One of Us Buried by Johanna Craven (year 2 reading books TXT) 📕

The barge, thankfully, did not take us to sea. Instead, the waterman guided it down a wide, dark river, where the water became coppery and trees hung above us like ghosts. Bronze light shafted through the branches, banks of thick wilderness swallowing the specks of civilisation scarring Sydney Cove.

I hugged my knees, watching coloured birds swoop down and ripple the river. The sound from the forest was unending; musical trills and discordant birdcalls, within the constant sighing of trees and water. My senses felt overloaded.

There were fifteen women crammed onto the raft, watched over by two marines and the burly, bearded waterman. But our humanity seemed insignificant. I felt as though we were the only people left on earth.

We were to be taken to the factory for women in Parramatta, I knew, but what was that but a name? It seemed impossible there could be any civilisation among this endless wild.

For the first time, I began to truly appreciate the abrupt turn my life had taken. Somehow, tucked away within the confines of the ship, I had managed to block out the reality of it. Perhaps a part of me had believed that when I finally set foot on solid ground again, I would be back at the docks in Woolwich. I’d never known any home but London, so how could my mind fathom this boundless forest and this quicksilver river and the impossible stretch of the sky?

When the last of the light was sliding away, the waterman tied the barge to a chalky tree trunk at the river’s edge. He disappeared into the shelter in the middle of the vessel and returned carrying a flask of water and a loaf of bread. He passed them among us.

Surely we weren’t to stay here the night. Not with trees all around us and nothing overhead by sky. The meagre shelter was barely big enough for a single person to stand.

In the corner of the barge, two women sat bundled in the thin grey blankets we had slept under on the Norfolk.

“Would you look at that?” Hannah said, jabbing a finger in their direction. “Don’t I wish I were smart enough to have done the same.”

I hugged my knees. The thought of bringing my blankets with me had never even crossed my mind. What kind of savage place was this, where we were not even to be given bedclothes? I forced down a mouthful of bread, the anxiety in my stomach leaving me with little appetite.

The waterman leaned back against the shelter, blowing a line of pipe smoke up into the darkening sky. The soldiers sat side by side on the riverbank, chuckling between themselves. One crunched on an apple and flung the core into the trees. The baby born on the voyage mewled in his mother’s arms.

I wondered distantly at the time. The sun was slipping below the horizon, but in this strange place, I had no thought of whether that made it ten in the evening or three in the afternoon. Time seemed insignificant. A construct of men trying to tame an untameable world.

As the darkness thickened, a chaos of shrieking pressed against us. Birdsong, I told myself, but in this violent wall of sound, there was not the barest hint of musicality. The river lapped up against trees that seemed to grow within the water; their gnarled, bare branches eerie in the twilight.

And then there were stars; an endless brilliance lighting up a deep black and purple sky. I lay on my back with my spare clothing in a cloth bag beneath my head, staring up at the crescent moon that hung above the treetops. Lying there in the cradle of the river, I could give no form to the shape my life was to take. It hardly seemed to matter. Against the vastness of this place, what was I but an insignificant scrap? And with each minute I spent here, I was coming to see that, as a discarded woman bound for the factory, the shape my life would take mattered less than anything.

CHAPTER TWO

‘It will readily be admitted by every impartial observer … that there is no class of the community [that] calls more earnestly for the attention of the state than these unhappy objects, who have from various causes and temptations, departed from the paths of virtue and forfeited their civil liberty.”

Rev. Samuel Marsden

A Few Observations on the Situation of the Female Convict in New South Wales

1808-1817

By dawn, the barge was carrying us back down the river. My back was aching from a night on the uneven logs, my skin a mosaic of insect bites. I’d managed a few hours of broken sleep, punctuated by images of creatures in the dark. I couldn’t tell if they had come from my dreams or reality.

Bend after bend, the river swept onwards, the waterman’s oar rising and falling, rising and falling. Just as I was beginning to believe it would go on forever, the wilderness broke.

A riverside tavern. A sailboat tied to a narrow jetty. And then a cluster of mud huts and farmland.

Parramatta.

A row of redcoats was waiting on the riverbank to meet us, rifles held across their chests. How many? Six? Eight? Ten soldiers with their weapons out, ready to greet a barge full of women. Their message was clear; we were prisoners. Step into line or come to regret it. But there was something oddly defensive about the soldiers’ gesture. I couldn’t help but feel as though those rifles offered them a little protection against everything that raft of women represented. Protection against allure, desire, temptation.

The redcoats peered at us as the raft bumped against the wharf, sizing us up like the men had when they’d climbed aboard the Norfolk. The look in their eyes told us we were both nothing and everything.