The Imperialists E-Book

Vivian Stuart

• Herausgeber: Skinnbok
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Serie: The Australians
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 406

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

The twenty-third book in the dramatic and intriguing story about the colonisation of Australia: a country made of blood, passion, and dreams.   A new century has dawned as Australia forms their country.    New hopes characterise the lives of the young Australians. Some had to the Outback in search of gold and glory. Others find their fulfilment in politics and seize power in the newly-formed country. Some are even moving north to conquer new lands.

Leseprobe

The Imperialists

The Australians 23 – The Imperialists

© Vivian Stuart, 1990

© eBook in English: Jentas ehf. 2023

Series: The Australians

Title: The Imperialists

Title number: 23

ISBN: 978-9979-64-248-0

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchase.

All contracts and agreements regarding the work, editing, and layout are owned by Jentas ehf.

The Australians

The ExilesThe PrisonersThe SettlersThe NewcomersThe TraitorsThe RebelsThe ExplorersThe TravellersThe AdventurersThe WarriorsThe ColonistsThe PioneersThe Gold SeekersThe OpportunistsThe PatriotsThe PartisansThe Empire BuildersThe Road BuildersThe SeafarersThe MarinersThe NationalistsThe LoyalistsThe ImperialistsThe Expansionists

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What’s Australia? A big, thirsty, hungry wilderness, with one or two cities for convenience of foreign speculators, populated mostly by mongrel sheep and partly by fools.

— Henry Lawson, Australian poet and storyteller

One who would travel this country for pleasure would, go to hell for a pastime.

— R. T. Maurice, Australian geographer

Australian History does not read like history, but like the most beautiful lies. It is full of surprises, and adventures, and incongruities, and contradictions, and incredibilities; but they all happened.

— Mark Twain, an American tourist

Prologue

“If you ask me, sir,” said Lieutenant James Camber, “there are some parts of the British Empire that I’d just as soon give back to the natives.”

Captain Andrew Broome, Royal Navy, turned to his junior officer and chuckled. “I think you have a point there, James, though I doubt the Colonial Office would see it your way, or the British people either.”

Standing at the rail of his ship, HMS Durable, Captain Broome took in the scene before him. The vessel lay at anchor in Port William Inlet on East Falkland Island. On shore the few clapboard houses of the town of Stanley overlooked the harbour, their roofs painted in gay colours, as if to offset the drab, chill landscape of this outpost of the British Empire. For the first time since Durable had steamed into the area of the Falklands, the sun was shining, and the captain was surprised to find that there was, after all, some colour on these islands in the South Atlantic.

Although Captain Broome, an Australian by birth, had been baptized Andrew, his most striking feature — the rust-red hair inherited from his father — had given him the nicknames by which he had always been known, Rufus or Rufe. Indeed, he could not recall the last time anyone had called him Andrew, and he suspected that some of his fellow officers and men did not even know his true given name.

On deck he was a tall, formidable figure, bulky and snug in his winter blues and cold-weather gear. His greatcoat collar was turned up, and he stood with his hands in his pockets, his visored cap pulled low over his eyes. Even in the summertime it could be chill in the latitudes beyond fifty degrees south.

“It takes a sailor to appreciate the extent of the empire, doesn’t it, James?” Rufe commented.

“That it does, sir,” the lieutenant answered.

“As for me,” Rufe went on, “I’ll be glad when this voyage is over and we’ve reached home port in Sydney. D’you know that in my thirty-odd years in the navy I’ve barely set foot in my native land? My family are mostly in Sydney now, and I haven’t seen some of them more than half a dozen times in all those years. It’ll be good to be back there.”

“I can imagine it will be, sir,” the lieutenant replied. Then, seeing a hint of motion at the coaling station on the Stanley wharves, he lifted his binoculars. “Signal, sir. They’re ready for us.”

“Very well,” Rufe said. “Make preparations to get under way, Lieutenant.”

The Durable was a Havoc-class torpedo-boat destroyer, although most Royal Navy men referred to her and her class simply as destroyers. She was 180 feet long, displaced 320 tons, and mounted three 6-pounders and a 12-pounder, in addition to her three 18-inch torpedo tubes. She had been built to serve defensively against enemy torpedo boats and offensively as a torpedo boat to attack larger ships. Why a war vessel was assigned to duty in these cold and largely empty South Atlantic waters would have been a mystery to her captain and her crew, except that wherever the British Empire was, there, too, was the Royal Navy.

The empire in the Falklands was evidenced by the Union Jack flying over the coaling station in Stanley. The empire extended even farther south, across the Drake Passage to the South Shetland Islands just above the Antarctic Circle and — at least in claims — beyond that to Antarctica itself, to the storm-driven snows and the eternal ice of the southernmost continent.

After taking on a full load of coal, Durable was covered with black dust. The crew, grumbling as all sailors do, turned out to spit-shine the ship, seeking out all the tiny places on deck tainted by coal dust.

