Our Sunshine: Popular Penguins Read online

  Plaguing our friends and family. Arresting Wild Wright and his brother Tom for threatening language and locking them up, their lawyer pointing out that Tom is better known as Dummy Wright. Being deaf and dumb, he doesn’t use language threatening or otherwise.

  And all this time spying on my sisters. Shadowing them every time they leave the house. Laying strychnine baits for their dogs so the yapping wouldn’t give their spies away. So Maggie’s and Kate’s dogs wear muzzles day and night. And the girls start walking them on leashes, four or five muzzled dogs each, up and down outside the Benalla police station just to drive them crazy. Mad Nicolson even convinced Maggie sends us messages in her washing. The way she hangs clothes on the line must signal things. Right-side-up trousers means it’s safe, he thinks; upside-down trousers means troopers coming; the number of socks hanging up is the number of miles away.

  ‘Well, long johns with the back flap open must mean officers,’ Joe says.

  Maggie then enjoying hanging pants up sideways, shirts dangling by one arm, a line full of corsets.

  ‘Watch it you aren’t gaoled for hanging insulting washing,’ I tell her.

  LOVE TO drive them crazy. Love to amuse ourselves by tracking the search parties out tracking us. This is a cinch, the way they toss away their empty rum bottles and beef tins and snap twigs off trees to pick their teeth and leave pyramids of shit behind every second bush. A mystery to me why they don’t use the blacktrackers more. (All right by me!) The blacks are so good they make my blood run cold. It’s because they’re so good they don’t use them; they don’t want to be shown up. Funny people, police.

  Drives them crazy that we haven’t let the Hunt cramp our style. They call this being flash, and now the press has picked up the word. Meaning cockiness and not kowtowing to stuffy English expectations. Flash is attending the Whorouly races as usual, playing billiards with Wild Wright, going home to Joe’s for dinner – entering the house using Wall’s Gully – right under the noses of the watching police, and visiting Melbourne regularly to mingle with the horsey set and buy good guns. (Did get a fright, though, wandering around the Melbourne Exhibition, my pockets stuffed with apples, to see Higgins, the Beechworth magistrate, staring straight at me. Not as surprised as Higgins, however, seeing me and my apples jump into a cab and disappear into Bourke Street.)

  Flash is me secretly marrying Steve’s sister and Joe’s sister and a housemaid in Deniliquin with the exotic name of Madela – or would be if I’d done it like the Chronicle, the Advertiser and the Argus said.

  Can’t see myself being that flash.

  Rivers fall again, seasons turn, people suddenly start to crack a smile and wink a certain way and straighten up when they talk about you. Even a lot of our enemies changed their minds about us as soon as we robbed banks.

  Maybe they admired us for acting out their own wishes. Who doesn’t daydream of robbing a bank, of staging a neat, well-mannered crime?

  Like clockwork.

  Six weeks after Stringybark the Murray is running low enough to cross – so the police are reminded in a letter from my uncle, Pat Quinn, which falls deliberately into Constable Flood’s mail-tampering hands. Uncle Pat’s letter provides dates and details of our next attempt to cross the border. So Superintendents Nicolson and Sadleir hurry to the river to set up a joint trap with the New South Wales police. And so with the police strength of the region trotting north, we canter south towards Euroa.

  Steve’s not yet recognised as a gang member so I send him into town to reconnoitre the National Bank position. We know that next Tuesday is the day the licensing court sits in the Town Hall, keeping the town’s only constable occupied. Steve comes back saying that the side door of the bank is kept ajar between 3.30 and 4 p.m. when the railway master deposits his takings. And that Scott, the bank manager, and his family live on the premises.

  Clockwork.

  We need a staging point for this exercise. On Monday at noon we saunter into Younghusbands’ station four miles north of Euroa, bail up the station-hands as they come in to lunch, lock everyone in the storeroom, and keep them cheerful enough with food and Dan’s saucy pack of cards while we eat lamb and chutney sandwiches in the kitchen.

  But only after the housekeeper’s tasted them first. My usual worry about strychnine and arsenic. ‘Nothing personal,’ I say to her. ‘Do you know Dan Morgan wouldn’t eat anything but boiled eggs in company, and he wouldn’t eat those if they were cracked?’

