Children of The Earth

By Gwenneth Walton

Children of The Earth begins c. 1850. Having bought land from a map, Adam George finds himself on a small farm cut off from Adelaide by the Mount Lofty Range and a landslide, with only his unhappy wife, Hestia, for company. Into their lonely life come the eccentric German prospector, Johannes Menge and newchum, 'Hermes', a former classics teacher, fallen from grace, and now 'a remittance man without a remittance'.

While Hestia and Hermes are poring over Ovid's 'Metamorphoses', Adam discovers a young Indigenous woman, Unatildi, injured by a fire he has kindled. These five characters weave themselves into a tangled plot in which the ancient gods of Europe encounter the ancient gods of the Australian Aboriginal Dreaming

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gwenneth Walton
• Release date: Sep 20, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465953148

Gwenneth Walton

Gwenneth Walton is a retired librarian living in Adelaide, South Australia.As well as a BA in Librarianship she holds a Masters degree and a PhD in Creative Writingfrom Adelaide University. Her writing interests include the 19th century colonization of South Australia by free settlers. She uses Jungian literary theory and comparative mythology to explore the meeting of European and Aboriginal cultures, but chooses to write simple, uncomplicated narrative fiction.

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

Hestia George smoothed the freshly-ironed tea-towels in the drawer of the oak kitchen dresser, observing that her hands were strong and brown, but not as rough as they might have been, considering her circumstances. Usually they served her well, but just occasionally, without her permission, they went diving under the tea-towels and table-cloths in the dresser drawer, feeling for the worn leather bindings of the two books she could not read. It was a waste of time, but her hands knew what they wanted, and had their own way. She sighed, capitulated, then took a firm hold on both books, and withdrew them without disturbing the precise order of the household linen.

Ovid’s Metamorphoses and its smaller companion reminded her of the greatest of her life’s many disappointments, her lack of education. She had often begged the Professor to teach her to read the larger volume, but he had said it was much too difficult for a lady. She loved him for calling her a lady, and believed him when he said that as soon as he had time he would find her a Latin grammar and something more appropriate. She guessed he would approve even less of the smaller book but she had no intention of letting him see that. Once she had mastered the language she was sure she would be able to decipher both books. Keen as she was for the Professor to begin her lessons, she hid her impatience at his usual reply.

‘Soon, soon, my dear Mrs George.’ He patted her arm and smiled. ‘Just as soon as I have established my Chinese college.’

‘But Professor, you will be busier than ever then.’ She knew quite well that he had no money to pay for his foolish dream and would have none, unless he were to strike gold in the forested range that overshadowed the cottage. She wondered how such a wise man, such a knowledgeable man, could delude himself so completely when it came to practicalities. How could he imagine that a penniless old prospector, no matter how well educated, might establish a college to prepare missionaries to take Christianity to the great masses of China? She thought for a moment it might be kinder to confront him with the truth, but could not bring herself to argue with him.

‘I understand, Professor Menge,’ she said. ‘Your work must come first.’ But she could not resist asking a question which had been on her mind for some time. ‘It surprises me, Professor, that you do not want to first take Christianity to our own Aborigines. They are much nearer at hand.’

‘They reject it.’ Menge shook his ragged white head slowly, and began filling his well-seasoned pipe. ‘Their own peculiar beliefs are too deeply ingrained.’

‘Perhaps, in time –,`she began.

‘They have no concept of the Holy Spirit. Only a few dark demons they use to frighten the children. Demons but no angels, Mrs George. No sense of the sublime.’ He tamped down the tobacco with finality. She wrinkled her nose and hoped he would not light until he was outdoors. Menge’s pungent tobacco smelled almost as bad as his unwashed body, and she would not have tolerated either in her kitchen if he had not been a devout Christian. He was also her last hope of learning Latin.

‘You have tried,’ she said, as he went to the stove to light a spill.

‘Yes, I have tried.’ Menge exhaled deeply. ‘Better men than I have tried. But we have failed.’

It surprised her to hear him admit that there were some things beyond his power, but she merely nodded and said she felt sure his Chinese project would be more successful. After all, who was she to question the judgement of a man of his age and great learning?

