Man of Two Tribes. Arthur W. Upfield
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a smart dresser, and locally renowned as a radio script writer. The husband had been a radio actor, thirty-four years old, handsome, and, by all accounts, a perpetual drinker and an insatiable lover.
The Counsel for the Defence claimed that the husband had been the essence of a blackguard, and that the accused had long been a martyr to his mental frenzies and physical violence. The story went that the husband came home late from a ‘conference’. There had been ‘words’ between them, and he had rushed out to the garage for a pistol. Subsequently there was a struggle, the gun went off, the husband fell dead. Same old story, proving that Australians are not original.
The Prosecution proved that the pistol, a war souvenir, had been recently oiled and yet required strong pressure on the trigger to fire it. The experts swore that the pistol was at least three feet from the victim’s chest when discharged.
To the court officials and the press, the trial was just one of those things, but the accused provided much of interest to all men. She wept throughout. She wept during the judge’s summing-up, and when the jury was absent. She wept whilst being escorted from the court by friends, to receive a mighty ovation from a crowd of teenagers.
The jury’s verdict was a mockery of reason. If ever the jury system was made to appear useless in murder cases, it was by this jury’s verdict, tending to prove that, rather than accept responsibility for a hanging, it would acquit the accused.
For weeks prior to her trial, Myra Thomas received terrific publicity, which during the trial equalled that of the Melbourne Cup. But never a word was published in sympathy for the murdered man.
The ‘heroine’ and her mother decided to leave Adelaide and live in Perth, W.A. They travelled under assumed names, and with them on the four-twenty express from Port Pirie were two other women. The beds were made up after the train left Reid. After leaving Fisher they all retired, and all slept fairly well, only one woman remembering the next morning that the train had stopped several times.
The conductor brought the morning tea when the train was between Deakin and Chifley, and then the three women discovered that the fourth wasn’t with them. The train was searched without result. All stops between Chifley and Reid were contacted, but the missing woman had not left the train to be marooned. The train had to proceed, and the permanent way men searched the line, also without result. Finally, the weary Easter and his weary helpers gave up searching the country for ten miles either side of the line.
It had been hard on Elaine Easter, who had had to cook for and entertain inspectors and sergeants from both Adelaide and Perth, as there wasn’t a hotel at Chifley. The poor things had to eat and sleep somewhere more comfortable than the engine sheds.
At last blessed peace and order, when the house was once again her own, as well as her husband. They could listen again to the sweet song of silence sung over the Plain at night, and now and then accompanied by the organ music of an approaching train. Books to read. Sewing to do. Recipes to try. The tucker-box to be packed when her husband had to leave on patrol. And now this! Another policeman coming even then from the standing train.
The diesel hooted and she heard the train pulling out on its long long way to Kalgoorlie in the west. And its music would dwindle and dwindle into the whispered lullaby of the Plain.
The aroma of coffee filled the kitchen, and the old American clock tick-tocking on the mantel over the stove had counted the moments for three generations. She placed the chops on a dish within the oven, and was surveying the breakfast table when she heard their footsteps on the veranda, along the passage. The train was sounding its nostalgic fare-you-wells, and the clock was striking the half-hour when they came into the kitchen.
The stranger was at first disappointing to Elaine Easter. She was accustomed to seeing very large men enter her kitchen, men with large square faces and small gimlet eyes which she always said they made small on purpose. This man was slight, wiry, dark-skinned, and the most amazing blue eyes she had ever seen regarded her as though appealing for forgiveness of the intrusion. She experienced a distinct shock when at the back of her mind she realised that he wasn’t a full white man, but the shock was suppressed instantly by the charm of his smile as he waited to be presented.
Her husband put down the large suitcase, and she tried to avoid staring at him, because he was actually looking very happy. He said:
“Guess who, Elaine! Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte! He says we must call him ‘Bony’. Says if we don’t he’ll recommend my demotion. Meet the wife . . . er, Bony.”
Inspector Bonaparte! Her husband’s tin god. The greatest crime investigator in all Australian history —according to her husband. The man who never yet had failed—again according to her husband.
Now she was being bowed to, and one part of her mind wondered why the other part told her that she was a woman, not just Elaine Easter. She was caught by the blue eyes and found herself listening with pleasure to his voice.
“All my friends call me ‘Bony’, Mrs. Easter. Even my Chief Commissioner, my wife and my sons, call me ‘Bony’. I’ve been sure I would meet none but friends at Chifley.”
Chapter Two
Bonaparte’s Assignment
At breakfast the Easters were captivated by their official guest, but it was not until much later that day that they were able to analyse their reactions. Both were of what is loosely termed ‘the bush’, and they had expected their guest to be the opposite of what he proved to be—one of them.
That he was of mixed races they had to accept, reluctantly. His features and bearing were far removed from the castes with whom they were familiar along these southern districts of Australia, for Bonaparte had entered the world in the mid-north of Queensland, and his maternal ancestry had been powerfully influenced by the impact of the Polynesian peoples. When meeting the calm blue eyes and listening to the soft accentless voice, it was so easy to forget the duality of races.
Bony had crossed the Nullarbor many times, by train and plane; once only by car following the old telegraph route which skirts the southern edge of the Plain where it drops to the narrow coastal belt. Never previously had he been professionally interested in this part of Australia, and he anticipated no hardships additional to those he had experienced closer to the centre, such as the mulga forests, the gibber deserts, the desolation of the salt-pan basins. Although these several geophysical areas are strikingly different, common to all is the force of opposition to man, varied only by the circumstances confronting the individual.
“You have an office with the usual map of Australia pinned to the wall?” he asked, well knowing that the Police Station is the cross carried by every policeman in the true outback.
Easter conducted him to his own particular cross, where he lit the oil-lamp suspended from the ceiling, permitting Bony to survey the usual littered desk, the usual wire files hanging from nails driven into the walls, and usual large-scale map. Mechanically constructing what could be assumed to be a cigarette, he stood with Easter before the map on which someone had etched with blue pencil the area marked Nullarbor, meaning no trees. The cartographer had drawn a rule-straight line from east to west, and named this the Transcontinental Railway, the line bisecting the area.
“Authorities differ over the extent of this Plain,” Bony said, without intention to teach but rather as a preface to what he had in mind to say. “It’s probably much more than the estimate of thirty thousand square miles. What do you know of it?”
Easter’s forefinger traversed the railway.
“Three hundred miles of dead straight line built on dead level ground, or what appears to the naked eye as dead level.” The finger flashed downward on the map to within an inch of the coastline, moved slowly upward to cross the railway, continued upward until seemingly stopped by a blue dot named Lake Wyola. “From here down to the coast is something like three hundred miles. No trees, no surface water except in rock-holes filled by rain. Just a vacuum spanned by a railway, the railway stops by nothing but a few houses and servicing depots. No out-lying homesteads excepting to the south and one to the north-west. No roads but that coastal