The Black Dress Read online

  I ignored Uncle Donald then because I was thoroughly glad to be going to South Australia. At least in Penola I would be spared the constant thumping of the presses and the head-aching smell of ink. I can sit down to teach my cousins—no more aching legs at the end of the day. I’ll be back in the country. Perhaps I can even ride again.

  In the coach, almost there, I wasn’t so sanguine. I looked out and sometimes saw cattle, but more often the road passed featureless bush. I wasn’t expecting much of Penola, a little back-country village. I knew there was a hotel where the coach passengers stayed—my Uncle Sandy owned it. They called him ‘the King of Penola’, as he had started the settlement 11 years ago, when he had received his freehold title over the land he had settled.

  ‘The King of Penola’ had sounded like a joke in Melbourne, but as I craned my neck out of the coach window when we came into the town, the title lost its humour. This was no sleepy village. There were stone buildings as well as wooden, two hotels, a courthouse, police station and stores. I was astounded.

  ‘Cobb & Co.,’ the coachman yelled to the ostlers as they drew up with a lurch and rattle. ‘Look busy!’

  The offsider leapt from the perch and opened the coach door. ‘Royal Oak, Penola. Good tucker here and a damn good beer. Beg your pardon, miss. Ten minutes, you others. We’ll pick you up at the Cobb & Co. office down the street.’

  I ignored the profanity and climbed eagerly down the carriage steps. The other passengers, men from the goldfields, rushed past me into the tap room. They had just enough time to have a drink and grab a pie or damper and cheese before the coach left. The Cobb & Co. coaches waited for no-one.

  Uncle Sandy was waiting. He was beaming, that wide smile I knew so well from childhood, and I blinked back tears.

  ‘Whist, Mary, lass,’ he said and hugged me, a great bear hug, careless of who might be watching. ‘You’re as pale and peaked as a dying swan! Never mind, we’ll soon get roses back in your cheeks.’

  In all my imagining, I had never dreamed of the great relief that swept over me as Uncle Sandy hugged me. Here, he was the responsible one. He would look after everything and everyone, including me. All I had to do was teach. At Sands, Kenny & Co. I had felt quite old, 30 at least. But as soon as Uncle Sandy called me ‘lass’ I felt even younger than I really was. I laughed.

  ‘Oh, it’s good to see you,’ I said. ‘And what a town you’ve made!’

  He grinned. ‘Aye, it’s a good one. Better than you expected, isn’t it?’

  ‘Much!’

  ‘Ha. Those old women in Melbourne. What do they know about my kingdom? Come away and we’ll get out to the homestead. Your Aunty Margaret can’t wait to see you.’

  ***

  Aunty Margaret came out as she heard the sound of the buggy. Children surrounded her. Margaret, my eldest cousin and the only one I really remembered, was away at boarding school with the Sisters of Mercy in Geelong, but there were plenty more.

  I climbed down a little shyly, feeling very travel-stained and untidy in my old green dress, but Aunty Margaret threw her arms around me and hugged me hard.

  ‘Och, welcome, lassie! Come away inside.’

  ‘Can’t I meet my cousins first?’

  There was Ellen, at 12 (‘Almost 13, Mum’) already as tall as I was, with her father’s bushy black hair tucked willy-nilly under a hair net. Then there was John, a skinny ten-year-old, and Sarah, a red-haired Scot if ever there was one, who was nine.

  They were my pupils. They eyed me with interest as I met the next one in line, young Mary.

  ‘We’re twins!’ she said delightedly. ‘We have the same name!’

  Alexandrina, a year younger, said, ‘You can’t be twins. You’re only five and cousin Mary’s old.’

  I smiled at them both. ‘Well, we can be pretend twins.’

  ‘See?’ Mary said with satisfaction, and took my hand. ‘That’s Ann. She’s only two. She’s scared of strangers.’

  Ann was a tiny thing with black curls and her father’s dark eyes. She was hiding behind her mother’s skirts.

  ‘Come out of there and say hello to your cousin,’ Aunty Margaret urged. Ann shook her head, her thumb in her mouth.

