To Love a Sunburnt Country Read online

Mrs Armitage turned curious eyes on Nancy. ‘Have you been in Malaya long?’

  ‘Nearly a year. I came to help Moira pack to return to Australia,’ she added. ‘But she felt too … unwell … with Gavin … to travel that far.’

  ‘Ah, I see,’ said Mrs Armitage.

  Nancy wondered exactly what she did see. Did Mrs Armitage think Nancy’s family had sent her to Malaya to find a husband, as so many female visitors did in India and other colonies, where white women were in such short supply that even a girl or woman who had failed to find a suitable husband back home might have a chance?

  ‘And is there a young man waiting for you back in Australia?’ asked Mrs Armitage archly, settling the question. ‘Or perhaps there’s an officer who’s caught your eye?’

  ‘I’m only sixteen,’ said Nancy, hoping that was answer enough without having to add, ‘Too young for husband hunting.’

  ‘So no young man then?’ Mrs Armitage persisted. Perhaps Mrs Armitage had a son of suitable age in England, thought Nancy, and wanted an Australian heiress for him. Which she supposed she was, if you counted the value of Overflow in the pounds, shillings and pence for which it never would be sold. Mum and Dad had never discussed what would happen after they died, but she supposed that, as with her Sampson cousins’ property, Overflow would be divided between Ben and herself — one reason perhaps why Dad bought up any of the surrounding land that came on the market. Overflow was half as big again as in his father’s day.

  Mrs Armitage still waited for her answer.

  ‘I have a …’ Nancy stopped. How would she describe Michael? Friend was too little, fiancé too much. It had been a year since she had seen him. People changed in a year. She had changed in the year droving to Queensland, and changed in her year here. Michael was still at school. Even if school was endlessly the same, Michael must have changed too.

  Except at heart he would still be Michael of Drinkwater, as she was Nancy of the Overflow. They were …

  She didn’t know the words, and there was no way the older woman would understand even if she could have found them.

  Mrs Armitage noticed the blush on her cheeks. ‘Ah, there is a young man. Do your parents approve?’

  Did they? She had never given the matter much thought. ‘Yes, of course,’ she said.

  ‘And his parents?’

  Was Mrs Armitage thinking Michael’s parents might object to a … tanned … young woman?

  Did Michael’s parents approve of her as a possible daughter-in-law? She imagined Michael’s mother, still called Miss Matilda by half the district, daughter of the famous swaggie who had died at the billabong in Australia’s most loved song. Drinkwater was Miss Matilda’s kingdom, and half of Gibber’s Creek too. Thought of Michael’s father, Tommy Thompson, called ‘legendary industrialist’ in the Sydney papers, a small man with baggy-kneed trousers, and eyes that were both shrewd and kind.

  She suspected that Michael’s parents, like hers, would let their children discover the hearts of their own lives.

  Did they like her? She smiled, remembering that last Christmas party. She’d yarned to Miss Matilda for hours before it began, telling her about her trip to Charters Towers while they’d inspected the improvements to the shearing plant. How could a woman like Mrs Armitage understand Miss Matilda, gumboots over silk stockings so she didn’t get her green leather shoes (from Paris before the war) stained with lanolin in the shed?

  ‘I’ve known his parents all my life,’ she said instead. ‘They’re family friends. We spend Christmas at a cousin’s property next to theirs every year. It’s only a couple of hours upriver from ours, almost next door. There’s a party at Drinkwater on Christmas Eve, then a picnic down at the river on Boxing Day and, well, all sorts of things.’

  Mrs Armitage smiled approvingly. Nancy realised it sounded terribly respectable — parties of women in white dresses and big hats, like the picnics in Malaya, and servants in white gloves, instead of food laid out on trestles in the shearers’ quarters.

