Peter Lumberg's Broken Lives: Poem Analysis

This narrative of broken lives begins with a man cut, not broken, but stories find their own beginnings and on Monday, 4th September 1905, an assailant drove a knife deep into Peter Lumberg's throat causing his blood to spray onto foliage metres away; a fatal wound, though not fatal enough for the attacker who unleashed a frenzied assault; cutting, slashing and stabbing Peter's face a dozen times and finally, chopping into the back of his head with a tomahawk. The victim offered little resistance. At the age of 67, he no longer possessed the strength to fight off a determined murderer.

The killer left. He ignored the watch with the silver chain. He never checked his victim's pockets. He took nothing but the old man's life. The body lay undisturbed

throughout the night and into the morning.

At 10:30 am, Thomas Seaton, Inspector of Nuisances for the Municipality of Cairns, came by looking for nuisances.

He found two, an illegal campsite and a corpse. At first, he mistook the corpse for a bundle of discarded rags, but on closer inspection, he saw the rags were clothing, the clothing of a dead man who lay face down beside a pool of dried blood, gashes in the back of his head and on his neck, host to a swarming cloud of exuberant flies.

Of late, as Inspector of Nuisances, Seaton primarily went into battle against unsanitary backyard dunnies, his only call to arms restricted to occasions when goats assailed the town gardens, but as a former British military officer, he retained all the martial bearing of the younger self who fought for Queen and country against the Zulus. The Inspector of Nuisances took charge.

Taking a path through the undergrowth out to the Hap Wah Road, Seaton marched to a nearby hotel, officially, the Royal Hotel, though only the Licensing Court and occasionally the police called it that. Others called it the Parramatta after a previous pub which burned down on the same site or Dunwoodie's, after old Mrs Dunwoodie who recently bought it. Finding Mrs Dunwoodie's son George there, Seaton recruited him for the mission, "Put your hat on and come over. I think there's a man dead." Back in the small clearing where the body lay, Seaton issued George his orders, "Don't touch the body, and don't let anyone near it till I bring the

police."

"That's old Peter," said George, recognising the old bloke who recently set up camp here and only two days before, on Sunday night, spent a few hours drinking at the pub and chatting with Mrs Dunwoodie. Preoccupied with his mission, Seaton appeared not to hear and departed to enlist reinforcements.

Alone in the clearing with the butchered body, George began a cautious investigation of the crime scene. A large sprawling Mango tree distinguished the clearing from the bush around it and though secluded, the path in from the main road offered passers-by a glimpse of a makeshift tent, presumably Peter's, and even of the body beyond it in the loose sandy soil. Noticing George guarding the body, people from nearby houses and others passing into town began to gather. Protective of boot tracks he noticed in the sand, George kept them back. Except Arthur Keeble. George, as the son of a publican and himself a part-time cab-man, possessed insufficient social stature to tell that successful businessman and sometimes alderman to keep back, so Keeble rode his horse into the clearing, recognised Lumberg and rode off into town where he spread word someone had shot Peter Lumberg.