THE SONG MASTER Read online

‘Yes,’ said Susan, relieved this was the understanding of her visit and not as a prospective daughter-in-law. Not that there was any reason Andrew might have hinted at this, but it was something of a detour, and she doubted many girls just dropped in to have a drink and watch a video.

  Ellen Frazer opened the door of a guest room. ‘I’ve put you in the wattle room. A good choice, you obviously like yellow.’ She complimented Susan on her mustard pants, cream shirt and the sunflower pinned to the straw hat she carried.

  ‘It’s lovely,’ declared Susan with delight as she looked at the wallpaper sprinkled with faint sprays of wattle blossom; the yellow and white bedspread and white cushions on the armchair embroidered with more wattle. Sheer white curtains hung at the windows.

  ‘There’s a fan and an airconditioner if it gets unbearable. Most times, if the sun is too hot, Charley lets down the canvas awnings on the verandah outside. That seems to keep the rooms cool. There’s a bathroom right next door. Perhaps you’d like a shower.’

  ‘Thank you so much. I might just do that. It’s been a long day.’

  ‘Come and join us in the sitting room back down the hall on the right. My husband is working in the stockyards. He won’t be back until dinner.’

  Susan had a quick shower, changed into a light dress and put on fresh lipstick. She examined the family photographs as she made her way back to where she could hear Andrew’s voice and noted the mix of furniture. Some lovely old pieces must have been acquired by Andrew’s grandparents, while in the sitting room newer upholstery did little to disguise the solid fifties lounge chairs.

  A silver tray on a sideboard held glasses, a bucket of ice and a jug of fruit juice. Andrew handed her a glass. ‘Thanks. This is just charming.’

  ‘You wait till you see Mum’s garden. Nearest thing to an English cottage garden in the outback.’

  ‘I can’t claim the credit. Give anything enough water out here and it will grow,’ said Ellen. ‘And Jilly loves looking after it – now she knows the difference between weeds and flowers.’ She gave a faint smile.

  ‘Jilly and Charley help around the place,’ said Andrew. ‘Throw your washing in your hamper and Jilly will look after it. Now, how about the tour?’

  Susan followed Andrew around the house, the garden and past the laundry, several sheds and a workshop. ‘What’s that over there?’ asked Susan, indicating an area around a brick chimney covered in shade cloth.

  ‘It was the original cook-out. Mum’s made it a kind of greenhouse. She has a few orchids and treasures in there. I used to love playing in there as a kid.’

  Susan pointed to an old wooden billycart outside one of the sheds. ‘That yours too?’

  ‘My grandfather made it for Dad. I used to push my brother, Julian, around in it once in awhile.’

  ‘How’s he going?’

  ‘Great. Going to come home this weekend. He’s taking the chopper out for a few days. Got to do some work up the river.’ Andrew pointed towards a gully. ‘Down there is the creek where we swim. The main stockyards are over here, and there’s another yard and a dam back over that ridge. We’ll ride out there tomorrow and take a picnic. It’s pretty.’

  ‘So who else helps run the place? Where are the stockmen?’

  ‘There’s a manager, Tom, and his wife. They’ve been here since I was a boy. And the blacks, of course. The camp is on the far side of that creek. Charley and Jilly and Earl, the head stockman, and his missus live in smaller houses close to the stockyards. Earl is related to Jilly.’

  ‘Have they been here a long time?’

  ‘Yeah. Some are extended family or friends who drifted in and stayed, but the main group go back to my grandfather’s day. They’ve been as much a part of Yandoo as our family.’

  ‘So it was their land in the first place?’

  ‘Depends what you mean by ownership, I suppose.’ Andrew spoke thoughtfully. ‘It’s all pretty much a hot potato these days when you hear the political boys and radicals talk. When my grandfather settled here it became Frazer land. The Aborigines in the area drifted in and grandfather started using them and so that started the Yandoo mob.’

  ‘Were they a particular tribe? From this area?’

  ‘I suppose so. There are various families and relatives. They have such a complicated family system. But anyway, they shared the place, helped build it up, they had tucker and a permanent place to camp, though they still went walkabout in the old days. My grandparents looked after all the families as well. It was a tradition and everyone seemed content with their lot and it continued into my father’s day. But then came Wave Hill and things changed.’

