5

There is nothing as good as bananas on the breath when it comes to making a horse feel it is akin to you. And it has always been my contention that it was for reasons very similar to this that Charles mistook Leah Goldstein for his mother.

When, on that chilblained afternoon in 1931, he grabbed her around the legs, he imagined his seven years of wandering were at an end, that the declared goal of our travels had been achieved, that we would return to the splendid home he could not remember and abandon the converted 1924 Dodge tourer in which we slept each night, curled up together amidst the heavy fug, the warm odours of humanity, which so comforted his battered father.

You would have met Leah, you might have embraced her and not noticed the smell of snake, buried your nose in the nape of her long graceful neck and smelt nothing but Velvet soap. But Charles – although he had never met a snake – recognized the odour of his flesh and blood and all his belligerence and suspicion melted away like the frost in a north-south valley when it finally gets the sun at noon.

We were camped on Crab Apple Creek, just outside of Bendigo, still six hundred miles from Phoebe Badgery. If I am inclined to refer to frost when referring to Charles's emotions, it is because it was a frosty place. When the frost melted it soaked into the mud. Even the magpies were muddy in that place. They scrounged around the camp, snapping irritably at the currawongs, and held out their filthy wings to the feeble sun, making themselves an easy target for Charles's shanghai.

On the day in question I was panning for gold while I tried to keep an eye on Charles who was reading a (probably stolen) comic on the running board of the Dodge while Sonia was floating sticks down the creek (a rain-muddied torrent that hid the pretty slate you can see in summer). I was getting a little colour, just a few specks, and my time would have been more profitably spent trapping rabbits. However I had a few bob in my pocket and we were on our way up to Darkville where one of Barret's clerks now had a still for making tea-tree oil. He had promised me a month's work cutting the tea tree and I had sent a wire saying we were on our way.

There was a depression on. Everyone knows that now. But I swear to you that I did not. I had lived seven years in an odd cocoon, criss-crossing Victoria, writing bad cheques when I could get hold of a book, running raffles in pubs, buying stolen petrol, ransacking local tips for useful building materials. I had long since stopped trying to impress motor-car dealers and agents. I had a salesman's vanity and could not bear rejection. I could not tolerate talking to men who would not even open my book of yellowed write-ups. Those Ford and Dodge agents in Ballarat, Ararat, Shepparton, Kaniva, Warragul and Colac finished off the work that Phoebe's poem had begun and I entered my own private depression and kept away from anything that might damage my pride any more.

I, Herbert Badgery, aviator, nationalist, now wore Molly's belt and chose not to see that the roads were full of ghosts, men with their coats too short, their frayed trousers too long, clanking their billycans like doleful bells.

I gave up having the newspapers read aloud to me on the day Goble and Mclntyre made their flight around Australia in a seaplane. I concentrated instead on the things I could hope to achieve: keeping my children clean and neat, turning the collars of my frayed shirts, polishing my boots and hoping that the brave new signs I painted on the door of the Dodge would convince people who saw me that I was a success and not a failure. The people I imagined were those who peer from a farmhouse window as a glistening custom-made utility goes by, a butcher in Benalla unlocking his shop at seven a. m., a cow-cocky driving his herd of jerseys from one side of the Warragul road to the other, a whiskered garage owner pumping four gallons up into the glass reservoir of a petrol bowser before taking my bad cheque. As for women, the only ones I spoke to were barmaids whose permission I sought before raffling sausages.

I panned for gold whenever I had a spare moment but I no longer hoped for anything remarkable. It was miserable work in winter and on the day Sonia found the emu my bare feet were blue with cold and my bandy legs were as white as an Englishman's below my billowing woollen underpants.

She had crept upstream while I was busy panning. I looked up and found her missing. I bellowed her name above the roaring yellow water that tugged malevolently at my feet. I threw the unwashed gravel back and scrambled up the slippery clay bank just as she came running through the bush with her finger held (sshh) to her lips. My heart was beating so loudly I could hardly hear what she said. I crushed her to me but she wormed out of my arms impatiently.

"Papa, it's an emu." Her appearance, her manner, were a continual joy and a pain to me for she was like her mother in so many ways, in her murmuring throaty speech, in the extraordinary green of her eyes. Yet she was without the imbalances in either her character or her face: Phoebe's low forehead and long chin had rearranged themselves into a more harmonious relationship.

"With feathers, papa." She pulled the sleeves of her woollen cardigan over her hands and flapped them with impatience and excitement. "An emu."

I expected a goldfinch or a chook, but I pulled on my trousers and my boots while she danced impatiently around me, stretching her cardigan out of shape.

"Hurry. Hurry."

I followed her, my laces dangling, mimicking her exaggerated stealth.

Charles came bellowing behind, enraged that he was being abandoned. He did not understand me: I would never have left him behind in any circumstances. I explained this to him. I, after all, knew better than anyone the horrors of being alone at ten years of age. Had I not lived amongst the garbage in the Eastern Markets, living on old cabbage leaves, too frightened to taste the saucer of warm milk the Wongs left for me each night? Charles knew this story. I wished him to know I would never abandon him. I explained it endlessly, but he could not be comforted. He worried that I would forget to pick him up after school. If I was five minutes late I would find him blubbering or running in panic down the street. If I got up in the night he wanted to know what I was doing and on more than one occasion I have had a nocturnal shit interrupted by my son blundering through the dark in search of me. He was my policeman. He would stand beside me shivering while I wiped my arse and only then would he return to bed.

Sonia took her brother's warty hand to lead him to the emu. She never flinched from the feel of those warts, but ministered to them constantly, gathering milk thistles and carefully squeezing their juices on to the ugly lumps that were always marked with ink from one unhappy well or another.

Sonia's hand did not comfort Charles. Now he was with us he became surly. He dragged his boots along in the gravelly mud and scratched the leather I had worked so hard to shine for him.

"Where are we going?" (It was his continual cry, here, and on the road where he kicked against the confines of the Dodge.) "Where are wegoing?"

"There is an emu," Sonia said, "with feathers."

"There ain't emus."

"I think it's an emu." Sonia was always ready to defer to her brother but just the same she parted the blackberry briars stealthily.

There are no crab apples on Crab Apple Creek. There is a tangle of blackberries and a number of giant river blackwoods. We came under the blackwood canopy to a clear bit of land by the bridge on the Castlemaine Road and there, amongst the ash of swaggies' fires and the dried pats of cattle dung, was an emu.

It was the cleanest thing in that muddy place. Its feathers shone. Its long neck glistened. It also had the most remarkable pair of legs I was ever blessed to cast my eyes on. They were long and shapely and tightly clad in fishnet stockings.