The weather closed in with fog so thick that one could not see the brightly painted roofs of Stanley. Finally, when visibility permitted, Rufe took Durable out into the open sea. The Antarctic summer was coming, and Rufe’s orders were to use the days of almost unending light to explore the seas around the icy continent. He set a course for the South Orkneys, sighting Coronation Island on a glowering day that threatened storm. Past the Orkneys he gave the order to steer due south, into that part of Antarctic waters known as the Weddell Sea.

Durable had not been designed for the comfort of the men who lived in her. The wind whistled through the open bridge, bringing with it the scent of the ice cap, and the officers’ and the crew’s quarters were inadequately heated. The ship pitched and tossed as around her the seas towered up, dwarfing her. When she was in the trough of a wave, her stacks were lower than the crest. The wind was holding at about force seven; on land such a gale would sway whole trees, but it was not unusual at sea, particularly in these latitudes.

As the icy swells grew in size, the seas reaching ninety feet, Durable’s passage became a carnival ride. She was quartering the swells, and that angle of attack gave her all of the motions that a floating body can achieve: up, twist, twist again, and level out momentarily, then dive, twist, and thunder down into the trough, with the cold spray driving all the way back past the forward gun turrets.

“Rather a spectacular show,” Rufe Broome commented. Although he was all navy and had been since the age of fourteen, Rufe had an easy way with his junior officers, so long as they did not try to take advantage of his amiability.

“I’m quite sure there’s a misunderstanding somewhere,” James Camber replied. It was his watch, but the captain was on the bridge with him, both officers bundled into their coldweather gear. “Are you sure our orders aren’t to sail straight for the Coral Sea?”

Rufe laughed. “Too bad you’re not the senior officer. If you were, I’d pretend ignorance and let you interpret our orders in just that way.” Rufe would have liked nothing better than to have been able to sail straight to those balmy waters off Australia’s northeastern shore.

The Durable’s job in the frigid Weddell Sea was to take weather observations and investigate the conditions of the ice packs. Afterward she was to proceed westward through the Drake Passage, sailing as close to Antarctica as weather permitted until she reached the Ross Sea and the Ross Ice Shelf — a frozen mass almost the size of France.

Down here at the bottom of the world a relatively short journey took a ship quickly across many degrees of longitude; accordingly, the run from the Weddell Sea to the Ross Sea would bring Durable from a point south of South America to a corresponding point southeast of Australia and New Zealand. After the tortuous haul past the Antarctic coast, Rufe would at least have the consolation of being nearer to home.

The exploration of high latitudes was a priority in naval circles, and other ships were doing the same as Rufe’s. The fact that Durable had not been built for pushing through ice packs seemed not to have troubled the Admiralty. Fortunately, Rufe’s orders were hedged with the words if possible, an escape clause that he would not hesitate to use if he needed it. He would turn back the first time the ice threatened, because if Durable were caught in the pack, her metal sides would be crushed much more easily than those of the specially constructed wooden ships used for Antarctic and Arctic explorations.

The men assigned to take the weather observations were doing their jobs efficiently. Sooner or later, when Durable’s readings in the Weddell Sea were compared with records she would make in the Ross Sea as well as simultaneous readings on other ships, scientists would have a more detailed understanding of the climate on various sides of the icy continent.

In the next half hour the wind swung a quarter of the way around the compass and peaked at force ten whole gale. Now the huge swells hissed with white on the top, and they were closer together. Durable bucked and twisted, dived and wet herself back to the stem with frigid salt spray that, as the gale continued, began to freeze on the deck, riggings, and superstructures. Rufe gave orders to put the storm on her stem, steaming northeastward. It would have been more comfortable bracing the storm bow on, but that way lay the Palmer Peninsula and the offshore ice packs.

The sky was clear, and visibility was unimpaired. The wind blew out of some huge polar disturbance, and by morning the ship was badly iced, weighed down with tons of it. Rufe turned out the crew with axes to begin chipping away the increasingly dangerous burden.

The whole gale blew on unabated; on land such howling winds would have uprooted trees. The waves lifted Durable’s stem, swept under her, and let her fall backward off their crests. The men chipping ice had to be rotated often to prevent frostbite. Conditions underfoot were hazardous, for the decks were made perilous by the slick ice; men moved with difficulty, leaning on the wind, huge sheets of ice flying as they chipped at it with the axes.

The wonder of it was that the accident did not happen sooner. Suddenly an axe slipped off ice, then glanced with force into the knee of a seaman. Blood spurted from an opened artery as the man fell, moaning with fright, his hands clutching at his leg.

James Camber saw the incident from the bridge and raced down to the deck. Sailors tried to staunch the flow of blood, and a medical corpsman was arriving just as Camber reached the spot and began to shoo the sailors away. The corpsman tightened a tourniquet on the outside of the injured man’s clothing and ordered that he be carried to the infirmary. Camber followed.

