wash your hands then get a plate and put these out for me.
i got up on a stool and took down a big blue and white platter and put it on the table in the middle of the kitchen and arranged the jam tarts. grandmother weil took down four cups and saucers and we spread it all around on a big tray and the water boiled and grandmother weil made the tea and put the pot on the tray and lifted it and went into the drawing room whistling. legally bound for up to four years.
we have tried the established channels, said mother, but its difficult now to get a. yes, its become the case all over the state, why thank you, i will, just tea, no tart thank you. youll be wanting to make sure she goes to mass while shes here, father. if mrs rose is willing. i mean the little one. a receptive age. how old. technically. slightly retarded. careful of that pot, father it is very full.
after tead dad and mother and i got in the car with the priest and we drove over the bridge into town and up meehan street to where st augustines used to be. well it wasnt all on meehan street, to keep on the old angle. we followed the priest through the courtyard to the stone rubble presbytery. dad admired it. we dont know, said the priest, if father lovat built it himself when all this was starting out as yass mission, or if someone else did later. it has been improved, the shingles were not originally of slate. it was lovat who drafted the plans for the church, though they were lost in the mail before they could reach st marys. it would take another twenty years before that torrential september the finished building could be blessed at last. its very imposing, said mother. the highest spire in the region. its only galvanised iron but it isnt permanent. later perhaps you would like to see the stained glass windows. our sicilian marble altar is, i should say, worth the visit. youre flattering my mothers influence.
is it augustine of hippo or of cantebury said dad and mother gave him a look.
the foundation stones laid on the africans feast day should have left little room for doubt if it wasnt that during his inaugural sermon father bermingham referred to him sent by pope gregory with a message of peace to angles and saxons, whether by design or mistaken impertinence we cant be sure. if only the archbishop had been there to clarify. unfortunately his grace had to telegram from campbelltown to say that he was turning back to sydney. roads and creeks impassable. the ceremony went ahead without him, by his instruction, in a second telegram, though naturally the post couldnt get through either so the courier had to publish the address hed mailed behind him to be delivered on the day by proxy, thus leaving an appropriate symbol of the perplexed surface of our activities. there was singing, thanks be to god, by the young ladies of st augustines school, with mrs moon on the harmonium. schubert i believe. it was before my time.
must have been quite crowded once.
the site was not unoccupied when fathers lovat and brennan arrived. father lovat came to an understanding with their elder and in return the chief moved his people off.
to the tune of.
a clergymans outfit.
ha ha, i did hear, what was it batman gave for. but your parish goes as far as melbourne doesnt it.
that is a rumour we havent been able to shake. it may be the fault of our own registers. galong was entered as geelong, and colock as coolac. though lovat did cross the murray once in eighteen forty five and went on as far as wangaratta. they did a terrible amount of riding in those days. of course afterwards with the gold rush and free selection a mere ten years later the church ministry rapidly expanded. there were no less than five thousand catholics in sixty one, scattered over hill and dale as doctor oconner put it, on banks and rivers, and amidst vast wastes on scarcely populated planes. many hundreds, in addition to the settled inhabitants, lead a nomadic life wandering from goldfield to goldfield, and exposed to the thousand perils and temptations of very eventful careers, he said, in their way perhaps wanting schools and churches, baptism, confirmation, and sabbath-keeping.
and now you are a parish.
father bermingham did leave the year after the blessing for the continent, for health reasons, and perhaps to petition rome to elevate yass to a bishopric, but im afraid the windows and that marble altar from cork city are the only material benefit we have had from europe.
mother told me to wait in the courtyard and they went into the presbytery. it was one of those lovely open days, the clouds scudding over the blue sky like the underside of ships. i ran around the gravel courtyard for a while nothing particular in mind. later there was a little rock grotto put in beside the church as you went down towards the presbytery with a virgin in it who had a rose in the folds of her hem but back then all i remember is the gravel courtyard and some forgettable little garden beds and a low wall made of lumps of stone and chains dipped in blocks of concrete. what did mother say once. like having a rose above your head. she called me over to where they were standing under the bullnosed awning of the verandah. i ran halfway then took my time. there was a girl with them i suppose twice my age but she looked like a little woman. she had her hair cut short like the assistants at hordens. and then the first time you. i was quite stunned. mother told me say hello. x looked at the priest and said i hope im getting paid for this. he smiled at mother and put his hands behind his back. you can see she hasnt been through cootamundra. shes a treasure of the sisters and quite a scholar. your daughter will benefit from a fine mind and an inherent sense of discipline.
dad put his hand on my head. mother reached out and took the priests hand and thanked him and said we would all come back together one day soon to really see the church. the priest nodded, and waved goodbye from the verandah and we went around the block to where grandfather sat waiting in the sulky outside charlie quails old globe hotel. it had been a busy place with a billiard table and there were lots of meetings and they ran bookings for the telegraph line of american covered coaches to lambing flat. yass might have been the capital once. it had its own gaol over the road where the cop shop is and they policed the goldfields all the way to young. the courthouse is big and ugly enough for anything. what could have been. the church bell rang out on the hill behind us. x in stitches. dropp, dropp a teare and dye. her my woo. boo hoo ow ow oh oh. come on chick buck up. do your best, said dad. most extraordinary. grandfather was keeping his eyes on the road.
it was true his fossils were nothing to write home about. a leaf, a marlstone, some tabulae coral. when we got back grandmother weil took xs bag and put it in my bedroom. she asked x to follow her and when they got there she said if x needed anything she found she had not provided for she was to ask. she blinked, said i thought i was getting another child on my hands, and went in to make us all tea. we did not in the end get to see mr shearsbys collection. instead he was invited back to dinner and proposed an outing to hattons corner to look for fossils ourselves. they agreed to leave the next day. he and grandfather and grandmother weil had been talking about their parents generation, when both families first came to yass. they were squatters but started out small like free selectors, lived in a shack for a year, took rolf boldrewoods advice before the letter, to start modest, to eat his elderly ewes and reread his classics instead of buying beef and books, until the salamanders wool comes in. but still they fell on hard times. if it wasnt for old nick rose, why if i hadnt got talking to your father after they tried to run his gin display out of town. you know what really piqued his interest, it was when i told him wool had scales on it, that that was the way it held together. it really tickled him somehow, gave him ideas. to think you only had to buy into the new machines to help as much of it get together as possible and do what it wanted to do of its own accord and if the weather held you were printing money. of course he was in for a rough patch almost right away. i kept telling him if we just got through the drought wed break even and start again from there. we got through alright. remember what they wrote in the pastoralists review. the frozen meat trade is the silver lining in the cloud that is passing over australia. we went from exporting four hundred carcasses to britain in eighteen eighty to more than a million by the end of the nineties. and everything else they packed in, butter, slabs of honey stacked together with sheets of cardboard in between, eggs wrapped up one by one in little rugs. we pulled through alright. and it was nicolaas himself saw the potential from day one. there i was telling him about wool and he said this boat they called le frigorifique had been the first to cross from bordeaux to la plata and they were getting better all the time at transporting and if we ever had to resort to butchery. well, you know there were plenty of gadgets at that show, i just laughed told him see if he couldnt do something with old fashioned fleece first. i wish hed seen it out. its a tragedy, peter, that he never got to see the industry like it is today. still he was chuffed to high heaven about those freeze works.