  At the Boxing Day picnic, women dressed in anything from jodhpurs to bathing suits to the latest Sydney fashions, and waved the flies from the doorstops of bread, and lettuce or beetroot salads. A tribe of kids splashed and yelled or fed carrots to Sheba, the elephant left by the circus that had ended its days in the Drinkwater paddocks, kids brown from the sun or from Aboriginal heritage, kids with Chinese parents or grandparents, like the Lee twins, or Mah McAlpine’s children. The men barbecued mutton chops over glowing coals, yarning about the price of wool or the next contender for the Melbourne Cup who might just be running now in their back paddock. The cricket game afterwards where everybody played, women as well as men, the toddlers with their grandfathers showing them how to hold the bat, just like Granddad had shown her …

  It was so vivid she was back there, the buzz of flies, the scent of river water, the plock of the cricket ball on the bat. Gran and Ben cheering and Granddad holding her in his arms to make her first run …

  ‘And what is his name?’ persisted Mrs Armitage.

  ‘Michael,’ said Nancy. ‘Michael Thompson.’

  Chapter 5

  Gibber’s Creek Gazette, 9 December 1941

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  DRINKWATER STATION, NEW SOUTH WALES, AUSTRALIA, 9 DECEMBER 1941

  MICHAEL

  Michael Thompson sat on the sand and watched the water. The river pondered between its banks as if there was no war to ruffle its world. Yesterday Australia had been part of Europe’s war, its armies fighting for England. Today Australia was not just formally at war with Japan, but already fighting on battlefields in Malaya, the enemy heading south. The world had changed overnight, but not the river. Men might fight and women weep. The river obeyed the rain and sun, not humans.

  A year ago he’d sat here and watched the water with a girl.

  It had been Christmas Eve. His parents’ annual party. Everyone came to it: the workers from his father’s local factory and their families; the whole McAlpine clan and the women who worked at Blue and Mah McAlpine’s biscuit factory too; his mother’s maternal relatives, the Sampsons; and every neighbour within driving or riding distance and a few from beyond that.

  Christmas Eve 1940 had been the same as every other year, till you looked closely: saw the absence of nearly every man between twenty-one and forty; saw the wives, sisters, mothers, smiling too brightly, lipstick defiant, seams drawn on the back of the legs to replace the silk stockings already in short supply, with shipping and factories devoted to the war effort, not luxuries.

  He’d spent the day mopping the shearers’ quarters, the afternoon loading the buffet tables while guests arrived, a few in cars but mostly on horseback as they might have come decades earlier, because of the war’s petrol shortages, the women vanishing upstairs to change out of their riding clothes into party finery, the men heading down to the stockyard to inspect the new rams.

  Flinty Mack and her husband had ridden down from Rock Farm in the mountains for their annual visit to her brother Andy McAlpine, Drinkwater’s manager, and his wife, Mah. Flinty’s three kids kept riding, expert on their ponies, down to Moura to stay with Blue McAlpine. Blue was married to Flinty’s other brother, Joseph McAlpine, now a doctor in the Medical Corps in Malaya, and she and Mah ran the Empire Biscuit Factory. The Mack family had camped out the night before on their way down from their valley in the mountains, a four-hour car journey turned into a two-day adventure.

  Laughter and the stamp of horses, and behind it all the thump of the generator. His mother had decreed that for this night only, despite petrol shortages, the generator would be going; too much danger of fire in the summer’s heat if th
ey had candles or slush lamps.

  Which meant Mrs Mutton and Mah McAlpine had taken advantage of the electricity to make ice to freeze ice cream, and he was put to churning, churning, churning custard while Blue McAlpine tied satin bows on all the dogs, even three-legged Brute, and no one mentioned Joseph, or his brother Jim doing basic training with the AIF, or the Sampson boys in North Africa, or Kirsty McAlpine working up on a property near Darwin for the duration.

  Tablecloths on the trestles from the shearers’ quarters; the big silver punch bowl filled with Mrs Mutton’s special recipe of lemonade, ginger ale, fresh lemon juice from the trees out the back, sugar, ice cubes, crushed mint leaves and canned pineapple juice carefully hoarded in the larder — this might be the last year for a long time they added pineapple juice to the punch. Lamingtons too were becoming a rare species — one needed desiccated coconut for a decent lamington and although most larders had begun the war with a good supply, it was also becoming scarce. Nor would there be hams tonight — all pigs, ham and bacon must be sent to Britain, so home-corned legs of mutton took their place.