‘But busy as I shall be with my college, Mrs George,’ he chuckled, his eyes suddenly bright with anticipation, ‘I shall never forget my friends. Be sure of that.’

‘I know, Professor. You will stay for supper, of course?’ She asked out of habit.

‘Not tonight, my dear, thank you. I have a guest waiting for me at the cave and I must take him some supplies before I go north.’

A guest? Afterwards she wished she had questioned him about his mysterious visitor, but Adam had come indoors at that moment, with a warm sheep’s liver quivering in its earthenware dish, and a sudden uprush of anger had momentarily scattered her wits.

Her husband set the dish of liver in the centre of the kitchen table as though it were a special treat, then went out to exchange a few words with the departing Menge. She would have to slice the flaccid liver, fry it with onions, and serve it with lashings of gravy and mashed potatoes, or face a week of sulking. He knew that she detested liver, and could barely bring herself to touch it. No one would ever believe that a man with such innocent blue eyes could be so deliberately provocative. If she complained he would give her a look that said she had grown up in a family poor enough to eat any bit of offal that came its way. It was having been a lady’s maid which had made her finicky, his look implied. He would not actually say this, thus depriving her of the opportunity to assure him she had always hated liver. But even translated into words, this silent argument would have been unwinnable. He would have pointed out that – now she was married to him – she never wanted for good meat.

It was true. Adam killed a sheep every fortnight, and if he ran out of store sheep he went hunting for a kangaroo or a pair of native turkeys. In the early days when the farm was less well established they had eaten everything from roast emu to parrot stew, but they had never gone without meat.

It was normal, she supposed, for a man who had once worked in a slaughterhouse to feel no revulsion at butchering an animal, and it was not unreasonable to expect a tenant farmer’s daughter to be equally unaffected by blood and raw flesh. But even now, after seven years in South Australia, she could not repress a shiver if she chanced to see Adam deftly stripping veined hide from naked flesh, his boots still bloody from cutting the sacrificial throat. Then he would plunge his big square hands into the gaping abdomen to remove the steaming entrails. Once, when she was on her way to milk the cow, he had called her over to see the heart, still beating after the animal had been bled and skinned. Since then she had kept her distance until it was safely shrouded in its white calico bag and hoisted by rope and pulley into the high branches of the gum tree that shaded the dairy.

Next morning, when the carcase had set, and was no longer an animal, but meat, he would lower it again and take the cleaver to the backbone, splitting it expertly and exposing the yellow spinal cord. After that the cleaver and the meat were hers. She would lay one side of mutton on the solid red-gum chopping block outside the dairy, and would dismember it fiercely into fore-quarter, loin and leg, reserving the flap and the kidney for the dogs. In the dairy a small barrel of brine waited to preserve half the meat while she and Adam ate the first half fresh, with occasional help from the Professor. On the first day after the killing she would merely joint the forequarter for immediate use. Swinging aloft in the breeze like the ghost of itself, the meat would keep for up to a week, except in very hot weather. Then it had to be cooked quickly and later recooked as shepherd’s pie or, at worst, given to the dogs. She supposed Adam’s dogs ate more meat than some families in England, but then he treated them like spoilt children.

By the following afternoon the insult of the liver was fading from Hestia’s memory. The forequarter was sizzling in the oven of the black iron stove. She strained off the surplus fat for making soap; it was almost time to peel the potatoes for supper. But the two dilapidated books hidden under the tablecloths still teased her, as they did sometimes. They invited her to feel their worn leather covers, to sniff them for traces of Grandfather’s tobacco, which strangely enough she did not mind, and to recall his country voice reciting the stately phrases.

Leafing through the Metamorphoses she wondered why the Professor would think poetry unsuitable for a lady. Almost against her will she opened the small book and fingered its coarse yellowing paper. The uneven gothic type looked difficult, and she was unreasonably irritated by its refusal to give up any meaning. Once she had learned Latin she thought she would be able to decipher it. It certainly meant something; that was plain from the primitive woodcuts scattered through it. For years she had tried not to allow herself to dwell on them, but recently, when she was alone, she had gone back to them more times than she cared to admit. She justified these lapses by telling herself that she was, after all, a married woman.

