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‘… only condensed milk, I’m afraid. Mr Condon. When you live in a place like this you have to expect that,’ the woman was saying. She held the teapot stagily suspended, waiting for his answer.

‘Oh, no, no milk. thank you.’ Looking out into the hostile heat of the paddock, he had momentarily forgotten her. But he drew up his chair now and made an effort at conversation.

Though it was really too hot to try to keep up her tea-party foolishness. Good Lord, the woman had actually changed her frock; she put on some frilly affair–chintz, was it? The word sounded right; brittle and chattering.

‘Have you lived here always, Mrs Hastings?’

‘Oh, goodness, no. Harold came here as manager three years ago; that was before we married. I always tell him there would have been no wedding-bells if I had had any idea…! But we hope for a city job, as soon as we can find a house–so difficult, you know. Of course, the pay here is quite good; I have to admit that. But to be seventy miles from the nearest town–and such a town!’

‘And frankly, Mr Condon, I don’t feel myself cut out for country life. Now my old home–well, it makes me miserable to think of it now. Down on the river-bank, you know, quite close to the city and the shops–right in the swim, you might say. But Ellen Downs is really beyond words–now, isn’t it? I have a phrase for this kind of country–the abomination of desolation. Don’t you think that’s appropriate?”

He found the right formula in answer, and went on, ‘Who really owns this place, then?’

‘Oh, it’s run by a company–most of these places are now, you know. One doesn’t put up with country like this unless one has to, does one? I don’t know how long they’ve owned it. We get a director’s visit now and then–big cars, you know, and good clothes–they make something out of the place. But they only come in the cool season.’ She laughed rather viciously. ‘They don’t have to know what the rest of the year is like, now do they?’

‘You don’t know, then, whether any of the original buildings are still standing?’

She looked bored; she pouted. ‘Well, I don’t. I’ve never asked, to tell you the truth. But Bertha might. She’s the cook-housekeeper here, you know. Her father was a stockman on the place all his life, she tells me; and Bertha never left the place. She didn’t marry–you’ll see why, if you’d like to ask her yourself.’

‘Well, thank you, I should like to know. I have a special reason,’ he began to explain, ‘You see, this place–’.

But she was not interested in his reasons. ‘Bertha,’ she called to the dim back regions beyond the broad verandah. ‘Come here a minute.’

There was a pause at this summons; then he door leading off the verandah behind him opened. Bertha advanced, any age over forty, deeply coffee-coloured, barefooted and hideously dressed; she half-hopped, half-limped, on a withered leg.

*  *  *  *  *

AND yet, looking up, Condon felt himself in some dark way put in the wrong by her existence. It had come over him again, for no reason—the feeling of failure, of isolation, that this landscape had given him. About the serene ugliness of this half-caste woman there was nothing, surely, to rouse envy or admiration, as there was nothing desirable about the burning rock, the dusty, scanty land in whose uninhabited miles she had lived her life.

Bertha and this country might have stood for the same thing. That was it, he realised suddenly. A Condon had failed here, as he himself had failed; the landscape had rejected that forgotten hope, here where this brown root of a woman lived. And that old failure of Stephen Condon’s had somehow linked itself in his mind with his own. So, this obstinately foolish expedition of his led to no renewal of pride in him. The landscape defeated him, as it had defeated old Stephen.

Bertha, too, ignored him. ‘Yes, Missus?’

‘Mrs Hastings, Bertha, please,’ the woman corrected. ‘This gentleman, Mr Condon’ (Condon half-bowed as at an introduction, but Bertha’s glance did not waver) ‘would like ask you about the old buildings here.’ She took out a cigarette and turned impatiently back to the tea-table.

Bertha waited.

‘I was just asking Mrs Hastings’–Condon could not help a propitiating tone–‘whether any of the original buildings–the first that were built on the place–are still standing.’

Bertha raised a sinewy arm. ‘Out there, by the big green tree, you see?’

‘Yes,’ Condon answered.

