Compassion by Julie Janson

Author:Julie Janson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Magabala Books

While riding down the Great Western Road into Emu Plains, I looked at the tiny settlements, the English shepherds folding their fleeces in neat piles. Everything in those times was strange and unexpected. Men acted like wild beasts, but the poor ex-convicts sometimes performed acts of great kindness, they cared for fellow convicts and fed the hungry blacks. One man gave me bread. So compassion and gentleness could seep from kind hearts.

With hope for a safer haven, Mercy and I arrived at a real theatre at a convict farm. I had never been to a theatre. We bought a penny ticket, and tethered our horses at James Gosper’s Dove Inn near the soldier’s barracks, we stopped at a gin shop called Smith the Gin Man. Not tarrying looked a good idea, as a free fight over cockerels and unpaid bets was wrecking the pub. Chains were being hurled and men with bloodied faces leapt through glass windows. Outside the grog shop, a cage held a pale striped tiger from Van Diemen’s Land, and it paced back and forth in its own shit with pitying howls. Again I thought how cruel men could be and was tempted to free him, and before I could stop myself, I had hold of the latch. But a hairy man’s hand snatched me away from the cage.

‘Be off girl!’ he sneered.

Mercy had a terrible thirst and tasted grog from each establishment, using my money. I just drank my mug of lemonade. When Mercy had drunk too much, she fell and I offered my hand, but she pushed me away. She would not stand up and I jiggled from foot to foot. Suddenly I couldn’t stand it anymore.

‘Stand up, for God’s sake. I can’t keep watching you drink!’ I said.

‘Dort,’ Mercy mumbled and I dragged her to her feet. We walked into the building. It was built of slabs of timber and smothered in pise of wattle daub. Agricultural Station convicts were now thespians in that theatre. We rested on the seats, bored by a travelling Methodist preacher with his sermon about damnation. He pointed at me, and I shivered. The ranting minister reminded me of my father, but it was a distant memory.

Later, after a sleep, we watched actors singing, dancing folk dances, acting farces and silly sketches and Shakespeare. Women from the Female Factory sang bawdy songs and made fun of their betters. But this theatre delighted me most because it had stage machinery and red velvet curtains. Mercy assured me the fabric was cut by a tailor from the same bolt her gown had been made from in mysterious circumstances to do with a nguttatha with a tailor. While his wife sewed in the back of the tailor shop, he threw his leg over Mercy. She roared with laughter.

Around us sat ex-convicts, prostitutes, whores, bawds, tarts and trollops, thieves and feminine scoundrels; along with the reprobate, fornicators, rapists, bolters, scabs, and dirty rascals that passed for men.

Out the back the actors had grown a garden for the kitchen, hoeing potatoes and carrots for our nightly stew.

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