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Tag: Stawell Bardo

  • Miasma

    Miasma

    The sweet smoke bathed everything in a black light, turned even the sun black, which cast down its inky rays upon an ashen desert dotted with blasted stumps and the remains of unidentifiable beings. And it was as though a miasma arose from the earth to meet the ghastly light, some dark cloud arising. Finally his senses would numb and the faint vestigial flicker of luminous bone dim along with the remnants of wakefulness. What relief it brought, fleeting alas, this bleak corpse-like state.

    Herein unendurable day-lit regrets and cravings subside, assimilated by whichever skeletal self donned them as slabs of weightier stuff, like rag-doll stuffing, marionette trunks chiseled from wood and covered in miniature clothing, so as to impart a compelling illusion of life. First, the fleshing-out of a penny existence, soul without hope; and now the reverse, as in the erasure of a sketch, spiriting away first hatching and shade with light strokes of the rubber, and then the substantive lines with razor blade and spittle.

    Whose awareness was it of the grinning skull within, yet containing him, strangely? A drooling grin spread across his own sticky face; more than an expression, an extension of his embodied grotesqueness, a germ of lasciviousness for its own sake, abjuring any particular object. Some kind of perversion implicit in the skull. Memento mori. Never forget that you must die as well. Well, if that’s all, that’s naught: neither death nor life makes much difference to me. Why should I dread my approaching dissolution? Life is a borrowed thing, and the living frame thus borrowed is like so much dust. Life and death are day and night. He observed such thoughts pass through the skull over and again.

    A shadowed figure peers into a smoky opium den filled with drifting haze and dimly seen occupants.

    Echoing his uneven, scuffing footfalls and stumbles, a passage had led him here, but which? Or which wasn’t it? The one with the ante-room? On the one side a deserted gambling table and on the other the same. Both deserted, for luck had forsaken the place. A hallway led down through the building, from which a number of small rooms opened off, half of each occupied with a staging spread with gaudy carpet. He pushed open a closed door, to peer in through the beckoning smoke, almost sickly sweet as it was. Two … what do they call them … orientals, celestials … pigtailed, reclined on the staging, curled either side of an oil lamp, the wisps of black smoke spiraling up. To look into their eyes was to find no spark beyond faint reflections of the lamplight. Beyond those unseeing orbs, no, orbs revolved inward, no sign was granted the interloper, no sign of life, nor any of the myriad fluorescent blossoms and gems of the transcendent realms, the dreams that held them in thrall.

    Further back, in the shadowier corner, another lay, grotesque grin on his unshaven face, hugely magnified, as though mirrored on the convex surface of the observing eye that had somehow passed by the other two unseen.

    From time to time, one or another stirred in order to reload his cane pipe, about a foot long, on the end of which was affixed a bell-like covered bowl, with a round hole the diameter of a pea, to admit the opium. Using a long steel needle he took up a portion of treacle and heated it above the lamp until it attained the plastic consistency of dental gutta-percha, whereupon it was ready then to be inserted into the hole. He put the end of the cane tube to his lips, applied a light, drew in the smoke and released it out through his nostrils.

    The third awakened, reenacted the ritual, then lay back and drifted again into a fleeting paradise, his head resting on a firm-cushioned stool about six inches high. Once again, and again, further confounding the befuddled mind, which beheld as one continuous action what was in truth a composite of disparate moments. And what if not merely the mind but the spirit as well was so disorientated by this freezing of time’s components that it became dispersed among them? Not knowing where or when it existed in any segment of the action. Not to say that the self was concerned about such contingencies as time and place, so close was it to its dark and eternal home, so close, merely a membrane separate. Bearing in mind that the self itself – note the impersonal pronoun – could not be said to know or think, being merely an effect or illusory thing.

    Immediately he recognized his own face in the contorted smirk, the gesture itself took control, such that he, the mirror image, must only obey. Which was this dark passage through which he had arrived, from a course traced through so many forked paths? Might he rejoin his mother and intimates, Pu-erh, Ugly Toad, Yongyan, and Wang via this corridor, with rooms coming off to the right and left, multifarious false paradises? Places of dreams, ante-chambers of the grave, which remind us of our lost ones, since the walls are hung with their portraits and decorated with their busts, as though designed to relieve our desolation, we who must remain a while longer.

    Whence the guilt, the miasma, the dark cloud arising?

    • • •

    Ugly Toad rose to a position of great respect in the temple, successfully wooed one of the most beautiful women in the village below, and took her for his concubine.

    “I would prefer to be next to him,” she said, “than married to any other man in the province, unattractive as he is.”

    Her given name was Ling, which is like the sound of a bell or a tinkling piece of jade. Jokingly, he called her his Concubine Ling, which was the title the Empress Xiaoyichun had borne a century before, when she rose to fifth-rank consort of the Qianlong Emperor.

    “Concubine Ling,” he said, “your name carries within it the sound of the sweetest chime, but surely you must realize that such a chime will sound muffled and confused when hung between two old earthenware pots like your father and me.”

    How could she answer other than with a smile?

    “You are getting these chestnuts out of some old Taoist rascal in those books, I’m sure. I think you’re spending far too much time pondering in the library these days and not enough planting in the garden.”

    “Yes indeed, Concubine Ling, I noticed just today that the new bamboo shoots are coming up; it may be time for somebody to harvest a few, for they will soon be growing up in front of our eyes.”

    “I disagree,” she replied. “The watermelon radishes are more advanced, and if we don’t pick them, they will turn. And what is more,” she added with a come-hither smile, “they are called ‘beauty in the heart,’ so it is auspicious if you are the one to harvest them, emperor of my heart.”

    “Of course, my dear, you are right. The bamboo shoots can wait a little longer. It is yet quite cool, after all.” And he never failed to do exactly as she wished.

    Similarly, he never expressed any opinion contrary to those of his neighbours. Consequently they grew to love him nearly as much as did his wife and father-in-law, who moved in with the couple and would never be separated from his son-in-law, such was the fondness he developed for him.

    “I wonder why you always seem to agree with everyone’s opinions?” his father-in-law said to him with a faintly critical overtone, one quiet evening when they sat relaxing by the cliff-top, enjoying the moon over a cup of hot toddy mixed from rice wine, sugar, and spices. “I’ve noticed that, even when they are quite contrary to each other, you always manage to concur with all of them and don’t adopt a particular one of your own.”

    “Well, you know,” Ugly Toad said, “it must be because here in this temple I have grown to prefer appealing to the infinite, rather than be disturbed by everyone’s conflicting ideas. Now I think of it, though, listening to what you say, perhaps I should make an effort to have an opinion of my own one day …”

    Lao Tzu’s disciple Zhuangzi says that if an ugly man has a child born to him at midnight, he hurries to it carrying a light to examine it most eagerly, afraid that it may look like him. When their daughter arrived, Ugly Toad did just that, but the baby turned out to be even more beautiful than Ling, and he wept tears of a greater joy than that of most new fathers, as joyful as they are in their own right.

    Endowed as she was with a phenomenal wisdom and depth of knowledge in Confucian law, among her wealth of other attributes, Pu-erh had her pick of administrative roles in the district, for a succession of emperors had come and gone, and the Imperial Court had by now forgotten all about her, sunk from notice in such a far-flung place, leagues upon leagues from the Forbidden City. And anyway, anyone who came across any mention of her in the records would have assumed, naturally enough, that she had passed away many years ago.

    She employed Yongyan and Wang as assistants-in-training, instructing them in the “Ten Wings,” Confucius’ own commentaries on the Yi Jing, and in his principles of law and social harmony, while at the same time guiding their education in Taoist philosophy. A far cry from their activities as less than competent ginseng poachers and bandits, their lives now became devoted to self-improvement and to becoming citizens whom all the villagers would admire for their virtues and upon whom model themselves. Pu-erh’s aim was to form a supremely harmonious society in the mountains – to transform this rough clay into the finest porcelain. Corporeally honed by a fervent idealism, Yongyan the Hungry became thin as a reed and came to be known as “the Sated,” while Wang the Eviscerator became “the Meek.” Wang kept his head and face shaved and packed away his beloved goose-wing sabre, having learned that sharp weapons are instruments of evil omen, not of the cultivated person, who uses them only when compelled by necessity. The regional government instituted Pu-erh as travelling magistrate, and she and her two subordinates successfully undertook many charitable projects. Together, the three engineered drainage and irrigation projects, set up soup kitchens and winter shelters for the poor, and eliminated the widespread practice of infanticide carried out by families who had too many children to feed, known euphemistically as “marrying her off” or “transmigrating him to the body of another.” Mostly girls, but sometimes boys; mostly the poor, but the rich as well.

    Then one day, his eyes reflecting the heaviness of his heart, Wang the Meek came up to Yongyan the Sated where he was working in a vegetable patch, lowered a pack to the ground, and leaned on his walking stick.

    Two weathered monks tend a small garden in a misty, rugged landscape.

    “The life of the do-gooder has been great for what it’s worth,” he said, “and I’ve learned all sorts of new things, but enough is enough and I’ve come to the end of my tether. It’s tired me out, as much good as I know we’ve done. My heart weeps and all this is starting to give me the shits. Before we met up with Pu-erh and Mow Fung, I had a hankering after adventure. Remember after the bear got me up there at Changbai, I said to you, Enough of the mountain life, let’s go down to the Pearl River Delta and work as pirates shipping opium for the Heaven and Earth Society? There are all sorts of openings down there with secret societies starting up all over the place, all wanting to get rid of the Emperor and all the other Manchus.”

    He spat down onto the dirt.

    “And how about Ugly Toad? I can’t talk to him any more, he just agrees with me all the time. How can you communicate with someone like that? I used to like him much more when he was disagreeable. I’ve loved Pu-erh since I first set eyes on her, but there’s no denying she’s too good for me and always will be, no matter how hard I work at it. She doesn’t even see me; it’s as though her eyes look right through me. I love Mow Fung too, like the son I never had, but I never see him any more. Last time we met he raved on about the Jade Volume and all it was teaching him, over and over. He sits up in those caves in the cliffs above the Jagged Rocks. He’s going loco with all that fasting and chanting, and too much reading that old stuff isn’t good for you in this day and age. He’s been acting even weirder than usual, and he’s got even the monks talking, let alone the village folk. How would you like to come with me, back to our good old life of fun and adventure?”

