A gentle hand on his shoulder. “Tommy, enough, it’s done.”
Slowly he came back to himself. His grip loosened, his body wilted; Katherine held his arm and helped him stand, and togetherthey looked down at Noone. Tommy felt for the shotgun. He peeled it from her hands. She’d managed to get the second cartridgein. “I have to make sure,” Tommy said. Katherine backed around the table but didn’t avert her gaze, watching as Tommy restedthe muzzle squarely on Noone’s forehead, and blew it clean away.
* * *
The house went up like a bonfire, flames gorging the desiccated wood. In the yard Tommy leaned against Katherine, her armaround his waist, holding a rag to his side, watching his childhood burn. And all it held within it, all the memories, allthe pain; Noone. There would be nothing left when the fire was finished, nobody would find the body, nobody would be lookingfor him out here. Another unseen killing, another hidden pyre. All across this vast country they were burning, as they hadfor a hundred years, all lit by men like Noone. So many dead in the ashes, thousands of them, scattered over the colonies,never to be found, the wind tossing their remains like a plaything, and teasing the dust off their bones.
Epilogue
1908
Gippsland, Victoria
He is pulling up carrots from the veggie patch when he hears singing from inside the house. He pauses, straightens, grimacing;his hand goes to his side. Barefoot and shirtless in the warm sunshine, wearing only a pair of ragged shorts, there is a star-shapedknot of scar tissue in his sunken midriff and a jagged white line high on his left arm. He stands listening. She must havebeen crying again. But Emily has the same way with their daughter as he’s had with certain horses over the years. Just thesound of her voice soothes her. Soothes him too, in truth.
Carrots dangling in his hand, he walks back to the house, brushes off his feet on the porch. He opens the door, steps inside, puts the carrots on the kitchen bench. Arthur and Rosie will be over later. It’s Tommy’s turn to cook supper for once. Quietly he pads to the archway and listens, peeking around the wall. They are in the living room, the two of them, bathed in hazy sunlight through the window, Emily rocking the baby while she sings. Elizabeth, they have called her, after his mother; Lizzie is what she gets. Swaddled in a white blanket, her pink little face peering out, staring up at Emily with something close to awe. His wife and his baby—Tommy can scarcely believe that it’s real. At a break in the song Emily nuzzles Lizzie playfully, and Tommy hears her giggle for the first time. He gasps and Emily catches it, turns to him and smiles. She beckons him forward. Tommy steps into the room. Emily hands him the baby and he takes her, clumsily, he still looks awkward as hell. He will get used to it, she has told him. If you don’t practice you’ll never learn. But he worries that he is hurting her, or will drop her; he worries about everything now. He cradles her against his sun-warmed chest and her heavy eyes seem to narrow into a frown. As if asking, who is this man, what is he to her, what will he become? Everything, if Tommy is able. He will give her everything he has, though nothing from before she was born: his past is not her weight to bear. His daughter, his wife, himself even; if he can help it, they will know him only for the man he is now.
The baby’s eyes close gradually. Tommy kisses the top of her head. She is so beautiful, he thinks, so peaceful. Lying therein her swaddling, the soft wash of her breathing, eyelids fluttering faintly, asleep in her father’s arms.
Author’s Note
The characters, events and some of the locations in this novel are fictitious, but all are rooted in historical fact. TheNative Police operated in Queensland from the colony’s formation in 1859 until the early years of the twentieth century, andis considered by some historians to have been one of the biggest single killers of Aboriginal people during that time. Knowledgeof the force’s crimes was widespread, but despite numerous coronial inquests no Native Police officer was ever criminallyconvicted over an Aboriginal death. For his comprehensive study of this subject, and all aspects of the force, I am againgrateful for the work of Jonathan Richards, whose book The Secret War: A True History of Queensland’s Native Police (University of Queensland Press) has been a valuable resource throughout.
Billy McBride’s line “You’ll get nothing out of it” in chapter 21 echoes notorious Native Police Sub-Inspector Lyndon Poingdestre,who, at an inquest into Aboriginal killings at Kimberley, and aware the bodies had already been removed, reportedly mockedthe presiding magistrate, “What’s the use of the enquiry, you’ll get nothing out of it.” Sure enough, Poingdestre was onlydisciplined on a technicality; no criminal charges were brought. Mark Finnane and Jonathan Richards’s paper “‘You’ll Get NothingOut of It’? The Inquest, Police and Aboriginal Deaths in Colonial Queensland” (Australian Historical Studies, no. 123, April 2004), provided the quote and its context, along with a helpful overview of the futility of frontier inquests.
Evan McHugh’s The Drovers (Viking) is both an entertaining read and a trove of firsthand tales from drovers who worked the central Australian stock routes in their heyday. The phrase “coochies and debil-debils” in chapter 18 appears in that book, quoting from George Farwell’s Land of Mirage (HarperCollins), as do the stories of the ill-fated teacher walking to Birdsville and the friends on their way to a racemeeting forced to drink their horses’ blood.
David Hampton (Curator, Workshops Rail Museum, Ipswich, Qld) and Jeff Powell (Curator, Cobb & Co Museum, Toowoomba, Qld) weregenerous with their time and expertise on period rail and coach travel, respectively—my thanks to
