Nanberry Read online

  Nanberry tried not to cry as well. He watched his grandfather bend his head and splash water over his hair, over and over as though he might beat the fever with its freshness. His mother lowered the baby onto the wet sand and let the waves run across her body.

  Nanberry clenched his fists. The cool water would make them better. It had to! Meanwhile they needed food. If you didn’t have food and fresh water you died. He was the only one now with strength to care for them.

  He had no spear — only warriors could carry spears, and it would be many summers yet before Nanberry could go through his initiation ceremony and have his front tooth knocked out. But he had seen a bungu tree as they had staggered here: a big tree, with scratches on the trunk showing where the bungu scrambled up every day to sleep in a hollow where a branch had rotted away. The bungu would be so sound asleep it wouldn’t wake until it was too late.

  You didn’t have to be a warrior to catch a bungu, a possum. He could dig yam roots, and roast them on a fire.

  Nanberry glanced down at the others. His mother’s eyes were shut, but she still held the little girl. Yagali had covered her face again, perhaps so she couldn’t see the blisters breaking out across her body. His grandfather muttered, words that made no sense, staring at the waves.

  ‘I won’t be long.’ Nanberry didn’t think they heard him. He ran into the bush.

  The bungu tree was where Nanberry remembered it. He wrapped his arms and legs around its trunk, and pushed with his knees many times, till he reached the first branch. He pulled himself up next to the hollow.

  Sometimes snakes or lizards slept in holes like this. But the bungu scratches told him this hole was safe. A big bungu would keep snakes away from its home.

  Nanberry reached inside. His fingers met soft fur. It didn’t have time to struggle before he twisted its neck and pulled it out. Its head hung limply on its body.

  Something dropped from the bungu’s back onto the leafy ground. Nanberry peered down. It was a baby bungu, perhaps half grown; it had faint dark fur, not the pink skin of a tiny baby. It lay there stunned, its eyes big and black.

  Nanberry considered it, as he slid down the tree. There wouldn’t be much meat on it. He needed to get back.

  He ran through the dappled shade, leaving the baby bungu among the dead bracken and grass.

  His family were where he had left them, dozing as the waves lapped around their limbs. It was late afternoon now. The beach was striped with tree shadows.

  Nanberry gathered driftwood and dried tussocks, thrown up above the high-tide mark by the last storm. He held the fire bone — a hollow bone with a slow-burning coal inside it — to the dry grass until it flared. He threw on dry branches, then skinned the bungu. He poked a stick through it, then propped the stick up with stones so the meat would cook.

  He sat there as the night gathered itself around him.

  How could life change so suddenly?

  There had always been many hands to share each task, and songs and love and laughter to brighten the work. Now there was only him to care for his family on the beach.

  All his life the seasons had come as they were supposed to: the season of the emu pattern high in the night sky, when the fish swam thickly in the harbour; the season of rain when the geebungs and five-corners fruited, and the figs swelled; and the cold days when you knew the shellfish were sweetest, and the kurrajong bark was at its most supple for weaving into baskets or fishing lines — just before the bloodwood sap flowed so the women could soak the lines in it to harden them.

  When the sun rose higher it was time to travel up the river to Parramatta, to strip the stringybark sheets to make the new canoes. When the wattle bloomed the fish swam once more in great families, so many that the lines were always heavy.

  There was a time for the settling of disputes, and a time to go west to feast on eels, a time when the bees wore fluffy yellow pollen on their legs, when you knew that in another season of moons the nectar would flow sweet and pale green when you poked a stick into the honey trees.

  Everything has its time, he thought.

  So this was a time of death.

  The moon rose. He held meat to his mother’s lips. He tried to coax his grandfather to eat. Yagali just shook her head. ‘Water,’ she whispered.

  How could he have forgotten? He hurried to where his mother had dropped her net, and took out two coolamons.

  There was no stream near this beach, not even a waterhole, but he’d seen a half-burnt tree, hit by lightning before he was born. There would be rainwater trapped there. He climbed the tree and filled the coolamons, trying not to let the water spill as he climbed down and ran back to the beach. The moonlight was making blue shadows under the trees.