    “Too much still to accomplish,” Yongyan said, resting on his hoe. “When you do a job well, you should do it thoroughly, and when you start something, you ought to finish it.”

    “You don’t say. Really? Did you make that up by yourself?” Wang said, realizing how utterly he had relapsed, but preferring things that way.

    “It is a wise teaching of the ancient sages, a rule that we all should follow.”

    “See what I mean?” Wang said almost to himself, sighed, shook his head and spat again.

    “Even now as we speak,” Yongyan said, “the villages in the valley below the eastern flank of Tranquil Mount are engaged in a controversy about the watercourses over there. Some of the villages noticed unused water flowing down the canal to the Eight-Mile River, you see, and they decided to tap it with unauthorised irrigation ditches. But the village of Great-Water thought this was wrong and appealed to Pu-erh as magistrate; and on going down to investigate the river system and seeing abundant water running down from Dog-Head River – which used to be known as South Ditch, the lower stream of Dog-Head Spring, but hasn’t been called that since the sluice gate was put in and the ditch dredged in spring and summer … But that’s by-the-by. Where was I? Ah yes, noticing that the South Ditch has quite a deep bottom, thus letting more water through than the forty per cent she had allotted to the eight villages along the circulation ditch, she ordered stones be placed on the bottom and sides, thus decreasing the amount they can siphon off. You see, that restores the forty-sixty ratio between the two main groups of villages. As well, she’s placed a five-wen fee on water usage for one day and one night, and limited the amount of water that each person can take during a given cycle of twenty days. Now, listen closely, because here it gets complicated –”

    “Enough,” Wang pleaded. “That’s exactly what I mean. You’ve changed too. I understood you better when you used to let your belly do the talking. I can’t bear any more of these convoluted issues. They have brought both my brain and spirit to the point of collapse. These are exciting times in the world, you know, what with the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom toppling Nanjing and chasing the Emperor out; and you’ve still got the Miao kicking up a stink in Guizhou province, and the Red Turbans look like they may take over Canton. And I’m missing it all for what? The chance to play sluice monitor for a gaggle of rustics.”

    “Wang!”

    “Alright, I apologize, I take that back.” He gave a snort. “Well, there’s little more to say but fare-thee-well. My destiny is out there somewhere waiting for me. Always remember that I love you like a brother, and it is my joy to have gotten us out of some sticky situations in the old days. Pass on my fond regards to Pu-erh and Mow Fung, will you? I hate long goodbyes and don’t think I’d be able to get away without making a fool of myself.”

    With that, disguised in the clothes of a peasant, best to avoid the attention of rebel and Qing soldiers alike, who, when they were not engaged head-to-head in one deadly battle or another, seemed to spend their time searching out and terrorizing Buddhists and Taoists, and defacing their temples, he shouldered his pack and set off for the forking paths in the bamboo grove. His heart was heavy but his tread light, in the understanding that “the skilful traveller leaves no trace of his footsteps.” The last Yongyan heard was a few snatches of a sad old song that Wang used to whistle once in a while in the old days:

    Breaking willow twigs –

    a hundred birds cry in the garden grove.

    • • •

    Mow Fung dreamed of a giant fish that turned itself into a bird and flew across the Southern Ocean, known also as the Heavenly Pond. When he awoke, the heart of the bird remained inside him, and he found himself consumed with its yearning for the south. Impenetrable darkness enclosed him as though he were a fossil caught in a piece of coal, and he recalled that in his dream, before he became the fish, he had found himself in a dark house of multiple paradises where he lost his way as well as his friends. He sat up and reached forward gingerly in the dark until his palm came to rest on a vertical granite plane. He began to crawl, groping his way along the wall. At the next turning, he halted. This was further than he had come on his past excursions in answer to the call of the thousand-mile-long black dragon Zhu Long, believed by the ancients to be the creator of the world, who usually lived deep beneath Zhong Mountain, fasting and holding his breath, but had evidently come here to pay a visit. It was through the light shed from the candle it held in its mouth that, roaming deep inside those caverns, Mow Fung gained his first views of the Nether World.

    The call had become an increasingly powerful roar during recent weeks. He did not hear it through his ears exactly, like a normal earthly noise, but rather through various parts of his body. At first, his heart, stomach and lung cavity vibrated annoyingly, a symptom that would become so pronounced and painful in one or another of them that he feared he might keel over dead any second. As for his ears, first they numbed, then began to burn and feel as though they bled inside. The channels that led from his ears into his brain fed in waves of pressure, synchronized to the pulsing of the blood. Having come so far inside the granite labyrinth, so near the dragon, the fluctuating pressure assaulted his ears, not from the outside but from within himself. Squeezed by the pressure, his eyeballs warped and perceived false, luminescent ghosts.

    He had the subterranean system memorized perfectly up to his present location and found his way back outside without difficulty, though assaulted all along by the voice. The mouth of the tunnel opened from a sheer cliff high above the rocks. As soon as he emerged, four peals of thunder sounded and a bluish-green light flashed six or seven times in the sky like thunderbolts. Clouds of dark vapour arose from the foot of the adjacent mountain and from the depths beneath him. From behind, mice scurried out between his limbs and along the narrow track carved into the cliff face. A silence descended, but for a whistling breeze carrying a scent of rotten eggs. The breath of Zhu Long! He knew immediately what it was the dragon had been trying to tell him all these long weeks.

    As frantic as was his effort to hasten, progress was nauseatingly slow, inching along the track, back pressed against the cliff, heels guided by a carved groove. Then into the forest he went, stumbling over boulders, splashing through streams as he staggered down the eastern shoulder. He came to the crossroads, deep in the forest, the place the monks called the “ineffable centre,” meaning the centre which is everywhere, the circumference nowhere. The temple or the high village? There was only time to warn the one, but not the other. He must decide. Behind him, the east, the Black Dragon; to his left, Rosefinch; straight ahead, White Tiger; to his right, the Tortoise. Out of nowhere, a streak of crimson, a pause, then a ringing, slowly rising trill, Weeja-wu-weeja! Next, the alarm: Chay-eeee! And away.

    A dishevelled monk runs toward villagers, who stop their work and stare at him in a mountain village scene.

    At the outskirts of the high village, peasants tended vegetables, led an ox, wove a basket, braided leather thongs, repaired a gate. They all stopped what they were doing at the sight of the mad young monk in rags come staggering into their midst, unable to speak. Moved his mouth, but no words came – either from the effect of some narcotic or from his months of confinement in the caves. They started to laugh at him and continued until the moment the first tremor struck and threw them all off balance. The earth shuddered and their hovels shook and creaked, but none collapsed. A massive clap of thunder sounded from the direction of White Tiger peak, and an overpowering crash and rumble rent the air, as gargantuan slabs of rock and earth slid and vanished into the abyss before their eyes. The Taoist temple and everything within its grounds and its walls disappeared along with the entire mountain peak, everything mangled and disintegrated as one, like a shovelful of gravel. When the peasants arrived running, there was only an abyss of nothingness where the temple had stood minutes before, much as if it were a chalk drawing wiped from a slate. A vision of it was still there in the memory, as tenuous as a retinal image. Yet, much as they rubbed their eyes and shook their heads, the building itself would not reappear.

    From the draft novel Stawell Bardo © Michael Guest 2026

  • Dust of the Dragon’s Tail

    Dust of the Dragon’s Tail

    The fleeting glimpse he had gained of a young fair-haired woman through the half-opened doorway to the inner sanctum of the Jade Phoenix had nagged at the detective. Of late, Chinese camps were acquiring a reputation among certain of the Wimmera youth for the unwholesome diversions they afforded. Alluring as these places may have appeared to some of tender years, especially to the wayward and unchristian among them, they were commonly reckoned iniquitous dens.

    One sixteen-year-old girl undertook a week-long, hundred-and-forty-mile journey from her home at Ballan, only fifty miles out of Melbourne, in quest, so she said, of a situation at Horsham. Playing upon the compassion of publicans she visited along the way, she obtained overnight board and a shilling here and there to buy meals on the road. Her real destination turned out, after a circuitous detour, to be the house of a suspect European woman at the Deep Lead Chinese camp, where she took up quarters.

    Hearing news of her arrival, Constable Hillard went out to interview her and, disbelieving her story, gave her notice to quit. When she spun him more yarns, attempting to fob him off and contrive to remain, he brought her up on vagrancy before the Stawell bench. The magistrate discharged her after a sound admonition, and the next thing you know, off she went to live with a Chinese gardener at Doctor’s Creek. Not a week later, Hillard ferreted out a second one, not even sixteen, who deserted her family home for the camp, because, she explained, of her father’s cruelty and the lack of comforts at home.

    This same girl was already known to the police, having recently preferred a rather serious charge against a young man from Stawell, which he was to answer at the next General Sessions. There was something wrong in the state of Denmark, the magistrate informed Forster in writing, when girls such as these sought the association of a Chinese camp, proposing that if an example were made of those who harboured them there, it might prove a deterrent.

    Dark-eyed Miss Chan – Forster addressed her as such, for the woman’s unassailable poise checked in him any impulse he may have felt to assume the familiarity of ‘Lili’ – acknowledged, when he called on her the next day, that she had indeed engaged a young white woman as a waitress and housekeeper, and he was welcome to meet her; she was just now in the back garden feeding the chickens. This he did. No ragamuffin, but a strapping, jocular red-haired Irish colleen of nineteen she was, radiating goodwill and health, and obviously unsoiled by the demons of opium and rum.

    Perhaps, Forster reflected, the growing distaste for the Chinese immigrant as ignorant pagan and filthy barbarian had little basis beyond plain bigotry and the biased reporting of the newspapers. There was the old enmity of rival gold-miners, resulting in thuggery and atrocity at Buckland River, Lambing Flats, and as close by as Ararat itself, less than twenty years ago.