Once in the infirmary Camber had to swallow hard to keep from losing his breakfast while the corpsman bared the leg. The axe had severed the sailor’s kneecap and cartilage, leaving the lower leg dangling by a thin strip of flesh and the tough tendons at the bend of the knee.

“There’s work for a surgeon,” the corpsman said.

“Not likely,” Camber said.

The injured sailor was comatose.

“He’ll pack it in if that leg isn’t taken off and the bleeding stopped,” the corpsman said. “There’ll be a doctor at the whaling station on South Georgia.”

“I’ll speak with the captain,” Camber said.

Hearing the report, Rufe Broome checked the charts and did some calculations. Durable was more than fifteen hundred miles from South Georgia and caught in the midst of an Antarctic storm. With his second-in-command, Lieutenant Camber, on the bridge, Rufe went below.

The injured man was awake but dazed with the morphine that the corpsman had given him. “How are you, son?” Rufe asked him.

“Doc says I’m going to lose my leg,” the sailor said weakly.

“That’s a fact,” Rufe said. “There’s a bit more to it, though. Are you man enough to face some hard truths?”

“Ain’t got no choice, have I, sir?”

“Not much choice,” Rufe confirmed. “The nearest sawbones is on South Georgia. One choice is to turn north and run for South Georgia, rolling in the troughs all the way and maybe, in the time it takes us to get there, having you bleed to death.”

The man shook his head in negation.

“The other choice is for me and the doc, here, to cut through what little remains of that leg and tie off the arteries while we ride out this storm, and then head for South Georgia to have the doctor there neaten up what we’ve done.” He put his hand on boy’s shoulder. “I think you can see what we have to do.”

The boy nodded grimly.

The nervous corpsman gathered tools and readied the ether. Rufe, dressed in a medical smock, hands and arms scrubbed thoroughly, surveyed the damaged leg as the corps man administered the ether.

The tendons of the sailor’s legs were surprisingly tough, requiring a lot of force before they were severed. Rufe worked with the corpsman as he located and tied off the main artery. Pressure slowed the bleeding from other veins, and when at last there was nothing more than a slow ooze into the bandages, Rufe wrapped the severed lower leg in a sheet, washed himself, and went back to the bridge.

Over the next few hours the ship came north gradually as the storm abated somewhat, but the rolls were still severe. The seaman’s leg was buried at sea but without ceremony.

The South Georgia whaling station was a bleak, severe place made odoriferous by the rendering of whale fat and the dumping of refuse into the bay, where thousands of seabirds squabbled over the bits and pieces. The doctor in residence smelled of rum, but his hands were steady when he examined the seaman’s stump.

“I wouldn’t call it a neat job,” the doctor said. He looked up at Rufe and smiled. “But you quite obviously saved the boy’s life, Captain. And I’ve seen worse cutting by licensed doctors.”

With the corpsman’s help the doctor put the seaman to sleep again and trimmed up the stump, pulling skin down from the leg to suture over part of the raw flesh. The seaman was left on South Georgia in the whaling company infirmary to be under the doctor’s care. Durable steamed southwest.

The detour to South Georgia Island had used up some of the time for exploring Antarctic waters. Rather than return to the Weddell Sea, Durable proceeded directly through the Drake Passage toward the Ross Sea, crossing the invisible line that marked the Antarctic Circle and circumnavigating a good portion of the globe as she made an arc past 150 degrees west longitude.

They entered the Ross Sea in weather so clear that the sky was a deep blue, unlike any sky that Rufe had ever seen. A distant soaring seabird gleamed like a white jewel in the brilliant sun, and the waves that rolled easily under the ship were as free of colouration as a chunk of freshwater ice. Durable made her cautious way through a field of free ice, passing bergs that were as large as a cathedral. The air was cold but intoxicatingly pure.

The gleam of snow-covered ice was on the horizon when, gradually, the sea began to turn to slush, and floes of shattered pack ice caused frequent changes of course. A shoal of penguins stitched its way past the ship, the trim little swimmers surfacing and diving, heading for the distant gleam of whiteness. A drifting floe banged Durable’s port bow with a force that made Rufe wary.

“Well, Lieutenant,” he said to Camber, “it seems to me that this is as far as ice conditions permit.”

“I came to that conclusion yesterday, sir,” Camber said.

“Sort of anticlimactic, though,” Rufe said. “Since we’re this near, I’d like to see the ice shelf. Maybe just to say I’ve been that close to Antarctica.”

“Let’s pretend we got close enough to see the ice shelf and I swear that I’ll never tell anyone you’re prevaricating, sir.”

