Free Listening to Mondrian by Nadia Wheatley

somewhere.’
    We stumbled around in total darkness, like a game of blind man’s bluff. Suddenly the house was unfamiliar. Doorways, the dresser, a chair at an angle became things to crash into. I remember at one stage our feet hit something and we fell together in a pile. It was the first time we’d touched in ages. ‘Bloody skateboard!’ Mum said. Then down there, on the floor, with the storm crashing at the windows, we started laughing. ‘On top of the fridge,’ Mum finally said. ‘That’s where convicts keep their candles.’
    We lit all six of them, three up each end of the kitchen table. The fuel stove was going, Mum was cooking one of her oxtail stews. Potatoes in the oven. We were warm, and wouldn’t starve, but it really was a bit scary – not the thunder and lightning, but knowing that the pine trees were huge, and far too close to the house, and shallow-rooted in the sandy soil, and the wind could easily bring one down. It was obvious that that was the cause of the blackout: trees had brought down the lines all over the town.
    ‘Oh well,’ I said, ‘it’ll be a good excuse to tell Ms Pap.’
    ‘Come again?’
    ‘Why I can’t get my convict stuff together. Why I can’t write my letters.’
    She started then. ‘What letters?’
    I told her and she went on to ‘Why do you always leave all your homework till the last night?’ Then bit her lip. Since the fight, it was as if she really had decided that it was my homework, my life, my future.
    ‘But you might as well,’ she urged, ‘write the wretched letters tonight. I mean, Ms Pap will just make you do them for Monday. And it’s not as if there’s anything else you can do.’
    When she said that, I thought, We’re stuck together tonight. I can’t disappear to my room and listen to music, she can’t sit in the lounge and watch TV, we are together for a whole night with none of the toys of the twenty-first century to help us not to talk to each other.
    So that’s how I started. In the dark kitchen, with the stove going, the smell of stew, the crashing surf noise of the wind through the pines, the flares of lightning through the window, the boom of the thunder, the flicker of the candlelight, me up one end of the kitchen table, and my mother up the other. And half a world between us.
    Mace’s Farm
Coxs River
New South Wales
24 January 1832
    To My Mother,
I hope you are feeling good. Though I have been in this country for more than a year, this is the first chance I have had to write to you, as up until now I didn’t have a pencil.
    I will tell you of the trip over here first. The boat we travelled on was very overcrowded. All of us were treated and fed very poorly, resulting in numerous deaths from scurvy and other causes.
    Shortly after I arrived in Sydney Town I got into a fight with some of the other prisoners. I swear to you it wasn’t my fault but when you are new in a place, people pick on you and test you out to see what you are made of. So this group of three men began to taunt me, laughing at the way I speak and saying Ireland is a boghole, and I began to argue back, and the next thing I know we are all fighting on the ground and an overseer arrives and the others say I started it. As a result I was sentenced to 12 months in an ironed gang and sent to work on the new road at Victoria Pass. That was sheer Hell – working in leg irons, breaking rock, grubbing out massive tree roots, carting huge blocks of sandstone for the culverts. We rose at daybreak and worked all day, and at night slept in bark huts (5 or 6 men to a hut) inside a stockade.
    Anyway, I do not wish to worry you, and that is over now. I have been assigned to a Master called Mr Mace and I arrived at his farm yesterday. The farm is out on the western plains, beyond the mountains, and I am told it is 650 acres of which 5 are cultivated. At the farmhouse, there are two other men in service (one of them kindly gave me this pencil) but I am to work alone as a shepherd