The Man on the Headland Read online

  Benison was very interested in the baby. “Kangaroos,” she told a horrified elderly lady, “have a pouch outside them, but the baby came from a pouch inside my mother.”

  His father drove the baby home from Maitland with Benison and myself in attendance. It might have been the strain of the trip that sent him to hospital with a poisoned foot. He was there for weeks and I had to drive the thirty-five miles to Port Macquarie to see him with the baby sleeping tranquilly beside me in its basket. The road at that time was worse than a creek-bed with huge broken stones laid for repairs. Even after the headmaster returned he was still breaking out in the mysterious rash only kept down by Pop Slocombe’s horse-goo.

  People would say, “Ah, it’s going about”, when a mysterious epidemic, nurtured by mosquitoes and sandflies in the mangrove swamps, struck the town. The dead fish drying along the river bank for bait were also blamed. I had battled against every infant ailment with Benison and now, with a new baby and a sick husband, it was time to beat a strategic retreat. My good friends in Head Office pointed out that there was an interesting old school in a waterside suburb of Sydney falling vacant, and Roddy was too ill to resist. Our children make cowards of us all.

  “It’s no use,” Ernie told him, “she’s made up her mind. When a woman makes up her mind the best thing you can do is give in.”

  On Christmas Eve I was myself swept into hospital by a doctor friend who had an imperious nature and took no notice of any patient’s objections. Roddy returned to Laurieton to manage the move. He had instructions to bring down my orchids, but he was distracted by bumping the back of the truck when he was dumping garbage and he brought only a glossy Moreton Bay fig-tree in a tin.

  He had long had an election-day feud with a Seventh Day Adventist who lived across the river. The Seventh Day Adventist would not leave his house until after sundown and would wait at the gate of the school until a minute past eight. Roddy and Peg, who acted as assistant poll clerk, would be making up their tally when the Seventh Day Adventist would come knocking at the door demanding the right to cast his vote. They were too good-natured to refuse him the ballot paper.

  Now he came to buy my ducks, ten of them, and Roddy let him have them for two shillings each. The next day he was back complaining that as soon as he let the ducks out of the bags they had soared off back across the river. He had not known that I would not cut their wings. “And they came straight back in this direction,” he said grimly. He did not actually accuse Roddy of training them to fly home but began peering under the house and in places where ducks might be concealed. Roddy, in a haughty and aristocratic way, gave him his pound back. I never found out what happened to the ducks, probably a fisherman ate them, but I like to think they continued up the river to the swamps where they would be safe.

  Most of Roddy’s transactions over the sale of furniture seemed to be in the same strain. Some he gave away, some mysteriously vanished. He packed the books carefully in great boxes, then left the house until the removalists cared to arrive some weeks later. If you are in hospital these things fall into proportion.

  I was again stitched down the middle from one of the bargain-basement operations where doctors peer in and decide what to snatch. I had really thought I might die this time and my hidden motive was to bring the children where they would be near my mother and sister. But the Chinese declare I am under the sign of the Water Rat which can burrow, swim or run untiringly, while Roddy is the Wise Snake who shares the same burrow.

  Before I had left I drove Ernie to Port Macquarie to draw his first issue of the old-age pension. “Now Royalty and I are on the same level,” Ernie remarked. “The country’s supporting both of us.‘’ The old-age pension, by his spare method of living, actually allowed him to save some money. For Ernie, accustomed to live on almost nothing, it was wealth.

  “You’ll never come back,” Ernie had said on our last visit to Dimandead.

  The others had gone down the beach and I was fretful because the food would be overcooked. I was inclined to be haggard at that time and impatient with Ernie. “We’ll be back here every holiday, see if we’re not.”

  And, indeed, for some years after we left we spent more time at Dimandead than when we were in Laurieton, We would come straight down the Moorland road and never go into Laurieton except for food and to see Bonte and Mac, who had retired from the post office to the cottages they let by the breakwater.

