Clancy of the Overflow, page 34
This wouldn’t be a problem for long. Half the country was looking for work. Meanwhile, thankfully, Clancy agreed that Overflow was badly overstocked. Clancy, Tiger and McKenzie — the old man refused to be left behind for what might be his final spree in a city — took two-thirds of the stock to Sydney. By some miracle they even had a bit of fat on them, enough to see them to Sydney and still look good at the sale.
Two days after they had left two men turned up, Zebediah and Big Moses, on horses with protruding ribs. Their skins were the same colour as her son’s: white fathers, Rose reckoned, and black mothers, though she did not ask. They’d been stockmen for old Drinkwater, but had heard that the new boss at Overflow would pay coloured stockmen wages as well as handing out rations.
Rose hired them, subject to Clancy’s agreement, which she assured them he would give if they’d worked well.
They did. Within a week, the kitchen was knocked down and burned as an irretrievable hovel. O’Hara — who even spoke some of her true language — took the cart to Gibber’s Creek to purchase necessities, paid for with the money in her bank account, which could be accessed by a white man with her bankbook and a letter of authority, even if no bank manager would have allowed her through the door.
Meanwhile Rose and Mrs McKenzie, and Zebediah’s newly installed wife and older daughters, scrubbed and washed. The cart returned. Zebediah and Big Moses painted the walls: hilarious at first, for none of them had ever done such a thing, though they had seen it. Rose was going to have green hands for weeks, or months maybe, and a pale blue streak upon her leg, while Big Moses was going to keep the yellow nose, painted on him as a joke, for an embarrassingly long time.
Now and then Rose took out Maria’s magazines, the ones Ethelred had given her, to make sure she was doing it all right.
A new kitchen was built of poles cut on the property and corrugated iron. It looked ugly, but was clean and would be fire-proof. A stove, with an oven and kerosene refrigerator, just like at Dirty Butter. Luckily Big Moses’s wife, Jane, had been a housemaid at Drinkwater and knew cooking, as well as what a kitchen needed to turn out a decent meal. Rose could learn how to carve up a sheep into the bits that could be baked, grilled or stewed, but she never got the hang of a sponge cake, or even a damper that didn’t weigh as heavy as a rock.
There was no way of course to tell what day the men would return. But all was ready. Jane had filled the biscuit and cake tins — biscuit tins were a new concept for Rose, but they seemed an excellent innovation — and had been given instructions to put a stuffed shoulder of lamb with all its accompanying vegetables into the oven at the first sign of horses, and to make fresh bread every morning (for Jane knew the secrets of keeping yeast too) to eat with the cheese made in what had been a prison, then a storeroom and whose thick stone walls now made an excellent dairy. Jane made jam from the plums in the orchard, as well as a plum sauce she said went fine with lamb eaten cold the next day.
The men rode up just on dusk. Luckily O’Hara had glimpsed them from the top ridge, where he’d gone to chase a young ram who’d managed to get out through a wombat hole under the fence. They were travelling slowly — Rose guessed they had pushed on rather than spend another night camping.
There was time to have the roast on, the kettle boiling and the tea table set out by the time the hooves plodded up to the house and the five men — Rose hoped there’d be work for those newcomers too — slid off their horses.
The men heaved their swags over to the workers’ quarters. McKenzie, Clancy and Tiger stepped across the veranda — scrubbed and repaired too — and into the parlour.
‘Dad!’ said Benjamin, toddling towards him.
Rose watched her husband’s expression.
A new blue velvet tasselled sofa with cushions; three matching armchairs; a not-quite Persian rug in blue and red; a footstool; a rocking chair — she had seen one years ago and fallen in love with the idea; and even a vase of flowers.
And Clancy smiled, a look of such happiness she felt a small sun warm her. And then she realised he had not even noticed the furniture, the newly painted walls, but looked only at her.
