Birrung the Secret Friend Read online

  She stopped. She turned and looked at me. ‘It’s you and me, Elsie,’ I said softly. ‘Always was. Always will be. I don’t understand, but if something’s happened and you want to leave, just wait till I get my hat and shoes.’

  Elsie smiled. It was like the moon rising out of the dark mountains. I’d never seen her smile properly like that. She put out her hand, the one that wasn’t holding the bundle. I took it. She led me back inside.

  Birrung had gone. I saw her sitting with Sally on a rough seat Mr Johnson had made out in the garden, plaiting onion tops together to hang them up to dry. Mrs Johnson sat in the sun too, patting Milbah’s back to make her burp.

  Elsie let go of my hand, then marched into the girls’ lean-to. When she came back, her hands were empty.

  ‘So we’re staying here?’ I asked uncertainly.

  Elsie nodded. She took up the potato peeling where Birrung had left off. After a bit I joined her, making more soup for the almost dead.

  I never did work out what Elsie had got upset about. Like I said, she could be stubborn.

  CHAPTER 12

  The Dead

  Days passed in a shiver of winter. Weeks passed, bleak and cold, except in the garden, which was sheltered by the house, or our big warm room with its fire. But all through the colony the bodies stank where they’d been buried above the Tank Stream.

  One morning I came down to the garden to find an arm among the potato plants. It was a woman’s arm, I think, probably dug up by a dingo, maybe dropped when a sound from inside our house scared him the night before.

  I didn’t tell Mrs Johnson about the arm. I didn’t tell anyone. I thought I’d take it back to the Tank Stream graveyard, but the dingoes might just dig it up again. So I buried it under an apple tree, and said a prayer for whoever had owned the arm, for all those white-faced wretches and for Mr Johnson trying to help.

  For us all really.

  And then I dug up potatoes and onions to make more soup.

  At last one day Mr Johnson walked back up the hill, just as the cease-work drum roll sounded for the day. He was thin. His hands trembled as he hugged Mrs Johnson. He smelled of soap. The skin under his eyes was yellow. I thought: He’s been sick. But he won’t tell Mrs Johnson that.

  I looked into his eyes and wondered what else he wouldn’t tell her. Because I’d been down in the dark of ships like that. Not as bad — not near as bad. Captain Phillip had forced us to live, even whipping coves who wouldn’t eat their fruit when we stopped to get supplies. But I knew how that dark got to you, how the stink seeped into your soul. Mr Johnson carried some of that darkness now too.

  We sat at the table, Milbah on Mrs Johnson’s knee. Mr Johnson gave thanks as he always did for what we were to eat, for what God had given us. ‘And thank you too, Lord,’ he added, ‘for the gift of letting us give help to others.’

  I stared at him as he finished the prayer. Was that why he’d brought me and Elsie home with him? And helping others made him happy?

  I thought how good it felt to dig potatoes for everyone, to know I’d helped look after Mr Johnson’s family while he was nursing the sick. Mr Johnson was right.

  Sally served us, then sat down as usual. She’d made apple dumplings, so as to give Mr Johnson a treat, made from the first apples from the trees he’d planted, stored in a sack in my lean-to. Mr Johnson pretended to eat. And then he went to bed, though it was still light, and Mrs Johnson followed him.

  Things were different after that, not just in our house either. For two and a half years it had been just us, the colonists who’d been on the first ships. We’d landed on a strange land where there were no other white people at all. We’d cut down the trees and built the huts and planted the gardens. We had survived together, even if we didn’t like each other much. You knew everyone back then — not their names, but the faces were a bit familiar. Every hut and garden was made by us, and even if the place wasn’t as good as it could have been, well, it was all ours.

  Now there were strangers everywhere — skinny, sort of twisted strangers, looking as though the light still hurt them after so many months of dark. Right scary, the lot of them. But still no one stole anything from Mr Johnson’s gardens. The new convicts, and the ones who’d been here first too, thought Mr Johnson was the best man in the world, the only man who chose to go down into those stinking holds below deck, among the hopeless and the dead.

