The Butterfly Field

By Dawn Florence Wade

Isadora Galloway is the youngest daughter of a sweet gentle mother and a domineering father. Harsh and ambitious, her father has no time for sentiment. When her dog has puppies, a young Isadora watches him drown them in the well — an image that haunts her for much of her adult life. Her father's destructive behavior leads to cycles of dependency and abuse, including two intense and ultimately doomed relationships. But these relationships also provide her with three adored sons for whom she must fight like a tigress.

This story spans three countries and nearly twenty years - from the mid-sixties to the mid-eighties - ranging from the savage and beautiful countryside of PNG to the law courts of Australia, from immense wealth and privilege to abject poverty and imprisonment, from brutal physical and mental abuse to passionate love. Above all, it is the story of one woman's survival and triumph over every obstacle in her life to emerge free and victorious, with her beloved children by her side.

'The Butterfly Field' is a powerful and epic story of an Australian woman of uncommon strength and spirit as she fights to survive and provide a life for herself and her children in the turbulent and dangerous world of Papua New Guinea — a country whose struggle for independence so closely mirrors her own.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jun 24, 2021
• ISBN: 9781922565426

Book preview

MOTHERS’ DAY 1974

It was around midnight as Isadora drove into the cemetery with Sam. A tropical August moon lay heavily overhead but it gave little light. They passed tall rain trees, with a cuscus hanging from one of them. They parked the van near the gate.

Isadora got out and waited for Sam, who was reluctant to move. She spoke in pidgin, ‘Hurry, Sam…please.’

‘Mama… me no like.’

Isadora took him by the hand and started walking. The head-lights lit the ground for a short distance but the beam was blotted out by a grassy hummock, casting the graveyard ahead into darkness. She thought of going back to the van and turning the headlights off but didn’t want to stop now. But they would have to hurry or they would be stuck with a flat battery.

They wound their way through the long kunai grass. Isadora could hear it squash under Sam’s bare feet. Leaves and twigs rustled and broke as they moved. There was no path, no track, just a mat of grass and graves.

‘Missus, plenty snake,’ Sam stopped. ‘Careful,’ he warned. ‘Forget the snakes. Let’s just get this done and get out of here before the bloody mosquitoes eat us alive,’ she said, slapping her arms and legs.

‘Wet season bring too many bina tangs,’ Sam whispered.

A bina tang was anything from a mosquito, to a flea, to a spider. Bina Tang had been a Chinese coolie who had died a hundred years before of swamp fever and whose German master had blamed a million tropical insects for his death.

It was nearly silent in the large graveyard except for the occasional echoing sound of a native woman wailing for her dead in a nearby village.

Isadora began to feel uncomfortable. ‘My God, what a desperate way to make a living,’ she thought.

Sam started pulling her back towards the graveyard gate but she dug her heels into the muddy ground and pulled her arm free.

‘Mama, we go.’ Sam was intent on leaving the cemetery.

She knew he wouldn’t leave without her and there was no way that she would turn back now. She felt Sam’s strong, sensitive fingers curve around her forearm.

‘Missus,’ he whispered. ‘Me frightened, me no steal, me think Jesus Christ come down and cook ’em me.’

Sam moved his body closer. Isadora turned her head towards him. His handsome, expressive face was hidden by the darkness, but she didn’t have to see his tortured expression to know what he was suffering inside.

‘Jesus Christ, he no come down cook ’em you,’ she said in a reassuring voice. ‘Suppose man steal ’em something, then he come up sorry in his heart. Okay, he go to heaven.’ Sam could not read nor write but the missionaries had taught him some values and virtues and had certainly instilled the fear of God into him.

They were creeping cautiously through the dark when she stepped on a fresh grave. Her foot sank quickly into the mud and she grabbed Sam’s arm for support, pulling her foot free with a wet, sucking sound.

‘Disorganised even to death’ Isadora thought, where else but Papua New Guinea would graves be placed like this — totally random, with no headstones, nor any other markers? She tried to let go of Sam’s arm, but he was holding her tight. He looked back over his shoulder.

‘Mama, quick, time we go,’ he panted. His mouth hung open, and his beautiful, strong white teeth flashed like pearls in the darkness for a moment as the moon came out. Sam saw a light in the trees ahead and froze in terror.

‘Sam… what is it?’

He was shaking. Isadora heard the native woman’s wailing again, louder. Sam’s eyes widened.

‘I see lights, colours, dancing around me,’ he said as he gestured to Isadora.

She shook her head. She couldn’t see anything.

