Best Australian Short Stories (29 page)

Grandmother Warden lived in one of those Otway valleys where farmers see only sky and walls of grass and cows grazing perpendicularly above the chimneys, and a few white trunks of trees, dead and ghostly reminders of the original forest. In her old age she grew azaleas there and rhododendrons, and lived as a matriarch, even when there was only Uncle Silas left to rule. She was, I suppose, more than a matriarch. She ruled the entire district.

She never saw Melbourne; in fact, she only once saw Warrnambool—this after she had been shipwrecked east of there in the
Schomberg
in 1855. She stayed thereabouts for a time, more or less where the sea had left her, then as the Otway country opened, she moved into it until she came to this valley. I suppose its depth and its forest were a check even to such determination as hers. There was also a man in her odyssey, a grandfather I never knew. He first went into the valley on foot, then he took her in on a horse- drawn sledge and built her a but in the clearing he had made. And there was another woman, not in the valley, but in Melbourne, an older sister known to us as Great-aunt Elizabeth. The two women never spoke to one another; at least, not in my lifetime, nor in my mother’s.

My mother and seven aunts and uncles had been born in the valley, most of them without doctor or midwife—a circumstance in those days to be expected. Except for Uncle Silas they all left the valley—my mother to marry a local postmaster.

Our drives to the valley I remember well. Away from the Otways the country would be summer-white; but in the afternoon we would leave it behind and climb into the forest and smell the cool scent of undergrowth at the car windows. So it was all the way up the range, the air growing cooler, the forest heavier and more mysterious the higher we went. On its other side the hills were bare and green and descended in prodigious leaps to the sea, the far, pale-blue, apparently motionless sea. Sheep and cattle grazed on ledge-like tracks there, balanced precariously.

The farm was four or five hundred yards off the road. As I opened the gate I would feel that one false move might send the car plunging, like the horseman in the sky, to the valley floor. Down there I could hear dogs barking and Uncle Silas calling the cows, and the creek running, even though its movement was scarcely perceptible to the eye. I used to look directly on to the house and its rising smoke and gathered treetops, and, read the name faintly painted on the iron roof—Warden Vale.

In the year of the “pilgrimage”, as it came to be called, I was fifteen. On the evening of Boxing Day we had seated ourselves at the dining-room table, twelve or fifteen of us, my grandmother at the head, and Uncle John opposite her. My grandmother was at this time nearly ninety-four, and only then beginning to have the transparent appearance of age. Her hair was no more than steel-grey, and her eye was still quick to detect every reaction in those about her. As we waited to begin tea she said, “I have it in mind that you will take me—you, John—back to Curdie’s River. I want to see the Schomberg Rock again while there’s time.”

Here it was she had been wrecked as a girl of eighteen.

Uncle John, who was a craggy, amiable man, looked from under his eyebrows. “But, Mater, this is really quite preposterous—” “I shall now say grace,” said my grandmother.

Bowing her head and folding her hands, she enunciated carefully, “Bless this food for our use and ourselves for thy service, O Lord, our stren and our Redeemer.”

“Amen,” we said.

“But it’s quite three hours away—”

“It used to be as many days,” said Grandmother Warden, “and no comfortable days at that.”

“But you were a deal younger.”

“Stop ‘but-ing’ and eat your tea.”

And Uncle John, who was a leading grazier in the Upper Chetwynd country and had been a major in the war, ate his meal like a child.

“We’ll leave in the morning directly after breakfast,” said my grandmother.

My aunts and uncles murmured their assent without another protest.

Such was Grandmother Warden. Sitting at the head of the table, she was a replica of Victoria Regina, body erect, hair parted at the centre and drawn back, expression unamused. I suppose in her day Victoria-like wives had ruled half the homes of the country, even in places as remote as this. In her presence I often felt that my cousins and I lacked some intangible grace which might have been ours had we been born “at Home”, or even educated there. There was that faint smile of hers, something between pride and dismay, as if she had said, “It’s an experiment really, raising colonials. They’re not quite what one would like; but, after all, what can one do?” And yet it was she who had borne the impact of the new world: the wreck, the journey, the forest. And fires she had known, fire on fire, and then the accident which had killed my grandfather. She had found him in the forest where he had been felling timber. A tree had pinned him, but he was conscious still and able to tell her what she must do, now that she was alone. She had dug under him all that night, she and Uncle John. But he was dead long before they ended. Remembering these things, I could never be intolerant of her.