  Ernie lived from day to day in enjoyment of his animals, his morning toast, the sunlight on the paddocks, the way a bird whistled back to him. He had immense reserves of the profound tranquillity of a meditative man, When he lay down at night and his thoughts swept over Dimandead where he knew which trees were budding, which insects breeding, it was as though the pattern of the place had become pattern of the man. He was Dimandead.

  “I’ve often thought I’d go back to Queensland and have a look at a mine I never rightly tested out.”

  “Ernie, you need a drink.” I shook the stone demijohn. “There’s only a little in the bottom and it’ll serve them right if they come back late and find we’ve drunk it,” I tilted the wine into two enamel mugs and a little dead lizard fell out from the last of the wine.

  “Clean little feller, ain’t he?” Ernie poked the lizard reflectively. “Paws folded on his chest. When I die I’m going to walk out somewhere in the dunes with a rifle and the warm sand will drift over me.”

  “Drink up! Anyway, they wouldn’t want any wine if they knew there was a lizard in it.”

  We drank our wine, toasting each other, “Here’s seeing you.”

  I knew that when Ernie went in to town there would be no Rodds to press books on him. He would go past a house of strangers where no one would welcome him in. He had all of our friends, Rudl would play chess with him, Bonte and Mac would be glad to welcome him to a meal, and now he had many mates of his own.

  But Ernie’s waiting for us to come so stamped itself on my mind that I would always see him in the sunlight with the Flower of the West Wind around his boots, looking down the track, and Dimandead looking over his shoulder.

  Chapter XI

  NO SOONER were the Rodds gone than Clara came back. “It seems to be a law of nature,” Ernie said. “A man thinks at last he’s got a chance to catch on his loafing and before he knows it a woman has arrived thinking up things for him to do.”

  Later, Clara could only express what she thought of the house by a deep groan. But like the swallows who called in all their relations to help build the nest over Ernie’s bed, Clara called in her clan and had new bearer beams under the kitchen floor, all the white-anted wood ripped out, the window replaced, the kitchen painted and new linoleum laid, a new stove and sink. Even the newspapers in the little room Benison and I had once occupied were ripped down.

  Ernie took refuge in his bee-yard down near the lake in very thick bush and, with a series of good years, refurbished his hives so that there were again treacle tins full of dark honey. He refused to wear a bee veil and the bees would be hanging from his beard.

  The white ants took refuge in our shack and my first thought when I came up was always to crawl under the house and look for white ants’ nests. When Roddy hired some builders, at Bonte’s instigation, to enlarge and extend the veranda, they built it low down to the ground, which made a perfect setting in the damp and dark for white ants to work.

  This meant that we, too, had to tear down inner walls, put in new windows and floorboards. A wool expert, Jim James, master-minded this operation, insisting on aluminium frames for the windows which the white ants could not chew.

  Ernie, creosoting the tank stand, was very witty about the white ants, telling us about the man who had left his suitcase standing in an upstairs bedroom of a Queensland hotel while he went down to do a little drinking. He changed his boots before he went and thought no more about it. When he came back he lifted up his suitcase and out fell a chunk of ant-heap where the white ants had eaten all his clothes. He lifted up his boots and th
e white ants had eaten the soles off. “Industrious little fellers,” Ernie said affectionately, helping James to pull down the walls to get at them. They did not touch the great slabs of red mahogany but had built behind them so that we had an inner wall composed of white ants and the earth they had brought in. They chewed along the floorboards leaving a thin paper on top which a footstep would crumble. “These wet years,” Ernie murmured, “the bees have done real well. Plenty of nectar in the blossom.”

  Terry, on holidays in Laurieton, somehow found himself involved in hammering and holding up wallboards. My friend Elizabeth cut her leg open in the surf and was driven in to the doctor to be stitched after she had insisted on bringing back her load of wood from the beach to mend floors.