Sam moved backwards, slowly. He spoke to her in pidgin, ‘I’m frightened. I can see spirits.’

‘It’s all right. There are no spirits here.’

‘It’s the spirit of my mother. It’s coming to get me.’

‘Of course it’s not. Come on now, you’re being silly.’

She moved on. Sam followed reluctantly, mumbling something she couldn’t understand. She looked around, but there was nothing there except darkness.

‘Sam,’ she said forcefully, ‘no spirits here.’ She wasn’t sure just what she believed herself, but she tried to sound as convincing as she could.

Sam’s fingers tightened around her arm. ‘We go to shop,’ he said, ‘and work ’em on new flower.’

‘I haven’t got any new flowers,’ she protested. There were no flowers in the shop; the shipment of fresh flowers, which she relied on, hadn’t arrived on the aircraft from Sydney that day. And Sam knew what the problem was, even if he wouldn’t acknowledge it — Isadora needed the flowers she had sold for the Alley funeral that day for the Brae son’s funeral on the next. As there was no refrigeration at the morgue, the funeral had to go ahead, with or without her flowers.

If I can come up with thirty wreaths by tomorrow morning it will mean another five hundred dollars, Isadora thought to herself. I badly need it to pay my lawyer. Without it, I don’t know when I’ll see my children again.

‘Sam, if we don’t get them, I’ll lose plenty of business,’ she explained, ‘and then I can’t get my piccaninnies back.’

‘Don’t worry, Missus,’ Sam said. ‘I’ll get the Puri Puri men to get your piccaninnies back for you.’

Isadora smiled in the hot darkness. He was always loyal to her. She couldn’t tell him that she didn’t believe in witchcraft — she only wished that she did. It would be a lot cheaper hiring Puri Puri men than flying a barrister from Sydney. Then she heard the mating call of a cuscus in a large rain tree ahead. She knew the grave they were searching for was near that tree. Then she smelt the roses.

‘Here,’ Sam said.

‘Yes, that’s it.’ She sighed with relief.

The moon was brighter for an instant and she recognised the pile of wreaths she’d sold that day. But it was impossible to tell what shape the flowers were in — they would have to get them back to the shop and see what could be rescued.

She fell to her knees. She grabbed the wreaths and sheaves from around the grave. She passed some to Sam and stood up. ‘Take these to the van.’

She loaded as many wreaths as she could into her arms, feeling the soft petals fluttering under her chin. Sam started to walk quickly back to the van, Isadora followed. There was a movement in the tree overhead, Sam’s walk turned into a run and Isadora ran behind him. The wailing of the native woman became even louder. They reached the van, bundled the flowers into it, and set off quickly, back towards Port Moresby. Isadora studied Sam’s face as he drove the van. He had told her that he wasn’t sure how old he was although his physical appearance had suggested that he was probably around twelve when he had come to work for her as a houseboy. Shortly after arriving, he had begun to call her Mama, and soon felt comfortable enough to confide in her with his deepest secrets, and most intimate details of his life. He had told her that the most vivid memory he had as a small boy, was the day he had eaten his mother.

Isadora knew that Sam was been terrified that his mother’s spirit had come to the graveyard to bring kuru to them both. As they drove in silence, she thought of the great leap he had made into the future, by coming from his village to Port Moresby. The distance of emotional and intellectual difference must have seemed ten thousand years for him in his short lifetime. He was torn between his primitive ways and white man’s ways. Seeing the confusion and fear that he was suffering for what she had called on him to do, she wondered which he preferred. Possibly, one day Sam would know enough to take over the flower shop. Tonight had been frightening for him, but he was young and had a lot to learn about survival yet — and in herself, he had the perfect teacher.

Looking at the clock as she slid into bed, Isadora noticed that it was already one o’clock. She covered her sweating body with a well-worn sheet. The overhead fan generated what little breeze it could in the unbearably hot, thick tropical night air.

She left the bedside light on and gazed at the vase of red hibiscus flowers on a cupboard at the end of her bed — the only colour anywhere. For almost a year, she’d been holed up in this awful little hut, which was only a one-bedroom shed with a bare concrete slab for a floor, a tin roof and a cockroach-infested oven. For these comforts, she paid the exorbitant sum of one hundred and fifty dollars a week.

As she lay staring at the ceiling she thought of Joshua and Daniel, her two little boys. Despite the perfect conditions they lived in, she worried constantly that they were unhappy. Warm tears rolled down her cheeks onto her pillow, already soaked with perspiration.

