The White Earth (40 page)

‘My hat,’ said William, startled.

The smile was gone. ‘It isn’t yours. It belonged to my grandfather.’

‘I know,’ he said. ‘But Uncle John said I could wear it.

‘Indeed. What was it you told me — you thought it was an army hat?’

‘I knew it wasn’t, not really.’

She was holding up the hat, so that William could observe the badge. ‘You see the letters? QMP? I was right, they stand for Queensland Mounted Police. So I looked up the records. They’re sketchy, but yes, a Daniel McIvor is mentioned. He joined the force in 1888, when he was very young. He served for seven years and then left. And that was it. No big deal. Except that he wasn’t just an ordinary mounted policeman. He was part of a special detachment.’ She cast the cap aside. ‘They were called the Queensland
Native
Mounted Police. And that hat is a rarity. No complete uniform from the detachment survives. Not even the Police Museum has one.’

William frowned. He already knew that her grandfather had been a policeman. Did it matter exactly what sort of policeman?

Ruth was considering the painted walls.

‘You have to understand, Will — the history of Queensland settlement was a little different from states like New South Wales or Victoria. One of the differences was that there were more Aborigines in Queensland than down south, and so when white people tried to move out and settle the bush, there was more trouble. The tribes were warlike, and they weren’t going to stand aside and lose their land. They killed quite a few whites in the more remote areas. At times it got so bad, especially up north and out west, that whole white communities went into a panic and evacuated. The government decided they had to do something, so they set up a special troop. The Native Police. There were over one hundred of them, at their height. Quite an army for those days. And their job was to make sure that the Aborigines didn’t bother the white settlers. Their orders were to “disperse” any troublesome blacks. And the thing was, no one ever really defined what “disperse” might mean.’

William too looked at the walls, at the faded images of old England, and then at the ghostly riders in Australia, trailing after their sheep.

‘The word itself means to break up, to scatter, to chase away. And sometimes that’s all the Native Police did. Ran the blacks off, or arrested them. Other times, however, they just shot them all. No one knows how often exactly, because the Native Police didn’t keep official records. The old reports speak only in euphemisms.“We dispersed this tribe, we dispersed that tribe.” It could mean hundreds of dead, it could mean thousands. But the Native Police operated all up and down Queensland, and they went on “dispersing” for over thirty years. It got so awful that it disturbed white people, even back then. There were complaints and inquiries. But that didn’t stop the killing.’

And inevitably, William found his eyes drawn to that corner of the mural where the dark faces huddled. Were they lying in wait for the white men, he had always wondered, or were they hiding in fear? And now that he looked more attentively — were there rifles in the riders’ hands?

Ruth’s voice was flat. ‘My grandfather was one of them. He slaughtered blacks for a living,and wore this hat while he was doing it. It’s an officer’s cap, by the way. The officers were the only white men in the Native Police. The private troopers were all Aborigines from New South Wales and Victoria, trained and armed. Who better to hunt down and kill blacks than other blacks, right?’

Wide eyes stared out from the walls, and the glimmer of teeth.

‘Is that what happened here?’ William asked faintly.

Ruth gave an odd laugh. Then she shook her head.‘
Officially
, the Native Police never had anything to do with Kuran Station. The first troop was only formed around 1860. By then, there was no need for them on the Darling Downs. The real troubles were further out on the frontier. As far as I can tell, my grandfather was stationed mostly in the far north, where the blacks kept causing problems right into the late 1890s. But after that the Native Police were disbanded, and he was out of a job.’

She fixed William with her stare.

‘He kept hold of his gun, though. He used to carry it with him, when he worked here. And obviously he kept that hat. I know you don’t really understand, Will, but my father’s had you dressed up in the Australian equivalent of an SS uniform.’

William studied the cap. No, he didn’t understand her, but it seemed darker now, and heavier. And yet he remembered the feel of it on his head, the pleasant weight of the badge. And he remembered the men from the League, Terry and Henry, and the way they had laughed and saluted and called him Captain Bill. They had thought it was all for fun.

