Our Sunshine: Popular Penguins Read online

  This is the scheme. How about a little man-to-man hard drinking in the ranges? Do you good to ride rough and shoot to eat, roll up in a blanket on the ground, wake up with frost silvering your muttonchops. You can have a hearty bushman’s breakfast – a spit, a piss and a good look round. Or, if you’ve got an appetite, wild figs and last night’s leftover kangaroo-tail. Don’t imagine you’ve drunk billy tea spiked with gumleaves and Irish whiskey, laughed around an open fire, smoked a pipe or two, exchanged the rudest gossip, given compliments where they’re due.

  And when each side’s top dog has sniffed the other’s bum we’ll lay things on the table over brandy. A three-star conversation – the persecution of the Kellys, the mutual advantage of a bloodless give-and-take, the whole shebang. Jesus, Lord Normanby, let’s face it, your mob’s not very good at it. I’ve got all the selectors on my side: the country boys, the terrain, the whole bush telegraph. And the city people, the little people, don’t mind me either. Hate to say this, Excellent, but we’ve got the numbers.

  And don’t worry, there’s a precedent across the river. Your counterpart in New South Wales, Sir Hercules Robinson, pardoned Frank Gardiner on the condition he left the colony. And now I hear Frank’s running the best saloon in San Francisco and a credit to all concerned.

  Absolutely.

  You can check with Sir Hercules. Drop him a line, send off a wire, give him my best.

  Ha! Times change; we’re out of fashion. It’s thirteen years since they cut off Morgan’s head and tied the corpse of Gardiner’s mate, Ben Hall – carrying thirty-two bullets – to his horse and paraded it through the town of Forbes. God knows the precedents aren’t good for outlawry.

  Guess what, your Lordship. From our hideout at Bullock Creek, through intermediaries, I made them an offer at the outset. Charge me and let her go. The message came back along these lines: We don’t bargain with outlaws – we’ll catch you anyway. What do you think this is, son? That reminds us, must look in and see how your mother’s doing. The word is that in between saying rosaries and Hail Marys she’s looking after all the warders nicely, especially the Germans and those randy Orangemen. Which one was your father, anyway?

  Okay for Gardiner, but Ben Hall was betrayed, first by his wife, then by a friend for money. Then ambushed by the police. Thirty-two bullets in his unarmed body. Over the years I took all that in.

  Seems to be common practice everywhere. Read that Jesse James’s brother Frank surrendered for an amnesty. Ended up an usher in a theatre. They had a sign: Get Your Ticket Torn in Half by Former Outlaw Frank James.

  What about my brother? Looked at officially, the only ones who’ve personally killed anyone are me and Joe. Dan? Only a bit of assaulting here and there. Yes, sometimes Dan resents my orders, doesn’t try to see the bigger picture. Doesn’t appreciate my warnings about liquor. Says fugitives need their relief. ‘Am I an outlaw or not? Correct me if I’m wrong, but if I’m not a man yet, why’s half the country trying to shoot me, hang me, poison me, set my balls on fire?’

  That sort of talk just makes me want to clip his ears. What’s he thinking when he gallops off in a sulk, doesn’t talk for hours and gets that younger brother’s envious look?

  Could Dan go against the blood? And his pal, Steve, he hasn’t shot a soul. He could get an easy pardon for turning us in. Well, Jesus, what about Joe? My lieutenant, the man who knows the schemes. If I were Hare, Joe’d be the one I’d pardon to get the goods on us. Mustn’t forget the one he killed wasn’t police, just an informer. Just a paybook entry, easily overlooked if he turned state’s evidence.

  Just Aaron.

  They could turn a blind eye to everyone but me. They could let the others go. Mother too. It’s me they want to kill.

  And I could call a halt to all this violence. Just blink and keep events from snowballing, at least stop the wild momentum. Four dead already, people gaoled and outlawed, a battle brewing. A war! All this madness happening now just because Alexander Fitzpatrick couldn’t hold his brandy-and-lemonade!

  Still not too late if we hurried. We could leave here this minute, singly or together. Saddle up and ride safely north across the border. Try a new life in Queensland, even New South Wales. Not as if we haven’t swum the Murray before.

  Then why don’t we do it?

  There’s more to this now than me, or us.

  – Thank you. I will have another brandy. Just a small one.