‘That was the old homestead, my father tell me years ago. Made of split slabs. Roof used to be bark, now they got tin on it. We use that one for store–old timber, paint, that kind of thing. Should have pulled it down; nearly falling now.’

‘Did your father know–did he mention the name of the man who built it? The name of Condon?’

Bertha looked vague, uninhabited. ‘No, never said. I got scones in the oven, Missus–Hastings. I think better go and look now.’

Mrs Hastings, swinging a paste earring (good God!) looked at Condon wearily. ‘Were there any more questions you would like answered, Mr Condon?’

Condon shook his head, humbly thanking Bertha. The wall was blank, of course. Little enough had ever been written on it. The years, the dust of the dry seasons, the wet of the monsoons, had washed out names, memories, whatever there had been. But he would like to look at that hut, just the same, before he went.

‘Tell me,’ Mrs Hastings turned to him with a pallid interest; ‘how long ago were your people here?’

‘My great-grandfather left here in eighteen-sixty-five.’

‘Good heavens,’ Mrs Hastings murmured, now definitely dismissing him as hopeless. ‘Fancy still being interested in it. Would you like to go and look at the shed, perhaps? My husband won’t be home for an hour, but I do hope you will stay to meet him.’

Condon rose with relief. ‘I should like to look at it, thank you. I shall have to be going shortly, though. My appointment in Hambleton is for this evening.’

‘Please make the place your own,’ Mrs Hastings invited. ‘I wish we could do more for you. We don’t get so many people dropping in for a chat, do we?’ Her eyes said plainly that this chat had been a sore disappointment.

*  *  *  *  *

Condon made his way down the side steps and turned towards the old building. As he left the shade of the roof, heat took him by the shoulders and the dry air burned into his lungs. November was no month to travel in north-western Queensland; he would not take this particular dirty job on again for the firm, if he could help it. It was the name of the town that had arrested his attention–Hambleton. So it still existed, he had thought, that name that had come into the old diary, written in rusty pale ink like dried blood. Then the places were real. He would go and see.

The little building, crooked, tottering against a support like an old grey staggerer on a crutch, had yet been honestly built, it was easy to see; and he remembered the progress of the work, noted in the diary over months–the choosing of trees, the felling, the splitting and dessing of the slabs, the mortising; then the roof was on, the ant bed floor smoothed.

‘Ellen and the two children moved into the house yesterday. A great change from the wagon and they are rejoicing accordingly. All now looks fair for our new venture, and cattle so far doing well.’

He bent down to examine that ninety-year-old mortising–yes, Stephen had known his job. ‘As far as I can tell,’ he said to himself bitterly. For it seemed to him suddenly that there was a pride in that work that he himself had never known.

Inside, the house was shelved and stacked with cast-off and useless material accumulated over the years. Two old wagon wheels leaned in a corner; slabs, fencing posts, coils of rusted wire, branding-irons, nameless pieces of timber and metal, dusty odd stirrup irons, buckles, lengths of chain–all deeply dusted with the piercing whitish grit that blew in from outside on every wind.

He could see the window space, nailed-up with timber and hung with a few pieces of old greenhide. There Ellen (he did not think of her as his own great-grandmother, so real had she become to him in his absorption in that old diary) had sat and worked; had stood shaking with ague while the two children tossed feverishly in the rough stringybark bunks; had endured her private loneliness, enjoyed her brief pleasures. Ellen, the Devonshire girl, seventeen when she married, twenty when she came here, twenty-two when she died—who had loved birds and fed them with scanty crumbs, who had hated snakes and lost her daughter by one. And by the window stood a rough-sawn table, built-in one with the wall; Stephen had made that.

*  *  *  *  *

But the heat in the little room drove him back to the door.

It was inhuman, that heat; the climate of another world. He leaned gasping on the doorpost, and looked out beyond the homestead buildings to the thin ragged trees that clung to this earth—an earth that burned the hand.

Pioneers, oh pioneers!

