Marngrook and Other Award-winning Stories from the Stringybark Australian History Award Read online

  Marngrook

  And Other Award-winning Stories from the Stringybark Australian History Award

  Edited by David Vernon

  Selected by

  Gregory Blake, Jamie Hodder, Nadine Smith and David Vernon

  Published by Stringybark Publishing

  PO Box 464, Hall, ACT 2618, Australia

  http://www.stringybarkstories.net

  Smashwords Edition

  Copyright: This revised collection, David Vernon, 2018

  Copyright: Individual stories, the authors, various.

  These are works of fiction and unless otherwise made clear, those mentioned in these stories are fictional characters and do not relate to anyone living or dead.

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of these authors.

  Contents

  Introduction — David Vernon

  Footsteps in the Dark — Elsie Johnstone

  Blow for Blow — Ted Witham

  The Death of Beatrice Mayhew — Janet Lowe

  Ace of Spades — Peter Rondel

  Badu Boys Rule! — Dianne Bates

  The Cat — Frank Stubbs

  A Bouquet of Lettuces — Beverley Lello

  Remembrance Day — Julie Davies

  Donald Charles at Ziza — Anne Atkinson

  Encounter — Laurence de B Anderson

  Deportation — Carol Price

  Marngrook — Sean Quentin Lee

  Elsewhere — Rosalind Moran

  Upon the Flat — Julian Howard

  Act of Defiance — Harold Mally

  New World — Valerie Volk

  Beechworth — Thea Biesheuvel

  On Mercy, Justice and Redemption — Frances Warren

  Fire — Frank Stubbs

  Retribution — Kate Komoll

  Water Rights — Kate King

  Kamilaroi Country — Wendy Seddon

  To my Sister, Hessie Burke — Beverley Lello

  Bush Hero — Dianne Bates

  The Woman at the Back of the Room — JB Rowley

  The Bunyip Hunter — Michelle Williams

  The Stringybark Australian History Short Story Award 2011

  About the Judges

  Introduction

  — David Vernon

  Australian history has, sadly, a poor reputation amongst Australians. “Dull,” “Tedious,” “Short,” are some of the words bandied about when Australians are asked about their past. This jaundiced view says more about some of the teaching at school that Australian school children have endured, rather than the reality of the subject. Having visited a few contemporary classrooms as an adult and spoken with my sons’ history teachers, I hold out much hope that Australian history will no longer be seen as dull, but rather as a fascinating area for study.

  History doesn’t just tell us musty facts from the past; history helps explain the present and predict the future. My enthusiasm for history (and particularly Australian history) led me to run the Stringybark Australian History Short Story Award that has culminated in this fascinating anthology of Australian history stories. Some of these stories are factual and some are not; but all shed light upon some part of our history — both modern and also pre-white settlement.

  This book is the fifth anthology of short stories from Stringybark Publishing’s short story awards. It consists of twenty-six short stories that received highly commended awards (or won prizes) from a field of 117 entries.

  Nobody after reading what is presented here can claim that Australian history is dull! Have a wonderful time exploring the nooks and by-ways of Australian history that these twenty-four talented writers illuminate.

  David Vernon

  Editor and Judge

  “Stringybark”

  January 2012

  Footsteps in the Dark

  — Elsie Johnstone

  The green and cream tramcar rattled its way down Victoria Avenue to the beach on its last journey for the day. It spewed out its three remaining passengers, all of them men, who disappeared into the gloomy obscurity of the wartime blackout.

  Windows of the houses breasting the elegant avenue were covered on the inside with black cloth, ensuring that no shingled ray shone onto the street. Men were especially employed to enforce this deep darkness because light would alert the enemy that Melbourne city lay beneath, and they might drop their bombs.

  It was eleven thirty and the tram only needed to return to the South Melbourne Depot before the crew of two stamped their cards, collected their personal items and signed off for the night.

  No self-respecting female would be on the streets by herself at this dark and dangerous hour. There was a killer lurking in the shadows. There had been a spate of murders lately, all of them women. No apparent motive or reason; simply the wrong place, the wrong time.

  A woman named Ivy Violet McLeod had been found beaten, strangled, and left for dead in the doorway of a shop, on this very avenue in Albert Park. Her purse was still in her bag, so it was evident that robbery was not the motive. Six days later, a thirty one year old woman named Pauline Thompson was found strangled. When last seen she was in the company of a young American. Less than a week passed before Gladys Hosking was murdered on her way home from work at the Melbourne University Chemistry Library. Again, robbery was not the motive. Several women who been lucky enough to survive similar attacks reported that the man assailant was one of the many American soldiers who had swarmed into the city at this time. There was a killer on the loose and the population was petrified.

  Claire was aware and alarmed by these murders, as was everyone in this city. With many of the men at war, the women were left to do the work, to care for the children and the elderly. There was nobody to protect them.

