Our Governess

We had a governess once. Her name was Jacaranda. She was conceived, she told us, in Grafton, in the back of a kombi van during the Jacaranda Festival, when the roads were lined with an explosion of purple. The first time we saw her she was stepping off the train in Quilpie in a cotton singlet-dress, batik-dyed with a long-stemmed single flower running the length of it. But it wasn’t really a flower, more like a seed head, the ones you blow to be mesmerized by the froth of seeds separating into individual identities and floating off to who knows where. We knew it was her because she was the only woman who didn’t look like a station manager’s wife or a jillaroo or a sex-less loud-mouthed fag-dangling, cussing opal miner. My father says they probably got plenty of sex out there back of Quilpie in the opal fields, there were so few women it didn’t matter what they looked like or what came out of their mouths. “Rough as guts,” he used to say. Truth was, the land was rough and if you weren’t a bit rough yourself you didn’t survive.

Quilpie was the end of the line. Still is. Our cattle station was called Yapunyah and to get there from Quilpie you first had to drive to Eromanga, population six, including a publican and a policeman. It was a good road. But from there to Yapunyah station it could be another story entirely. The amount of weaving you had to do to negotiate the criss-crossing deep ruts in the clay road –  if you’d been lucky enough to have rain, but unlucky enough to have  loaded cattle trucks carve the road up while it was still wet – was maybe not much different to driving drunk. The irony of it was that once the clay dried it would stay that way for ages, mocking you with the memory of what you couldn’t have. It hadn’t rained for months. That day, at Eromanga, Dad had just one beer. He was on his best behaviour and he had a clean shirt on too. Nothing ever stayed clean for long out there. He stretched his arm round my Mum’s waist and joked with Joe, the publican.

 “Her waters will break before the drought does, what d’you reckon?” Dad said. It wasn’t like him to joke about the drought.

 Joe laughed. “Just see if you can get her into Quilpie in time, this time round, ‘eh?”

I was six when Penny was born in the Eromanga pub. That was as far as we got, she was in such a hurry to get out. It has been talked about so much that the only thing I know for sure is my own memory of that day is Sam holding my hand so tight I thought my bones would break while Mum  was crying out as we bounced over the ruts. “Is she gonna die?” Sam had whispered to me.

Dad bought all of us lemonade and gave Sam a clip around the ear for noisily sucking up the last drops through his straw. Penny was doing the same. I saw that Dad noticed, but he didn’t seem to care. He told Jacaranda about his cattle, how they were dying of dehydration and hunger, how it broke his heart. How the last time it had sprinkled with rain hundreds of roos had appeared out of nowhere to raze the green pick. The cattle missed out on most of it. They were territorial, he said. They would walk to water if they had to, but then walk back home. For some of the cattle the closest water was 10 miles away, or more, since Orange Creek Bore had broken down. He had tears in his eyes.

When Dad stopped talking you could have heard a fly land. Joe had gone out the back and there was no-one else in the pub. I wanted to ask Jacaranda something but didn’t know what. Mum broke the silence. “I hope you’re alright without a lot of mod cons”, she said to Jacaranda, “We’ve just got a small generator and we can’t run much off it – not at the same time, anyway. And we don’t run it all the time.”

“Are you saying I can’t use my hair curler?” Jacaranda looked horrified.

“We should have told you about the power. We’re so used to it, you see…” Mum’s voice trailed off and she looked embarrassed. Dad raised an eyebrow and had a little smirk on his face.

Then Jacaranda grinned and winked at me. “Just joking. I wouldn’t know what to do with a hair curler. Don’t worry. I didn’t come out here for the power.”

Dad looked at her strangely and Mum just seemed relieved.

“Meet Bolt,” said Penny, as we opened the wire-screen door.

“Who doesn’t know a pig’s arse from its tusks,” said Dad, with his usual scorn.

“He nearly got skewered last week.” Sam filled Jacaranda in.

Bolt was a Jack Russell/Kelpie cross, a birthday present one year for Penny, from the McConachies on the neighbouring station an hour’s drive away. He was mostly white but had a black patch from halfway down his left eye, like it had slipped. We sometimes called him The Pirate. Dad said that the only Kelpie part must have got ditched with the after-birth. He pretended to hate him.