  His grandfather gulped the water eagerly, then shivered. ‘I’m cold,’ he muttered. ‘Cold.’

  Nanberry felt hope surge through him. Had the cold water driven away the illness? He helped the old man over to the fire, then took the water to his mother. She held the coolamon up to her daughters’ lips then she drank too.

  The tide had gone out. The waves fell back towards the sea. His mother lay in the wet sand, cradling her baby. Yagali huddled next to her. Nanberry nestled down in the cool sand. His skin burnt like the sun had kissed him.

  He slept uneasily, waking every time one of the others cried out in fever dreams. He dreamt that tomorrow the women would be out in their canoes, laughing and singing, the children feasting on the shore while the fish smoked in the fires, to keep for the winter days when the schools no longer gathered so near the shore. Tomorrow he would swim again, in the soft blue water. Nanberry opened his eyes. The light was like a spear. He forced himself to look around.

  The sky grew grey, then pink, and a too-bright blue. Yagali had vanished. He struggled to sit up. Why did his body feel like a jellyfish? He peered around frantically, looking for her. Had she run into the bush to find the others, or tried to swim out to cool her body? But even her footprints had been eaten by the waves.

  ‘Gumna?’ he cried to his grandfather. ‘Wianga?’ he called to his mother. But they only muttered, their eyes blank, their minds lost in the land of fever.

  He looked down at his hands, his arms, his legs. The white blisters covered his skin.

  He forced himself to his feet. He had to fetch fresh water before he grew too ill to move. He had to find Yagali. But his legs had turned to whale blubber. He collapsed onto the sand.

  Chapter 2

  SURGEON WHITE

  COCKLE BAY (NOW DARLING HARBOUR), 14 APRIL 1789

  You can cure men of many things, thought Surgeon White, as he tramped through the trees with his two convict assistants. But you can’t cure stupidity. Below him Cockle Bay gleamed in the sunlight.

  New South Wales! The Surgeon snorted.

  He’d done what he could. He and Captain Phillip had brought eleven ships and nearly 800 convicts, poor starving wretches, white-faced and weak from prison, halfway across the world, the longest journey a fleet had ever made. Only twenty-four had died — far fewer than if they had remained in prison in England.

  It was a miracle. And it was due to him.

  As Chief Surgeon he had insisted that the convicts eat fresh food in England, at Tenerife in the Canary Islands, and at Cape Town on the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa, the last port before the final seemingly endless voyage across the almost uncharted ocean. Convicts who refused to eat because the fruit juice stung their mouths were whipped.

  The day after they had landed in this poor excuse for a country he’d made sure the tents for his laboratory and the sick had been put up. He’d had a garden fenced off to grow fresh vegetables. The poor wretches, swollen with scurvy, their teeth falling out, too weak to stand after so long at sea, needed fresh food, not medicine. And again, he’d had to threaten beatings if they didn’t eat.

  The Surgeon snorted once more as he pushed away a branch. Stupidity! Most of the convicts only knew the stews and slops and bread of city streets. They t
hought fresh fruit would kill them.

  Well, fresh food had saved their lives. But most convicts and marines were too stupid and too lazy to grow their own.

  The tiny colony had been established at Sydney Cove for more than a year now. Time enough to get huts built, gardens planted and harvested, for their sheep and cows and hens to have given birth to more. But what had happened? Surgeon White shook his head.

  Most still lived on their rations, the salt meat so hard you couldn’t cut it with a knife but had to hold it on a toasting fork over the fire to roast it. Sour flour that was more weevils than grain, dried peas …

  You could count the good men on the fingers of one hand. Governor Phillip, as he now was, wearing himself out with work and worry; Watkin Tench and Captain Waterhouse. The others were as bad as the convicts. Major Ross was a liar and a troublemaker. Even his Assistant Surgeon Balmain refused to give White the respect due to a gentleman of his rank.

  I’m lonely, thought the Surgeon. Deep, bone-deep lonely.