The midnight raid on the cemetery had been a test of early moral education for Isadora. She kept hearing the voice of her dead mother echoing in her head, saying, ‘God is watching you.’ But it was a measure of her love for the boys, that had made her disobey her mother’s teachings. Her mother had always told her that what you sow you reap. The memory of this philosophy brought with it a fear now of what she might suffer for leading Sam on a sinful mission of stealing in a graveyard. But fear was nothing new to Isadora, she had lived with it for most of her life.

She turned the pillow over and drifted off to sleep.

With morning light came the familiar sounds of passenger trucks carrying native workers to their jobs. Work started early to escape the heat. Isadora woke, startled, and realised that Sam and Theresa would already be at the flower shop, so she had best hurry.

Theresa had been with her since Isadora had bought the shop. The woman had come from the Brown River tribe and had been educated by nuns at one of the oldest Catholic missions on the islands. She and Sam were friends despite their different levels of education and the fact that he was a New Guinean and she was Papuan. Isadora sent up a heartfelt prayer of thanks for them both, as she hurried.

When she walked into the shop, Theresa was busy teasing the dead flowers out of the old wreaths. She was a heavily built woman in her early twenties, wearing a traditionally patterned brown and white skirt, which fell to her ankles and a sleeveless, black European top. The bones of her face were strong and beautiful and her short hair crinkled tightly about her skull. She had been the first trained Papuan New Guinean florist and had been working for the previous owner when Isadora had taken over.

Theresa was grinning from ear to ear as she talked to Sam, but Sam looked worried.

‘What’s wrong?’ Isadora asked.

‘Oh, Mrs. Grubach,’ Theresa said, in her perfect English. ‘Sam just got word from his village that his father has bought him a bride and they want to send her down here next week.’ She broke into infectious laughter. The abundance of flesh that covered her large frame wobbled and shook as the enormous sound of her laughter swelled out of the door and down the street. Isadora felt laughter welling up but tried to keep a straight face.

‘Missus,’ Sam said soberly. ‘Me no like marry.’ He was angry.

‘Have you seen her?’ Isadora asked.

‘No,’ said Sam.

‘Well, what are you going to do?’

Sam just pursed his full lips and screwed up his face in despair. Isadora felt sorry for him. As if last night had not been enough for him. ‘Why not just send her back?’ she questioned.

Theresa began to giggle and Isadora joined in. Sam, near tears, dropped the wreath he was working on and started laughing as well, hopping from one leg to the other.

‘He can’t do that,’ Theresa explained. ‘They’re already married. By proxy, you see. Sending her back would disgrace the village. And her parents would have to give the bride price back, you know.’

Sam shook his head and picked up the wreath. He spoke in pidgin. ‘Papa pay twenty thousand dollar for bride price. Me think two hundred pigs enough, but now one four-wheel drive, four dozen cartons beer. Something like that,’ he mumbled.

Theresa, serious, said, ‘Bride price is so bloody silly. There’s no way my father’s going to sell me like a cow or a pig.’

They all began to work hard on the wreath-making and there was silence for a while.

‘Sam,’ she said, ‘if she doesn’t give you a piccaninny in two years you can send her back and your father can get the bride price back.’

‘Really?’ Isadora said.

‘Yes, that’s the village law.’

‘That true?’ Sam asked. There was a glimmer of hope in his eyes. ‘Make sure she doesn’t get a piccaninny, then,’ Isadora said. She knew that Sam was a virgin and knew nothing about birth control.

Sam looked embarrassed at such talk. Theresa, putting the finishing touches to a flower arrangement, turned to Sam. ‘Don’t use Gladwrap. My friend from New Britain used it all the time. And she still got a piccaninny in her stomach.’

‘What’s that?’ Sam said puzzled.

Theresa smiled kindly. ‘You know, Sam. Her boyfriend wrapped it around his stick. But it just didn’t work. I won’t get a piccaninny because I have eaten a plant from my village at Brown River.’

‘Which plant is that?’ Isadora asked.

‘It grows in the rainforest near the river. Only some of the Lapun women, you know, the older women, know where it is. They go there and pick it and cook it and give it to the young girls.’

‘Can you get some for Sam?’ Isadora asked.

‘No. It’s a secret. The old women would never give it to anyone outside the village. They won’t even let anyone see where it grows.’

‘What ’em you talk?’ Sam asked.

His curiosity was curtailed by the arrival of their first customer for the day. Sam loaded the wreaths and flower arrangements into the van and set out for the day’s deliveries.

