Peter Carey - Illywhacker

If I had known she was carrying snakes, I doubt whether I would have let her come to our camp. However, once Charles had decided she was his mother he had no intention of being parted from her again. He picked up her two suitcases and no one could persuade him to let anyone else share the load. He struggled along on his two sturdy bandy legs, jutting his jaw, more like a midget than a child.

Sonia led the way through the blackberries, holding aside brambles for her brother. Leah followed her luggage. I followed her.

She did not walk like a dancer at all. You would not think it the same person. She held her head high on her long neck and locked off her upper body into a rigid unit while her long legs perambulated independently beneath her.

"My name is Leah," Leah said. "And I am a married woman."

Bedevilled by vanity, troubled by falling hair, I had my skull shaved quite bald in 1926, a fashion I maintained for twenty-one years. And although I was much given to romancing about the sexual attractiveness of a man's bald head there had been no practical proof of the theory. Nor, with the advent of Leah Goldstein, is there going to be any change. So there is no use – as you watch me roll up a log to the camp fire for her, as my children squeeze on either side of her like bookends – no use at all in you skipping pages, racing ahead, hoping for a bit of hanky-panky. Leah was not only a married woman, but one with a firm sense of right and wrong and, having modestly discarded her feathers, she armoured herself against misunderstanding with a severe black dress, long woollen socks, and a blue-dyed greatcoat of the type dispensed to the unemployed.

The three of them sat in the firelight watching me prepare a meal, a dish known as Bungaree Trout which is made by slicing large potatoes, dipping them in batter, and frying them. If you eat it in daylight your eyes will tell you that you are eating fish, but if you eat it in the dark there is no fooling yourself: you're a poor man eating spuds.

We, the Badgery family, were in the habit of keeping ourselves to ourselves, and I cooked the potatoes in a mingy sort of spirit. If the dancer had once expressed a desire to leave I would not have argued with her. But she stayed and when it was teatime I had no choice but to feed her.

I piled the trout high on a tin plate and invited her to tuck in. The loud noises coming from her stomach had given me fair warning of her appetite.

"So tell me," Leah said, when she was half way through her third trout, "what sort of business are you in?"

"Mining," I said.

You see what has happened: how the lies that once smoked like dreams have diminished to such an extent that by 1931 they are ignoble snivelling things, excuses more than lies, the sort of lies my son told when he was caught stealing at State School Number 1204. They sent him home with notes about it. They strapped his hands; they caned his backside; they hit his warty knuckles with wooden rulers. This did no good at all. He rubbed peppercorns on his palms to stop the pain. He rubbed gum resin on his knuckles to ward off the sting. He put handkerchiefs in his pants to cushion the blows. In Castlemaine he stole an American dollar from the parson's son and claimed he had found it in the gutter. In the gutter! I understood his interest in money, but it was subsistence lying and it has no lasting value no matter how you look at it. And I, with this cock-and-bull story about mining, was no better. I lied to this strange woman (this trout-wolfer) because I was unemployed and could not bring myself to admit it. I did it to ward off the look I had seen in those Ford agents, whose sugary glaze of compassion did nothing to prevent – in fact intensified – my sense of failure.

Likewise, when I was forced to line up with the unemployed at Bungaree at spud-digging time, in Mildura when the grapes were on, at Kaniva and Shepparton for the soft-fruit season, I held myself aloof from my fellows. I, having shone my boots and ironed my shirt, was not one of them. When some stirrers up at Bungaree tried to organize a strike against the spud farmers who were paying only sixpence a bag, I was called a scab. There were plenty of us, don't worry, and it was us scabs who brought in the spuds for those celebrated spud cockies at Bungaree.

"What sort of mining?" my guest inquired politely, while my son, unseen by anyone, jiggled a little piece of wire inside the lock of her battered brown suitcase. (If you look at him now, pressing his body against the dancer while he undertakes his inquiry, you will be certain he will grow up to be a thief. He has all the qualities, the most important of which is sheer persistence.)

"Gold-mining," I said.

The dancer snorted. An extraordinary sound. The shape of her body, the elegance of her legs, the broomstick spine, the tidy contours of her flinty face, gave no indication that such an untidy explosion could emerge from her. Sonia was entranced. She liked odd things and I could see the noise attracted her. She came and sat beside me and squeezed my hand secretly. A joy to Sonia was nothing if it could not be communicated.

"It is gold", the dancer said sternly, reaching for a fourth Bungaree trout, frowning, and then deciding against it, "that is the curse of this country." She wiped her mouth with a little square of torn newspaper, a gesture that smacked of both fastidiousness and complacency. "It is what is wrong with it, has always been wrong with it, and once you look at what gold has done, you can go back and look at the attitude towards land ownership and find it is exactly the same."

I had no idea what she was talking about, but I was offended just the same. I took the last slice of trout, broke it in half and gave it to my children.

"It is gold", Leah said, "that has led ordinary working men and women into terrible delusion; it has made them think that they can be the exception to ordinary working men and women all through history; it has made them think that all they need is luck. They have been blinded by gold. They have imagined that all they need to do is drive their pick into the right spot in the ground and they will be another Hannan – they'll be bosses themselves. It has corrupted them. It has been the same with land. Men who spent their lives suffering from the ruling classes went out and stole land from its real owners. Hey, presto, I'm a boss. There has been no history here," she said. "The country has woken like a baby and had to discover everything for itself and only now are people learning what the ruling class has done to us, that we have been lied to and deceived about some Working Man's Paradise and we need more than luck to have freedom. So if you are still, in 1931, looking for gold to solve your problems, I must say you are barking up the wrong tree."

"I did not ask you to share my tucker," I said, "to hear you insult me in front of my children."

"It's not personal," she said. It may have been a trick of the light but I imagined I saw her eyes flood with tears. "Why do people always take it personally? I try to have an intelligent conversation, but there is no tradition of intellectual discussion here. When a subject is discussed the women simper and say they have no ideas and the men want to settle it with a fight. I am not attacking you personally, Mr Badgery." Her voice was half strangled. "I am attempting to analyse the history of this country and point out why the working classes have always acted as if they're going to be bosses tomorrow. I'm trying to point out why we're in this mess. But if you want to take it personally, that's your right. You can give me my marching orders now, and I'll go."

She took another square of newspaper from her pocket and blew her nose. It would have taken a hard heart to evict her. She rubbed the corner of her eye with the sleeve of her coat and stared into the fire.