  ‘Bless you,’ one old woman said, grabbing Mr Johnson’s hand after Sunday service. ‘Bless you for what you did for us.’ But she wasn’t old, not really, though her hair was white and her back bent. It was just what those wicked, greedy captains had done to her.

  There were new soldiers too. They’d made money from those death ships. They’d seen what those captains did and didn’t care.

  ‘How can you smile at them?’ I asked Mr Johnson one day.

  He looked at me with that new darkness in his eyes. ‘They are God’s children too,’ he said.

  So is a rat, I thought, as two of the new ‘New South Wales Corps’ strutted past us, the convicts making way for them like they were Lord Muck and his brother. They didn’t even bow their heads politely to Mr Johnson. One of them said something when they were past. The other laughed.

  I clenched my fists. I knew they’d said something about Mr Johnson. How could men like that understand a man who cared for the poorest in the world, instead of taking the food from their stomachs to grow rich?

  More convicts were assigned to Mr Johnson’s gardens now, and to the house too. Some didn’t stay long. Mrs Johnson wouldn’t have any swearing and it seemed like those were the only words some convicts knew. But the Johnsons gave them chance after chance, teaching them how to speak and even their letters, just like they had for me and Elsie. They were sad every time they had to send any of them away.

  But the newcomers didn’t understand about Birrung, no matter how much Mrs Johnson and I tried to explain. Us old-timers knew about the Indians, knew they were people like us. We’d met them, talked to them, like kind Arabanoo or Bennelong, the governor’s friends, and Nanberry, who was like Surgeon White’s son now, and Birrung too.

  ‘Black savage,’ one old lag called her.

  ‘I ain’t sitting at no table with a darkie,’ said another woman, brought to help Sally with the housework, like she was a queen instead of a pickpocket and Birrung was a rat in the sewers.

  ‘Then you’ll do without dinner,’ said Sally shortly, just as Elsie gave the new convict a sharp elbow in the ribs. Even Sally loved Birrung just a bit by now.

  I wanted to say that Birrung knew everything that mattered, when the stars would say the emus had laid their eggs, how the wattle flowers could tell you if it would be a dry summer. But this woman couldn’t even see that those things were important. ‘Old sheep face,’ I said to her instead, which was the worst insult I could think of that wasn’t swearing. ‘Baa!’

  ‘Stop it! All of you! Abaroo is part of our family, and God’s,’ said Mr Johnson sternly.

  ‘Taperabarrbowaryaou,’ said Birrung softly. ‘But I shall not become white.’

  The new convict woman said something I promised Mrs Johnson I’d never say, much less write down. She stomped out and went to work for one of the officers. There were so few women in the colony back then that any who could use a broom and a cooking spoon was sure of a place to live.

  Even though they loved Mr Johnson, the new convicts didn’t stop swearing, and they couldn’t see past Birrung’s skin.

  That was when Birrung stopped laughing at all, I think, though it was weeks before I realised. She still didn’t go down to the harbour. Some lout would yell at her, about her being black and wearing clothes just like she thought she was a white person.

  Then one day she was gone.

  I’d been working down in one of Mr Johnson’s other gardens with Scruggins. I came in for dinner and Birrung wasn’t there, and no place was set for her at the table.

  For a moment I went cold, thinking she might h
ave got the typhus. But Mrs Johnson just said quietly, ‘Abaroo has gone back to her native family.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked.

  But I knew why. It wasn’t just the insults and the yells. There were more white faces than ever now.

  Birrung knows, I thought. She knows we will keep coming and keep coming. When we were a few strangers in their land, then the natives could welcome us, stare at us, stay with us like Birrung and learn our ways, think maybe one day we’d learn their people’s ways and words too, like I had begun to do.

  It wasn’t going to happen. I knew it. Now Birrung did too.

  Mrs Johnson must have seen my face. She said kindly, ‘I think she has gone to get married.’

  That hurt me even more. Why didn’t she wait for me to grow up, I thought, and marry me? But of course she’d be getting old by the time I could marry anyone.

  ‘I forgot to wash,’ I said. I went out to the water trough behind the shed so no one could see me cry.

