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  We have a photograph of her which I sometimes find myself studying. She had broad cheekbones and prominent teeth; people say I take after her, although I cannot see it myself. She has baby Dan on her lap and I stand very close beside her, as if attempting to hide behind her skirts. She is smiling (in fact, she is the only one who smiles, as the rest of us children are either glowering or grimacing), but there is a look about her, almost in the slope of her shoulders, that indicates a person who struggles with her health. Nonetheless, her expression is one of gentle kindness, and that is how I remember her. The Eden Observer and South Coast Advocate, in noting her passing, commented: ‘She was highly esteemed by all who knew her.’ This was true; I could only add that small children and animals esteemed her most of all.

  One of my strongest memories of my mother is the way she used to talk to an old grey kangaroo that would come and graze about the house in the dawn and the early evening. My mother liked this kangaroo, and whenever she saw him, she would go out and talk to him in a kindly fashion. ‘Watch him, Mary,’ she would say. ‘Watch him go all sleepy when I talk to him.’ She would then proceed to tell him how handsome he was, what a fine kangaroo, how nicely his fur gleamed in the sunshine. On and on she would murmur these compliments; after a little while, the old kangaroo would start to close his eyes as if falling asleep. His battered old head would start to sink. Occasionally he might open his eyes and gaze at her dreamily, then close them again as if in a trance. He seemed to like to listen to the sound of her voice. I liked to listen to her, too. I would sit very quietly on the back step and watch. When it was time to resume her chores, she would bid the old buck goodbye; he would rouse himself softly, as if from a reverie, and hop slowly away.

  The morning after she died, I was standing in the kitchen, feeling rather sad and lonely for our mother, when I looked out the door and saw the old grey kangaroo. He was standing beneath the jacaranda tree, and he seemed to be gazing at me in a very deliberate way. A sudden feeling of hope lifted me; I felt at once compelled to go outside and talk to him, just as my mother had so often done. Approaching him carefully, I began by assuring him that he was indeed a fine old kangaroo. I told him that our mother was dead, but that his handsomeness was beyond question. I remarked on his fine posture and how magnificently his fur gleamed in the morning sunshine (in truth, he was rather battle-scarred and moth-eaten in appearance). All the while, the old kangaroo eyed me steadily. As I continued, I noticed that his expression seemed to be growing increasingly indignant. Every now and then, he would swing his head around sharply, as if in scornful disbelief. Then, after several minutes and with an air of the greatest disdain, he turned his back upon me and hopped away. I have never forgotten it. A feeling of the utmost despair came upon me. I was thirteen years old and motherless; I wanted only that he stand there and listen to me. The old grey kangaroo could not have chosen to hurt me in a more deliberate fashion.

  On subsequent occasions, whenever I saw him about the place, I would greet him curtly and continue on with my chores. After a while, he stopped visiting at all. I assumed he was dead, and felt glad about it. However, some months later, while taking baby Violet for a walk in the bush up behind the house, I suddenly came upon him. He had been basking in a patch of sunlight, nearly asleep; I had caught him by surprise. He lurched to his feet in a most ungraceful manner, and hopped away into the scrub. This unexpected sighting infuriated me. The fact that he was still alive but chose no longer to visit us seemed to be his final insult; I felt that he could scarcely have been more pointed in indicating what a poor substitute for my mother he thought me to be. Overcome with anger, I flung at his retreating form all the various anathemas I could think of; startled awake by my shrill cries, Violet commenced howling afresh. She was teething and unhappy, I had taken her for a walk in a bid to settle her. This was the last occasion on which I saw him. Over the ensuing years, we have had many wallabies come to eat the new grass around the house. I much prefer their company; they are timid and deferential by nature.

