Musk and Byrne

1871

As the last train of the evening pulls out of Wombat Hill station, a woman dressed in black is left standing on the platform like a lone figure on a stage. For a moment, she appears confused. Has she got off at the wrong stop? With a sigh that faintly echoes the hiss of the departing train, she moves towards the stationmaster who is waiting with outstretched palm. The man raises his hat and mutters ‘Good evening’ but the woman does not meet his eye as she presses the ticket into his hand and slips out into the street beyond. Clutching her ticket as evidence, the stationmaster watches her go: this veiled stranger, this woman in the garb of mourning who has arrived alone and been met by no one, at such a late hour.

The woman hurries up the main street, avoiding the yellow pools of the gas lamps. At her back, she feels the stationmaster’s lingering gaze and can almost hear his mind ticking over. She knows that by tomorrow morning word will be racing across the countryside like the shadow of a cloud. Jemma Musk is back.

Jemma pauses to look at the sleeping town. Once a haphazard outgrowth of the gold rush-a random accretion of houses, institutions and shops-it now appears to have sprung up fully formed, as if in the same almighty convulsion that created the hill on which it sits. But to Jemma it might be a ghost town, a place haunted by what was gone. She contemplates the years rushing by, the people who will come and go, and the calm indifference of the buildings which will outlive all who inhabit them.

As her footsteps echo through the night, she wonders what she is doing here, picking her way through this memory-pocked landscape. She carefully avoids Manotti & Curle’s Aerated Waters in case Celestina happens to be up late in the tearoom, but can’t resist passing the shop where Gotardo worked as a bootmaker in those painful months before she fled. Peering through the glass, she searches for his workbench and tools only to find that it is now a bureau for Cobb & Co. Suddenly, it is not the past that threatens so much as the present, the possibility that things may not be as she had assumed, that Gotardo may no longer live in the town. That he, too, might have gone away.

It has become too cold to linger. Jemma had forgotten how the temperature plummets at night. She curses the flimsiness of her taffeta skirt and bodice with its decorative, useless jacket. Why hadn’t she brought a coat? Pulling her woollen shawl about her shoulders, she hurries on down the hill and away from the township with the Milky Way reeling overhead. When the farmhouse finally comes into sight-lit up by
a lamp within-a ghostly little hand slips itself into hers and leads her through the gate and up the front path past the pergola. Jemma imagines she can hear snatches of song and a small voice saying, Mama, look!

And so it is that a lost time erupts, tearing through the night’s fabric as Jemma grips the veranda post before reaching out to knock on the door.

Towards noon, one hot January day in 1868, Jemma Musk is walking with her sketchbook through the ragged Hepburn forest when she comes upon a family having a picnic on a ridge. They make a pretty tableau-a smartly dressed woman under a parasol, her dapper husband in a bell topper hat and their young daughter in her frilly Sunday best. In the searing midday light they look like cut-outs, not quite real.

They say they do not mind if she takes their likenesses, as long as she does not mind if they occasionally move about. Settling herself against the treacle-dark trunk of an ironbark, Jemma lets her hand rove across the page. She does not think about what she is doing, aware only that she wants to capture the unreality of what she sees. Swirls of ochre dust eddy around her feet but Jemma does not notice the wind until it picks up one side of the tartan rug on which the family sits and tips the child’s cordial onto the dirt. In an instant, a black rim of ants appears around the yellow pool. The linen napkins go winging across the stony ground, and when the man leaps up to grab them, he scatters the china plates and sends sandwiches flying. All the while, Jemma’s hand moves in a blur as she sketches this sudden flurry, this scene of outdoor domestic harmony transformed into disarray. Their backs to the swollen pewter clouds massing along the horizon, the family struggles on with the picnic, their food peppered with grit.

Jemma sees the cool change rippling towards them like a wave across the treetops. The wind plucks the child’s bonnet from her head, its silky pink ribbons fluttering a desperate farewell. The woman scolds and the girl begins to cry. While the man is off in pursuit of the bonnet, an explosive gust finds its way under the child’s wide-hooped crinoline, filling out the skirt and lifting her into the air. The woman’s cries alert her husband, who turns to see his dumbstruck daughter momentarily aloft, poised mid-air above the ventilation shaft of an abandoned goldmine. From her vantage point further up the ridge, it is evident to Jemma that none of them can reach her in time. Another tableau-a hatless man and a woman with windswept hair beseeching the sky as the small figure of a girl floats angelically by. Almost independent of her will, Jemma’s hand continues to dart over the page, inscribing black lines that will capture the child before she is swallowed up by the earth.

