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  Wurrannah had returned to the camp and was hungry. He asked his mother for some food but she did not have any. He asked other members of his clan for something to eat, but they had nothing either. Wurrannah was angry and left the camp saying, “I will leave and live with others since my own family is starving me.” So he gathered up his weapons and walked off into new country. Wurrannah travelled a long way until he found a camp. Seven girls were there. They offered him food and invited him to stay and sleep in their camp for the night. They explained that they were sisters from the Mea-Mei clan. Their land was a long way away but they had decided to come and look at this new land.

  Wurrannah woke the next morning, thanked the sisters for their kindness and pretended to walk off on his travels. Instead, he hid near the camp and watched. Wurrannah had become lonely and decided that he would steal a wife. So he watched the sisters and followed them as they set out with their yam sticks. He watched as the sisters unearthed the ants and enjoyed their feast.

  While the sisters were eating, Wurrannah crept up to where the women had left their yam sticks and stole two. After lunch, when the sisters decided to return to their camp, two sisters discovered that their yam sticks were not where they had left them. The other sisters returned to the camp, believing it would not be long until the two found their sticks and would join them. The two sisters searched everywhere. While they were looking through the grass, Wurrannah stuck the two yam sticks in the ground and hid again. When the sisters saw their sticks, they ran towards them and tried to pull them from the ground, where they were firmly wedged. Wurrannah sprang from his hiding spot and grabbed both girls firmly around their waists. They struggled and screamed but their sisters were too far away to hear them. Wurrannah kept holding them tightly.

  When the two sisters had calmed down, Wurrannah told them that they were not to be afraid. He was lonely and wanted wives. If they came quietly with him and did as they were told, he promised to look after them and be good to them. Seeing that they could not escape him, the sisters agreed and followed but they warned Wurrannah that their tribe would come to rescue them. Wurrannah travelled quickly to avoid being caught.

  As the weeks passed, the two Mea-Mei women seemed to settle into their life with Wurrannah. When they were alone they talked of their sisters and wondered whether their sisters had begun to look for them, knowing that they would be rescued.

  One day, Wurrannah ordered them to go and get bark from some trees so his fire could bum quicker. They refused, telling him that if they did he would never see them again.

  Wurrannah became angry. He said to them, “Go and get the bark!”

  "But we must not cut bark. If we do, you will never see us again.”

  "Your talking is not making my fire bum. If you run away, I will catch you and I will beat you.”

  The two sisters obeyed. Each went to a different tree and as they made the first cut into the bark, each felt her tree getting bigger and bigger, lifting them off the ground. They clung tight as the trees, growing bigger and bigger, lifted them up towards the sky.

  Wurrannah could not hear the chopping of wood so he went to see what his wives were doing. As he came closer, he saw that the trees were growing larger and larger. He saw his wives, high up in the air, clinging to the trunks. He called to them to come down but they did not answer him. The trees grew so large that they touched the sky, taking the girls further and further away. As they reached the sky, their five sisters, who had been searching in the sky for them, called out, telling them not to be afraid. The five sisters in the sky stretched their hands out to Warrannah’s two wives and drew them up to live with them in the sky, forever.

  Elizabeth took comfort from the story of rescue. Looking at the familiar patterns and recalling these stories made her feel as though she was lying only a few feet from her home, as if she could look across and see the fire and the shadows of her family through the trees at the end of the Howards’ yard. Maybe, she thought, the train journey took less time than she had imagined. She had been so afraid, everything was unfamiliar, perhaps it felt longer than it was. A journey always seems longer the first time it is taken, she thought. After all, walking to the store always seemed to take more time than it took to walk back. So maybe, she hoped, she was closer to Euroke, Guni, Baina and Kooradgie and all her family than she had thought. Her family, still Eualeyai. Unlike her, with an altered name. She thought of them as solid and unchanging.

  My name is Garibooli. Whisper it. Whisper it over and over again.

  Sometimes, after the work was finished, late at night, with limbs numb from tiredness, Elizabeth would spend time with Miss Grainger. With this feeling of ambient afterglow, Elizabeth felt bravest and the older woman felt affection for the child, more, she reflected, than she ever thought it possible to feel for a little darkie.

  Frances Grainger had been of the opinion that the Aborigines were too primitive to be able to adjust to life in the civilised world. She could remember her father’s comments that they were all dying out. Mr Howard had explained that the best that could be done was to rescue the children and try to train them. Reflecting on the way in which Elizabeth always tried so hard to do her chores exactly the way she was told, Frances had to concede that on this matter, as with all else, Edward Howard had been right. When the young girl seemed to yearn for her family and her home, Frances would reassure her that what was being done was for her own good and that she ought to adjust to it as best she could.

  “I wish I knew when I was going home,” Elizabeth would say, as the two sat together on the stone back step.

  “You can’t always get what you wish for. Sometimes home just doesn’t exist anymore.” Miss Grainger would offer these observations with such measured sadness that Elizabeth knew that there was sorrow as deep as her own within the woman whose gaze seemed to stare inward rather than out towards the stars.

