What Happened at Hazelwood? Read Online Free PDF Page B

it hammer and tongs about Dismal Swamp. I may as well say now that I have not yet really got the hang of it. Something called reticulation was always cropping up, and I suppose that this must be a method of irrigating large areas of land. My final impression was that the Australian Simneys had given George during his sojourn out there confidential intelligence of some development-scheme in which they were proposing to get rather shadily in on the ground floor. They had information they ought not to have possessed and were about to exploit it by buying potentially valuable land on the cheap. Whereupon George, knowing that they couldn’t afford to make an open row, had teamed up with some syndicate or other and done the buying first. This had rankled – it is apparently not the sort of thing the Australian landed gentry do – and now here were Hippias and Gerard proposing to make themselves belatedly nasty about it while digging well in to George’s cellar and larder. The situation was drear.
    Joyleen, naturally, was not much interested in this old family dispute. She was taking off her coat and at the same time looking at me defensively, much as if my eye was searching for traces of primeval slime about her person. She came from Bondi, she explained – and I gathered that this must be some dressy Sydney suburb. As for Dismal Swamp – and she glanced at her father-in-law and George, who were still slinging mud at each other in more senses than one – she had never so much as set eyes on it.
    ‘But,’ I said (for I wanted to get them washed and in to our interrupted dinner, and I was feeling rather cross), ‘if a place is like that, why ever should one not call it so? Would you prefer to call it Paradise, or Eden, or Windsor Park?’
    This just didn’t register on Joyleen. But Gerard spoke up at once. ‘Quite right,’ he said. ‘There were three ways of giving names in Australia. One was to stick to the native ones. Some are quite pleasant, like Yankalilla and Paringa and Mallala. Even the grotesque ones, like Mudamuckla and Cobdogla and Nunjikompita–’
    ‘I like Nunjikompita,’ I said.
    ‘It’s not bad. And I rather relish Pompoota and Muloowurtie. They fit the places, somehow – and nobody remembers that quite a lot of them have surprisingly indelicate meanings. Well, that was one way, and quite a good one. The second was to remember the old folks at home. That gives Hazelwood Park. And it gives names like Clapham and Aldgate and Brighton and Edinburgh to little groups of shacks in the middle of nowhere. A sentimental method, and of course, after a time the effect isn’t even sentimental but just silly. The third method was the best. It was just to notice what a place looked like, or remember something that had happened there, or even just acknowledge what it felt like. That gives the real Australian names – the white ones to set over against the marvellous dark ones of the aborigines. Lone Gum, Emu Downs, Wattle Flat, Policeman’s Point, Cape Catastrophe, Wild Horse Plains, Mount Despair, Watchman, Disaster Bay, Dismal Swamp. Yes, these are the real ones. Our home – Hazelwood Park – is quite a mature old place in its way, and the furniture is English and must have been a bit old-fashioned in the time of Queen Anne. But is all that right? I can’t say that I’m sure it is. The house should be called Claypans or Stringies. And the furniture should be in some decent colonial style that can cope with our hardwoods.’ Gerard paused and nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it’s very satisfactory to have a place called Watchman.’
    Gerard, then, despite being a Simney, an Australian, and the husband of Joyleen, was a tolerably civilized human being – and, I thought, definitely nice as well. It was true that he seemed quite willing to be not less aggressive than his father in the matter of George’s ancient double-dealing. But I didn’t like him any the less for being prepared to square up to my