Unfinished Business

There were Cantys still living at Malingabar. There was a death notice in the paper. George Edward Richard Canty, Centennial Creek, Malingabar, aged 87 years. Russell had to read the notice two or three times before he realised why the name was familiar to him.
      He hadn't read William's letters since Cornwall. He hadn't shown them to anyone, not even Rachel. Godfrey had mentioned them in his last letter. He wanted to know if his cousin had found a place for them, some appropriate institution or historical society. Russell hadn't replied. He didn't feel he was ready to part with them.
      He was reminded of Hal's monograph of his great-grandfather. He made a note to look up the copy in the municipal library. Russell thought it would be interesting to read it again, find the part where the girl should have been. He wanted to imagine her there, living flesh in a dun-coloured landscape. He wanted to find a place for her.
      In the meantime he drove up-country for George Canty's funeral.

He arrived late (it was further than he remembered), the mourners were gone. He walked among the graves for a while, reading the names and dates. Many of the graves were unmarked.
      He had memories of Malingabar from camping trips taken with Hal when he was a boy. It was neglected and forgotten, a scattered community of weathered cottages and small acreages. Goats grazed in the street. There was a primary school where small black children chanted rhymes, and a general store with a petrol bowser, a relic of earlier days, blistering in the sun. There was no hotel.
      William Dyson had selected land near here.
      A man approached as he was leaving the cemetery. He was elderly, unshaven, but dressed with particular care in a dark loose-fitting suit. He waited while Russell closed the gate.
      'You looking for someone, mate? A relative, maybe.'
      Russell paused a moment, considering his reply.
      'I'm looking for the grave of Polly Longstockings,' he said.

* * *

August 19 Conversation with Leon. Haven't seen him for months, not since before we went overseas. Though he may have been at the service, I don't remember. He didn't say. Skirted around the subject for a few moments then asked me if there were any 'theories' about Jenna's disappearance. Kept referring to it as a 'queer business'. I asked if he'd heard the one about parallel worlds. L. looking acutely uncomfortable. Thought I was joking but wasn't sure. He mentioned the Burney case, listed for next month. Hoped Jenna's absence wouldn't help the bastard get off...

August 20 No contact with Adrian. Rachel says he needs time, he's confused. Keeps asking what the blue was over, getting nothing out of Adrian. Thinking of that slap makes me go cold, but it's done now. Don't want to discuss it with Rachel.

August 21 Found a pair of Jenna's shoes in the wardrobe. Can't think how I missed them. They look old, summer sandals, red and white straps, down at the heels. I threw them in the bin then fished them out again. Rachel made such a fuss over the clothes. She went to St Vinnies and bought one of the skirts. Never wears it, I'm sure. Just being sentimental.

August 22 Rachel called, asking for money. She doesn't believe how much Adrian can eat these days. He's started playing football or basketball (she's not sure which). He swings on the pantry door after tea, looking for chocolate and biscuits. She told him, your father should be feeding you, not me. He went to his room and sulked. He's a great sulker. Now she's upset because he's stopped calling her nanna. He doesn't call her anything. It seems he's given up using names altogether...

August 24 Thinking about that little piece of serpentine stone. It was on the dressing table where I left it, covered in dust. It was meant for Rachel, but what would she make of it now? I was almost afraid to touch it. Perhaps it would be better in Rachel's cabinet, an icon of sorts, to be taken out and admired by cronies and sundry dinner guests...

* * *

He'd left his telephone number with the man at the cemetery at Malingabar. The man had said, 'You want Luke. No one been buried around here in eighty years, nearly, Luke don't remember. Maybe I'll talk to him for you.'
      Russell spent days waiting for the telephone to ring. When it did it was usually Rachel wanting to talk about Adrian. The boy seemed settled for the moment but Rachel insisted they 'get things sorted out' by Christmas.
      Russell composed conciliatory speeches, but couldn't act. He passed the boy on the street one evening without speaking to him. Adrian had a girl on his arm, a skinny freckled kid of about fourteen or fifteen.
      'Adrian's got a girl,' he rang Rachel later.
      'I know.'
      'No one told me. No one tells me anything.'
      'I tell you things all the time,' his mother complained. 'You never listen.'
      'I don't want him fooling around with some girl. He's got his HSC at the end of the year. It'll ruin his concentration.'
      'Don't be ridiculous,' his mother said, and hung up.


