Absent mothers, child loss, and maternal grief

Absent mothers, child loss, and maternal grief shape Molly Johnson’s sense of herself as a daughter and a mother, and connect her family’s private losses to the violence and racial power surrounding them. The novel gives this grief a recurring form: a missing mother remembered through silence and song, babies mourned through acts of care, and a fleeting apparition that offers Molly a sense of wholeness before absence returns.

A daughter formed by absence

Molly knows from childhood what it means to grow up without a mother’s presence or affection. She describes the absence not simply as pain but as an emptiness, a hole in the soul: there was no shared path, guidance, or access to a mother who had never been there. Her father, Jock Stewart, and she did not speak about the missing woman. When he was drunk, he sometimes broke into a fragment of song, “Black is the colour of my true love’s hair.” The words preserve an attachment Molly cannot know directly, while also suggesting that her father carried his own grief because he had known the woman Molly had not.

As a little girl, Molly dreamed of a woman with long black hair. The dream gives an image to a loss for which she has no personal memories, but it does not resolve the uncertainty surrounding her mother. Instead, the mother’s absence remains part of Molly’s inheritance: a family silence, a repeated song, and a longing built around what was never available to her.

Motherhood as an answer to loss

When Molly is about eight months pregnant, she pauses from washing clothes by the river to settle a quarrel among Danny, Joe Junior, and Henry James. The small domestic scene places pregnancy and motherhood amid the ordinary demands of caring for her children. Later, as she walks home hoping that exertion and a bath in the springs might bring on labour, she thinks of the love she wants to give her children. Having grown up without a mother, she wants them to remember that they were loved, even if anything should happen to her. Her hope for a daughter is especially tied to Delphi: she imagines a sister and playmate for the girl.

That wish is set against Molly’s own bereavement as a child. Her desire to give her children the affection she missed is not an abstract ideal but a response to the particular absence that shaped her. She wants her children to retain a knowledge of her love that she herself could not inherit from her mother.

The stillborn daughter and acts of care

Molly’s labour begins unexpectedly and becomes a dangerous breech birth. When she realizes that the baby is presenting feet first, she is frightened and overwhelmed; her immediate concern is the survival of the child and of her other children. The stranger she later knows as Yadaka offers help, but Molly initially fears the racial and social consequences of allowing a Black man to touch her during childbirth. She strikes him with her shotgun, then has to face the limits of what she can manage alone.

After the baby girl is stillborn, Molly sits on the verandah with the child wrapped across her lap. She rocks in a homemade chair that she had found in pieces on one of her lonely walks and repaired herself. In that chair she has rocked all five of her living children, and now she rocks the dead baby as well. She hums “Black Is the Colour,” the lament her father sang, so that the song associated with her absent mother and father’s sorrow becomes part of her response to losing a child of her own.

Yadaka brings a small coffin. Molly explains that a woman once showed her a gesture meaning that someone would always be with her. That woman had helped her bury her firstborn, Jack, and her father; Molly recalls the woman’s grief and says that she adopted the gesture because she liked it. Repeating it for the baby makes mourning an act of continuity: a sign passed from one woman to another and then carried forward by Molly. Yadaka helps bury the stillborn girl, and Molly frees him from his iron collar in return, acknowledging that he helped with the burial and essentially saved her life. Her grief takes place amid physical weakness and isolation, but it also produces a bond of practical care.

Shared bereavement and colonial violence

Molly’s loss is not the only family grief the narrative sets beside maternal absence. Yadaka tells her that he found his wife, children, and elders dead. From the tracks, he understood that his family had been forced into a river and fired upon from both banks in a planned ambush. Molly has no words for the account, but she recognizes its brutality. Their connection deepens through their shared experience of losing loved ones, especially children; grief becomes a form of recognition between two people who have little reason to trust one another in a racist and punitive society.

That society also threatens the next generation. Miss Shirley characterizes Molly’s children through the racial category “Octaroon” and urges Judge Eisenmangher to remove them. At Molly’s trial, the Crown presents her mixed heritage and knowledge of her mother’s plight as part of an argument that she was encouraged toward revenge. These official accounts turn family history into evidence against Molly, while the removal threat places her children’s future under colonial authority. Her promise that they will have all the help and love they need expresses maternal hope under circumstances in which the state claims power over their lives.

The apparition of Mary

On the first full moon of winter, after the trooper’s death, Molly sees a young, fair-skinned Aboriginal woman with red hair holding two swaddled dead babies. Molly recognizes the woman as the figure who appeared with her beneath the water, and wonders whether the babies are Jack and Daisy and whether the woman is her mother, Mary. The moment gathers several strands of grief into one image: the mother Molly never knew, her dead firstborn, and the daughter she has just lost.

Molly does not experience the apparition as a threat. For a brief moment, she feels warm and complete, as though she is no longer alone and her mother is present. When a cloud covers the moon, the woman and babies disappear; Molly calls Mary’s name, and the feeling of wholeness gives way to emptiness. The scene offers no confirmed account of what she saw. Its significance lies in the temporary connection it gives her, and in the return of absence immediately afterward. The mother remains beyond reach, but the vision brings her into relation with the children Molly has lost and the maternal care she has tried to give.