Our Sunshine: Popular Penguins Read online

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  OUR SUNSHINE

  Robert Drewe was born in Melbourne and grew up on the West Australian coast. His novels and short stories and his prize-winning memoir The Shark Net have been widely translated, won many national and international awards, and been adapted for film, television, radio and theatre around the world.

  Also by Robert Drewe

  Fiction

  The Savage Crows

  A Cry in the Jungle Bar

  The Bodysurfers

  Fortune

  The Bay of Contented Men

  The Drowner

  Grace

  Memoir

  The Shark Net

  Non-fiction

  Walking Ella

  Plays

  South American Barbecue

  The Bodysurfers: The Play

  As Editor

  The Penguin Book of the Beach

  The Penguin Book of the City

  Best Australian Stories 2006

  ROBERT DREWE

  OUR SUNSHINE

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London, WC2R 0RL, England

  First published by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd 1991

  This edition published by Penguin Books Australia Ltd 2001

  Copyright © Robert Drewe, 1991

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  www.penguin.com.au

  ISBN: 978-1-74-253149-6

  For

  James Fraser

  and

  Ray Lawrence

  Myth is gossip grown old.

  STANISLAW LEC

  He stole my left ear. I took his right eye. He concealed fourteen of my teeth. I sewed up his lips. He stewed my behind. I turned his heart inside-out. He ate my liver. I drank his blood. War!

  ELIAS CANETTI

  No one is himself …

  PAUL BOWLES

  FLARE

  The lion is out of sorts. It’s probably the smoke more than the human hubbub or the seesawing concertina music making it bark that deep and chilling moan and scrape its ribs along the bars of its wagon. You have to step close to see it – then hold your breath and heart still. Against every instinct, press your face up to the bars and peer into the ferocious meaty shadows. The bars are chipped and jungle-coloured, far too fragile-looking, with damp lion-fluff sticking to them. Balls of dusty lion-moult drift over the floor, too, among the odd bullock shin and lion dropping, and the lion pads through this muck with a fierce thin-hipped precision. Controlled panic. It hacks its moaning cough, it paces, it rubs its skin raw, but its paws never touch bone or turd.

  From the pub’s verandah he can catch a glimpse of the lion each time they throw another branch on the bonfire.

  Now its tension has spread to the camel and four circus ponies. And to Mirth, dear Mirth, twitching and stamping on her tether in the saplings behind the inn. A mangy old lion, but not often seen in these parts – rare enough to keep Jane Jones giggling at the idea of it all the way through their polka. Giggling, and prodding him to see if he’s real. Pulling his beard.

  When she brought him his ham and eggs this morning he’d asked how old she was and given her his revolvers to look at.

  ‘Sixteen,’ she said, sighting along a Colt. ‘Although couldn’t I pass for eighteen at least?’

  ‘Still a boy myself under the whiskers,’ he said. Dancing just now, the curious springiness of her young sapling back bending against his hand.

  ‘What a sweet touch, stealing a circus!’ she said. Well, it was. What an extra treat for the prisoners, something to tell their grandchildren in the next century! How he’d turned on a circus for them as well as free drink and games of cards and the hop, step and jump competition (which he, sportingly handicapped by his holstered Colts – and fatigued by a night’s hard riding – had allowed Jack McManus, the blacksmith’s offsider, to win by eighteen inches), and his genial demonstration of crack shooting and, above all, now, the dancing to the concertina against the joyful flames of the bonfire.

  Not that the circus owner hadn’t been surprised and reluctant to be bailed up with sleep still in his eyes on a Sunday morning in his caravan on the Benalla Road.

  ‘You bloody mad bushman! I’ll set my lion on you!’

  He just laughed. He couldn’t take seriously a sleep-ruffled codger with a red-arsed monkey on his shoulder. The Great Orlando!

  ‘Look sharp, or I’ll tickle you up with this.’ He pointed one of the revolvers. Mirth was already skittish from the lion and the monkey and rank things glaring from cages, but even with no sleep he’d felt relaxed and resolved back then at eight o’clock with the dawn’s dew still laying the dust and his plans smoothly unfolding. One, Aaron just shot dead, as arranged. Two, the Police Special from Benalla therefore coming for them, as arranged. Three, the line torn up to send the train to hell, as arranged. Four, the Benalla banks thus unprotected, as arranged. Five, the townspeople all rounded up in the Glenrowan Inn, with drinks on them, as arranged. And they had a few more little arrangements up their sleeves. No wonder the monkey shot him spiteful looks; the circus was a bonus. When Mirth shied and snorted he reined her into a pirouette worthy of the ring.

  ‘You should sign me up,’ he told the circus owner. ‘I’m Ned Kelly.’

  Why did they always draw him as a maniac? All glaring eyebrows, matted hair and putrid bird’s-nest beard. Lunatic’s eyes and mouth like a bayonet slash. A nine-foot cannibal who’d slipped the chain from some madhouse or freakshow.