  ‘How did Wave Hill affect Yandoo?’

  ‘Well, as you probably know, the Aborigines walked off Wave Hill Station south of Darwin in 1966 demanding better conditions and equal pay with white stockmen. They took it to the United Nations.’

  ‘But they won, didn’t they?

  ‘Yes. Anyway, eventually the government passed the Pastoral Award, which meant pastoralists simply couldn’t afford to pay all Aborigines award rates, so many had to go. That’s the trouble with the political activists and some of the Land Council people, they go in and stir up trouble telling Aborigines that they’re being exploited, and that they should be self-sufficient and exercise self-determination.’

  ‘It was pretty radical stuff in those days,’ commented Susan.

  ‘Particularly as some old-fashioned Aussie communists were among the whites who helped the Gurindji fight the owners, the British Vesteys. The decision had quite a chain reaction. Station owners everywhere had to lay off Aborigines. They simply couldn’t afford to pay them all. It turned the whole industry upside down.’ He grinned. ‘Some reckoned it was the end of civilisation as we knew it. But it wasn’t, and I reckon we’re all better off in the long run. God, could you imagine today what the world would say if we paid our black workers only a fraction of the white pay simply because they were black?’

  ‘Not to mention the work for lawyers like us! But seriously, the miracle is that the industry got away with it for so long.’

  ‘Anyway, on Yandoo we had to toe the line. Pay them right, just like the whitefellas. Like everyone else, we had to cut the workforce, but technology came to our aid. Better vehicles, helicopters, road trains instead of big cattle drives with stacks of stockmen . . . we coped.’

  ‘It sometimes takes just one event to change history . . .’

  ‘Dad told me things were going to pot before that big walkout. There’d been some phasing out of Aboriginal workers as properties got better equipped. The shearers’ union stopped Aborigines working as shearers. And once the white women came and settled on the stations, standards changed.’

  ‘For the better, one assumes.’

  Andrew gave a wicked grin. ‘Depends. The boss had to behave himself, no more fraternising with the pretty black girls. No more half-caste yella kids running round the stations.’

  ‘What happened to them?’

  ‘The white bureaucrats and churches just took them and put them in institutions, as they’d been doing for years.’

  ‘That Aboriginal client I just represented, that happened to him.’

  ‘Anyway, he got a good education out of it. He was on TV, wasn’t he? Made a lot of money? He wouldn’t have managed that if he’d stayed in the bush.’

  ‘Andrew! You don’t know that! There are opportunities now for talented Aborigines. And how can you say he’s better off? He has no family!’ Susan’s eyes blazed. ‘How would you feel if it had been you, and not your friend Hunter, who was taken off Yandoo when you were a kid?’

  Andrew, ever pragmatic, decided to end the conversation. ‘T h e fact of the matter is, that didn’t happen, and so I’m getting on with my life.’

  Once again Susan dropped the subject of Barwon and the Stolen Generations.

  ‘So what happened to the Aborigines when the law changed?’

  ‘Some pastoralists excised a living area on their land but, because many
Aborigines were unemployed, they drifted into town and got on the grog or became fringe dwellers and it all became a bit of a mess.’

  By now they were walking towards the creek and Susan saw the camp she’d noted from the air. Small corrugated-iron huts, some larger in a dormitory style, and a big communal kitchen and laundry were clustered together, the heat bouncing back at them off the metal walls. They were on high brick piles surrounded by red dirt. One tree shaded a corner where a child’s tricycle was left and a dog lay in the coolness under a water tank. Untidy, hot, depression era. Susan was surprised at the very basic conditions.

  ‘This wouldn’t make House and Garden magazine,’ she remarked.

  ‘They don’t want anything fancy. They live their way and we live ours and we all get on just fine. They’re healthy, well fed, have jobs and live how they want. I reckon the Aborigines here are better off than a lot of white people.’

  ‘Where is everybody?’

  ‘Either working around the place, fishing, or swimming in the creek. The kids might be having a lesson. Now they do School of the Air up at a room next to the office. Some of the older kids are allowed to use the computer. Jilly and Mum take turns supervising.’