  CHAPTER 13

  Presents from Birrung

  Birrung visited a few times after that. The first time I’d never have known she’d been there, except for the honeycomb in the bowl on the table, and a great spray of the yellow and purple flowers that clung to the rocks around the harbour, like they lived on air and stone, not soil, and the big fish for dinner.

  ‘A present from Abaroo,’ said Mrs Johnson. ‘She is looking well.’

  It hurt a bit that Birrung came to see Mrs Johnson and Milbah, and not me. We were living in the Johnsons’ new house by then, a good brick one, with proper doors and shutters at every window and even proper beds for every one of us. A proper bed to myself! All Mr Johnson’s books came out of the sea chests, smelling of mould. They looked fine on the new bookshelves.

  I was away when Birrung and Mr Johnson went as hostages to stay with Bennelong’s wife, Barangaroo, while Bennelong went to see Governor Phillip, who had been badly wounded by an Indian, to try to make peace between the colonists and the Indians. If I hadn’t been working at the Kissing Point gardens, I could have been a hero like Mr Johnson, risking my life to try to make the colony safe. I could have spent the whole day with Birrung.

  I was away working the next time she visited too. Sally said another Indian girl had come with Birrung, and Mrs Johnson said that Elsie had gone for a walk with them. I didn’t know whether to be jealous that she was with them, not me, or worried that it was late afternoon, and she wasn’t back.

  The back door opened. Elsie came in, carrying a big basket woven of grass. Her cheeks were flushed red from the sun, like ripe apples, and her face was full of laughter.

  I was jealous of that too.

  ‘Where have you been?’ demanded Mrs Johnson, cross because she had been worried too. ‘I said a short walk, not the whole day! Is Abaroo with you?’

  Elsie shook her head. She put the basket on the kitchen table. She took out hunks of meat, wrapped in grass to keep off the flies.

  Sally peered at the meat. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Gan,’ said Elsie.

  I stared, and Sally stared, and so did Mrs Johnson. Had Elsie really said a word? Maybe it had been a baby ‘goo’ from Milbah, or a sound outside.

  ‘What’s gan?’ I asked at last. There was something familiar about the word.

  But Elsie shrugged. If she’d said a word, she wasn’t going to say another one.

  Sally fried the steaks. It had been a week since we’d had fresh meat, when Mr White’s shooter had shot more wild ducks than they needed at the hospital and he had sent us some. The meat was good, a bit like duck, all fried up with pumpkin and onions and served with boiled cabbage and boiled potatoes, as much as we wanted to eat, and then sliced melon.

  I looked at the bones on my plate after we’d finished eating. Like a sheep’s backbone, but smaller. And all backbone, no legs.

  I remembered Birrung pointing to a curving track in the dirt, then making one finger wiggle like a snake. ‘Gan,’ she’d said. ‘Gan.’

  My stomach wiggled too.

  I thought: If it came from Birrung, it would be good.

  The next time I saw a snake, pretending to be a stick by the track, I thought: Dinner.

  It was the summer of 1793 the last time I saw Birrung. It was hot, but the ants were building their castles, the ones Birrung had told me meant that it would rain, so I was up on the hillside above the harbour, cutting bark to roof the new church instead of lugging buckets of water to the vegetables: the rain would do the watering for me soon enough.

  It wasn’t much of a church, not like the stone ones back in England. But no one was going to order convicts to build one in Australia, even though Mr Johnson said the governor’s instructions from England had been clear that one was to be built. Mr Johnson was still preaching in the fields or the old storeroom with the rotting roof when it rained.

  I wasn’t no builder, just like I hadn’t been no farmer, but every man in the colony learned how to put up wattle and daub, unless their brains were too rotted with rum to care if they had a roof at all.

  The seagulls yelled and the waves danced. I piled up sheet after sheet of bark.

  Someone pointed down the road. They yelled, ‘Sails ahoy!’

  And there was Birrung.

  She wore her white petticoat, her feet bare and dusty, her hair frizzy like all the Indians’, not plaited straight like it had mostly been when she lived with us. She walked like she didn’t hear the shouts of the men, the whistles.

  I grabbed my axe — you couldn’t put a tool down in the colony without some lag pinching it — and ran up to her.

