Picnic Races

By Dymphna Cusack

Picnic Races is a cheerful comedy celebrating the lives of small-town Australians. Gubba is preparing to celebrate its centenary and its history as a gold rush town. But there are two factions in Gubba - the wealthy 'woolocracy' with their social pretensions, and the ordinary townsfolk who are just after the peaceful life. Pretty young Eden Dutton gets caught up in the feud when her father wants to make the town a centre for tourism and 'picnic races.' But her heart seems to be fighting for the opposite side. A surprise discovery brings a change when it was least expected and upsets all the townspeople's plans.

• Language: English
• Publisher: House of Books
• Release date: Jul 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9781742699257

Book preview

29

Chapter One

STILL IN pyjamas and dressing-gown, Jack McGarrity opened the french windows and padded on to the veranda. The sun was not yet up and the dew lay thick on lawn and flowerbeds.

The morning ritual began. He did a few chest exercises, flexed his biceps and made a token gesture of touching his toes.

‘Never felt better, Bunyip,’ he told his ginger cat, gaunt and bony as himself. ‘Ought to write a book: Life begins at 90! Put some heart into the young fellers.’

Bunyip, who was sixteen, yawned, interested only in the swooping swallows that came back to nest each year on the veranda.

‘Ought to have finished my History of Gubba long ago. Only half done and the Hundredth Anniversary not much more than a year off!’

He breathed deeply again, unfolded the letter he took from his pyjama pocket and adjusted his half-moon glasses. Delivered late yesterday he already knew it by heart, but now he read it again, hoping that the morning would throw fresh light on it. Typed on expensive notepaper, bearing the embossed address of ‘Warrawungah,’ it had no personal salutation, merely: ‘You are cordially invited to be present at a meeting in the Gubba Mechanics’ Institute at 7.30 p.m., September 21, to discuss the question of celebrating the coming centenary of the discovery of Gubba.’

The signature was indecipherable, but he knew it for Lock Dutton’s. ‘What’s that snollygoster up to now, Bunyip?’ he asked frowningly. (McGarrity disapproved of the profanity usual in Gubba speech, so invented his own.)

Bunyip, accustomed to conversation, miaowed. McGarrity answered himself: ‘Him and his blow-ins trying to pervert our anniversary for their own ends!’ He went on to stigmatize the new-risen woolocracy that the meteor-fortunes of wartime racketeering had set in the social firmament, where they blazed with a spurious brilliance not possessed by the older, long-established and harder-working families which had provided a solid if rather dull background to the town for nearly a century. ‘They’ve made a Tammany Hall of the Council, expropriated the Common and now they’re out to monopolize our History. I’ve a good mind not to go. No authority to call a meeting.’

Even as he spoke he knew that he would go if only to point out that the meeting wasn’t a meeting at all.

He took up his binoculars and ranged lovingly round the saucer of timbered hills to the township enfolded by the twin crescents of the Jalangala and the Noonbee before they joined to water the shovel-shaped valley.

He focused on a green patch marking a plateau known as the Shelf, where Dutton would still be dreaming of his schemes to conquer Gubba, while farther on, at ‘Illandree,’ Mike O’Donnell, wide awake, would be doing rather more profanely just what he himself was doing, since he, too, hated Dutton and all he stood for.

That was the only thing on which they had agreed in all their long lives. He ruminated upon O’Donnell’s life-long pigheadedness.

Last surviving contemporaries of Gubba’s great days, they had enjoyed a passionate antipathy since McGarrity—aged four—had pushed O’Donnell—aged three and three-quarters—off the front step of his father’s public house, The Harp of Erin, and O’Donnell had responded by hitting him on the head with a ginger-beer bottle. Somewhere under their white hair, each carried a scar as reminder of that first encounter.

They had been rivals in the earliest days of Gubba’s sporting events, where McGarrity always beat O’Donnell in the Foot Races, while O’Donnell always beat McGarrity in the Horse Events. In their teens they had fought over the honour of riding on the box-seat beside the driver since they both wanted to handle a coach-and-six. In this forgotten art O’Donnell had outstripped McGarrity, and years later had been chosen to drive the Governor’s coach on his visit to Gubba, while McGarrity had been selected to make the speech of welcome, a copy of which, enshrined in the Mechanics’ Institute, ambitious public speakers were still advised to study.