When her mother had told her about these matters on her thirteenth birthday she had shrieked, ‘No man will do that to me!’ She had hidden her face in that comforting but diminishing lap, her head against the hard bulge that meant another baby was on the way. Her mother had stroked her hair and sighed.

‘’Tis the way God made us. We are part of Nature, child. Like the birds and the beasts. Maybe it is not the right time for me to tell you this. You are too young. You will understand when you are older.’ Had her mother known that she would not be there when the right time came? It seemed so. Now, even after all these years, she wanted to weep, but could not. If Mother had lived, she thought, she would have told me more. She would have taught me how to be a woman, how to cope with it.

The pictures in the timeworn book held a guilty fascination. Perhaps they would reveal some secret which her mother had not lived long enough to tell her. Besides, they were less revealing than the paintings and statues in the big house where she had once been employed. Yet for all their simplicity they were more troubling, those naked intertwined couples. The colophon on the final page made her shiver but she could not resist looking at it. Why would the artist have drawn a circle of intertwined leaves framing a coiled snake with its tail in its mouth?

Adam knew the land was still too wet to plough, but the few days of winter sunshine were perfect for clearing up the felled trees and old timber lying around the paddocks. Driving an axe into sappy wood, dragging limbs into heaps for burning, stacking timber he could use for fence-posts, he felt the surge of energy in his muscles. It was a good feeling, in the morning, before his body tired. The air was sparkling, the magpies urged him on joyously, the chocolate earth welcomed him and said, ‘Do with me what you will.’ The land was fertility itself, asking for whatever seed he chose to sow. Although he would never find the words to express it, on mornings like this, alone with his land, he felt godlike.

The ten wet acres he had tenanted in Lincolnshire were still as clear in his memory as the grim necessity of having to slave for his landlord to supplement a bare living. He recalled the village school being closed so that the women and children, right down to six-year-olds like himself, could go and scrabble in the dirt for the potatoes the gentry would eat. He remembered his mother, bending awkwardly with her stiff back, and whispering, ‘Get all the little ‘uns, son. Them’s ours.’ He thought of his embittered father, old in his fifties from a lifetime of hardship, and wished he had lived long enough to know that one of his sons was now a man of property. Writing letters had never come easily to Adam, but somehow he would have mastered the words to describe this new land, with its strong red-brown soil, dry and sweet for all but three months of the year, and then never frozen. And, more importantly, now he had finished paying for it, it was his land.

When he arrived in the colony with nothing but his modest savings he had not expected to own land quite so soon. But he had worked from daylight to dark cutting and splitting stringybark roof shingles on the nearer side of the Tiers, the range that hemmed in Adelaide’s fertile plain . The work had proved profitable and soon he had accumulated enough capital to dream of buying his own land. When he saw the eighty-acre farm advertised in the South Australian Register he thought there must have been a mistake in the price. But no, the agent said, the previous owner was off back to England and wanted a quick sale. A good little acreage, the man said, stabbing the map with his finger, nothing wrong with it, except that the first settler’s wife and child had died there, and even after three years he still could not bring himself to go back.

At first sight of his farm Adam had regretted his hasty decision to buy from the map. He had known the land was over the range and some distance north of the settled part of the colony, but it had been a disappointment to find himself in so isolated a place. On the map the distance had not looked great. Then it had been a shock to discover that almost a third of his land ran back into the hills and was too steep to plough. But it was not all bad. Soon he saw that his hill country would make a good sheep walk, when he could afford to increase his small flock and employ a shepherd; but first he must fence fields and plant crops. It was good, also, that the house was tucked against the foothills, sheltered from the winter weather, and near a fine creek that tumbled down from the range and meandered across the flats.

He had been full of optimism when he set out from Adelaide in the wagonette, driving to his farm with his wife beside him and all their worldly goods packed around them. A new start. Perhaps now that he was a landed gentleman she might learn to love him. But that had been too much to hope for. The empty landscape was one thing, but finding the cottage in such a mess had made his chances even worse. The agent’s long list of sundries left by the previous owner had not lived up to its promise.

It appeared the door of the cottage had blown open during a storm, and three summers’ dust had spread over everything. The irons and the pots were rusting, and the furniture was thick with possum dung. The bedroom had sent his wife running out into the fresh air. Of course the woman who had last occupied it could not help dying in childbirth, and it was understandable that her husband had just buried her with the infant and walked away from his debts and his bad memories.