  I was as tall as she was now.

  There was so much to tell her; about the new church and the schools Mrs Johnson had organised, with convict girls she’d taught their letters teaching the little ones in turn, and Mrs Johnson teaching the older ones, and at Sunday school Mr Johnson himself teaching the ones who could read and write and do their sums — like me — about the nations of the world like France and how they’d killed their king, and how to read big words like ‘sojourner’.

  I stayed close to her till we reached the house, ignoring the shouts from the convicts amazed to see a black girl wearing clothes, and all the rude suggestions. I thought: Maybe Birrung has come back to stay now. Maybe now I’m taller she might even think of marrying me in a few years’ time. I had some money saved up by then, and dreams too.

  Mrs Johnson came out when she heard the noise. She hugged Birrung and little Milbah hugged her too, and showed her the dolly made of a corncob that Mrs Johnson had dressed in tiny clothes. Mr Johnson was over at Rose Hill, staying overnight after the service, for it was a long weary voyage down the river there and back.

  We went inside. Elsie and Sally made maize-flour griddlecakes, sweet with dried currants from our last crop, and a pot of sarsaparilla tea, the flowers dried from the spring before.

  When Mrs Johnson gave thanks, so did I, deep in my heart, remembering how hungry I had been and seeing the plenty in front of me, and Birrung sitting at the table again, laughing and eating griddlecakes, just like we’d been before. We all sat and laughed and were happy.

  I never saw her again.

  CHAPTER 14

  I Tell You My Secret

  Mr and Mrs Johnson taught me to praise God and to read words. Birrung taught me to see this country as beautiful. She taught me to see the land.

  I heard that she came back again a couple of times to see the Johnsons, naked like all the natives, not even wearing her petticoat. Elsie and I weren’t there to see it, but why we weren’t, and where we’d gone, what happened when the Frenchman came for Elsie, is a story I won’t tell you today.

  I am an old man now, not a ten-year-old boy, but I can still see Birrung like I did that first day by the mud storehouse, clean and pretty in her blue and white dress. I can hear her voice telling me native words. I’ve even used some of those words with native people, and they understood them too. I’ve used all that she taught me, and I reckon Elsie learned
things from Birrung I never knew about back then too. I’ve never shot a black man, like so many of my neighbours, or put out poisoned flour. I’ve tried to understand and, because of Birrung, known I can’t.

  So that is my secret. I had a friend a long, long time ago. She was a girl, and she was black.

  I loved her.

  Now you know my secret too.

  AUTHOR’S NOTES

  Barney Bean, Elsie and Sally are all fictional, although based on real people. Mr and Mrs Johnson, Mr Dawes, Milbah and Birrung/Abaroo existed. Their lives in this book are based on what is known about them from letters written at the time by Mr Johnson, and diaries and books written by others in the colony.

  Mr Richard Johnson was the colony’s first clergyman, beloved of the convicts and some of the officers. He was a committed and passionate Christian who saw himself as a missionary to the colony of New South Wales, to the convict and Indigenous populations as well as to the officers. Often described as ‘tireless’, he was more likely often very tired indeed, building his first house mostly by himself, cultivating the most productive and possibly the largest gardens at the time in the colony, giving Sunday services in the open air or in a crumbling storehouse when it rained, and trekking down to Rose Hill, an outlying settlement, to conduct weekly services there too, while also working as a magistrate, tending the sick in hospital, caring for orphans, and teaching both children and adults to read and write and do sums.

  Bennelong went to visit Governor Phillip, who had been badly wounded by an Indigenous man, to negotiate peace in the aftermath of this potentially war-inciting event. Barangaroo, Bennelong’s wife, was violently opposed to Bennelong’s role as an intermediary between the native people and the colonists, so Richard Johnson and Birrung remained with her as a guarantee that her husband would be returned to her.

  Mr Johnson’s work was heroic during the hellish months after the arrival of the Second Fleet. Against all advice he insisted on going down into the holds of the ships, among the dead and dying in the filthy darkness, tending them, feeding them from his own supplies and garden. The convicts loved and revered him — even if he couldn’t stop them swearing.