He received an odd little letter and a photograph from the Cornish constabulary. Some articles of women's underwear had been found on a peninsula just north of the one where he'd last seen Jenna. The underwear was white, Jenna's size but of a style he'd never known her to wear.
      The photograph disturbed him. A limbless display model had been dressed in the discovered underwear and then photographed against a clean pink wall. The head was turned slightly to one side. He could imagine eyes, heavy-lidded, downcast; the eyes of a coquette in a soft porn movie.
      An elaborate ensemble, calculated, it seemed, to arouse or titillate rather than jog his memory.

* * *

Extract from a discussion paper on Aboriginal heritage on the North Coast prepared by the Department of Planning.

The first Europeans on the coast were cedar getters. They arrived on the Macleay before 1835 and were cutting timber on the Richmond by 1842 and on the Tweed in 1844. Squatting licences were taken out on the Clarence in 1839 and by 1845 most of the valley had been taken up.
      While sometimes violent, contact between cedar getters and Aboriginals was limited. The arrival of the squatters was more devastating. As the flocks of sheep competed with game for the grasslands, Aborigines attempted to preserve their livelihood by killing sheep and shepherds. The settlers responded by killing Aborigines, at first in retaliation, but soon in a systematic drive to completely wipe them out. Therefore, in the contact area of this region, there were periods of violent confrontation. Sporadic guerilla-style warfare continued for up to 30 years after contact, particularly on the eastern scarp of the tablelands.
      The massacre and systematic extermination of Aborigines by settlers, aided by the Border Police and later the Native Police, had broken the back of the Aboriginal resistance in this region by the 1860s.
      The Robertson Land Act of 1861, allowing for selection before survey, and the breaking up of the squatters 'runs' into small farms brought intensive and permanent contact with whites and complete dispossession of Aboriginal land. Movement across the landscape in the traditional sense was to become impossible...
      There was no access to most of the former hunting grounds and the game had been so reduced that new camps had to be directed towards the only alternative food source, the white stations and settlements. These were the first fringe camps.
      Aborigines provided cheap labour for the white farms, as well as being exploited for their superior skills in bushcraft (such as cutting bark for fencing and housing or tracking stock in the bush). Their camps frequently had to be moved as white settlement intensified and they often had to leave land that they themselves had cleared...
      In 1882 the Aborigines Protection Board of New South Wales was established and the first reserves were set up in the region...


Extract from a monograph on William David Dyson, selector, 1821-1901, by H. Dyson. (Unpublished MSS)

There is anecdotal evidence that around 1870 a scurrilous document was circulated implicating Dyson in the murder of blacks at Coggan's Punt (now Punt Lane). No copies of the account - purportedly written (or dictated) by a surviving Aboriginal woman - have been located. It is doubtful whether any existed. Dyson may have fallen victim to an insidious rumour campaign (there were a number of disputes over land ownership at the time) but if this was so, his reputation appears to have survived untarnished...

* * *

A party of primary school children were huddled around a table a few metres away, busy with crayons and scraps of paper. They were drawing dinosaurs.
      Russell read the passage again.
      It is doubtful whether any existed...
      He flipped through the pages to check Hal's sources, but there was only the vaguest reference to local historical records.
      Anecdotal evidence... Hal was never one to put much credence on anecdotal evidence. His trust was in official words and in what he could touch and see. Anecdotal evidence suggested gossip and deception.
      'I've written a little paper on my great-grandfather,' Russell could remember him saying. 'It's nothing much. Just the facts, I'm only interested in the facts.'
      Russell pushed the pamphlet back on the shelf where he'd found the glossy Department of Planning publication. He regretted now having read it. Something had been spoilt for him; something he'd wanted had been made to seem foolish and sentimental.
      What had mattered to Hal was not the facts but the denial of elusive truths.
      Walking away he bumped the side of the table where the children were sitting. A small girl shot him an accusing stare. 'I'm drawing a stegosaurus,' she announced sternly.
      Her pronunciation, he noted, was exquisite.

* * *

September 3 Wrote to Godfrey. What happened to the copy of PL's Account William sent his brother? Asked Godfrey to investigate. Must have been there somewhere among his mother's effects.
      Mentioned the letter and photograph from the Cornish constabulary. Without comment. Showed the photo to Rachel yesterday. (Why the delay?) She went quite pale. Told her I was sure it wasn't Jenna's gear. She left the room. I heard the bathroom door close. (Occurred to me, I've never seen my mother cry.) She returned after about five minutes and told me to go home. There was a smell about her, the faintest whiff of puke.

