The pilgrimage to the promised land took months. No family was able to carry all their possessions at once, and so were forced to trek back and forth, carrying what they could in a day’s journey, and then returning the next for another load. Sometimes it took two weeks to complete a distance that would otherwise have taken less than a day.
As the congregation slowly advanced forwards, following the dray tracks of the plains towards the lush blue-green distance of the Mount Lofty Ranges and its promise of cool, I sprawled on my father’s handcart, letting my head loll on its hard edge, and studied the sky. I could not fathom such impossible blue. The sky was higher, bigger, a cloudless wonder of vastness. Everything seemed small under its endlessness. Everything would die one day, but the sky would remain, and under such timelessness all time-tied things seemed sweeter for their impermanence. My throat tightened thinking about such things, and I slid myself off the handcart and walked from person to person, running my hands over their hot foreheads in wonder that they existed at all. You are all here, alive, all at once. What miracle, I told them. You will be gone one day. May the sky that has steepled over you hold you in its memory like a spark! I shouted this at Herr Pasche. Even dour-faced Christian seemed to me, in that moment, a marvel of life.
Nature had always been my whetstone, had always made me keener, and after the congregation reached the foothills, I felt myself sharpen to life. The landscape on the ascent to the ranges was unlike anything I had ever seen before. I had thought the pine forest back in Kay a place of divinity, but this country was infinitely more sovereign. Each morning, while it was yet dark, the birds filled the air with singing so that the sun, when it rose, brought light as symphony. The birds were everywhere: hosts of raucous angels, black-bodied, yellow-topped messengers of shrieking delight. Soot-streaked choral masters. Feather-fat kookaburras suddenly, alarmingly, proselytising to the dawn. Even the trees grew in such a way as to welcome the sun to the world. In Prussia canopies were dense and thick. Forest floors were deeply shadowed. Here was a place of lightness. Leaves dappled thin and shiny, fluttered pink, grey, green. I crushed them in my palm and smelled medicine. Healing. Hot, still days dropped branches, all bone-crack, and brought the sounds of bees. Sometimes I smelled honey warming the air. Animals were muscled fur and liquid eyes, or scaly thicknesses, tongues darting. All of it, trees and possums and kangaroos and bright beads of ants circling trunks, veered from stillness to flashing movement in an instant. There was energy here. Rough-softness. Sometimes it rained and, when it stopped, the air was perfume, a clean scent of wet leaf and damp sweetness. I wanted to drink that washed summer air. I imagined it tasted of reprieve.
My father, too, was invigorated by everything he saw. He ran his fingers along the ground and filled his nails with soil. ‘God’s gifts,’ he said, smiling at Matthias. Papa’s voice in prayer was the first to interrupt the dark. He scaled the ridges with kingdom-come strides, and remarked aloud upon the extravagance of sunlight, the yawning orange of rock faces, the views that suddenly appeared, paradisiacal, when the trees fell away to vistas that stretched to a shining belt of sea. He wore the hardship of the journey like a hair shirt: the wonder and the deprivation and the physical toll were bringing him closer to God. It was all sanctification.
No one else seemed to find such joy in the journey; the to-and-fro soon became tedious. While the Pasches, Radtkes and Volkmanns had, like my own family, bought small barrows from workers at the port, other families from Kay had no choice but to carry their possessions on their backs, and as the journey grew harder and heat settled into the days, the trail of Old Lutherans thinned. I decided to leave Papa’s barrow to walk beside the Eichenwalds, and I soon noticed that some of the women seemed to be avoiding Anna Maria.
They have heard rumours, I thought to myself, watching as Beate Fr?hlich ignored Anna Maria’s request for help and let the Wend’s bottles of dried herbs – fallen from a rip in her canvas bag – roll down the track. Magdalena has troubled them against her.
Whether by design or accident, the Eichenwalds found themselves moving through the gullies and ranges largely alone. They often made camp early and spent the last few hours of daylight examining their surrounds. Friedrich felled trees to examine the wood and Anna Maria, her bag already filled with samphire from the port, picked plants to smell and taste them.
‘They dry my mouth out,’ Friedrich said one night, chewing some small red berries she had kept.
Anna Maria threw a spoon at him. ‘You don’t trust me?’
‘I like them,’ said Thea. She examined one in her fingers. ‘Like a cherry, only the stone is on the outside.’
‘Topsy-turvy, like everything here,’ Friedrich said, spitting the stone into the bush behind them.
I noticed that the Wend had suddenly stilled. ‘Friedrich?’
‘Hm?’
Anna Maria placed a hand on Thea’s knee and I noticed, then, what she had seen. Behind Friedrich, standing a little way off behind the trees, was a group of people regarding them in silence. Three women stood, cloaks draped over their shoulders, with two men and a few small children. Even in the gloaming their bodies shone, hair greased and reddish. I was struck by their upright bearing.
‘Eingeborene,’ Friedrich whispered. He had gone very still and serious. I watched his eyes flick to the small hand axe that sat in the dirt at his feet.
Thea noticed. She shook her head at him, eyes alarmed.
The group calmly looked across at the Eichenwalds before one of the women nodded at the unlit pile of twigs and fallen wood in the centre of the camp. She inclined her head and muttered something to the other women.
It was Anna Maria who moved first.
Eyes not leaving the group, she got up and walked to where she had heaped their belongings for the night. She gave the women a quick smile, hands shuffling in a canvas bag, and then removed a wrapped parcel of ship’s biscuit.
‘Brot,’ she said, approaching the group.
One of the women said something in a language I could not understand and glanced down at the biscuit in Anna Maria’s hand, then back to the pile of kindling. She did not take it.
‘Give them some real bread, Mama,’ Thea whispered. She reached for the crust of rice and wheaten bread she had been eating and offered it. The bread hung in the air for a long moment, before one of the other women stepped forwards and, with a few words to Thea, took it. In the twilight I saw that this woman was the same age as Anna Maria, perhaps a little older. With her free hand she reached up and gestured towards Thea’s hair. Thea removed her headscarf, and the woman peered at her pale braids, looking back at her companions and making some comment that made the other women smile.
‘You can go away now,’ Friedrich said. ‘Off you go.’ He had gone pale. ‘Weggehen.’ He motioned them away from the clearing. The smiles vanished and the men stared him down for a few moments before making their way back onto the path.