As the parents scramble across the hard ground, the gust subsides, speeding the girl’s descent. Her feet are disappearing into the hole when something miraculous happens. The child’s crinoline puffs out like the dome of St Peter’s and settles around the mouth of the shaft, suspending her there.

Half in this world, half in the next. The child is so stunned she cannot utter a sound, the wire hoops of her petticoat trembling under her weight. Her mother screams at her daughter not to move a muscle, then throws herself across the space between them, seizing the girl by the wrists as the hoops give way.

Released from her trance, Jemma drops the charcoal and tosses her sketchbook aside. She hurries down the ridge and across the rocky ground towards the huddled family, only to find herself unwanted; an outsider at the closing of ranks. The reproach in their eyes says it all. She can see it is futile to protest. She has dared treat this freak event, this near-fatal caprice of nature, as a fit subject for art. How can she explain? Reluctantly, she returns to her satchel, packs her sketchbook away and melts back into the forest.

During the two-mile walk home, Jemma’s swollen feet grow sore and hot in her tightly laced boots and she welcomes the harsh wind on her face. Before arriving in the district, she had heard about rich volcanic soil as red as blood; about acres of orchards, potatoes, strawberry gardens and pastures thick with clover; about mineral springs gushing from rockbeds in densely wooded forests and fern-filled gullies awash with chartreuse light. But the road from Melbourne that took her through the southern goldfields had revealed a scene closer to the outer circles of hell: the spewed-up clay of mullock heaps, the gaping mouths of abandoned mines, the earth stripped bare of all but the lowest scrub, the corpses of deserted settlements and makeshift shanties, mile after dispiriting mile. Then, just as she had begun to despair, the stagecoach had entered an avenue of Oriental plane trees, a long, luminous colonnade out of which they emerged to find themselves in the elegant town of Wombat Hill, overlooking a fertile plain.

Now, as she climbs over a rise, the town comes into view through the bony swaying branches of the eucalypts. The new brass bell in the fire station tower catches the mid-afternoon sun and blazes like a ball of fire. Halfway up the hillside on which the town is perched, the three churches huddle together.

Below them sits the fortress-like Mechanics’ Institute, the town hall with its Corinthian columns and the sombre facade of the bluestone courthouse. The main street is almost deserted except for a few men lolling in the shade of the wide verandas and some dogs fighting over scraps in the gutter.

Soon, she can read the signs on the shops—Brabant’s Emporium of Empire Goods, Geo Jay’s Ginger Beer & Cordial Works, Mrs Blanchard’s Servants Registry, Maximilian Helburg’s Dancing School, Langbein’s Steam Coffee and Spice Works. On the far side of town gleams the white stucco of the Locarno Guest House flanked by Mozzi’s Macaroni Factory, the Swiss-Italian bakehouse, the orchards of cherries and plums giving way to neat rows of vines on the rocky slopes. She stops to savour the patchwork of human settlement and the faint aroma of Sunday roast. Pretty indeed, but how sleepy! With a pang, she thinks of Melbourne’s brash theatres, its smart boulevards and jewel-box arcades.

There are, though, some compensations for being in the middle of nowhere: the wide vistas here please her artist’s eye, as do the oceanic swell of the southern sky and the shimmering, far-flung horizons. And, as much as she can tell after two weeks, the Rutherfords are pleasant employers, their daughter Caroline an undemanding charge. Most important of all is that she can pursue her art in the afternoons when Caroline is out paying calls with her mother or taking piano lessons. Jemma is determined to save the necessary funds for her passage to Europe and follow in the footsteps of Miss Adelaide Ironside, a young Sydney artist who studied in Paris and is now settled in Rome, and whose paintings are fetching good prices in London. According to the papers, she is on the verge of major success. That Jemma has none of Miss Ironside’s advantages, no family to support and encourage her, no reputation to precede her, is not something she cares to consider.