Theresa went to lunch but not before Isadora had warned her not to mention the stolen wreaths to anyone. She had nodded and left, slinging her native bilum, her multi-coloured string-bag, over one shoulder. It was two o’clock when Sam returned, worried. He had always been quick to pick up on things that he might benefit from, and he had been talking to his friends in the street about his new marriage.

He started begging Isadora to save him. ‘A friend, a one-talk, he told me that I should buy a balloon and put it on my stick so that she won’t get a piccaninny. Then I can send her back to her village quickly.’

Isadora smiled.

‘Can you go and buy me one?’

Isadora was lost for words. She couldn’t go into a chemist and buy condoms. It could start the whole town talking about her and she couldn’t afford a scandal like that — she had to get her children back. In Moresby, the courts would certainly frown on a woman doing such a liberal, unheard of thing.

Sam did not understand her silence. ‘Missus, you no do this, me no go long night helping you steal flower.’

Sam had a point, Isadora admitted ruefully to herself. With what she had asked him to do for her, the least she could do in return was to buy him some condoms. Perhaps she could get someone else to do it for her.

‘Okay Sam,’ she said in pidgin. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll get you some French letters. Go now, you go and have some lunch.’

Sam nearly ran from the shop, his huge calf muscles flexing as he went. Poor Sam, she thought. Though he sometimes still seemed primitive, he was now much closer to Isadora’s way of life than to that of his village. It was sad to see him lumbered with an arranged marriage, against his will.

Isadora looked at her watch and wondered why Theresa was not yet back from lunch. Her question was answered when a native policeman came into the shop. He walked briskly to the counter.

‘Yes, good afternoon, Missus,’ he said. ‘Do you have a Theresa Sari working here?’

‘Yes. What’s the matter?’

‘She was in a fight,’ he explained.

‘Is she all right?’ Isadora asked nervously.

‘She’s okay, but there’re three men with bleeding noses. One of them had his teeth knocked out. I’m afraid she started the fight. We had to lock her up and charge her.’

Selfishly, all Isadora could consider was that she had the funeral to do that afternoon and she couldn’t cope without Theresa.

‘She has requested you come down and bail her out,’ the officer said. ‘Her charge will be heard later.’

Isadora got Theresa out as soon as she could, and took her back to work in the shop.

Because he had been up all night, Sam was tired, so she sent him home and took the last delivery of the day herself. Ironically, it was to the house next door to where she had once lived with Oskar.

Outside, she stopped her car and looked around for a moment. The mansion overlooked the harbour, and had superb views. The spray from the tropical aqua-blue waters splashed onto the roadside beside her. An array of fishing boats, barges, Japanese freezer ships and stylish yachts bobbed up and down as the tide lapped in. Across the harbour, towering mountains rose.

The tranquil sight had Isadora wishing that she could return to what was rightfully her home. After the confines of the tiny shed she had called home, the house that she had taken so much for granted was now something she longed for in her dreams. She had been the mistress of the house that others coveted.

It was a centrally air-conditioned palace, with marble floors and a marble staircase spiralling up to the first story. She and Oscar had built it only a few years before, and, when it was finished, it had been the biggest, grandest house in the Papua New Guinea islands. For over a year, Isadora had spent her days overseeing the project, dreaming that this would be where she would live her days in extravagant comfort. But, as much as she had thought of it as her house, she had known that it would always be Oskar’s. He had built the mansion as a monument to himself. He always had to have the biggest and best, and, of course, the most expensive and decorative. He felt that these material symbols were a just tribute to his status and success.

While she had been living in the mansion she had considered herself the chatelaine, but now she realised that she had been kidding herself. She had been nothing but a mere ornament: to adorn Oskar’s house and greet his guests at the door. She was only another bauble to grace his arm in public and turn heads in restaurants.

Now he had sold it and gone back to the house he had been living in when she had first met him. The enormous profit he’d made from the sale of the mansion had helped him to buy a castle in Austria, one of her old friends, Will Van Hamen, had told her.

She ached to see the children, perhaps Oskar would allow her just to see them, although it wasn’t till the following day that it was her turn to have official access to Joshua, three, and Daniel, twenty months, for a few fulfilling hours.

The following morning, Mothers’ Day, she went to the shop although it was a Sunday, then weary and with a sense of foreboding she drove to Oskar’s house.

Once there, Isadora knocked and, getting no answer, walked in. She hoped desperately that Oskar would be away. But as she walked into the hall she saw him walking slowly down the stairs. With a sinking heart, she realised that she wasn’t going to be lucky, this time.

