned in at another big gate. Cars lined both sides of the driveway. A tent had been put up near the farmhouse — a comfortable-looking house but nowhere near the size of the homestead at Drinkwater — with tractors and other farm machinery scattered around.

‘What’s happening?’

‘An auction,’ said Miss Matilda crisply. ‘The Sawyers haven’t been able to pay their mortgage — not surprising with stock prices the way they are. The drought a couple of years ago didn’t help. The bank has foreclosed. Everything’s for sale today. Land, house, machinery, furniture.’

‘The poor people.’

Miss Matilda looked at her, amused. ‘Perhaps not,’ she said enigmatically. ‘Here.’ She handed Blue ten shillings. ‘You’ll need to register to make a bid. I’m going to register too. Bid on anything you like, but never more than threepence.’

‘Threepence? I don’t understand.’ What would be for sale here that might go for threepence? A chamber pot was worth more than that, even in times such as these.

‘You’ll see,’ said Miss Matilda.

Two hours later, she did.

‘And what am I bid for the potato harvester?’ asked the auctioneer wearily. ‘Pre-war but in good condition. Who’ll bid fifteen pounds? Fourteen? Twelve?’

‘Halfpenny,’ said a man nearby, dressed like most of the others in moleskin trousers, muddy boots, tweed jacket and wool tie. His skin was dark, Aboriginal dark, like many of the men here today.

Blue had never seen Aboriginal men in ties before, nor had she ever noticed any Aboriginal people in their audiences. The circus people wouldn’t turn natives away, but she knew that many in their audiences would either walk out if a black family had sat next to them or, even worse, have roughed them up before they even entered. Aboriginal families knew to keep away from white crowds.

The auctioneer looked at the bidder without speaking for a moment. He’d objected the first dozen times this happened, the tiny bid for a valuable lot. But now he’d accepted the inevitable. The one time someone had put in a bigger bid a small circle of men had closed in on the bidder till he managed a strangled, ‘Bid withdrawn.’

‘I have a bid of a halfpenny,’ said the auctioneer resignedly. ‘Do I have ten pounds? Nine?’

‘A penny!’ said Blue. It was the first time she’d put in a bid.

‘I have a penny? Will anyone make it eight pounds? Seven?’ The auctioneer paused. ‘Threepence?’ he asked ironically.

No one answered.

‘Going once. Going twice. Going three times. Sold to the lady in blue for a penny. Now this fine tractor …’

Faces grinned at her. Blue grinned back. It seemed she owned a potato digger. ‘What am I supposed to do with it?’ she whispered to Miss Matilda.

‘Wait and see,’ she said.

An hour later, the auction over, part of the crowd and the auctioneer gone, the rest gathered in the house for tea and scones with jam, pikelets, rock cakes and curried egg sandwiches, all served on a variety of plates. Presumably they’d been brought by women in the crowd.

‘Tea?’ The woman with the pot didn’t have a hat on, which made her one of the family here. But she didn’t look like someone who had just seen all her belongings sold, her home and all she owned lost to strangers.

‘Yes, please.’ Blue held out her cup.

‘Good turnout,’ said Miss Matilda. ‘Glenda, this is Blue Laurence; Blue, this is Mrs Sawyer.’

‘I can’t thank you enough for helping us today, Miss Laurence,’ said Mrs Sawyer, as she poured the tea. ‘Milk and sugar? It’s over there.’ She moved on through the crowd.

‘I don’t understand,’ said Blue.

Miss Matilda grinned. ‘You’re giving the potato digger back to them. Everything sold today is theirs again.’

‘I … see. But how did you make sure no one else would bid?’

The grin grew wider. ‘A spirit of gentle cooperation. Plus I suspect a little, er … persuasion … from Bluey and Ringer back there.’ Blue looked back to see two familiar stockmen devouring a gallon of tomato sauce on top of home-made meat pies.

‘It all comes right in the end,’ said Miss Matilda. ‘Another scone?’

‘Yes, please,’ said Blue. ‘I’ll get it. Would you like one too?’

‘Thank you.’ Miss Matilda turned to chat with a neighbour.

Blue looked at the faces of the crowd as she made her way to the tea table, the neighbours who would make sure that no bank dispossessed a family, a community that looked after its own and others too.