  As the tramcar rumbled along, Claire took time to pause and reflect about these worrying matters as she hung from the safety strap above her head. Her balance was good. She had learnt to be in tune with her host and anticipate its jerky starts, its proppy stops, its rocks and rolls.

  Tonight, she was weary and her feet were tired because she had done an eight-hour shift. Exhausted, she sat down heavily on one of the long wooden bench seats that ran the whole length of the internal department. She could do this now, as there was just she and the driver on the tram, and they were not taking more passengers.

  Her sensible, polished brown leather shoes were placed together on the floor in a lady like manner, with her brown straight skirt pulled down demurely over her knees, ensuring modesty. She did not wear stockings, just a brown line, drawn on with an eyebrow pencil and looking like a seam, down the back of her shapely legs. This trick was used by many young women on account of the fact that it was wartime and stockings were hard to buy. Her dark hair was swept away from her face in a neat, low bun. Enough curls escaped around her pretty face to soften the severe, brown captain’s hat. It was trimmed in a green and cream ribbon bearing the emblem of the Melbourne Metropolitan Tramways Board on the front. Her brown tailored jacket was a little shabby around the edges from the constant rubbing of the leather conductor’s bag sitting on her lap like a child.

  She began reconci
ling the money paid in fares with the numbers of the tickets sold. It should all balance. Coins were easy enough to count as they were organized in cylindrical carriers of appropriate size and shape. The notes held deep within the bag’s pouch were withdrawn, straightened, counted and returned. She inspected the metal ticket holder, flicking through the tickets with the aid of a brown rubber on her right thumb, writing the top numbers of each in her notebook. Perhaps she might be quick away from the depot tonight.

  The tram jolted to a halt. Almost instinctively she placed the bag on the seat, took her pole from where it was stored above the tram windows, and stepped out into the cold air to hook the overhead conductor onto the power line that would alter the direction of this beast and take them to their journey’s end. Minutes later, the tram shuddered to a halt, the driver called his farewells, and she alighted and entered the warmth of the company office where the bursar would collect and collate her money.

  “Would you like me to phone for a taxi, Claire?” asked Stan, the cashier as he tallied the takings. “I’ll put in a call now, and by the time we finish here, it will come.”

  A cab would cost money Claire could ill afford, so she replied that it wouldn’t be necessary, it wasn’t far to walk, and she could do with the exercise.

  “I don’t like a young lady like you out in the dark with all that is going on around here lately. There’s a murderer on the loose.”

  “No, no, I’ll be fine. It isn’t far to go,” lied Claire as she collected her handbag from her locker, signed off and headed off home. It was a lonely, twenty-minute walk to where she lived in Ashworth Street with her mother and her disabled brother. Money was tight as she was their sole support. Taxis were a luxury they could ill afford.

  “Dear God, Stan put the wind up me then!” thought Claire. “He needn’t have mentioned the murderer.”

  Stoically, putting that thought aside she started out, head down, into the still, misty night.

  In Montague Street she became aware of a single set of footfalls behind. Not the click clack of a woman’s heel but a small click of a metal heel protector followed the steady dull sound of leather on the pavement.

  “Click, thud, click thud, click thud.” A man’s sturdy boot. A man’s long stride.

  She noticed, but she did not panic. It was not yet midnight. All sorts of people were out and about. She herself had just finished her shift. There was nothing sinister about footsteps on the street.

  Just to make sure, Claire changed her course, stepping into O’Grady Street.

  “He won’t follow,” she hoped, nervously.

  He did!

  “Click, thud, click thud.” Fearful now. Was she imagining it or were the footsteps getting closer?

  Her heart palpitated, her throat tightened. It may just be coincidence.

  “Perhaps this is the way he always comes. Perhaps this is where he lives.”

  She stepped into Merton Street. Still the footsteps followed.

  Anxiety.

  Down Finlay Street.

  Her steps quickened. She was beginning to panic.

  She was out of her comfort zone for she had never taken this route before. Normally she would have continued down Montague Street to Kerford Road, and then home. The steps seemed to be gaining on her.

  Not a star in the sky, the sea mist chilling the air, dark and still, the houses standing silent sentinel. Just these two people! Footsteps in the dark!

  “Stay calm!”

  Quickly, over Richardson and into Phillipson Street. It was even darker here.

  Change routes again.

  Fear, fright, frenzy!

  Danks Street, lined with its small terraces resting shoulder to shoulder, was more populated. “I will be safer here,” she thought anxiously. “Someone will hear me.”

  The steps seemed to be getting closer.

  Strident strides.

  Terror!

  She could feel the denseness of him. He was almost upon her. In desperation, she turned into one of the terraces, hoping he might think she was safely at her home, that he might give up and leave her alone.

  The gate squeaked, her heart pounded, thumping in her ears. Stay dead still. Let him pass.

  But no! He opened the gate and he followed her in.

  “Get away! Get away!” she breathed, too petrified to shout. “This is my house; this is where I live. Go away!” She tried to swing her handbag at him. He brushed it aside, taking her hand mid air.