  But most of the party’s staples had always been local anyway: cold chicken, dispatched and plucked by farm manager Andy McAlpine in an orgy of clucking, with pin feathers still flying around the courtyard; roast turkey, bred at the Lees’ market garden; potato salad, with salad cream dressing; pickled beetroot; sliced tomato, cucumber and lettuce salad dressed with cream and vinegar; vast bowls of fruit salad and whipped Jersey-cow cream; almost as many kinds of pie as there’d be women here tonight, each one bringing her speciality — late cherries, early apple, early plum and apricots, mock ginger made with spiced choko that tasted and looked like pears, blackberry, raspberry; jam tarts, the pastry traditionally made with suet, from boiled mutton fat, which made a lighter and moister pudding than butter; sponge cakes light with duck eggs, filled with more Jersey cream and strawberries and the passionfruit that clambered across most backyard dunnies; pikelets already topped with jam; plain scones or pumpkin scones with lemon butter or strawberry jam; and giant plum puddings that Michael knew had been eked out with grated carrot because he had wandered into the kitchen while Mah McAlpine and Mrs Mutton were grating them. They’d demanded he stay to give the pudding bowl a stir for luck. Sandwiches, because after all there was nothing like a sandwich at a party — you could hold them and not need a plate or fork: cheese and tomato; cheese and grated carrot; cheese and salad, the beetroot staining the top bread slice red; curried egg; mutton and chutney.

  Tonight there would be ice cream too. And music. Dancing. Laughter.

  There was also a girl.

  He saw her as his parents led the first dance, with Andy and Mah McAlpine and Flinty and Sandy Mack following, an old-fashioned polka fast and bright to push away the dark of war, the bombs’ savage descent on London and Berlin, the triumph and tragedy of an army lost and saved at Dunkirk, the worry about where Jim was headed after training.

  Black hair. Brown eyes. A dress that looked thrown on, three sizes too big, not fitted to her shape like those the other young women wore. Darkish skin that might be tan but he reckoned more likely made her one of the Sampson clan, which meant she was a second cousin five times removed, or fifth cousin two times removed, something like that. She saw him too. Their gazes cut through the crowd under the oak trees.

  ‘Ah, Michael, good to see you. How’s school?’ One of his Sampson cousins.

  ‘Good, thank you,’ he answered automatically. ‘Excuse me a moment …’

  He made his way towards her. The same age as him, he thought, or maybe a year younger. Skin clear as river water, eyes deep as a billabong. You could see the stars reflected in her hair.

  ‘Michael, how you’ve grown! How’s school?’

  ‘Good, thank you, Mrs McAlpine. Will you excuse me? There’s someone I need to see.’

  The girl stood and waited till he reached her, then grinned as he stood there, suddenly unable to think what to say. ‘Are you going to ask me to dance, or stand there and let the mozzies fly into your mouth?’

  ‘We’ve met?’

  ‘Of course we’ve met, you drongo. I’m Nancy. Nancy Clancy. And if you say, “You’re a poet and you don’t know it,” you’ll get a plate of ice cream in your hair.’

  ‘Don’t you even think of wasting that ice cream. I spent half the afternoon churning it.’

  She was Pete Sampson’s great-niece then, old Mr Clancy’s granddaughter. Nancy of the Overflow, two hours’ drive down the river, or three hours’ ride if you took the shortcut. The Clancys came for Christmas every year, spending a week at the Sampsons’. But he couldn’t place Nancy. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said frankly. ‘I can’t remember meeting you.’

  ‘You have,’ she said dryly. ‘Just this year I’m wearing a skirt.’

  Now he did remember her. Not from the year before — he was sure he hadn’t seen her then — and not the year before that either. That was the Christmas he’d stayed with Taylor’s family in Sydney, because Sydney had sounded so much more exciting than coming home, then regretted it, missing the hilarity of the Christmas week.

  Yes, she had been different three years back. She’d been what? Twelve? Eleven? Tattered moleskins, hair cut as short as a boy’s. She’d been one of the mob he’d splashed in the river with, Christmas after Christmas; they climbed trees, rode branches like they were horses, collected cicadas, hiding them in the darkness of their cupped hands then opening them to hear them sing.

  He remembered his mother’s gossip, eighteen months earlier: Nancy Clancy had abandoned school at fourteen, a year before her Qualifying Certificate, left her parents a note to say she’d gone to Queensland droving. Remembered Dad laughing and saying if the Clancys had wanted a daughter all lace and proper, they shouldn’t have called her Nancy. ‘I doubt she’d suit the office, Nancy of the Overflow.’