  That picture showing him as a leering ogre straddling the Murray River! One widow-crunching boot set in Victoria, the other in New South Wales. Disembowelled police strewn about. Children’s corpses trickling from his lips. Hangdog weeping women. After that one, he wrote an angry letter to the editor. MONSTER REPLIES! the rag screamed. Was there no justice in the press? Well, this time the Melbourne Punch, the Australasian Sketcher and the Illustrated News would have had to send their best artists, their top men.

  This time they’d see something.

  They’d also see what dapper was. This hacking jacket, these new tweeds. Kids squabbling to shine his boots. The beard now trimmed a stylish spade, this scarlet cravat blossoming out from under it. And later in tonight
’s proceedings won’t I be wearing the sash of honour, the green and gold!

  Their very own dashing devil would gleam like a nugget and smell like boronia.

  Oh, yes, he’d been keeping track of the press’s insults these last twenty months, been looking forward to making their personal acquaintance. The chamois leather gold-dust pouch from the Euroa bank was jammed with newspaper cuttings.

  Devil incarnate of the Antipodes, Satan’s right hand, our Mephisto, the Vulture of the Wombat Ranges, beast of prey, outback monster, rural sadist, flash young ghoul, savage yokel, bog-Irish fiend, homicidal maniac, corpse robber, cheap assassin, man of blood, bog butcher, jumped-up bush butcher, brute creation, crawling beast, jungle gorilla, creeping thing, reptile, viper in society’s bosom, sewer scum, vermin, bog worm, peat maggot, maggot on a dead kangaroo, slippery goanna, dirty lizard, dingo, wild dog (‘should be shot like a …’), snivelling cur, mad dog, dirty dog, pariah dog, cunning fox, pack wolf, shark, spineless jellyfish, strutting rooster, scrub bull, bush bully, cut-and-dried villain, hangman’s customer, agrarian outcast and social bandit (these by ‘An Educational Correspondent’), cut-rate highwayman, champion of the lower orders and street-corner loungers, evil marauder, predator, common thief, desperado, thug, ruffian, bad egg (ho-hum) –

  – Things he’d been called by the gentleman of the press, ta rah!

  A corner of the faintest memory flickered.

  Hadn’t Dad called him Sunshine?

  So here at the inn, waiting for the Police Special, raring to go, is the so-called Kelly Gang:

  Me, Edward Kelly, twenty-four.

  Over there sipping brandy and trying his best to grow a moustache, my young brother Dan, seventeen.

  Making eyes at Ann Jones, the landlady, loverboy Joe Byrne, twenty-one.

  That jockey-shaped customer relaxing on the ottoman, bristling with revolvers and grizzling about his swollen feet, Steve Hart, nineteen.

  All Irish boys and selectors’ sons just happening to be in the same place at the same time – Stringy-bark Creek. Killed three police there before they killed us. Robbed banks, captured towns, lived in caves, drank pubs dry, stuck by each other, killed a traitor. Had war declared on us by Victoria, by New South Wales, by the Crown, by the Melbourne Club, by the London Times. The Queen in England proclaimed things against us; said anyone in the world is allowed to kill us. She strongly advocated it.

  I guess that makes us a gang.

  AND WAITING with them in the pub these last twenty-four hours are their sixty-two prisoners – waiting on them, pouring them drinks, serving them Sunday roast lamb and mint sauce, napping in corners, flirting with them, singing to them, toasting them, laughing with them, badgering them for dances and autographs and yarns of their adventures, sniggering at Dan’s pack of saucy playing cards, bathing Steve’s feet, doing what they ask. And the few here not their friends – Curnow, the schoolteacher; Stanistreet, the stationmaster; Bracken, the local constable – admire their manners and do it anyway. Well, maybe not Bracken. So he admires their weaponry and sits quiet.

  And they are hospitable, amiable, insistent hosts. Dance faster, Mr Curnow, in your soft schoolteacher’s boots. Cheer up, Mr Stanistreet, what’s a torn-up rail on a steep culvert, one train more or less? Drink up, Mr Bracken. Whoever heard of such well-mannered, responsible outlaws?

  Now, for your entertainment and pleasure, ladies and gentlemen, the Kelly Gang brings you the famed acrobat and juggler, the Great Orlando! Watch him toss and catch those four whisky bottles he’s helped empty!

  This rowdy crowd is anxious to curry favour and restless in the policeman’s vicinity. Dan and Steve, even Joe, are uneasy too. They want to keep Bracken handcuffed. But he, the leader, is feeling magnanimous. He winks as he tops up Bracken’s glass.

  ‘In case you’re wondering,’ he shouts to Bracken over the din of the concertina and the tipsy voices roaring the Kelly Song, ‘I’ve confiscated the fancy throwing knives and the key to the lion’s cage.’

  The signal rocket from Dray’s Peak arcs into the sky, rises with the lion’s swelling roar and slowly flares across the membranes of his vision.

  So the Peak contingent is in place and quietly waiting, too. Everything can begin. He wishes it could start now while he is still alert and optimistic, making his rounds like a general, moving back and forth from the verandah to the bright ruckus of the bar and the parlour and to the bonfire outside. And to the dark patch of bush behind the pub.

