The moonshiner an austra.., p.1
The Moonshiner: An Australian Outback Romance, page 1
The Moonshiner
Lucy Walker
Copyright © The Estate of Lucy Walker 2022
This edition first published 2022 by Wyndham Books
(Wyndham Media Ltd)
27, Old Gloucester Street, London WC1N 3AX
First published 1961
www.wyndhambooks.com/lucy-walker
The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, organisations and events are a product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, organisations and events is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
Cover artwork images © Dean Drobot / Wright Out There (Shutterstock)
Cover artwork design © Wyndham Media Ltd
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The Call of the Pines
Reaching for the Stars
The River is Down
Girl Alone
The One Who Kisses
The Ranger in the Hills
Come Home, Dear
Love in a Cloud
Home at Sundown
The Stranger in the North
Wife to Order
A Man Called Masters
Follow Your Star
Down in the Forest
The Runaway Girl
Kingdom of the Heart
The Other Girl
The Loving Heart
This Distant Hills
The Gone-Away Man
Sweet and Faraway
Heaven is Here
Gamma’s Girl
Joyday for Jodi
The Mountain That Went to the Sea
The Moonshiner
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Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter One
Joan Yelland descended the steps of the DC-3 plane and walked across the red earth tarmac towards the station-wagon that was parked on the verge. The heat struck at her like a blow.
She could see Shelley Easton getting out from behind the wheel of the wagon.
Walking across a private airstrip on an out-paddock of a cattle station had its own particular brand of glamour, Joan thought. She liked the momentary excitement of it even better than the starry feeling of walking down the long strip of carpet, across the polished floor of the great drawing-room of a luxury hotel. Joan had often modelled the latest fashions from London, Paris and Rome for charity functions in the luxury hotels of Sydney and Melbourne.
She had loved that zippy moment when the announcer called her name, described the interesting features of the dress she was wearing, and then, slender and perfectly poised, she walked swiftly, easily, gaily down that long strip of carpet. In that moment Joan always felt reborn and adventurous.
So, now, she felt reborn and adventurous walking across a red span of earth where there was nothing in all the world but the aeroplane behind her and a girl getting out of a station-wagon in front of her. All else was silence, stillness and desert.
She hadn’t felt like this boarding that plane, or for the first part of the journey. It must have been what the captain-pilot had said to her when he sat down beside her for ten minutes, earlier in the afternoon.
‘Just as a ship rides out a storm, so does a plane fly out of a storm. One keeps going until journey’s end. Then happy landing!’ he said as he stood up, smiled at Joan, saluted and weaved his way up the gangway to the flight deck.
Nobody in that plane would have thought of Joan as needing that helpful advice. They would not have thought of her as having any troubles at all.
She was beautiful. Her simple blue linen dress was so perfectly cut it meant it had cost a lot of money. Her shoes were elegant and also costly. The shine on her wrist came from a diamond watch; and the red hat she wore had all the earmarks of being a French model. Her hands were long and white and slender and had quite obviously never done any hard manual work.
Sitting there in the plane, her eyes closed and her rather sweet mouth just a little sad, she had looked like one of the privileged people of the world. One of the lucky ones: someone who had everything.
Curious people tried to hazard a guess as to who she was. A model? An actress? An opera star?
Whatever or whoever she was, she was a stranger to the cattle country in the North and looked as much at home in that northern-bound plane as would a snow-flower growing by a dusty road on the Equator.
It was, indeed, that delicate air; the soft colouring of her skin, the arched eyebrows, the gentle curves of her mouth that had made fellow passengers look curiously under lowered lids at Joan Yelland.
Yet she was, at that moment, someone in need of sympathy from her fellow human beings. She was flying North on a visit to her godmother, Mrs. Atherton of Lantana Station, because she had quite literally fled her own home in the south.
She sat in her seat, unaware of the interest of the other passengers because she was preoccupied with her own painful thoughts.
When the captain of the plane came and had a chat with her, as he did to each of the passengers in turn, he found it difficult to answer her polite questions about the flight as if she were an ordinary person. He thought he had never seen anyone quite as beautiful as this girl; seemingly shy one minute, curiously interested the next. When she smiled, it was like the sun coming out over a snowfield. No, he thought, something more delicate than that … like the rainbows shining through mist clouds when the plane was flying above them.
While they were talking the plane flew into an air pocket. It seemed to lurch uneasily in the air, drop several hundred feet, and then continue on its course as if nothing had happened.
Joan’s eyes had widened in that one moment and the captain had smiled reassuringly at her.
‘Air pocket!’ he explained. He smiled. ‘This craft doesn’t worry about things like air pockets. Nor even about a first class electrical storm. And we get them up here sometimes.’
‘What do you do when you strike a bad storm?’ Joan asked. ‘Do you try to fly above the area, or below it?
