HOW GOD CAME TO WARRAMULKA
Wunngra Watamulka was a place of long dry summers and short sudden winters, inhabited by wombat and crow and wallaby, and the Narrunggara people. The Narrunggara people and their Dreamtime Gods.
To the Narrunggara, Wunngra Watamulka meant the Sacred Trees, a sweet stand of mallee and quondong, atop a small knoll under an endless sky, where their women went to give birth since the beginning of time.
But in eighteen-forty-one the Colonial Commissioners in faraway England drafted a grand plan for the great open lands of the Narrunggara, a vision of grain and mutton and wealth, and in their wisdom chose not to see the Narrunggara as landowners, or even as equal human beings, and with a stroke of their bureaucratic pen wrote them and their Gods off into the margins of history.
With one solitary nod of conciliation though, they kept the name of Wunngra Watamulka, which sloughed off into “Warra Mulka”, and claimed that it meant where the natives’ babies were – not born - but made. The locals would refer to it, with a nod and a wink, as “Rutting Hill”.
And so it was, in those beginning days, that Warramulka was a God-less place, as the McFarlane and Unthank and Pryor settlers were the lowest labouring sons and daughters of grand County estates, with tied cottages and precarious lives. Which is why, there in the outlands of the Crown’s Antipodes, they’d quickly become all hard-bitten farmers, who prayed only to Jupiter Pluvius, prayed for more rain, or sometimes less rain, depending on the state of their skinty crops and the dryness of their dams, and how finished were the shingly roofs of their shacks and shanties.
Not that their surrounding Hundred of New Suffolk was totally God-less, as an overnight trip in their jinkers, on slight and rutted tracks, gave them access to places a little more civilised and church-ified, although those early Warramulkans never seemed to embrace the Gods of the Anglicans or the Catholics, who they found all too Old Country and Parish-bound. And just a fraction distant.
It would be Ephraim Cordwainer who’d bring God to Warramulka. A fresh new God. And if ever there was a place needing a fresh new God, it was Warramulka.
The Cordwainers were deep-chested draughthorse plodders from the farmlands of Dorset, and had known about grain and mutton since the sixteen-hundreds. But also knew the basic mean-ness of a life that would never contain the profits from either, no matter how long or how hard they plodded. And the only God they ever saw was the Squire’s God, eternally thrust upon them from a great height, with rules two feet wide by four feet high amongst all the other Thou Shalt Nots above the manor pews, rules about who's grain and who's mutton.
It was these rules, and a cottage burdened with fifteen mouths to feed, that sometimes led the Cordwainer menfolk to desperate measures. Like poaching. Poaching that cost anything from a few shillings to three months hard, from the odd pigeon or trout all the way up to a brace of pheasant. And beyond.
By the time he was seventeen, Ephraim Cordwainer, along with his older brother ‘young’ Walter, and their father Walter The Elder, had each regularly beset the Dorchester Assizes for poaching, so one would expect that between them there would've been a modicum of care, if not talent, in acquiring meals for the pot. At least a sense of cause-and-effect.
There wasn't.
One night Ephraim and young Walter, emboldened by too much Dorset cider, stole a whole sheep, at a time when the Assizes still kept ‘Shall be hung by the neck until dead’ for just such a desperation. Not that it had been used under Queen Victoria – possibly because nobody had been stupid enough to test it in recent times.
“Gee-ZUZ! – yo’ pair o’ – pair o’...”, but Walter Cordwainer was lost for words, “...pair o’ fockin’ BOLLICKS!”, and kicked both his drunken sons very hard up the arse with his hobnailed boot, buried the evidence, and set about wringing emigration contributions from his neighbours. And as most of them knew what too much poacher hullabaloo could bring down on their own heads, were happy enough to see them off to Portsmouth and onto the first emigration ship available.
Martin Dearlove was the preacher on board, a free-thinking and fervent young Dissenter who spoke openly to anyone who’d listen, of maybe a better God for their new land, a rewarding and benevolent God - yes, indeed, a workingman's God. And Ephraim and Walter, two months at sea in the great southern oceans, became heavily intoxicated on all these notions of freedom and visions of possibility.
But God always has plans, and in this case, He had barely begun.
Walter was crushed by a runaway dray on the Sydney docks, the morning they arrived, and took three days to die, with Ephraim at his side, the two of them enveloped together in one agony, the agony of distance, and separation. Maybe of damnation.
Young Walter drew his brother close to him at the end, and gave a rather strange smile, maybe from torment, but maybe from serenity, a smile as ambiguous and as alien as the new land around them, as if that particular smile had just that moment been invented, for this time and this place. He put his pale lips up to his brother’s ear, to impart the wisdom now streaming in from eternity.
“What... a bastard...”, young Walter pronounced, quite softly, but with deep conviction, and let go of the whole damned thing.
Ephraim moaned in helplessness and desolation, and took this to be some kind of message, from a very affronted God, and from it fashioned a great guilt, and for three years and eight months he wandered the long dirt tracks of the colonies, preaching at logging camps and shepherds’ huts, as some kind of penance, trying to appease his angry God by offering Him to anyone who'd listen.