September 5 (6am) Dreamed of her. She was crossing a field of long brown winter grass. She was far away, waving or beckoning, trying to catch my attention. I saw her but was afraid. The grass was waving too, waving to and fro in the warm afternoon breeze. (Why do I think it was afternoon?) There was such quiet, no birdsong, no voices, traffic. Nothing. It was a place I'd never been to before, a great empty stretch of pasture with hills all around, thick with scrub.
      Why was she waving at me? Did she think she knew me?
      I looked away. The sky over the distant hills was the deepest blue I'd ever seen, almost black, the green grey black of a squall coming up from the south. There was a dusty red road leading down to a creek. It was shady there, the grass sea-green; cattle were grazing. I unlaced my shoes.
      She was in the creek before me, bathing. All I could see was her head and shoulders; beneath the surface, this long dark quivering shadow.
      She raised her arm again and I waded in. I was unafraid this time, almost joyful. I swam into the middle of the creek. The water was cold and dark and deep. It was oddly erotic, swimming between the snaking shadows of her long black legs...

* * *

One morning, as he was rinsing the breakfast dishes, stacking them neatly along the drainer as Jenna had always done, the telephone rang. It was the man he'd met in the cemetery at Malingabar.
      'Have you got something for me?' Russell asked.
      'Yes, mate.'
      'You know where the grave is, the one I'm looking for?'
      'It's not in Malingabar, I know that.'
      'You've spoken to your friend. He told you that.'
      'He did.'
      There was a pause in which Russell believed he could hear echoes of old conversations crossing the line.
      'Will he talk to me?'


That same morning a letter came addressed to Jenna in a hand he didn't recognise, and postmarked Toowoomba, Queensland. It was from Hilary, the woman they'd met in the shabby back-street pub in London. The letter was brief, little more than a few hurriedly jotted notes. Hilary said she was happy to have returned to the 'country of my father', though of course there was no way that she could stay. She thanked Jenna for having given her the Dysons' address and wondered if she might visit before she returned to England. 'I can't tell you how much your listening to me helped,' she wrote finally. 'At the time I thought I could only talk to you the way I did because I would never see you again. But I feel differently now. Even if things had not turned out all right for me I would forever imagine you wondering what had happened. It is the curse of a tidy mind that makes me despair of "unfinished business". I do like to see ends properly tied. Has it occurred to you I may have more in common with your husband (do you remember what you said?) than you thought..?'
      Russell folded the letter and returned it to the envelope. He would have to write to her, of course, give her the sad news. She would not come to visit now, not to see him. He felt a moment's unease at the reference to himself, but let it pass. Jenna would have enjoyed a joke at his expense; he couldn't believe it would've been cruelly meant.
      Leaving the letter on the hallstand he went upstairs and sat for a while on the bed. Hilary's letter had caused something strange to happen, something quite wonderful. Reading it he had been less conscious of what Hilary had written than the place that Jenna - the living Jenna - had taken in her thoughts at the time. It was as if her ignorance of Jenna's death had allowed him to read the letter through Jenna's eyes; indeed, as if it were Jenna herself reading the letter while he peered surreptitiously over her shoulder.
      All at once he was reminded of how Rachel had gone about exorcising ghosts after his father's death, and was ashamed that, over the last few weeks, his own sense of loss had driven him to perform the same pitiful exorcism. Looking around, he became anxious to find something, some small thing that might have been precious to Jenna, and his eyes settled on the tiny piece of serpentine stone that she'd brought back from Cornwall to give to Rachel. He picked it up, weighed it carefully in his hand, and for the first time was no longer afraid of it. It hadn't been precious to Jenna in the way that he'd intended yet, warming in his hand, it took on a significance he'd been partly aware of all along. He realised now why he'd been so reluctant to let it go. It had powers, powers of association that connected with something deep inside him. Slipping it, almost without thinking, into his pocket, he went quietly downstairs and picked up his car keys.


The day was warm with a faint breeze coming in off the coast. Over the ranges small clumps of dense cumulus cloud had begun to form, though the sky to the south was clear.
      He drove north along the highway for an hour or so and then turned inland. There was little traffic on the road, the long simmering bitumen broken just here and there by clusters of brightly coloured cottages, the odd hotel.
      He stopped briefly at a solitary service station to fill up with petrol. As he pulled up, a road gang opposite threw down their shovels and moved into the shade to drink their tea. A short distance further on the river appeared, a slow sweeping curve of shimmering silver.
      The day grew hot, the early cloud long dissipated. Across a narrow wooden bridge he hit the dirt.
      The road climbed steadily, frequently winding back on itself, loose edges crumbling down the steep gullies. Away from the river, the grass was dry and sparse. He passed through four or five different properties, rattling across rusting iron grids, though the only evidence of roadside grazing was a rare pat of steaming dung. Just before he arrived at Malingabar he scattered a small herd of brahman crossing the road to drink at a muddy dam.