  The marines refused to guard the convicts or act as magistrates. They were here in case the French invaded, or the natives attacked. But no such trouble had arisen, so the marines lounged around complaining that they hadn’t got their due supply of wine or rum. None of them even lifted a finger to grow corn or cabbages, relying on the convicts assigned to them to do everything from digging their gardens to pulling on their masters’ boots.

  Few gardens produced enough to feed their owners. Most of the cows had wandered off into the bush. All of which was why Surgeon White was here today, hunting out fresh greens and native fruits to add to the colony’s supply of food, trying them himself first in case they were poisonous. Luckily only one lot had been really dangerous, the ‘native beans’ he had tested last year. He’d had to keep the chamberpot handy for two weeks after he’d eaten those.

  Surgeon White looked at the convicts on either side of him. They were browned from the sun, but far too thin. Yet he doubted either of them would bother to eat his share of the wild spinach he’d ordered them to gather today, the samphire, the leaves of the vegetable tree, the native cabbage and sarsaparilla, or even the fish the Surgeon had caught last night. The fools would eat ancient salt pork and weevily flour instead of good fresh fish and spinach.

  Well, he made sure the convict patients in his hospital ate properly. They ate or they were whipped!

  One of the convicts muttered something to his friend. Surgeon White held up his hand for silence; the men would scare the birds. This land was paradise for a scientist, if good for nothing else. Birds were moving north for winter now. Who knew what he might spy …

  The older of the convicts — a wiry wretch, thirty years old perhaps, starved all his life so he looked more like a monkey than a man — pointed silently towards the tussocks.

  Surgeon White squinted. A bird?

  No, it was an animal; a small one lying on the ground. He gestured to the convicts to stay back, and trod quietly forward.

  The tiny creature didn’t move.

  The Surgeon peered down at the scrap of fluff and bones. It was just a baby o’possum. He’d discovered three new species of o’possum here, but they were too like American o’possums to be worth describing in the book he was writing.

  On the other hand, a baby o’possum was small enough to fit in a preserving jar. Someone in England might be interested — if a ship ever came, bringing them fresh stores and taking his letters and specimens home.

  He gestured to the smaller convict. ‘Put it in the sack with the wild spinach.’

  The man nodded. He reached down and picked the creature up. ‘Sir … it’s still alive.’

  ‘What?’ The Surgeon peered at the o’possum. The tiny beast’s heart beat under the long soft fur. It looked much like an adult: the cat-like face, the long tail with its white tip, the front fur white, the back almost black.

  Surgeon White shrugged. ‘It will be dead by the time we get back. Just put it in the bag, man. We need at least another four sacks of greens if they are to be of any use at the hospital.’

  Chapter 3

  MARIA

  SYDNEY COVE, 14 APRIL 1789

  Maria peered into the black pot on the kitchen fire. It held wild duck the Surgeon had shot last dusk, and potatoes from their garden, stewed with turnips and parsnips.

  Later she’d add wild greens, like Surgeon White had told her to, and use their flour ration to make fresh soda bread on the hearth, near enough to the coals to cook but not to burn.

  She and the Surgeon ate better than anyone in the colony except the Governor, she reckoned.

  Gran had taught her to boil a pudding and sew a seam. Then Gran had died. She’d eaten flour and water gruel in the workhouse after that, till the lady came to buy her to be a kitchen maid. But she weren’t no ‘lady’. She wanted Maria to pick pockets — after she’d lured them into an alley for what Gran called ‘Men’s Rampaging Lusts’.

  All there was to eat was penny stew after that, small bones she were sure was rat.

  She were always hungry. Once you’d starved she reckoned that nothing ever made you feel really full. She’d had cold kangaroo meat and hot potatoes for her midday dinner, all she wanted, and Indian maize pudding for breakfast, with oyster pie, and now she were hungry again.

  Maria gave the pot another stir. Oh, but it smelt fine. She’d picked the buckshot out of the duck, so the Surgeon wouldn’t break a tooth when he ate the meat. The buckshot could be melted down and used again. Surgeon White had told her that buckshot was precious now, till a supply ship could reach them from England — if it ever did.