He did notice the tea tray though, when Mrs McKenzie brought it in: a new teapot and new china cups and saucers, not the enamelware they’d had at Dirty Butter, matching cake plates and tiny forks, sponge cake oozing cream and topped with strawberries and passionfruit, the plate of lemon shortbread, the neat cheese and pickle or tomato sandwiches, in triangles with their crusts cut off, just as the magazines had described.
He liked the dining room too, and especially what Jane had left on its table: the full roast dinner with gravy and baked pumpkin, potatoes, choko in cheese sauce, the treacle pudding with custard, and coffee made from Essence of Coffee for after dinner, again following the magazine’s advice, though no one wanted to drink it.
But the rest was good.
Clancy liked their new bed as well.
She lay awake after he fell asleep. She had heard the owl swoop down — owls were silent flyers, even the powerful ones, but she knew how to feel the air for the silence of their wings, just as she could smell when the wind changed from the north, which would mean good rain, or from the east, which would bring drizzle.
Clancy snored beside her. He had shaved before going to Sydney, but his whiskers were long enough to be grey again. She was glad. A man was — odd — without his whiskers, the sign that he had truly become a man.
She was happy, deeply, heart-rich happy. But she was content as well, which was not the same thing. Content to be in a bed, more comfortable than the ground, especially as your bones ached just a little in the cold as you grew older. Content to be in a house, as long as she could spend much of the day with her feet on the ground: bare feet as well as booted feet.
People needed to feel the soil beneath their feet, but not, she had discovered, all the time. Floors were comfortable and carpets pretty, and she enjoyed looking at herself in the mirror too, and dressing in different clothes each day. There was a white dress with cherries on it she would wear for Clancy tomorrow, at least at breakfast before she changed to help with the dagging. They might have more stockmen now — and maybe more than they needed — but she’d still work alongside her husband . . .
Her husband who was proud of her. He had not said it, but she knew it. Overflow was a white man’s house now, a proper house for Clancy of the Overflow, for the man her son would become, and for his wife too.
And that . . . fit. For Benjamin was half white, so needed the right house, the sheep, and she would teach him not to ringbark his land, and where to put the fences if fences they must have.
Clancy was proud of her, a woman who could make a home and dag a sheep, and smell a rainstorm months away. He was not the husband she had expected as a child; nor had the land she’d known continued forever, as she had assumed it would. But still . . . with happiness as well as loss, Rose of Overflow lay there content.
Chapter 54
How to keep a clean, safe chimney
Send a goose or fat hen up your chimney twice a year to reduce the need for sweeping. Always ensure the wood you use is dry, and your chimney will not catch fire.
OVERFLOW, 1903
CLANCY
Two more years of drought, the drought that finally forced a handful of colonies to become a nation rather than collapse alone. The final year was the worst so far: mere miserable dribbles grudged by the sky, except for a single miracle thunderstorm in spring that let them grow a crop of corn and pumpkins. Always, always pumpkins. When the drought was over, he was never going to eat pumpkin again.
The river became a glaring stretch of white sand, smeared here and there by stretches of dead algae. The men dug deep holes that slowly filled with water overnight, enough for the stock they had left as well as the animals who had always been there.
It should have been a desperate time and was for much of Australia. More than half the sheep and cattle in the nation died that year. No one counted the deaths of wildlife, their feed and water stolen by the stock, nor how many people died of heat, crammed in smoky slums or outback runs where the water failed or turned putrid.
But at Overflow the land still provided most of what they and their employees needed, including breezes up from the remnant river and down from the mountains at their back. The inheritance paid for the rest.
In the autumn of that second year, the third year Australia had been called a nation, Rose and Clancy sat on the veranda watching the night. Benjamin was asleep at last. ‘Look, a shooting star!’ said Clancy.
Rose said nothing. Her face was lifted, her eyes shut. She breathed deeply, nostrils flaring.
‘Rose, what is it?’
‘I can smell something.’
Sheep, thought Clancy, the two hundred that were all the vast acres could support these days. Or wombat. He sniffed. Yep, there was a particularly pungent wombat pong that night.
Rose opened her eyes and looked at him. ‘It’s going to rain,’ she said.