His name was Luke Coneybar. He was seventy-nine years of age, and four months. He lived about three kilometres out of Malingabar in a three-roomed cottage built of asbestos sheets and corrugated iron.
      Luke walked with a stick which seemed more of a handicap to him than his shaky legs. His eyes were sharp and attentive. His wife had died the previous year, but there was a girl, a young woman of about eighteen, the child of a near neighbour, who came in and looked after him.
      The girl's name was Penny. She sat in the kitchen, listening to the radio while the old man talked. Later a boy came in. He was quiet and shy and went to sit with the girl. She reminded Russell of Clara, dark and pretty, but without Clara's intensity. She wore tight pants and had dust in her hair and went barefoot.
      The boy plainly adored her.
      Luke was talking about his family. He showed Russell a photograph, a group of four elderly unsmiling women dressed in white twinsets and wearing white sandals. Two wore headscarves and had handbags slung over their bare arms.
      'My aunts,' Luke said grimly, 'going to church.' He turned the photograph over so that Russell could see the date: June 1952.
      Russell smiled. It might have been a photograph of some of his own dour-looking relatives, except that their faces were black.
      The girl brought some tea.
      'Are you writing a book?' Luke asked. The tea the girl had brought was hot. Luke lifted the mug to his lips and blew cooling ripples across the surface while Russell constructed a reply.
      'I have some letters written by my great-great-grandfather,' he said. 'His name was William Dyson. He took up a selection not far from here. Sometime around 1866 an Aboriginal girl was placed in his care, an unusually tall girl, for an Aboriginal. She was mute...'
      He paused while Luke situated these random details of another's past into the landscape of his own. The old man's great unblinking eyes closed for a second.
      'Of course,' Russell said, uneasy for some reason, 'that was a long time ago...'
      Luke opened his eyes again.
      'What did you say your name was?'
      'Dyson. My great-great-grandfather was William Dyson.'
      'No Dysons around these parts,' Luke said emphatically.
      'No. There were Cantys though. William Dyson mentions a Canty who lived at Malingabar. Richard Canty.'
      The old man laughed, a little unkindly. 'Cantys, lots of Cantys. Long time ago. Not any more.'
      'There was a funeral...' Russell began.
      Luke laughed again, and fell silent. Russell sipped at his cooling tea. He was curious to know why the name Canty should make the old man laugh. He thought there might have been a feud at some time, a falling out of friends.
      'Bad neighbours, were they?' he asked.
      'Who?      
      'The Cantys.'
      'Whitefellas don't mix much with us blackfellas,' Luke said simply.
      'I see,' Russell said
      'Not even poor whitefellas,' Luke added. Russell thought he was going to laugh again, but he only sighed.


Luke pulled out more photographs of his family. He had convinced himself that Russell was writing a book. People often came poking around Malingabar, he said, looking for bits of history. Then they went away and wrote books and made a lot of money.
      Russell looked carefully at each of the photographs. He was hoping to find one of an ageing Aboriginal woman, taller than most. He thought she might have lived to be seventy or seventy-five, and been known to the young Luke. The old Luke couldn't say: to a child, one adult's head seemed much the same distance above his own as any other.
      'They called her Polly Longstockings,' Russell murmured in a voice that sounded quite unlike his own.
      Luke continued to delve among the family snapshots: the name, that waggish allusion to the girl's great height, meant nothing to him.
      Many of the photographs were from newspaper cuttings. They were yellow with age and had begun to tear along the folds. Luke kept them in a chocolate box tied with a length of twine to keep it all together.
      The box was so old it was splitting at the corners. There was a picture on the lid of Buckingham Palace.
      Presently he uncovered a small crumpled snap of a young girl. 'That's Ruthie,' Luke said.
      'Ruthie?'
      'My daughter. She died.'
      'I'm sorry.'
      'Long time ago now. She got knocked down by a car.' He stared at the photograph for a few moments without speaking. It was as if he was seeing it afresh, but from a great distance.
      He passed it to Russell. The girl was lying on a rug or blanket, apparently asleep. There was something awkward about her position.
      'When was this taken?' Russell asked.
      'After she got knocked down. Big property man from someplace, touring with his fancy-looking wife. They came and fetched me. Ruthie wasn't breathing too good. The property man said he had to take her to the hospital.'
      'Did he take the photo?'
      Luke nodded. 'His wife, this fancy-looking woman, she had a camera. I said, "You take a picture of my Ruthie in case she don't come back." Blackfellas didn't own cameras in those days.'
      Russell was silent. He felt cold and slightly nauseous as if the girl had put something in his tea that had disagreed with him.
      Luke put the snap to one side.
      'You can have a lend of it,' he said generously. 'For your book.'