But then another memory came, of night, and of cicadas shrilling, and of a shapeless creature with glaring eyes.
You bear the
mark, boy
. Yes…he had borne that hat like a beacon the whole time he was in the hills. The murderous shepherd had recognised it, and drawn away. The explorer had saluted its authority. And the bunyip had regarded it with ancient hostility. But why? The Native Police had never been on the station, his cousin had just told him they hadn’t. Whatever her grandfather had done with his black troopers, it had happened miles away from here, in some other part of the state.

Ruth was gathering her papers.

‘So, those women at Cherbourg, I said to them,“You bet it’s my business. My grandfather was out there wading in Aboriginal blood.” That got through to them. But I didn’t tell them the very worst thing about my grandfather. I haven’t told you yet, either. I’m saving that for your uncle. He’s the one who needs to hear it first.’

William gazed at her, shaken by doubts.

‘Do you still want to go up to see him?’ she asked.

He didn’t know. He felt dizzy again, half drawn back into the dream-world of the hills. The things he had seen and heard, the messages, the warnings, the hat, the coming rain — they were all linked somehow. And the answer seemed to dance tantalisingly close.

His cousin held out a hand.‘C’mon then. Let’s go up.’

Chapter Forty-two

H
IGH IN THE WHITE CHAMBER, JOHN MCIVOR FOUGHT AGAINST delirium as he waited for his nephew.

A fever throbbed within him, mirroring the heat of the room, and he could feel his twice-scarred heart beating febrile in his chest. He was seventy-nine years old, and he was probably dying. Not his mind — his mind was alive in a way it had seldom been before. Oh, but his body…

Pain flared, and he strove to shift his limbs, sweating with the effort.

He was so weak. How he hated the indignity he had suffered these last months, having to be fed and nursed like an infant. And by the boy’s useless mother, no less. In fact, he was surrounded now by women he did not want. Veronica, and the old housekeeper, they were vultures the both of them, circling, eager to pick at his carcass. But worse by far was his daughter, the poisonous child. If only he could rise from his bed and physically cast her out. Cast all of them out.

He groaned, rolling his head across the pillow.

And for a bewildering instant it seemed as if his father was there in the room with him. A stern, silent, giant of a man, his gun at his side, and dressed in a uniform.

That was Ruth’s fault as well. This fuss about William’s hat. In some ways, she had seemed angrier about the hat than she had about William being sent out alone. You’d think he’d given the boy a snake to play with. And yet, there was no denying the rest of it — his daughter’s revelation had been an unpleasant surprise. John had never known the details of his father’s police career, until now.

‘You didn’t tell me,’ he complained to the empty room.

And for a moment, something inside John quailed. The Native Police — was that the taint that had smeared his father so long ago?

He banished the doubt. Of course not. It was no shame to have served with the Native Police. They had performed a necessary duty, that was all. Did his daughter think that Australia had been claimed as easily as walking onto the land and taking it? No, it had been fought for, like land anywhere in the world. Declarations of war and treaties meant nothing in the end. There was only the reality of occupation, and it was a brutal business.

‘Whites were dying too, remember,’ he muttered.

And if it happened that his father was part of it all, so what? It didn’t make the man a murderer or a monster. The history was there to be read — lives had been saved, settlement had been assured. So what did it matter where William’s hat came from? It couldn’t do the boy any harm. There was no evil genie hiding in an old police badge.

But his daughter wasn’t finished with him, he knew. She was rummaging through his papers downstairs in the office, searching, no doubt, for details about the station’s lease. Well, let her look. The only document that mattered was his will, and it wasn’t in the office, he had it there in the bedroom, beside him in the cupboard. He had typed it himself only yesterday, forcing his trembling fingers down on the keys. And there was no mention of Ruth, nor of the other two women. Let them guess and wonder and plot to usurp him. And let them perish with frustration in the end.

‘I have the boy now,’ he told the room, grinning hotly at the memories.

True, he had doubted William at first.

