Arthur Upfield - No footprints in the bush

“It naturally followed that my sister and I grew up in close contact with the aborigines, especially with the children of our own generation. But the time came when my sister began to crave for a wider world, the outside world of men and women of our own race. Our father and mother encouraged us to read the books they had brought from the homeland, little understanding that those very books pictured a wonderful world beyond the vast and empty one in which we lived.

“So my sister fled with a surveyor. He was a good man and married her as quickly as was possible. Flora was their only child. I did not leave here. Flora got to hate the place and the country. The older I became, so the greater became my love for the country and those who inhabited it.

“I was considered headstrong, and my parents imagined that I would quickly fly to the devil if they sent me down to a city school, far from their watchful protection. My father had been tutor-taught, and was hostile to schools. That was why he had sent up here a succession of three Scotch tutors. Not until I was turned twenty-two was I permitted to journey away down to Port Augusta.”

McPherson paused to refill his glass and to relight his pipe.

“The only youthful friend I ever had was Burning Water. You and I agree that he still is a fine looking man. In those days he was a kind of deity to me. He had a sister named Tarlalin, meaning water lying at the feet of bloodwood-trees, and after my lessons had been learned for the day we three would race away to our bush humpy and there I would teach them what I had learned. Tarlalin was a dunce, but her brother sopped it up easier than I did. And the blacks married me to Tarlalin without my knowing it.

“Came the time when the blacks took me away to the bush and proceeded to seal me into the tribe. My father and motherraised no objections on the score that being thus allied to them, I would not in the future have any trouble with them, or from them. Shortly afterwards Burning Water was sealed into the tribe. Now as warriors we were permitted to join in with the secret ceremonies.

“Then I fell in love with Tarlalin. Why does a man fall in love with a particular woman? Why should a white man fall in love with a black woman-or vice versa like Othello and Desdemona? The good Lord probably knows-we don’t. Tarlalin had always been good looking for an aborigine, and when I fell in love with her she was the sweetest thing that breathed.

“We went bush. The chief and Burning Water and almost the entire tribe approved. It might all have been otherwise had I known white women, but I have never regretted having known Tarlalin. I was as close to this land of sand and scrub and burning water as she was, as all herrace are.

“My mother was shocked and then indignant, but my father didn’t raise a rumpus. He said the boy must have his fling; that later on I would marry a white woman and settle down and have an heir to carry on the line. Extraordinary man, he once knocked me down for saying damn, and in this instance he was wrong, for I have remained true to Tarlalin.

“I am certainly not going to offer excuses for myself. You can have but little idea of the young man I was grown to, the isolation to which I was born and reared, the cast-iron rules imposed by my father and endorsed by my mother. They seldom differed, but my mother wanted a parson brought out to marry us white fashion, and my father scoffed at the idea and made up his mind that it was but a youthful fancy.

“He had a house built for us up along the reservoir gully, and there Rex was born. Rex became the cause of the only serious quarrel I had with my father. He wanted the boy to live with him and mother. Tarlalin objected to her son being taken from her, and I wouldn’t have her living here because my mother could never approve of her.

“The years passed and Tarlalin died, died before she became old. My father then had his way with the boy, and my mother came to dote on him as well. Still more years passed. My father died. My sister died. Then my mother died, after Rex had been sent to a college in Adelaide, a course I determinedly insisted upon. The last word she uttered was the boy’s name.”

Bony was making his seventh cigarette, his gaze directed at his task; and the squatter paused to reload his pipe. Bony was not a little interested to note that this unburdening was making McPherson actually appear young.

“I suppose it’s because I’m a dunce at the science of living that on some counts I cannot understand my father and mother,” McPherson continued. “With me they had been strict, as though I were a young animal that must be trained. Their attitude to Rex was exactly the opposite. He could do no wrong. He had to have this and that, and whatever he wanted to do he could do. When my father died, he left the boy at school an income of two thousand a year without any qualifications or conditions whatever, other than that he was unable to touch the capital.

“When he returned from college for the last time Rex was flash. He was no good. Whatever he wanted he must have. He even regarded me as a semi-idiot. He said I’d have to be modern, have to have aeroplanes on the station to overlook the cattle instead of wasting time sending stockmen out. I refused, and he went down to Adelaide for two years and got himself taught to fly aeroplanes.

“News came that the trustees who managed his capital had dissipated it. Rex’s income stopped. I thought it a damn good thing it had stopped. Rex came home, and all the money he had was left over from the sale of an aeroplane and a car.

“I gave him all the chances, for he was my son; and when he laughed I gazed on the face of his mother. But he was finished. He debauched the blacks. He would clear out with those of his own kidney, go bush in the open country, hunting women of the Illprinka tribe.

“He was away on one of those expeditions when Flora came to manage the homestead, her father having followed her mother to the grave. She’d been here two months, and the place and life had become orderly and peaceful when Rex returned from the open country.

“You can imagine what followed. Rex wanted Flora, seemed to have the idea that Flora hadn’t a say in the matter. He swore he’d become reformed when she turned down his-well, unorthodox advances. He spurned his companions. He asked to be made my overseer, and I assented. He asked for a comfortable salary and I gave it to him. He swore he would be worthy of his name: he lasted five months.

“He offered Flora marriage, and Flora as kindly as possible told him she couldn’t marry him because she didn’t love him. So what did he do then? Why, he persuaded four of the blacks to join him, and they abducted Flora and ran off with her, headed for the open country. Burning Water and I caught up with them in time.

“The limit had been reached. I sacked Rex. Gave him a cheque for a thousand and told him if ever he showed his face here again I’d give him in charge for a dozen crimes we’d kept dark. Burning Water and his father dealt with the four blacks who had assisted in the abduction.

“Then followed the affair of the forged cheques. How could I prosecute a man who reminded me of Tarlalin every time he laughed: a man whom I would try to please just to see him laugh? After that there followed a period of peace, broken by the first theft of my cattle and a letter Rex wrote. He said I was getting too old to manage a station, and that I would have to retire to live comfortably in a city. He would take over the station, and if I refused to accept this idea he’d ruin me by stealing all my cattle and running them in the open country, where he’d form a temporary station of his own.

“I took no notice of his absurd ideas and his threat. Then he and the Illprinka blacks made the second raid, and another letter came from Rex demanding that I retire and hand the station over to him. I was to signal my surrender by making an oil smoke. Instead, Burning Water and I took a party of blacks into the open country and tried to locate the cattle. We found none and lost two of the blacks in a fight.