The Man on the Headland Read online

  Crossing to the Dunbogan side, he turned left behind Uncle Johnny Longworth’s house with its windmill above the water trough and the racecourse as a kind of back paddock. Here cows grazed and there were mushrooms in the rough grass. Ernie took the road along the lakeside, leaving the town on the opposite shore with the smoke from the timber mill lying like a fallen scarf around the mountain-foot. The town, in the early sunlight, was still rubbing the sleep from its eyes. Shags perched on grey piles and settled their neck feathers; oyster leases showed black sticks and numbered notices in the wide still water. Ahead on rising ground was thick scrub where the town girls went to pick a cartload of boronia whenever they wanted to decorate the Community Hall for a dance, throwing out the sweet-scented pink flowers next morning to wilt unregarded.

  The track was heavy grey sand, for the seashore was only a quarter of a mile to his left and the murmur of it came over the sand-ridges. Across the creek was jungle country with staghorns and orchids in the tree crotches and black mud under the sulky wheels. Then the track ran out on the plains and Diamond Head swelled up in front with smooth green contours of turf tapering down to forest tops about its flanks. The sulky was going across the black peat land where Christmas bells flickered a rush of small flames in their woody-sounding bells. Far off towards the South Brother were a line of paperbarks advancing in decorative attitudes.

  The great green haunch of Diamond Head sprawled out onto the beach with a little creek creeping out of its protection as if to taste the salt water. Diamond Head had another creek, with a golden lagoon on its southern side, draining the plains behind, which had once been all under-seas when the river ran by Diamond Head. Gradually this entrance had silted up and the lake had shrunk inland until the strip of seven miles of sandy level cut it off from the ocean. The plain in a wet season still reverted to its former habit and became one great bog.

  Ole Mammy, Blue and the Pup set their noses in the creek. The horse drank, blowing sensitively on the surface. By the beach there was an old ruined racecourse—Uncle Johnny’s—and a couple of houses he had planned for holiday letting, which were in the lonely occupancy of white ants. Where the track curved round the rear of Diamond Head the paperbarks had new leaves the colour of red wine. Ernie noticed a fire had gone through here, singeing black the outer bark above the torn strips of pink, white and buff inner bark. It was always dark and shady in the patch of forest with lawyer vines tangled in the trees. Then there was a great stand of redgums near the Metcalfe gate and beyond, on the rise, the cleared land cheerful in broad sun with the homestead, the old fig-tree, the grape trellis, orchard and beehives.

  His brother Jack helped Ernie unload and Clara, his sister, put the kettle on while Ernie was restoring the pup to Ole Mammy and taking the horse out of the shafts. Ernie had a look at the pig and scratched under its ear. He asked how the bees were doing and was told they were in bloody poor shape. All the Metcalfes were great beekeepers. Presently the three of them, Jack, Clara and the wanderer, were eating Clara’s good cake, sitting round the kitchen table.

  Clara was a woman with a gentle smile and an active domestic mind. When she was seventy-five she walked to Laurieton to see the doctor and he told her that he wished he could be as fit as she was. She could climb the cliffs, at that age, better than I could. She held the half-share of the farm that had belonged to her mother, and Jack owned the other half-share. Jack Metcalfe was the youngest of the family and was born of a different father. He was a worrier—always had been.

  He had a stubborn bullock’s face and head, he was cantankerous, and strangely enough bore the reputation of being a great lady’s man. Now, with Ernie home, he complained of pains in his chest, his bad heart. Diamond Head was killing him. Clara had saved up enough money to build a new house because, she said, this one was so eaten with white ants it was likely to fall down. Besides, she said, the place was too “shut in”, and where her new house would stand you could see over the open paddocks to the peak of the South Brother against the sunset. Clara had always been a great one for sunsets and her brothers teased her.

  “The trouble with you,” Ernie asserted, his mouth full of cake-crumbs, “is that you don’t settle down. The family that was here before moved from over where you want this house built because they said it was too lonely and they liked to be near the road to see the traffic going by. They might miss something. And now after only about twenty years you’ve got to move back. I suppose it’s all this traffic whirling past.”

