Melbourne and Mars/Chapter 2

EARLY one morning my two sisters and I had the painful experience of parting with our dear mother. We carried her trunk to a store in George-street, where a clumsy broad-wheeled dray stood laden with flour, tea, sugar, and other merchandise. The driver found a place for her amongst bags and boxes, where she might sit or even lie in tolerable comfort. The bullocks were attached, kisses were exchanged, tears freely shed by all of us, until the driver cut a painful scene short by a crack of the long whip and some mystic words that the bullocks evidently understood though we did not. Need I say that I followed that dray several miles, that I hugged mother till she must have been weary, and that with lingering feet and tear-dimmed eyes I walked back to Sydney too late for any work that day.
Four uneventful days passed after mother's departure. Sydney was at that time a very sleepy little town. The various movements of a few semi-military men, the changes amongst convicts, and the arrival or departure of a ship; these were events. On the fifth day a mail boat arrived, bringing with it a FREE PARDON for my father.
For six weary days the bullock dray toiled on with its freight. Six days of heat and dust and thirst, of the monotonous cracking of the whip and the vigorous, but mostly unintelligible, language of the driver and his mate. Six nights of camping out and roughing it, and now the seventh day's journey, the last, has begun. Each day mother commenced by walking a few miles. If she had known the way she would have waited on this last day and left the dray to follow. As it was she was a good mile ahead when the dray was overtaken by a mounted trooper, who asked for Mrs. Jacobs. Pointing to a speck in the distance before them the driver said "that's her."
In a few minutes the trooper had ridden up and told my mother his errand. Told it all too abruptly, for when the full significance of his words reached her consciousness she reeled, and would would have fallen, as if stricken with a blow, had not the trooper caught her and laid her gently down. There was no water at hand, but the trooper rubbed her hands, fanned her face, and forced a little whisky from a pocket flask between her lips and brought her back to life.
By the time the dray got up to them the trooper had shown his important document and explained to mother that he had been sent as messenger owing to the exertions of some of her friends in Sydney, else the pardon would not have reached her husband for many days yet.
Mother pleaded with the trooper to let her be the bearer of the pardon. To this he consented, although it was not quite in accordance with his instructions, and was the means of causing suffering to both my parents. Only about twelve miles remained. Mother walked that, the trooper walking by her side leading his horse. The station was reached late in the afternoon, but the squatter and his foreman and all the men were away, and the place was in charge of some native women called jins and a female convict, a respectable looking woman, Mrs. Finn.
Mother and the trooper were supplied with a rough and ready kind of meal, Mrs. Finn meanwhile telling how difficult it was for free people to obtain work owing to convict labor and that of the blacks. Mrs. Finn could tell nothing about the convict Jacobs except that he came to the station once a fortnight for rations, and that he was trusted with an important duty on a distant part of the run. There was nothing for it but to wait the return of the squatter. It was late when Mr. Beedham, the squatter, returned, and later still before he would pay any attention to my mother's errand. However, when he saw the pardon releasing Jacobs from his control he expressed surprise and consternation, for that very afternoon he had found that Jacobs and his mate had been fighting at one of the huts about a jin, that he could not got to know which was in the wrong, and had sent both to a J.P., who resided twenty miles away.
The trooper explained to mother that no man was allowed to inflict punishment upon his own assigned convict servant; that he was bound to have him punished by order of a magistrate or to send him back to the stockade for punishment. The squatters got over this by getting sworn to as J's.P., so that they could mutually oblige by punishing for each other. The amount of flogging a man should have was generally decided before a man was sent away for the nominal trial to the neighbouring J.P. If a squatter was busy and could not afford to have a hand laid up, the punishment was not of a disabling kind, though it might be severe. It is scarcely necessary to say—remembering the cruelty of that time—that the invariable punishment was the lash.
Mr. Beedham said that both men would probably be punished about nine o'clock the next morning and that he did not know whether or not the King's pardon would over-ride the magistrate's award for a fault committed in the country. He, however, would be inclined to give Jacobs the benefit of the doubt for he had been a willing servant and he had, until that afternoon, had no cause for complaint. Even in that particular case the other man was quite as likely to be to blame as Jacobs was.
Mother was terribly anxious.
It was night. She had twenty mile to go and to be at her journey's end before her husband's appearance in court the next morning. For she wished to present the pardon and claim her husband as a free man before a local sentence of any kind was passed upon him.
As I have previously mentioned she could not ride, Mr. Beedham had nothing lighter in the way of a conveyance than a bullock dray. All the horses were saddle horses used for boundary riding, yarding stock, etc. American buggies were not to be had in the back blocks of N.S.W. in King William's day. After a good deal of talking and planning it was decided that mother and the trooper should start about three o'clock in the morning for McCallum's station, she fitting as best she could upon a horse led at walking-pace. For the distance was more than a day's journey for a bullock team and very rough and wearying walk for a woman who had been travelling for a week in the primitive way of the time.
