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  Thea Astley was born in Brisbane in 1925 and studied at the University of Queensland. She taught in schools in Queensland and New South Wales, then at Macquarie University in Sydney between 1968 and 1980. The author of fourteen novels, two novellas and two short-story collections, she won the Miles Franklin Award four times, for The Well Dressed Explorer (1962), The Slow Natives (1965), The Acolyte (1972) and Drylands (2000), which was also nominated for the 2001 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow was nominated for the 1997 Miles Franklin Award, and in 1989 she was awarded the Patrick White Award for services to Australian literature. In 1992 she became an Officer in the Order of Australia, and received a special award at the 2002 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards for lifetime achievement. She died in August 2004.

  THEA

  ASTLEY

  A Kindness Cup

  This edition published by Allen & Unwin House of Books in 2012

  First published by Thomas Nelson Australia in 1974

  Copyright © Thea Astley 1974

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

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  ISBN 978 1 74331 200 1 (pbk)

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  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  Begin Reading

  Should auld acquaintance be forgot

  And never brought to min’?

  Should auld acquaintance be forgot

  And days o’ lang syne?

  For auld lang syne, my dear,

  For auld lang syne,

  We’ll tak’ a cup o’ kindness yet,

  For auld lang syne.

  —Robert Burns

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The impetus for this novel came from an actual incident at The Leap, Queensland, in the second half of the last century; but this cautionary fable makes no claim to being a historical work. Liberties have been taken with places and times, and the author happily admits possible anachronisms.

  Acknowledgments are made to the report of the Select Committee on the Native Police Force, Queensland, 1861.

  THIS WORLD is the unreality, he thinks between smiles and frowns over the letter.

  After twenty years—back!

  They’d done it after ten—a folly he’d ignored. Back to The Taws. After all these longitudes of time, what would that make them all if all of them could make it? Trembling sexagenarians, hearts pausing—but not for joy; eyes cataracted, prostates swollen or excised, livers cirrhosed, hearing dimmed.

  This man pauses in his shaving to squint at the piece of paper again, razor hesitant, eye returning anxious but reluctant to the blurred letters. Who is Barney Sweetman? A name he has tried to forget. Barney… Sweetman? Jesus! Sweetman Sweetman Sweetman? Raintrees outside the stock-and-station agent’s before the dogmatic through road eased round by the school. Where he. Under crushing dust. Velvet crushes. And the flies busy. A youngish man then. And that other youngish as well, weighing out some sort of glittering utterance with his face ju-jubed by School of Arts stained glass, frecklings of cerulean and jonquil in lamp-light. From shadow into heat and buggies, dozy cobs blinkered in shafts by a water-trough. The slipperiest of memories. Had that been Barney Sweetman, later town councillor, mayor, State member, mutton-chopped hearty? Retired now? Conniving now?

  He nicks himself and the tired blood trickles a moment, stops easily these days almost before the cotton-wool sticks.

  Crumples the letter that morning. Picks it out of the bin that night, hearing wind along the Moreton Bay reaches moving out of the sea into the empty passageways of his house with its too many lumps of darkening furniture and the whisky bottle too handy. Smoothes it out again and licks at the strange invitation a little, the liquor moist on his lip. The impersonal jargon of some bleeding go-getter, he tells himself, making a quick quid on the boosted tourist tears of returning townsfolk! Why, his bay is filled with tears and the figs of its name, the long roots stretching, groping down in laterals to weep over slight grey waters with islands humped and sandduned and afloat. He is drenched in nostalgia here. What is the point, any point, in a return?

  My filled days, he thinks ironically, my filled days. With walks along the front, a shambles to the pier and along it to the point where winds knot green swirl of sea and gull and fish and some crumbling other man casting his lines. Back to the figged park and the bottle-lollied picnic kiosk and an hour or so beneath broad leaves pecking at book or paper. Barney Sweetman. The bastard, he says. And Buckmaster. Buckmaster and Sweetman. Knighted for milking God’s earth. Knighted for handling the sugar strikes. Knighted for owning more acres of sweet grass in the north than any man had the right to control. But not knighted for that noon at Mandarana—how the names come back now!—the virtue guards with rifles kicking their unwilling horses up the runty slopes while the natives scuttled like roos from bush to bush until the high plateau. Or after. The down-curve through hot air and the body whizzing.

  He closes his eyes.

  ‘Boys,’ Mr Dorahy said, ‘let us recapitulate …

  ‘I cannot believe,’ he continued musingly, his finger poised at a certain section of the Gallic Wars, ‘that men are rational beings when I observe their militaristic antics. I mean the drill protocol claptrap, of course, quite apart from the specifics of learning how to kill.’ His thin and rather sour face was extremely gentle. He smiled with the terrible snaggle teeth that all who had grown to love failed now to notice. ‘What do you think, Jenner?’