There had never been an issue of local importance on which they had not been on opposite sides; no Election, State or Federal, in which they had not sat on opposite platforms. But, McGarrity assured himself and Bunyip, not even a dyed-in-the-wool, medieval-minded, retrogressive, reactionary, stick-in-the-mud Tory troglodyte like O’Donnell would stand for Dutton’s tricks. And O’Donnell would certainly go to the meeting, which meant that he too must go.

‘Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the country,’ he quoted aloud. Ah, well, it would mean another ding-dong battle.

The thought of another fight knocked twenty years off his age, though it meant that he would have to postpone his History once more. But he must write it. It was not only the town’s history, but his father’s history and his own, for he was born on Gubba exactly ten years after the first discovery of gold in its gullies.

(Everything relating to Gubba was ‘on’, not ‘in’. You were born ‘on’ Gubba, worked ‘on’ Gubba, died ‘on’ Gubba.) Poor Annie. Always delicate. Died just before the last war; only 85, she was. She should have lived to celebrate Gubba’s century with her own.

The tenderness awakened by the thought of all those who had gone before mingled with his love for Gubba. Once more the binoculars roved over the familiar scene.

How beautiful it was in the morning light with the hidden sun gilding the clouds above the Ulandilla Walls! There the Jalangala rose, making its way down the mountain in a chain of deep and inaccessible bunyip-holes, to fall at last in a series of cascades into the pool whose aboriginal name the first whites had delicately anglicized as ‘The Navel’, while some unrecorded wit had named the two rounded hills that rose beside it ‘The Paps’.

For the Aborigines it had been the centre of their tribal life and the womb of their traditions. For him it was much the same. He had paddled in it, swum in it, courted his wife by it.

On the ridge above the Navel, the poppet-head of ‘The True Blue’—his father’s mine and his—stood stark and solid, though it was thirty years since it had closed down. His father had been lucky to strike a reef which outlasted all the others, but which eventually, like the others, died out.

Each morning the poppet-head brought back to him all his past.

He had exulted and suffered with all Gubba’s vicissitudes. He had seen it flourish in the ’60s, shaken by the big strikes that swept the country in the ’90s, go bankrupt in the Bank crashes of those years, suffer in the drought of 1902. He had seen its revival in the First War, its decline in the ’30s, its resurrection with the rise of gold in the ’40s, its post-war boom with the sky-rocketing prices of wool.

In its great days there were 30,000 people on Gubba. Now the population wasn’t a thirtieth part of what it had been then.

He stood balancing his binoculars in one hand, drinking in the air with its smell of burning gum leaves from chimneys that now began to send up unwavering pencils of smoke.

A moment later the sunlight poured into the Valley, turning the waters of the Navel to a pool of dazzling light, the corrugated-iron roofs to silver and the blossoming fruit trees to earth-tethered clouds of rose and white. His enjoyment was quenched by the gaping excavations and piles of red brick for Dutton’s new hotel, unseemly amidst Gubba’s simplicity, and arrogant in that its very position seemed to claim the Navel as its own.

The township itself was scattered over the undulating hillocks without planning or design, its core clustered on the Flat where the first tents had been erected nearly a hundred years before. The slopes were pock-marked with abandoned shafts and dumps that defied the efforts of nature to conceal them.

He knew the history of every single building. He could tell when it had been built and by whom. He could tell where every claim had been staked and every shaft of any importance been sunk.

Once diggers had flocked there from all parts of the world, and between them they had taken out fifty tons of gold.

Ah, the money that had flowed then! Money unpredictable in its coming, like the gold that created it, too often gone in a flash. Hans Meyer discovered the biggest nugget, ‘Gubba’s Gift’; took one hundred thousand out of the North Pap in a month, and spent it all in twelve! A burst of fantastic spending on beauties brought from the City, on champagne and gambling; a house too big for his needs, and furniture it took him a fortune to import.

Through his binoculars he carefully examined the town to make sure no cataclysm had occurred overnight. A surrealist pattern of wireless aerials flicked across the lens, symbols of the town’s prosperity.

Gubba’s walls were now gleaming in the sun. Many of the houses were of whitewashed pise that had survived the years; others of pale grey granite; and because Rolandson had once got a load of white paint very cheaply from his contract for the Military Camp in Mingoola, the majority of the new weather-board houses were also painted white. The Bank and the Insurance Company were red-brick, but they were hidden from him by the ‘Diggers’ Arms’, whose old stone walls were grey in the morning light.