Rufe sighed. He gave orders to bring Durable about. As if to prove that his decision to end the penetration of the outlying ice field had been correct, the skies darkened with fearful swiftness, bringing night in the middle of the Antarctic day. As the waves built, freezing rain coated the ship with an icy shroud. The slush through which the ship had been pushing began to freeze into a thin, hard crust of ice. Rufe ordered half speed ahead, and Durable breasted the waves, smashing her bow into them challengingly until, two days later, she emerged from the darkness of the storm into diminishing seas where there were merely sixty-foot smooth-topped swells.

Rufe took Durable just to the west of Macquarie Island southwest of New Zealand, bypassed Tasmania to the east, and in a climate more to his liking brought her slowly into her new port at Sydney Harbor. He had come home.

Chapter I

Western Australia

For the third straight season, drought held the land of the-snake-as-big-as-a-hill-walking-about in a red haze of heat, hunger, and thirst. The small tribal unit of the Baadu of Warrdarrgana, wandering far from the home given to them in the long ago time of the Dreaming, suffered great privation. If it had not been for Ganba, they would have starved.

Still, the Baadu hated Ganba as much as they respected or feared him.

For a Baadu, Ganba was a hairy man, his features large and impressive. From his prominent fleshy nose and heavy-browed eyes, his forehead swept back in an almost flat plane to a shock of hair that was heavily greased and formed a pointed mass at the back of his head. His facial hair was stiff and dark, and his broad chest bore the sweeping scars of ceremony.

The old ones said that Ganba was large because as a boy, during another time of drought and hunger, he had been given his baby sisters to eat one by one, their fat being spread on his skin as protection against the burning sun. Ganba had accordingly grown faster than the other boys his own age, and he had been initiated into manhood with older youths who, in spite of their years, lacked his size and strength.

The flesh of Ganba’s baby sisters had not only made him broad and fat but given him a permanent taste for human meat.

No one in his tribe knew exactly what had formed Ganba’s attitudes toward his fellow man, but it was said that he had never met a man, woman, or child that he liked. He had hated his natural mother, his various tribal mothers, and his older sisters and brothers as well. He would gladly have eaten them all, but that would have been impossible, for they were older and stronger than he. However, as soon as he had grown big enough, he regularly beat his mother and any other female who dared challenge his wants or needs. Once he blinded a young girl by throwing pebbles into her eyes, and he seemed proud of the deed.

For these reasons, when the time came for Ganba’s initiation, the men who threw him into the air during the wa-warning dropped him several times instead of catching him, and the blows they struck him were not merely ceremonial, as they were with the other boys. Ganba was furious but forgot his rage when it came time for the drinking of blood. All Baadu were blood drinkers, but few of them relished human blood as much as did Ganba.

After surviving the initiation ceremony, Ganba became, as he matured into manhood, a wearer of “murderer’s slippers” — the ceremonial anklets, without soles, that were worn by those appointed to carry out tribal executions. He thus became a stalker of human game. He was also — in that time of direst hunger — the chief supplier of food for the small, displaced unit of Baadu.

Finally, as the sun continued to bake the land and no clouds formed in promise of breaking the drought, Ganba made two decisions. First, he would leave the land of the-snake-as-big-as-a-hill-walking-about, and second, he would not travel alone. Selecting a young, plump, hardworking woman, he told her family — he would not deign to ask — that she would be his wife. The bride price he offered was the food that he would supply.

Bildana, the young girl, was terrified, for she was not sure whether Ganba wanted her as a bedmate or as a meal. She wanted to run away and was prevented from doing so only by her greater fear of unseen things in the bush — beasts and spirits that were even more terrifying than the possibility that she, like several of Ganba’s former wives, might end up in his cook fires.

Unwilling to flee, Bildana appealed to her kommuru, her mother’s brother. “The killing of wives must be stopped,” she pleaded. “While it is true that women who wantonly give themselves to any man may, by custom, be eaten in times of hunger, Ganba’s wives were chaste, and Ganba broke tribal law when he killed them.”

The kommuru nodded.

Ceremony was a vital part of the Baadu’s life, as it had been since the Dreamtime, when men walked the earth as kangaroo and barramundi and wallaroo. In this year of unrelenting drought four young men were preparing for marriage along with Ganba. During one phase of the drawn-out festival Bildana’s kommuru tried to kill Ganba.

The five men to be married were lined up facing the kommurus of Bildana and the other wives-to-be. The older men held in their hands the livers of unfortunate members of another tribal group who had been slaughtered by Baadu hunters and thus had unwillingly joined the festivities. The young men preparing for marriage had to catch pieces of raw liver in their mouths as they were tossed by the kommurus; the youths were forbidden to touch the slippery chunks of meat with either hands or teeth. It was not an event to be taken lightly, for if a man-to-be-married touched the liver with his hands, or if he was observed using his teeth, or if he vomited up the raw and bloody pieces, then he, too, would die and become a part of the wedding feast.

Bildana’s kommuru gradually increased the size of the pieces of liver that he tossed into the gaping mouth of the man who wanted his favourite niece. He was fervently trying to force Ganba to miss, or to hit the meat with his hands or teeth, or to gag and reject the larger and larger pieces.