  Elizabeth reflected quietly as she looked out into the darkness. She felt that wherever her mother was, wherever Euroke was, wherever her father was, wherever her tree and her camp was, there was home.

  I am running through the grass.

  Running further through the grass.

  I can feel it whip against my legs.

  I can feel the hot sandy soil beneath my feet.

  These rare, quiet moments with Miss Grainger came closest to breaking Elizabeth’s loneliness, but any intimacy built up in the late evenings had dissipated by morning when an air of friendly formality would fall between the two once more.

  Elizabeth would occupy herself with her jobs. Cooking became the duty she enjoyed the most, especially making sweet things. Her favourite was Apple Truelove. She would boil the peeled and cored apples in water and place a dab of fresh churned butter on each. She would then cover each in a sauce of apple stock, sherry, lemon juice and sugar and then place a tablespoonful of apricot jam on the top. It tasted so good that she would be asked to make them when Mrs Howard had a dinner party.

  She learnt many little tricks in the kitchen from Miss Grainger. Cauliflower tasted better if it was cooked in milk rather than water. Strong flour, fluffy and light, was better to make bread with because it absorbs moisture. She could tell with a touch of her fingertips when the scone mixture was just right — not too dry so as to create lumpy looking scones and not too wet so as to cause the scones to spread.

  Elizabeth also observed the way the adults around her behaved towards each other. Because she was not considered very important in the scheme of things, she was often assumed to be too stupid to see what was really going on. But, she thought, I am smarter than Mrs Howard who does not seem aware of how much Miss Grainger dislikes her. Elizabeth also noticed the way Miss Grainger would repeat everything Mr Howard said, magnifying its insight each time she repeated it. And she saw how, when he was at home, Miss Grainger would make an extra effort with her hair, long and like strings of honey, the prettiest thing about her.

  The only person Elizabeth could share these observations with was
Xiao-ying, who would giggle as Elizabeth fluttered her eyelashes to imitate Miss Grainger’s attention to Mr Howard or walk with exaggerated swinging hips and mouth screwed up tight like a dried plum to show her interpretation of Mrs Howard’s walk.

  After their giggling subsided the two friends would talk of serious things. Over the early months in which their friendship blossomed, Xiao-ying told Elizabeth the story of how her family came to live in Parkes. Her grandfather on her father’s side had left his parents and brothers in China to travel to Australia looking for gold, after promising his cherished wife riches. When she died on the goldfields of Bendigo, he moved to Ballarat. He weathered the resentment directed at the success of the Chinese who extracted much of their wealth from claims that were seen as non-productive by the other miners. The number of Chinese miners, who kept to themselves, weathered the antagonism directed towards them. But fortune did not favour Xiao-ying’s grandfather the same way that it had many other Chinese miners who returned to their homeland. Instead, he turned his hand to market-gardening, remarried a younger woman wooed from China, and had seven children.

  By the time Xiao-ying’s father was bom, the market farms were less able to compete with large-area farming. The family moved into the fruit industry and Xiao-ying’s father joined the camps in Hay. He worked as a cook until he had enough money to marry Xiao-ying’s mother and set up the store in Parkes. Xiao-ying’s mother had also been bom to market farmers. When farming was no longer lucrative as a small business, her family opened a laundry in Hay. They were married by the time the Immigration Act was passed in 1901 to stop Asians from starting a life in Australia, their family firmly entrenched in an Australian life.

  At the end of the day, with the dinner dishes washed and dried, the ironing done, the darning completed, Elizabeth could fall asleep. Her last thoughts were always of Euroke.

  He will come and rescue me. He will come and rescue me.

  6

  1919

  THE PACE OF THE HOUSE changed little as the frost-bitten months arrived. The only difference to the routines that governed the house was that Mr Howard was home more often in the colder weather. A principal in a stock company, Edward Howard had acquired all the status he thought he wanted, with his house on Hill Street and his marriage to Lydia Streetland, and was confident in his place in life and society.

  It was only Edward’s wife who could make him feel as though he did not have command of everything. Lydia Howard harboured more aspirations than he, coming from a family who had thrived in colonial politics, her father a respected politician. Edward was very wealthy, but without her father’s influence. Lydia’s increasing frustrations at his lack of political ambition would scrape away the comfort from his contentment and, as the years passed, he would resent this, avoiding her company and unspoken accusations.

  Lydia Howard, née Streetland, would have objected to the way her husband would have described her if they had a relationship where such inner thoughts could be shared. If they had the type of union where they would speak in the dark hours of the night as they lay in each other’s arms, if affection had been an indispensable part of the way they related to each other, she would have told Edward that he was wrong to think that she didn’t love him. She had at times wanted to say to him that she cherished him, that she had been irretrievably drawn in, seduced by his reserve and his quiet dignity. But she could never get the words to pass her lips, even when she had rehearsed them.