  Jack had a literal mind. “Might be a car come by sometimes—chaps fishing. Get bogged in the wet, but.”

  “You’re a fine one to talk, Ernie.” His sister smiled. She was glad to have him home and it was her habit to wait on people. Jack gave her not enough scope.

  Athol Stace came out to build his mother-in-law’s new house. Jack plodded and complained. Ernie was the most deft and daring, joking as he straddled the roof. It was a four-room cottage and, with materials hard to come by, was made of grey fibro with a corrugated-iron roof. It was fenced all around so that the cows should not eat Clara’s roses or the grape cuttings she brought from the old place. Behind it was the track up to the cliffs and in front the ploughed land and paddocks stretched away rimmed with trees. On a slope Jack had planted corn and on the other side was the vegetable garden, the fowl-house.

  Ernie began dismantling the old house and carting the great slabs of red mahogany that constituted the walls to make a barn which stood more solid-seeming than the new house. His attention was taken by the little lake beyond the pasture and he would walk down in the evenings to study it. Fish swam up from the sea between the ferns and tree-roots and the blue water-lilies. Diamond Head held this lake, curled round it as though it were a golden cup it guarded, holding it between two paws of and.

  “A man,” Ernie said, “could drain that lake.”

  “You’re mad,” Jack replied with the true Metcalfe impulse to disagree with a brother.

  “You’d get another acre of good grazing.”

  “And kill your bloody self into the bargain. It’d take a dozen men and a team of horses and then you wouldn’t bloody do it.”

  “A man could do it on his own.” Ernie had been growing restless.

  The South Brother heaved itself up against the sunset as the pig heaved itself against the fence when Ernie went to talk to it in the evening. But the South Brother was only a tame peak and Ernie’s thoughts were of gold and sapphires in the Great Dividing Range. He still wore his boots of Queensland leather and had sworn to go back to Queensland when they wore out. Twenty-five years later they had still not worn out.

  Diamond Head, true to its uncanny character, offered to all who came to it what they most cared for. What Ernie most cared for was a stupendous task, a problem to solve, something that no other man would undertake. Diamond Head held out the lure of the lake.

  It was Jack the worrier who noticed the lump under Ernie’s chin and found out he had another on his lip. Ernie claimed he was putting ointment on them, but to stop Jack’s nagging he agreed to go to the doctor in Taree, forty miles south, a town with a big hospital.

  Ernie made light of the whole affair. The milk truck would call for him on Monday and he’d have a rest in hospital after all this work. They’d just worn him out with building this house.

  “Why didn’t you tell us before?” Clara demanded, and Ernie said that if a man began to worry about a lump o; his jaw he’d start letting her fuss over him and the ne thing, he knew she’d have married him off to some poo unfortunate woman the way she’d always planned. Whe Ernie went off to hospital with his clean-washed pyjam; in a little case such as children use for school books h sister sat down and cried.

  “He knew it was cancer,” she said to Jack. “He nevr let on.”

  The nurses made a great pet of Ernie because he was handsome and good-humoured. They asked which one c them he would marry and he laughed, saying that n$$$ woman could catch him because he could run faster than any girl.
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br />   “Be-the-gawd,” Jack said later, “the doctors damn near cut his head off. He’d uv been dead if he hadn’t uv went.”

  Ernie grew a piratical beard and moustache and hid the scars. He dreamt of his little lake with blue water-lilies in the shadow of the trees. When he came home he bought Jack’s half-share of the farm, for he still had a money belt from his Queensland gold-mining. Jack wanted two hundred pounds, which was what die whole farm cost originally, and he retired to Laurieton to nurse his bad heart. He had a war pension of £1 6s. 3d. a fortnight and established himself on the sawdust dump in a beautifully fitted cedar caravan under a great fig-tree. He was within walking distance of the hotel. He could watch the “outside” fishermen load their lobster traps and die “inside” fishermen drying their nets. He could stroll across to Dot’s house for a cooked meal when he felt like it. Clara worried about him and felt he had not long to live. That was why he had persuaded Ernie to take over the farm.