  Must say she doesn’t look as if she wants to poison us. Keeps smiling at us with her shallow, dish-shaped face. We’ve never looked or smelled more spruce, thanks to a hawker named Gloster who blithely drove up just behind us in his covered wagon and quickly joined the prisoners in the storeroom while we took turns to outfit ourselves from his best stock. Now everyone’s flash as a rat with a gold tooth: new whipcord trousers, tweed jackets and waistcoats, soft cotton shirts, the best quality felt hats and English riding boots. And we’ve sprinkled eau de cologne on our new silk cravats. We’re the most stylish murdering thieves northeastern Victoria’s ever seen when, next afternoon, we leave Joe overseeing the captives’ card game, chop down the telegraph poles along the railway, drive the hawker’s wagon and the farm’s springcart into Euroa and rob the National Bank of everything it’s got.

  We’ve brought the carts to take Scott the banker and his family as prisoners. When we slip inside their residence they’re all dressing for a funeral. The wife’s a tall, good-looking, bony woman who recovers smartly from the shock of us. He calls her Susan. Despite our guns and need to hurry, Susan Scott insists that mourning wear is unsuitable for a hostage travelling in the countryside. ‘I’m not going any distance wearing black in summer like a grandmother,’ she says, and demands to change into a creation just arrived from Melbourne. The boys and I exchange looks while she sails into her bedroom. We’re worried she’ll signal from her window, so while she changes clothes we leave her door open a crack and I get Steve to stand just outside.

  Like to be a fly on the wall of that room myself but something bloody-minded makes me turn aside. How to tell if some woman stirs me: I’m the pig-headed, frowning one standing farthest away.

  The way her husband’s afternoon has gone so far has set him pacing up and down and made him pallid and moist around the hairline. The chunky sort, quick to sweat and anger. After ten minutes waiting he and I catch each other’s eye. ‘Whisky?’ I say. So we have a glass. (After he’s tasted it first.) Then there’s a sigh and crash and we need more whisky for his wife’s old nurse, who’s fainted at all her nightmares becoming real. And for her mother, who says with all this excitement she needs a heart starter too.

  After half an hour Susan Scott makes her entrance in fancy muslin and lace and ribbons, long white driving gloves and a hat covered with tulle and paper flowers. ‘Well?’ she says.

  Women with tickets on themselves usually make me act thick, pretend not to get their drift. Annoys me that they appeal the most.

  ‘Well, are we all ready now?’ I say.

  She twirls with a little frown. And looks questioningly along her narrow nose at me.

  By now, on this worst day of his life, Scott’s looking redder and ropable. No need to make it worse. ‘Not quite what I expected,’ I say.

  ‘You’re not either,’ she says. ‘A magenta cravat! The Age said you looked distinctly animal, with the facial features of a creature born to crime. They also called you a mutilator of the dead.’

  ‘I wouldn’t believe that tripe.’

  Dan pipes up, ‘He can be a handful though.’

  ‘Are you the brother?’ she says. ‘I wouldn’t wear yellow with your skin.’

  We get still more than we bargained for. We have to abduct all the family. We can’t leave anyone behind to give the alarm so into the carts we load the Scotts and their seven children, then help up Susan Scott’s mother – a big woman also – and her old nurse with the vapours, and then their two servant girls, putting four children in one cart and t
hree in the other as a security precaution. Then there’s the three of us to squash in somewhere. I give Susan Scott the reins of the springcart. I drive the wagon, with Dan keeping a gun on her from a hole cut in the wagon’s canvas.

  We also take a freshly baked cake from the Scotts. (And the robbery proceeds.)

  As we pass the cemetery (someone’s child has died) Susan Scott is horrified at what the funeral party will think of her driving past in unseemly haste. But as we leave the last shacks behind and ride into the yellow countryside, the open air soon flushes along her high and sharp-boned cheeks. She has emphasised a mole above her top lip, just above and to the side of the cupid’s bow. She’d be maybe forty, bland-skinned for her age; reminds me of a flouncier version of Mrs C. She glances sidelong at me, has to shout above the cicadas’ buzz, the wheels and horses. ‘What are you going to do with us now?’

  ‘Madam,’ I yell back, ‘we’re taking you out to tea.’