  ‘Did you really run away from home and leave your parents a note?’

  ‘I rode away from home. I didn’t run. And we were only fifty miles away by the time Dad caught up with me.’ She looked at him, laughter in her eyes. ‘I had to do something to make them realise I didn’t want to be a schoolteacher like Mum.’

  ‘Did it work?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ The grin was wicked now. ‘Dad arrived with a new swag all packed — fruitcake and books to read and all — and instructions that I was to wire home from every town we passed, and if I wanted to come back he’d send me the train fare.’

  ‘Just like that?’

  ‘Yep.’ She shrugged. ‘I thought I might get a walloping, but he didn’t even seem that surprised. Old Ringer Bailey was boss anyway. He and Dad go way back. Been droving with Granddad too. Mum and Dad knew Ringer would keep an eye on me. Mum might even have thought that I’d decide to come home after a week without a bed.’

  ‘But you didn’t?’

  ‘No.’ Her eyes shifted, looking back towards the river, the dark plains. ‘It was … wonderful. Just that. A year of wonders.’

  He thought of the poem written about her grandfather. And the bush has friends to meet him, and their kindly voices greet him, in the — how did it go? The whisper of the river and the murmur of the stars? He didn’t think he had the words right, but they were the ones he felt.

  He wanted to say that he had heard them too, the stars singing out of the depth of night, a clarity you never got at boarding school in Sydney, the river muttering so you could almost make out what it was trying to say.

  Instead he said, ‘You’re back home then? For more than Christmas?’ Her shoes looked too big for her, he noticed. Worn shoes, polished but showing cracks.

  She said lightly, ‘Pretty soon I will be. Just one more adventure before I settle down. Ben’s up in Malaya, managing a rubber plantation. He’s just joined the local Volunteer Defence Corps. I’m going up there to help his wife pack up and come here.’

  ‘Seriously? Half the country is trying to leave Malaya and you’re going up there?’ The previous night at dinner with the M
cAlpines Dad had said that war with Japan was inevitable; that the Japanese must strike further south to keep supplying their country and their forces. But Andy McAlpine argued that Japan would never be stupid enough to attack the British Empire. Prime Minister Mr Menzies had worked hard to keep relations good with the Japanese. There was even a Japanese ambassador in Canberra now, and an Australian one in Tokyo. Andy had fought in the Great War, of course, but Dad knew about things like trade and resources. And perhaps Andy too hadn’t wanted to worry Blue, with Joseph with the army in Malaya.

  But whoever had been right, this wasn’t a time to go travelling unless you had to, with the Empire in retreat and so much of Europe falling as Hitler’s armies advanced, so much damage wreaked on England’s major cities, children evacuated, much of its army lost at Dunkirk. Though surely Malaya was safe, protected by the impregnable might of Singapore in its south. Other towns might fall, but Singapore — and the lands it protected — could never fall.

  ‘Ben was pretty insistent. I’ve never met Moira, but it sounds like she can’t even pack up the house without help.’ She grinned. ‘Just for a few weeks, then I really will be home for good. It’ll be fascinating to see Malaya. Your dad wangled me a passage on one of the cargo ships. American — neutral, so there’s no worry about attack by German U-boats. Your family has useful connections.’

  ‘Yes.’ Dad’s factory here and the ones in Sydney were now devoted to war work, manufacturing a new wireless of some kind, invented by his father. Michael had neither asked for nor been given details. As the paper said, loose lips sink ships. He also knew vaguely that much of his father’s money had been made with a similar invention in the Great War. Government contracts and export licences did mean contacts in all sorts of places, and he supposed with shipping companies too. ‘Who’ll run the plantation?’

  ‘Half the blokes in the local Defence Corps are like Ben, with a property or business to manage. He’s got a good foreman and he can get back there every week or so. But it sounds like Moira — Ben’s wife — is going all to pieces with him being away so much. Moira’s English,’ she added, as though that explained going to pieces, though with what England and the English had borne the past year, Michael thought that ‘even though she’s English’ might have been a better way to put it. But Moira was her sister-in-law, not his.