  Lydia first saw Edward Howard in a crowded room at a fundraising dinner for her father’s re-election in Sydney. She decided then that they should meet — an encounter he would always believe was fateful chance. Her cunning was no match for his open-faced honesty. The enormity of what she felt for him, the compelling love that grew so quickly within her, was unlike any emotion she had known before. It excited her but made her fearful at the same time. Her heart would beat when she saw him but she reserved her affection so that she would not feel rejected or downcast if the intensity of her feelings were not returned. The uncertainty of her situation, her inability to find security, made her feel she had to push Edward in subtle ways to see if he felt for her as much as she felt for him. What Lydia really wanted, secretly craved, was for him to show her that he felt the storming infatuation inside that she felt for him. When he didn’t, when he withdrew further and further, she grew bitter. The betrayal urged on a seeping coldness in her, it increased the aloofness she had armed herself with from the start. His silence, his passiveness and resignation all fed her resentment.

  Lydia determined that she and her husband would appear to all others to be perfect in their happiness and ensured that her public persona was one that was socially vivacious and civic-minded. She crowded her house with dinner parties when Edward was home and became involved with as many church and special-events committees as she could when he was away. But it was in her vociferous support for conscription where she found her deepest commitment outside of her home. She was drawn to the nobility of patriotism, the reserve and dignity so evident in displays of duty, bravery and loyalty.

  They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old:

  Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

  At the going down of the sun and in the morning

  We will remember them.

  Lydia was unfailingly touched by what she saw as the heroic beauty of self-sacrifice. It motivated her strident belief in conscription and the debate that was still raging as Australia sent more and more young men off to war.

  Lydia’s father, George Theodore Streetland, was a brisk walrus of a man, whiskered and gruff. He had developed ideals in a young country on old land, felt superiority from the conquering of the continent. Wealth from rum and rebellion were conveniently forgotten in his generation that had edged towards nationhood at Federation. In these moves he was less motivated by a sense of nationalism than the greed of economics. His real drive made him no different to his father who had used alcohol to build a financial empire that was now legitimated on land, stock and agriculture, but G.T. Streetland would never make the link between his own activities and those of his father’s. Instead he enveloped himself in the power and privilege of politics in a generation that preferred to ignore the sins of their fathers.

  As to Lydia, G.T. was indifferent — tradition needs sons. She was lost behind the heir to the family fortune, William Charles, who had come along when Lydia was still too young to demand any attention in the male realms of a Victorian household. G.T. would engage his son in long conversations about the benefits of free trade between the states, the importance of retaining power from a federal government and the extent to which the interests, especially the economic ones, of a large state like New South Wales might be subsumed by the smaller states. Lydia would hover around the room, pretending to engage in needlework, or playing a game of solitaire until her fidgeting would cause her father to ask her to leave. She would take to her bed and sob, fostering hatred towards her brother, William, and planning her next attempt to win affection from her father. She would imagine how he would look at her, pleased and proud, when he realised how devoted she was to him, how she loved him more than he knew. She hungered for the time when he would acknowledge her.

  Her father was often away and she would see him rarely and often then from afar, their time together short and formal before she would be ushered away leaving him in the company of earnest men. She had tried confrontations, petulant tantrums and cutting comments, only to find herself further excluded from the circles she sought to enter and receiving a harsh lecture from her mother about the appropriate behaviour of a young lady.

  Until, at one such informal meeting at the fireside, her father’s cigar, through inattention and general carelessness, singed her gown. His profuse apology, believing he had hurt her when in fact the damage was only to her dress, compelled her to emphasise an imagined injury to sustain his attention. And from there she studied the subtle art of manipulation. So much easier, was the lesson
she learnt, to undertake a conquest through sympathy and guilt than to win it fairly.

  She was only a few years older when, at a fundraiser, she had spied a tall, commanding young man with cool green eyes. Upon inquiry she had obtained his name and occupation, and contrived an introduction by persuading her mother to invite him to their next evening party. When Edward Howard was seated beside her at dinner the following week, he was delighted and curious to have found a woman so knowledgeable on all of his interests. Her father was satisfied with the match and Lydia enthusiastically turned her focus and energy from her father to her husband.

  To the surprise of her friends and family in Sydney, Lydia Howard set up her house in Parkes. There, however, she had been able to show, through her exile, how much she had sacrificed for Edward. And in Parkes, she was the wealthiest woman, not just one of many, and she liked to be without equal.

  No one had given more than Frances Grainger to the war effort. To her, the war was summarised by different sentiments than those that Lydia Howard held dear. Frances Grainger knew a different kind of dignity.

  But though kind Time may many joys renew

  There is one greatest joy I shall not know

  Again, because my heart for loss of you

  Lies broken, long ago.

  Frances had lost her fiance and her two brothers in the war; the loss of the latter two men destroyed her mother and then her father, dissolving her family and the life she had known before war was declared. Edward, the youngest of the family, had died the first day of the landing at Gallipoli. He did not even reach dry sand. Bernard, the eldest, was shot down a day later. When the third letter came concerning Harold, more fodder for the bullets of the Turks, Frances had almost been expecting it. Words clearly stated in efficient, official type notified her of the erasing of flesh and blood, of bones, tissue and fibre. What she had not anticipated was the loss of her parents, safe as they seemed to be in the home that three young men died believing they were protecting. But her mother, and then her father, slipped away and Frances was alone. These devastating losses had left her without family, without a sense of belonging, without a feeling of security. She had just memories and ghostly companions.