  I knelt down and smiled at her. ‘ You’re very beautiful,’ I said, ‘aren’t you?’ She nodded. Her mother laughed.

  ‘She’s her father’s daughter, all right, and knows her worth.’

  ‘Maybe you could show me where I’m going to sleep?’ I asked Ann. ‘Do you know where?’ She nodded.

  ‘ I’m going to show you!’ Mary announced.

  ‘I’ll show her,’ said Ellen. ‘I’m the oldest.’

  Sarah stamped her foot. ‘You always say that, and it’s only ’cause Margaret’s not here. It’s not fair!’

  ‘Sarah! Mind your manners,’ Aunty Margaret said and made an expressive face at me. I had the impression it was Sarah I was really here to teach. A handful.

  ‘Can I show her, please?’ Sarah said.

  I winked at her. ‘But I’ve already asked Ann.’

  I looked at Ann and held out my hand. She put her own into it and looked up triumphantly at her sisters.

  ‘Me show.’ Then she dragged me away down the verandah, the others trailing behind.

  ‘But she never goes to anyone!’ Aunty Margaret protested. ‘You’ve cast a spell on the bairn, Mary.’

  The homestead was a long, low building, made of stringy-bark boards with a zinc roof. It was huge—15 rooms—with French doors opening onto a verandah all the way around. The kitchen was separate, as it so often is in the bush, to reduce the heat and the risk of fire. Ann was a little confused about which room was mine, so Aunty Margaret led me to a room on the end of the building and chased away the children. The room was large by Richmond standards, with a lovely view of Torilla Lagoon. I could see black swans sailing past the pair of huge red gums that stood on the edge of the lagoon.

  ‘It’s so pretty, Aunty!’ I said. ‘There’s so much water.’

  ‘Did you think you were coming to the desert?’ she teased.

  ‘Well, I had thought the rainfall here was much lower than around Melbourne.’

  ‘There’s not that much difference. And Sandy picked a good spot for the homestead, that’s the truth. Now get yourself freshened up and come to the parlour for a cup of tea.’

  As I washed my face and tidied my hair I wondered how long I would stay. My life seemed to be one long round of moving—from house to house, from farm to city, even from state to state. I yearned for a settled, quiet period in a place I could really call home. But Penola wasn’t likely to be that place.

  Although Sarah acted like a much younger girl, she was already nine, almost ten. Ellen was due to go to the Sisters of Mercy next year, and Sarah the year after. So what need would they have of a governess then? There was Mary, Alexandrina and Ann, but Sandy Cameron believed, like many Highlanders, that a child should not be schooled formally until they were at least seven. They were unlikely to keep me just for Mary. And where would I go? Back to Sands, Kenny & Co.? I didn’t think I could bear that. So I put it from my mind. Here I was, living in what seemed like luxury after our cramped, poor house in Richmond. Lots of food, fresh air, pleasant company. I sang as I unpacked my things after tea.

  Ellen bounced on the bed and laughed. ‘I thought you would be all prim and proper. Everybody said how good you were.’

  I laughed too. ‘Nowhere near as good as I’d like to be,’

  I said gaily. I put the last of my underthings away. ‘Come, show me the stables. I’d like to meet your pony.’

  ***

  The next day we started lessons. It was no use teaching the young ladies, as they liked to be known, Latin or ancient history. They were no scholars. So I concentrated on the things they would need to know when they, as they undoubtedly would, married some upstanding young son of a settler and had to run their own homestead—accounts, ordering, letters of recommendation, agreements with tradesmen, all the practical skills of re
ading and writing.

  As well, we read novels together—Sir Walter Scott, of course, but also other uplifting stories. Ellen was particularly taken with Emma by Miss Jane Austen. Although written a half century before, the position of Emma in her town of Highfield was so much like Ellen’s as daughter of the King of Penola that she was captivated—and, I hope, warned of the dangers of such a position.

  I found Sarah to be shockingly ignorant of mathematics and with a very shoddy hand. John already knew a great deal about sheep, but next to nothing of the world outside Penola. Much of the young ladies’ curriculum was useful to him, also.