But, mostly they didn't, as Ephraim Cordwainer tended to use a touch too much Hell for them to handle, and godknows the bush and the snakes and the long dusty tracks of the colonies were hell enough already.
And so it was that in the summer of eighteen-forty-nine, he stumbled into that wide and wheat-belted Warramulkan landscape, and fell over the doughty daughter of a farmer from Dundee, a fiercely red-headed McFarlane Gael with small keen eyes and atheistic leanings.
Maude McFarlane was seven years older than Ephraim, and as doughty as her dadda, and set about striking what she saw as a fair bargain with this ragged evangelist from Dorset. On the understanding that for six days a week – she was at least prepared to accommodate his compulsions for fire and brimstone on Sundays – he had to sharefarm long and hard with her father, and build her a house, and in return she would give Ephraim abundant sons, which he deeply desired, from a mixture of paternal compulsion and dynastic zeal.
Ephraim believed he had at last found his place, the true gate to his salvation, and each Sunday, in a gibber limestone lean-to cobbled onto the stables, preached a doctrine of God’s Gifts from the Good Earth. He called his church “The Lord’s New Earth Ministry”. It touched a chord in these hard-nosed, dirt-scratching, rain-praying farmers.
It was a promising beginning. He began to expand. And improvise.
On one hand he gave them graphic images of retribution in the everlasting fires of Hell, but on the other reassured them they could be surely saved, through full immersion baptism in the symbolic waters of the River of Providence.
But, as there were few rivers with full immersion qualities in Warramulka - in fact, none at all – the nearest thing to it he could find was one or two hard-bottomed farm dams with enough water to cover a fully repentant person. Which meant summer was mostly out of the question. And winter was not at all popular. People just didn’t seem inclined to be reborn to God in the cold, converts tending to flower only with the coming of a little warm weather. And so late Spring soon evolved into a kind of Pentecostal season, which in turn became permanently attached to the full blossoming of the earth, taking on a likeness to the agrarian beliefs of old, where God and annual produce were interdependent.
This was farmer religion at its most promising, and gave Ephraim cause to directly associate re-birth and salvation with wholesome and fundamental images of their own hard-won produce. His mission began to flourish.
But God was a long way from finished with Ephraim Cordwainer.
One two three daughters arrived all in a row, to the point where Ephraim was wondering what else he could do to rekindle God's favour, and be blessed with true and everlastingly-named Cordwainer sons, and he wrung his soul deeply, looking for the answer, but daughters four and five came and still no son to bear his name, and in time carry on his ministry.
And by then the greater district was seeing other “New” churches elbowing in. Especially worrying were the Bible Brethren, also promising salvation through full immersion, albeit in a galvo tank under the altar floor.
Ephraim bore down harder in his mission to harvest good farmer souls.
For a while he tried the once fashionable speaking in tongues, but this quickly fell out of favour when on two occasions a rather nasty and persistent feud over water rights between neighbours was given a surreptitious airing, with something that sounded like yurrafatbahstidbob and yurraprikanalltu wafting out from the general hubbub of kolygrym jam doowits and cumswyla dun fidlmydyngits.
So, taking a page from the mainstream faiths down the track, he earmarked their own special Sundays, named them the Blessing Days. But what he really needed was a defining edge, a unique point of difference, yet something that would still give his flock's path to God a simple and rustic mysticism.
With inspiration born of desperation, Ephraim devised a chanter to fill the ritual void, adapting the North Country’s ancient five-finger sheep-counter from back in the darkness of time, a time of wolves and godless men, of wary shepherds with only one hand free, obliged to count their charges often while keeping a very large club at the ready in the other.
This was used on First Fruits Sunday, all Woolblessing Evensongs, and for the whole of Tithe Harvest Month, in which Ephraim would symbolically point in turn along a line of twenty woolbales, or golden sheaves of hay, well-dumped bags of barley, or caged cockerels, leg-tethered lambs, poddy calves, and to the background chorus of moos and squawks and squeals and baas the congregation would joyfully intone a sort of Gregorian singsong of symbolic scores...
yan tan tethera methera
pinip...
bethera lethera rovera dovera
wick...
yanawick tanawick tetherawick metherawick
bumpit...
yanabumpit tanabumpit tetherabumpit metherabumpit
jiggit!
...called The Counting Of Our Blessings, like a mantra to divine multiplication.
And as if God was at last pleased with Ephraim, with one more glutinous grunt from Maude the golden son finally slid out into the world, but bringing several of his mother's exhausted organs with him. That one son. Like an edict from a God with a grudge. Thou shalt have only one true Cordwainer. I shalt shew you.
But Ephraim was ecstatic. He named him Elimelech - “My God Is King” – from the Book Of Ruth, although in time, some would say that Ephraim hadn’t chosen well. And with good cause.
Eli Cordwainer was a tearaway, as redheaded and as wilful as his mother and his grandfather, and with the same keen blue eyes. But Eli’s contained a wild streak, a devilment, growing up unpredictable, disliked by his mother, and spurned by his many sisters. And he wasn’t at all popular among his peers in the district, who quickly discovered a subtle but vicious approach to his football, as he was known to grab at ears, sometimes testicles, in any melee, and twist. As if hate was at play. Only his precocious and singleminded ball attacking kept him onside with Warramulka’s coach.