    Detective Forster sits alone at his desk in a modest 1880s bush office, leaning over papers in a dark coat and brimmed hat. An oil lamp and scattered documents rest on the desk, and the scene has a sombre, reflective mood.

    Disgruntled unionists were, he presumed, at the root of the more recent political pressure to exclude Chinese sailors and stokers from working on steamers trading to and about the Australian ports. Invariably cheerful and obliging Chinese fishmongers and hawkers of all sorts of useful wares had now become the targets of insult and violence from many working-class Australians, owing to a general animus against the Australian Steam Navigation Company, which had been hiring Chinese. Most unworthy of a great, free people. And what did this rabble know of China, a country they so despised? Most likely little, if anything, more than he did.

    If Lili Chan and his other new acquaintance, the mysterious Mow Fung – full of surprises he was, publican-cum-priest of some sort, evidently – were a measure, the Chinese had much to contribute to this country, and especially to a far-flung region like this. In idle moments, he found his thoughts wandering in their direction – and in Lili Chan’s, he cautioned himself, rather too often. He could entertain not the slightest likelihood that such a woman might have any possible interest in a crusty, ill-oiled bachelor such as he, even despite her situation, which was a morally tenuous one in the eyes of most. He could only wonder at what had brought her here, to the middle of nowhere, when clearly her talents and charms – that trace of a cultured American accent – would have fitted her for a rewarding position in Melbourne, at least. Enigma indeed. Her skin was of such a subdued olive hue, her features of such subtlety, that she might well pass for white, given the right circumstances and Western attire. Now, there he went, off again on mad imaginings …

    It was in the midst of reflecting on her features that he recalled having paused, some months earlier, on an item in the weekly Victorian Police Gazette – one that had caught his eye by departing from the usual notices concerning people wanted for questioning, prisoners discharged from gaol and the like. He retrieved the number from the bottom of a tea chest packed with old copies of the journal in a corner of the storeroom by the stables.

    “The whereabouts of a missing heiress are sought. The Cantonese woman, of Anglo-Chinese descent, has been traced from the United States, where she spent several years after leaving China, to the Colony. Information has come to light concerning her entitlement to a handsome fortune, of which she is not likely to be aware. Contact should be made with Chief Commissioner Chomley.”

    The memory of the notice clung to him. The next day he rode to the Jade Phoenix, and presently laid the gazette before Miss Chan. The proprietress looked up from the page and bathed the detective in the cool liquid of her unblinking gaze.

    “I was not aware, Sergeant, that you took such an interest in the minutiae of my appearance and background. Your detective’s training, no doubt. The innocent Miss Finnegan discovered in the employ of this humble if disreputable establishment – that speaks well for your skill. Are you ever able to separate yourself from your duties as a … copper?”

    Mincing by their armchairs just as her name was mentioned, the lusty Molly Finnegan, playing at saucy Irish soubrette, flourished her feather duster and made her exit.

    “Have you ever thought of entering the gambling line? Your attention to detail and, I suspect, your talent for handling disturbances would be invaluable,” Lili Chan said.

    “I dare say the references would prove difficult.”

    “On the contrary, Sergeant. In certain establishments, a good blow and a discreet silence recommend a man admirably.”

    “I suspect I should make a very poor ornament to such a profession.”

    “A poor ornament may still have his uses,” Lili said.

    She lowered her eyes to the gazette again. “In some houses, usefulness is the rarer quality.”

    He watched her a moment. “Miss Chan, does this notice mean anything to you?”

    “My origins are too humble, I fear, to promise any inheritance beyond poverty and woe; but if it will put your mind at ease, you may enquire with the Chief Commissioner on my behalf.” What harm, she reflected, could come of agreeing to so much, when to refuse would only raise suspicion.

    • • •

    “Where were we?” said the voice of Huish-Huish, accompanied by the gentle jangle of a consecrated shamanic rattle, amid the light aroma of incense.

    “I recall, the zither.”

    After Fang Jing Dock’s tong began putting some serious pressure on Ah Toy, unassailable though she had been for the past twenty years, she sold up and moved to an undisclosed destination. With no choice in the matter, Chan Lee Lung became his mistress, and he moved in with her. It had been clear for some time that despite his dandyish affectations he was an enforcer – a so-called highbinder or hatchetman – for the Hing San Fong Tong, passing publicly under the name Society of the Mind Abiding in Tranquility and Freedom. Whenever he went out to conduct business of a certain kind, he would don chain mail beneath his dress shirt, tightly bind his queue up underneath his derby, to keep it from being seized in any rough stuff, and conceal his butterfly swords beneath the back of his jacket, all the while preening himself before his ornate mirror.

    One evening he and a henchman returned to the house with another Chinese man unknown to her. The three repaired to a room that Fang had commandeered as his music studio, where he also kept a small vault containing the most precious valuables of his tong: a handful of flawless diamonds of inestimable value. Before long the sound of Fang’s Viennese zither could be heard filtering out, a fantasia on Il Trovatore. She went to her bed and fell into a deep sleep, to be shaken awake by Fang.

    The highbinder Fang wearing suit, derby, and barely concealed chainmail vest, preens himself in an ornate mirror, adjusting his appearance with deliberate care. The image is rendered in a watery, near-monochrome wash with a subtle red highlight, the reflected figure contained within the frame and the edges fading into abstraction.

    “Go and see what you think of the new centrepiece in the studio and tidy up a bit in there. Fat Louis and I have some business to discuss, then we’ll get things back in order.”

    The third man sat slumped sideways in a wicker chair, his sightless eyes bulging wide, his tongue lolling from the contorted blue face. Around the throat, biting deep into the flesh, was a garrote fashioned from a metal contrabass string, carving what looked like a raspberry-jam-filled rut. She sank silently onto a chair and took stock of her future, which was clearly what Fang had intended.

    When she entered the sitting room, Fang and Fat Louis were sipping pink champagne, and nibbling on Roquefort.

    “Nice tang,” Fat Louis said. “King of cheeses.”

    “Butyric acid caused by the fungus Penicillium roqueforti,” Fang said. “Legend has it that the cheese was discovered when a youth herding his sheep on Combalou Mountain, partook of his lunch of bread and ewes’ milk curds. Seeing a beautiful girl in the distance, he ran off vainly in pursuit of her, leaving behind his flock and his lunch. When he revisited the spot a few months later, the mold had transformed his plain peasant repast into this delectable bonne bouche.”

    Then looking up at Chan Lee, “That was quick. Did he have anything to say?”

    “He thought the end was the best part,” she said in a measured tone.

    “The critics be damned, I say!”

    The two men fell about.

    Chan Lee looked at Fang steadily.

    “There is no medicine for vulgarity,” she said, taking up the champagne flute on the table for Fat Louis to fill. No way out of this but forward; she must watch for an opportunity out of the corner of her eye. 

    “I told you she would have what it takes,” Fang said. “You can tell a woman of breeding. And she knows as well,” lending a malevolent emphasis, “that the song of a dead bird is a sad one.”

    One thing was certain: to run to the police, if the chance arose, would be a waste of time and might well invite a fatal reprisal from Fang’s cohorts, were he to be put away, which in fact was unlikely, since the law tended to stay out of Chinese matters when they did not directly affect anyone else. For the time being she played the dutiful concubine to Fang. As he wished, she took on the mantle of his wife, at least in the view of the public, though the union was not sanctioned by either a Chinese or American ceremony. As an enforced confidante of the highbinder, who often boasted to her of his crimes, she was ever more ensnared in the strands of his fate, becoming, in the parlance of the courts, an accessory after the fact, and thus acquiring the guilt of his felonies.

    • • •

    In the Deep Lead Joss House, Chan Lee sorted through fifty yarrow stalks as Huish-Huish had taught her, occasionally raising them to her nose to savour the herb’s unique aroma. Huish-Huish counted off the number of stalks remaining between Chan Lee’s fingers at each stage, and the procedure was repeated six times to determine the lines of the session’s hexagram: Biting Through – judgement, punishment, discernment. None of the lines signifies guilt, though a little harm may be done. On the whole, an optimistic sign: though there may be trouble at the beginning, one bite’s through. Justice is administered, punishments exacted. If you lose your teeth, you lose your grip.

    Black on gold image of the Yi Jing (I Ching) hexagram 21 Biting Through. Bottom to top, the lines are Yang (solid), Yin (broken), Yin, Yang, Yin, Yang.

    “Cutting … gnawing … chewing …” Huish-Huish said. “A picture of the mouth. You bite through, get your teeth into something.”

    “Cutting.” Chan Lee intoned the word, the eye of flesh closing, the inward gaze of the eye of her contemplation floating back in time. “If you chew dried salt meat, you’ll find yourself poisoned.”

    Knowing not whether for good or ill, she decided that her best move would be to gratify him by seeming to take pleasure in what he did – deeds she found appalling and sickening, lacking as she did the same innate relish for inflicting misery that she now knew to be his. She did not stop to ask whether repeated exposure would inure her to his evils; whether, by touching black paint, her fingers too might be blackened. One thing was sure: there was no iota of love in her heart for the man who had become her ostensible protector. Fang was a man in whose arid heart love for any other creature had never taken root. As time went by, familiarity became contempt, and instead of any initial ardour, the possession of one so desired by others only fed in him a seething sadistic scorn that grew stronger by the day. This scorn he expressed in a ritual of cruelty, a proxy for the conjugal act, with strangulation and cutting for caresses. Sometimes his fervent passions quite got the better of him, and it was on the cards that he would murder her before too much longer.

    Deadened by morphia, a living ghost of herself, she faded from the view of her admirers, most of them so addled that, appeased by a surfeit of available substitutes, they forgot her before long – or rather, recalled only the myth of that bewitching peony of the Barbary Coast, and not the flesh-and-blood woman. Most. An up-and-coming stage magician, Chee Ling Qua, formerly of the ‘Court of Peking’ troupe, was presently engaged at the Bella Union – fire-breathing, sword-swallowing, linking rings, disappearing rabbits and chickens, the works. He could materialize a great big glass bowl full of goldfish out of thin air. A gentle soul, meek and mild, far from a hero come to save the day, but she credited his avowals of undying love and knew that he possessed, if not great means, at least some paste gems of amazing fire and brilliance for use in his performances.