  But I see I have gone on at length about my mother, and in fact I only mentioned her by way of explaining that she had taught us older children to read and write. After her death, our father employed a governess briefly, a Miss Gurney; however, she did not stay with us for long. I do not remember much about her except that she was very tall, and took the largest size in boots and gloves; also, we were a little afraid of her as she seemed very harsh and once referred to my brother Harry as a ‘bl---y b-----d’. On one occasion, she asked my father if she might accompany them on a whale chase; of course he was horrified and would not hear of it. He did consent to let her take the rheumatism cure for her lumbago, and she was subsequently submerged up to her head in the carcass of a dead whale. (This treatment was quite a popular sideline for my father at the time; the combination of the natural benefits of whale oil and the heat generated from the fermentation process was known to have a curative effect.) I remember her staggering up the hill afterwards, looking as if she might faint; shortly after this she departed abruptly without giving notice, a paltry thanks for my father’s kindness.

  Preoccupied as he was with his own concerns, it seemed not to occur to him to employ another governess, and we were left to our own devices. Years passed and the little ones grew out of babyhood. One day I realised that Dan, almost nine years of age at the time, did not know so much as his ABC. I immediately took it upon myself to educate the younger ones, and from that day on devoted an hour or so daily to their schooling, sometimes including the Aboriginal children in my ‘classroom’ – that is, the children of our Aboriginal whalers, if it was whaling season and they were willing to be confined indoors.

  They were good little children on the whole, and eager to learn, with the possible exception of Darcy, whose natural high spirits seemed to incite mischief in others, especially Louisa. I remember the pair of them once encouraged the younger children to eat tree sap wrapped in tinfoil, claiming it was caramel toffee. My classroom rapidly became the sick room; I spent the afternoon administering salt water and ground mustard as a purgative. On another occasion, I found Darcy terrifying the younger children with an account of a bunyip he claimed to have witnessed emerging from our creek.

  ‘The water was bubbling and the ground started shaking, and there he was, with a huge white head like a bull, and terrible rolling eyes . . .' And here Darcy rolled his eyes alarmingly while the little ones clutched at each other and whimpered. ‘They say if you done something wrong, he’ll come looking for you. You’ll hear him panting like this’ – and here Darcy began to pant stertorously – ‘and then he’ll start to roar, and you better watch out, because if he bites you, you die.’ At which point, the little ones erupted into shrill screams, and I was forced to intervene. Fortunately for me, Darcy commenced whaling at thirteen. As fond as I was of the boy, I was glad to banish further talk of the bunyip from the classroom, for reasons of my own which I will now describe.

  As a very young child, perhaps two years of age, I had once wandered away from the house as far as the creek that runs along the back of our property – that same creek where Darcy claimed to have seen the bunyip. It was most unlike my mother to let me roam so far; her anxiety of losing us was such that she used to tie a small bell around each of us so she knew at all times where we were. It occurs to me now that on this occasion she may have been indisposed with another of her sick headaches; perhaps she had been lying down in a darkened room. For whatever reason, I nonetheless disappeared for several hours, and it was only as darkness approached that my mother found me, playing happily with a pile of stones I had collected by the side of the creek. My little bell had apparently been caught on a branch and broken free, and I was soaking wet from head to toe, as if I had fallen in; however, the creek runs deep at the point at which I was discovered, so if that had been the case I would surely have drowned. I certainly have no memory of having fallen in, or indeed of anything prior to my mother’s discovery of me, b
ut that I recall very vividly; in fact, it is my earliest memory. Her face was very red and her features contorted with fear as she gathered me up and clutched me tightly. Suddenly, almost as if we were being chased (although I don’t believe there was any pursuer), she began to tear wildly through the undergrowth so that it ripped her skirt and scratched our arms and faces.

  Even now, I can make no sense of this memory when I think of it. Why did she take off like this? Why did she not simply return the way she had come, where she would have emerged very quickly from the scrub and returned safely to our house? If there was no one pursuing us, why did she run? Of course, the only explanation for this was my mother’s terror of the bunyip, for she had heard the blackfellows talk of it.