  It was a toss-up which would win, the host of friends or the host of white ants. Terry was still full of conversation and philosophy and sat in the lamplight talking about the after-life with Ernie, who didn’t believe there was one, and Jim James, who didn’t care but would take any side for the sake of argument. Years later, coming up with his family to Dimandead, James had a heart attack just as they were leaving, was whipped into Port Macquarie hospital and nearly found out about the after-life for himself. Dimandead had done for him what it did for everyone, given him an outlet for his energies until they tore him apart. After that, when he came to Dimandead, he took it much more quietly as Ernie had advised. James was going to finish the outdoor lavatory and roof it when he had his heart attack, so for the next ten years it didn’t have a roof, and then a bushfire swept through and burnt it down.

  Because we had to come three hundred miles on our visits we stayed much longer at Dimandead. One year we brought a clerical friend, the Reverend Alf Clint, who sat on the beach persuading Roddy it would be a good idea if I came with him to a small aboriginal mission far up on the Cape York Peninsula to write about a trochus and cattle co-operative he was forming there.

  “What about the children?” I had just brought them back from Central Queensland on what was my last trip before writing The Honey Flow.

  “You can take Bim,” Roddy agreed generously, as though giving me some splendid gift.

  By the time Bim was three Ernie was accustomed to look at him sternly. “He kicked his sister.” I had never seen him so angry as on this occasion. “A boy who kicks his sister when—” he could not even contemplate such sacrilege. Had we not been there Ernie would undoubtedly have given Bim the licking he deserved and it would have done them both good. But Ernie restrained himself. I think that Ernie and Bim only became friendly when Bim was hitch-hiking to Queensland to look for work over the school holidays. He and an equally outlandish friend were heading for Mount Morgan and called in at Dimandead where Ernie insisted on giving Bim some money and advising him about Queensland. With his long hair and his guitar he was still strange to Ernie, but he was broke and looking for work, refusing to send home for money. That was something Ernie understood. Bim’s friends, musicians, thought Ernie “cool”. It was a high compliment. They found Dimandead a friendly refuge for young outlaws.

  Alf Clint, one Sunday at Dimandead, decided to celebrate Mass on the kitchen table in our shack. He just put on his white alb over his shorts, brought out his little communion set, and placed a couple of candles in milk bottles. Ernie attended as an onlooker, sitting by the fire, interested, with his eye cocked like a bird in the clearing. Alf was accustomed to celebrate Mass on some lonely island, in thatched huts and native churches. Ernie could count on one hand the number of times he had been inside a church, but he formed a warm admiration for Alf. “The kind of bloke that anybody could get on with.”

  When we came back to Dimandead from the Torres Straits where we had left Alf, everything looked the same until we drove into our clearing. Across it was a hideous scar of upturned clay and turf where a tractor had churned its triumphant way across the paddocks, past our veranda and through the fence where Ernie had obligingly removed the wires to let it pass. He could not resist the plea of a fellow miner. It was his old principle of letting people have anything they asked, of giving the coat off his back.

  “They’d never have got through the swamps,” he explained. “You know that. Got to give a man a fair go.”

  There were notices on great stakes, claiming not only the sandhills but all the swamps behind and all up our creek.

  I called in to a sherry party in the city and to my astonishment heard a dumpy little man, Sir James or Sir George Something, holding forth to a circle of ladies about his claim on fifteen miles of perfect beach and how by superhuman effort he had driven a road there and what an undependable lot the fishermen were as a work force.

  “The first time I saw this place,” he said, “I drove in my car to this farm behind the cliffs at Dimandead. No one there except an old chap with a beard puttering about. Over in a clearing is a run-down shack but nothing else. I just sat in the car and looked at it and a feeling like poetry came over me. ’This is for you,’ I says to myself. ‘Retire here, put up a good house and retire.’ I’d let the old man stay on and potter about till he died. Just the place for me and the wife to breed cocker spaniels and grow banana-passionfruit. There’s a market for them.”

  “Which?” I said stonily. “The banana-passionfruit?”

  “The dogs.” He was a good-tempered little man.

  “That is my house in the clearing,” I told him, “the run-down shack. Neither I nor my friend, Mr Metcalfe, who owns the three hundred acres, would sell you an inch of it.”

  The ladies hastily changed the subject.