  In the late afternoons, the young ladies learnt the manual skills of a householder—dairying, cooking and sewing—with their mother, while John went out on the run with his father.

  ‘You’ll be glad to have some time to yourself, I imagine,’ Aunt Margaret said, smiling kindly. But really, I would have been just as glad to keep teaching.

  The girls and I went riding together. I used Aunt Margaret’s mare, Gussie, a lovely little chestnut with a white blaze over half her face. The countryside was very different to Darebin Creek, but it was lovely to canter over the limestone hills and see the sheep grazing quietly, the trees shivering in the breeze and the snaking green lines of the creeks.

  Bringing the horses back to the stable I often saw a couple of children, a boy and a girl, who would hide around a corner of the building and giggle as they peeked out at us. I said hello, but they ran away.

  ‘Oh, that’s the Dawson twins,’ Aunt Margaret said. ‘Dawson is our overseer.’

  I was startled.

  ‘There are other children on the station?’

  ‘Half-a-dozen or so. We have three married couples living in the outlying houses, you know.’

  I had known, but hadn’t thought about it.

  ‘Who teaches those children?’

  ‘Nobody, I’m afraid. There aren’t enough of them to form a school on the station, and it’s too far for them to travel into the township to Mr O’Grady’s school. Besides, they’re Catholic and he doesn’t take Catholics. I suppose their mothers teach them what they can.’

  Of course, I was employed only to teach my cousins. But there was nothing to stop me teaching the station children in my own time. Poor little things. If they grew up ignorant they would be forced into the hardest types of labour.

  My aunt shook her head. ‘Mary, Mary, why do you always take the world on your shoulders? Those children are their parents’ responsibility, not yours.’

  But she spoke to the parents and soon enough I had a second school on the verandah in the afternoons. Just as well. Not only did I find the children abysmally ignorant of letters and numbers, but also none of them knew their Catechism properly. Catherine Dawson thought the Holy Spirit was really a dove, and her brother thought that ‘born of the Virgin Mary’ was ‘born on the verge in Merry’ and that Christ had in fact been born on the roadside in a town called Merry! He had been quite puzzled last Christmas to hear the story of Bethlehem. I tried hard not to laugh, but I’m afraid that time I didn’t succeed.

  Those children were my first exposure to the widespread ignorance of country children. It’s hard to believe today, but there were no free schools, no compulsory education, no-one to care if most of a generation grew up unlettered, and pagan to boot. The parents’ lives were so filled with work that they had no time to teach their children. For the first time I wondered how much Papa’s failure as a farmer was due to his insistence on teaching his children and the time he took from his work to do it. Mamma, too, taught us our Catechism and prayers as a normal part of our daily ritual. But, in the early years, she had help around the house, which gave her some time to spend with us. We were doubly fortunate and, like most fortunate people, we took it for granted.

  At Penola I learnt how fortunate we had been. Most children who lived in the bush were pitifully ignorant about everything except their immediate physical world—though granted, they knew this in intimate and profound detail. There were half-a-dozen unschooled children on Uncle Sandy’s run—and a similar number on each of the runs around the town! It added up to scores of children, in this one town alone. Across Australia there were thousands. There was no one to worry about them; certainly no-one was making an effort to educate them.

  It wasn’t until 1875 that compulsory education was introduced in South Australia and later than that in the other states. Even then, the country children fared badly. After 1875 the number of schools and teachers increased dramatically, but not fast enough to reach most country children.

  What difference did an Act of Parliament make if there were no school? In country towns of the 1870s, if there was a school, it was usually one of ours. Now, there are St Joseph’s schools all over Australia, as well as the government schools that followed us.

  In 1861, there was just me.

  I worried over it, but I thought at the time there was nothing I could do but teach those children who were near me. It took Father Woods to make me realise I was wrong.

  ***

  St Joseph’s church, named by Father Woods, the parish priest, was a lovely little stone building, complete with belfry. It had been consecrated only a couple of years before and still had that lovely new smell.