A lot of rot was talked about them. As though they had been better than human creatures, as though they had been nobler, more equipped with endurance and virtue, as though they had been equipped with an extra allowance of endurance, virtue, nobility, as though they had been–clichés. One didn’t put up with this unless one had to, said Mrs Hastings dimly in his mind. Or had they, indeed, been different? Was there something in old Stephen—some faith, some vitality—that Mrs Hastings and he, John Condon, had never known? Nonsense to ask. One could know no more than the diary said.

And what did it say, of the life lived in the crazy hut that sagged beside him? Death, death and again death; hope revived and lost again; loneliness, hard work, semi-starvation; and at last the handwriting almost unrecognisable and conformed to no ruled lines:

‘My wife is dead.’

No name, no details, and nothing more said; the diary ended. It was by chance he had found out the rest, down in the hot northern port, in the crumbling earliest file of an old newspaper, consulted more in idleness than expectation. So Stephen Condon left his venture, nothing but graves behind him. One son, the eldest child, remained; he had ridden with the boy in a pack saddle those three hundred miles to the northern port, and died there.

Of what had happened after that, John Condon had no idea. Only the diary remained, washed up on the shore of his father’s death, unexplained among old papers. On it his father had written, among a scrawled crowd of jotted sums, whose pounds, shillings and pence had probably never added up to any advantage for the Condons who had lived on hope and the three-thirty next Rosehill:

‘Diary of my grandfather???’

So sank Stephen Condon behind question marks into a lost past.

And what on earth had brought his great-grandson nosing here? Nothing had come of this but a headache. Did he want to live here, in this disastrous oven of a place which had already started every nerve throbbing behind his eyes? Even if he had been able to buy the place–and most certainly he couldn’t –no, he certainly did not.

He leaned giddily against the door-post and looked round for shade. Death! The place was full of it.

But round this wall and beyond there was shade. Seeing it only as a respite in the terrible attack of a world-wide light, he made for it thankfully. Not until he looked up did he see the thick green depth of swaying leaves, the cool cave of branches, the blessing of that color. A weeping fig tree.

‘Today Ellen planted the Port Jackson fig. She has kept it alive in a crock all the way in the wagon. I must say almost miraculously. We plan for our old age a bench and table under it, though it is now just one foot in height. It will make a splendid shade in the garden.’

. . . . .

‘A black and bitter day for us. Today we buried little Jane under the fig-tree. Ellen says she cannot bear to have her any further from the house.’

. . . . .

‘Ellen last night bore a son, which died at birth. She is grief-stricken and very weak. The child is buried near little Jane. One son remains …’

A sentimental journey. A crazy journey. Yet he could not help feeling, as he looked up into the old tree’s shadows, a strange triumph. ‘Well,’ he said to himself, hardly knowing why, ‘that was worth coming for.’

Yes, that tree. It was an achievement of some kind. It was huge, alive, green, in that country of stunted greys. And in it, he told himself, those dead Condons must have some part; their red blood had gone to feed its green. It was taller than anything he could see. The Condons and the landscape were reconciled in it, failure and hopelessness forgotten. Something sprang up in himself; here was a root, here was something he needed.

*  *  *  *  *

Mrs Hastings came delicately across the grassless waste; her enormous hat was a feathery pink straw.

‘Do come and have a drink, Mr Condon. Do you know, you’ve been here nearly an hour? I quite thought you had a sun stroke or something.’

He indicated the tree on impulse. ‘My great-grandmother and two of her children are buried under that tree.’

Now why had he said that? For it was a boast, he knew.

Mrs Hastings screamed a little.

‘But how dreadful! That just puts the finishing touch on the place for me. You don’t know how creepy graves make me feel. Do come back to the house. My husband is just washing; he would so much like to meet you, I’m sure.’

Driving away, John Condon was the minor businessman again. He had not much time to get to town for that appointment. Tall and incredibly green, the weeping fig stood out in that withered landscape. He had got what he had come for.