  We arrive back at Younghusbands’ station where we make a ceremony of burning the selectors’ mortgages, take tea with the Scotts, swap Dan’s horse for a superior Younghusband bay gelding and entertain our guests with some trick-riding. One by one we boys stand on the saddle, one by one we bend to pick up her handkerchief, race each other the length of the home paddock. She’s laughing, we’re laughing, getting hot faces, showing off. Only when the evening’s first mosquitoes begin to bother Susan Scott’s canny cheeks do we simmer down. We load the treasure on to our pommels. We put on frowns and order everyone to sit tight for two hours under pain of ghastly death. And then we ride off, laughing like devils and jumping fences, into the bluish, fading light.

  NOT QUITE true. I did look. For a long moment I peered into the crack of her bedroom doorway. I sent her husband off with Dan for whisky and I looked. My ears roaring with this new excitement – power, success – and an urge to glimpse forbidden things. A shadowed light spilling along the corridor – a gentler light than enters huts. Patterned sun squares burnishing the walls and carpet. The day vibrating outside. What I saw in this powdery female air was her dressing table and on it a wide, white bowl of objects. A display of her treasures. Egg-shaped river stones of many sizes, notched and gashed with red streaks of iron, lumps of quartz veined with fool’s gold, pyrites, also wild birds’ eggs – spotted, white and blue, from magpies to emus. And, tastefully arranged among them, a selection of small skulls.

  The bank manager’s wife collected the skulls of wallabies, possums, koalas, a bandicoot, something even smaller – maybe a tiny shrew or two. A perfumed bowl of eye sockets and grimaces. They looked well handled. It dawned on me that these small skulls were egg-shaped too.

  Another flare spears up into the sky from Dray’s Peak. They’re still in place and waiting but they’re wondering now. Getting impatient. Where’s the bloody train, what the Christ’s happening? With this noise, the singing, the concertina, have we missed the whistle? I’ve even forgotten how a train whistle sounds. Getting tired of always waiting for some whistle or other, some flagman’s-warder’s-lookout’s-scout’s-spy’s-watchdog’s-peacock’s signal on what the next stage of my life will be.

  Used to lie awake in the dark hut waiting for his homecoming whistle. Wheep~whew. Every night he’d whistle coming through the door. Never mind the time, all hands on deck. Every available child running and greeting him by the dying note of that Wheep~whew.

  I would still run, but warily.

  Strange: as his body gradually filled with liquid, the whistle dried up. Lost its juicy warble. At the end it had that lonely piping sound.

  Now I can’t waver, must stay like gristle, like tendon. Pliable but firm. Must stay calm and think clearly. Stay like gristle was a favourite expression of old Harry Power’s. Didn’t lack gristle or guts, Harry, just basic grey matter.

  Wait and listen, stay calm. Sometimes best to let events adjust around you. Things do make room for you – nature, air, even rocks sometimes. Like when we rode back through the black landscape beyond Benalla after the last time I saw Mrs C up close.

  No bird, insect or frogthing chirping, even the bushflies dead or gone. In the scorched silence we make a different sight from our arrival, four saner ghosts, riding a horse each, our naked heads and chins all sickly luminous against the trees.

  We’ve shaved off our burnt and crusty hair. Mrs C’s fed, watered, clothed and patched us up, but only after we’ve pulled pistols on her. That makes the situation more comfortable for her. Another advantage of the guns: they enable us to select better horses than would have been on offer otherwise.

  ‘You’re not taking Princess Beatrice!’ This is her husband’s favourite hunter, a lovely grey mare named after Queen Victoria’s youngest, only a six-year-old and with her best hunting years still ahead of her. Mrs C speeds after me into her stall, swings the feed bucket against my shin, then tries to snatch my Colt. Luckily the Princess has learned manners from an early age, is trained not to kick out at hounds; she doesn’t lift a gracious hoof for the fifteen or twenty minutes we roll underneath her in the straw.

  ‘This is where you belong,’ says Mrs C.

  ‘In you?’

  ‘In the dung and muck.’

  My shaved, pale head certainly makes me look like something wormy from under a stone. With all my burns and grazes smarting, I’m moving sluggish like one too.

  ‘I thought you’d moved up in the world to murderer,’ she says, ‘but you’re still a shitty horse thief.’

  ‘I’ll probably get the mare back to you,’ I say. ‘Though it won’t do your husband any harm at all to lose it to me.’