  My dramatic denunciations of rutile-mine-owners left Ernie undisturbed when I next came to Dimandead, but he hinted to the manager at the rutile works that I was getting more cut up than the clearing. It was time the rutile works built its own road. This they did, making a quarry of the south flank of Dimandead and throwing the rock and clay into the swamp. They brought in power lines. Tall corrugated-iron sheds hummed with machinery. Their dam cut off the water from the lagoon, and the dam, stagnant and scummed with oily sludge, covered our track to the beach so that we had to scramble round its edge.

  The thunder of machinery as the rutile works thumped and roared twenty-four hours a day cut out the sound of the sea. The place spawned more buildings, it sprawled wider and wider. A dust cloud from the trucks hung over the plains of wildflowers. To widen the road into Laurieton the grove of redgums by Ernie’s gate were nearly all chopped down. This was so the heavy machinery could be moved. The quarry in the south flank of Dimandead, which looked like a great cancer, eroded and began trickling down in bloodstained clay and yellow bile, leaking its wound into the dam and silting it up. In the golden lagoon were old motor tyres, rusted oil-drums, jutting iron and timber that washed out when the dam collapsed. Another dam, much deeper, with a huge fortification and a pump-house, was put up just below our house.

  “In fifty years,” Ernie comforted me, “it will all be gone.”

  “So will we. In the meantime these people have made something beautiful into a disease.”

  When I was bad-tempered because the beach blew away in fine stinging dust because all the heavy elements had been churned out of it, Ernie muttered as usual that it was “nothing a good storm wouldn’t fix”. As patron and saviour of the rutile works Ernie was always invited to the Christmas parties. Even Alan Mobbs was “working on the rutile” and Ernie knew all the men there.

  I tried to take Ernie’s view, and one year when our son was about ten he made friends with the manager’s son and there were visits to our shack and we were invited to visit the rutile works roaring and churning by night, sifting down through great worms the gold and rutile and zircon. We stood on steel ladders in the noise while processes were explained to us. We were polite.

  Next day we were driven down the beach five miles where a dredge in a small lake was chewing out sand dunes. The operator was tranquilly reading a book as he sat in the sun on the dredge. “Now there’s a job I’d like,” Roddy murmured.

&
nbsp; But I was unreconciled and secretly uttered a great Scottish curse. It is the only time in my life I have ever cursed anything, believing that curses only ruin the one who curses. I cursed the rutile works for Dimandead, the great headland with its bleeding, cancerous erosion. I cursed the men’s indifferent greed. It was all very well to say that “the Rutile” made work for the men of Laurieton. The men of Laurieton would boil down their grandmothers’ bones if somebody paid them, as they would boil the bones of this land.

  “May their gold go into the sea that it came from,” I said. “May their roofs fall down. May they strike with a knife with no blade.”

  A useless and futile curse. The cow from the rutile works had a special taste for the Christmas bells which once grew in thousands on the plains and the flowers vanished into its great coarse mouth. The men went shooting kangaroos at the week-end. “Teach them to stay inside my fences where they’re safe,”- Ernie said.

  The Rutile budded a second diseased-looking set of excavations on the road to Moorlands, levelling great tracks of white paperbark swamp and leaving black sludge in their place with uprooted trees like skeleton corpses.

  There was the year of the flood when the North Coast excelled itself in the continuance of rain. It drank it up until even the rutile works’ road, built high over the swamps, was under water. In Laurieton the Camden Haven River, which had never flooded so near the sea, spread out over the low-lying land in rolling brown torrents.

  Ernie had gone in to have Christmas dinner with Jack, who now lived in a house near the punt, Albert of the magnificent moustache, the courtly manner, die great maker of mead and honey beer, had died. Perhaps, although neither of them had ever been close to Albert, his absence reminded his two younger brothers that they had a stronger link with each other. Not that when they met at the hotel they said much. Jack was inclined to remark, “How’s the farm going?” with the accent on the “farm” to remind Ernie of Jack’s orthodoxy in putting fertilizer in the “furrers”.