Adam had burned the feather mattress and the blankets. Fortunately they had brought their own new bedding, and a supply of soap, scrubbing brushes and whitewash. Although Hestia’s expression had been grim she had gone to work energetically and in a few weeks the cottage looked clean and homelike. When the yard was fenced, old Menge, passing through on his endless search for minerals, had brought seeds and cuttings begged from some other settler’s garden.

Sometimes Adam saw his wife standing outside the cottage, gazing at the great forested hills as though she feared they were coming to crush her. He could understand how they affected her. After the flat open land of Lincolnshire they were too near, too solid, too uncompromising. In the late afternoon they cast a great shadow that engulfed first the house and then, little by little, all his land. Worst of all, their tangled forests concealed unpredictable inhabitants who practised strange magic. Or so his first visitor, Johannes Menge, had suggested.

‘Don’t say that in front of the wife.’ Adam had straightened up from digging Hestia’s vegetable plot, and jerked his head towards the house.

‘Of course not,’ Menge reassured him. ‘The Peramangk are less friendly than the Kaurna down on the coastal plain, but you will have nothing to fear from our sable brethren if you do not upset them. Give them some food when they come round, and never shoot, not even over their heads. Turn a blind eye if they help themselves occasionally.’

‘I’ll not turn a blind eye if they touch my stock.’

‘Then don’t blame me if they cast a hex over your crop,’ Menge had laughed. Laughed. It was no joking matter. Adam scowled and could not resist a quick glance in the direction of the house.

‘You will be all right.’ Menge was sober again. ‘You are a decent fellow, Adam George, and if you treat the Peramangk decently they will respect you.’

He had warmed to Menge for saying he was a decent fellow. The way his wife shrank from him had almost made him believe he was not.

In spite of Adam’s misgivings Hestia had seemed more resigned than resentful over finding herself so isolated. He had purchased a small flock of sheep, a cow and calf, and a quantity of seed potatoes to plant in the one small clearing. He had built a henhouse and had driven miles to find chickens and ducklings for sale. Hestia had even shown small signs of pleasure then, rediscovering the skill of milking a cow, and talking to the calf and the chickens when she thought herself alone. She had cleaned out the dairy and set out skimming trays on its stone bench so she could make butter and cottage cheese. She had asked whether she might have a stove to replace the camp oven in the open fireplace, and Adam had bought her the best one he could afford. Once Menge had taught her how to make yeast with potato water and raisins they no longer ate damper, but proper loaves of bread. She had found two struggling fruit trees, a quince and a plum, planted by her predecessor, and was manuring and watering them, coaxing them to bear fruit for jam.

It had encouraged him to see her so resourceful, and ready to make do. She was always calm and unruffled until late in that first year when he had come home one evening to find her standing outside the cottage, looking towards the hills with undisguised horror.

‘What is it, lass?’ he had demanded, fearing an attack from his unseen neighbours. ‘Is it the blacks?’ She had shaken her head and run indoors, dry-eyed but trembling and breathing in small gasps. He had been torn between reassuring her and finding out what had frightened her speechless, but when he opened his arms to offer comfort she had backed away. He had pulled out a chair and told her to sit and rest while he looked around outside.

Finding nothing untoward he had come back in to the kitchen. She was silently preparing the supper. He decided to wait. She would tell him in her own good time. But she never did. Weeks later, in the bush beyond the fenced garden he stumbled on the faded wooden cross that marked the grave of the woman and child who had died. Someone had recently cleared the grass and weeds from the grave and planted the few geranium cuttings. He pictured Hestia alone, filled with dread at finding the grave, yet conquering her fear sufficiently to go back and perform this small service for the woman she had never known. It would have been good to be able to take her in his arms and tell her he would never let that happen to her. But he knew that merely touching her would have made matters worse.

CHAPTER 2

Hermes emerged from the cave and looked north and south along the range. He thought he knew what it would feel like to be the last flea on the flank of a very large animal. An animal with a curly coat of dark grey-green.