I showed Jacaranda her room. It looked out on the garden that Mum wasn’t allowed to water any more and the two rain water tanks rising up from behind the orange tree. I showed her the classroom: we even had proper wooden school desks. The radio for School of the Air sat on its own desk in the corner on top of Granny May’s doily. I never understood why people put things on doilies which cover up most of the doily. Embroidered blue gentians peeked out from underneath. I didn’t have School of the Air anymore because I’d started high school by then, but Sam and Penny had to tune in for half an hour each weekday. I lifted the lid of my desk and showed her my books. Watching her face as she flipped through the pages, the slight tension – like you get when you watch someone unwrap a present from you – dissolved. It was going to be alright. More than alright. It was going to be good.

“I see you’re pretty good at English,” she said, “and science and maths. Are you sure you need a governess?” She smiled and I noticed her eyes were green. They were blue before, I thought. She opened Sam’s desk and laughed. “Tomorrow,” she said, and the gong rang for tea.

I’ll never forget that first evening. While we were waiting for the casserole to come out Penny brought out all the application letters for the governess position and explained to Jacaranda why we had chosen her. She felt very proud because it was because of her, really. You see, she’d fallen out of a tree just a couple of days before and Jacaranda wrote that she liked climbing trees, which made us all laugh. We imagined the fun of her living with us and after that all the other letters sounded, well, too serious. Penny was showing off her scabs as Mum came in with the casserole and a surprised smile.

“This one’s from hitting a branch on the way down. And these ones on my knees are from landing. See this one – on my chin? Mum tells me not to pick it. It’s from landing too.”

“She landed in a triangle,” said Sam, grinning.

“Who asked you?” Dad growled. “Save your geometry for the classroom.”

My face stung like it had been slapped. I glanced at Jacaranda as she glanced at Sam. Sam was looking at his empty plate. Mum was ladling steaming casserole onto Dad’s plate. Then Dad’s face just about fell off when Jacaranda said she didn’t eat meat.

“This is a cattle station for crissakes.”

“Would you have given me the job if I’d said I was vegetarian?” she asked him.

“No bloody way. So what do you think you’re gonna eat?”

“Everything else.”

His dark eyes tried to drill holes in hers but she lightly shrugged and tucked into the potatoes and minted peas. She told us she’d brought some beans and lentils and things with her.

“That’s all we bloody need out here. A real hippy. And don’t expect Sharon to cook anything special for you. She’ll be run off her feet, soon enough, with the baby and all. And don’t go giving her any ideas.”

But Mum loved her meat too, so there was never any danger of that. Dad’s face settled after a while and when Mum brought out her rice pudding, everyone glowed, especially Jacaranda. Cooked slowly in the oven for two hours, the pudding had a golden-brown crust on top and sticky caramelized sugar oozing up around the edges. We all liked it really creamy so she always put loads of milk powder in it. I remember how Jacaranda laughed later that night, when she saw thirty or forty big tins of Sunshine milk powder in the pantry. And after she’d been with us for a few weeks she said there were a lot of things we didn’t have, but what we did have, we had a lot of.

It was true. We had a lot of dust. A lot of flies. A lot of exhausted cattle. A lot of red-bellied black snakes lounging in the shade around the house. A lot of wild pigs on the beat, patrolling the perimeters of what used to be huge water holes, hoping to sink their teeth into the soft parts of any poor cattle beasts stuck in the stinky black mud, but within reach. A lot of crows fighting over their terrified eyes.  But we also had a lot of stars.

In our beds dragged out on the verandah in the hottest months, shielded by fly-netting, us kids could watch the stars before we fell asleep. One night Jacaranda joined us out there. She appeared in a knee-length tee shirt with the foam mattress off her bed under her arm and plonked it down in the middle saying, “I’ll cook if I stay in my room. You don’t mind, do you?”

“Look! There’s the saucepan,” said Penny, turning to Jacaranda but still pointing so she wouldn’t lose it.

“She can only find the saucepan,” said Sam.“

That’s not true. I can find shooting stars too.”