  THE LADY that asked me about going straight – Madam, if it wasn’t for Fitzpatrick, we’d be meeting in entirely different circumstances. No bonfires, lions and concertinas. Fitzpatrick changed the face of things for ever.

  He’s the pivot, the one in a hundred thousand who changes the way things are. Pity he’s a liar and a fool. Things hardly ever work out neatly, do they?

  It seemed like just an ordinary night at Eleven Mile Creek. Shepherd’s pie. Everyone at the table but George King (absconded), Jim (out of gaol and shearing in the Riverina), and me. Me? I’ve been trimming Mrs C’s bluestone foundations and am lingering late.

  So Dan’s the only male at home when Constable Fitzpatrick rides up by way of a nerve-settler at Lindsay’s grog shanty with a warrant to arrest him for some horse matter. Thanks to the peacock’s warning Dan is waiting on the doorstep, fork in hand, as he dismounts and states his business. Dan says, ‘Very well, but let me finish my tea.’

  Dan’s story: Fitzpatrick sits down, sweating waves of brandy, keeps his hat on to look official but accepts a cup of tea while Dan slowly chews his pie, carefully butters a slice of bread right into the corners and stirs his tea relentlessly. All the kids around the table are agog at this infuriating performance. Snorts and muffled giggles, a fart or two. Mother frowns, the older girls sigh and roll their eyes.

  Fitzpatrick slurps his tea and asks for something stronger. Kate brings him a rum and – the booze, the agreeable absence of other Kelly males – he gives her a drooling smile and tries to sit her on his knee. She elbows him. ‘I’m sixteen and I’m not having that!’

  Mother’s reaching for the shovel. ‘Let’s see that warrant.’

  Actually all he’s got is a telegram from his district superintendent telling him to proceed with the serving of a warrant. He stands up, weaving, saying, ‘He’s arrested anyway,’ and draws his revolver.

  Chairs and dishes crash, the dogs jump for the shepherd’s pie as mother swings the shovel at Fitzpatrick and swipes him on the helmet. But he gets his gun out, swearing bloody murder, so Dan yells, ‘Here’s Ned!’ and as Fitzpatrick swivels around, clamps a wrestling hold on him and gets the gun. Dan throws him outside, taking the door with him, and on the way out Fitzpatrick scratches his wrist on the door latch.

  And I’m riding home in a daze – still tingling from recent flesh events – unaware of all this. I’m snatching leaves off peppermint trees and munching them, rubbing the minty spittle on my face and neck (a guilty habit to throw my mother off the scent when I’d been with perfumed women), when I hear a horse coming up fast. I pull up behind a tree, and Fitzpatrick gallops past me in the opposite direction.

  After the fight at our house he fled back to the grog shop and reeled home to the barracks at two a.m., spilling out his face-saving drama. Saying I’d been there and shot him in the hand. Even though the doctor who dressed the scratch would only say a bullet might have caused it, and that the patient stunk of brandy, his superiors jumped at this opportunity.

  Attempted murder of a policeman by the Kellys! The suddenly, blissfully, dead-meat Kellys.

  Can’t reveal my alibi, that I was romancing Mrs C. So Dan and I ride off into the Wombat Ranges to Bullock Creek. Rewards posted on our heads. Mother’s soon in gaol. All this is on the evidence of a single witness soon cashiered as a lying pisspot. Bugger the truth, they want me regardless. So angry, more than angry, I can’t sleep or keep food down.

  So I damn one woman by protecting another.

  In a winter hiding guilty in the ranges the mind and body quickly turn to whisky
.

  WHISKY HANGOVERS have their good points. A rum hangover marinates the brain in syrup and overlays all next day, next week, with a sticky aftertaste. With a gin hangover it’s shoosh the kids and hide the guns and mother’s knives and draw the blinds and roll up in cotton sheets till the season changes. (Joe says a gin hangover is like looking at life through a black snake’s bum. Inwards or outwards. Things are bleak and won’t get any better.) Draw a pistol with a brandy hangover and you’ll shoot something important off you. But a whisky hangover is like peering through a steamed-up window: it cuts out unnecessaries. Even the worst ones, where the bright world quivers behind clouds of leaves and feathers, can slowly set certain trains of thought in motion.

