"Sleep on it," she said. "There is no requirement that you accept."

"But I must go."

"Sleep on it."

"I am not sleepy," he said. He was awed by her. He loved her.

"Then come home with me," she smiled, "and we will play penny poker until you are." She could marry this man, she knew, and still be captain of

her soul.

83

Orphans

Our history is a history of orphans, or so my mother liked to say. She used the word in a sense both literal and sentimental. She did not mean it in the sense that it is true for the nation as a whole, but only as it applied to the three corners of the family history, to Oscar, to Lucinda, to Miriam Chadwick, who lost her mother when the Grafton was wrecked crossing the bar at Bellingen Heads.

Miriam Chadwick would never forget how the black dye came and took her lovely peach silk dress. The dress fell like a rose, "Prince's Pride," into a copper of Indian ink. It sat there a second, its colour all the more precious and intense because of the glistening ebony framing of the dye, sat there as if it might have the will to resist the insinuations of death itself, and then-like the withering of a flower, but much accelerated-the dress sucked in the black and first it ran in blurry lines along the fine pleats and then it spread, a rush of grey, a blanket of

Oscar and Lucinda

black, and Mrs Trevis took the laundry stick and poked it, shoved it down into the dye, like a stake to the heart, and stirred.

Miriam never forgave her employer that stab. Everything else, but not the way she drowned the dress. There was a slight grunt, and then a strong-armed stir. She saw it, in the year that followed, over and over again, saw the mole on the wrist, the black hairs on the pale arm. Mrs Trevis had not expected a governess so young or one so beautiful. She was not sorry-you could not blame her if you knew her husband — to have her wrapped in mourning, and yet she did not mean the dyeing viciously. It was impatience and nothing more. She felt Miriam's upset about the dress and was inclined to judge her harshly for it, that she seemed as much grieved about finery as she was over the human being whose demise occasioned it. And if you are inclined to think the same, that she makes too much of the loss of a dress and not sufficient of her dear mama-whose body was delivered by the tide on to the flat at Bellingen Heads, found by crows before people-then you must consider her position, which was not only to be marooned, an orphan in a hard and hostile environment amongst people whom she would, at Home, have regarded as her inferiors, not only to be quite impoverished, but to have been plunged back into mourning when she had, at twenty years of age, spent almost all her adult life in black.

First there had been her maternal grandmother, then the paternal grandfather. Her mother, a dressmaker, had been most particular as to the correct etiquette for mourning and had followed, as far as her intense curiosity could reveal it to her, the Royal Precedent. Thus there would be three months of deep mourning, an entombment so complete that neither hands nor face should be shown without their covering of black. The process back to life was taken in gradual stages, like a diver ascending from the deep, until, at six months, one could eat in a public place, in nine months be seen at the theatre, and at the end of a year one might cast off one's black and, with luck, be asked to dance the Grenadier Waltz.

She was eighteen, and still in mourning for her paternal grandfather when her father, also in mourning himself, went down with pneumonia. It was winter. She sat in the coal-sleepy room, and even while she nursed him, while she sat beside his bedside, lifted his heavy body to a sitting position so he might more easily breathe, and saw his face all blotched, lost, suddenly old, his eyes shut, his lips dry and swollen so they were the size of the black boy on the Church Missionary Society money box, even while she waited and wept and heard him gurgle and

Orphans

choke himself to death, she felt another grief, another despair, an anger, selfish perhaps but intensely felt none the less-that she would end up an old maid because she must now spend another year in mourning.

But in the end it had not been a year, for her mother-although strict on matters of etiquette-was also a practical woman. She did not wish to waste precious space in their trunk with clothes they would never use once they were in New South Wales.

The mother was a strong-willed woman. The emigration had been her idea. She had announced it without consultation. It was she who found the daughter a position as a governess at Boat Harbour. In her ignorance she had imagined a town like Bournemouth. It would be a healthy place, she said, and gay. She made their new clothes, scandalously bright, it seemed to her daughter, to suit this new location. She chose taffeta and "Peking" silks. They had boarded the Sounion in a style that elicited much admiration (from strangers-the family had been farewelled in Hammersmith). They wore, mother and daughter, dresses of the palest and prettiest colours, the daughter in peach, the mother in a moiré grey, but both of them in bright petticoats and Miriam's crinoline cage producing an effect like a trumpet flower you might imagine growing in exotic latitudes: once on board, of course, this finery was packed away, for they could afford no better than steerage, and it was in that very trunk, the same big wooden trunk, all bound around with black iron bands, that the dress had travelled in the little brig from Sydney, transferred to the whaler outside Boat Harbour, and which had floated to the shore when all those souls had drowned.

This was on Christmas Day in 1858. Miriam had been the only one of thirty passengers saved from drowning. Her left arm was broken, and never quite set right, but she was alive. Her whole trunk was delivered to the Trevis house, for it was there she was to be employed as a governess. And on her first morning Mrs Trevis filled her copper with black dye and put her lovely new clothes into the copper, one by one. Miriam felt sick in her heart, as sick about this blackness as anything else. She would never forget that moment. The peach dress, a fallen bloom in a copper of ink.

When the clothes were dyed and dried and ironed, she put them on. The black got into her skin. It was the humidity. There was nothing to be done about it any more than there was to be done about the sandflies, the mosquitoes, the tropical rains that flooded the river and took the stock floating away. She taught the children as best she could. There were few books to help her. '.n i,

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W1

Oscar and Lucinda

There was dancing, of course, quite a lot of it, too. But it would not be possible for her to go. She wrote long letters to Mrs Carson, who ran the governess agency in London. They pretended to take a cheerful or optimistic line while exactly communicating her despair. She begged to be sent to a place where learning might be appreciated. She complained she was asked to set the fire, to sweep the house, to "muck in." She put this term in sarcastic inverted commas. Nowhere did she make a comment on the Trevises' class or education and yet, somehow, it was made clear that they were below her.

Miriam could not have known it, but all of Mrs Carson's life was dotted with letters like this. They irritated her, and although she would permit two or three of them, the fourth was likely to attract a strong rebuke.

In January 1862, a year of floods so great they would not be repeated until 1955 (floods George White and his cohorts on the council like to forget when they issue development permits) Miriam Mason was married to Johnny Chadwick by Dennis Hasset's predecessor, the one who was thrown into the Bellinger River. There is no parish register showing this marriage, but there is a photograph of Johnny Chadwick in the local museum. He is standing in front of a log hut which the Historical Society has decided was his schoolroom. In fact it was his house. He is surrounded by his pupils, and you will read, on the little typewritten note George White had Sellotaped on to the bottom of the photograph that he died as a result of snakebite in 1863. It does not say that the snake was enraged by being thrown around the school ground by the pupils. They had long sticks which they used to flick it through the air towards each other. Johnny Chadwick, it seems, had tried to kill the snake.