There was a place, not far from Malingabar, where a town had been; a rumbustious mining town once, but now nothing more than a name on maps and fading signposts: a place of ghosts and shadows.
      And graves.
      Luke thought this might be the place he was looking for.
      'Big blackfellas' camp there once,' he told Russell. He could remember going there as a boy with his father to see relatives. They rode sometimes on the provisions cart, perched on kegs of beer, or bags of sugar and machinery parts.
      Luke's father had been a fencer and noted tracker. He had enjoyed great local prestige and influence.
      Russell had seen photographs of the town taken in the 1950s: a handful of tumbledown shacks and cottages, a few miserable-looking inhabitants living off small plots.
      He asked Luke if it wasn't a fine day for a drive.
      The old man eased himself out of his chair. He collected his stick and a battered straw hat, hanging behind the door. It was then a little after midday, the air hot and still.
      The girl wanted to come too. She cleared away the tea mugs and slipped on a pair of shoes. Her boyfriend hovered behind her. He had been so quiet Russell had forgotten he was there. His gaze now was cool and direct, slightly hostile. He wanted to come with them but was too proud, or too something to ask. He was waiting to be invited.


It was ten or twelve kilometres from Malingabar. A narrow concrete causeway took them across the low river. They followed a single rutted track where once a mail rider had brought letters and newspapers from Europe, four months old. There was nothing at the end of this road now except memories for old men like Luke, witness to a century of failed dreams and speculations.
      Then the gravel and dust gave way to grass. At the bottom of a dip they were stopped by a creek too deep for the car to ford. The banks were shaded and cool.
      Russell got out and doused his face and neck. The water was so cold he thought his skin would crack.
      'How much further?' he wanted to know.
      Luke knelt awkwardly in the dust. 'A mile, maybe.' He indicated with his stick a ridge of trees a hundred metres or so above the creek.
      'Past them trees it's all open and flat. Cemetery, what there is of it, just before a gully, under the trees on the far side. Nothing much to see now, just a few stones and a bit of fencing.'
      Russell slipped out of his shoes and socks and waded into the creek. The water came up to his knees and made him shake with the cold. He could hear Luke and the girl whispering behind him. The old man called out, 'You won't find no blackfellas' graves. No stones for blackfellas.' Half turning, he could see them, holding on to each other, seemingly fused in the irregular light. The boy stood slightly apart. He was silent; there was a look on his face, something like pity, or puzzlement.


A hawk was circling far above the few spare shrubs growing where the township had been. He stopped for a moment to observe its careful mapping of the ground. He had to shade his eyes from the blaze of the sun.
      Nothing else stirred. The land, as Luke had said, was open and flat.
      Why had he come? He kept thinking of that other great silent place, the Lizard heathland and, in particular, that lonely stretch of road where he'd got out of the car to photograph the tracking station on Goonhilly Down.
      He remembered Jenna sitting, sulking in the front seat.
      He walked on. A mob of cattle resting some distance off turned their ponderous heads as he approached. Nothing remained of the town, no tracks or brick stumps, no crumbling blackened chimneys. Just this silent treeless plain. It was as if every small item of human endeavour had been swept away overnight and the land returned to grass.
      Somewhere where a church or hotel might have been he stopped and looked around. The long summer grasses had died and gone to seed. A short way off, against the blue wash of the distant hills, something caught his eye; four or five weathered posts, dangling rails: and a tip of silver from the sun.