  As the creek was our primary source of fresh water, my mother was required to venture there several times a day. She claimed that on one occasion she had seen the bunyip scampering through the trees; also, that she heard it crying out at night and, on several occasions, had even come upon the ragged bones of the creatures it devoured. She was convinced it was the bunyip that had lured me up to the creek, torn my bell from my clothing and thrown me into the water; she feared it would very likely have eaten me had she not stumbled across the scene in time. When we asked her what the bunyip looked like, she would clamp her lips tightly shut and shake her head, as if its appearance was too monstrous to describe. At night, sitting by the fire, especially if my father was out chasing whales, she would suddenly stop what she was doing and motion for us to be quiet. In silence, we would listen. Mostly, we heard nothing but the sound of our own panicked breathing; sometimes the crack of a branch outside. ‘Bunyip,’ she would whisper to us triumphantly. ‘Prowling about.’

  Of all of her children, I became the most frightened. Having been lured away by the bunyip once, I became fearful of venturing far from the house lest he entice me again. My fear of the bunyip was such that I felt a great need to stay close to my mother at all times, and became very agitated when separated from her. When my mother died, my fear of the bunyip only escalated. I now refused to go to the creek at all, even in broad daylight. This was a great nuisance to my father, as he had enough work to do without having to fetch water for our domestic needs.

  ‘Don’t be foolish, Mary!’ he said to me one day, in exasperation. ‘There’s no such thing as bunyips. Don’t you realise your mother only told you that to keep the little ones away from the creek?’

  At first, I was deeply shocked by this, for if it was true, then she had lied to us, and my memory of my mother was sacred to me. But after a great deal of thought on the subject, I concluded that my father had only told me this in a bid to dispel my fears. Of course my mother had feared the bunyip; I remember vividly her great panic on the occasion on which she rescued me. This was something I had witnessed which my father had not: her terrified whimpering, her wild blundering through the undergrowth. Naturally, she would have tried to keep her fears from him, not wishing to concern him with her private anxieties when he had already so much to worry about. Also, and this was something I could not emulate, my mother was, in spite of her terror, somehow still able to visit the creek to fetch water every day. Given this, it is perhaps little wonder that my father concluded that her fears were not genuine.

  The situation was only alleviated by the arrival of a book entitled Mr Bunyip, charitably bestowed upon us by Mrs Pike of the Great Southern Hotel, along with several other books her own children had outgrown. I opened it with some trepidation; however, once I commenced reading I could not stop until I had finished it (admittedly it is a slim volume of twenty-four pages). By the time I put it down, I felt altogether differently about bunyips, and my one regret was that my mother had not had an opportunity to read it also.

  The story concerns a little girl named Mary (coincidentally the same name as my own) who is sitting by the river one day when a huge monster (the bunyip) rises out of the water and approaches her. Paralysed with fear, she is surprised when the creature addresses her not with a fearsome roar, as Darcy had described, but with a mild, gentle voice:

  ‘ “Don’t be in the least alarmed, my little dear,” says the Bunyip. “I know who you are. You are Mary Somerville, the best-conducted girl in your class. I wouldn’t hurt a hair of your head for all the gold in Ballarat.” ’

  He then describes to her something of his life (he is one hundred and eighty years old), and talks of how important it is for boys and girls to apply themselves to their schoolwork. He advises all children to put money away for the orphanages in Melbourne, to listen to old people and not be too trusting of strangers. He talks of how he dealt with a cruel white settler, Peter Hardheart, who used to shoot down the Aborigines as if they were wild beasts.

  ‘I kept my eye on him till one day I saw him chasing some of the poor fellows along the bank here, and I was out of the water and had him in a moment.’

  He dealt similarly with Tommy Turbulent, a small boy who used to steal other boys’ marbles and play truant.

  ‘When you see Susan Slattern, tell her I have my eye upon her, too. I know all about her capsizing the perambulator and throwing her baby out in the thistles.’