To Ganba’s left came a strangled cry. A young man, made frail by sickness and the long drought, bent at the waist and coughed up bloody bits of liver. From the darkness beyond the blazing fires a woman cried out in sorrow as a tribal elder struck the blow that was ordained by ancient ceremony. The frail young man would never know the pleasures of having a wife.

Ganba laughed and opened his big mouth to catch a still-larger piece of liver tossed by Bildana’s kommuru. He let the slick meat glide past his teeth and tongue, then swallowed convulsively. The fresh blood in the liver almost satisfied his thirst.

“Now you have failed, old man,” Ganba mocked. The kommuru angrily hurled one last piece of liver, and Ganba swallowed it greedily, burped contentedly, and leered at the cringing Bildana. “But this one” — with one dusty foot he lifted the lifeless body of the frail young man who had died — “this one will not make much of a meal.”

Bildana’s wedding night was painful but mercifully brief. Ganba used her fiercely and then kicked her disdainfully away from him. She cowered as closely as she dared on the other side of the fire, shivering in the chill of the night. In the deathly quiet of early morning she rolled naked into the still warm ashes of the fire and slept.

When Bildana learned her husband’s intentions for her, she almost would have preferred to be eaten right away. Ganba planned a long walkabout to the west, all the way toward the swollen and blistering sun to the sea. For Bildana a march so far into the unknown with Ganba seemed a fate beyond enduring, and she was weeping and moaning as, laden with sundried human flesh, she followed her master into the sunbaked never-never.

At the last moment a few of the Baadu chose to join Ganba in his trek. Ganba sneered at them, taunting them and asking them how they intended to live during the crossing of the desert, for he had only enough food for himself and his wife. “If these people come,” he confided to Bildana, “they will be food we do not have to carry, food we do not have to hunt!” His wide mouth split in a satisfied grin that showed his rotting rear teeth.

Bildana shivered. She almost warned the fools who had chosen to accompany her husband that they were no more than a walking feast for him, but in the end she feared Ganba too much to betray him.

Soon the food that Bildana carried was gone. Hungry, fearful that she might be the first to satisfy Ganba’s appetite, Bildana found herself rejoicing when one of the other women who had come with the group fell into a rocky crevasse. The woman lay there moaning, red blood spurting from both legs where jagged ends of broken bones had tom her flesh. Ganba scrambled down into the crevasse, swiftly dispatched the screaming woman, and began to butcher her on the spot, for to lift her bodily from the deep crevasse would have been difficult. Then he began to pass up the various pieces.

The woman’s husband had made no protest, for he had quickly seen the necessity of Ganba’s deed. Actually, it was merciful, for the injured woman would have died a painful, lingering death had not Ganba’s axe ended her suffering. Now, at least, she would face the spirits of the Dreaming with the credit of having helped her fellows in a time of need by providing several days’ worth of life-giving food.

Ganba’s little group reached the hills near the sea and a white man’s town built on a river. No further members of the band had been lost or killed, for as the group neared the coast, Ganba’s spear had found targets in the form of kangaroos.

Now Ganba stood looking down at the town that the white men called Perth. There was movement in the streets, and in the harbour a small ship left a trail of black smoke as it made its way seaward.

“These whites,” Bildana asked, “are they fierce?”

Ganba growled. As a young man he had encountered occasional groups of white men in the outback. He had watched as they brought down their meat with firearms, the magic smoke reaching out from the muzzles of their long black sticks and felling kangaroos at a distance many times greater than the strongest man’s spear throw. He had hated the white men then, for he knew that they were intruders. But he had also coveted their weapons.

On one occasion he had seen a white man give another a shooting stick in exchange for round pieces of metal. An elder of his tribe explained to him about the white man’s money, and again Ganba felt greed.

Now, as he looked down on Perth, he felt confident. “The white man will not harm us,” he told Bildana. “We will go there and be among our own kind.” He was pointing toward an outlying district of dilapidated dwellings called humpies, poor houses constructed of all sorts of discarded white man’s material.

When he led his companions into the shantytown, Ganba found that the people who lived there were representative of several tribal groupings. Various dialects were spoken, with a sort of fractured English being the accepted way for one tribesman to communicate with another of different dialect.

Ganba did not know, nor would he have cared, that the original coastal Aborigines had long since succumbed to the white man’s weapons and diseases and that the present inhabitants of the humpy town were, like himself, outsiders who had drifted in from the arid interior. Nor did Ganba know that Western Australia, as the white man called Ganba’s native lands, was now part of a unified continent-wide nation, the Commonwealth of Australia. Ganba knew only two things: He wanted to get his hands on the white man’s goods, and in order to do so, he would be obliged either to earn the white man’s money or to steal it. Stealing lay more within Ganba’s talents, but he knew ways of earning money, too.