  When Jack was over eighty he was still disparaging Ernie’s farming.

  “Before I left I ploughed the paddick. I left the furrers pen. ‘All you got to do,’ I says to him, ‘is put in the Utilizer with the bean seeds and push the dirt in on top, “‘Why?’ he says.

  “‘Why,’ I says, ‘because that’s the bloody way they go.’

  “He poked them in. No fertilizer.

  “‘How’d the beans go?’ I says to him later.

  “‘Bloody eel-worms ate ’em,’ he says. Eel-worms!”

  Chapter V

  ERNIE’S GRANDFATHER, the Welsh poacher who was transported for taking a pheasant, had a son, John Metcalfe, who was a bullock driver with a farm up in the ranges out from Walcha. In the high tablelands the people are as hard as the grey granite boulders that once made good cover for bushrangers. Possibly the convict grandfather came to Port Macquarie, for his son carted stores between the Port and Walcha, a hundred miles up through the ranges that would break a man’s heart as well as a bullock’s: slow, hot sunbeaten miles, walking beside the team, sweat and effort getting them over the pinches, the strain of the heavy load, the lonely camp.

  At the end of the trip John Metcalfe would throw his cheque on the bar counter and drink it out. His wife, Frances, had to go round the stations sewing, and she was also a midwife. Her first child, Harry, was born under the bullock dray. Her family increased to six boys and four girls and, apart from one little girl who was drowned, they all throve. Ernie often spoke of “The Mother” as one speaks of a deity, but of his father he never spoke at all.

  His elder brother George left home at the age of eleven and found himself a job in a timber mill. The father never made any inquiry after him. Some time later the man rode past and called to his son: “Hear you’ve got a job?”

  “Yes.”

  “See you keep it then.” And he rode on.

  Clara, as the eldest girl, managed the house and the little ones while The Mother would be away awaiting the arrival of a baby on some grim farm. Clara was ten when Ernie was born on 21st September 1885, and she reared him. She never lost her habit of caring for the family. But it was a miracle Ernie ever grew up because he could think of more devilment than other boys. He sought out snakes and would pick them up and crack them like a whip.

  “He was a bugger for snakes,” Jack recalled. Jack detested snakes. “He’d bring diem home—tiger snakes, black ones, brown ones. Once he sent me for the shovel and the womenfolk see me going off with it. ‘What d’you want the shovel for?’ they asked. ‘Ernie wants to dig out a snake.’”

  The outcry women made over little things like that or boys falling off bucking horses or out of trees formed a habit in Ernie of “never letting on” when he was badly hurt. He would stagger home somehow and not let the girls know.

  “Clara spoilt him,” Jack said morosely. “He was The Mother’s favourite, too.”

  Jack, the youngest, tagged along when Ernie truanted. “Your boys weren’t at school yesterday, Mrs Metcalfe.” But how could a woman with a living to earn see that they got their schooling? Ernie was caned and thrashed and detested school the more. Then there came a schoolmaster who discovered the boy was brilliant and tried to persuade him to study for a scholarship. How could he let his mother work to keep him?

  He was a born musician and could play any instrument. (“I always fancied a fiddle.”) But his musician’s hands broadened and became scarred with hard work. He was the lightest and gayest of dancers. One night he looked through the window of the wooden hall where drunken young men stumbled with flushed girls. “How stupid they look!” he said remotely. “I will never dance again.” And he never did.

  He would make these sudden decisions and keep them. For instance, he would decide not to drink for a space of so many years. He always kept to his word. He had a Spartan, ascetic streak and decided never to marry. He had observed married people.

  Ernie said that what turned him off marriage was a neighbour’s wife who was so fat she hardly stirred from her chair. She kept her husband’s bullock whip by her and would flick it round the ankles of her children into any corner of the one-roomed hut. When he was a little fellow Ernie would be sent on a message and watch the woman through a crack in the door, fearful that she might lay that whip around his legs.