‘There is something I want to discuss with you,’ he said in his almost-perfect English.

‘When I bring them back,’ she said.

‘You can’t take them until I say so!’ he exploded. ‘You hear me?’

‘Oskar, please…’

Joshua and Daniel came running down the stairs as fast as their legs could carry them. She could see in their faces that they were filled with excitement. Her frustration with Oskar’s attitude disappeared. She loved her two boys desperately. She kneeled down onto the cool carpet to hug and kiss them. It had been only days since she had seen them but it seemed like an eternity. The time between visits was becoming increasingly unbearable. As she held them and felt their warmth and love surge through her, she began to sob.

‘Don’t cry, Mummy,’ Joshua said as he stroked my hair. ‘You’re a big girl now, Mummy.’

‘It’s okay, Joshua,’ she said. ‘It’s okay, because Mummy is happy to see you.’

Daniel put his tiny hands on her face and said, ‘We go.’ He started crying too.

Oskar interrupted them. ‘I want to talk,’ he pulled the boys loose. ‘C’mon, boys, behave yourselves.’

He thrust a paper and a pen into Isadora’s hands.

‘Oskar, I don’t want to sign anything. Not now, anyway,’ Isadora said. ‘I’ve just come to get my children.’

‘They are no longer your children,’ he said coldly, confidently. ‘I have custody. They are my children.’

‘I’ll look at it later,’ she said.

‘You will look at it now!’ he screamed. ‘Now, not later. There is no later!’

Instinctively, Isadora stepped back. ‘Well, what is it?’

‘It’s a contract signing over the rest of your shares to Grubach Investments — your shares in the shoe shop.’

‘You can’t take that,’ she pleaded, ‘it’s all I’ve got left.’ ‘You sign or no more visits.’

Isadora’s head reeled with shock.

‘I didn’t start that business with any of your money,’ she said. ‘You’ve never put a dollar into it. The only reason you have a share at all is because I gave it to you. You’ve taken everything else. But that’s enough. You’re not taking the shoe shop.’

She took a deep breath. She needed to appear calm, cool. ‘And if you think you can try anything else, you’re wrong. I’ll never leave Moresby — I’ll never leave this country. No matter what you do. I’ll never leave. And I have a legal right to see my children. The court gave me that, at least.’

She wondered if he knew how much she was bluffing. Isadora was strong, she knew that. But she thought that she would never be as strong, or as hard as Oskar, no matter how hard she tried.

Oskar sensed her humiliation with the keenness of a predator seeing the first signs of weakness in its prey. A smile flickered on his lips, then disappeared, almost before she noticed it.

He slapped her so quickly that she didn’t see it coming.

‘No, Oskar, don’t!’ she begged. But he already had her by the hair and was dragging her towards their old bedroom.

‘Oskar! Not now, please!’ she pleaded.

‘You are still my stupid wife and I’ll have you any time I want!’ he yelled. His bitterness chilled her.

‘Please, Oskar,’ she said, more gently. ‘Oskar, please. The children!’

‘The children,’ he snorted, ‘My children. They’ll learn the way I learned. By watching my father fuck a woman.’

He threw her down. If there had been a way to make it seem like the uneasy agreement of a prostitute taking a trick, it wouldn’t have been so bad. But she knew Oskar and she knew that he was violent. However she didn’t resist. There was no use making it worse. She lay on the thick carpet, waiting. She felt numb, to her soul.

Oskar looked down at her on the floor. He took his hunting knife from the dressing table and with a quick movement sliced apart the cotton sun-frock she was wearing, cutting savagely through the straps of her bra. She dared not do anything to stop him as he ripped her bikini pants from her.

Behind the bulk of Oskar’s hip, she could see in the doorway, Daniel’s blond, curly hair and tearful sad green eyes and heard Joshua, pale uncomprehending, tearfully pummelling his father to, ‘Stop hurting Mummy!’ Would they ever forget?

Her own revulsion would, she knew, be mirrored in her face. She knew too that Oskar would relish her pain and the ineffectual pummelling of his frightened son’s puny fists.

She had so believed what he had said on their wedding-day barely three years ago.

‘You are my wife and you will never want for anything. Half of everything I have is yours.’

Soon, but not soon enough, it was over.

Lying there after Oskar had gone, she sought to obliterate self-disgust by conjuring up blue sky and a green field stretching away from her with the little boys running ahead laughing, ineffectually chasing myriad butterflies, which rose before them, cloud after cloud of flittering colour in the bright morning sun.