‘No, we don’t run away from anything on this route,’ the captain said and there was a straight firm line to his jaw as he spoke. ‘As a ship rides out a storm, so we fly out a storm.’ He smiled into Joan’s eyes as if all along he had sensed this girl needed someone to say the right thing to her. ‘Keep going,’ he said as he stood up. ‘Then happy landing. That’s the life of the aircraft on this route.’
Joan acknowledged his friendly salute and watched him walk away to the flight deck.
‘Fly it out … keep going …’ she said to herself. To have imagined a ‘happy landing’ to her heart’s journey at this moment would have required an act of faith on her part of which she was hardly capable just now.
But she would keep going … keep going. Fly it out. Then … well, only the future could reveal what would come of it all.
She felt better.
For the first time in many weeks she accepted the fact that she must be captain of her own soul, and if her soul was like an aeroplane in flight she must bring it safely to land somewhere, someday … herself.
The captain had not been able to show his interest in his face even by a flicker of his eye. Pilots, especially the captain, have to be the same person to all passengers. But Joan, whose tall slender fragile beauty would have marked her out for notice anywhere, was, perhaps, the most delicately exotic person who had ever travelled that air route.
She was the only daughter of a wealthy woman who held a powerful position in ‘society’ in Sydney. Mrs. Yelland had sent Joan to a Swiss finishing school and then brought her home and enrolled her in the lists of the smart people in an exclusive set. Having gone abroad for her schooling Joan had not made friends in her own country. When she arrived home she found herself immediately whirled into a round of being seen at the right places with the ‘right people’. The ri
ght people were almost exclusively Mrs. Yelland’s friends. Unconsciously, what Mrs. Yelland was doing to her daughter was making of her a mirror to her own vanity.
It added to Mrs. Yelland’s prestige to have continually beside her this rare and lovely girl who was, of course, the object of congratulations to herself. Her maternal pride was so excessive she could go nowhere without Joan; nor did she suffer Joan to go anywhere without her.
Then one enchanted evening Ben Arnold walked into Joan Yelland’s life.
The one entertainment and social duty which Joan undertook with real joy was modelling at exclusive fashion parades for charity. She was the perfect model. Glamorous yet intriguing. Beautiful, but remote, the girl with the delicate air.
At one of these parades, at which Joan was, as always, the star, the attractive man at the microphone, with a brash smile and an engaging frankness, was introduced to the society misses and matrons as coming from a well-known family in the West. The family was named and known so that there was a general nodding of heads in approval. And more nodding of heads as it was seen that he almost forgot his cues each time Joan Yelland walked down the models’ strip of carpet, across a sea of polished floor.
A loving heart is a manager ever and somehow that day Joan, and this excellent young man from the West, eluded Mrs. Yelland’s watchful care of her daughter.
Joan never knew how … but they found themselves laughing together in the back of a taxi posting hastily into the heart of Sydney. They found an intriguing continental cafe in King’s Cross and somehow contrived to wear out the rest of the day and all that evening looking at one another, laughing, and generally seeing rainbows in their skies and diamonds under their feet.
For the next few weeks it seemed to Joan as if the heavens had opened and a host of friendly suns shone their rays down on her. She and Ben wined and dined. They danced and went surfing and drove along the coast. Happiness had come, radiant, into Joan’s life.
Then Mrs. Yelland shattered this gaudy bubble of existence.
Ben Arnold was a fortune seeker. Joan had not been the first heiress to whom he had presented his heart. Mrs. Yelland had chapter and verse … all the unassailable proofs … to show Joan that it was not herself but her wealth with which Ben Arnold was in love.
Never mind, Joan thought desperately. She loved his gay and charming manner and the fact that he had brought laughter into her life. What did it matter what he liked most about her? Her eyes? Her hair? Her tall slender model’s figure? Or her potential wealth! So long as he liked her. She could not bear to go back to that former loneliness where all she amounted to was a gilt-edged shadow of her mother.
Who managed it, or how, Joan never knew, but Ben disappeared into the blue.
‘Back West, where he belongs,’ Mrs. Yelland said briefly. ‘He is now well aware that Mountain Falls Station and all the other property is mine, not yours, Joan. And Ben Arnold will never have one penny of it. Nor any other man who comes fortune seeking. If we can’t find a man of your own class and fortune … then it is better you stay unmarried. Haven’t I stayed unmarried for you all these years? And I could have married again. Many times. Take Somes Ellison, for instance.’
Joan was speechless. Also heartbroken.
A fortnight later, when her mother had gone to Melbourne for a gala social function, Joan had briefly telephoned her, ‘I’m going for a holiday, Mother ‒’ She had put down the telephone receiver before Mrs. Yelland could effectually flatter, cajole or implore her out of such foolishness.