Not that his father would have any of this. Ephraim saw only – radiance – some commendable dedication to the life God had given him. But that light within the golden son would be his father’s undoing.
It was late Spring. The dams were full and – if not the water – the air at least was warming. As always, there was promise of crops, and flowering. And as it was expected that all the young of Warramulka would be properly baptised on turning fourteen, on that Sunday morning Eli stood by his father, knee deep in Pryor’s dam, shivering quietly, the mystical words being invoked, on ploughing God’s Fields, and renouncing Satan and his Works. And Eli made his Pledge. But smiled, at nubile Clarissa Unthank.
With one hand on his son’s back, and one over his folded arms, he thrust him into the clay-toned waters and Redemption, and the congregation stood, expectant, waiting to do The Welcome, of one more into the inner circle of the cleansed and truly saved. But, it was still Eli, and the devil that was in him, who burst to the surface.
“Bloody SHIT that’s cold!” he announced, and with one great gasp of disbelief they all fell silent. And so shocked was Ephraim that it was like he had hold of a complete stranger, an alien being, and he instinctively thrust him down into the depths again, and again and again, and Eli came up spluttering and threshing, and coughed up –
“I’m... sorry... father...”, but the damage had been done. The light in his father’s eyes had faded.
For two years Eli made himself appear smaller, respectful, but the devil in him was only resting. The end came one Woolblessing Evensong.
He was sixteen. Clarissa Unthank sat opposite him. Clarissa Unthank with the welcoming thighs and the peachy breasts, and who was fifteen and had recently been introduced by Eli to the delicious fires of sin and the joys and mysteries of the flesh that could be found on Rutting Hill.
The traditional twenty wicker washbaskets of wool from the last shed to shear were lined up beside the pulpit, and Ephraim, Bible in hand, was leading the blessed counting. The congregation, with faces tending to be just a little heavenwards, intoned solemnly -
“...bethera tethera rovera dovera wick...”
- and Eli's eyes sought those of Clarissa’s across the aisle and doing the same, and as –
“...yanawick tanawick tetherawick metherawick bumpit...”
– came from their lips, Eli made his eyebrows rise, and his nostrils to flare, extravagantly enough to question the possibility that this might just be a little bit funny what do you think?
Clarissa looked away with her chin on her chest and a smirk held tightly in her cheeks, but as –
“...yanabumpit tanabumpit tetherabumpit metherabumpit...”
– was joyfully offered up, they glanced back towards each other, and a recognition of mass foolishness flickered between them, and both hunched into a juddering struggle with gagged mirth, and they may have even survived that but for the loud and resounding –
“...Jiggit!”
– at the end, and in that sweet moment of silence that always seemed to follow The Closure, mutual and noisy snucker-snorts lurched out of their noses and shattered it, to the baleful glare of Ephraim, and the simultaneous crack! crack! of motherly advices wrapping round their earholes, as respect of a sort, for God and tradition, was imposed on them once again.
It was at that moment Ephraim Cordwainer finally came to see clearly, how this was not the son he’d bargained for, and his eyes bored straight into him, as he strode back and forth, losing a little control as he invoked Jehovah and Lucifer equally like it was his own personal battle, striking at the sin in the air with his Bible.
But the damage had been done.
A dreadful seed had been planted in the minds of Warramulkans.
It was the seed of doubt. About the sacred words. That two of the next generation had seen something of the true nature of the human condition, and how serious parts of it, if held up to the light, were ridiculously funny.
But worse was to come.
Nature and new hormones, once let loose, are truly callous in their uncaring, and it was only a matter of time and Clarissa Unthank was blubbering to her mother about the condition of her belly, and Cyril Unthank went purple, and confronted Ephraim with swear words and clenched fists and threatened to do serious harm to that bastard of a boy, and Ephraim in his grief became belligerent and degenerated into a shirt-poking blaming match, with loud and unbecoming words about how many it took to make a baby.
So Cyril Unthank belted his pastor sharp across the cheekbone, which caused his pastor to give Cyril a truly mushy blood nose, and he went down, bellowing like a bull. Then menfolk stepped in, and everything went quiet.
But something had broken in Warramulka.
The Unthanks left the congregation and took the Bawdens and the Conways with them, went way over to Wattle Creek and into the Bible Brethren, whose galvo tank became the Redemption of choice for all but the Cordwainers and the McFarlanes and the Pryors.
But Ephraim’s heart, and his zeal, and his church, were shattered. He stopped preaching and turned back into the draughthorse he always was, and sharefarmed his life away and never spoke again to his wayward son.
Today there is still no church in Warramulka, and the locals rarely speak of those old days, or if they do, give odd and varied accounts. And Rutting Hill lost its name, containing too many connotations of colonial waywardness, and became Wunngra Watamulka again, as if given back, back to the Dreamtime Gods of the Narrunggara.
© T. R. Edmonds 2022
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