    He was also on close terms with the most highly skilled and secretive Celestial apothecary in the city, whom he commissioned to create incendiaries and other chemical substances necessary for his stage effects. Chan Lee contrived to steal some time alone with the magician in his dressing room one evening when Fang was occupied with business; though he despised her he was as possessive of her as ever. He was much preoccupied these days, his gang embroiled in a war with a rival tong over the exclusive right to operate fan tan games and lotteries in the Barbary Coast. As it happened, Ling Qua was on the verge of pulling up stakes and setting off abroad with his own small troupe. Chan Lee should come with them at any cost, he begged, as she rearranged his robes. She could work as his magician’s assistant, peppering up the act with an arabesque here and a shimmy there … she’d pack them in.

    A month later, the Australasian and American Mail Steamship Company’s City of Melbourne headed towards the Golden Gate, its passenger list including a modest troupe of performers, a mixture of Chinese and Europeans, among them the sylphlike Suzon Chabrier formerly of the Folies Bergère, an inconspicuous brunette who, on closer inspection, as the customs official who processed her had remarked to his colleague, had a charming and subtle nuance of face that could almost pass as oriental. While her fellow passengers lined the decks for their last glimpses of Angel Island, Yerba Buena, and Alcatraz, Miss Chabrier reclined on a deckchair in a discreet black velvet dress, her chapeau decorated with simple field blossoms and pushed forward over her head, perusing the Daily Alta California. She was particularly attentive to an article on page two, which reported on the sudden death of a despised highbinder for the Hing San Fong Tong, one Fang Jing Dock. A photograph of the victim’s corpse had sunk into grainy shadow, which was perhaps for the best, the report ran, since readers would have found the contorted face and twisted limbs most distressing. Suzon applied her reading magnifier to the image, then read on. A note found on the corpse showed that he had expected death by rival hatchetmen.

    Chan Lee, later known as Lily Chan, sits in a deckchair aboard a steamship leaving San Francisco, having assumed the identity of Suzon Chabrier of the Folies Bergère.

    The note read: ‘Soon I must go to my fathers. Whether by the broad bladed axe or by dust of the dragon’s tail, it matters not. This I know. I go. I commend my spirit to Buddha, the all-wise and merciful.’

    “A searching examination of the body,” the reporter continued, “failed to reveal any marks of violence. It is believed that by ‘dust of the dragon’s tail,’ Fang referred to some potent oriental poison. From his expression of agony, it appeared he had been administered sufficient of the substance, whatever it was, to kill an hundred men. Police arrested another highbinder named Fat Louis, who is well-known to have been an associate of the dead man; but it has come out that he was employed surreptitiously by the rival tong in question, the See Yups. The dead man, who will not be missed, was under suspicion for a number of murders of fellow Chinese. A woman with whom he cohabited, once well-known around the gambling dens and houses of ill-repute, has not been seen for several months, and is now added to a long list of the presumed victims of the deceased ne’er-do-well.”

    From the draft novel Stawell Bardo © Michael Guest 2026

  • Hessian Sack

    Hessian Sack

    Some weeks passed. Detective Forster, in his modest office at the Stawell Police Barracks, untied the hessian sack and spread its contents across his desk before Mow Fung. The coat and waistcoat had both been slit cleanly down the back, likely to ease their removal from the body; a white twilled shirt with blue spots, an undershirt, and a fragment of a wideawake hat lay beside them, all stiffened and blackened with blood.

    “These were recovered near where the corpse was found,” he said. “I’m showing them around the district, starting with the publicans, to see whether anyone can put a name to them. Ever clap eyes on them?”

    “Not easy to say. Clothes are clothes,” Mow Fung said.

    “The spotted shirt? Pale hat?”

    Mow Fung drew an exaggerated grimace of doubt.

    “Not so unusual. Could belong to anyone. You are going down to the Chinese camp after this, I suppose?”

    As it happened, that was precisely Forster’s intention.

    “What makes you say that?”

    “Police always look there first. I hear talk – they say the murder was done in the camp, and the body carried east to where the head was taken off. That ground lies midway between the camp and Stawell – four miles. Convenient.”

    He gave a wry smile. “Naturally, it must be the Chinese camp. Many more men live in Stawell – but they are good white men.”

    “No call to get prickly, is there? There have been disturbances in the camp. It draws the rougher element, that much is certain. I can’t say I blame a man for drifting there. There’s precious little diversion in the bush.” Forster, Melburnian by origin, retained something of the city’s broader tolerance.

    “Who is to say the owner is the same?” Mow Fung said. “Blood on shirt and vest – but none on trousers. They were not discovered together, correct?”

    “I believe I am the one paid to ask questions,” Forster said mildly, “but there is no harm in your knowing that they were not found in the exact same place. I recovered the trousers roughly four hundred yards from the body and the other items.”

    “The blood on the coat is faint. There has been little rain of late. It may be animal blood, or human. We shall never know. Anything is possible. But if the murder were done in the Chinese camp, why take the body east toward Stawell to dispose of it, when there are many deep mines much closer to the west?”

    “A reasonable observation. Still, someone in the camp may have seen these garments before, when their unfortunate owner was still walking about in them. If you are heading home, I wonder whether you might accompany me to one or two establishments there – since you were good enough to lodge the deceased on behalf of the Victoria Police. That is, if your good lady would not object to your being away from business a little longer.”

    “Why do you want me to come?”

    “Only that you’ve got more English than many of the men down at the camp, and some of them are apt to clam up – or go to ground – when a policeman turns up. Despite what you say, there may be one or two uneasy consciences there.”

    “Perhaps some understand English better than you suppose, but prefer not to speak to policemen.” He glanced at Forster’s plain clothes. “It is wise not to wear the uniform – it softens the impression. My wife will manage the pub. I had intended to return as I came – on Shank’s mare, as they say.”

    • • •

    Forster drove them out of the township in a trap, along the track, through the dust and glare beneath the blazing sun. The landscape grew strange once the town fell behind them and its ordered shapes yielded to the scrub. Each, sooner or later, noticed the black mat of flies on the other’s back, where they pressed and jostled to feed on sweat and the salt of human skin, in their obscene communion. Best to leave them; disturb them and they rose in a thick, droning swarm.

    The dull thud of the horse’s hooves, the creak of the trap, and the rattle of the harness were swallowed by the silent bush, as though sound itself were absorbed into the vast, listening earth. Holes appeared in patches of bare orange soil already surrendering to growth – the signs of earlier incursions. Here and there, mounds of excavated dirt lay heaped about deepening shafts, like oversized crab-castings along a shore. The human crustaceans who dug here twenty or thirty years ago were gone, many returned to the earth whence they came, having taken what was of value and left their detritus here. Thus history ends where it begins. Or only in these parts?

    Rear view of Forster and Mow Fung riding in a trap across an abandoned goldfield, their backs dark with swarming flies as the dusty track threads through pockmarked earth.

    The two continued along in a silence punctuated by the discordant cry of a single bird.

    “Did he say ‘Ballarat’?” Mow Fung said with a delighted start.

    “Not too far from home, enjoying his day-trip like us, maybe.” Forster chuckled. Grey butcherbird, probably. He had read that places were sometimes named for the cries heard there. “They say that Ballarat means ‘resting place.’”

    “Those shafts are Chinese ones,” Mow Fung said. “Round holes with no corners for evil spirits to hide in. Also, round is better than square, because the sides won’t fall in so easy, and you don’t need much timber. A European does not have to worry about ghosts and spirits, does he? Too rational for them, so they cannot harm him,” he added with a small laugh.

    The camp’s heyday lay twenty years past, when gold gravel was struck midway between Stawell and Deep Lead, one of the richest alluvial fields in Victoria. Before long most of the gold was taken, leaving only enough to sustain a dwindling community of oriental fossickers. Of late, the diamond drill had kindled hopes of renewal, and the New Comet Company had even set up in Deep Lead; yet a recent regulation barred Chinese from employment on non-Chinese leases.

    “A rough, strongly built man – there are many such men working on the railway these days,” Mow Fung mused. “If he is not known in Stawell, then he must have come from elsewhere, perhaps to work on the new line.”

    “They are indeed a transient breed.”

    Shops and dwellings huddled together, walls and a variety of roofs clad in boards all askew, yet which somehow in their chaos attained a harmony all their own; frail but sound constructions lining a street not wider than a cart track.

    To Forster, this time too, everything seemed Chinese, from curious fabrics and wares in the windows to the cats and dogs yawning and scratching in patches of shade. Mow Fung exchanged a few words in his own tongue with a plump, amiable woman shaking a mat as Forster pulled up the rig. Her two infants played with a top in the dust at her feet and squealed in high, lilting tones, miniature editions of their mother. The newcomers stirred a hubbub in the nearby buildings, and within a minute a dozen Celestials had poured out and gathered around the trap to inspect the garments Forster had displayed on the seat, while he fended off the more enthusiastic who reached to handle them.

    “Nobody recognizes these things,” Mow Fung said.

    They proceeded down the street, Forster leading the horse and trap.

    “What a pong. For God’s sake, that’s a great patch of human dung beside that place!”

    “Dried out, it makes good fertiliser,” said Mow Fung. “We Chinese have had to learn that practice, because Chinatowns are usually built below the main town, at the bottom of a hill where sewage and rubbish wash down. Very smelly, though. The newspaper editor often worries that diphtheria will not kill us here, but will drift over to Stawell instead.”

    They stopped before the joss house, a low timber building with a sloping roof. A faint scent of incense drifted from within. Mow Fung went over to pay his respects, bowing and disappearing through the open door.

    “No good,” he said when he came back out, holding a paper lantern. “Somebody knocked off some ritual ornaments. Terrible omen.”

    “What’s that you’ve got?”

    “Kongming. Sky lantern.”