Now here she was, more than a thousand miles away from Mrs. Yelland and Sydney society, in a lovely linen dress and a red hat, walking across the airstrip to meet Shelley Easton.
As they had flown in, Joan had seen the dust-covered station-wagon standing waiting by the verge. Except for the tiny dotted village of Orphir homestead in the distance that station-wagon, and Shelley Easton getting out of it, was the only sign of life in a thousand square miles. All else was spinifex and pindan; and a crest of hills to the north.
It was five o’clock in the afternoon and the heat was still at a hundred Fahrenheit.
Shelley was out of the car now and came towards Joan. The engines of the plane were whirring up the propellers ready to taxi down the landing-strip and Shelley had to raise her voice over the din.
‘Hallo Joan! Well met this side of the Equator. I suppose you know who I am? I’m the niece … Shelley Easton. Aunt wired you I’d collect you at Orphir, didn’t she? It’s our nearest landing strip for a DC-3.’
Joan put down her suitcase to shake hands.
‘Thank you so very much for coming for me. I hope it wasn’t too much trouble.’
Shelley, a young woman of about her own age, was dark-haired with attractive dark eyes and a very red mouth, but she stared at Joan now, momentarily without friendliness. This beautiful, polite girl nonplussed her. Would she have to be treated like the hot-house flower she looked?
Shelley herself was probably taller than she looked in her Bermuda shorts with the white and red striped blouse tucked into her waist. On her head she wore a white linen hat … just a little shabby. She had red scuffs on her feet. She smiled a little grudgingly.
‘It wasn’t so much trouble coming for you as it might be going home with you,’ Shelley said and her eyes took in all of Joan’s groomed appearance and digested it.
‘The river’s rising,’ she added. ‘We won’t have time to go up to Orphir homestead. I’ve been up and told them. Is that your case out there on the strip?’
The plane was taxi-ing away, leaving Joan’s larger case sitting, a lonely island, in the middle of the runway.
‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ said Joan, distressed. ‘I suppose I should have carried it off with me ‒’ Her heart dropped a little at the lack of graciousness in Shelley’s manner.
‘You expected some manpower around, I guess,’ said Shelley. ‘Sorry, but I left our two men at the river to rig up a flying-fox if the river rises any more while I’m up here. The current might be too strong for the horses. How well do you ride, by the way?’
Joan had turned and together they walked back towards the case. She was aware that as Shelley mentioned horses and riding her eyes had again taken in her simple but lovely blue linen dress, her white spike-heeled shoes, and the big red hat.
‘Reasonably well,’ said Joan. ‘I do a lot when I’m on the station.’ She wished she could make the right answers to this other girl, Shelley Easton. More than anything else in the world she needed, at this moment, a friend. She felt very alone.
‘Sheep country, isn’t it? Not much rough riding, I suppose?’ asked Shelley.
‘I’m afraid not,’ said Joan simply. She felt she couldn’t apologise for the fact she rode beautifully, but only thoroughbreds.
They had reached the case and Shelley stooped to grasp the handle.
‘Oh please …’ said Joan. ‘I’ll carry it. It is not so very heavy. I rather thought not to bring too much. It s always hot up here, isn’t it?’
Shelley brushed Joan’s hand away.
‘Dear girl, you are not dressed for carrying cases.’ If there had been any intended sting it was hidden under a laugh. ‘You look awfully nice, Joan, but I’m afraid you’ll have to do something about that rig-out when we get to the river. If we do swim the horses, you’ll get wet. And of course, you can’t ride in that tight skirt and those shoes, or that hat.’
The plane, well down the strip, roared into a take-off and the two girls moved towards the station-wagon.
‘I should have made inquiries,’ Joan said quietly. ‘I have riding things in the case. Is there anywhere I can change?’ She smiled to show her willingness to co-operate with anything Shelley might suggest.
Shelley stowed the case in the back seat of the wagon and they both got in. She then revved up the engine and the car moved off over the grass bumps on to a rough track.
She changed into top gear in a thoughtful silence.
‘Look …’ she said, glancing quickly at Joan. ‘You’ve got the whole of the Australian bush to change in once we’re over that ridge, a half mile on. The scenery’s different. You’ll see. We go down on to the riverbed and there’re trees and what have you.’
‘Anywhere will do, so long as I change, I suppose,’ Joan said hopefully.
‘I don’t think you know much of the set-up of Uncle’s station so I’d better tell you,’ said Shelley. ‘To begin with, Aunt … your godmother … is not my aunt. Her husband is my uncle. Get it? Good. Well, Lantana Station is about the most ungetatable station in the North. Cut off by ranges to the west and east and this river to the south. We can’t get quickly in and out like most other big stations. They can land a small plane ‒ Anson or Dove ‒ at the main homestead sometimes. Not the DC-3. Short strip, you know. Depends on the winds. And the Wet, of course.’