“Judith, you could come with us, and you, boy, too.”

“Thank you,” we said.

Judith I must describe. She was about my own age, daughter of a city uncle, but a girl with more of her grandmother’s spirit than any of us, more audacity, more assurance and poise. Even at this age she could be all fire and hostility, or all graciousness. She had for years been Grandmother Warden’s confidante: Judith it was who attended the old lady like a maid-in-waiting at her ninetieth birthday celebrations; before Judith I believe she showed more of her underlying feelings than she did before anyone. I remember Judith at this time as having her grandmother’s quick, imperious eye, even though she was only fifteen. Her hair she wore in a single plait, brushed out at the end and brought over her shoulder.

I had been elected to go on the journey simply because Grandmother Warden had long made a kind of secretary of me, requiring me to record any memories she cared to dictate, or to peruse documents relating to local history, or even to write to public libraries; for she had an obsession with Otway history.

Such was our introduction to the “pilgrimage”. Through the dining-room window, as we sat there at the table, we could see the forest on the other side of the creek. It had never been pushed farther back, and it rose now in a wall above the running water, dense, brooding, and oddly menacing.

Next morning we breakfasted in the kitchen, the four of us who were to go. When I came in, Grandmother Warden was alone and had already started her slice of toast and two cups of tea. She wore the white linen dress with fine black lines which she had worn on all the festive occasions I could remember. By her chair was her silver-topped stick, which was never far from her reach. When we had spoken she said to me, “And you wonder too why I should go?”

“No,” I said.

“No?” She looked at me with her intense eyes.

“I would want to do the same,” I said.

“And why would you go?”

I could only say perhaps to remember; perhaps to feel again what it had been like so long before.

She seemed pleased with this. “Yes,” she said. “Yes.” But her expression clouded and she said, as if to herself, “I have put it off long enough. Now it has become necessary to me.”

She met my eye and I became unaccountably confused, as if I had eavesdropped. But then the others came in: Uncle John wearing his Harris-tweed jacket, carrying his wide-brimmed hat, mur-muring still that it was preposterous; and Judith glancing at me in a way at once curious yet detached.

“Fifteen minutes for your breakfast,” said Grandmother Warden.

Behind her the wide black stove was open at the top, casting an aureole about her slight body. I had finished now and went outside into the morning. The sun had struck narrowly into the valley through a gap to the north-east. Although the valley walls were in shadow, the creek was in sunshine. Birds were diving from the forest to catch insects, darting through sunlight, then soaring back to shadows. As they dived, the sun momentarily brightened their bodies, so that the valley was full of flashing wings and choir-like singing.

We left before six, Grandmother Warden next to Uncle John, Judith and I in the back, well apart in our corners.

I remember this journey with particular clarity; not only because of its ending, but because I felt all day that, led by this aged woman, we were thrusting time aside, going back to the beginnings of my mother’s family. Perhaps my grandmother anticipated this sort of reaction from me; perhaps this was another reason for her taking me. And yet I knew little enough of the family history, except the story of the wreck. The Schomberg had struck a rock off Curdie’s River, but the passengers had been saved. Grandmother Warden and Great-aunt Elizabeth and various brothers and sisters had been with their parents. But when the family had continued the journey in a passing ship, Grandmother Warden had gone the other way to Warrnarnbool.

This fact I had always accepted unquestioningly, but I see now it was an extraordinary division, especially in a Victorian family, and one placed in such circumstances. Great-aunt Elizabeth I had known well. She had been a maiden lady a year or two older than Grandmother Warden, a gentle, absent-minded soul whom I had never once heard mention her sister, or even the
Schomberg
.