    Forster made a noncommittal grunt. “Right. Say no more.”

    Mow Fung shrugged. “My mother used to say, ‘If you want to become full, admit the emptiness.’ Lao Tzu said the same. It means don’t think too much – listen once in a while.”

    “Steady on. It’s too hot for philosophy.”

    At the far end of the street, a group of men loitered smoking in front of a building.

    “Miss Lili Chan’s Jade Phoenix,” Forster said. “Its reputation precedes it, and not in a good way. Sly grog and opium. Fantan croupier of prodigious luck – or suspect dexterity.”

    “Good friend. Lady of fine quality,” Mow Fung said.

    Heavy curtains enclosed the parlour, parted here and there to admit thin slivers of light. As Forster looked about to gain his bearings, portions of the room surfaced briefly before retreating again into shadow. He had been expected; nothing illicit met the eye. A girl seated on the end of a couch plucked on an instrument resembling a pear-shaped lute, producing a languid, elusive strain. Beside her a man leaned with his head slumped insensibly against the shoulder of a young female, who smoked a long pipe and fanned herself with a bored look. Some men sat around a table playing pai-gow with black dominoes marked in red and white, wagering from little heaps of matchsticks.

    Lili Chan herself emerged from a curtained doorway in a loose-fitting, mercerised cotton changpao. The matte black fabric gave a restrained rustle as she crossed the room. For an instant Forster thought he saw a light-coloured shock of hair before the curtain slipped back into place. She took a cheroot from a lacquered box on the mantel shelf, inserted it into a cigarette holder and signalled to a brawny attendant to light it for her, before at last addressing the two men.

    Lily Chang in a loose black thick-cotton changpao stands in the Jade Phoenix parlour before a curtained window, half-lit in shadow.

    “Detective Forster,” she said. “I assumed our paths would cross again. I take it this is not a social visit.” With a smile, she nodded to Mow Fung.

    “Business has a way of intruding,” Forster said. “Even in agreeable surroundings.” He tapped the hessian at his side.

    “Intriguing. Even so, perhaps you will still allow me to extend some hospitality.”

    She gestured to a young woman, who brought a small tray with porcelain cups and set it on the low table. Lili Chan took a seat without hurry. After a brief hesitation, Forster and Mow Fung did the same.

    Tea was poured from a pot painted with blossoms and winding script. Forster sipped from courtesy; the brew proved lighter than he expected. The murmur of Chinese between Lili and Mow Fung faded into the notes of the lute. Her garment fell in precise folds from her shoulders; the high Mandarin collar framed her face and lent her bearing a formal gravity. A diagonal opening crossed her chest, secured with subtle braided knots. Though the room held the day’s heat, she inhabited a cooler plane altogether. She offered him neither word nor glance, yet he was aware of being measured.

    Then the voices were quiet and he heard only the sparse notes of the lute. She drew on the cheroot, inclined her face and, exhaling the smoke through her mouth and nostrils, looked at him fully for the first time.

    Forster opened the sack and laid the clothing on the table. “You have seen these before?”

    Her eyes moved once across the cloth. “No.”

    “You are quite certain. Perhaps someone else present?”

    “I do not recognize these things,” she repeated. “Nor do my employees, for I do not.”

    At the door, Forster offered her a smile and nod.

    “I understand there was some trouble in the camp last week,” he said. “You see much in this street, Miss Chan. If any part of it bears upon my inquiry, I would be obliged to hear of it.”

    “The temple was robbed by a vagrant from Stawell, a European. I explained to the priest, Mow Fung, that there was no need for the law. The stolen goods were recovered, and mercy shown. Too much to drink. He returned everything when he sobered up and regretted his deed.”

    Outside, Forster turned to his companion. “Priest?”

    Mow Fung looked bashful. “I only consecrate a few things here and there, make rain, tell fortunes, guide the dead, heal boils, such matters…”

    • • •

    Forster found John Campbell, publican of the Royal Hotel at Glenorchy, in his back office. He placed the sack on the table and took out the clothes, one by one. Campbell watched without moving, then gave a short, humourless snort.

    “I know these,” he said. “I’ve seen them worn.”

    Forster waited.

    “Two railway hands, December – navvies off the Dimboola works. Twelfth to the fourteenth, in the one room. Burns was one – smooth-tongued. His mate called himself Charley Forbes. Big red-bearded fellow. ‘Scotty,’ they called him, though he said he was Irish.”

    Campbell touched the coat, as if confirming a weight.

    “He wore this. Coat and hat – same sort. Burns did the talking. Held the money. Kept him close.”

    Forster wrote.

    “They came down by train?”

    “From Horsham, they said.”

    Campbell’s mouth tightened.

    “They ran out of money here. Lost it at cards and drank what was left. When it came time to pay for the room, Burns left a watch with my barman as security – said once the debt was met it was to go on to Stawell, care of Phelan, the storekeeper.”

    Forster noted the name.

    Campbell reflected for a second and added, “I saw Burns at the Stawell races a few days after Christmas. I asked after Forbes. Burns said he’d gone up to New South Wales with an old mate.”

    Forster gathered the clothes together.

    “That’ll do,” he said. “And if you’re pouring, I’ll take that whisky now.”

    • • •

    A few days later, Forster reached the railway camp outside Dimboola, closing in on his phantoms.

    “Painter and his son?” Forster said.

    “Ain’t here …” the foreman began.

    The discharge came with a dull whomp! – sudden and overwhelming, as loud as a cannon, yet muffled by the tons of dirt and rock. The vibration struck the stomach as quickly, if not quicker, than the eardrums. Forster jumped and got through the “Holy–” before tons of dislodged rock thundered down out of sight around the bend.

    “… Jesus!” He blanched and stepped quickly into the cover of the embankment, underneath which a line of navvies was gathered in loose formation, with some standing and others seated in the dust or on rails and stacked sleepers. A drizzle of stones pattered beyond the shelter of the embankment and a cloud of dust surged round the bend. A few seconds of silence followed, the men watching the detective regain his bearings.

    “Who’s opened his bloody tucker bag?” one of them drawled, earning a chortle or two. Forster looked over and was met by steely, sullen faces and a few grins bordering on sneers.

    “Should’ve mentioned that,” said the poker-faced foreman. “Bit of blasting this morning.”

    Evident the copper was put out. Didn’t much enjoy being the butt of a joke.

    “The detective is lookin’ for the Painters?” he called. “Where are they?”

    “Morning off,” came a reply. “Doubler yesterday.”

    A whistle-blast came from around the bend.

    “You men get back to work now,” the foreman said.

    He showed Forster to one of the tents at the workers’ campsite some hundred yards off. Two men dressed identically in grimy singlets and shorts, Richard and John Painter, father and son, sat on stools drinking tea, either side of an upended wooden fruit box that served as a table.

    At Forster’s direction, they examined the clothing, identical smokes drooping from the corners of nearly identical mouths. Coat in two pieces, almost the same colour as the grass in which it had been found. Waistcoat also in two halves, the buckle and strap suggesting it had been quite new before lying exposed for a month or more. The blue twilled shirt, comparatively new, a button torn out – that button found in the vicinity. Relics of the wideawake hat. All the garments except the wideawake more or less saturated with what looked like blood. He had not brought the trousers, which were found down a mine shaft some distance from the body; he reckoned they were probably the dead man’s too. Less distinctive, though; harder to identify positively.

     The Painters hummed and harred, seeming to communicate to each other in their own language of undecipherable mutters and growls, scratching their beards and shaking their heads deep in thought. The detective waited. Just as his nerves began to wear thin, the two men sucked in a breath as one, glanced at each other over their cups of tea, and shook their heads.

    “Yep,” said the elder.

    He opened his mouth to continue.

    Painter the elder sits in a canvas tent beside an upturned fruit-box table, tea and battered cups among cards and ash.

    “Teeth, Father. Company. Manners.”

    Painter the elder fumbled for his dentures on top of the fruit box between them, alongside some grimy playing cards, three battered tin cups – two half-filled with tea – an overflowing ashtray, and half a browning apple.

    “Reckon we know this bloke,” the father said. “Or knew him, you might say.”

    “The feller who owns these here clothes,” the son said. “Know him pretty bloody well. Knew him.”

    “Worked with him, God rest his soul,” the father said. “Nice chappie, broth of a boy. Bit slow. Addicted to the drink.”

    “Never once saw him drunk, Father.”

    “Never seen him drunk? You must be jokin’.”

    “Who said he’s dead?” Forster said.

    “Been reading the papers, that’s all. The body at Four Posts,” said the son. “Terrible thing, shocking. Must’ve been him.”

    “What was his name, then?” Forster said.

    “Scotty, they called him,” the son said. “But Charley Forbes was the proper name.”

    “Charley Forbes,” the father agreed. “Charley Forbes.” Tutted.

    “You’re certain these belonged to Charles Forbes?”

    “We know this coat by where it’s mended,” the father said. “This bit of stitching on the breast here.” He pointed a finger, the hand had a slight tremor in it now.

    “This here stitching on the breast,” the son said. “Charley burnt a hole in it with his pipe, so he stitched it up like this. Couldn’t be more certain it’s the very coat. I never saw him burn it, but I saw it stitched.”

    “Not a bad piece of stitching, really,” the father said, bending closer. “Quite sure as to the identity of this coat. No question.”

    “No question,” said the son. “Ain’t seen him since him and Burnsey took off together, a bit before Christmas.”

    “What’d he look like?”

    “Broad-shouldered, stout fellow. Large, flowing beard.”

    “Sandy coloured.”

    “Well, light sandy coloured, I’d say. Beard was lighter than the hair on his head, which was a dark sandy colour.”

    “Yeah, I s’pose you’re right there, Father. Light sandy coloured beard. Dark sandy coloured hair on his head.”

    “Sandy complexion, wouldn’t you say, Son?”

    “That’s right, Father, very sandy.”

    “And this other character, his mate?”

    “Robert Burns,” said the son. “Like the Scottish poet.”