He had seen no one in the two days since the old chap had left him, and did not expect to. What man in his right senses would come to this place, more inhospitable than any landscape he had ever seen? Now, perched on a flat stone a few yards above the entrance to his hillside cave, he scanned the vast plains to the east of the mountain. He thought of it as a mountain, because it was steep, although he knew Menge was right when he said it was only a pimple, compared with the Alps. But long erosion, Menge chortled, meant that these hills gave up their mineral riches easily.

Hermes could not argue. His knowledge of geology was slight, but it seemed to him that at some remote time this range might have erupted violently out of the rough skin of the plain that spread out below him. Or perhaps its rocky core had merely withstood the elements while all the surrounding land was washed, or blown away. But that time was long past. With the exception of some large stony outcrops the slopes were now thickly forested, a sombre green that turned bluer and bluer as the tiered hills faded into the distance and met an empty sky. Empty, except for an occasional smudge of smoke, which reminded him that there was another explanation for this landscape.

What was it Menge said the natives called the range? Nganno. Nganno, whose name began with an unpronounceable consonant, was the slain ancestral hero whose body had merged into the landscape, with two mountain peaks for ears, one a little higher than the other. Hermes couldn’t see the ears, which were somewhere to the south, and had no idea which part of the mythical creature’s anatomy he was sitting on. Up here he had not seen even one of these local inhabitants. Menge said they were sometimes around, watching, but could make themselves completely invisible. Though Hermes preferred not to dwell on the memory of it, at dusk last evening he had sensed someone or something nearby, and had felt the hair rise on his neck. He shivered and looked around furtively. Friendly, Menge had said, unless you tried to harm them or the things they treasured. Then it might be different.

He resolved to treat them with great circumspection if he met any while he worked out a plan to get himself back to Adelaide, a distance he calculated to be at least sixty miles over rough terrain. First he should get his bearings. Being only half way up the mountain he could not see as far as the River Murray, which Menge had said lay only two days walk to the east. Two days for Menge probably meant four for anyone else.

Even if he were to climb to the peak of the range Hermes suspected he would see nothing to the east but an even greater expanse of dreary scrub. Beyond the river there would be God only knows how many hundreds, perhaps thousands, of miles of endless plain. Somewhere east of that unimaginable expanse of emptiness lay the Great Dividing Range and the booming town of Sydney, already more than sixty years old. Perhaps that would have been a better choice than Adelaide. But in England news from the colonies had suggested that Sydney was full of jumped-up ex-convicts, while South Australia was being settled by free men, men of ideals and education. Some said that even the farm labourers had to have character references before they were accepted as immigrants.

Hermes looked up to the top of the mountain but had no inclination to scale it. It seemed to get steeper and rockier as it went up, and the shock of realising he had been hoodwinked had drained his energy. Not that he had been short of energy when he had climbed Helvellen with the brightest of the Upper Sixth on that last summer holiday – he had been in his element leading his little band of acolytes up the steepest Cumbrian slopes, in the footsteps of Wordsworth. Ghosts of his students’ laughter echoed inside his head and he was glad they could not see him now, outwalked and outwitted by a skinny old man.

Still nervous of unseen observers, he sensed a small change in the vast landscape. Instinctively he turned his head to the left and squinted across the valley into the shadows on the opposite hill face.

‘The Professor!’ he muttered, suddenly ashamed of his suspicions. ‘Back, after all!’

He shook his head in slow amusement, the way people did at the mere sight of Menge. The sun setting behind the ranges had thrown them into deep shadow, making Menge a dark goblin as he plunged recklessly down the steep slope across the valley, now visible in the clearings, now disappearing into thickets of bush. Menge’s method of locomotion was unique. In spite of the deepening dusk there was no mistaking the hurtling body with its dwarfish shape and its remarkable resemblance to Punch. The flat black hat with its round crown ought to have blown off long ago, but somehow had not. The baggy greatcoat ballooned behind him and perhaps slowed his body’s dangerous flight. Even without the pair of geological hammers in his hands, there would have been no mistaking that wild flying shape.

Both feet together – jump! Hands holding the hammers – back! Feet landing – hands – and hammers – up! By all the laws of physics Menge should have fallen flat on his face each time, but he was as sure-footed as a goat and as graceful as a kangaroo. Perhaps it had something to do with the length of his arms compared to the shortness of his legs. Or was it the weight of his great head and broad chest compared with his spindle-shanks? No, that should have had the opposite effect. It was simply that Menge knew he would not fall. He knew that his God would not let him fall, in spite of all the demons waiting to trip him up.