Mother would not have cared; she would have cheerfully set off at once and walked all night, but where would she have got to? There was only a track through the wilderness, no telegraph wires and no roads; she would have been hopelessly lost before she had walked two miles. In this portion of the Australian Continent there is a constant sameness in the scenery. Even in flying over it by rail or coach, the same scene keeps repeating itself brown and almost bare plains; dry, dusty, dotted with eucalyptus. Close your eyes for an hour, look out of the carriage window again—the same scene, you have travelled twenty miles and might not have moved.
At eight o'clock the next morning mother and the trooper—the latter managing both horses presented themselves at the front of a decent sized house supposing themselves to be at the end of their journey. In this they were labouring under a mistake; they had got off the main track and had got to the house of the foreman, quite eight miles from McCallum's principal station. They found two jins in the house, and one of these brought in a black who could speak a little English.
The black was induced to go with them and act as guide lest they should again got off the track and lose more invaluable time.
Owing to the delay it was nearly half-past nine when they arrived at McCallum's. Meanwhile the farce of an investigation had been made and both father and his co-worker had been sentenced to twenty-five lashes each. They had been taken to the stock-yard for punishment. Out rushed my mother, shouting "Where is my husband?" The soreness and cramp and weariness caused by seven hours in the saddle all disappeared instantly, and mother ran like a girl the quarter-mile distance to the yard. Yes, there was father, face towards her, as mother ran calling, "Stop! stop!! a pardon! a pardon!!"
Father's face was set and his teeth clenched and he was doing his best trying to bear his utterly undeserved punishment in silence, when suddenly he heard his wife's voice; and saw running swiftly towards him the woman whom he supposed to be in England and whom he never expected to see again.
He would have endured the lash, but the sudden revulsion of feeling produced by mother's coming and the King's pardon proved too much and for the first time in his life he fainted.
What had led up to this tragedy?
Simply this: Father was what colonials term a "new chum." He did not understand and could not appreciate the ways of the community into which he had been thrown. He was too moral for his surroundings. His working companion, a convict like himself, had been on McCallum's station for several years and thoroughly understood his work. The new man was sent to work with the already trained one, and the two lived in the bark hut a dozen miles from the central house or homestead. Great numbers of the men so situated got native women, called jins to live with them, and to prepare their rations and do what housework had to he done or could be done where the house was a bark hut twelve feet by ten or less.
Father's mate had had a jin for several years about the hut, and she had died a few weeks before father joined. For months after there was no jin about the place, until one day the shepherd brought in with him a young jin, apparently a girl of about twelve years of age. As father had been cook and housemaid since his arrival he set to work to teach the new girl her duties, and took some interest in his charge. He learned a little of her language and she learned more of his, until they could understand each other pretty well. By this time the jin could do all the indoor work, and have the meals ready for the men. Father described her as a nice girl, and said that she appeared more intelligent than the majority of Australian blacks.
One evening as father rode up to the hut he heard a series of shrill screams. He threw himself off his horse, and dashed in to see what was the matter, and found the girl Nattie struggling in the arms of his mate, who was attempting something improper. Seeing father he desisted, and the girl sheltered herself, sobbing and quivering with excitement, behind father. Father's companion pleaded that it was the custom of the country to make the jins into slaves of that kind, and told father that he was welcome to keep one himself. Father said he had a dear wife in England, and that, he would never degrade himself or his wife by any such connexion, and that he would protect Nattie from outrage.
From this time there was a deal of sullenness and illfeeling between the two men. Nattie, too, showed much aversion to Bob, and took care never to be in the hut unless father was there. So events went on until the day before mother got to Beedham's station. Again father had caught Bob in the act of molesting Nattie. This time he had ridden after the poor girl until she could run no longer, and had caught her, panting and gasping for breath.
Father kept his promise, Bob tried to defend himself, and managed to plant a few blows on father; but on the whole he got much the worst of the encounter. Beedham thought he understood the matter, and so sent the two of them off to M'Callum's station, charged with fighting for the possession of a jin and neglecting their duty. The innocent cause of all this trouble wandered about the hut for several days, and saw the return of Bob, with his half-healed back, and seeing nothing of father she went back to her tribe and her old wild life.
When father regained consciousness he was released from the grating, and mother was kneeling beside him washing the blood off his torn and bruised back, upon which had fallen five of the twenty-five lashes he was sentenced to receive for protecting a girl from the mad lust of a fellow countryman.
Fortunately Bob had been triced up the first, else father would have received twenty more, and been rendered incapable of movement for a week at least. It was a cruel time. For mere trifles, and often for no fault, men were flogged almost to death. A black pall of crime and cruelty overhung the whole land. No wonder that the settlers, a few years later, demanded that freedom from the stain of being a convict settlement. No writer will dare to depict the social life of the time, Marcus Clarke has given some phases of it as applied to Tasmania, and his pages are harrowing in the extreme.[1]
Father soon got better, freedom and the presence of his dearly-loved wife wade him forget his pains. In ten days from that memorable morning we all met in Sydney again. We were as poor as ever, or nearly so; but we were all healthy, happy and free from the stigma of crime. Mother's journey was over.
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