ISADORA

SHe was laboriously cutting out coloured pictures. One was a map of Papua New Guinea, a country which had fascinated her ever since she had painstakingly read that it was still the haunt of cannibalism - both of which frightened and excited her.

Her mother, Grace Galloway, was sitting at the homestead’s kitchen table. She looked out of the window at their property, stretching in every direction. The bare, brown paddocks showed the effects of the long drought in New South Wales. The sheep looked weary, and dry. Only a few trees broke the harsh skyline, near the dams where the sheep gathered to drink thirstily. Isadora was sitting next to her, with a pile of magazines, mainly, The Women’s Weekly.

‘Look at the Queen Mummy. She’s so pretty. Why is she wearing her crown?’

‘It’s for her subjects to admire, dear.’

Isadora stared intently. ‘Is her blood really blue?’

‘Of course,’ Grace said, ‘she’s Royal.’

Isadora opened another magazine. ‘And this man?’

Grace looked down to where her daughter was pointing. She saw a young, smiling handsome face. She read the words under the photo. ‘Michael Rockefeller?’

‘Oh, I know. The American!’

‘What about his blood?’

‘No, I don’t think so.’

‘Then why is his picture here?’

‘Because they’ve got such a lot of money,’ Grace said.

Isadora picked up a pair of scissors and carefully cut out the handsome face, the tip of her tongue protruding from between her lips as she did so. She sat and looked at the picture for a long while, dreaming.

She then shook her head, knelt down, and patted Sadie, asleep in a basket near the door. The dog was her special friend, always. She ran her hand over the dog’s heavily pregnant stomach. At last she got up and started brushing her mother’s fine, faded hair.

‘Mum, why don’t men have babies?’

‘Because they could never stand the pain.’

‘Why not?’ Isadora asked.

‘Well… that’s just the way God designed things. Look at us. We’re the stronger of the species, my darling. If men had to give birth, there wouldn’t be any more children.’

Isadora put the brush down. ‘There you are. Queen Gracie, the Second.’

‘Thank you.’ Grace turned and hugged Isadora. ‘Then that makes you my princess.’

‘No, I don’t want to be a princess. I want to be an actress.’

‘Now, you know your father would never allow that,’ Grace said.

Isadora ignored her. ‘Like Vivien Leigh. She’s your favourite, isn’t she?’

‘No, my darling… You are.’ She put her arms around Isadora. ‘Or maybe I could even be a trapeze artist. Or a dancer.’ Grace smiled.

Isadora ran to the lounge room and turned the gramophone on. She began to dance, and beckoned Grace to join her.

‘Dance with me, Mummy.’ ‘Of course…’

They danced around the drab room, avoiding its heavy, old-fashioned furniture, inherited from Albert’s parents and polished every week by Grace, without fail. ‘And a nice gentleman will always know how to dip a girl properly.’ She dipped Isadora. They both laughed and continued to dance.

Albert, Isadora’s father, looking every one of his sixty years, appeared in the doorway like an avenging god. Red with anger at what he saw, he strode to the gramophone.

‘You stupid woman. You’ll have that kid as mad as a wet hen if you don’t teach her how to work as she should.’

He turned to Isadora, ‘You’ll never amount to anything anyway. You’re good for nothing. You’re a stupid child.’

She ran from his wrath and hid behind the long velvet curtain at the window.

Grace pleaded with Albert. ‘Please, Albert. She’s a good child. Surely Isadora is entitled to some pleasure?’

Picking up the machine, Albert turned away with the gramophone still playing in his arms. Isadora and Grace ran after him. Outside, on the verandah, he hurled it onto the dry ground below. Isadora watched in disbelief as it burst open, its powerful spring leaping from the shattered wooden case like some vicious serpent. The scratchy dance tune seemed to hang in the air.

Isadora lay on her bed, cuddling her many teddy bears, suffused with fear and sadness. The fear was of her father, whom she desperately wanted to love. There was a blast of thunder, she could hear a patter on the tin roof. Through the window, she watched torrential rain begin to fall out of the sky. It grew stronger, deafening. The drought had broken at last. At least her father would have one thing to be pleased about. Holding her favourite bear, Tootums, Isadora went over to the window, and smiled as she watched the rain fall with a mighty force.

‘I won’t have it Grace! I will not have a child of mine spending her time with that dotty old coot.’

Grace said patiently, ‘Sid Rabbit-oh’s not dotty. And he’s not much older than you. He’s just different. He likes Isadora. Has time for her.’

