…the Australian federation is a year old. Our story is seen through the eyes of a 12 year old boy, Tom. Tom loves and worships his father who has dragged his family from the city to an isolated cabin at the edge of the woods with his evangelical dream – a mission to farm the land.
But the dream has died. Tom’s older sister has begun to question not only the dream, but her father’s sanity. One night, three men arrive on horseback; ex-soldiers from the Boer War. Tom, like his father, believes they are providence, a gift. But one of them has a secret – he has gold. When Tom realises that the gold has poisoned both his father and his sister, the cabin becomes a psychological battleground. Soon Tom is forced to choose between the ideals of his father and the basic, brutal laws of survival.
Having had most of his memories on the farm and having been the only other male in the family, Tom has been brought up by Nat to carry on the good work, and he’s made a very good job of it. Nat’s fanaticism has rubbed off so entirely that Tom believes utterly that he’s fighting the good fight
But when his mother dies Nat finally starts to fall to pieces, and Tom witnesses this, at first not understanding and refusing to believe it, and then slowly coming to realise that this means everything his father told him about conviction and strength and truth could in fact be a fiction. Unless of course this is his test, as his father always talks about, to protect the dream and keep it alive.
A city schoolteacher all his life, a sensible family man of god but also the worst kind of genuine idealist, Nat like many others listened to the preaching of local clergymen compelling them to go out on to the land and take up the selections in the name of god — to farm the land as god would want it done.
For Nat the land, the country and the mission in Australia are all bound up in the same notion that god has a purpose for the people and the land they have come to. But he’s never picked up a hoe or an axe in his life and, armed with a rudimentary pamphlet on how to run a farm, he buys into a selection and takes his young family and their possessions out of the city.
Now, faced with the physical and emotional collapse of everything around him, refusing to believe that god has abandoned them, he begins to hear it in the trees, in the land itself, and his conviction has begun to turn into madness.
Sarah left the city when she was just old enough to have gathered friends and feel comfortable. She’s always known that her mother Emma never wanted to go either, and they’ve both silently lived the last ten years out here believing that it will finally all be over and they’ll return to their old life – before she loses the chance to know what it’s like to live like other normal women do.
But now her mother is dead she’s truly alone. She has Tom, but her little brother is so obsessed with Nat’s dream that there’s almost no way of convincing him they’re doomed and likely to die out here. Sarah is on the verge of running away, as nobody has come to rescue her from it all, and needs to find a way to take Tom with her. Damn Nat, he can stay and expire here with his god for all she cares.
Naïve, opportunistic and a bit of a dope, Jimmy was taken under the wing of Henry and Carver during the South African war, but he was always going to be something of a liability. It’s not that he isn’t loyal, it’s just that there are so many temptations.
Jimmy’s perpetual inability to control his hormones or his impulses has got them all into a heap of trouble wherever they’ve gone and it’s always been Henry and Carver pulling him out of it. But this time he knows he’s deceived them and after what they’ve been through together that’s stepping over the line – they’ll kill him before forgive him.
The ceaseless peripatetic, moving from one country to the next, always in search of something he could call home, a father and brother to everybody and nobody, at heart desperate for the one thing he never had, and the one thing he ultimately destroyed when he returned from the war sodden with blood and alcohol – a family.
He found it to some extent in Carver and Jimmy, but what he longs for is the dream, the ideal, the home hearth and the place where love and trust can grow and thrive. But Henry’s left it far too late and as he’s learned from many wars as a mercenary, sometimes when opportunity calls you have to do what’s necessary, because god and the land aren’t going to care about you one way or the other.
‘Beat senseless by his old man when he was a tacker’, Carver grew up the hard way with his two brothers, boundary riding for the squatters. When his two brothers were murdered by bushrangers and he was cut up by them the first thing he did was get his revenge, then he took off up country, taking any rough job he could find, no longer considerate of ’society’s morality’. He’d seen too much for that.
There was the bond of one man to another and the rough morality of the land that held nobody up higher than the next, and that was that. And when the call came for men to fight in South Africa he found himself a new family in Henry and someone who had seen the world with the same eyes he had – somebody he knew he could trust.
The ‘illustrious local landlord’, one of the many large landholders that were compelled to portion out their land into ’selections’ by the colonial government in order to move more small farmers into the country and break up the squatter hegemony.
Connolly, like the rest of them, has largely paid lip service to the law and foisted useless strips of land on these new ‘Selectors’ swarming out of the cities, and now they’ve gone predictably to rack and ruin he’s buying the land back at a fraction of the price it’s worth and using it to build his railroad — to bring modernity and industry to the bush and ’secure the new country’s future’.
Charlie, the Rabbiter, one the many itinerants who’s managed to eke a meagre living out of the smallholders, but as they’ve steadily disappeared, forced off the land, he’s come to the realisation that there must be more secure ways to earn a living.
Once, like Nat, a man of religious conviction, he’s seen too much despair and disappointment to believe god has a hand in any of it all, and Connolly’s railroad with its basic practical wage and eye on the future seems like the best step to take as the new century and all its changes beckon. There’s no god here.