  Her knees almost buckled beneath her. She should run but he stood between her and the gate.

  He felt her fear.

  “Madam, I am sorry, but this is not your house. It is my house. This is where I live.”

  She burst into uncontrollable and deep sobs as the front door opened a fraction, the pencil of light revealing a smallish, grey haired lady in a pink dressing gown, who called into the darkness, “Malcolm, is that you? Are you all right?”

  “Yes Mother, we have a frightened young lady here, claiming that this is her house. Can I bring her inside, while we sort it out.”

  And sort it out they did. In front of the coal fire, over a cup of hot, sweet tea! He walked her the rest of the way home that night and the rest is history.

  That is how my parents met.

  Historical note: On 9 November 1942, Edward Joseph Leonski, (also known as the Brownout Strangler) was hanged at Pentridge Prison for the murder of Ivy Violet McLeod, Pauline Thompson and Gladys Hosking. Leonski, who was 24 at the time of his execution gave no reason for his crimes.

  Elsie Johnstone is a writer and author from Melbourne in Victoria. She has published two books, Our Little Town, Growing up in Lakes Entrance and Lover Husband Father Monster, a novel in two voices by Elsie and Graeme Johnstone. She has also been included in the Stringybark anthology A Visit from the Duchess.

  Blow for Blow

  — Ted Witham

  The kangaroo meat smelled tangy as it crackled in the camp-fire. Joe Forde had been camped out twenty miles south of The Spring for two weeks minding 97 sheep for Mr Darling. Life on his own had a different rhythm to the work gang on Fairfield, Mr Darling’s main farm. Here the daily tasks of moving sheep to water and new pasture and the nightly challenge to coax them into the portable fencing kept the loneliness at bay. Joe missed the banter and piss-taking of his fellow lags. But it was sign of the trust Mr Darling had in him that led him to offer Joe this job. And Joe took it. It was a step to living a respectable life in this colony.

  Tonight he was camped near a creek the local aborigines called Wadjekanup. It was still running, just, this December. The roo meat was nearly ready. The sun had disappeared and Joe watched as the eucalypts along the creek bed lost their colour and faded to a uniform grey. Just the time of day when vision blurs and you are not sure that you are seeing what you are seeing. There was a movement — or was there? — on the far side of the bleating sheep. Just a shadow in the twilight, just a swirling of the dust raised by the feet of 97 sheep, or the movement of the camp-fire smoke, or was there something?

  Joe was comfortable. It was nothing or all of those things. The light was fading and the flickering camp-fire provided the most reliable light source now. Soon Joe started tearing off strips of meat and relaxed into the warm feeling of eating well.

  The night was cold, but with his greatcoat around him, Joe slept well. He woke to the first grey lights of dawn. He stirred the ashes into life, boiled the billy and poured a pannikin of tea. The sheep woke too, and began their bleating. Joe instantly felt ill at ease. Something was not quite right. Maybe he should have investigated the movement last night. He laboriously changed the configuration of the fence into a narrow funnel allowing the sheep to run one by one down to the creek. 94. 95. 96. Damn! He trusted his counting. There was definitely one fewer sheep that when they had been rounded up the night before.

  “Those savages,” he complained aloud, and then saw Billy standing by the large flooded gum on the creek bank.

  “Hey, Mista Joe!” B
illy called.

  “Hello, Billy!” he replied cautiously. “I've a question to ask you.”

  Billy came loping over — that style of running that the natives could keep up mile after mile. “Yes, Mista Joe?”

  “I lost one of these sheep last night,” Joe said. “Know anything about it?”

  Billy smiled. He wasn't about to hurry his answer.

  “How many sheep you lost?” he asked eventually.

  “Just the one.”

  “Hey, Mista Joe, what you eat last night?”

  “What is it to you?”

  “What you eat? Yongar?” Billy used the Noongar word for kangaroo.

  “What if I did?”

  “How many you eat, Mista Joe?”

  “One. What ya think? I ate ten on my own?”

  “I think you eat one yongar. Him my brother. I eat one sheep. Is fair.”

  At this, Joe's temper could not be contained.

  “You keep away from these sheep, ya hear? You touch any sheep, I'll blow yer brains out. These are my sheep.”

  But as suddenly as he had arrived, Billy had already disappeared into the morning haze.

  Historical note: The Swan River Colony began as a free settlement in 1830. From 1850-1868 the Colony requested England to send convicts. ‘Fairfield’, a farm 300 km south of Perth near Kojonup (‘The Spring’) employed large numbers of convicts.

  The incident in ‘Blow for Blow’ was inspired by an incident described in Kim Scott’s new novel about first contacts, That Deadman Dance (Picador, 2011).

  Ted Witham has tried to escape the pull of his native Western Australia by living for a few short years in Melbourne, the US and Mauritius — without success. He is happy now to be retired in the South West with his wife Rae and spaniel Jeannie, and to have real time to write stories, poems and hymns. He had an earlier story published in the Stringybark anthology, The Umbrella’s Shade.