The Navel glittered. The iron roofs glittered, the dew glittered. The Flat was emerald-green after the winter rains. Tremulous green of willows bursting into leaf broke the dark evergreen of bullokes and sheokes lining the river, and on the hill-sides above it wattle trees tossed foaming yellow showers.

He was happy that spring had come again. Not because he disliked winter, but he loved change, and brief winter yielded to spring almost overnight in Gubba, and was now bursting with its usual riot of crimson gum-tips, wild flowers, fruit blossom and youthful indiscretions.

He chuckled to remember how in the old days he used to go birds-nesting on the hill-side and yabbying in the creek, sometimes wagging it from school when the first spring days made the temptation irresistible. Ah life, life!

Savouring the contrast of the sage-green hills and the emerald valley, he murmured absently: ‘Where every prospect pleases and only man ...’ No! He pulled himself up.

No. Gubba mightn’t be Utopia, but it was pretty near to it. It had its usual share of vices, but they were human vices. Men drinking too much, betting too much, women gossiping, girls getting themselves into trouble, but till now there had been nothing in its moral life either Father Bradey or the Rev. Thomas couldn’t iron out with a heart-to-heart talk backed by a little bit of pressure on a reluctant swain from Constable Saunders.

Today, there was work for all. The terrible years of the Depression were a nightmare unwillingly recalled by the older generations, and a myth to the younger. Today the only Gubbans who weren’t working were half a dozen old men and women in the Blacks’ Camp whom all but the Rev. Thomas had long ago written off; Eddie Rolandson, who was content to sponge on his father; and Sandy Alf, who had mysteriously appeared in Gubba thirty-three years before, dead-drunk on a bullock-dray, and stayed to be an object-lesson for his habits and a respected citizen for his learning that was always, drunk or sober, at their service.

Gubba had suffered all the ups and downs of mining towns. These and its isolation had built it, however reluctantly, into a solid community. In the old days Gubbans had shared what they had—up to a point—in the good times and also in the bad—again up to a point. A shop-keeper was expected to ‘carry’ the local cockies in a bad season at the threat of boycott in the good. And boycott in Gubba was death. Even the Bank had been disciplined to the point where it never foreclosed on a poor Gubban for fear of losing the accounts of the rich.

The binoculars picked up the movement of figures along the stretch of river that fringed the Blacks’ Camp, though the humpies they lived in were too low to be visible above the trees. Focusing carefully, he made out four men carrying a litter across the ford to the Blacks’ cemetery which had been there so long that not even he remembered exactly when it had been set aside for them. Today, King Billy’s descendants would be taking him to perform some ceremony whose significance only he knew, for he had been a magnificent young man when McGarrity was a small boy.

He had a momentary pang as he first remembered him, lithe, straight as a bronze statue. For it was King Billy who had tracked him through the tangled shrub when, as a child of five, he had wandered away from home. He was Moogaray then. It was a long time before the years stripped from him not only his dignity but his name. But all McGarrity’s life his father before him and he in his turn had seen that Moogaray or King Billy didn’t lack for food or blankets. Well over a hundred the old man must be. He docketed the memory for his History—Gubba’s history.

There was something in what the Rev. Thomas had said about the Camp being a disgrace to the town, but he comforted himself with the thought that at least Gubba, if it did nothing for it, did nothing against those who wanted to get out of it, except refuse to sell them land anywhere near the town.

Any road, there was no history of murder of Aborigines in Gubba, as nearly everywhere else where civilization had come to oust them. The white man had come in too great numbers to be resisted and be had wanted things the Aborigine did not value. By the time the Gold Rush had passed and the squatters had begun to settle on the Shelf, the tribes had dwindled, due to the disease and liquor brought by their civilized brothers, and had no will to fight left in them. So gradually the remnants gathered on the gravelly section of the river-bank the township didn’t want and continued to exist in the gap between two worlds to neither of which they belonged in full.

Beyond the cemetery stretched the U-shaped river flat that the forefathers of Gubba had wisely set aside as Common, recreation-ground and anything else the citizens decided to make it in the interests of the community. For whatever the defects of their founding-fathers might have been, with them community interests came first.

They would turn in their graves above the Noonbee if they knew that their descendants had betrayed them by letting the control of the Town Council get into the hands of a lot of jumped-up blow-ins who wanted to use it only for their own purposes.

He had warned them often enough, the Lord only knew how often. But it was not by accident that Gubban and stubborn rhymed.

They were impervious to suggestions that they should wake up and do something about keeping in office a Shire Council that would continue to look after Gubba’s interests rather than its own.