‘Enough for a bit of grass?’
‘Enough for twenty years of grass, maybe.’
He had lived so long with drought that it was hard to accept it might end. His hair had still been brown the last good season. ‘Real rain? When?’
‘Spring. When the wombats need new grass for milk for their young. That’s the smell of mating wombat, the first for years. I can smell river-gum blossom too. They don’t come out if there won’t be water for their seeds. Trees don’t waste their flowering.’ He didn’t ask if she was sure. ‘I’d better have a talk to McKenzie,’ he said instead.
Rose nodded. ‘Yes. I think you’d better.’
He rode over to Dirty Butter the next morning. McKenzie was taking it easy, eating drop scones with prickly pear jam in the kitchen in his socks. ‘Glad to see you hard at work,’ said Clancy.
‘Cattle are eating. I’m eating too.’
Mrs McKenzie grinned and put more batter in the pan, then handed the platter she’d just made to Clancy. He helped himself, honey instead of jam. Four drop scones and half a mug of tea later, topped up with milk from the new kerosene refrigerator, he said, ‘Rose says it’s going to rain in spring.’
‘Drought’s going to break?’ asked McKenzie cautiously.
‘Yep.’
McKenzie looked at his wife. ‘What do you think?’
‘I think you forget I grew up in Sydney, you old fool. I don’t know much more than you about the weather here.’
‘But still . . .?’
‘I think we need to buy cattle,’ said Mrs McKenzie. ‘And sheep for Overflow. We’ve got about a hundred and forty pounds. Reckon we can get a lot of cattle for that. People are almost giving them away this year. What about you?’ she asked Clancy.
‘About four hundred pounds left. I’m going to mortgage Overflow. We don’t just need money to buy stock — we’ll need to buy feed for them till it rains.’
McKenzie stared. ‘Can’t buy hay for love or money, no matter how much you’ve got.’
Clancy shrugged. ‘Feed ’em pumpkin, corn, Granny Smith apples from Tasmania, whatever we can buy. Hire more men to cut kurrajongs and she-oaks.’
Which would mean if it didn’t rain, he’d lose everything. He threw away the crumb of doubt. This was Rose’s land. She knew it.
‘Not much stock around these days,’ said McKenzie. ‘And they’ll be too weak to walk fast. Need to feed and water ’em on the way too.’
He stood, grabbing his stick. ‘Better get my boots on, woman. Better get yours too. We’re goin’ drovin’ again.’
The McKenzies bought cattle first — McKenzie’s contacts were mostly cattlemen. He went to Sydney for the sheep, taking Clancy with him and leaving Mrs McKenzie at Overflow.
‘The wife worries when I’m Sydney,’ he explained as the two men let their horses find the best way through the trees. ‘Bad memories.’
‘I thought she’d have liked working at Government House.’
McKenzie stared at him. ‘You got bats in your attic? They made her eat scraps on the doorstep.’ He had boasted she’d been a cook, not a kitchen maid, but Clancy did not remind him. Mrs McKenzie’s cooking was undoubtedly better than any the official cook prepared.
‘That’s where they found her,’ McKenzie said shortly. ‘Mob of footmen, gardeners maybe. Drunk, probably. They grabbed her one night, dragged her down in the gardens. When they’d finished, they left her in an alley. Probably thought she was dead.’
‘But . . . Government House?’
McKenzie shrugged. ‘When she was missed, someone would have said, “Oh, them natives, always going walkabout.” That’s where I found her, in the alley.’
‘And you looked after her?’
McKenzie hesitated. ‘I wasn’t going to. I’d asked if she wanted to come with me once before, but she’d refused. Stuck in my craw, that a black girl could refuse a white man, a man with a job too, even if he had a few more years than her. But she knew I hadn’t meant marriage then. Oh, I’d have taken care of her. But I wouldn’t have made her my wife.
‘But all beat up like that? Couldn’t take her back to my lodgings. Told myself if she wasn’t dead, she soon would be. Then she opened her eyes and looked at me and said, “Please.” Just that one word. And suddenly I saw a woman, not the colour of her skin.’
