4. alternative history in minor cadenza

[Was it like that? Or did the young widower chance upon a girl’s slender neck bent over her latest copy of the Westminster Review, the publican’s quiet daughter reading the English mail where the shade cast by an apple or pear tree was coolest? His first wife died of an abscessed tooth before she reached her twentieth birthday. Catherine couldn’t read. Elizabeth read as if there were no tomorrow. George, who had never heard poetry read, recognised sonnets in her deeply blue eyes.

George Dalton Lane, son of George Lane and Martha Bell. The name Dalton came from Martha’s family, the Lanes clinging to it thereafter. George Bell was a conman sentenced to seven years’ penal servitude in the colony of New South Wales, a punishment he doesn’t appear to have served. He was adept at securing privilege, meeting up with his young wife and baby son in Rio de Janeiro en route to Sydney Cove. That’s where Martha was conceived, her mother following George on another ship sailing to the Great South Land. Records show that Martha was born at Cowpastures, New South Wales, in 1814, six months after the couples’ arrival to the land of the peerless blue sky.

History steers a tricky course at this juncture. George Lane, Martha’s husband and progenitor of Australian men named George Dalton Lane, appears to have been born to two question-marks at Cowpastures in 1810, symbols grammatically destabilizing who I thought I might be.

Perhaps George’s mother was a convict girl working for a parson called George Lane. There was one proselytising the faith among the criminals and the hapless indigenous at the time. Perhaps the mother was indigenous, the parson granting her the privilege of giving birth to a ready-made Christian. Perhaps an indigenous woman met up with a Chinese man, a ship’s boy pursuing serendipitously prospects in the new colony. My only reservation about this construction is that indigenous mothers liked to keep their babies and did so before the law advised that they should be stolen by welfare officers. A convict mother may have given up hers, whoever the father might have been. Or was George’s mother the wayward daughter of an embarrassed family bent on respectability, the religion of those fearful for their reputations.

Perhaps my antecedent was an exclamatory conception.]

5. interlude in blue

blue eyes
always
navy
cornflower bright
millpond deep
grey blue
the fuss about colour
skin too pink hair too black
touching was not done
being longed for
the direct gaze
blue eyed
the studying embrace
distant and
wanting to know
who are you, exactly?
what are you up to?
her mother said
sew a fine line, dainty
hemstitches are rare
make money,
pin-tuck and
embroider.
Lizzie, earn your
usefulness, so
she studied maths and wrote
clear sentences,
her inked letters
blue

Copyright © Carolyn van Langenberg, 2007.

---

Carolyn van Langenberg grew up in the rural hinterland of the Far North Coast of New South Wales. She lives with her husband in the Blue Mountains. A trilogy of her novels — Blue Moon, Fish Lips and The Teetotaller’s Wife — has been published by the Australian publishing house, Indra.