He recalled his initial sight of the lad, moping about on the day his father died. (What luck, that harvester catching fire.) There hadn’t been much promise to see in him then, but John had persevered. And on that dreadful night of the rally, William had proved that he was the right choice. For the boy had seen it too! Not for real, of course, his childish imagination must have plucked the image from a dream. But it was the
same
dream, John’s own dream, and surely that was the point.

The room waited silently.

‘Yes,’ he explained, ‘but I had to know for sure.’

And if the boy wanted Kuran Station, then he had to discover the answer for himself. Ownership could not be shared. Not the power of it, and not the weight of it either. It could be crushing, that weight, encompassing all the history that the land had ever witnessed, the summation of the lives and deaths of all those who had walked it before. But William barely even
knew
the station — he hadn’t smelled it or touched it or felt the terrible age of its bones. John didn’t remember what he had said to the boy to launch him out into the hills, he remembered only his certainty that William had to go.

And there had never been any question of his mother picking him up. The child was afraid, and it was fear that he needed to master. He would have to find his own way there and his own way home. It didn’t matter that Veronica had been frantic, or that Ruth had interfered. The women weren’t important, they would never grasp the truth. Perhaps, John considered, ownership was fundamentally a male concern. He had always known that the boy would survive. If he was worthy. If not, then better the fact be known now, before it was too late.

‘It’s not my fault the water hole was dry,’ he complained.

Anyway, the thing was done. Once William reported what he had seen and learnt, then the matter would be sealed and there would be nothing anyone could do — not Ruth, not Veronica, not even Mrs Griffith. John would have his heir.

And it was right! The vindication came every time he closed his eyes. Awake, his mind swarmed with thoughts, but ever since he had sent William into the hills, his sleep had been blissfully calm. The past no longer stalked his dreams. There were no more visions of the House as it had been when he was a child, with all its lights and sumptuous crowds,no more phantom appearances of Elizabeth White, always aloof and mocking and out of reach. He no longer dreamt about his time in the mountains, of great dark forests and balding peaks. He no longer dreamt of Dudley, with his sad tortured face, or of the hideous sight of him, stretched naked across a crying girl. He no longer dreamt of Harriet, or of that single perfect moment they’d shared, amidst the rock and the water.

Most crucially of all, there had been no more nightmares. Not one glimpse of that familiar figure standing patiently while it burned. Perhaps it was Oliver Fisher, perhaps it wasn’t — John had stopped pondering the question years ago. But ever since the day of Oliver’s death, John had known that there was a price he must pay to achieve his ends. Friends, family, wife and daughter — he had surrendered them all. And that, he had come to believe, was what the nightmare really signified. The burning man was his reminder of things lost, and his accuser of things done.

But now it had vanished, and John knew why. It had moved on to William. All unknowing, the boy had assumed the burden, and John was free of it at last. He dreamt of nothing now, as if he was a man without history or memories. There was only an empty, silent place in his sleep, where his mind hung in soothing darkness.

John blinked, stared into the corners of his room.

There was no one there.

Beside him, the radio whispered stories of rain sweeping across the country, and of fierce debate raging in the Senate. The world spun on, and now Native Title loomed, the final decision hanging in the balance. Did he care any more? No … all of that was gone with the League and white robes dancing around stones. Still, the vote was approaching, and if the new laws passed, then it was fitting that William should witness the moment, here at his side.
See
, he would say to his nephew,
with one hand I give you the property, and with
another they begin to take it away. Not with this law maybe, but with the
next, and with all the others that will follow.
The boy would know he had been betrayed,even before the inheritance was his, and the seed of a lifelong hatred would be planted.

Rightly so.

John McIvor smiled. He moved the radio dial, let his fingers fall drowsily.

What was keeping the boy?

Chapter Forty-three

W
ILLIAM AND RUTH FOUND THE OLD MAN FAST ASLEEP.

His arm was draped across the bedside table, fingers upon the radio dial. Static crackled, and the room was stifling, awash with an angry red light that told of faraway fires and smoke, but to William, his uncle looked at a peace, lost in a deep, sweet dream, his head thrown back in abandon.