  He sips from the eagerly proffered drinks, he listens (for a panicky train whistle, for the shrieking scrape of brakes, for a crash), he chats, he shakes hands, he slaps shoulders, he ruffles children’s hair, he snatches moments to sit and think things through. And every fifteen or twenty minutes he treads a path through the winter weeds to the same broad twisted gumtree trunk, its crown charred and hollowed into a turret by some ancient bushfire, and in the shadows behind it, in the clay around its roots, he urinates.

  The image of the flare fizzes on his nerve impulses long after its smoky trail has drifted off and the tapering growl is just a shiver on the air and his exposed skin.

  All the time lately these dreams he’s younger and back with old Harry Power sticking up a Cobb & Co. on the Sydney Road. So real the dust dries into bogeys in his nose, the sun drums on his shoulders, the horse twitches and swells under him. An old coarse-maned strawberry roan.

  The strange thing is, this coach turns and chases him. Off roads, across deep streams, up loose gravelly slopes, defying terrain and gravity. And it’s packed with fuzzy pock-marked marskmen, turbaned troopers, fierce crack-heeled renegades in scraps of uniform ripped from mutilated white men, all smirking and firing weapons from the coach. Others, heroes’ stolen medals stuck everywhere (on their crotches! in their hair!), spitting purple phlegm through filed teeth, encircle him with some lost regiment’s artillery, and from high up every gumtree a grinning sniper snipes. All air around his head crisscrosses hot with bullets. Creasing his cheeks, his chin, his scalp. Oh, there’s one through the tongue! The ear!

  Wouldn’t be so bad if he wasn’t up to his stirrups in mud, if his gelding wasn’t galloping backwards to the enemy, if this Martini-Henry hadn’t turned into a droopy oxtail in his hand.

  In real, waking life there’s this certainty of who’s coming after them this very minute, who’ll try to kill them when he gets there – in five minutes, or thirty, or one hour, or six – who has no choice now. He more than knows this fact; he’s counting on it.

  Hare. Hare’s in as deep as he is now. This is his affair too. Hare’s with him and after him for the duration. For as long as it takes.

  Hare’s coming and he’s waiting. They’re all waiting with their new rapid-fire Winchesters, their shotguns and revolvers, their kegs of gunpowder, their maps and schemes and friends, their rested horses, their body armour. All these tricks up their sleeves. Just thinking about the train arriving and Hare’s face when he sees them makes him grin and shiver at once. Does Hare also feel that twinge in the groin? That niggling, always-needing-to-piss sting?

  AND HARE’S special Queensland blacktrackers have to be coming too, those barefoot bush shadows with their osprey eyes. This whole train crash is for their benefit! And also for his special Victorian troopers, the pride of Melbourne’s lowest brothels and the shady side of Collins Street. And not forgetting those adventurous special correspondents, the gentlemen of the press, ta rah!

  He likes to think of Hare jolted from his after-dinner cognac and Havana in the smoking room of the Commercial Hotel, Benalla, by the telegraph message that his special informer, Aaron Sherritt, had been most specially murdered. Fop and spy, apple of each other’s eye. If Aaron’s corpse doesn’t bring Hare running, nothing will. Hare is shocked. Hare is disturbed. Yes, Hare is also raring to go.

  So, you special squeaky-voiced Superintendent, not long now.

  He’d swear you could almost smell Hare’s anxious cigars, hear those praying-mantis limbs propping and pacing. Oh, that
dampness on the forehead, that lank moustache and undertaker’s pallor will never do for the Queen’s languid hero.

  And if by chance Hare lived, what a lovely hostage he would make. Easily worth an outlaw’s mother.

  In answer to that handsome black-haired lady in the corner … Madam, in this world and the next, these are the ones I hate:

  I hate Constable Thomas Lonigan, shot clean through the temple, dead but not forgiven.

  Senior Constable Hall, yes, that fat, gutless pistol-whipper and sly bribe-taker.

  Constable Flood, horse-thieving bastard and hypocrite.

  And that trooper’s farthermost orifice, Constable Alexander Fitzpatrick, drinker of brandy-and-lemonade, dirty fighter, lying bully of women and children, poisoner of my name, corrupter of the law, perjurer before God. Even the Victorian police force has kicked him out. What more can I say? If he weren’t such a spunkless rabbit I’d call him my worst enemy for starting all this.

  Oh, and Judge Barry, Judge Barry, Judge Barry.

  Not Hare, oh no. He will be my prize, my joy, our saviour.

  SO WHERE did that leave Aaron? Charming, smooth-haired, smooth-voiced Aaron Sherritt, Australia’s friendliest man, shot through his easy-going heart and brain just last night?

  Somehow he couldn’t hate Aaron. What he had felt was stronger and more bitter, but that was when Aaron was still alive. Today, right now, he was almost indifferent. Aaron was as much a part of this place as he was. He was just the other side, the side he’d never understand. The constantly obliging side. Every man’s mate, every young girl’s lover. The cool, dead, agreeable moon.