    “That Man to Man, the world o’er, Shall brothers be for a’ that,” quoth the father, and lapsed into vacant thought, his head nodding involuntarily.

    “Old Jake seen him over at Murtoa the other day, getting off the train,” the son said.

    “Burnsey?” Forster said. “Where’s this Jake?”

    “Shot through.”

    “Where to?”

    “Goodness bloody knows. Just cleared out the other night.”

    From the draft novel Stawell Bardo © Michael Guest 2026

  • The Joss House

    The Joss House

    Hung and festooned as it was with tablets, banners and fans, the joss house at the Chinese camp in Deep Lead was a living bubble of China in the Wimmera. House of deus, so called, from the Portuguese for god. Just inside the doorway, to the left, stood a large iron bell and a tall, barrel-shaped hand drum, with a peacock painted over the pig-skin drumhead. Beside them were glass cases containing sacred candles and five tiers of shelves holding prayers written on paper slips.

    To the unaccustomed eye, the decor was gaudy, with multi-coloured pennants, Chinese characters in purple and gold painted on the walls and roof. Paper and stained-glass lanterns hung from the ceiling; bunches of tinsel in vases were set on stands carved in relief, to depict different epochs. No master craftsman created these, but they proclaim a naïve hand: work executed with painstaking devotion by a jack-of-all-trades, a long-time resident of the Chinese camp.

    Watercolour of Joss House interior. A woman tends the altar, on which is seated a carved deity. There are incense, lanterns, a drum, and various other religios artefacts.

    In her ceremonial robe adorned with all the deities of heaven to clothe her in the protection of the universe, Huish-Huish, Mow Fung’s wife, prepared the altar for the ceremony dedicated to making peace with ghosts. At the very back, raised on a pedestal, in the position of greatest honour, stands the immortal Guanyin, provider of good fortune, who is certain to help, for she hears all the cries of the world and is ever willing to offer protection from any kind of threat or attack. She sits placidly upon a lotus, attired pure white, with gold ornaments and crown. In her right palm she holds a golden flask filled with pure water, in her left raised hand, a twig of willow. Water is to ease suffering and purify the body; willow keeps evil and demons at bay. Huish-Huish communes regularly with the bodhisattva, as though she is a dear friend. She regularly brings the statue flowers, food and drink to sustain and empower her. She is no less beautiful for being made out of plaster. The neck of the statue is pierced with a hole, for other spirits to enter and represent her, after the fashion of an avatar; for Guanyin cannot be everywhere at once herself.

    She lit the sacred lamp for the illumination of wisdom, then the two candles, standing for the sun and moon, and for the two eyes of the human being: the light of the Tao and windows to the psyche. These would help her penetrate the dust of the everyday world. In front of them, three cups, one each of tea, rice and water: tea for yin, the female energy; water for yang, the male; and rice the union of both of these, containing yang from the sun and yin from the earth. In front of them in turn, five plates of fruit to represent the five elements: green for wood, red for fire, yellow for earth, white for metal, black for water. These for the liver, heart, spleen, lungs and kidneys – in harmonious cooperation, a cycle of good health. Sour, bitter, sweet, salty, pungent: plum, apricot, dates, peach, chestnut. She placed dried foods on the altar on this occasion, because she wanted to absorb power from it. When she wishes to empower the altar, she gives it fresh food and flowers, from which it draws life energy.

    In front of the five plates stood the incense burner, a bronze dragon turtle, the smoke curling up through the vents in the top of its carapace – vents in the form of the eight trigrams. The joss sticks were Lena’s work: Mongolian incense, pepped up with dubious substances extracted from her beloved maiden wattle. Necessary cleansing rituals completed, Huish-Huish burned the protective talismans and traced their forms in the air.

    Knowing from previous experiences the ceremonial protocols, Chan Lee Lung – known in Deep Lead as Lili Chan, proprietor of the Jade Phoenix – bowed in deference as she entered, then seated herself. Huish-Huish placed a talisman on her head and performed the mudras, the hand gestures used for drawing out spirits. Based on their previous ceremonies, she has come to suspect that urges to self-harm and suicide afflicting the woman are quite possibly the handiwork of a ghost. There are any number of possible reasons why a ghost might wish the subject injury. She is a beautiful woman, and some ghost may want to marry her, particularly if she has said something inadvertently in earshot that put such a nonsense into its mind. On the other hand, it was common for the ghost of someone who died by suicide to become stranded at the gates of hell, compelled to reenact the fatal act for eternity, unless they were able to find someone to replace them, through that person’s own suicide. Or she may have crossed paths with the spirit of a suicide, or tarried at a haunted spot marked by an unnatural death. Such spirits were always in search of a victim.

    Watercolour image of a Euro-Asian woman in closeup, with her eyes closed, and acupuncture needles in her face, at a few points around the eyes

    The only way to get some idea is to travel with the woman as she journeys through her psyche via the medium of her speech, her story. In this way Huish-Huish may make the woman aware of the ghost, and encounter its weaker manifestations within the trance; there, the ghost itself may be dissolved or at least dissuaded. At the same time, however, in order to heal, she must make herself whole, cultivate herself, and grow in accord with the principles laid out in the Yi Jing and other Taoist teachings. No quick fix here, no game of fantan, this.

    “Every child loves the pretty fable of Kwang Kau’s dream about the butterfly, which Zhuangzi teaches us,” Huish-Huish says. “When Kau awoke from the dream, he found himself unable to tell whether he was Kau dreaming he was a butterfly or the butterfly dreaming it was Kau.

    “Another tale strikes me as somehow similar, in which Shadow and Penumbra converse – Penumbra wanting to know why Shadow moves as she does, perhaps because Penumbra must follow. So Penumbra says, ‘Before, you were walking, but now you have stopped. You were sitting, but now you stand up. How and why do you do that?’

    “Shadow answers, ‘I have to wait for something else to move, and then I will do the same thing as it, almost as though I am its second skin …’”

    The woman listens, as though to a disembodied voice – fluent, lilting Mandarin. Though her own native tongue was that of the city of Taishan – Taishonese, a dialect of Yue, kin to Cantonese – the music of the hypnotic voice draws her into its discourse, and it seems she leaves the world behind her.

    “‘How on earth would I know?’ says Shadow,” Huish-Huish continued. “‘How could I possibly know what it is, that thing which moves, and which I follow – whether the scales of a snake, or a cicada’s wing? How should I have an idea why I perform one particular act instead of another?’”

    The woman’s eyes are closed, and she is already on the brink of a great descent. She hears the pure tone of a chime, and the jingling of rattles, the sounds suffused with the heavy smoke of the incense.

     “Like Shadow and Penumbra,” the voice continued, “I wonder whether we might allow ourselves to pass through phases of our deeper selves – or our earlier selves, when these are not the same thing – and sink into each other, you and I. Penumbras of the scales of a snake follow the shadows of the scales, which follow the snake; they need not feel the belly of the snake sliding across the sand, which is irrelevant to them and impossible to access. And to whom is visible the penumbra of a shadow of the wing of a cicada? And what does the cicada follow, when it does as it does?”

    Huish-Huish aims to melt away her own ego – to become a nothingness, receptive to the projections of memory – because memory is the essence of the psyche itself.

    She guided Chan Lee Lung to lie back upon a low wooden plinth set before the altar, her head resting upon a rice-husk dragon cushion.

    With an austere calm, she placed fine needles along the woman’s brow, at the temples, beneath the eyes, where the face is thinner and the mind can loosen its hold. Chan Lee Lung felt no pain – only a spreading lightness, as though the weight of her features were being unhooked from memory.

    After a while, Chan Lee Lung could no longer separate her inner dialogue from the sound of the guiding voice, which had transposed itself into a chant, whose symbolic words she was unable to comprehend as words, but which fell into a silence as deep as that of the deepest well. As they penetrated the surface of the ether, or whatever liquid-like substance lay at the bottom of the well, something more pure than water, the pitch darkness ignited: each word flared into a splash of sparkling light, cohering into one image, then another, then the next, setting in play a flickering spectacle. A dream that was not quite a dream; a reality that was somehow greater than her reality of the everyday. As instructed, she began to say whatever went through her mind, as though she were a traveller in a railway carriage, sitting by the window, describing to someone else in the carriage the changing scenes she saw outside.

    Standing on a Canton roadside are a woman and her five children, all dressed in their best holiday black, which is nevertheless patched in some places and threadbare in others. Hardly finery, but the woman does her best under extenuating circumstances, as she repeats often to her neighbours and the grocery vendors. The middle daughter examines her mother’s face and observes a liquid bead run down along her nose and fall to the dust.

    “Mama, do you cry?” she asks.

    “Only sweat. Stand quietly.”

    Their sign leans upright against the trunk of the slender tree under whose branches they have sought shade. The mother pacifies the baby, bounces him gently and reassures him with baby-talk, before binding him again to her back, where he falls asleep immediately. At this sight, the eldest daughter stifles the lump in her throat until the mother notices her quivering jaw and corrects her sternly. In the joss house at the Deep Lead Chinese camp, Chan Lee Lung is once again overcome with a profound sadness. Her mother was a hard woman. Again she tastes the blood in her mouth, where she bit herself on the lip to prevent herself from crying – and bites it once again.

    They met up with the broker, who was carrying their sign, at the appointed spot. She disliked the man’s fat, ugly, greasy face. Even his queue seemed to have lumps of fat in it, and he smelled like rotten pork. He laughed when she pointed out these shortcomings to him. He took a piece of lemon from his pocket and presented it to her. She asked him why he thought she would want a piece of lingmung. He corrected her, with another patronising laugh.

    In a Canton street, an old Chinese man, grinning. offers a young woman a piece of lemon. Watercolour image.

    “Ningmeng,” he said, pronouncing the syllables of the Mandarin word. And again, after sucking the lemon, he repeated it, pedantically now, with his bloated, sensual, wet lips, “Ning meng.” Emphasised with two beats of his fat forefinger on her forehead. He told the girls to stand in line, with their bags arranged neatly by their feet.