  Clara married Bert Bullen, who had a pretty sister, Bertha Bullen. Ernie, Clara said, might have married her, but there was some misunderstanding. He thought she had not answered a letter he wrote her and he vowed never to write again. So Bertha married another man and Ernie went on his travels. He took good care to stay away, Clara said, until Bertha was married. “When Ernie went to the war Berdia cried for him. Married as she was, she wept for Ernie, and perhaps she was not the only one.”

  But Ernie, not grieving for his lost romance, went down the Darling in a canoe with another fellow, getting lost in the Menindee swamps, swapping fish for flour and tea at the stations. They were once taken for river pirates. They were often hungry, but they followed the Darling to the Murray River and the Murray to the sea across a quarter of the continent.

  At this time Ernie’s elder brother George had taken up a farm on the road that led from Moorlands to Diamond Head. He had become George-with-one-arm. George had lost the other arm working in the timber on Langley’s Line—steep country where you rode on the logs down the mountain. George had put the new hand on the brake as it was at the back, the safest place. He was up in front and the new hand lost his head, let the logs gain speed. George was thrown off and his arm was crushed. “No compensation in them days,” his son Harry said. So George cleared the farm and rode a white stallion that no one else could handle. Ernie said he once went to give old George some help but he couldn’t work his pace. “I had to sleep in the sun for a week to recover.”

  George-with-one-arm wrote home that the family who had taken up land on Diamond Head wanted to sell their farm. The boys should buy it and make a home for The Mother. Ernie’s brother Albert and Clara’s husband, Bert Bullen, rode their push-bikes down the odd hundred miles to George’s farm. Next door to him George had an Italian family growing grapes and the young men from the highlands of bitter grass and grey stone gaped at the fertility of the soil. In those days the North Coast was being opened up, all sunlit promise and prosperity, rich in dairy cattle and deep crops.

  “Bananas,” Albert said. “If you cleared that jungle you could grow bananas. Sheltered from the southerlies and the frosts. Or you could try passionfruit.”

  They cycled over to Diamond Head with its crest to the sea and its tail of forest. The enchantment took them. Only time reveals the character of Diamond Head. The Pullens —their name seemed a good omen, being close to Bullen—welcomed the boys as their chance to get away. Why did they want to go ? Well, the women found it a bit lonely. The children needed schooling. The Pullens promised to leave the whaleboat on the pebble beach below the cliffs. They spoke of the run of mullet on the beaches, showed the groper and lobster holes for fish-traps. If you wanted moorhen or duck you
only had to shoot them on your own lake. There were plenty of kangaroos if you ran out of meat for the dogs. You could take a cart down on the beach and shovel up the pipis, boiling bucketfuls at a time for fowl feed. Wonderful golden eggs the hens laid when fed on pipi meat.

  There were fields of maize and the orchard was coming into bearing. The Pullens had moved over to the road so they could put up a store and sell everything from tinned milk to sandshoes because the place was going to be a great holiday resort. Already Johnny Longworth had put up two houses and made a racecourse. People came and camped there for the races. (“I never ever won a race,” old John Longworth said. “The jocks used to bet against my horses when they rode them.”)

  The Pullens wanted two hundred pounds for this valuable holiday resort. In 1913, two hundred pounds was a lot of money. But for three hundred acres freehold, with two hundred more on leasehold, it was still a good offer. The only one of the boys who had any money was Jack, who was seventeen at the time. His mother took his money because she said he would only waste it. He had been working a tin lease out from Tingha—“camped in the scrub miles from anywhere”, Jack lamented. But he had a dispute over water rights and, the lawsuit going against him, he took a job at the smelting works.

  The Mother put her savings to Jack’s and bought “Dimandead”, and it was a good thing she did because she never trusted banks and kept her money in a secret place in the house. They might not even have moved then, but one night when Jack was skating at a rink in the town men came yelling, “Jack, your bloody house is burning down.” Everything was lost The house was of cedar with cypress-pine posts and it burnt as though it was doing it for a bet. The skillion kitchen had mosquito net over the window to keep out flies and the lamp had caught it.