Ganba ousted a weaker man and his family from a poorly built house, and by a combination of bullying, cheating, and stealing, he managed to scrounge enough food so that the group was adequately fed and Bildana’s buttocks remained attractively plump. That was desirable, since Ganba had plans for her.

Going down to the waterfront, Ganba watched the comings and goings of ships until a Japanese pearling boat docked and chattering little men scurried ashore. The brown-skinned men were met by a grim, grizzled, fierce-looking Abo man with a plump-bottomed girl at his side, a girl who, they were told, was for hire.

For as long as the Japanese ship was in port, Ganba lived well. But then the Japanese vessel left, and subsequent ships brought only white men, most of whom had no taste for Aboriginal girls. Eventually white constables caught and punished Ganba for stealing, and when he was released from the white man’s jail, there was no food in the humpy. He ached for a real meal of half-roasted human flesh; but the white man’s law ruled Perth, and he dared not risk that sort of hunt.

It was at that juncture in his life, when he was almost ready to give up and go back into the never-never, that he heard of the young white man who was looking for a guide into the interior.

Chapter II

The agent in Perth representing the interests of Misa Mason and the far-flung Mason business holdings was Robert Endicott, barrister, businessman, and family man. Endicott hated Australia — particularly Western Australia — with a passion that he vowed would last forever, if the good Lord granted him eternal sentience. A well-built middle-aged man, he affected a neatly trimmed goatee separated from side whiskers by an area of almost unnaturally pale English skin, and he went about the town dressed — or so said the fair dinkum I-am-very-damned-definitely-Australian types — like a London whoremaster.

Endicott was worried.

When the son of the woman who had inherited Jon Mason’s business empire appeared suddenly in the outer office, accompanied by his young bride, the agent was caught off guard. The Mason business in Perth consisted largely of routine shipping, day-to-day necessities coming in and raw materials and foodstuffs going out; the traffic constituted but a small part of the Mason trading enterprises. But Jon’s widow had acquired a reputation for ruthless efficiency, for after taking over her husband’s business, Misa Mason had purged it of corrupt employees and had dismissed a few of the independent agents as well. Endicott himself was scrupulously honest in his dealings, but since his law practice in Perth was not all that remunerative, the generous fees that he charged for the work of handling the Mason ships made up an important part of his income. Mrs. Mason, living at a safe distance across the continent in Sydney, had never questioned those charges, but perhaps that was about to change.

As Endicott nervously watched Thomas Mason come through his door, he was impressed at once with the youth’s most obvious feature — his size. Young Mason had taken his height and bulk from his mother’s Samoan forebears, and he towered over the older man. His broad shoulders, though well fitted with an expensive business suit, seemed ready to burst through the cloth and they seemed almost menacing to Endicott, who at five feet eight inches and 150 pounds was the average size for a man of his generation.

Endicott eyed the youth appraisingly. Under a shock of jet black hair Thomas Mason’s face was well formed, the skin only slightly darker than that of any white man who had spent most of his time in the bush. His nose was narrow — very English, like his father’s — and his eyes were dark brown. The young man stood easily, his natural poise an overt expression of his self-confidence.

It was a full thirty seconds before Endicott turned his attention to the young girl clinging to Thomas’s anther head coming only to his shoulder, and when he did so, he was taken aback by her radiant beauty. He had to clear his throat awkwardly before he could stammer a greeting.

Red-haired Java Gordon Mason was only eighteen, but she possessed the radiance and poise of a happily married matron. The recent voyage around Australia from Sydney had browned her face, in spite of her care to protect herself from the sun, but the tan was becoming. She wore a sensible travelling gown of dark blue, and the hand that clung to her husband’s arm was delicate, the fingers long and the nails well manicured.

She fixed her eyes on Endicott as if taking the measure of the man and then, evidently satisfied with what she saw, lifted her face to her husband, whom she addressed as Tolo. The look in her eyes made the older man uncomfortable. It was like that with some young couples: At odd moments they seemed to exude an aura of sexual energy, a disquieting passion that might rouse envy and covetousness in younger men but that in Endicott’s case caused only a smile of empathy followed swiftly by a hint of sadness. That youthful flame, he thought, would all too soon consume itself of its own intensity.

“Ah, Mr. Mason,” Endicott said, stepping around to the front of his desk to shake the young man’s hand. “It is a great honour and pleasure to have you visit us.” He cleared his throat again. “I had a communique from your mother only last month.” He took a deep breath. “Or was it the month before?”

“We’re not here on Mason business,” Tolo replied.

Endicott sighed with relief that Mason would not be prying into his books, but then he was puzzled. Perth was not noted as being a health spa or a holiday spot. “How may I be of assistance?” he asked finally.

“Our intention is to travel into the interior,” Tolo replied flatly. “I want to study the Aborigines.”

“ ’Strewth,” Endicott said. “You can’t be serious!”