  Bullock Creek’s a good place to hide and think. For hiding and thinking and drinking – and for realising we have to make some quick, quiet money to get a new trial for our mother and a lawyer for ourselves. Deciding that a whisky still and gold digging are the quickest ways to make quiet money.

  The Greta Mob helps us with a hut, two miles of fencing and cleared ground to grow barley and man-gelwurzels to distil whisky. We’ve got all the tools for digging and sluicing for creek gold, and Tom Lloyd bringing regular news of police movements and sugar and extra supplies along the stock track over the hills from Greta. (Tinned herrings in tomato sauce for Dan, satsuma-plum jam for me.)

  We build the hut strong enough to withstand a siege. Bulletproof logs two feet thick, an iron-plated door with loopholes to fire through. And from the hut we practise shooting in every direction with targets set up on trees at ranges from twenty to four hundred yards. Shoot and chop, shoot and chop. Shoot head and chest shots in the afternoon; every morning chop the cold bullets out of the wood, melt them down, remould them and shoot them again.

  Spend one long winter among the gouged and gradually splintering trees of Bullock Creek. Working on the stills and sluicing, selling gold dust, slaughtering the occasional footloose beast, socialising with trusted members of the Mob, practising our shooting every afternoon and preparing for the day when the police come for us.

  Meanwhile we like the idea of being bootleggers, even building a dummy still in case of raids and hiding the main one downstream like all the best sly-groggers. But we don’t get to sell much whisky.

  I’D LIKE to say in front of witnesses that I’ve got nothing against Kennedy. Seemed an honest man. I’ve never said he was a fool. Nor were we. Well …

  He was the sergeant based at Mansfield. Discovered Tom Lloyd was regularly selling gold dust for someone and guessed Tom’s cousins were hiding in the ranges. One of his informers had more details and told him the gang was hiding among the creeks. He’d seen Tom in the Greta general store. Look for a still, the spy said, prospectors’ muddy tailings, a bit of barley crop. Jam and herring tins.

  Stupid bugger didn’t know enough to also warn him of the hut’s wide radius of splintered trees, all gouged at the height of brain and heart.

  Kennedy decided a pincer movement might flush us out – one party patrolling south from Greta and the other, led by him, searching north from Mansfield. A funny thing about police informers: as soon as Kennedy, Lonigan, Scanlon and McIntyre left town disguised as prospectors, the spy rapidly saw the other point of view and rode off to square himself with the Mob.

  He was our informer too, you could say.

  The showdown was brought on by exploding par-rots. Rosellas. There was this explosion, then these booming, screeching echoes along the gulleys followed by a cloudburst of green and crimson steam.

  What happened was this: Tom was already on his way out of town with the weekly supply of still-sugar, jam and herrings when Joe’s mother waved him down at Twelve Mile Gully and passed on the informer’s warning. Mrs Byrne didn’t know how fast these phoney prospectors were travelling, only that they were heading in our direction. Tom galloped so fast along the stock trail his horse was roaring by the time he reached us. We reconnoitred and saw where their horses had stamped down the speargrass only a mile away at Stringybark Creek.

  But there was no sign of them. I sent Tom to search downstream while Dan and I went upstream, keeping quiet and low. Joe and Steve followed ten minutes behind, to cover our rear. Still no sign of the police.

  A perfect spot for snipers. But expecting a sneaky bullet makes any place seem ominous. Angled lumps of quartz poke from the hillsides here, and this particular afternoon these glistening outcrops looked to me like tilted gravestones. Long fluttery shadows fell across the creek. Breezes nipped around the ridges and hissed through the speargrass where it tangled up with the dense wattle and stringybark and sassafras trees down by the creek. Down here the visibility was down to twenty or thirty feet. And then this boom rang out and when its shock waves had echoed along the creek and our gullets had loosened enough to breathe again we saw shreds of feathers floating down like painted snowflakes.

  McIntyre was the sort of sleuth-hound who eased his nerves by loosing two barrels at a flock of parrots. When the din and fluff had settled, Dan and I crept up to the police camp. It was very easy to find now, only two hundred yards away – as well as all his racket, McIntyre was by this time building a big smoky fire as a beacon to other members of the hunting party. There was a tent in the middle of a small clearing and another trooper was sitting by it on a log, daydreaming into the flames and twirling a revolver in his fingers.