Isadora, outside the door, heard every word. Another of her few pleasures, which caused her father to rage.

‘How do you know what they get up to? It’s not natural, living in the bush, catching rabbits, living on fish.’

‘He had a bad time in the war. He can’t be bothered by houses. His sister says that he hates sleeping inside.’

Albert drew himself up massively. ‘A lot of us have been in a war. I have for a start. Did it make me do that sort of thing? Has it affected me?’

Grace did not dare say what she felt.

‘If I catch her with that man again, I’ll kill him. And I’ll make sure she doesn’t sit down for a week. So make sure she doesn’t see him again!’

Isadora thought, ‘I will see him. I will. I will!’ But she knew she would only defy him when he was away from the property at a race-meeting. Sid Rabbit-oh would understand.

Madge Mitchell, from one of the neighbouring properties, sat at the kitchen table, drinking tea. She was a large woman in her late sixties and had a gammy leg, which she rubbed constantly with her free hand. She was forever flicking the lank curls from her face.

‘Another cup, Madge?’

‘Mm… please. You always make a nice cup, Gracie. Gawd, this leg of mine aches.’ She drained her cup and looked around the bare, drab kitchen. Grace always kept it sparkling clean, but it certainly wouldn’t have hurt Albert to spend a bit of money on it once in a while, Madge thought. After all, he had plenty of it.

‘You’re a good neighbour, Gracie, so I want to talk to you about something,’ she hesitated.

‘What are you trying to say, Madge?’

‘Truthfully, my girl, ya look pale. Pale and worried.’ Madge rubbed her leg. ‘And it don’t take any Albert Einstein to figure out that it’s all because of that man of yours…’

‘No, it’s nothing to do with Albert. I just haven’t been very well lately… but it’ll pass.’

There was a silence.

Then Grace spoke again. ‘But between you and me, Madge, he can be difficult, sometimes. Still, I don’t begrudge him anything. He’s had a hard life.’

‘And so have you, Gracie. Living with him.’

‘I wanted to win his respect,’ she stopped. ‘His love.’

‘I know, Gracie.’ There was an unaccustomed gentleness in Madge’s voice. ‘I remember you, you know, when you came here as his bride. You were so young, so pretty. He’s turned you into a work-horse, that’s what he’s done. He’s got plenty of money, hasn’t he? But all these years he’s had you up at five every morning to get the Clydesdales in, harness them to the combine and drive the team until he’s finished sowing the crops. Then you’ve still had to do everything else. There’s no rest on a farm. Still, you needn’t have had such a hard life as you’ve had, you know. And he’s bought you nothing for this house, to save you a bit of work. Not like my Ted. Then you had your first five, one after the other. And who would have thought Isadora would come along after all those years?’

‘It wouldn’t have mattered,’ Grace said sadly. ‘If only he’d… cared about me. But you’re right Madge. He didn’t want me— he wanted a slave.’

At the back of the shearing shed, near the house, Sadie lay quietly, suckling her new-born pups in the early-morning sunshine. Albert came into the shed. He stood over the bitch for a moment and then his hands reached down to wrench the pups from her teats. He threw them into a small bucket he was carrying.

The two women looked up in alarm as they heard a piercing scream and Isadora ran into the kitchen, frantic.

‘Sadie’s pups, Mummy. We have to help her. He’s going to kill them for sure,’ Isadora ran out.

Grace followed her, with a sigh.

At the front of the house, Albert had emptied the pups into a small well, from a bore that had been sunk and was drowning them with a stick.

Grace came out onto the verandah and stood behind Isadora who was sobbing.

Beside Albert, Sadie whimpered.

‘Mum, she’s never been allowed to keep even one puppy. I’ve always wanted one, too. I’ve asked him and I’ve asked him. But what’s the use?’

Grace patted her on the back, consolingly.

‘It’s not fair!’

‘Your father wasn’t always like this, Isadora. Sometimes, when life isn’t kind to you, you’re not very kind to others. Don’t blame him darling. It was the war. War changes people. It changed him.’

Albert was poking the puppies merely to be sure they were dead. He fished the bodies out and one by one threw them on the fire that was burning in the yard. The drowned corpses hissed in the heat.

Isadora heard the sound. ‘He’s finished, hasn’t he? And I didn’t even get to say good bye to those little puppies… ‘She had her hands over her eyes.

