Our Sunshine: Popular Penguins

P
ENGUIN
B
OOKS

OUR SUNSHINE

Robert Drewe was born in Melbourne and grew up on the West Australian coast. His novels and short stories and his prize-winning memoir
The Shark Net
have been widely translated, won many national and international awards, and been adapted for film, television, radio and theatre around the world.

ROBERT DREWE

P
ENGUIN
B
OOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (Australia)
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(a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London, WC2R 0RL, England

First published by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd 1991

This edition published by Penguin Books Australia Ltd 2001

Copyright © Robert Drewe, 1991

The moral right of the author has been asserted

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

www.penguin.com.au

ISBN: 978-1-74-253149-6

For
James Fraser
and
Ray Lawrence

T
he lion is out of sorts. It’s probably the smoke more than the human hubbub or the seesawing concertina music making it bark that deep and chilling moan and scrape its ribs along the bars of its wagon. You have to step close to see it – then hold your breath and heart still. Against every instinct, press your face up to the bars and peer into the ferocious meaty shadows. The bars are chipped and jungle-coloured, far too fragile-looking, with damp lion-fluff sticking to them. Balls of dusty lion-moult drift over the floor, too, among the odd bullock shin and lion dropping, and the lion pads through this muck with a fierce thin-hipped precision. Controlled panic. It hacks its moaning cough, it paces, it rubs its skin raw, but its paws never touch bone or turd.

From the pub’s verandah he can catch a glimpse of the lion each time they throw another branch on the bonfire.

Now its tension has spread to the camel and four circus ponies. And to Mirth, dear Mirth, twitching and stamping on her tether in the saplings behind the inn. A mangy old lion, but not often seen in these parts – rare enough to keep Jane Jones giggling at the idea of it all the way through their polka. Giggling, and prodding him to see if he’s real. Pulling his beard.

When she brought him his ham and eggs this morning he’d asked how old she was and given her his revolvers to look at.

‘Sixteen,’ she said, sighting along a Colt. ‘Although couldn’t I pass for eighteen at least?’

‘Still a boy myself under the whiskers,’ he said. Dancing just now, the curious springiness of her young sapling back bending against his hand.

‘What a sweet touch, stealing a circus!’ she said. Well, it was. What an extra treat for the prisoners, something to tell their grandchildren in the next century! How he’d turned on a circus for them as well as free drink and games of cards and the hop, step and jump competition (which he, sportingly handicapped by his holstered Colts – and fatigued by a night’s hard riding – had allowed Jack McManus, the blacksmith’s offsider, to win by eighteen inches), and his genial demonstration of crack shooting and, above all, now, the dancing to the concertina against the joyful flames of the bonfire.

Not that the circus owner hadn’t been surprised and reluctant to be bailed up with sleep still in his eyes on a Sunday morning in his caravan on the Benalla Road.

‘You bloody mad bushman! I’ll set my lion on you!’

He just laughed. He couldn’t take seriously a sleep-ruffled codger with a red-arsed monkey on his shoulder. The Great Orlando!

‘Look sharp, or I’ll tickle you up with this.’ He pointed one of the revolvers. Mirth was already skittish from the lion and the monkey and rank things glaring from cages, but even with no sleep he’d felt relaxed and resolved back then at eight o’clock with the dawn’s dew still laying the dust and his plans smoothly unfolding. One, Aaron just shot dead, as arranged. Two, the Police Special from Benalla therefore coming for them, as arranged. Three, the line torn up to send the train to hell, as arranged. Four, the Benalla banks thus unprotected, as arranged. Five, the townspeople all rounded up in the Glenrowan Inn, with drinks on them, as arranged. And they had a few more little arrangements up their sleeves. No wonder the monkey shot him spiteful looks; the circus was a bonus. When Mirth shied and snorted he reined her into a pirouette worthy of the ring.

‘You should sign me up,’ he told the circus owner. ‘I’m Ned Kelly.’

W
hy did they always draw him as a maniac? All glaring eyebrows, matted hair and putrid bird’s-nest beard. Lunatic’s eyes and mouth like a bayonet slash. A nine-foot cannibal who’d slipped the chain from some madhouse or freakshow.

That picture showing him as a leering ogre straddling the Murray River! One widow-crunching boot set in Victoria, the other in New South Wales. Disembowelled police strewn about. Children’s corpses trickling from his lips. Hangdog weeping women. After that one, he wrote an angry letter to the editor. MONSTER REPLIES! the rag screamed. Was there no justice in the press? Well, this time the
Melbourne Punch
, the
Australasian Sketcher
and the
Illustrated News
would have had to send their best artists, their top men.

This time they’d see something.

They’d also see what dapper was. This hacking jacket, these new tweeds. Kids squabbling to shine his boots. The beard now trimmed a stylish spade, this scarlet cravat blossoming out from under it.
And later in tonight’s proceedings won’t I be wearing the sash of honour, the green and gold!

Their very own dashing devil would gleam like a nugget and smell like boronia.

Oh, yes, he’d been keeping track of the press’s insults these last twenty months, been looking forward to making their personal acquaintance. The chamois leather gold-dust pouch from the Euroa bank was jammed with newspaper cuttings.

Devil incarnate of the Antipodes, Satan’s right hand, our Mephisto, the Vulture of the Wombat Ranges, beast of prey, outback monster, rural sadist, flash young ghoul, savage yokel, bog-Irish fiend, homicidal maniac, corpse robber, cheap assassin, man of blood, bog butcher, jumped-up bush butcher, brute creation, crawling beast, jungle gorilla, creeping thing, reptile, viper in society’s bosom, sewer scum, vermin, bog worm, peat maggot, maggot on a dead kangaroo, slippery goanna, dirty lizard, dingo, wild dog (‘should be shot like a …’), snivelling cur, mad dog, dirty dog, pariah dog, cunning fox, pack wolf, shark, spineless jellyfish, strutting rooster, scrub bull, bush bully, cut-and-dried villain, hangman’s customer, agrarian outcast and social bandit (these by ‘An Educational Correspondent’), cut-rate highwayman, champion of the lower orders and street-corner loungers, evil marauder, predator, common thief, desperado, thug, ruffian, bad egg (ho-hum) –

– Things he’d been called by the gentleman of the press,
ta rah!

A corner of the faintest memory flickered.

Hadn’t Dad called him Sunshine?

S
o here at the inn, waiting for the Police Special, raring to go, is the so-called Kelly Gang:

Me, Edward Kelly, twenty-four.

Over there sipping brandy and trying his best to grow a moustache, my young brother Dan, seventeen.

Making eyes at Ann Jones, the landlady, loverboy Joe Byrne, twenty-one.

That jockey-shaped customer relaxing on the ottoman, bristling with revolvers and grizzling about his swollen feet, Steve Hart, nineteen.

All Irish boys and selectors’ sons just happening to be in the same place at the same time – Stringy-bark Creek. Killed three police there before they killed us. Robbed banks, captured towns, lived in caves, drank pubs dry, stuck by each other, killed a traitor. Had war declared on us by Victoria, by New South Wales, by the Crown, by the Melbourne Club, by the London
Times
. The Queen in England proclaimed things against us; said anyone in the world is allowed to kill us. She strongly advocated it.