  Well, any real murderer would’ve picked them off from the bushes. A cinch for any monster! But my idea was just to take their guns and horses and leave them stranded. While Dan watched the man by the fire and I covered McIntyre, I stood up and ordered them to throw up their hands. Then things happened.

  McIntyre did just as he was told.

  The other man got clever and ran toward a pile of logs.

  Dan froze and couldn’t shoot him.

  The man reached the logs. He raised his head to fire and I shot him through the temple.

  The man said, ‘Oh Christ, I’m shot!’ and died.

  I said, ‘What a pity the bastard tried to run.’

  I’m always quoted as saying that.

  I KNOW the papers’ name for it. The Killers’ Picnic. Trooper McIntyre fussing around, boiling the billy, making tea and toast. And Lonigan the groin-grabber is spread-eagled, seeping, on the picnic rug. (You wouldn’t read about it in the Age! Of all the police in Victoria I’ve killed the man I swore to kill!) While this fact sinks in I’m gulping strong tea so hot my tongue bubbles. And big, pale McIntyre’s in a tizzy spreading fresh butter and marmalade on our slabs of toast.

  He’s offended when we make him taste the tea and food before us. He munches his toast in a huffy way, shakes his head at the very idea of poison. ‘It’s you who’s the deathly worry to me,’ he says. ‘Not the other way round.’ If we don’t kill him he promises to leave the force first thing tomorrow. Of course all the time he’s making toast, flattering our abilities and fervently decrying the police, he can’t keep from casting sidelong glances at Lonigan’s extra eye peering out.

  The new eye is weeping colourless stuff. Well, no tears from me. If it has to be anyone’s, I’m glad it’s Lonigan’s brain juices, that’s all. Just look at it as my several-hundredth afternoon head-shot.

  Dan’s grinning at me. ‘Very pretty.’ Leans over and picks a little red feather from my beard, and another. Bright parrot fluff sticking everywhere to me.

  AT SIX the picnic ends suddenly. In the twilight the other police ride up from the west – Kennedy and Scanlon. I’m down behind a log; Joe and Dan crouch in the speargrass; Steve’s in the tent. I’m covering our puppy-dog McIntyre as he steps into the sunset, saying, ‘Sergeant, better surrender. You’re surrounded.’

  Kennedy’s pink Irish bearded face, too well-groomed for any prospector, is still grinning at this joke – Oh, Mac, ha ha … there’s the welcoming fire, the cheery smell of toast! – until I stand up and prove it. A general gasp, a split second passes – there’s still just time for everyone to live a proper lifesp
an – but this time it’s Scanlon who can’t not try some cleverness. Swings his horse around, unslings his rifle, swings back and fires at me. So I shoot him in the heart.

  At the far edge of the clearing, Kennedy’s whipping out his revolver as he slides off his horse. Dan’s advancing on him and Kennedy fires over the horse’s rump and nicks Dan’s left arm. Now Joe and Steve start blazing away from the shadows, so the gully’s ripped by flashes, blasts, oaths and horse screams. It’s almost dark. I can’t get a clear shot at him. The panicky horse springs away and Kennedy fires into my face, so close I smell sizzled hair as the bullet parts my beard. McIntyre sees his chance, flings himself on his sergeant’s horse and makes a run for it. And Kennedy stumbles toward the creek and crashes into the cover of the wattle and swamp gums.

  I follow him.

  This one’s not an amateur. I’ve scooped up Scanlon’s Spencer repeater but the mechanism’s unfamiliar and I drop it in favour of my old shotgun. Kennedy retreats from tree to tree, stopping to fire, while I push him deeper and deeper into the scrub, trying to remember how many shots he’s fired.

  He fires his fourth shot (I think) ducking on the run, fifth (probably) from behind a tree. And he’s aiming his sixth bullet (I estimate) when I hit him in the armpit with a blast of swandrops before he can fire.

  When I shoot him in the armpit he drops his revolver and heads off again, crashing through the bushes in a shambling run. But at that second I don’t realise he’s dropped his gun. As he’s changing his mind, panting like a croupy draughthorse and swivelling around to surrender, half-raising his arms in the twilight, I mistake the blood all darkening his hand for that revolver with one bullet left – and I fire again. And the shot passes through the right side of his chest.