The back creek had once been the main creek, until, in the big rains of 1821, it quite suddenly changed its course. So the Mitchell's Creek beside which the Leplastriers had built their hut was a new Mitchell's Creek and the trees that grew there were no more than thirty years old, whilst the back creek contained a richer, tangled growth of old gnarled trees where you could see the scars the blacks had made cutting barks for canoes and other implements. It was dark under the trees by the back creek and the water was stained with fallen leaves and moved slowly. Light came in motes from the ceiling of the canopy and there were small birds which lived on the ground and made alarming scuttling noise in the undergrowth right next to you. It was Blackfellow territory. Lucinda placed her doll on a springy khaki-green tussock, the glue-pot on some dust-dull river gravel. She then collected twigs and bark. She elected to build her little fire competently. She arranged two rocks on which the glue-pot would sit. She had wax matches in her pinny pocket. She lit the fire and watched it, squatting with her bent knees cloaked by the calico pinafore. She had a thoughtful, intelligent face-a high forehead, perfectly arched and clearly denned eyebrows, a mobile, slightly thin but prettily bowed upper lip, which betrayed-by its constant contraction and expansion-her enthusiasms, and a full lower lip, which would one day suggest sensuality but now, set against her large, heavy lidded green eyes, made the false promise of a wry, precocious humour. Her hair was reddish brown, more brown than red except here, by the creek, where a mote of light caught her and showed the red lights in a slightly frizzy halo.
She did not like her hair. It dragged and snagged on her mother's tortoiseshell hairbrush. Both her mother and father had straight black hair through which a comb could pass as if through water. She loved the way the strands of their hair lay so neatly, side by side, like pen lines. She had assumed-until her father had gently disabused herthat her own hair would change when she grew older, that the brush would one day cease to pull and the hairpins might at last have her as neat as she was meant to be.
Indeed the sole purpose of this illicit journey across the back paddock was all to do with her admiration for straight black hair. It was her plan to give a present to her doll, and while the glue-pot began to give off its comforting and distinctive aroma, one inextricably linked (like the smells of bran, pollard, tweed, apple peelings and ink) with her father, she took the doll in her lap and began to pull the hair from its head.
The hair was like her own-curly and frizzy to touch-but blonde, of course, where hers was frizzy brown. She pulled the hairs out in little tufts, grimacing and screwing up her eyes.
"Oh, do be still," she said. "If you squirm and slide you'll only make it worse." She placed the hair in an envelope on the back of which was written the name of John Bell, a Fellow of the Royal Society, and the man-by the by-responsible for Abel Leplastrier having such a large entry in the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Soon the envelope was fat and spongy and the doll's head was not bald and shiny as she had imagined but sticky and brown with a substance a little like a hessian bag… 65
Oscar and Lucinda
"There," she said. "You see. it wasn't so bad."
But she felt a little frightened, not only of what she had done, but of where she was doing it. She looked around her, peering into the deep shady tangle of bush.
"I like the blacks," she told the doll loudly, "I like them better than the Mayor of Parramatta." But she had lost some of her earlier cornposure and when she reached for her other envelope-the one in which she had the hair her father had trimmed from the Percheron's black tail-her hands grabbed and her fingers pecked and, quite suddenly, nothing would go right. The glue ran down the doll's face, across her wide blue eyes. She used the shawl to wipe it clean, but the glue would not come off and then she saw she had made a nasty brown stain. She tried to wash this in the creek.
As for the hair-she had seen, in her mind's eye, how it would fall. She had seen it clearly, often, particularly after she had said her prayers and was drifting into sleep. But now the hair did not behave as she had imagined. It lay flat and sticky, matted together. She laid the doll down flat on the gravel bed and thought how she should now proceed. She rubbed her neck and forehead and left brown marks there. Then she coated the doll with more glue and this time she pushed the hair on in handfuls. What fell loose she pushed on again. It did not look how she had imagined, and although a part of her was alarmed, another part was thrilled by the great change she had wrought in Dolly who was-as if by magic-a different person, a native of a land where maps were not yet drawn. Her father would know which one, and if did not, then, why, he would make believe.
She was not prepared for the upset she created. There was no bread and butter when she brought her doll back into the hut in the late afternoon. Indeed, finally, there would be no supper. Dreadful things began to happen around her. Her mother slapped her leg. She had done this once before. Her mother had passions; she recovered from them quickly. But her father had no passions, did not shiver and shake. He was steady and even and never fussed, even when he lost the mail from Home somewhere in Parramatta. Her father saw the doll. She held it up to him. He drew himself up, he opened his mouth, he shuddered, he threw their best serving dish across the room where it nearly broke a burning lantern. Lucinda held her doll up in the air. Her mother threw a frying pan through the open doorway. She threw it so hard it clattered down the boulders on the creek. These missiles were not directed at her, but the air was filled with a violence whose roots she
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Lucinda
would only glimpse years later when she lost her fortune to my greatgrandmother and was made poor overnight. Then she wondered how much the doll had cost.
"Why?" they asked her. "Why?"
And all she could say, through her tears, was that she wanted her Dolly to be neat. This was not an event one would easily forget, and Lucinda did not. And yet, paradoxically, when she came, as a young adult, to think about her own neatness, a habit she was always at war with herself about (suggesting as it did a great construction, a lack of generosity) she somehow failed to realize that it must have been with her from a very young age. She did not remember how great a virtue neatness had been held to be in her early childhood. This early childhood was always "quite normal" in her recollection. She imagined that her neatness was something she had
"caught" from her mother after her father's death, for then Elizabeth, left alone to farm, became like a caricature of her former self and would demand neatness in the most ridiculous degree. It was-as we have seen-not so; although her confusion of memory may be explained by the curious coincidence that the death of her papa also involved hair, and when she thought about the death she would always see a sticky black mess of hair like the one she had made herself at the back creek so many years before.
On the Saturday before Palm Sunday in 1852, her papa was thrown off his horse in Church Street, Parramatta. He cracked his crown and was dead almost immediately. Mr Chas Ahearn brought the body out to Mitchell's Creek in a wagon borrowed from Savage the grocer. He had wrapped a gaudy checked blanket around her papa, tucked it in tight around the sides and it was when this was undone that Lucinda, clinging to her silent mother as someone might clutch hold of a tossing log in a flooding river, saw the hair which would now grow for ever-matted, sticky, suffocatingin the gloomy undergrowth of her nightmares. It was only after this, so Lucinda remembered, that they suffered the disease of neatness. Elizabeth Leplastrier believed, as many still believe today, that you can tell everything you need to know about a farmer's skills by the condition of his sheds and fences, and whilst this may be true enough in a way, it became, for Elizabeth, such a tenet of faith that fences and sheds were attended to in preference to sheep and wheat and, on one occasion that was soon notorious in the district, amongst