Wrenching herself free from her mother’s arms, she ran into the paddock nearby, pushing through the wheat crop, slashing and kicking the stalks as she moved, sobbing, ‘I hate him, I really hate him. I just wish he would die.’ Although deep within herself she knew that she didn’t really hate him. She feared him, but she didn’t hate him. She wanted to love him, if only he had ever shown an interest in her while she was growing up— had smiled at her, once— or approved of something she had done. He never had. Not once. Why had he killed the pups?

‘Can’t afford useless mouths on a working property,’ he’d said to Grace. ‘Everything must earn its keep. We only need one dog."

‘Anyone’d think we were poor. Look at your cars! If we’re poor, how come you have that Rolls? And then there’s your betting.’

‘I’m careful with what I’ve got. That’s why I can buy cars and have a bet. It’s my money. Your job is in the house and looking after the girl, making sure she doesn’t grow up empty-headed. Dancing! Reading books! Puppies! What a man wants is somebody with sense, who knows what to do in bed.’

Grace knew that it was his way of saying that she was not the sort of woman a man wanted. Had he really been different before the war? Or was it that she had been naive and looked at him with rose-tinted spectacles. And then, unexpectedly there had been Isadora. He hadn’t wanted another child about the house after all this time, especially not a girl. Would a boy have fared any better? Grace was not afraid of him in the way Isadora was. She hated his rages and his shouting and his cruelty, but over the years she had given herself a shell from which she looked out. But she feared for Isadora. Nothing she could do pleased her father. He even resented her intelligence - especially her precocious love of reading. She was fearful that one day he would come back and find the little girl up in the dusty attic with its cobweb windows, immersed in the books Albert’s father had collected.

They had been consigned to the attic immediately after the old man’s funeral and the room used as a study, a library even, had been turned into an uncompromising office. It was as if Albert’s whole intention had been to reject the old man. But he had kept the money. He had wanted that. So the books had gathered dust until Isadora had discovered them and graduated from the old women’s magazines. If he ever found out that Isadora enjoyed the books, they would go the same way as the puppies. Yet, something in Grace refused to let her tell Isadora that she must never let her father know of her discovery of the books in the attic. That would have been a betrayal of their marriage. She merely hoped that the books would remain undiscovered until Isadora was old enough to understand.

Madge was still at the table, drinking tea and rubbing her leg when Isadora, back from her wild run, returned with Grace.

Grace made her sit down.

Isadora sat at the table, and stared blindly into space.

It was very quiet in the kitchen. It was obvious to Madge that both of them had been crying.

‘Have a cool drink, darling,’ Grace said. ‘It’ll help you feel better.’ ‘Heartless brutes these men,’ Madge said. ‘I don’t know why God ever put breath into them.’ She spoke directly to Grace. ‘The only way to a man’s heart is through his stomach and what hangs beneath it.’

‘What does that mean, Mummy?’ Isadora asked.

‘It means that when a woman makes her bed, she has no choice but to lie in it. Woman is born to suffer… it’s God’s design.’

‘What are these Mummy?’

It was hot under the roof. Dust motes danced up and down. She held out some small hand-written volumes. There were six of them, each bound in pigskin polished with age and frequent use; page after page of neat tiny hand-writing interspersed with exquisite, tiny, delicately coloured sketches and maps.

‘These were your grandfather’s. His diaries. Did you know he prospected for gold as a young man?’

She nodded. Her father had once said that his father found gold. Grace turned the pages, ‘I didn’t know him very well…… he was quite old when I met him, and then he was ill. I never knew he could draw like this and paint. Look at this Isa,’ she held out a page.

‘Mummy! It’s where the Queen went.’

‘I don’ think so darling. This was a long while ago.’

‘But the natives look the same, look.’

Grace took the page back and turned it. Isadora was quite right. The distinct dress of Papua and New Guinea left no doubt. She looked at the title of the volume written in Indian ink on the smooth parchment-like skin. The Pacific Islands. She looked at the other titles: Alaska; Alaska & Yukon; California; Australia 1; Australia 2. In each case there were the same drawings, delicately washed. Faces and people, scenes of the diggings, bar-rooms; the women who had followed the miners, local inhabitants - Indians, aborigines - Papuans, a marvellous record of what it had been like in those far regions long before the camera was commonplace. Every so often there were maps with detailed locations and passages which were evidently in code or shorthand. She closed the volumes.

‘These were all written and painted by your grandfather, Isadora.’ ‘Would Daddy give them to me?’

After a pause Grace said. ‘Perhaps. One day, but you must never ask him.’ It was the nearest she could come to telling her that if she mentioned them they would be destroyed.

Grace was away in hospital. Albert was unconcerned, except that he expected Isadora to fill