To Hell & High Water by Gregory Bryan

Author:Gregory Bryan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Big Sky Publishing

DAY TEN

Children in Henry Lawson’s Life

Mrs Douglas had a hard time, with her two little girls, who were still better and more prettily dressed than any other children in Bourke.

- ‘Lord Douglas’, Children of the Bush, 1902

I don’t believe in parents talking about their own children everlastingly—you get sick of hearing them; and their kids are generally little devils, and turn out larrikins as likely as not.

- Brighten’s Sister-In-Law, Joe Wilson and His Mates, 1901

We have a big day planned, as our aim is to cover 40 km to Tony Marsh’s Kia-Ora. John tells me to help myself to breakfast cereal but I am happiest with toast and Vegemite.

‘Here’s the butter, Greg.’

‘Oh, I always just have my Vegemite without butter. I like it best this way.’ I am still a Vegemite kid. It is the way I have always eaten it, and I will continue to do so throughout the eternities. If there is a Heaven, there will be Vegemite there.

When I am ready to leave, John walks with me to show me where an old Aborigine used to live near the homestead. The sunrise away to the east is stunning. Flames of gold slice through the grey clouds to bring light to the day, bathing the plains in golden warmth. All of the Aboriginal tribes have their own Dreamtime legends to explain the advent of the sun but a common denominator amongst many of them is the notion of a great campfire burning in the sky.

‘Tommy Spider’s humpy used to stand over here,’ John says, directing me towards a small pile of iron and rubble amongst some Mulga Trees.

‘Did Tommy Spider work for the Dunks, did he?’

‘Well, yes, he’d help out a bit here and there and do whatever he could.’

Who knows? Perhaps Warroo’s Tommy Spider could trace his ancestry back to one of the Aborigines Henry encountered and upon whom some of Henry’s characters are based. ‘Old Black Jimmie lived in a gunyah on the rise at the back of the sheepyards, and shepherded for my uncle,’ Henry wrote. ‘He was a gentle, good-humoured, easy-going old fellow with a pleasant smile; which description applies, I think, to most old blackfellows in civilisation. I was very partial to the old man, and chummy with him.’

‘Every year, they’d give Tommy Spider a new suit and then he’d take a bath and put on that new suit and walk around as proud as a peacock,’ John tells me.

I laugh a little uneasily at the image. ‘Yeah?’

‘He wouldn’t take that suit off until he got his new suit the following year.’

‘Yeah, really?’

‘When they had to start paying the Aborigines the same wages as the other stockmen, Tommy said to me, “This’ll be the end of it” and he was right.’

‘Why’s that?’ I ask, not knowing why equality would spell ‘the end of it,’ whatever it might have been.

‘Well, the station owners were just helping them out and giving them food and a place to stay. Tommy knew that when they had to be paid too, there would be no more handouts because there was not the work to employ them.

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