I thought about that as we drove over to Beaconsfield on one of our lunch dates. I must have been in high school by then, and growing aware of my country’s hidden history. It struck me that only two Aborigines had ever featured in my mother’s stories of her childhood. One a young, nameless domestic servant who had been sent from a mission to work for Ril shortly after her marriage to Norman. The girl had taken fright and run away. The other an old man known only as Bill, who had worked for Norman for many years as a stockman and general roustabout. My mother had a picture of Bill posing for the photo beside a pony, with her sitting up on the saddle behind, aged three or four.
‘He was devoted to Dad,’ she said. ‘Every morning he’d sit outside the study door until Dad came out and gave him his jobs. And then one day he was gone. Vanished.’
The way she told these stories, Bill and the housemaid were more like apparitions than real people, ghosts returning briefly from some other world to lay claim on their country, only to disappear all over again, too distressed to stay.
The landscape changes somewhere between Barcaldine and Longreach. The trees disappear, the soil changes from ochre to bleached bone. Seen in a drought it can look like a moonscape, just a barren plain, but after rain it can turn into an ocean of grass. I gathered that Beaconsfield was better country than Delta, though I couldn’t tell, knowing nothing of the exigencies of grazing. All I saw, turning onto the Beaconsfield road, was more featureless nothingness. Not so for my mother, who knew every inch of the road from years of travelling up and down it as a child. She remembered where it took a turn towards the dry creek bed, where it rose again to give you your first glimpse of the homestead, where it passed by the tombstone of the cowboy who had been struck dead on the spot by lightning over half a century ago. She was excited to be travelling the road again. I could tell by the way she sat forward in her seat and pointed out what was up ahead.
‘That’s where Dad bogged the car bringing me back from the train after I’d finished school. On the way home I said I wanted to go on to university. Waste of time. Full of communists, he said. We had to leave the car and walk the rest of the way, arguing.’
There it was again. My mother’s exile. She went to university in the end, somehow persuading her father to give her permission, and that marked her out, for the rest of her life, as dangerously over-educated, full of ideas that were foreign to her family. It made them afraid of her.
She gave a little cheer as the homestead appeared up ahead. It was conspicuously grander than Delta, although of the same basic design. A huge canopy of green tin over a sprawling structure that seemed without back or front, having expanded over the years out from the centre. A lush garden shaded the house on all sides, oasis-like in the middle of the scorched plain all around. Peter and Jan appeared on the garden path and waved in a gesture of welcome. They didn’t look at all mean in the way I’d heard them described, just proprietorial, which was enough to rankle Mum.
‘I’m surprised they don’t charge us an entry fee,’ she said.
Peter put his arm around his wife’s shoulder in a protective gesture and they advanced together through the gate to be there when the car pulled up.
‘Welcome to Beaconsfield,’ he said, as if to a group of strangers, after which there was embracing and handholding, none of it especially warm. It was a contrast to Ranald who almost lifted you off the ground when he met you, held you to his barrel chest so you could take in the working man smell of him.
‘Come in, come in,’ said Jan. ‘Let us show you around.’
The tour was for my mother’s sake, to show off all of the changes that had taken place since her last visit. Rooms had been added, or joined together, or opened up, made more formal or more casual, redecorated according to Jan’s taste. As I followed the group around I could see my mother growing more and more irritated, as if the whole exercise was a slap in the face. Peter had a way of referring to ‘my mother’ and ‘my father’, a slip she found so exasperating she corrected him more than once.
‘Our mother,’ she said. ‘Our father.’
But he took no notice. He was too busy showing off the formal dining room, which was furnished, according to my mother, with pieces she remembered from her childhood: the same long burnished table with the same solid chairs, the same sideboard heaving with silverware and china she recalled using as a girl. Peter wanted to let her know where the state governor had sat on his last visit, and which federal ministers had sat beside him, but my mother couldn’t have cared less.
‘This is where Ril used to sit,’ she told me, ‘whisky in hand. She had a way of rubbing her little finger against her ring finger, I remember. It was a sign she was about to blow up.’
She sat in the chair and showed me the gesture, holding her head in the way her mother had. I had seen enough photographs of Ril to recognise the lift of the chin, the imperious stare.
‘She faced your father down the length of this table once,’ she told me, ‘and demanded to know when he was going to give up adventuring and get a proper job.’
‘What did he say?’
‘I shall avoid it as long as humanly possible.’
‘That’s why they got on so well,’ said Jenny. ‘She didn’t frighten him.’
According to legend, my father had thoroughly charmed my grandmother, the same way he charmed everyone else. He played the dashing aviator, flying in once in a while for a surprise visit in a friend’s plane, alighting on the Beaconsfield airstrip wearing jodhpurs and suede boots, tweaking the ends of his air force moustache, and dazzling all and sundry with his villainous smile.
‘Errol Flynn, we called him,’ said Jenny.
‘The boots were too much for Dad,’ said my mother. ‘He thought suede was code for queer. He even took me aside one night to caution me.’
‘Shall we have lunch now?’ said Jan, discomforted by the turn of the conversation. I sensed that she found my mother unsettling, and not entirely respectable, that Mum’s visits were an ordeal to be endured rather than an occasion for celebration.
As Mum had predicted, we ate lunch in the kitchen, crammed into a corner breakfast nook where Jan had set out a salad and a plate of sandwiches on a small Formica table. The talk was mainly about rain and the lack of it, and about the fortunes of friends and neighbours who were doing it tough. My mother recognised some of the names and joined in, catching up on news of clans she had known of since girlhood, friends who had stayed behind when she left, and made their lives in the bush, while she was busy inventing an entirely different life elsewhere. Soon she grew restless at the table and excused herself.
‘I just want to take a wander on my own,’ she said.