Remembering Babylon by David Malouf

dark; or the delays. A different kind of balance was established between them in these first days in the colony, as if, in coming halfway round the world, they had arrived not so much at a new place as a new accommodation with their own natures.
    The delays went on, their money dwindled; they had to take cheaper lodgings where they were separated into dormitories, male and female, and still there was no sign of the land they had been promised. At last, when it was clear that they could expect nothing of others and must act for themselves, they left Brisbane for the Darling Downs, he to work as a general hand on a big holding, she as a housemaid. And Jock, in his disappointment, his shame too, perhaps, at having promised her so much and provided so little, began to refine in himself the stringy, hard-bitten qualities of dourness and harsh self-discipline that the land itself appeared to demand, and which, for all the fierceness of its own sunlight, dashed out the last of sunniness in him. She had Janet, then lost a little boy, then a girl. They stuck it out, saved what theycould, and when land was opened in the unsettled districts beyond the Burdekin, came north. She had left more of herself than she dared consider in the rooms of the homestead whose wide verandahs she had scrubbed and in the copper where week after week, on Mondays, she had boiled the household wash; most of all in the two small graves she knew she would not see again, under the black soil in the grove of bunyas.
    Jock, harder than ever now, since more was at stake, dealt sternly with himself and with the children too, Meg when she came, then Lachlan. She saw the last of his youth burned out of him in the hot, bushfire summers up here, when the whole sky, for days on end, was a glowing furnace. And it was to recall a little of his old light-hearted gallantry then – for her own sake, as well as his – that she would tease him about the girls she had won him away from; she knew their names from her brothers – Annie McDowell, Lettie Davidson, Minnie Kyle – happy to see, for all his protests, that it pleased him, woke some spark of his old shy devilry in him, to be taken back to his youthful conquests and the fair lad who had had to dip his head, that first time, silly-drunk as he was, at the door of their parlour. In time this teasing became a show to amuse the two little girls, but also to give them a glimpse of some other side of their stern father. They loved to hear the names – there were so few names in their lives.
    ‘What was she like,’ they would insist, ‘Lettie Davidson? Tell about Lettie.’
    ‘Oh, ye’ll hae t’ask yer faither aboot that,’ she would tell them. ‘Ah never clapt eyes on the huzzie. Tell them, Jock.’
    He looked foolish. ‘Get awa’ wi’ ye, thir wasnae ithers,’ he told her.
    ‘Keep me!’ she’d laugh, ‘sic lees the man tells. Look at the colour of him. Look at yer faither and see what lees a man can tell.’ It relieved him.
    He was often homesick though he did not say so. The land here never slept. If only he could wake one day and find it, just for a day, under a blanket of snow! What he missed were the marks of change. The crying, high up, of curlews flocking to a new season, to some place thousands of miles to thenorth where it had been winter and was now breathing the freshness of spring, brought an ache to his heart for the sight of rowans just bursting into sticky leaf, and for days afterwards he would be rough-tempered, as if the need of bark for the shiver of radiance was in himself.
    She could not afford such surrenders. Her nature was less volatile than his, less prone to extremes. Occasionally, washing an old frock with a pattern of larkspurs, all their lively colour gone to grey, she would experience a little pang at the thought that she might never again see one. She had chosen the print, years ago, because she had loved so much their vivid blue. But she had few regrets for the world she had