For the first time she understood that all the people saying ‘We’ll look after you’ weren’t necessarily saying that she was a poor, wilting flower who needed tending. Everyone needs help at times, she thought. Perhaps what they were really offering was a place in their web of friendship.

She ate her scone in silence, as Miss Matilda exchanged news with at least fifty people, pecking friends on the cheek or shaking hands — none of the men around here seemed to think it strange to shake hands with a woman. At last Miss Matilda handed her empty teacup to a girl in a well-ironed apron. ‘Thank you, Gladys. Tell your parents I’m so glad it’s all worked out satisfactorily.’

The girl grinned. ‘Yes, Miss Matilda.’

Miss Matilda leaned over and kissed the girl on the cheek. ‘You tell your dad from me it’ll be a good season next year. Good rain, good grass and prices up. Get the stock now, while they’re cheap.’

The girl nodded.

‘Come on.’ Miss Matilda turned towards the line of cars and sulkies.

‘Did you learn that from your great-grandmother?’ asked Blue. ‘About the good season next year?’

Miss Matilda grinned. ‘Auntie Love taught me about grass. My great-grandfather taught me about stock prices. Good grass means that the farmers who sold stock in the drought will be buying up again. The important thing is to stay out of debt. Drinkwater could afford to ride out the drought. We had plenty of hay, good water, and most importantly, no debt. The Sawyers had to borrow. It wasn’t just the repayments that crippled them, but the rising interest rates.’

The grin diminished to smugness. ‘But as soon as the bank foreclosed the Sawyers no longer had a mortgage to repay. Now they can start again, debt free.’

And you’ll keep an eye on them to make sure they don’t go into debt again, thought Blue. Exactly how many lives had Miss Matilda decided to manage? ‘Mr Thompson said you allowed a susso camp on your place.’

‘Not a camp,’ said Miss Matilda. ‘A settlement. They call it Riverview. Want to see it? I think the man you helped at the railway station is still there.’

Blue didn’t particularly want to meet him again. She was glad that he hadn’t been more badly hurt, but that evening had been too close to a nightmare. Nor did she want the heartbreak of another place like Hope Town. But there seemed no polite way to say so to this small, slightly ferocious woman.

‘Only take us fifteen minutes,’ said Miss Matilda crisply.

Riverview sat on a rise above the water, on a stretch of Drinkwater about three miles out of Gibber’s Creek. Miss Matilda was right: it wasn’t a susso camp, not the way Hope Town had been.

This was two rows of small square wooden houses — very small, each exactly the same, with a verandah that faced the river and a long stretch of vegetable garden below. On each side of the rows of houses were long low buildings, with long verandahs too, and beyond them paddocks with bony-hipped Jersey cows and scratching chickens. Out the front someone had inexpertly painted a large notice:
Riverview Estate
. Another hand had added in a small scribble underneath:
No slackers allowed
.

‘Single men in the dormitories on the left, women on the right. The houses are for families. All made from wood cut on the property,’ said Miss Matilda. ‘Most of the furniture too. My father built his house pretty much like these. Hardly a nail in it.’

Blue did a rough count of the houses. ‘Did you pay for all this?’

‘Not much that needed paying for. Even the shingles were cut here. They’re she-oak — easy to work with, even for a novice. Mr Sampson showed them how to do it all to begin with — he used to be Drinkwater’s manager. He’s in his nineties now, but he can still split a log or a shingle. Mr Lee helped them dig a water race from up the river, with channels down to each garden. Chinese market gardeners have been doing that for centuries. Well, maybe thousands of years.’

‘And everyone just pitched in and built all this?’

The grin appeared again. ‘No. Half the blokes didn’t want someone with a black skin — that’s Mr Sampson — or a Chinese man showing them what to do. Half of the rest said they had crook backs or some other excuse not to work up a sweat. Off they went. But the men and women who stayed — yes, they built all this. Kids too.’

‘What did you do for the ones who didn’t help?’

‘Not a thing. My land, my rules. Excuse me,’ she leaned out of the car and spoke to a couple of barefoot boys playing knucklebones in the dirt, ‘do you know where Mr Ben Atkins is?’

‘He the bloke the coppers knocked about?’ The boy spoke as if beatings from police were nothing new to him. ‘He’s got some relief work. They’re fencing the road across Muller’s Mountain.’