  ‘Are you serious, sir?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘But we have our own sort of drill, sir. I mean terms and classroom behaviour and …’

  ‘When,’ Mr Dorahy interrupted, but still gently, ‘have I ever required a clicking to, a standing to, a goose-stepping hop to it?’

  Jenner’s round sixteen-year-old face began a small grin. ‘We just do it, sir.’

  ‘You miss my point, boy. You miss it.’ Dorahy sighed and stared bleakly past the eight faces to the school paddock, still being fenced, at workmen whacking on wood for the new school block beyond the pepper-trees.

  ‘Close your Livy,’ he said tiredly. ‘If you’ll give me all th
at keen attention of yours, I’ll try to draw a parallel.’

  ‘Parable, sir?’ a shaggy lad next to Jenner inquired with a smirk.

  ‘If you like,’ Mr Dorahy said. He could feel reluctance lumping his tongue, ‘If you like. Tarquinius Sextus, as you will recall, was a bastard par excellence,’ The boys began to laugh quietly. ‘His bastardry,’ continued Mr Dorahy without a muscle-twitch of amusement, ‘entered the fields of male folly which ruined not only himself, I mean his soul, but a family line!’

  He began to quote but no one understood, so he dragged himself from his chair and scribbled the Latin on the board. ‘Buckmaster,’ he said, ‘translate.’

  The clock hands were staggering. Time passed slowly in that cube of heat and flies. Clause gobbets. Literal patches of historic infinitive. Torture, Dorahy decided. Sheer mindless torture. He said, ‘Take over, Jenner.’

  Jenner bumbled for a while, testing words with his incompetent tongue. He crashed over the last sentence—‘… and there to her surprise Tarquinius found her lying unclad.’

  Dorahy coughed. He coughed out this dust and the dust became the expectations of three failed years.

  ‘A little more delicately, I think: “And there surprised Lucretia lying naked.” It was Tarquin who did the surprising in the literal sense of the word, boys. Not the unfortunate lady. Though doubtless she, too, was surprised in your sense. I’ll read it to you again. “And there the Tarquin, black and forceful, surprised Lucretia lying naked.” ’ He repeated the last two words softly and a terrible adolescent excitement charged the room. The angle of his vowel, that first vowel, lecherously over-toned plus the quiet refinement of the soured mouth and face made for frightful antithesis.

  Outside a world of trees and umber. Flies inside drumming window-heat, taking glass for air.

  ‘The militaristic claptrap and the insolvency of the rapist are equally sub-human—is what I mean. Is very much what I mean.’

  Buckmaster didn’t quite scowl. He was later to sire three half-castes. ‘Women!’ he whispered hissingly along the row. ‘Gins!’ he whispered. And he scrawled furtively a set of parted legs on the margin of his Livy.

  ‘If your thinking, Buckmaster,’ Mr Dorahy proceeded gently, ‘lies only in the force of your genitals, God help the world.’

  Buckmaster senior later said, leaning on his silver-topped riding crop, ‘You cannot speak to the boys like this. There are certain matters. Things such as … Decencies must …’

  ‘In this noisome little colony,’ Mr Dorahy replied mildly with more sweat than usual running down the edges of his weary hair, ‘where masculinity is top dog, it seems to me that some occasional thought should be given, chivalrously you understand—do you understand?—to the sex that endures most of our nastiness.’

  ‘You’re mad,’ Buckmaster said.

  ‘You become that which you do.’

  Mr Buckmaster allowed himself a tiny bleached smile. ‘Any bloody teacher in this place would have to be mad.’

  ‘I meant you,’ Mr Dorahy said. The small scar of some long-forgotten protest whitened on his cheek. ‘Would you want your son to become one of the mindless, insensitive, money-grubbing bulls you see around this town and that he gives every indication of aping?’

  ‘I’ll have you sacked, by Christ!’ Pulling at his crotch. His cutaway donned for the occasion—running the bejesus out of a back-town schoolie—stank in the heat. Summer was crouching all over the town.

  ‘Please do,’ Mr Dorahy said. ‘I am so tired.’

  But it did not could not happen. Who else was there for a pittance in a provisional school slapped hard in the sweating sugar-grass north of the tropic?

  I am single, Mr Dorahy told himself proceeding through the drudgeries of instruction. I am single and thirty-seven and in love with landscape. Even this. Other faces cut close to the heart. His assistants, say, who took the junior forms. Married and widowed Mrs Wylie gathering in the chickens for a spot of rote tables or spelling, beating it out in an unfinished shack at the boundary fence. Or Tom Willard with his combined primary forms and his brimstone lay-preaching on the Sabbath. Or himself as a gesture to culture, keeping on the bigger boys of his parish, for he was priestly enough to use that word, for a bit of elementary classics and a purging of Wordsworth. It all seemed useless, as foolish as trying to put Tintern Abbey into iambic hexameters. He had come with a zealot’s earnestness, believing a place such as this might need him. And there was, after all, only loneliness: he was cut off from the pulse of the town, although, he insisted to himself rationalising furiously, he had been regularly to meetings of the Separation League and had blown only occasional cold air on their hot. He had drunk with the right men. He had kept his mouth closed. He had assumed nothing. And yet other faces, the wrong sort because they were black, had their own especial tug, the sad black flattened faces of the men working with long knives in the cane and their scabby children making games in the dust at the entrances and exits of towns. The entrances. The exits. Observe that, he cautioned himself.