In low gear we rose out of the valley, the sky filling the windscreen, the engine no doubt sounding like an aeroplane to those waking below. Grandmother Warden wore a motoring veil, though veils had long since become unnecessary, and she sat well back in her seat as if braced for shock.

She motored only three or four times a year, then always to Colac to shop and to see her solicitor, and in December to buy Christmas presents. I fancy she disapproved of the ease with which Colac could be reached by car: once it had taken her two days on horseback during winter. Again, she had sent Uncle John to the doctor there, as a boy, with the written description of an illness which had struck two of the younger children. And from that, as the practice was, the doctor had diagnosed. Uncle John had had prescriptions made up and had ridden back, down through the forest, across the range, into the valley. But the illness had been meningitis and one of the children was already dead. So she disapproved, I believe, of the ease with which one could go to Corac now.

Out of the gate we went and up the range, the sea far down through the rear window and the forest ahead.

“There,” said Grandmother Warden, “is the old bullock road— and a good road it was—cut by LaTrobe and Roadknight right to the lighthouse.”

It was a rutted track on the hills, impossibly inclined to the sea. Our valley was below us on the other side with Phillips’s place coming into view, its smoke unwavering, its cows black-and-white toys. Uncle John changed to second gear, but every now and then he grunted impatiently and changed back to low. For three miles we clung to the edge of the valley, rising slowly into the colder air. Then we turned along the ridge, climbing still, but no longer steeply. And there we entered the forest. It looked more than usually impenetrable, more than usually mysterious. Although it was summer, the air was chill and moist and a mist rose off the treetops, far up where the sun touched them. The noise of our engine startled crimson lories into flight along the forest edge.

“After a few more miles,” said Uncle John, “it’s downhill all the way, but twisty, Mater. I hope it doesn’t upset you.”

“And why should it upset me? Why should it ?” Grandmother Warden accompanied this with taps on the floor with her stick. Nobody answered her.

Beyond Laver’s Hill we swung left and right, mile on mile down the western side of the range, Grandmother Warden sitting bolt upright, one hand still on her stick, never taking her eyes from the road; Judith occasionally glancing at me in a curious yet indifferent way. I was beginning to feel clammy and nauseated, my stomach moving loosely inside me. I leant back in the corner, my eyes closed, until I heard Uncle John say, “We’re down, Mater, and there’s the Gellibrand.”

“Ah, poor Mr Gellibrand,” said Grandmother Warden vaguely.

I opened my eyes and saw a broad stream, dark-looking, flowing under low hills. The sunshine of the higher country was gone and the sky was overcast.

“He was very obstinate, they say,” said Uncle John.

Who was he?” asked Judith.

“A Tasmanian gentleman,” said Grandmother Warden. He and Mr Hesse explored in the Otways twenty years before we arrived Mr Allan, from this side of the range, found poor Mr Gellibrand’s remains up this river many years later.”

“Someone else’s remains, I think, Mater.”

“Perhaps. At all events, it was a sad happening.”

He ignored his guide,” Uncle John persisted, “followed the Barwon into the forest, and that’s the last they heard of either of them. I doubt if they reached this side of the range.”

“Perhaps not,” said Grandmother Warden testily. “I only say it was sad; very sad.”

“Of course,” Uncle John conceded.

Judith smiled faintly, but, catching my eye, was serious again.

The Gellibrand ran parallel to the coast, seeking outlet through a line of low hills. The sea was yet invisible, but from its direction streamed broken cloud, driven by the wind. The forest and ranges were gone and the atmosphere was of winter rather than summer. Spindrift hung over a rolling, dreary country where growth was stunted and bent by the wind. We were not far from what we called “the shipwreck country”. The
Loch Ard
lay there and the
Red Jacket
and the Newfield and, more important to us than all of these, the
Schoenberg
.

I looked at Grandmother Warden’s straight back. Clearly she had no intention of letting the sea daunt her, any more than it had daunted her then. When we came in sight of it, still some hundreds of yards away, she lifted her veil, like a knight lifting his visor. “John, I should like to stop for lunch where poor Dr Carmichael and his family were lost.”

“Where Dr Carmichael and his family were lost”, as if this chapter of history had occurred a week before.