    She wanted to know what was going to happen to her and he replied that if she was a good girl she would go in a magnificent European ship to a wonderful place called Gold Mountain, an earthly paradise where the streets were paved with gold. There she would find boundless happiness as a wife to many men, have all the food she could eat, wear a cheongsam of the finest silk, and return to China a rich lady.

    She saw the improper look he cast her mother, which he pretended was secret while intending her to notice it, a wink and leer that revealed his green teeth. She complained to the mother, saying she did not want to leave her sisters and little brother, and the mother reassured her that her sisters were leaving as well, to somewhere they would be safe from the fighting here. Her brother was too young to miss her, so she need have no concern for him.

    Another man arrived by rickshaw, perused the sign, and Lemon-man took him aside to discuss a transaction. Her mother told her to take up her bag and walk with dignity to the rickshaw. She was a big girl now, and the world would be her oyster. That is all she remembers of the time her mother sold her, except that as the vehicle moved off, she looked around to farewell her mother and siblings. Her mother had her back turned, remonstrating with the broker, as was her usual way in such pecuniary transactions. Her sisters were waving to her gaily, delighted to see her riding in a rickshaw for the first time.

    Two months later, the Pacific Mail Steamship Company’s China passed through the narrow strait into San Francisco Bay. The voyage seemed far shorter to the girl, who had been pacified with narcotics for much of the time, in order to prevent her from creating any fuss. It was a recurring delirious episode; she was rolled to and fro on her narrow bunk with the tossing of the vessel, nausea melding with visions of her sisters who, in her dreams, were transmogrified into salivating crimson ghouls. They were standing beside the repulsive man, between whose luminous green teeth issued copious streams of blood. In her waking moments, she was indifferent to the crush and squalor around her. 

    “This is the Golden Gate to Gold Mountain, the country of your dreams.”

    The woman assigned to play the role of her mother had, during her lucid intervals, been tutoring her in what she must say in case she was questioned by someone called Customs. The girl learned to utter the English word “seamstress” while performing an appropriate pantomime, smiling with an air of great earnestness.

    If her acting talents were unconvincing and the two apprehended, the White Devil would visit unspeakable torment on her.

    Although the two travelled in a better section of steerage, it was only thanks to the ‘value’ her buyers saw in her looks and talents in song and dance, which they judged superior to those of their former favourite, a Hong Kong girl they subsequently cast aside. Chan Lee Lung was cloistered with a group of a dozen other girls, away from the hundreds of male emigrants and prostitutes also travelling in steerage, shielded from the rapes and bashings by two bodyguards known not for their physiques, but for their ruthless cunning and their expertise with concealed weapons.

    Leaning against the railing on the starboard deck, bracing herself against the jostling crowd, the girl inclined her face to the magnificent morning sun, emerging from wisps of fog that had been thick and opaque only minutes earlier. This was the first time for the duration of the voyage that she had been permitted up on deck. The ship was about to dock when a splash was heard from the port side, followed by distinct female screams and a rising volume of anxious chatter, as a wave of agitation spread through the huddle of disembarkees. Descending the gangplank, shouldering a jute sack containing her meagre belongings, she overheard a high-pitched, trembling mention of the name Lee Sing, which seemed vaguely to resemble that of the girl in Hong Kong whose fate she had supplanted with her own.

    A girl among a crowd of disembarkees from the steamship China, docked at a San Francisco wharf.

    Bound-footed Madame Ah Toy, the girl’s new owner, immediately warmed to her. When the ageing madam raised the girl’s chin with two fingers to appraise her face more closely, despite the air of sadness that still hung over her, the girl’s eyes reminded her of her own, formerly renowned for their laughing quality. Goldminers “came to gaze upon the countenance of the charming Ah Toy,” the newspaper said once, in poetic, libidinous understatement. And they would come to gaze on the countenance of this girl, her newest attraction, as well. “But only gaze for the time being,” Ah Toy said to herself, in the cold arithmetic of her trade, now satisfied the girl was physically sound, “until you’re growed up good and proper.” There was more in those eyes, however, that drew the woman’s attention: a depth of soul and intelligence; a quiet defiance that she could see would never be crushed. The madam had good reason to identify with the girl’s sterling qualities, having herself wrought a fortune as the first Chinese courtesan and the first Chinese madam of the red-light district, the so-called Barbary Coast.

     Ah Toy oversaw the education of her new protégé as she would that of a cherished daughter, with a loving and stern hand. She declaimed her belief that “son without learning, you have raised an ass; daughter without learning, you have raised a pig,” and over the next few years, the girl flowered under her regime. She soon assumed mastery over the various academic and dance hall pursuits for which her tutelage had been commissioned, guided by professorial clients of Ah Toy’s famous establishment in an alley off Clay Street, under contracts of barter.

    The girl’s getting of wisdom served, as ever, a financial motive, for the ladies of the Chinese establishment trailed those employed in French, Mexican, British and American cat houses, whose popularity ranked roughly in that order. Competition was fierce in the bagnio trade. The French fandango parlour had its les nymphes du pavé, late of the Parisian gutters, who were packing in the patrons to overflowing, gussied up in their red slippers, black stockings, garters and jackets, nothing down below. Stories abounded of outrageous personalities: The Roaring Gimlet, Snakehips Lulu and the rest. Holy Moses! Madame Featherlegs would gallop a horse down the main street wearing nothing but batwing chaps.

    Unfortunately, although a successful entrepreneur, Ah Toy had also become rather a laughing stock, largely because of her Chinese-ness, but also because of the young age and sickly condition of the girls crammed into her shacks, or “cribs,” in Jackson Street, sometimes abused by white boys scarcely older than children themselves.

    These girls she considered, and treated, no better than chattel.

    The girl grew into her role admirably, expressing as though they were natural traits the aristocratic airs she was schooled in; airs that in fact derived from no single country, but from an amalgam of places, real and imaginary. Yet somehow her intrinsic class seemed to imbue these artificial attributes with substance.

    She was not overawed by anyone she met, but treated with due respect and equality all who crossed her path: from city officials who surreptitiously joined the growing flood of patrons paying good money for no more than the pleasure of gazing upon her, to slave girls locked in the cribs like animals. Most of these girls had been smuggled from China, either peddled, like her, or abducted outright. Sufferers of syphilis numbered among them, their short futures preordained: to die disfigured beggars on the streets of Chinatown.

    She felt a compassion for these creatures in the cribs, pleading their cause to Madame Ah Toy and doing her utmost to convince her, in terms she would understand, that acknowledging even minimal duties of care to the crib girls might serve her business-wise – allowing her to be perceived as less of a pariah and blight on society, though she couched that more gently.

    No cribs for her, nor even a residence in one of the sumptuously appointed parlour houses. Ah Toy set her up in a double storey brick house of her own, where she entertained only the most prestigious clientele – exclusively white, expressly no Chinese – when she was not assisting her proprietress to operate the gambling house and manage the business affairs. As well, Ah Toy provided her with a chaperon, a certain Fung Jing Dock, whom she introduced to Chan Lee Lung as an office bearer in a newly formed organisation known as the Society of the Mind Abiding in Tranquility and Freedom. He was, Ah Toy said, a virtuoso on the zither as well as an avid student of the Yi Jing.

    “Regarding my degree of talent with the zither, I must refuse to answer,” Fung Jing Dock pleaded charmingly, “in order to avoid incriminating myself.”

    Nevertheless, he proved to be a surprisingly good amateur zitherist, and Chan Lee Lung and he spent a few minutes at the instrument together now and then during the daylight hours.

    “But there is more to this story,” Lili Chan said as they came out of the joss house and into the dazzling sunlight. “It does not end well, I’m afraid.” She turned towards her establishment.

    Huish-Huish looked at her face, which seemed pallid.

    “As a process, the ceremony may sometimes require any number of iterations,” she said. “Some subjects joke that it will go on forever, and they will never be free of me. Things cannot be rushed, however. We will have plenty of opportunity next time.” She laughed. “There is no cure for the human existence, you know,” she said. She briefly squeezed her companion’s arm and went back briskly into the joss house. Pausing to look up at the empty expanse of sky for a second, Lili took in a long breath, before making her way languidly down the street.

    From the draft novel Stawell Bardo © Michael Guest 2026

  • The Minyip Letter

    The Minyip Letter

    “Must be about seven or half-past,” Burns thought as he walked up to Fergus’s European Hotel, the morning after he and Forbes had tramped off along the old Glenorchy track. Finding the front doors locked, he went around the side, in through the gate and past a pile of empty kegs, where a back door on the bar-side of the pub stood wide open. He was halted by the sudden appearance of his own ashen reflection in a large gilded oval mirror on the wall of the hallway.

    He forced a laugh. “Thought you were a bloody ghost, but only my own self. What next?” he said aloud to the reflection. He wiped his brow, which glistened with a heavy sweat. The morning was already warm.

    Eliza was giving the bar a wipe-down and laying out bar towels. She stopped at the sight of Burns with his axe, which he leaned against the bar as he drew up a stool. He swivelled away from her to the left, craning his neck as if to get a view out the window.

    “Give us a brandy, love, would you? I’m parched.”

    He took out his pipe and a plug of tobacco, which he cut with a pocket-knife.

    She watched his hands tremble as he inserted the weed and lit the pipe.

    “No brandy,” she said. Expression gormless.

    He looked up, and the pocket-knife, slipping from his fingers, clattered on the top of the bar.

    “For God’s sake.” Tone miserable in frustration. His head throbbed and his throat was dry. His heart thumped and fluttered alternately beneath his ribs, and the nausea set in. He took in some short, quick breaths to quell it, and bent forward, lowering his forehead into his hands. “Greed,” he moaned, “all greed. They’ve got it all but that’s nothing to them if they don’t ruin life for their neighbour as well. Rotten mongrels, and the coppers are even worse.”

    Eliza, who had seen much of what there is to see in life, was not discomfited by his demonstration, any more than she had been by his leering the day before. Truth to tell, she didn’t mind the flattery. Perhaps, she thought, he misunderstood her meaning.

    “Bit early, ain’t it? Delivery ain’t come in. Only got whisky.”