  Behind the kitchen and laundry a teenage girl was pegging out washing on a sagging line. A toddler played on the ground by her feet.

  ‘How’s it, Francie?’

  ‘Good, Mr Frazer.’

  ‘Ticker is growing up.’

  ‘Yeah. He doin’ good too.’ She smiled shyly at Susan and bent down to the plastic wash basket.

  As they turned back to the homestead, Susan asked, ‘Is that her baby, or her little brother?’

  ‘It’s hers. They get married young. The baby isn’t the result of a night out in the long grass,’ Andrew quickly added. ‘Francie fell in love with one of the stockmen but he was the wrong tribe, wrong skin, they call it. So they found her a suitable husband. He seems a good bloke and they’re happy enough. They have a very complicated system of who they can and can’t marry. Stops in-breeding, weakening the blood lines and so on.’

  ‘Does that apply to white people out here too?’

  Andrew ignored the teasing tone in her voice. ‘It does a bit. Country people tend to marry people off the land, their own kind. Works out better that way. It’s a pretty different kind of life, a city girl would find it hard to adjust.’ He caught himself. ‘Well, some city girls. Depends how tough they are.’

  Andrew looked at his watch and spoke briskly. ‘We’d better head back. Mum will have afternoon tea ready.’

  Ellen Frazer presided over an afternoon tea laid out like a magazine photo spread – lace doilies, a small vase of flowers, sponge cake and scones and a silver tea service. The tea was served on the verandah by Jilly, who moved slowly and deliberately – years of training and fear of dropping anything had made her cautious. But her smile was so friendly, her eyes so warm and her voice so sweet, Susan liked her immediately.

  Later, as Susan stretched out on her bed under the fan, she decided this was a rather civilised way to live.

  She fell soundly asleep and was woken by Andrew rubbing her shoulder. ‘Hey, sleepyhead. Cocktail time.’ He kissed her lightly on the tip of her nose. Not fully awake, Susan wound her arms about him, moving over on the bed to make room. It seemed a natural response, an indication of how comfortable she felt with him. He lay beside her, keeping his feet off the bed. ‘If I take my boots off, I won’t go anywhere.’ He nuzzled her throat and kissed her ear. Then sat up and smiled. ‘Lead me not into temptation. We should head down the hall. Dad is due back any minute.’

  Ellen handed round a tray of drinks and, as they settled on the verandah once more, a utility driven by an Aborigine pulled up and Ian Frazer got out, slapping his Akubra at the dust mixed with sweat on his checked shirt and jeans, and giving his dusty riding boots a kick on the ground. A leather notebook and glasses case were tucked into the top pocket of his shirt. It’s almost a uniform, thought Susan, but was quite taken by his imposing presence. Grey hairs poked around his open collar and his hands were calloused. His face had caught too much sun over the years. Susan could see traces of him in Andrew, the way he walked and held himself.

  ‘Welcome to Yandoo. Always nice to meet Andrew’s friends.’ He put his hat on a side table and kissed his wife as she handed him his drink. ‘So, what do you make of the great outback, Susan?’ asked Ian Frazer. ‘A new experience for you, I understand.’

  Susan realised that her visit had been discussed by Andrew’s parents in some detail. It was not unexpected. The parents would naturally be interested in knowing as much as possible about any young female their elder son invited home. After all, this was an Australian dynasty and he was the heir. The possibility of matrimony must always be kept in mind, whatever the initial evidence suggested. ‘Yes, it is, and a bit of an extraordinary experience at this stage. I was quite stunned by the desert coming up, I thought it would never end. But it’s nice to be here, at Yandoo. Nothing looks quite so . . . well, overwhelming now.’

  ‘I’m glad you’re feeling a little more comfortable,’ said Ian. ‘Y o u didn’t stay over in Darwin?’

  ‘No. Didn’t have time.’ She gave a little laugh. ‘I guess that sounds very much like city talk, doesn’t it? Time seems to have a new dimension out here. Everything seems to have new dimensions out here.’

  ‘I guess out here we have grown up with a different attitude to time,’ agreed Ian. ‘Been here a hundred years or so and we think in seasons rather than days and weeks. We don’t wear watches most of the time.’