It was cooler there under the fringe of trees. Fallen branches and the great carcase of a eucalypt, gutted by fire, littered the ground. Once this had been an enclosure of tidy graves.
      Was this the place where they'd lowered the remains of Polly Longstockings?
      There was only one engraved stone: to the memory of James Ward who departed this life 22nd April 1911 aged 80 years and 9 months; also Mary Ward who departed this life 15th December 1915 aged 86 years. REQUIESCAT IN PACE.
      Storm and fire and sun had diminished the stone. A low rusting iron railing surrounded the couple's remains: a single bloom of bladderwort sprouted from the flattened grass.
      There were two or three other graves, unmarked but for some broken timber or a cracked jar. The rest was earth and rubble and cowshit.
      He sat for a while and grew thirsty. Now he was here he felt somehow defeated. His reasons for coming had become confused and uncertain. He didn't want to think about them. At one stage he thought he heard someone approach, but it was only the sound of the long dry grass, rolling with a breath of wind. Then he became aware of a faint smell, a whiff of something familiar, half-realised, that drew him slowly into a pool of self-absorption. He heard a voice say:
      - Is this the place?
      - I don't know. It could be. There's no real way of knowing.
      - There are ways of finding out.
      - What would you do?
      - The usual. Library, parish records, Historical Society archives, talk to locals...
      - I talked to a man in Malingabar.
      - Was he helpful?
      - About as helpful as your monograph on William.
      - It's all we know of him for certain.
      - You should've read his letters to Marcus.
      - You have that advantage. What does it give you?
      - Her name, for a start. I know you didn't have it. It wasn't in your monograph. With the facts.
      - Names are unreliable. Names change, are changed. Particularly names of blacks who cohabit with whites.
      - You're trying to discourage me.
      - You'll be disappointed, anyway. You know you will. Is it so important to find this wretched woman's grave?
      Russell paused a moment, deep in thought. Presently he took the piece of serpentine stone from his pocket and held it out. Caught by the sun, there was the suggestion of glass, of coloured light.
      - I was going to place this on it.
      - A sentimental gesture.
      - I would expect you to say that. As a family we were never given much to sentimental gestures, were we.
      - Were we less of a family for it?
      - Ask my wife. Ask my son.
      - You loved them. It should've been enough.
      - I lacked insight. I let Jenna down, terribly.
      - Walking off into the blue yonder was her own doing.
      - Perhaps... It's the uncertainty that's killing me. So many 'what if...'s.
      - You know she's dead.
      - Do I?
      - Some things you know intuitively.
      - That's rich, coming from you.
      - A good hunch can put you on the right track. Isn't that why you're here?
      - I'm here because a man told me I might find what I'm looking for here.
      - A grave. In a field of grass and cowshit...
      Russell stood up. His thirst was growing urgent and he knew soon, very soon, he would have to return to the creek. In his head he made a few simple notes; library, parish records, Historical Society archives... and then, almost at once, forgot them. He wasn't sure any of it mattered any more. Walking a few metres from where he'd been sitting, he took a deep breath. The air was quite wonderfully clean. He walked on to where he thought the boundary of the cemetery might have been, and turned round.
      If he told himself he knew she was here, he knew also that his faith in the power of intuition was not deep. Nevertheless, he could believe she was here. If Jenna were to turn up alive, he thought, in whatever state of mind or health, he would be shaken, terribly shaken: but not so surprised. If nothing was certain, anything was possible.
      He took the piece of stone from his pocket again and examined it. He had imagined a small private ceremony - something more than a gesture - that, in his mind at least, would have brought a part of Jenna back to the country of her birth. It no longer seemed important that it should lie on the grave of 'that gangling Polly Longstockings', yet he felt himself hesitate, reluctant to return home with the stone still weighing down his pocket.
      He would have to let it go.
      Once, twice he pitched the stone straight into the air, and each time he caught it again. The third time he let it fly, watched it soar high up through the blue grey branches.
      And he followed it, kept his eyes on it, almost afraid some unseen hand might snatch it from its flight. And indeed, for one short moment it seemed to hang there, caught in the high branches, before spinning back. Spinning like a tiny green moon, he thought, nudged out of its orbit; spinning back to earth.



Historical Note

Thomas Bawden in his lectures of 1886 mentioned:
'Amongst them' (a party of blacks arriving at Ramornie Station) 'was a very tall gin, a very well known character about Grafton until the last year or so - a tall blind old woman. She was known to us on the station as Polly Longstockings.'

He made no other reference to her.

* * *

Ian Kennedy Williams was born in England in 1949 and came to Australia in 1970. He is the author of two novels and two collections of short stories. He has also written radio drama for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Call Polly Longstockings was part of a collection of long and short stories that won the Jim Hamilton Award in the 1995 Fellowship of Australian Writers (Victoria) Inc National Literary Awards.

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The Lizard | Panatellas | A View of the Mechanics Institute | Disinterested Bystanders | The Finding of Solitude | Unfinished Business | Table of Contents