  Aunt Margaret spread a starched white cloth over the altar. I added two shining brass candlesticks. I felt like singing as I worked, but that wouldn’t have been respectful. So I prayed instead, three decades of the rosary as we set out all our chairs and the stools from the men’s hut. The church had raised enough money for pews but they were still being made.

  There were so few priests out here. Father Woods had a parish of 26 000 square miles. That was not unusual in this new land where settlements were so few and far, far between. In his entire parish, there were only three small towns, hundreds of miles apart, with scattered homesteads and shepherds’ huts, miners’ camps and settlers’ shanties in between.

  No wonder it took him so long to make his rounds.

  It had been five weeks since I had taken Holy Communion. The longest I had ever gone, I think, since my first Blessed Eucharist. I was looking forward to the familiar litany of the Mass the next morning. It would be like it had been when Father Geoghegan, who was now Bishop of Adelaide, came to us out at Darebin Creek.

  But it was not like that.

  This priest was nothing like Father Geoghegan. He was young, thin and had haunting dark eyes and an astoundingly bushy dark beard. There was no friendly Irish accent—Father Woods was English by birth and education. But that voice! Father Geoghegan had been a full-voiced sweet baritone. Father Woods—I scarcely know what his voice was like in terms of note or musicality. But I know that from his first In nomine Patrie I could not look away from the altar, so great was his presence.

  This was a priest who lived the truth of the Blessed Sacrament with each celebration of it. That was clear. Christ was on the altar and he was privileged to bring Him into our presence. Every gesture, every word proclaimed it.

  Then his sermon. He spoke simply, quietly at first. He spoke of the pastoral letter he had received from Bishop Geoghegan, urging him and all the priests to set up schools for Catholic children. He spoke of his last trip around the parish. Of the children he saw, growing up in far-flung places with no chance of education or enlightenment. He spoke of big lads of ten and 11 who did not know their Catechism, who had never made their confession, who did not know the difference between God the Father and God the Holy Spirit. Illiterate, innumerate, ignorant—but worse than all of these, totally unaware of God’s goodness and Christ’s grace.

  ‘Suffer the little children to come unto me,’ Father thundered, and repeated it, softly. ‘Suffer the little children to come unto me. Yet how can these children of the bush come to Christ when they hear his name only as a curse? I pray for Divine guidance. I pray for instruction in what I must do to prevent these precious little ones growing up in ignorance of the Good News. And so must you. Each and eve
ry one of you. Pray! Pray! And do what you can to dispel the darkness of ignorance.’

  As he spoke, his eyes searched the congregation, pinning each one of us in turn. When his eyes met mine, and he repeated the bishop’s words, ‘Do what you can,’ I felt the great calm and joy come over me which I know as the unmistakable sign of God’s presence. ‘Do what you can.’ This was God’s message to me. I was sure of it.

  ***

  I am glad it is the middle of the night, and that the dark hides the tears in my eyes. More than forty years later, that memory still wrings my heart. Uplifting, terrifying, exalting, it set me shaking. A good friend of mine, a very devout Jewish woman, once told me that she had felt like that the first time she realised she was pregnant. A sense of destiny coupled with enormous responsibility, but also a sense of being directly touched by God, of being given a gift straight from His hands.

  Why am I going over this memory? There is no anger or impatience here to understand and repent. Yet I feel that I must examine this time, too. Perhaps it’s because Father Woods, like my papa, proved not to be so capable when put to the test; and yet I feel no resentment towards him at all. Without him, would I have ever been more than a governess? Sometimes I wonder. Sometimes I think it is people like Father Woods who are needed to start entirely new things. People who don’t think exactly like other people, who are not the slightest bit concerned with the ordinary, whose eyes are fixed on what lies beyond.

  Father Woods was far holier than I could ever be—and far less worldly as a result! My meeting with him changed not only my life, but the lives of hundreds, thousands, of others—nuns, students, priests, even bishops. I was so fortunate to have known him.

  ***

  ‘Father, this is my niece Mary MacKillop, who has come to be governess to our wild tribe.’