“Quite serious,” Java confirmed.

“I might want to draw on cash reserves in your accounts for the purchase of equipment,” Tolo added.

Endicott merely nodded. He suspected that the son of the extraordinary woman who handled the Mason business affairs knew absolutely nothing about the murderous bush that crowded Perth against the sea, but it was not his place to begin the young man’s education. “You will need a guide,” he said.

“Yes. Have you anyone in mind?” Tolo asked.

“As a matter of fact, yes,” Endicott said. “His name is Terry Forrest. I should guess that he knows more about the outback than any man alive.” His face flushed. It seemed almost indelicate to refer to survival when it seemed likely to him that Thomas Mason, in spite of his size, would probably die if he insisted on travelling into the interior. It would be a shame, he thought, if the young fool took his pretty wife with him to shrivel in the heat and to die of thirst and starvation. But he was the Mason agent in Perth, and the son of the owner had asked a service of him. He would provide.

Tolo and Java had arrived in Perth only a day earlier, the ship having made port in Fremantle’s spacious harbour in the early, sunny hours of a day in May, giving them plenty of time to make the twelve-mile journey by launch up the Swan River to Perth Water, the broad bay that fronted the city.

Now that the adventure was under way, Tolo had lingering doubts. After the long, quiet, blissful months that he and Java had spent on the Mason homeplace, a time when he did not have to share Java with anyone, he could almost resent the presence of other people. Java, however, was thriving on it. She had enjoyed the trip around the southern coast of Australia. She knew the names and the life histories of the officers and most of the crew on board the Mason Line ship. She loved meeting new people and looked forward to their arrival in Perth. She, more than Tolo, had been responsible for then-leaving the cattle station, for she had been eager to get on with the expedition to Western Australia.

It was, in fact, not their first visit to Perth. Nearly two years earlier, when Java was not yet seventeen, they had eloped, causing a family crisis in the Sydney home of Java’s parents, Sam and Jessica Gordon. The elopement had been impulsive, but Tolo had carried it out wisely — bringing his bride to Perth, beyond the reach of the laws of the state of New South Wales, in case the Gordons should seek to have the marriage annulled because Java was a minor.

Tolo had considered taking his bride directly to the old Mason station outside Melbourne. There they would also be outside the Gordons’ legal reach, but Sam could, if so minded, follow the couple to the station to retrieve his daughter. No, Tolo reasoned, it was better by far to take Java as far away as possible, to an unknown place.

As it happened, Sam and Jessica took no steps either to pursue Java or to counter the marriage. Instead, Sam advised his distraught wife to resign herself to having her daughter wed; Tolo, after all, was not a bad sort. He had the look of success about him; indeed, he had already proven himself an able land purchaser and would most likely be a good provider and a loving husband.

These sentiments were included in a letter that Sam posted to Java in care of the Mason Shipping Company, having no other address for her. The letter finally caught up to her in Perth, and reassured by its contents, she and Tolo decided to go back to the Mason station outside Melbourne — the home where Tolo, as a boy, had first heard the wondrous tales of the Aboriginal Dreamtime.

In the next few months Java learned to love the station almost as much as her husband did. More letters went back to Sydney, always answered by Sam, the replies full of expressions of his love — and Jessica’s, too, though Jessica herself did not write. Java noticed that omission, and it pained her; she longed to see her mother, both her parents, in fact, believing that she would never entirely make her peace with them until she saw them face-to-face. And she longed, too, to see her grandmother, Jessica’s mother, Magdalen, whose letters, though less frequent, were both loving and full of commonsensical advice on married life. But somehow the months slipped by, the young couple being absorbed in their happiness and the routines of the busy station. Tolo proved himself to be a capable young manager, never too proud to learn the finer points of running a large spread from the old hands who had served his family for many years.

Tolo wrote to his mother, Misa Mason, now permanently residing in Sydney. She had been startled at first by the elopement but then was happy for her son, praying that his life’s course should not be difficult because of the sudden step he had taken. As a full-blooded Samoan she had encountered her own share of prejudice among white Australians, and in her mind racial considerations had no place in matters of the heart — or in any other matter either. In these liberal leanings she was encouraged by her friend and business partner, Bina Tyrell. Together the two women toasted the young couple in absentia in a celebratory dinner at Bina’s fashionable restaurant, an event that Misa described to Tolo in a letter, adding that she hoped to do the same again with him and his bride present whenever they felt ready to return to Sydney.

After more months of blissful residence at Tolo’s old home, Java began to grow restless. She was eager to travel, and she also thought that if Tolo was going to study the Aborigines, as he claimed he wished to do, he should not put it off any longer. The station, in the hands of its experienced employees and overseer, could run itself. So she nudged her husband to take their second trip to Western Australia.

