The court is reconvened at half past four to hear Justice Blackall read his verdict. He is careful to sum up both cases and it is clear to Moishe and Runche that the judge has clearly seen what it is they have attempted to do. Jessica and Mary are lost in the tedium of his words until finally he brings down his gavel.
‘I have made my decision in favour of the plaintiff, Mrs Mary Simpson. I instruct that her two children, Polly and Sarah, at present under the jurisdiction of the Aborigines’ Protection Board and in the care of the Cootamundra Domestic Training Home for Aboriginal Girls, be returned to th
eir mother. I am quite sure in my mind that Mrs Simpson’s two girls stand a better chance of living fulfilled and useful lives without the State controlling their destinies. I direct that the whereabouts of Mrs Simpson’s two youngest daughters be made known to her and that she be allowed to make the decision as to whether they will be returned to her or will remain with their foster parents.’ Justice Blackall pauses. ‘We are responsible for the administration of the laws of the land, but we seldom question whether the laws of the land are responsible. It is not sufficient that we accept every law without equivocation simply because we are its custodians. We of the law are accustomed to arguing the smallest points of jurisprudence while often neglecting to see its glaring deficiencies. The law must be based on the charitable behaviour of people rather than making people behave according to the law. Laws should be based on natural justice and not on punitive reaction, on enlightenment and not on our fear. As a judge I am charged to uphold it. As a human being I have only this last to say.’ Justice Blackall looks about him. ‘As long as history shall prevail, the love of a mother for her child cannot be replaced by an institution which will give the child a full belly and an empty heart.’ Justice Blackall brings down his gavel. ‘This court is now in recess.’
Richard Runche turns to Jessica, takes her hand and, squeezing it, he says, ‘Jessica Bergman, my dear, you have made history.’
Jessica turns tearfully and hugs Mary, though inwardly she mourns for her own lost child, for her precious Joey. ‘We’ve done it, Mary, we’ve done it!’ she sobs.
THE FINAL CHAPTER
The year is 1929 and the New York Stock Exchange has collapsed and plunged the world into the beginning of the Great Depression.
It is also the year that Richard Runche KC doesn’t wake up one cloudless morning in mid-March. The old man is usually up at dawn for a wash by the side of the creek, whereupon it is his habit to light the fire outside the hut and put the billy on to boil. He’d make a mug of strong, dark tea sweetened with honey, just the way Jessica likes it, and then he’d wake her up.
Jessica wakes this bright day to find the light too sharp for the hour she usually rises. The hut is stifling with the sun baking down onto the tin roof. She lies for a moment feeling confused, curious that Runche hasn’t woken her with her usual cup of tea. She dresses hurriedly and comes outside to find the lanky Englishman lying in his bed under the lean-to on his back with his hands folded across his chest and his legs stuck straight out. He looks for all the world like an ageing knight laid out in a great medieval cathedral. Jessica reaches down and touches his calm face and knows the instant she does that he is dead.
Mary arrives later in the morning and, taking turns to dig the grave, Jessica and Mary bury Richard Runche next to Billy Simple’s gravestone and not far from one of Runche’s beloved beehives.
The barrister born into the English nobility, whose ancestors, since the time of the crusades, have lain in the same quiet churchyard in the village of Cerne Abbas in Dorset, now lies forever beside a quiet stream under the shade of a giant river gum. Here is no green and pleasant ancestral grave, no murmuring brook or dark shade of oak. This is a landscape beautiful only to those who know that beauty must be hard-won in the mind and the eye as well as in the heart. It is a harsh, new beauty with very little antecedent poetry to till and seed the white man’s imagination. A landscape that must be viewed with an Aboriginal eye to see its colours and patterns and cunning shifts in perspective. The whitefella eye is still a long, long way from seeing this land’s dreaming and the whitefella’s heart is not yet fully opened to the high and ancient antipodean sky.
Jessica and Mary stand over the Englishman’s grave and say the Lord’s Prayer. Both cry a little, but not for long — they loved the old man too much for a bout of rag-sodden weeping. ‘Don’t cry for me when I’m gone, my dears, I should hate that,’ he once said as they sat around the fire one night.