  As we argue under her we slowly start to rub and rustle in the straw. The lines around her eyes and mouth, her frowning years, smooth out. Although awake I dream I’m describing perfect circles. A kick, a braining death, don’t bother me. Finally my blistered fingers tip the pulse. Concentrate all my scabby flesh on this last humming gentleness. As it happens, even birdcalls between her legs don’t worry serene Princess Beatrice.

  So I ride the Princess away into the smell of charred trees, through the forest of smoking splinters. She’s already the colour of fine ash. Branches of black banksia nuts like cremated monkeys droop over us. Even the thinnest mosses and palest lichens haven’t escaped the fire. Every wisp and bud and sound of life is scorched and crisped away. The whole land looks like toasted death, the very End.

  In a silent line the four of us ride back into our territory. At least now the smoke has died away the visibility is good. After a bushfire you can see and hear a police patrol ten miles away unless they’re blacktrackers. At sunset we camp on a high elephant-shaped rock still warm from the fire and the sun. The missing evening bird choir, the void of the crickets, the total blackness, suddenly begin to weigh on us. We lie spread-eagled on the rock. Everyone is more or less normal again, but we can’t raise the spirit to speak or eat. The bushfire-sun sets gauzy red, the moon rises yellow as a guinea, the Southern Cross sparks down. The sky is the only light and movement and form of conversation.

  The sky wakes us at sunrise and we eat some supplies from Mrs C’s. Our food crumbs make ants appear instantly from nowhere. And as we gaze dully at the blackness the faintest tips of colour catch the corners of our eyes – exciting, sappy shoots are sprouting from burnt tree trunks; shiny maroon, green and purple leaves are bursting out. At the edge of our hearing a magpie, or its echo, calls. The pink flush in the sky rims the eastern cloudbanks and then flares gold. The overhead sky swings from sulky grey to blue like it was never otherwise.

  I GET a contact to leave one hundred guineas from the Euroa haul in Mrs C’s name at the front desk of the Commercial Hotel and I keep Princess Beatrice for myself.

  What’s a little guilt compared to a good horse? She’s the best I ever stole – and she’s got two hundred and eighty-three to beat. Certainly the best I ever paid for, and even worth the money. Sweet, randy memories every time I ride her. Anyway, she deserves a more exciting life than carrying a rich farmer’s arse a
fter the mangy offspring of English foxes.

  And I think Mrs C could have minded more. That day in the stable my knee hit on something hard. A little Allen & Thurber .32 revolver hidden in the folds of her dress.

  ‘Are you going to shoot me with that pepperpot?’ I say.

  And she says, ‘Now I know I easily could have, that’s enough.’

  Jerilderie is the mare’s and my next adventure together. The mood we’re in there decides what I call her. Mirth.

  After Euroa there was pressure on Standish to put a new man after us. He chose Superintendent Francis Augustus Hare, his assistant commissioner, a South African and, like himself, a ‘man of fashion’ and member of the Melbourne Club. Then he told Hare to sign up this charming young informer who’d made himself known to him.

  We’d been wondering about Aaron for a while. We all wanted to know for sure. Joe wanted to give him a second chance because he’d just got married. So Joe and Dan rode up to Aaron’s new selection opposite the Sugarloaf for a matey chat. Joe squatted on the ground for a heart-to-heart, sucked a piece of grass, drew a map in the dirt with a stick. (Aaron’s new wife was too young and green to invite them inside, or even offer a cup of tea. Dan stayed on his horse. He didn’t trust Aaron even then.) Joe told Aaron, well, we’re going here, and then here, to Goulburn in New South Wales to rob a bank and we want you to act as scout. Aaron excused himself, just being married and so forth. Winked at his old friend. Joe said never mind and he and Dan rode off.

  Waited a few days. (Joe had given nothing away, since we actually intended heading towards the Riverina.) When Hare tightened security and poured men into the northeast we knew Aaron was seriously on the job.

  Running from Victoria, Dan Morgan reached the Murray along the Warby Ranges, outwitting the police for the last time before they took his head on tour. Splitting into pairs two hours apart, we follow Morgan’s route twelve years later and come down onto the blood-red claybank downstream of Yarrawonga on a dry and humming February afternoon. The river trickles as slow as rust. In the heat we swim the horses across to the New South Wales side and climb up on the scrub plain without sighting anything human.