  ‘Almost like an Aboriginal sense of time, then.’ The conversation stopped dead. Ian Frazer’s hand stilled as he went to top up his beer. ‘Now where did you pick up that idea, an Aboriginal sense of time?’

  ‘Beth Van Horton, a woman who works among Aborigines, told me a few things in Sydney. Partly to get me committed to coming up, I guess. She puts a lot of importance on time. In relation to this country and the Aborigines. After all, it’s been their land for what, at least 40,000 years. That’s a long time.’

  ‘We don’t see it as their land necessarily,’ he said with stress on ‘their’.

  ‘Surely we all understand that those old ideas of Aborigines not having any place, being nomads and not using the land or having any claim to it, have been thrown out,’ persisted Susan.

  ‘You’re talking about early settlement days. In my father’s day we took up this land and have title to it. Many settlers ran the blacks off their places, they killed stock and harassed the homesteads. There was killing on both sides,’ he conceded.

  ‘Spears against guns. Pretty uneven odds in the long run.’

  Andrew shot Susan a glance. He didn’t look happy at the turn of the conversation. His father was determined to make Susan see his point.

  ‘I think my family acted with consideration. We chose to let them stay on the property. And they turned into pretty good workers. Great trackers and horsemen, too.’

  ‘I suppose many of the stations couldn’t have survived without the help of the local Aborigines,’ said Susan.

  ‘That’s exactly right. And let me tell you this, most of them became very loyal to their station family. Often more so than to their own people. There’re many instances of station blacks running down and capturing wild blacks in the neighbourhood who threatened stock or took over a waterhole.’

  ‘Maybe they’d never had reason to feel threatened by their own people before. As I understand it, they had their own groups and land and didn’t fight over it. I’m sure the station blacks had no idea where their so-called loyalty would end up,’ said Susan, sending home her last barb. ‘So in a way the Aborigines unwittingly contributed to their own demise.’ Then seeing the scowl on Andrew’s father’s face, she added, ‘I’m just playing devil’s advocate. It’s my job.’

  ‘She’s a solicitor, Dad.’

  Ian Frazer put his cup down and continued in a voice that didn’t agree or disagree with her poin
ts. ‘I see. If you’re interested in the history of Yandoo you might like to see the photographs in my study.’ He rose and Susan followed him off the verandah into a room filled with books, a gun rack, leather chairs, a desk, paintings and photographs. ‘There’s a photograph of my father taken back in the early days on Yandoo, and a painting of my grandfather.’ He pointed to two large oval-framed pictures on the wall.

  Cunning old bugger, thought Susan, fully absorbing the message he intended she get. She walked over to the pictures and took a long look. They were formal studio portraits, the men stiffly posed, immaculately presented. But staring into the faces of these Australian pioneers she thought she could see the determination and strength that had held them in this place, and also the pride in what they had achieved. There was no hint of softness and she wondered if their wives had longed for the gentle touch and sweet murmurings of lesser men.

  She became aware Ian was standing behind her. ‘I prefer the informal photographs, this one of my father and his favourite horse especially.’ Susan turned and looked up into his deep blue eyes that were just like Andrew’s. ‘I guess my picture will go up there soon enough, and one day, Andrew’s too. It’s a Yandoo tradition. It’s all a matter of time.’

  Time. A commodity that was daily rationed in her city life. Here it represented lineage and belonging. He was looking into her eyes almost confrontationally when Ellen Frazer broke the spell. ‘Enough of that talk, Ian, you’re getting into one of your deadly serious moods again. Susan, perhaps if you can stand up to it, Andrew might show you around a bit more. I’ll organise Jilly and dinner. You no doubt have some paper work to do, dear,’ she said pointedly to her husband.

  Dinner was quite formal, served in the old-fashioned dining room, watched over by family portraits, several good if conservative paintings, photos of horses, bulls and the homestead in its early years. Old wood shone in the flattering light of candles placed in heirloom silver. Andrew had told her the family ate together in the dining room most evenings. The routine of a genteel lifestyle hadn’t altered in several generations, Ellen Frazer presiding over the small talk and curbing any hint of dissension.