Ten years earlier, when the colony of South Australia was only a ramshackle camp set in endless haunted bush, Menge had been the first white man to walk from Mount Lofty to Cape Jervis, the tip of the wild peninsula to the south. In Adelaide, where he still boasted he had done it without compass or guide, they joked that when Menge played ‘Lead Kindly Light’ on a gumleaf the natives must have thought him a white Warrawarra, and fled in fear. But it had been some time before anyone dared follow in his footsteps, and then they went in numbers, well armed and wary.

The old man disappeared into the thick vegetation at the bottom of the gully, and Hermes, in his mind’s eye, saw him crossing the creek at the stepping stones above the rockpool, still sucking on his cold pipe, a pipe so deeply curved it might have been designed especially to go with the convoluted contours of his face. With the torrential rain that had fallen in the past two days the creek would be swollen, and even the stepping stones would be well under water. Hermes slithered down the slope and began breaking branches across his knee to build up the smouldering fire in the ring of stones just outside the cave. The Professor would arrive with wet feet and almost certainly with a colossal appetite. He went into the cave to see what food he could find. A remnant of salt beef, enough flour to make damper for one – but not for two. He busied himself with his last cupful of flour, adding salt and water. Ah, yes, water. He had better put some on to boil. The old chap would want hot tea.

He had only just hung the billycan from the iron tripod over the fire when Menge strode up from the gully, only slightly out of breath, his long hair and beard streaming around his face like so much white mistletoe.

‘Gott bless you, mein kind!’ The old fellow’s face creased into a benign smile which made a mockery of Hermes’ suspicions. ‘Gott bless you. You have the billy on.’

‘Only just, Professor. It will take a few minutes. You’d better sit down. Take off your wet boots before you catch cold.’

‘Acch! Wet feet do not cause colds.’ Menge had laid down his hammers and was removing the pack from his back. ‘It is demons who cause colds and other such afflictions.’

Hermes had no intention of getting into that argument again. ‘All the same, Professor, you must be tired.’

‘Tired? I am not tired. Only twenty miles I have walked today. But it is good to arrive here at my half-way house and find the fire going and a friendly face to greet me.’ He was disgorging parcels from his rucksack. ‘Flour I have bought, and sugar and tea. And oatmeal and rice.’

‘Just as well, if you want to eat tonight. All I have left is a little beef and a very small damper.’

‘You’ve had no success hunting? Your feet still troubling you?’

‘My blisters are healed, thank you. To tell the truth the prospect of hunger drove me out with the gun yesterday, but I simply could not pull the trigger.’

Menge was now seated on the only stool, drawing on his pipe with deep satisfaction. He blew smoke, cocked his head and waited.

‘It was a wallaby,’ Hermes said. ‘Standing there on its hind legs, looking at me with such an expression – so gentle, so forgiving. How do you shoot an animal that stands up on two legs and looks you in the eye? It would be like shooting a child.’

Menge nodded slowly. ‘I have never been able to do it myself,’ he admitted. ‘I underestimated you. You are more tender-hearted than I thought.’‘Yet you expected me to live by hunting.’ Hermes knew he sounded petulant, and that it had something to do with the long hours when he had imagined himself abandoned. ‘You said if I came prospecting with you I would be able to hunt for my meat. You said I would find gold. Precious stones, you said. The whole place is one great treasure trove of minerals, you said.’

‘So it is, mein kind. It is not so obvious here as it is farther north, but there is still treasure to be found. I would take you all the way to the Flinders with me, but your feet are as tender as your heart. You had better rest here until I get back.’

‘How long?’ Hermes sugared a pannikin of tea generously and passed it to the Professor.

‘A month or so. That will give you time to get used to the bush and fossick for gold in the valleys.’

‘But how am I to live? What shall I find to eat so far from town? There isn’t a shop within miles. Which is immaterial, since I have no money left.’

‘I have brought you a month’s supply of dry goods from Gawlertown, and here is your three pounds change.’

Hermes blushed and took the change. ‘But if this is all for me what will you eat?’

‘I have yet