‘Thanks.’ Miss Matilda turned back to Blue. ‘Once the men have somewhere to live they can sign up for relief work. It’s only two days a week, but it gives them some cash in their pockets. With a roof over their heads here, and vegetables and milk and the susso rations, they do all right. It’s harder for the women.’

She shook her head. ‘What am I saying? Harder? It’s purgatory. Women don’t even get the susso rations, even if they’re widowed. No relief work either. The government says there’ll be no rations for women while there’s still a servant’s job going anywhere in Australia. How can a woman with three kids work as a maid, with a half day off a week and no one to look after her children? And a maid’s wages won’t support a family.’

‘So they come here?’

‘A few,’ said Miss Matilda shortly. ‘One of the charities up in Sydney pays their train fare. At least here they can help each other with childcare, and make a few bob selling vegetables and eggs and butter. And Sergeant Patterson is a good ’un. If the women send their kids to get the rations, he pretends there’s a husband feeling too poorly to come in.’

Blue nodded slowly. Everywhere they’d gone she’d seen bagmen, carrying their swags, but never a bagwoman. A bagman’s life must be hard, even dangerous, jumping the rattler. But she remembered the long line of women’s faces too tired even for sadness, waiting for soup in Sydney. How many of those women, and children too, would rather have been on the road, fishing by a billabong while their billy boiled, with rations in their sack to make a damper?

She looked at the boys in the dust, throwing their knucklebones up to catch them on the backs of their hands. ‘How can it be changed?’

Miss Matilda laughed.

Blue flushed. ‘What’s so funny?’

‘Most people say things like “The poor are always with us”. You assume that change is possible.’

‘Isn’t it?’

‘Of course. As long as enough people stop pulling their lace curtains across the windows so they don’t have to look at anything unpleasant.’ She started the car, then leaned out again to the two boys. ‘Hey, you!’ For the first time Blue heard the accent of a girl who had worked in a factory, not the owner of Drinkwater. ‘There’s a waterhole, two bends down Gibber’s Creek. Good fishing.’

The boys looked back at her blankly.

Miss Matilda sighed. ‘You can catch fish,’ she began. ‘Get a stick, tie on some string — ask Mrs Leaver how Auntie Mavis showed her how to plait string from stringybark. She’ll show you how to turn a mussel shell into a fish-hook too, or you can see if someone has a pin. Dig up some worms from the muck heap … Look, Mrs Leaver will tell you how to do that too. But I bet by dinnertime you two will have caught a fish this long.’ She stretched her arms out.

‘Coo! Really?’

The other giggled. ‘
Ooey Gooey was a worm, a big fat worm was he
… My mum won’t let me play with worms.’

‘She will if you can bring her a fish for dinner,’ said Miss Matilda. ‘Just don’t try fishing in the river till the flood goes down.’ She pulled the accelerator lever. The car spun away in a spurt of dust and gravel.

Chapter 34

The telephone call came while they were at dinner. The housekeeper answered it, then came to fetch her mistress.

‘Excuse me.’ Miss Matilda left the table, shutting the dining-room door behind her. Blue tried politely not to listen — or at least to pretend she wasn’t listening. The voices were too muffled to make out much anyway. At last Miss Matilda came back again.

‘Sergeant Patterson would like to speak to you,’ she said to Blue and Mah. ‘You are both excused. By the way,’ she added, ‘the operator will be listening to every word you say, so don’t say anything you don’t want the whole district to know.’

Blue pushed herself up from the table. Her scar ached. All this sitting in chairs and cars had torn it again. She’d had to ask Mrs Mutton for bandages, to wrap around her legs, hoping the blood would soak into them and not stain her new dresses.

‘Miss Laurence?’

‘Yes.’

‘Sergeant Patterson again here. I thought you would like to know that your friends have been released.’

‘But they said they’d murdered that man Syd!’ Too late, she realised that the word ‘murder’ would be halfway around Gibber’s Creek by tomorrow. And everything she and Mah had said to the sergeant before.

A chuckle from the other end of the line. ‘All he had was a bad headache, by the sound of it. I got onto the sergeant up there. He was charged with the disappearance of his wife and sister-in-law, but nothing came of it, as their bodies hadn’t been found. Sounds like everyone believed him guilty though.’