They refused to wake up. They didn’t bother about Shire elections. And since Dutton’s Gang was very wide awake, they got a Council whose first act was to hand over (neatly tied up in legal mumbo-jumbo) a corner of the Common to make a nine-hole golf-course for the new hotel.

‘Don’t complain to me,’ he said, when the local football team and the dairy complained about it for different reasons. ‘A country gets the Government it deserves.’ But his impotence stung all the same.

He felt the usual exasperation at the awareness of the brevity of life compared with so much to do in it. They had meant to do so much in Gubba’s post-war resurrection. In a way they had: the new hospital equipped with a modern operating-theatre, and the refurbishing of the old school, still big enough for the town’s growing needs since it had been built in the great days of the eighties.

They’d have done more if it hadn’t been for Dutton and his ubiquitous devil’s brigade. He’d welcomed Dutton at first. The more new blood the better, and he showed sound sense in choosing to settle on Gubba. But he soon found the boy had the wrong ideas. Cared nothing for Gubba except for what he could make out of it.

There was the business of the new road that served mainly Dutton, built through Dutton’s influence but at Gubba’s expense. Dutton had influence everywhere, while McGarrity had so long fought for so many lost causes, attacked so many people in high places, been so incorruptible that he had no influence anywhere.

Then the hotel and all this tourist nonsense when what Gubba wanted was a sound enterprise that would outlast a slump in the inflated price of wool and offset its declining gold output, though deep in his heart he believed that gold would yet give the town a second life. Gold the tantalizing, the unpredictable. One ‘find’ and all its troubles would be over.

Gubba wanted something that would bring people to it again. People were wealth. The squatters, the big men, were of little use to Gubba. Too few people making too much money. Sheep-raising didn’t employ enough people. Most of them didn’t even buy locally but got everything from Sydney. Too often the town didn’t exist for them, or, if it existed, it was for the wrong reasons—like Dutton.

He would die happy to see Gubba live again as it had lived early in the century. Then he had been its first and only Labor Member of Parliament, for then there were enough workers in the town to put an honest Labor man in. Those were fighting days, but with the decline in population the region had been joined to Mingoola, and his power and his glory fell from him since he had nothing to represent.

What days they were when he had fought for the countryman against the growing powers of the City! Demosthenes against Philip of Macedon had not uttered more bitter Philippics than he against the incubus of the Metropolis.

Those were the days when an election meeting gathered a crowd in the main street to hear candidates speak from the balcony of the ‘Diggers’ Arms’: days in which the candidate was barracked by a crowd which knew what he was talking about.

Ah, there was a glory and a glamour about politics in those days that today belonged only to Cricket and Racing.

What a day it was when Gubba’s first candidate for Parliament rode to the election booth on a horse shod with solid gold, after him a procession of miners carrying banners with emblems of gold and buckets of beer to refresh themselves and would-be voters on the way!

He sighed.

All that was gone and it was the politicians’ fault. Except for Batt, the solicitor, who looked like Hitler and tried to act like him; and Archie Merritt—a Bolshevik if ever there was one—Gubba’s interest in politics today was practically nil. Not to be wondered at, when all it saw of its Parliamentary representatives was when at intervals of three or five years (according to whether they were State or Federal) they made a half-hour visit before each election and repeated platitudes which, irrespective of the party they belonged to, bore a depressing resemblance to each other. The result was the election of the incompetent by the ignorant to legislate for the improvident.

He must write a Philippic about the rise in politicians’ salaries: a disgrace to the country.

The milk-cart clattered along his street, with Laurie Leggo calling ‘Morning, Mr McGarrity,’ and, as he reached the step and poured the milk into the jug left out overnight: ‘Hiya, Bunyip.’ Bunyip miaowed. ‘Hear you got a meeting tonight, Mr Mac.’

McGarrity patted the topknot of woolly black hair and said: ‘That’s right, Laurie.’

Laurie took a note from his pocket. ‘That there Batt giv’ me young brother Teddy ten bob ter deliver the notices on the q.t. Thought yer might like the list ter know who’s gunna be there.’

McGarrity thanked him, squinting to see if O’Donnell’s name was on it. It was.

Laurie clicked his tongue. ‘Whacko for you! My word them snodgers don’t know what’s coming to ’em. I bet there’ll be sumpin’ worth reading in yer Philippic on Mundy.’

He shouted the last as he dexterously mounted the already moving cart, since the horse had been years longer on the run than he.