Everyone laughed, except Penny who didn’t get why it was so funny. Then she started laughing anyway, with her arm still reaching out to the saucepan. I knew she still didn’t get it.

“You should put your arm down before you turn into a statue,” I said.

“Hey – what’s in the pot, Penny?” asked Jacaranda.

“Rabbit stew.”

“Tell us more,” said Jacaranda.

“The cook forgot to peel it. And the legs are sticking up, covered in wet fur.”

 We all laughed. “You don’t peel rabbits,” said Sam gleefully, “ you skin them.”

“Oh yeah,” said Penny, and giggled.

“What do you think’s in it Sam?” asked Jacaranda.

 “Rooster soup. Rooster head soup. The foxes ate the bodies and we collected all the heads. The eyes are looking at each other as they float around.”

“Yu-uck!” Penny and I said simultaneously.

“I think there’s something nice in the saucepan – like mum’s beef gravy with dumplings,” I said. “What do you think, Jacaranda?”

“Chai. Indian chai.”

“What’s that?”

“Tea brewed with milk and sugar, cinnamon sticks, slices of fresh ginger, cardamom pods and a little black pepper sometimes. You can buy it everywhere on the streets in India. Mmmm..”

“Weird,” said Sam, and Jacaranda burst out laughing.

I stayed awake a long time that night, just looking out at the night sky. I’d never seen it look so bright. I thought about how Billy, the Aboriginal stockman who sometimes camped out on our station, could navigate by the stars. He said he could teach me, one time when Dad and I stopped to talk on the way to Orange Creek. Dad got angry later. “You’re not to go hanging out with Billy, especially not at night time, d’you hear me? And don’t put ideas into his head.”

“I thought you liked him,” I said.

“I do like him. He’s a good stockman. But you can’t trust boongs, not even Billy. Not around women.”

“Did something happen?”

“No, but you never know when it will.” His lips closed tightly.

The next time we came across him, Dad wasn’t as friendly as usual. I could see in Billy’s eyes that he noticed. But he flashed the same smile, like a row of lemonade ice blocks.  I’d lost the chance to read the stars, but I felt I’d lost something else too, though I didn’t know exactly what it was.

But just before I drifted off to sleep it was Jacaranda I was thinking about, not Billy. I imagined her in India sipping spicy tea on the roadside. Her long sun-streaked hair was in a loose plait and she was wearing a sari  – purple like Jacaranda flowers – and laughing so hard her tea spilt. The tea seller was laughing too, as he topped up her teacup. Tomorrow, I thought, I have to ask her what cardamom pods are. But I didn’t. And when I remembered, it was too late.

Jacaranda was nothing like us and nothing like anyone else we knew. “She’s off the grid,” I heard Dad once say to Mum.  But in his own way, he liked her too. Certainly he shook his head less and less as time went on – but I know he didn’t believe all her stories, as I did.

We got her on a Yamaha 175 pretty much as soon as she arrived. We lived on our bikes after school and on the weekends. She was very wobbly at first but got the hang of it. She was better on the clay pan and what we called The Gibber Plain than the low red sand hills though. She often came off in those but always got back on, grinning, and I could tell Dad liked that about her.We all helped with the musters and with the drought there was a lot more to do. We put out salt licks and pulled down some of the branches of the spindly trees so the cattle could eat the leaves. We tried to keep the cattle away from the mud pits, so they weren’t lethally drawn to the moisture under the surface crust. We steered them, far away, towards the troughs by the bores which were still functioning, sitting behind their swishing tails and plodding hooves on our bikes. Every so often a renegade or two would break away, eyes rolling, and one of us would dart off, motor revving, to plant ourselves in its path and eyeball it into submission. Often Dad would come home, smearing the dust and tears off his face, telling us the cattle were back near the mud holes with nothing to drink.

He wanted to fence the holes off but he was the manager, not the owner, and the owner, who lived on the coast where it rained, wouldn’t pay for it.

‘The Rich Bastard’, Dad used to call him and actually his name was Richard Brass so we all thought Dad was pretty clever. But once the drought really kicked in Dad changed it to ‘The Murdering Bastard’. I’d only met him twice, long before the big drought. He was tall and broad-shouldered and had a bit of silver in his sideburns. It was the first time I met him that I realised Dad wasn’t tall. I remember, too, how The Rich Bastard’s soft belly hung over his belt and a shirt button had popped open, showing fluff in his belly button. Dad ate plenty of fat on his chops and steaks but he didn’t have a sliver of fat on his bones. 

