To Name Those Lost by Rohan Wilson

Author:Rohan Wilson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2014-09-03T04:00:00+00:00

THE RIOT

JANE ELEANOR HALL CROUCHED BY A gas lamp on the crest of the Charles Street hill and surveyed the town below through her fingers. A numberless crowd covered the streets like a carpet, pitted in part with the holes of bonfires. Men loped through the smoke and dust, men blacked up with charcoal to hide themselves, wielding hoes and clubs and axes, hooting and whooping. The depth of noise made the whole air tremble. Above the rooves smoke scudded in a band of utter black. She held her face and could hardly breathe. Her gut knotted up. The town had lost its mind.

It took her a while to understand. The railways. The levy. She exhaled and rubbed her head. All week there had been warnings that if the auction went ahead then blood would follow. But this was more. This was rebellion. Gangs in masks moved store to store smashing the plates of glass that lined the street in a weave of silver. They dragged furnishings into the road to feed the fires. She looked across a town obscured by smoke billows. The people of this place were not suckers. They would not bear the debts of another. Now the railways’ shareholders and the men of Kennerley’s parliament would truly learn it.

She crouched there a long time. She had set about finding the man Thomas Toosey, the finding of him, the getting back of the money. Now her gut was knotting and her breath stalling in her chest. She rubbed the stubble on her head. At length she stood. She might have returned to the hut. Maybe even to Rabbit’s place. She might have stayed away from the trouble. Stayed safe. Instead she began to descend the hill. This was not the hour for fearful ways. She needed to act.

Her father had often led her along this road for her leg, for the bettering of it he always said, and he would take her hand crossing the roughest holes and then have her walk alone that she would give the leg the strength it needed, and him talking, always talking, calling her the bravest girl about and darling Janey in his rough whiskey voice and pointing over the river to the new station building dressed in its flags and bunting and promising her a trip to Longford or beyond in first class, for he was a railways man, a navvy, working a pick and barrow and laying out the ballast, and that was how he came to be retrieving a charge from its blast-hole while it was still wired and his death was instantaneous, the foreman had told them, instantaneous, as if that excused it, but that was no word she knew, a girl of fifteen hardly lettered, and her mother flew to claw out this fool’s vocals when he said there would be no money forthcoming for the funeral, no widow’s pension, by order of the Board of Directors and owing to her father’s status as a temporary

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