‘Don’t worry, we won’t,’ Jessica had replied cheekily.
‘I’ll be cranky as hell—who’s gunna bring me tea in the mornin’?’
Mary had laughed. ‘First thing that’s gunna happen, we’re gettin’ rid o’ them flamin’ beehives of yours. I been stung that often I couldn’t count that high, even with all the education you give me.’
Now as they sit at the rough wooden table, weary from digging Runche’s grave and saying their farewells, Jessica sips a cup of tea. ‘Well, I know he died happy.
He told me once that getting me outa the loony-bin, and getting back Polly and Sarah from Cootamundra, and fighting for Millie Carter and seeing the matron sent to prison for murdering her were the only good things he reckoned he’d ever done.’
‘He didn’t take no credit for it neither,’ Mary says.
‘He always said it was you give him the chance to be decent for once in his life.’
‘He was always decent, there wasn’t a bad bone in his body. He was born decent and he died decent,’ Jessica murmurs sadly.
Mary laughs. ‘And givin’ up the grog — that was another good thing he did.’
Jessica smiles, remembering. ‘Not that we gave the old bugger a chance to get back onto the sauce again. Even Rusty would have stopped him going into a pub if he’d tried.’
‘I never seen that done before. I never seen a drunk that’s as far gone as him, that’s got them DTs, who give up drinkin’. When we brought him back from Wagga, I truly thought you was mad. I was sure we was bringing back a dead whitefella we’d only have to take the trouble to bury.’ Mary seems to be thinking. ‘And he was right about Dulcie and Katie.’
Jessica looks up, surprised. ‘I’ve never heard you say that before.’
‘Well I should have told him so,’ Mary says regretfully. Jessica thinks back to the time after the court case when they’d won, and the judge had ordered the Aborigines’ Protection Board to return Mary’s children. It had taken another year before the Board finally gave them the name of the foster parents with whom the baby Katie and little Dulcie had been placed. She remembers how they’d arrived at a nice house in Gosford belonging to Kevin and Doreen Blake, a childless couple who’d fostered Mary’s two youngest children. What they’d found were two happy, healthy children clinging to the skirts of a pretty white lady who was very close to tears. Dulcie and Katie were dressed in charming little white dresses with yellow socks pulled up to their chubby knees and little patent leather shoes and they both wore a bright yellow ribbon in their hair.
Jessica recalls how Mary rushed up to them and how the two children had backed away from her, their eyes fearful, for of course neither of them recognised the strange dark woman coming at them with her arms wide open. What a crying match that had been. The two girls were howling and clinging to their white foster mother, who was also howling and clasping them tightly. Then Mary had started bawling, not knowing what to do, and even Kevin Blake sniffed into his handkerchief, about as useful as tits on a bull.
Richard Runche, who’d brought the papers with him to reclaim Mary’s children, sat them all down and talked things out quietly with them. It was obvious that the Blakes loved Dulcie and Katie as if they were their own and that they were truly broken-hearted at the prospect of losing them. The barrister had finally taken Mary outside into the garden, where they remained talking for nearly an hour while the sobbing continued inside the house. When they returned, a still-sobbing Mary agreed that Kevin and Doreen Blake could keep her two youngest and that they had her permission to formally adopt them. Mary had never yet confided in Jessica what Richard Runche had said to her to make her change her mind.
‘Mary, it ain’t none of my business, but what did the old bloke say to you, you know, about Dulcie and Katie, when he took you into the garden that time?’
Mary looks up from her mug of tea. ‘That a tough day, Jessie. We talked a lot there in that lovely garden and then the old bloke said something that I couldn’t find no answer to. He
said, “Mary, you can’t give more love than they’ve already got.’” Sudden tears well in Mary’s eyes as she remembers. ‘He was right, Jessie. Whitefella love is the same as blackfella love. Me kids were loved, that’s all a mother can ask for.’