“All that green grass going to waste on the coast and he won’t put his cattle on agistment. A bloody crime, that’s what it is. Murdering Bastard.  He’s like all the other big-shot station owners who live in their fancy houses on the Gold Coast, lounging around their swimming pools sipping Bloody Marys while their cattle are dropping dead like flies. The ones who give a damn mostly stay on their land – like Brett McConachie.”

School became something new, undreamt of. After the first couple of days Mum didn’t interfere at all. We did all our regular lessons for the correspondence school in Brisbane but time was stretched, somehow, and we did a lot of other things besides. We wrote poems and recited them to the chickens, we painted a mural and even did a bit of yoga.

“Wow! You’re all so bendy,” Jacaranda said. We learnt to do ‘Salute to the Sun’.

“If you’re gonna do that sort of thing you might as well do rain dances,” scoffed Dad. So we did – but we didn’t tell him.

We did drama for the first time ever and Sam was finally in his element. Even Penny, who was always a little smug about being better at every subject than Sam – who was two years older – watched him with open delight.

We decided to put on a play for Mum’s birthday. Sam was the witch, which meant that he could not only dress up in the craziest combination of my clothes, but dance around and screw his face up into frightening and ugly contortions, and spit words out like the venom of the tropical cane toads we read about. We blacked out some of his teeth and put flour and water in his hair. Dad walked out halfway through and Mum started to look a bit nervous, as if she shouldn’t be watching it if Dad wasn’t.

“The play’s for you,” Jacaranda said, smiling kindly. “The kids wrote it themselves. It’s terrific, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” said Mum. “It’s very funny.” But she didn’t laugh any more, and I saw that her eyes kept glancing at the open door as we continued to the end. Penny and I remembered all our lines and Sam remembered some of his. But the ones he made up on the spot were the best.

Later, drinking his ‘Four X’ stubbies on the verandah with his back to her, he told Jacaranda off for putting Sam in a dress. “Never again, d’you hear me? He’s enough trouble without you encouraging him. And no more drama till he gets perfect scores in maths.”

Well, that was never going to happen, and Dad knew it. What he didn’t know was that Jacaranda was trembling as her hands at her sides formed tight fists. Then she relaxed them and closed her eyes, raising one hand to wipe the tears from her face. I was afraid she would leave. And afraid that she wouldn’t.

Weeks turned into months but still it didn’t rain. That drought of ‘79/’80 was one of the worst. It was in another life that we’d pushed each other off the old tractor tyre in the brown yabby-filled creek a stone’s throw from the house. It had stopped flowing, leaving behind stagnating pools which then became boggy graves for a few cattle beast. The remaining patches of water were rank with the stench of decomposing flesh. Dust storms forced us all inside, manically stuffing towels and clothes into any gaps in an effort to thwart its pursuit. But still, we always emerged covered in a layer of brick-red, the whites of our eyes and teeth giving us a startled look.

Then Dad had an idea. He slammed a fist into his open hand as he stood up at the dinner table one evening, knocking his chair over. “I’ve got it!” he said triumphantly.

He didn’t talk about anything else for days. He drew plans. He drove into Quilpie for supplies. He walked with his old swagger again and his tan leather hat, always on his head, was pushed back a little, as if his eyes wanted to see what was in front of them again.

We packed up for the weekend. It almost felt like a holiday. Mum took the jeep with the tarps, mats and sleeping bags and the cooking gear. Little Beth, just three weeks old then, was with her of course. Sam and Jacaranda and I rode our bikes out. Penny went with Dad in the truck with the shovels, bags of Nitropril and gelignite in the back, and a drum of water. Because we were taking the truck we threw old mattresses on top, so we’d sleep comfy. We overtook the truck and laughed at Bolt leaning out the window, his ears blown inside out and his black gums showing as he grinned. “Go Pirate!” said Sam. Dad laughed and waved his hat.