  Starving when she were a child was probably why she still looked a tiny scrap now. She were fifteen years old, but she looked more like ten. That were a good thing. Looking young and helpless had meant the judge back in England had only given her fourteen years instead of sending her to the gallows, to be hanged by the neck till she were dead.

  Maria had seen coves kicking and screaming as the noose tightened around their necks after they dropped from the gallows to their deaths. At least she’d been spared that.

  There’d only been stale bread in prison, thrown onto the straw for everyone to fight for. The ship had been better — stew and biscuit twice a day, except she’d been too terrified and sick to eat, shivering in the filthy darkness as the water seeped through the wooden ship, holding onto her breath as the great waves tossed it.

  But Sydney Cove were better — or Sydney Town as it were starting to be called, though it were a long way from a town yet.

  Governor Phillip was a right good ’un. He’d sent the youngest convicts to Norfolk Island, away from the Men’s Rampaging Lusts. There were nearly 600 male convicts here, and close to 250 marines, and only 200 girls and women. Sydney Cove weren’t a place for a child, or for a woman neither, unless she didn’t mind Rampaging Lusts.

  It had been good of Governor Phillip to send her to Surgeon White. The Surgeon had no Rampaging Lusts. All he wanted was his food well cooked, his hut kept clean, his uniform mended. And Maria could cook and sew better than any girl in the colony. She liked things clean too.

  Port Jackson might well be a prison without bars, and convicts might have to work for whoever they were assigned to, but there were few who’d been lucky enough to be assigned to a man like Surgeon White.

  The door opened. She bobbed a curtsey as the Master stepped in, stamping the mud off his boots on the mat. Big Lon followed, casting a sack of wild greens onto the table. He touched his forelock to Surgeon White, then went out.

  The Master sat in his chair before the fire. The chair was colony-made, its legs already twisted and out of shape. But it had arms and was comfortable enough. She sat in it, when he were out. It was the only chair they had.

  She knelt to take off his boots. She put them outside for Big Lon to clean, then poured water from the hearth pot into his teapot with a handful of the dried sarsaparilla flowers to make the herb tea he liked. The Master wasn’t one for getting dru
nk either. He nodded his thanks, then picked up his notebook.

  Nor for talking, she thought, or not to servants any rate.

  She opened the bag of wild greens. The samphire was sandy. She’d have to wash it, which meant lugging more water from the stream, unless Big Lon was in earshot. And somehow he were good at not being in earshot whenever there was water or wood to lug. She’d have to —

  ‘Arrk!’ She stepped back.

  The Master looked up. ‘What is it, girl?’

  ‘Something moved, sir. In the sack. A furry beast with big black eyes!’

  He looked back at his notebook. ‘It’s just an o’possum. A baby one.’

  ‘Will it bite?’

  He looked interested for the first time. ‘I don’t know if they bite or not. I thought the creature would have died by now.’

  ‘It didn’t feel dead, sir.’

  ‘I’ll take a look.’ He peered into the sack. Maria looked over his shoulder.

  The black eyes stared at her, wide and frightened. It looks a bit like a cat, she thought, all black and white. Gran had a cat like that. It had sat on her lap and purred, while Gran fed her a pile of buttered toast almost up to her knees. She remembered a big rice pudding cooking on the hearth.

  A couple of the officers had cats here, but she’d never seen them, only the Governor’s dogs following him about. She supposed even if the colony cats had kittens there wouldn’t be a cat for the likes of her.

  Fool, she told herself. What did she want with a cat? Look out for yourself, that was it.

  Surgeon White lifted the o’possum out of the bag. For a moment the tiny creature lay in his hands, then it sat up on its hind legs, holding its paws like tiny hands. It stared right at Maria.

  She gave a gasp of fright. It didn’t look like a cat at all now.

  Surgeon White glanced at her, amused. ‘Don’t take on, girl,’ he said. ‘I’ll wring its neck and put it with the other specimens. Mr Balmain can preserve it in a jar tomorrow to send to England.’ His face darkened at the thought of his rebellious assistant. ‘And if Balmain doesn’t like the job he can take it up with the Governor.’