‘This fight against Dutton and his wicked, dastardly perverters of law and justice is just what we need to rejuvenate us both,’ McGarrity told Bunyip, who stalked ahead of him as he carried the milk to the kitchen where his housekeeper Mrs Wiley was heating the tea-pot.

‘Have yer cuppa ready for you in two shakes of a dead lamb’s tail,’ she said cheerfully. ‘I’ll bring it in to yer since I s’pose you got plenty to do for the meetin’ tonight.’

‘That’s right.’

‘Give it to ’em hot and strong. Lotta jumped-up blow-ins putting on more guyver than the Governor’s wife. What do they know about Gubba or care about it for that? It’s our town, ain’t it?’

Mrs Wiley stood with the tea-pot in one hand and the kettle in the other. Even at 60 she was a handsome woman, with a hint of Asia in the high cheek-bones, her bright brown eyes and her sleek black hair. She was one of Mrs Leggo’s ‘collection’, as it was known in the district. By now, Mrs Leggo, who had lived to be old and highly respected, was dead. It had passed into history that she had had, in the gay days of the Rush, four children: one by an Englishman, one by an American negro, one by a Chinese and one by a policeman. And—to quote Mrs Leggo herself—the only one of them that was no good was the policeman’s.

‘While you were up the back, me niece Dorrie on the switchboard rung up to say Dutton put in a trunk call late last night to his father, and asked him to sound out some of his cronies about getting a licence from the A.J.C. for Picnic Races.’

In no way surprised by the manner in which confidential information reached him, since Gubba had anticipated the speed of modern communication by decades, McGarrity snorted. ‘So that’s the big idea, is it? Hasn’t got Buckley’s chance. The Australian Jockey Club can’t be bribed or brow-beaten.’

Mrs Wiley sniffed. McGarrity carried the tray into his office, poured himself a cup of tea, strong enough for the spoon to stand up by itself, as Mrs Wiley used to say, put in a liberal amount of milk and a lot of sugar and began to read his handwritten notes again before settling down to type them with two fingers on the first typewriter that had come to Gubba.

Chapter Two

TEN MILES away at ‘Illandree’, at the same hour, Mike O’Donnell drank his cup of strong black tea in the kitchen while Mrs Gentle fussed over the fuel stove and chattered incessantly. It was lucky she had married a placid man, Mike thought, looking at Ossie’s long, horse-like face bent silently over his saucer as he sucked up the tea. Not all Mrs Gentle’s nagging could convince Ossie that tea did not taste better drunk from a saucer. Any road, what were saucers made for?

Placing a bottle of tomato-sauce and one of Worcestershire on the table beside the pound of butter, the jar of homemade jam, and a pile of toast, Mrs Gentle slapped down three plates each with three chops and eggs, grumbling as she invariably grumbled: ‘I don’t know why you men never can come to yer meals before the food’s ruined. A woman’s only gotter say breakfast or dinner and you have ter go up the back or wash yer hands or something.’

The old-fashioned wall telephone rang. Mrs Gentle poised to answer, but it rang again. All three waited expectantly counting the number of rings which would indicate which of the four other families on the party-line was wanted.

Dutton had the only private line on the Shelf, which was one of the many reasons Gubba found for distrusting him. Anyone who was prepared to go to the expense of putting in a private line instead of sharing a party-line must have something to hide!

‘Lamond’s,’ proffered Mrs Gentle when the phone stopped after the fifth ring. She tiptoed stealthily across the room whispering, as though the distant neighbours could hear: ‘Wonder what’s wrong there, being rung up at this hour?’

She picked up the receiver with the skill developed over long years of listening to other people’s conversations, and put it to her ear. A moment later, she flushed a rich magenta and slammed the receiver back as though it had bitten her.

‘Whassup?’ Ossie asked as she flounced back to the table and sat down indignantly.

‘Never been so insulted in me life. That there Lamond only been here six years and three months, and acts as though he owned the place. Just wait till they need sumpin’ and you’ll see!’

Ossie repeated placidly: ‘Whassup?’ knowing his wife would take her time.

‘Call from Warrawungah. The hide of him!’

‘Whassesay?’ Ossie obligingly drew out the suspense as he was expected to.

Mrs Gentle attacked a chop with vigour.

‘Whassesay?’ she repeated, the loose flesh of her throat wobbling like a turkey-gobbler’s. ‘ Hello, everybody, that’s what he says. Makes me ropeable that feller does, poking borak every time he gets a chance.’

Mike laughed.

‘No use going crook