We dug thirty- six holes between us that weekend, each one four feet deep. Dad cut a stick to measure. In some places the crust would hold our weight but in other places we had to walk out on a plank to spread our weight. The sides of the holes held like a wall of half-eaten blancmange. Bolt’s wagging tail was everywhere. Mum kept a billy on the boil and as the day progressed we took our tea sweeter and sweeter and piled the milk powder in. I slept like a dead cattle beast and when I woke up Mum was already sitting on the stump by the steaming billy, giving Beth a bottle. I crawled out of my cocoon and prodded Sam with my toe.  Looking down at the mud, for the first time I thought of a crater-filled moon and wondered why I hadn’t seen it before. Dad was out on a plank bending over a shovel, working before breakfast as usual. We dug till our arms could hardly move. Jacaranda took some pictures and Dad scowled that cameras were just for tourists.

By mid afternoon it was ready. Dad had mixed the Nitropril and gelignite, and the web of red fuses, like a bunch of balloon strings, were poised to fly. He told us to go. None of us wanted to be plastered by a wave of mud, though we did joke plenty about it. Sam and I rode off, following Mum, Penny and Beth in the Jeep. Bolt was perched on the petrol tank between my thighs, his pink tongue hanging like a length of sticky fly tape. I could tell he thought he was doing something important. We waited by the Yapunyah tree with the double trunk. Penny jumped up and down like a frog on vodka.

Jacaranda’s bike was in the back of the truck. She was to start the truck ready for Dad to leap into it after he lit the fuse. One second he was squatting at the edge and the next he was sprinting away, one hand on his hat, up towards the waiting truck. “She’s ready to blow!” he yelled, grinning like a little boy. I wrapped my arms around my chest and hunched my shoulders, then realised I was holding my breath.

“No!” said Penny, as Bolt dashed towards Dad.

“Get outa here you stupid mongrel”. Dad lashed his foot out but missed him. A crow at the edge of the mud let out a mournful “Cawww” and adjusted its posture. Bolt cocked his head and, after a moment’s hesitation, took off towards it.

As the crow lazily spread its wings and flew a bare two metres above the mud, Bolt pranced and yapped in its shadow. Then he disappeared and we heard a yelp.

Dad climbed into the truck just as Jacaranda bolted out of it. “Don’t be so bloody stupid. It’s a dog for crissakes”, he called after her.

“I’ve got time. A few minutes you said”. She raced down onto the mud and a couple of seconds later she was lying down on the crust, bent from the waist down into a hole. None of us said a word. Then she wiggled and stuck her bum into the air a bit and Bolt flew out of the hole between her thighs. We cheered. Without looking back, he dashed up the bank like lightning.

Then Jacaranda slumped forward, deeper into the hole. Her legs stuck out of it and from her knees were waving madly like someone treading water. I burst out laughing. I couldn’t stop. I heard myself, cackling like one of Macbeth’s witches. I knew it wasn’t funny but still, I couldn’t stop.

The black plume shot up four hundred feet into the air, like oil bursting through the earth’s surface. For a second it appeared suspended, then, like a sigh, it dropped and settled itself into its original place. There was still a billabong of mud, but now without a crust.

Dad watched it in his rear-view mirror and later he said it broke his heart. He had planted a lot more explosive in the central holes, and less and less as the holes neared the edges. He’d planned it out so carefully, been so sure it would work. The mud was supposed to evacuate the hole like water from one of those round garden sprinklers. He looked dejected and beaten and nobody said a word.

A minute or so passed before we remembered Jacaranda. It’s hard to explain, but it was like it wasn’t real, it couldn’t have happened. Then we walked slowly around the perimeter and called and called but it was futile, really. There was just the mud. Our eyes peered intently as if we could see through its darkness. Penny’s last eerie cry drowned in the silence that was so dense I found it almost impossible to believe I could still breathe. I watched her slump to her knees, hunch over and cradle her head in her splayed hands, and  gently rock.

I blamed the McConachies, I blamed The Pirate, I blamed Dad, the crow, the mud, the drought. I blamed myself. My mother said I had to stop blaming, but I didn’t want to. Blaming kept me angry, kept me busy, for a long time. And when I finally stopped blaming I could hardly bear the missing.