‘What happened then?’ asked Clancy quietly.
‘Gave a milko a shilling to go and get my swag. You can always trust a milkman. Bloke who does the same thing every night for forty years won’t let you down. Took her down by the harbour and set up camp. Lived on fish and what an old duck who lived in a big house just round the headland sent down to us — Mrs Sheldon. She’d been sketching and demanded to know what I was doing. I told Mrs Sheldon I’d found her beaten up on the street and was trying to nurse her back to health. She sent her boot boy to us with a loaf of bread, a billy of milk and a pail of leftovers every morning.’
They rode in silence for a while. ‘I wondered why you didn’t have kids,’ said Clancy at last.
‘They tore something inside her. Don’t know what. Anyway, never touched her that way in all our years of marriage,’ said McKenzie.
‘You mean you’ve never —’
‘We get by,’ said McKenzie shortly. ‘I been thinking — ought to send the word out that we’re hiring. Cattle mostly look after themselves. But sheep . . .’
‘We’ll need men to cut feed for them till it rains too,’ said Clancy.
Neither man mentioned the attack on Mrs McKenzie again.
It was early August when Rose pointed to a turtle slowly but purposefully heading uphill. ‘Rain in ten days’ time,’ she said.
‘Good,’ said Clancy, his back aching from carting in loads of kurrajong and she-oak slash. The cattle’s ribs showed; the sheep staggered. But mostly they’d survived.
And it was only eight days later when she brushed at some intrusive flying insects — not moths, more like winged ants: ‘Rain tomorrow night. Probably not much.’
‘Good,’ said Clancy again, and tried to keep the tightness from his voice. He had maybe two months to make the first major payment on the mortgage. If they couldn’t sell a mob of cattle for five times what they’d paid for them, they’d lose the whole of Overflow. If it didn’t rain, the rest of the stock would be worthless. Or dead.
The air filled with damp the next night, just as the flying ants had predicted, too thick for mist, but not enough to wet the ground.
Eight days later, it rained.
Soft rain, mist that hung over the thin tops of the gum trees, slowly dripped down the skeletons of ringbarked trees and those that had decided to die without human intervention as the moisture in the soil vanished.
The rain thickened during the night. He could hear it patter on the corrugated-iron roof. By breakfast it had stopped.
But the world was wet. The cattle looked surprised, the sheep gloomy. Life was hard and even worse when you were wet. The wombat who lived under the house wandered by, looking accusingly at the humans as if it knew they at least were dry — or possibly had caused this unaccustomed dampness.
It rained again that afternoon.
The rain on the tenth day brought a flood: not a channel washer, just a metre-high wave of logs and leaves and animal skeletons, the water growing higher behind it. It dropped slowly during the night, flowing sluggishly through head-high banks of debris.
And then it rained again.
By then the world was a green fuzz, then grass, then finally lushness that gave the sheep the runs and meant every hand had to be employed penning the cattle in a single paddock lest bloat kill them even as they escaped starvation.
Within six months, green was again normal; the cattle glossy, the sheep growing the wool that had once made Overflow a respected name in the industry. Their first sale of cattle — culls not wanted for breeding, but still fetching fifteen times what they had been bought for — paid off the mortgage.
By the second wool clip, McKenzie officially retired, to yarn with visiting mates as they sat on the Dirty Butter veranda, eating date scones laden with butter and strawberry jam, sponge cake with cream and passionfruit, trifles rich with raspberries and custard, all sourced from the newly planted vegetable gardens, the revived orchards and the Overflow dairy, as Mrs McKenzie put her feet up too, and instructed the two maids hired to help her.
By the third wool clip, Overflow was again one of the wealthiest estates in New South Wales and Horatio Clancy — far wiser than his father in how to arrange direct sales with overseas buyers and with no emotional need to waste his money on maintaining the appearance of being a gentleman — spent enough on good fences, new equipment and the best people — black or white — to work his land.