Arriving in Perth, they found the accommodations no better this time than on their earlier honeymoon journey. Although Tolo could well afford to pamper himself and his wife, money could not buy luxury when it did not exist. The hotel was barely adequate, but at least the room was clean, and it had a wonderfully soft double bed, which Tolo and Java put to excellent use.

After calling on Robert Endicott, they had to wait a few days until their prospective guide could be located and a meeting arranged. Tolo and Java used this time to revisit many of Perth’s sites, which on their first trip they had only half seen through the hazy glow of honeymoon happiness. Tolo, voracious reader though he was, found his literary appetite matched by his wife’s, so both were by now well versed in Perth’s history. Walking its streets, they examined the three-story Tudor-style gateway of the headquarters of the Enrolled Pensioner Forces, the soldier-settlers who had founded Perth. The archway and the clock tower of the city hall, built by convict labour, were splendid examples of intricate Flemish bond brickwork. Near the town stood King’s Park, an area of natural bush set aside years earlier so that children could, a thousand years hence, see what the bush had been like when the first settlers arrived.

The parklands and the town itself lay along the lower reaches of the Swan River. At Perth Water, where the Swan River widened to over half a mile, they saw a myriad of small sailing craft and barges as well as the steamships that ferried passengers down to the port at Fremantle.

It seemed a pleasant place, Perth, the temperature quite comfortable as Java and Tolo strolled through the often narrow streets, observing the people, who were a mixture of roughly dressed outdoor types and neatly cravatted businessmen. But then, one morning, as they were walking toward the outskirts of town, the scene changed abruptly. Stopping, they looked down a slight slope at a jumble of makeshift huts, the humpies belonging to Perth’s Aboriginal inhabitants.

The dilapidated buildings were arranged in no discernible pattern. Most were nothing more than ragged pieces of canvas over bush timber frames; only a few of the sturdier dwellings had corrugated iron roofs. All of them, Tolo reckoned, had nothing more than dirt floors.

The scene was one of unbelievable chaos and poverty. Blackfellows moved about among the buildings or lounged half dressed in whatever bit of shade could be found. Naked potbellied children played in the midst of the incredible filth of rank bones splintered to remove the marrow, rotting garbage, and the offal of man and beast.

For a long time neither Tolo nor Java spoke. Then Tolo took Java’s arm and turned her to walk away, to put the humpy town behind them, to hide it safely from sight behind the neatly kept homes of Australia’s white masters. It was Tolo who finally broke the silence.

“These people come to the cities because they’ve had a taste of what our so-called civilization has to offer — alcohol and tobacco mainly. They want other material things we have, but they don’t have the knowledge or skills for earning the money to buy them. So they’re reduced to eating the leftovers from our refuse cans and wearing our cast-off clothes. And they die of diseases as mild as measles.”

Java would have been forced to admit that her interest in the original peoples of her continent was not as fervid as her husband’s. She could pity them, of course, and decry their lot, but she could not altogether fathom Tolo’s fascination with them. What was it about the man she loved that made gaining knowledge about this unfortunate race of people so important?

It could only be his own mixed blood, she had concluded long before she saw the humpy town on the outskirts of Perth. He had told her that he was no longer bothered by insults against people of brown or black skin. But she knew his temper, and God help the man who made a racial slur against Samoans in Tolo’s presence, particularly if it touched upon his mother, full-blooded Samoan that she was.

Java’s love for Tolo had begun, she knew, in sympathy, for she was mature enough to understand her own weaknesses. His struggle against the colour barrier had touched her from the start. She had been reared in a house where open discussions on every subject were the rule, and she had heard both sides of the race question. She had listened to the writer Henry Lawson, one of the most vocal and visible advocates for a White Australia, who believed the Aborigines were a dying race, and good riddance to them. And she had also heard from some religious leaders the often febrile arguments in favour of human equality. She considered herself liberal in her own racial attitudes. After all, had it not been for an old man of dark brown skin — a near savage who lived in a hut in the highlands of Java — she herself might not be alive. The man had rescued her mother when Jessica, pregnant with Java, had nearly been killed in the eruption of Krakatoa and the tidal waves that followed. With the help of the women of his village, the old man had nursed Jessica back to health and seen to the safe delivery of her baby.

So Java could be interested in Aboriginal lore, but that did not necessarily mean that left to her own devices, she would have gone to any great effort to hear the tales of the Dreaming from the lips of a descendant of one of Australia’s first inhabitants. True, she found some of their myths touchingly amusing in their naivete and simplicity, but some of the stories struck her as repetitious and lacking in imagination.

Nevertheless, Java was ready and willing to follow Tolo into the far never-never simply because he was her husband, the man she loved, and she would help him in his chosen calling. She did not doubt for a second that he would accomplish his avowed goal of making a thorough study of Aboriginal life and putting his findings into print. And because she had been a part of Australia’s intellectual awakening in the 1890s, she did not question the value of knowledge for its own sake. Though she could not bring herself to apply the word culture