What she envies Miss Ironside most is her personal acquaintance with Mr John Ruskin, who was Jemma’s first and best teacher, and who speaks to her with more intimacy and good sense through the pages of The Elements of Drawing than any of her subsequent tutors, who have had the advantage of observing her work. Whenever she opens her Ruskin, his voice rises from the pages, deep and sonorous, addressing her directly, as if he is right there in the room. Since her father’s death, she has come to rely on Mr Ruskin more than ever- not so much for instruction as for the paternal reassurance of his smoothly rolling sentences and his calm certainty that to paint or draw is to confront the mystery at the heart of all things. This is his third law of good drawing, as important to Jemma as anything Newton might have divined; the law that nothing is ever seen perfectly but only in fragments and under ‘various conditions of obscurity’. Every serrated point and shining vein which escapes or deceives our sight among the forest leaves, he told her, was a lesson in the difficulty of discerning clearly or judging justly ‘the rents and veins of the human heart; how much of all that is round us, in men’s actions or spirits, which we first think we understand, a closer and more loving watchfulness would show to be full of mystery, never to be either fathomed or withdrawn.’

Jemma thinks of Mr Ruskin now as her path home takes her past the cemetery where a hawk is hovering on a wind current, its eyes fixed on the ground. Had she been like a hawk, preying on the child? She opens her sketchbook again. She re-examines the drawings and catches her breath but cannot regret them. She has seized the fugitive moment, as Mr Ruskin urged. The child lives, the moment is gone, only the drawings remain with their vision of reprieve. How many are granted that chance?

Her father had not been so lucky, and yet most would consider his a natural death. What, though, was natural about dying alone? She had returned home one evening after a day’s teaching to find him face down in the paddock behind their weatherboard cottage, a wilted bunch of buttercups clutched in his hand and the big, grey magpie he had been feeding all winter perched on his head, reproving her with its mournful warble. The night before, she had been woken by the creak of floorboards and had risen to find him pacing the lounge room in his nightshirt, one hand clutched to his chest. He let his hand drop when he saw her. They stared at one another in silence as the grandfather clock began its agonising chime. Dark hammocks of skin hung beneath his eyes; his spine curved under some unseen weight. He seemed to cringe, as if he longed to hide, to curl up in a small, dark space.

‘Indigestion,’ he said, forcing a smile.

But she had seen the fear in his eyes. Even then, she had been unable to believe that this great bear of a man could possibly die. This man who had never been sick, who doted on her with such tenderness, whose company she loved so dearly she could not imagine finding a husband to match him. He may have raised her as a freethinker but she had managed to reach the age of twenty-two with her faith in his immortality intact.

Then to see him lying there on the grass, felled like a tree.

‘Papa!’ she cried, sinking to his side and rolling him gently over. She gasped to see his open, marbled eyes. All expression gone. His heavy body indifferent to the world.
His silence was terrible; more final than anything she could have imagined. As she knelt over him, her tears falling on his mottled cheeks, part of her stood back and noted the shape of his fallen body among the buttercups, and the bird keeping vigil, and the violet light of early dusk slowly dissolving into evening mist. This part of her has stood back from life ever since. Taking her lead from Mr Ruskin, she has come to believe that it is only by breaking objects down that you can see them properly and put them back together in new ways. Only by doing violence to the smooth surface of things can you capture the fragility of the moment, the way life hovers on the brink of extinction.

And so she has thrown herself into her art and with the arrogance of youth tells herself that she has endured the worst and that nothing can touch her now.

In the weeks following the picnic, Jemma completes a series of paintings culminating in the reunited family, their unspoken fury turned upon her as they gazed out from the canvas. During this time, word of the incident spreads through the district, along with reports of the young governess who sketched the whole drama. While Jemma is still finding her way around Wombat Hill and settling into her new lodgings, another shadowy Jemma with a life of her own, a figment of rumour and speculation, is making her debut in the parlours and drawing rooms of the town. What kind of woman, it is asked, would continue to draw while a young girl brushed with death?

Extract published courtesy of Allen & Unwin
© Fiona Capp