May arrived and brought the last of the families and their possessions, as well as days of rain that greened the land and washed the air of dust thrown up by the clearing of the valley, already begun in earnest. After the dry heat of summer, it was with a mixture of relief and consternation that the congregation received the change in weather. I spent each night by Thea’s side, sitting between the comfort of her warm back and the wall of rough saplings. Some mornings dawned white with frost, and when I tucked myself into the heft and tower of a nearby blue gum I felt the thrill of ice melting upon our leaves.
With each new bright, crisp day, I walked to see my own family. My father prided himself on being the first to wake in the valley. Each morning, after pissing at the base of the same wattle, steam rising from the ground, he bent low at the entryway to his hut and thundered, ‘What more has man to do than to labour and to pray without ceasing? Hm? Beten und arbeiten. Pray and work!’ Mama and Matthias would emerge moments later, faces haggard with want of sleep, Hermine well wrapped and stirring in irritation on my mother’s shoulder. After prayers by the dead char of the previous night’s fire, Matthias would walk Hermine to Augusta, then return to work. Mama hauled the bag of wedges and sledgehammers from tree to tree for my brother and Papa, sawing smaller branches herself when needed. The grass was scythed short, the smaller wattles and gums felled with axes. The larger red gums took days. I watched Papa and Matthias labour through the hours, digging trenches, cutting as many roots as possible to weaken them. There were three magnificent trees bent together, so tall they seemed to commune with the sky, and each day Papa stared them down while scratching his beard. They stood in the middle of the land he intended for wheat, and I could see that they irritated him in their disruption. I sang my way inside the smaller of the three to watch my father circle below, muttering aloud about ringbarking, fire, while we felt hollows within ourself, filled with the soft turning of furred babies. In the end, the magnitude of the gums seemed to intimidate him, and he let them be, although not without several evenings of vented irritation to my mother about the inequity of his being allocated a section so sat upon by giants.
I was glad my father left the three sister gums alone; I took to keeping sentry within the smallest. Together, we were alive and thrummed with sap. We were scarred with old feeding tracks of termites, heavy with years, pathed with nicks from the claws of creatures who rested within and upon us. The comfort of a sleeping koala nestled in our forks was akin to the weight of a hand upon a weary shoulder. From our height, we felt the congregation burn and dig and scrape the land down. Drizzle kissed us. Smoke fires billowed over us. And always, below, the hypnotic pull and thrust of the saw, the relentless swing of the adze. As the days grew ever shorter and colder, everything smelled of fire and turned earth and the heady, brutal tang of new-felled wood.
At night, again myself, I felt my teeth ache in memory of the bone-deep reverberation of trees hitting the soil and consoled myself by sitting at the Eichenwalds’ fire, listening to Thea tell her parents what she had planted from the seeds provided to them. She stored them in paper within her canvas ship’s bag, kept dry within the hollow of the trunk next to their campsite. I listened to her recite the names of plants like answers to a catechism.
‘Lettuces, green peas, radishes, cabbages. Turnips. Spinach and cress.’
At first light she stalked the rows like a bird, eyes sharp for signs of growth in the soil. When the seeds sprouted, tender miracles of green appearing, she kneeled and gave thanks to God, and even my own disbelieving heart was filled with awe. I sat in the earth beside her as she prayed and I rubbed that giving dirt across her forehead so that the garden would know she belonged to it.
It was strange to see the land so quickly transformed. On Sundays, when the congregation gathered around the humble daub church, Elder Christian turned his Bible to the Book of Joshua, and the bush was compared to the wall of Jericho. God would help them bring it down. I could see the triumph in the shoulders of the men when they were able to finally wrest the more stubborn of trees from the air, and I understood that had I, too, been clearing the soil each day, I would have felt the hot dash of relief in my body when progress was made. But from my deep abiding within heartwood, root and leaf vein, I could more clearly feel that to clear the land was to scar it, and to triumph in that scarring seemed sinister and unholy. I did not sing the praises of felled trees. I did not sing the glory of sown seed potatoes, bags of wheat at one pound a bushel.
I do not praise it now. It has been a long time since I sought out the life flowing in the sapwood of a river red gum, but my memory of it remains acute. I know more now. That is why I no longer do it. I have no desire to sweep the earth clean of trees.
Winter settled in, squatting over the landscape and pissing down more freezing rain until the creek took on a wild, agitated look, creeping up its banks and threatening to flood. Often, after a heavy rain, small groups of ‘Eingeborene’ walked through Heiligendorf, looking in the makeshift shelters and observing the clearing of the land, before gathering by the creek to remove fish from traps they set there. They never stayed long and it was presumed by the elders that the valley was not favoured by them. When MacFarlane, one of the landowners who had negotiated the contract, drafted men from the congregation to fence his station, Matthias and Hans returned describing campsites they had seen higher up in the ranges, snug homes of stone and others abutting tree hollows built from branches, bark and leaves.
‘Cosy as you like,’ Hans said to Thea, visiting one Sunday afternoon. ‘Beds with possum skins, all sewn together. Much better than the hovel we’re living in.’
‘I heard Rosina complaining about it yesterday,’ Thea admitted.
‘I told my father we ought to spend the time making a better shelter, but no. “Wheat first, a house later.”’ Hans rolled his eyes. ‘Now he asks me why I’m doing so little to keep out the weather.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Thea murmured.
‘That’s why I’ve come,’ Hans explained. ‘I was wondering if your father might let me take some of those saplings by the border?’
‘Ask him yourself,’ Thea said. ‘You don’t need to go through me.’
Hans smiled, and there was something in it that unsettled me.
‘I also wanted to give you this.’ He handed her a small cat, whittled from wood.
Thea turned it in her hands.
‘You can have it, if you like.’
‘What good is a false cat to a witch?’
‘Keep it,’ he said. ‘I made it for you.’