Jacko by Thomas Keneally Page B

mythologizing verse Clancy of the Overflow :
    â€”I am sitting in my dingy little office, where a stingy
    Ray of sunlight struggles feebly down between the houses tall,
    And the foetid air and gritty of the dusty, dirty city,
    Through the open window floating, spreads its foulness over all …
    And I somehow rather fancy that I’d like to change with Clancy,
    Like to take a turn at droving where the seasons come and go,
    While he faced the round eternal of the cash book and the journal—
    But I doubt he’d suit the office, Clancy of “The Overflow”.
    I said, Your father’s Clancy of The Overflow. Your brother Peter is. You could have been.
    â€”Oh, I know, mate. I’m pleading guilty right now to not liking the cattle station life. You meet a very limited range of people, don’t you, Chloe? But you know, Banjo stated the Australian equation. He said you can go for A, or you can go for B. With Bickham there’s only Z, and most of us poor bastards don’t get to Z.
    He shrugged, made that winking motion of the head without actually winking (one of his trademark gestures) and quoted from Banjo the balladist again:
    â€”And an answer came directed in a writing unexpected,
    (And I think the same was written with a thumbnail dipped in tar);
    â€™Twas his shearing mate who wrote it, and verbatim I will quote it:
    â€œClancy’s gone to Queensland droving, and we don’t know where he are.”
    And then, finally, he did wink.

5
    Early in our friendship, I found myself questioning Jacko on the basis of what I knew of his abnormal childhood. How, from Burren Waters, did his fervour for the television medium derive? The medium had lain in wait for him in his babyhood, yet let him have his childhood before declaring itself to him.
    From these questions, I built something like a history of Jacko’s infancy. I am touched to think of little Jacko, yearning already for secrets which the landscape doesn’t hold, beginning his education on the radio telephone with School of the Air. The teacher would be sitting in a broadcast booth in Alice Springs, while baby Jacko sat some four hundred miles away in the radio booth of Burren Waters, wearing his headphones, listening to his class, reading aloud for them when the teacher pressed his button on her switchboard, competing with other members of the class to answer questions such as: What is four multiplied by two minus one?
    The classmates, spread all over the Northern Territory, were involved in competition with children whose faces they could only guess at. Jacko Emptor of Burren Waters, Sharon Tinsley of Apsley Waters, Robert and Timothy Cartwright and Catherine Ryan of Victoria River Downs, Astrid Kravitz of Morgan Waters, and so on. All their doors and faces locked to him by outrageous distance.
    When he was eight there was a boom in cattle prices, and the rainfall was a phenomenal two and a half inches above average. Stammer Jack expanded into the quarter-horse trade, and, at Chloe’s insistence, a school was founded at Burren Waters to provide an elementary education to the children of all the new men and women Stammer Jack and Chloe needed to employ.
    But there was still the question of high school. Petie had already been sent to the same school which had given Stammer Jack his polishing, a vast boarding school in a leafy suburb of Sydney designed especially for boys from the bush of vaguely Catholic persuasion. St Kevin’s was in some ways a factory farm for Rugby internationals, but when Jacko went there in his turn he showed a lack of commitment to the football code whose promoters called it the game they play in Heaven . Jacko was accused of poor teamwork. His lack of focus was all the more blameworthy in contrast to his brother Petie, who had been a great line-out specialist and had so much teamwork as to be a notorious inflictor of gashes to the forehead and eyebrows of those who got in his way when the