    She poured him a nobbler as he fumbled in his pocket for some coin.

    “Down the hatch.” He threw it back. “And another.” He sat and pondered for a while, smoking his pipe, staring out the window.

    She went back to racking glasses and straightening the towels. He held up his hands to examine them. The whisky had quieted the tremors.

    Burns cradles his head, at the hotel bar, an axe leaned up beside him.

    “Got a grindstone here?” he said.

    “What?” Warily, anticipating a lewd jest.

    “A grindstone for my axe. Got a grindstone on the place?”

    “Nothing of the sort,” she said.

    “Any grub or suchlike?”

    “What would you think, at this time?”

    “Well, give us a half bottle of whisky. You got that, don’t you? When I don’t have anything to eat, I have something to drink.”

    He slapped the money down on the bar and drew his hands up in a solemn, conjurer’s flourish, or one like a monarch’s, bestowing jewels and baubles of gold on the greedy.

    She watched him rise, pocket his bottle, shoulder his axe, and swagger out the back way.

    “Well, I’m off to cut wood, at any rate.”

    Next day, hair slicked down, on the way to the town hall he was afflicted with the shakes again. They told him downstairs to see Mr Franklin, who would know what he was talking about, so he groped his way up the staircase to the shire offices on the second floor, pausing halfway up to catch his breath, white-knuckled, supporting himself by the banister. Locating the door of John Henry Franklin, Esquire, Secretary, Stawell Shire Council, he knocked and was summoned in. He gathered himself, and again the call came.

    Burns stood swaying in the doorway for a full half-minute as light from the window behind Franklin washed him out to a silhouette. The room smelled of stale ink and hot dust; a blowfly buzzed against the windowpane.

    “My goodness, Burns, what is the matter with you?”

    Franklin sat there, amazed at the gaze that met his: maniacal, animalistic, uncomprehending. He recognised the man from a meeting six months back, over some piece of council business so trivial he could scarcely recall it.

    “Look at you, fellow, you’re tremulous. Have a seat before you fall down. What’s the matter with you? What are you doing here in a state like this? Confound me, you smell like a brewery. What brings you here, then?”

    Burns shook all over in a spasm before regaining the power of speech.

    “I have been on a drinking spree, sir, in my own time. Being once more sober, I have come here to …” momentarily forgetting why “… to look for work on the railway.”

    Franklin stared at the long, fresh graze that ran along Burns’s left cheek, which his beard did not conceal. The man was swaying in his chair.

    “You are serious.”

    “I am a simple railway man, sir.” Your bloody highness. “Except for honest fellows like I the locomotives would not run … I seek nothing more than honest toil. I vacated my position at Dimboola because … it’s too far to go … I tire of the scenery … Heard there is some maintenance available in the more local vicinity.”

    “I don’t think,” Franklin said, “there will be any chance of anything, at least until after the Christmas holidays.”

    Burns nodded slowly for an inordinate amount of time.

    “There is also the matter of the land I made inquiries about some months ago.”

    Franklin was prompted to recall the substance of their previous meeting.

    “There is no land available for selection,” he said firmly, and at that, Burns stood up, pulled himself together, and went away without another word.

    Three days after the Scarlet Robin and her flock had castigated him for creating such a commotion in the peaceful bush, Burns walked into a scrappy little farm at Pimpinio, eight miles the other side of Horsham, owned by a German named Baum. Passing the barn on his way to the house, he was assailed from behind:

    “The blokes you run into when you don’t have a gun.”

    He started and froze, his heart doing its new jig.

    “Mate, don’t get a shock.”

    Burns knew him as well as anything, just couldn’t place the face at first, here in this dump.

    “John, mate, from Avanel!”

    “Yeah, I know, Putney. Couldn’t place you out of the blue like that. Well I’ll be bushed. How are you, you scallywag?” Navvy who’d worked beside them on the rail.

    “Pretty good, mate. Just been doing a bit of graft for Baum, old tightwad he is. Say, what are you up to? Haven’t seen you and Charley since … must be more than a month ago on the line between Dimboola and Horsham, before I chucked it in.”

    “Ah, I’ve been up in the country selecting land. Thought I’d drop in on the way home and see if old Baum had anything for me to do.”

    “Well, I reckon you might be out of luck. Said he’s flat-out paying me. How’s the other bearded wonder, then, old Charley? Thought youse two were joined at the hip.”

    Think, think. Could kill two birds here.

    “Ah, haven’t seen him for a while, the bastard.” Think quick. “Wouldn’t believe the strife he’s put me through with the grog, so I left him out at Natimuk. Got on the spree, he did, as usual. Pawned his watch and I had to release it for him. Thanks to that I’m a broker. Look here, you wouldn’t happen to have a bit of tin on you, would you? I’ll be good for it next time I run into you, or I’ll bring it to you here or Avenel, whichever you wish.”

    “Barely got enough left to go for a drink tonight. Baum can’t pay me till next week. Well, I can spare you a couple of bob, I suppose.”

    “Thanks mate. Well, damn Baum anyway, I’m off home.”

    Late in the summer, he re-adapted to an itinerant lifestyle without his mate, travelling by rail here and there about the Wimmera, catching a few days’ work when he felt like it. Life’s not too bad with a few quid in the bank. “No sign of Charley,” he thought from time to time. “That’s all well and good. Passable life, that of the solitary rambler, well and good.”

    Burns enjoying a win at the country racetrack. He is observed by Archibald Fletcher.

    Three weeks after the Scarlet Robin, on a brilliant sunny day at Murtoa racetrack, he won a few bob on a skinny bush nag. Turned to leave the bookmaker and found himself face-to-face with Archibald Fletcher, the cow that Scotty, the idiot, had a run-in with at Glenorchy. Asked him what he won on, but Burns declined to reply, raising his lip as he brushed by him.

    “Where is your mate?” said Fletcher behind him.

    The same thing Fergus asked him the other day, when he’d run into him getting off the train at Stawell, peeved about all that money nonsense: “Here, I’d like a word with you. Where’s your mate?” “Oh, up there,” he’d said back to him, waving his arm, indicating vaguely – somewhere between Horsham, up the line, or that place upstairs, if such a one existed – as he escaped through the wicket.

    “None of your business.” This time to Fletcher, and kept going, just the same as the other day.

    He sat down in the refreshment tent with a beer and picked up a copy of the Ballarat Star, a few days old, lying on the wicker table.

    He let the beer sit while he read:

    Awful Discovery in the Wimmera Scrub.

    A labourer working near Deep Lead, close to five miles from Stawell, yesterday discovered a man’s body in the bush – naked and without a head. Police have given no word on identity.…

    The heart started its antics again. How fleeting, fortune’s favours.

    “What’s up, mate? See you done all right in the third there.” Michael Carrick, city bloke, now working with him on a place outside Murtoa, joined him with a beer. Thoughts and hideous images swamped Burns’s skull in such a torrent they confounded the brain and the tongue.

    “Nasty business that one, eh?” Carrick nodded at the paper.

    “They’ll never find the head,” Burns said.

    “What?”

    “They’ll never find the head. Or the man who did it.”

    “Daresay. When you think of it, I suppose that’s why the head’s not there. Means the culprit knew him. Yeah, of course. If they could identify the dead bloke, they’d go around looking at everyone who knew him. Still, with dogs and all …”

    That night, back at their campfire, Burns, carrying a gas lamp and a fountain pen and paper, interrupted Carrick playing “The Flooers o the Forest” on his battered harmonica to ask him a favour. Carrick being possessed of the finer, more legible hand, would he mind penning a letter for him? He wanted it written for a man named Charles Forbes, who was working at Minyip and did not want the man to whom the letter was going to know his handwriting. It was for a man named Fergus, who owned a hotel in Stawell.

    Good-natured Carrick saw no reason why not, and thought it was something he could do for his new mate. He shrugged and got a book out of his tent, on which to lay one of the sheets of paper.

    Burns dictated the following letter, and the next day had another man drop it at the post office when he was in town:

    Burns dictates the Minyip letter to Carrick at a campfire on the farm where they are employed as transients. Burns holds an oil lamp illuminating the letter. There is a harmonica on the ground by Carrick's knee.

    Minyip, Jan 20, 1882 

    Dear Fergus – I wish to let you know that I am here with a farmer at Minyip at six shillings a day harvesting. I will send you down £5 to redeem my watch which I pledged before I left Stawell. I owe Burns £4 8s 6d cash. I gave him the ticket of my watch as a guarantee for his money, so if you pay the balance of the money to Burns and let Burns redeem the watch, as I got three pounds on it. By you doing so you will much oblige.

    Do not answer this until I send you the £5. It is better for me to send for the watch than to drink it. I hope I will keep sober this time until I go to Stawell to you.

    Charles Forbes, Minyip

    Burns went down to the races again on the twenty-third of February, and asked a few of the bookmakers and drunks whether they’d run into Scotty, because he wanted the twenty quid he owed him. That night, he got drunk, created a disturbance at the Murtoa pub, and was arrested and taken to the lockup. When the watchkeeper arrived in the morning and heard the prisoner pacing and muttering inside the lockup cell, he paused at the door. With a jingle of keys, he unlocked it and pushed it open.

    “What am I here for? What have I done?” Burns moaned, gasping and in a lather, his shirt soaked with sweat.

    “Calm yourself, sonny boy, or else you won’t be goin’ nowhere for a while,” the watchkeeper growled threateningly, unimpressed at being assailed with such agitated queries.

    “Why am I here?” Burns in peril of hyperventilating. “What is the charge against me?”

    “You’ve been a naughty boy, that’s why. A very naughty boy.”

    Burns stopped breathing and chilled to the bone, a frozen lump of nausea lodged in the pit of his stomach.

     “Hauled in for being drunk and disorderly and causing a ruckus in this peaceable borough of Murtoa.”

    Hearing these words, Burns’s countenance changed immediately, and apparently in token of relief and joy, he whooped and danced a lurching, deranged hornpipe in front of his captor.

    From the draft novel Stawell Bardo © Michael Guest 2026