  Although I knew it was only a story, it nonetheless made a great impression on me, for this was an altogether different bunyip to the one of my terrified imaginings. This bunyip seemed a gentle fellow. He acted harshly only when appropriate, and his words were remarkably instructive and of value to all. But the greatest revelation for me was the way in which the bunyip’s physical appearance was described:

  ‘He had fins at his sides, which gave him the appearance of a whale, and as he had a difficulty in moving along the ground, and seemed much more at home in the water, she came to the conclusion at last that he must belong to the whale species.’

  I found this remarkable, given that we are a family of whalers and surrounded by whales, mostly dead, and from that point on, my fear of the bunyip diminished. What did I have to fear? My father was a whale-killer. Even a bad bunyip (presumably there were bad bunyips as well as decent bunyips) would be no match for his lance. I myself had stood upon the bloated underbelly of the ninety-foot blue whale whose ribs now form our pergola, as it lay belly-up in the shallows (this was for Mr Wellings, our town photographer, in order to best demonstrate the whale’s vast dimensions); how could a bunyip be more fearsome than that? I read the description aloud to my father, who raised his eyebrows thoughtfully and considered it a moment.

  ‘Next time you go up the creek, take the whale gun with you,’ he said at last. ‘If there’s no whales, we’ll try bunyips.’

  And, in fact, I did take the whale gun with me up to the creek the next few times in the hope of contributing to our family’s fortunes; however, I soon desisted as it was a cumbersome great thing and the water was enough to carry. Suffice it to say, the terrible fear I had suffered was now gone – I could go to the creek alone. For this reason, Mr Bunyip remained a book close to my heart, and I endeavoured to use it as a means of instructing the youngest two in particular. They had much they could learn from a little girl like Mary Somerville, ‘who seemed to carry sunshine with her wherever she went, and was a universal favourite’. Annie and Violet did not think much of the book however, except to cackle in the most uproarious fashion at Susan Slattern throwing the baby out of the perambulator into the thistles.

  An Unhappy Experience

  Three weeks into the season, and not a whale was sighted. Please God, we prayed, not another season like the last. Every night my father would return from another fruitless day of keeping lookout at Boyd Tower; every night he would seek something different to blame. It was a parasite, a worm of some kind burrowing into the whales’ brains and thus diminishing the population. It was the Norwegians with their factory steamers and their explosive harpoons. The whales had changed their breeding grounds. The water was too warm, or possibly too cold. After his dinner, he would sit by the fire and forbid us from speaking, lest
he miss the call of a wandering humpback. Please God, we prayed, bring our father a whale. Make it a big one, with plenty of whalebone. Let him pay off all his debts, and stop from worrying.

  To add to my discomfort, I was becoming increasingly preoccupied with my feelings for John Beck. Since our exchange over the bandages at the kitchen door, I had seen him only briefly when I served the whale men their slops; thus I found myself looking forward to this time of day with a mixture of eagerness and nervous dread. Unlike some of the other whalers, John Beck was invariably pleasant towards me; sometimes he even joked with me a little or teased me in a friendly way. Although I tried to respond in kind, I found I was often at a loss to know how best to reply to his remarks. Having lost my mother at an early age, I had no feminine example in matters concerning intercourse between the sexes. (I do not wish to give the impression that I am forever moaning about the loss of my mother. Most of the time, I do not think about it.) Being somewhat earnest by nature, I greatly feared I would make a dull companion; consequently, I had looked to romance novels for direction in these matters (the School of Arts had a small collection available for loan, although the waiting list was long). In so doing, I had often noticed a certain archness deployed by the heroines when addressing members of the opposite sex and I strived to emulate this tone whenever the opportunity arose, which was infrequently. I had been forced to practise on my brother Harry, or my father; however, I did not meet with much success, as my playful tones seemed only to irritate the former and bewilder the latter. In desperation, I had even attempted to engage my Uncle Aleck in repartee, but it was difficult to sparkle when constantly having to repeat things in a louder voice.