  He was friendly with them, as friendly perhaps as Charlie Lunt on his hopeless block of land west of the township; friendly even when they robbed his accessible larder, noting the small fires they made at the boundary fences of his shack; or when he caught Kowaha, shinily young, pilfering sugar and flour, eyes rolling like humbugs with the lie of it while he did a bishop’s candlesticks—‘But I gave them to you’—confusing her entirely. Bastardry not intended, he told his ironic self. Yet she asked next time, and the next, always at half-light so that the scurrilous tongues of settlers along the road were never sure of shadow or concretion.

  Nort, Mr Dorahy inscribed meticulously on Buck-master’s ill-spelled prose. Nort, he gently offered, as Trooper Lieutenant Fred Buckmaster gave his evidence before the select committee.

  Do you think, the magistrate, a bottle-coloured Irishman had asked, you should be cognisant of the facts before you take your measures? Have you no written or printed instructions?

  No printed ones, Lieutenant Buckmaster said, truculent and oiling slightly. I act on letters received from squatters.

  Do you think, the magistrate pursued, hating the stinking obese fellow before him, that it is right to pursue these blacks—say a month after their depredations?

  I always act immediately, Lieutenant Buckmaster said flatly, immediately I am called upon. But it is the tribe I follow. Not individuals. You can never see the actual depredators. (Conjugate that verb, Dorahy whispered to himself. Oh, conjugate it, man!)

  Mr Sheridan tapped his fingers on the edge of the greasy desk. He was not in love with his job.

  Do you not think there is any other way of dealing with them except by shooting them?

  Lieutenant Buckmaster smiled.

  No. I don’t think they can understand anything else but shooting. At least that is the case as far as my experience goes.

  And your experience goes a long way, does it not? Another point, then. Tell me, are your police boys in the habit of taking the gins from the tribes … for whatever purpose?

  Buckmaster edged slightly. His real rash irritated, but this was now a rash of the mind. It was very hot in the little court.

  No. Except with my instructions.

  Did they take any this way in the previous case at Kuttabul?

  No. Buckmaster could not conceal his contempt. There were no young gins there. Only old ones. Later some young gins followed us up from the Kuttabul scrub.

  And do they stay with you? The magistrate could not blur his wonder.

  No, Lieutenant Buckmaster admitted. They only stop a night and get a piece of tobacco in the morning and go away. (Mr Sheridan raised his eyebrows at this point.) But generally we have to flog them off. They will follow the men all over the country. I have known them to follow my boys for as long as five days and I have had to flog them off in the middle of the night.

  Have you indeed? Mr Sheridan inquired, unable to control himself. And watched with interest the slow red on the
lieutenant’s ruined face.

  Dorahy had been observed by the port-nosed Buckmaster allowing some slight scrap of black flesh to depart his humpy unmolested long after sunset. So long after sunset that Buckmaster was returning from his own bodily revenges on a depressed white woman who ran an out-of-town shanty on the Mandarana road. His sexual angers were unsatisfied, not merely because of the fifth-rate partner who accepted his adulterous attentions like a necessary lash but by sighting a sleek gin slipping with a sugar-bag of something from the sour schoolmaster’s. ‘To be in charge of my boy!’ he raved inwardly, kicking his horse into a canter. Its nervous rump responded quiveringly to the crop. He could have been flogging Dorahy or the gin or the woman he had just left.

  All round him, however, was the benison of cane arrowing on the back roads to his farm, the beige spearhead of flower proving gentleness. Yet he was sickened by cycles of it and sometimes wondered if he really were committed to farm.

  His own house was pocked with slow pools of light from the kerosene lamps along the back veranda where he found, gripping the rage within his flesh, son Fred playing a game of chess with young Jenner.

  Both boys stared curiously at this unsated man who communicated distemper with his first words.

  ‘Where’s your mother?’

  Fred dangled a lost pawn. It was an insolent gesture over-interpreted by the father who saw himself thus. ‘Sewing,’ Fred said. ‘In the front room.’

  His father could have been choking when he roared, ‘And what are you two wasting time on now? We don’t keep you on at school like bloody gentlemen, you know, simply to fritter. Yes, fritter, by God! This is the last year of it and then you’ll have to earn your keep. Slumped around here!’ His voice was lumpy with scorn.

  ‘It gives you a certain prestige,’ Fred said unwisely, ‘having an unemployed wastrel adult son.’

  ‘By the living Christ,’ Buckmaster roared, ‘I won’t take, I don’t have to take that!’ Slamming his broad hand across the side of his son’s thick head.