The Dunbar Case(4)

‘A bit like Lower Manhattan,’ Wakefield said as he stepped over a milk crate.



‘Spent a bit of time there, have you?’



‘Mmm. Some.’



‘At Columbia?’



He glanced sharply at me. ‘No, I was upstate mostly.’



We reached the church grounds and crunched down the path past the Moreton Bay figs, shrubs and flowers I couldn’t identify, and weathered headstones.



‘This is all in a disgraceful state,’ Wakefield said.



‘I don’t know, it’s got an authentic feel, sort of restful, as if no one’s bothering them and never will.’



He grunted. The church was quiet; we left the path and moved into the graveyard area proper where the roots of the trees pushed up and threatened to trip you and the grass grew in tussocks around the headstones and fenced graves. I had only the vaguest memory of where the monument was but Wakefield went straight to where it stood, white and imposing, inside a rusted iron fence, in pride of place in the middle of a recess in the east wall of the cemetery.



The dark lettering on the monument had suffered some attrition at the edges but most of it had remained clear enough: WITHIN THIS TOMB WERE DEPOSITED BY DIRECTION OF THE GOVERNMENT OF NEW SOUTH WALES SUCH REMAINS AS COULD BE DISCOVERED OF THE PASSENGERS AND CREW WHO PERISHED IN THE SHIPS ‘DUNBAR’ AND ‘CATHERINE’. THE FORMER OF WHICH WAS DRIVEN ASHORE AND FOUNDERED WHEN APPROACHING THE ENTRANCE TO PORT JACKSON ON THE NIGHT OF THE 20TH OF AUGUST THE LATTER ON ENTERING THIS PORT ON THE MORNING OF THE 24TH OF OCTOBER.



AD 1857 was engraved at the base of the tomb.



A mass grave is a sad thing, it seems to me, but if Wakefield had entertained such feelings he’d got over them.



‘Quite a few of the victims, those they could identify, are buried here,’ he said, ‘and a couple in this spot, but you’d be hard put to read the headstones now, apart from that one.’



He pointed to a well-preserved white headstone for John Steane, a naval officer who’d lost his life when the Dunbar went down.



‘A hundred and fifty-odd years is a long time,’ I said.



Wakefield took care not to brush against the fence. ‘You’re thinking it’s a long time-lapse to be tracking something down.’



I shrugged. ‘It’s what, five generations?’



‘Fewer in this case; four in fact. It’s a great-grandson of the survivor I’m interested in. That’s not a very long stretch as these things go. Some of the people claiming Aboriginal or convict ancestry have to push back a lot further than that.’



‘I know,’ I said. ‘My sister found a convict ancestor for us way back. She was a London prostitute.’



‘Colourful,’ Wakefield said, moving away from the monument. ‘As you may or may not know, we academics get our postgraduate students to do some of our research. They earn their degrees and go on to bigger and better things and



‘You write your books. I’ve heard of it.’



We moved between the headstones back to the path.



‘You object?’



‘No. I suppose it’s subject to abuse, but what isn’t?’



‘Just so. I was able to discover a reliable list of the passengers aboard the Dunbar. That took time and effort, let me tell you. There were many uncertainties. I set some students to tracing descendants of the victims—direct descendants. One of them found a record of a child born to one of the passengers in 1883. You see the implication of that date?’



‘Yeah, if it’s not a clerical error.’



‘It isn’t. You’re interested?’



‘Maybe.’



‘Fair enough. What I propose is this—I show you the fruits of my research so far, on an understanding of complete confidentiality, and the ... direction in which it’s heading and, if you’re still interested, we come to an arrangement.’



~ * ~



I thought he might be going to invite me back to the university but he didn’t. When I said I was in the car park behind the supermarket we stopped there and shook hands. He asked for my card and I gave it to him. He said he’d email me a document and that I should read it and get back to him with my thoughts. I thanked him for the lunch and watched him stride away—straight-backed, head up, one of the winners.



Or was he? I decided I had a fair bit of checking to do on him, on the university and on the Dunbar before I took this assignment. It might amount to no more than a good, a very good, lunch.



I went to my office in Pyrmont, paid a few bills, wrote the dates due on a couple of others and placed them where they’d stare at me. The office has no views to speak of, which is how I like it. My previous offices, in Darlinghurst and Newtown, carried a lot of memories, of clients good and bad, encounters pleasant and unpleasant, so that sometimes I could sit there reliving the experiences. A bad habit and it didn’t operate here where I hadn’t been very long and the memories were too recent to dwell upon.