Searching For The Secret River. Kate Grenville
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to know. The idea of a dramatic death in the family was all right, the idea of a ghost even better. But I wasn’t sure I wanted a murderer for a great-great-great grandfather.
Plus I wanted to get outside. The bar was right beside us. Any moment the publican would come out and there’d be a scene. He’d go, ‘Now what do you think you’re doing,’ and Mum would say, ‘Look we’re not doing any harm,’ and I’d stand there trying to be invisible.
Outside, Mum showed me the stone lions on the tall gateposts. ‘He brought them specially from England, they cost him a hundred guineas.’
The lions were invisible to me, but I nodded. I may not have been able to make the lions out, but I was close enough to the stone gateposts to see the way each block was pecked and pocked with grooves.
‘That’s where they worked it with the picks,’ Mum said. ‘The convicts he had, assigned servants.’
That was real to me: that close-up detail. Each block of stone had a hundred pick-marks, two hundred, five hundred. I could picture it: a man standing in the steamy sun, swinging the pick again and again to square off the lump of sandstone. And, when he’d got it right, he’d have to start straight away on the next one.
I remember running my fingers into the grooves, wondering how anyone could have put up with it.
Later we went off in search of the graveyard. The story included something about Wiseman having been buried with a box of sovereigns at his feet. That sounded interesting, but finding the graveyard was a matter of driving along dusty yellow roads through dusty grey bush. Every time Mum saw a person, she’d pull over. ‘We’re looking for Solomon Wiseman’s grave,’ she’d say. ‘He was my great-great grandfather.’
I’d see their faces open out in surprise, they’d stare extra hard at her, they’d peer into the car to have a look at me, and point away up another road.
What was it I could detect in their faces as they examined us a bit more closely than they needed to?
Cows wandered along the verges of those roads, and Mum stopped every time we drove past a cow-pat that didn’t look too wet. She’d get out and pick it up and put it in the sugar-bag that was always in the back of the car. I slid further down in the seat. ‘Don’t be silly, lovey,’ she said. ‘It’s not dirty, only grass, wonderful for the garden.’
At last we found the graveyard. In my memory it’s a blur of trees and grey headstones until I got up close. Then I could see where the stonemason had ruled guide-lines in the stone: exactly like the lines I drew myself, when I had to do a heading in my Social Studies exercise book, except that I rubbed them out when I’d done the words. But these chiselled lines were still sharp. The letters themselves were a mixture of ‘little’ and ‘big’, the way I’d written when I was in Infants. Some of the words were spelled oddly: did ‘Henery’ mean ‘Henry’? Now and then the stonemason had left out a letter by mistake and had to put it in above the word, with an upside-down v to show where it should go.
‘They probably couldn’t read or write,’ Mum said. ‘Copying it off a bit of paper. You’d get it wrong, you wouldn’t know.’
From that day at Wiseman’s Ferry, that’s all I remember. The steepness of the stairs, the labour of the picks, and the misspelled names of the dead. The past: another country. Nothing to do with me. A day that was too hot and steamy, the smell of cow manure ripening in the car.
It was forty years before I went back.
May in Sydney is a cold windy month, and the morning of 28 May 2000 was colder and windier than usual. On that day, the Sydney Harbour Bridge was closed to traffic and, along with 200,000 other people in beanies and scarves, I walked across it to show that I supported the idea of reconciliation between black and white Australians.
I’d have been hard pressed to say exactly what I thought reconciliation meant. It had something to do with what had gone on in Australia over the last 200 years: the violence, the taking-away of Aboriginal children from their parents, the fact that we descendants of Europeans lived on land that had once belonged to other people. Beyond that it was all uncertain: should we feel guilty, should we be talking compensation, what about treaties and land rights?
The Bridge straddles Sydney Harbour, its northern foot a short walk from the house where I’d grown up, its southern foot beside Sydney Cove where the city itself had begun. In 1788, Captain Arthur Phillip, in charge of a fleet of ships full of convicts, had dropped anchor in that cove, run the Union Jack up a flagpole, and declared Britain the owner of the whole lot.
The Bridge had come to stand for Australia, the icon that identified us around the world. Traditionally much of what mattered in Australia had come from Britain. We were proud of the fact that the engineer in charge of building the Bridge—a great technical feat—was an Australian. We knew the history of its opening day in 1932. The premier was lifting the scissors to cut the ribbon when a man called de Groot, who disapproved of the premier’s politics, galloped up and slashed the ribbon with his sword. It was a swashbuckling story that gave the Bridge a personality.
So the idea of having the Reconciliation Walk across the Bridge—with all its affectionate associations—was a potent one. The walk itself promised to be another big symbolic thing. Its aims were large and vague enough to make us feel cosy in spite of the bitter westerly wind. Everyone was smiling. We were all pretty pleased with ourselves.
We—myself and a friend and our children—strolled along the roadway with the crowd. I was thinking more about Mum than about reconciliation. She’d often told me her own story about the Bridge. She was a young pharmacist when it was to be opened, and had been given the afternoon off—a rare treat—to join the crowd walking across it. She claimed to have seen de Groot ride up on his horse with his sword held aloft.
She’d always said, though, that she might just have seen the picture in the paper the next day.
Almost at the end of the walk, on the southern end of the Bridge, I noticed a group of Aboriginal people leaning against the railings watching us. A couple of men with hats and spreading beards, two or three women with their skirts pressed against their legs in the wind. At the end of the row, a tall handsome woman frankly staring, as if to memorise each face. Our eyes met and we shared one of those moments of intensity—a pulse of connectedness. We smiled, held each other’s gaze, I think perhaps we gestured with our hands, the beginning of a wave.
It should have made me feel even better about what I was doing, but it sent a sudden blade of cold into my warm inner glow.
This woman’s ancestors had been in Australia for a long time. Sixty thousand years was the current figure. Her ancestors might have been living on the shores of Sydney Harbour when the First Fleet sailed in.
The blade I was feeling was the knowledge that my ancestor had been here too. Solomon Wiseman hadn’t arrived on that first convoy, but he’d arrived within twenty years of it. His ship would have anchored in this bay. He’d have come ashore right underneath where an Aboriginal woman and I were exchanging smiles.
And what if my great-great-great grandfather had glanced up, and seen her great-great-great grandfather standing on a rock watching the new arrivals? I didn’t know much about what had gone on between the Aboriginal people and the settlers in those early days. And yet I was sure that Solomon Wiseman wouldn’t have smiled and waved at any Aboriginal man watching him come ashore.
I hadn’t thought for years about that out-of-focus visit in my childhood to Wiseman’s Ferry. Now, for the first time, I wondered what had happened when Wiseman had arrived there and started the business of ‘settling’. Until this moment it had never occurred to me to wonder