Wild Lands Read Free

force.
    Attributed to James Erskine Calder, settler, 1831

Chapter 1
    Ten years later
1827 June – eight miles west of Sydney
    A cooling draft wafted in through the shuttered window, bringing with it the sweet scent of rain. Ten-year-old Kate Carter lay listening to the sound on the roof and the moaning howl of a dingo. It was the third time she’d heard the wild dog in as many nights and she wondered if he too felt lonely as she did. On her left, one of the two older women in the cramped room coughed and muttered in her sleep. Pushing aside the coarse blanket, Kate shuffled her way to the end of the bed. The tampered dirt floor was cold underfoot as her palm slid across the surface of the roughly mortared wall, bits of protruding oyster shells grazing her hand. She moved soundlessly to the end of the room and reached the window, which looked out across the rear of the garden. The room that adjoined the kitchen smelt of cooked mutton and a full chamber pot but the open door allowed the heat from the fire to take the chill from the air, and Kate was comforted by the wan light that the embers produced.
    At the window she pushed the shutters open and rested her arms on the sill. At the end of the garden a fig tree glistened in thepatchy moonlight, its green leaves glossy with moisture. The great woody plant reached up into the heavens, the uppermost branches appearing to caress the stars. The tree was dense with leaves but from the highest branch there was a good view of the countryside. The Reverend’s farm, where Kate lived, was surrounded by other farms in an area thick with natives and highwaymen. Only last year one of the fanciest homes in the area, Burwood House, had been robbed and the men responsible were captured and hung by their necks. The two women she now shared space with had been sent with the rest of the convicts to be reminded of the grisly end such actions caused, but the women had thought it a fine outing, one that spared them a few hours of work.
    Kate drew her thoughts from images of taut ropes and kicking feet and pretended she was atop the fig tree. If she looked westward to Parramatta she imagined she could see the cemetery where her father lay buried. In the topmost branches, surrounded by birds and leaves, she spoke to him, telling him of the small things that filled her days. Of course she never told anyone of these conversations, not even her mother. She’d promised her father that this would be their secret and Kate was proud that there was something special that only she and her father shared.
    Yesterday she’d told him about the cabbage-tree hat that she was learning to make. The Reverend employed convict women to weave the palm leaves together to form the flat-brimmed hats nearly everyone wore. Her mother said he made a good shilling supplying free settlers and convicts but that wasn’t his main occupation. The Reverend was a farmer as well. The convicts sniggered that he was a Presbyterian pastor with trade inclinations, although why everyone in his household called him Reverend, Kate didn’t know.
    With the darkening sky Kate couldn’t see the thick roots that sprawled out from the fig tree’s base like legs, but it was not difficult to imagine the hollow at the rear of the tree where she sat,once she climbed down from the boughs above. It would be cold at the base of the tree tonight, cold and wet. It seemed to Kate that there were now only two places of her very own in the world. The fig tree and the pallet that lay next to Madge’s. When her father was alive she’d had her own room in a little stone house with a bark roof. His passing had changed everything.
    On the floor behind her the cook, Lambeth, and the scullery maid, Madge, snored and muttered in their sleep. Kate leant out the window. Rain peppered her face and arms. Tilting her head towards the sky, droplets pricked her skin and outstretched tongue. She licked her lips and smiled as the air