Benang

by Kim Scott

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Benang

  from the heart

  the first white man born

  raised to this...

  funerals

  success

  ernest solomon scat

  hairy angels

  what reason

  strictly routine singing

  well-meaning friends and that entrepreneurial spirit

  ern to close

  what jack and kathleen built

  a menace in our midst

  heartbeats in the grass

  my sandy heart

  in white and black

  some tiny inlet

  hazel eyes!

  mirrors

  we move...

  registering romance

  sandy two

  headache

  stormy birth

  to the chief protector of aborigines

  Cuddles

  to the chief protector of aborigines

  whispering stories

  a writer

  jetty

  a rich lode, or

  mine mind awaking

  a coolman and school

  white, right?

  who is exempt?

  steel fences

  kathleen returns

  post marked kathleen

  almost a grave orgasm

  a place for jack

  and salmon fishing too

  tommy

  police report

  the black bark of yate trees

  never a dawg

  aunty kate

  mother

  ocean, roads

  blue me

  of water and ice...

  calling, and choosing

  last but one

  i say

  not beginning

  blooms its heartbeat

  continuing...

  Also by Kim Scott

  Benang

  from the heart

  Harley, a man of Nyoongar ancestry, finds himself at a difficult point in the history of his country, family and self. As the apparently successful outcome of his white grandfather’s enthusiastic attempts to isolate and breed the ‘first whiteman born’, he wants to be a failure. But would such failure mean his Nyoongar ancestors could label him a success? And how can the attempted genocide represented by his family history be told?

  Oceanic in its rhythms and understanding, brilliant in its use of language and image, moving in its largeness of spirit, compelling in its narrative scope and style, Benang is a novel of celebration and lament, of beginning and return, of obliteration and recovery, of silencing and of powerful utterance. Both tentative and daring, it speaks to the present and a possible future through stories, dreams, rhythms, songs, images and documents mobilised from the incompletely acknowledged and still dynamic past.

  Winner, Miles Franklin Literary Award Winner, Western Australian Premier’s Book Award

  Cover image: Terrence Shiosaki, European Subjugation, installation.

  Kim Scott is a descendant of people who have always lived along the south-east coast of Western Australia and is glad to be living in times when it is possible to explore the significance of that fact and be one among those who call themselves Nyoongar.

  Kim Scott began writing for publication shortly after he became a secondary school teacher of English. His first novel, True Country, was published in 1993 and he has had poetry and short stories published in a range of anthologies.

  In recent years he has received grants from the Literature Board of the Australia Council and the Western Australian Department for the Arts to enable him to devote more time to writing. He lives in Coolbellup, a southern suburb of Perth, Western Australia, with his wife and children.

  Many Nyungars today speak with deep feeling about this wild, windswept country. They tell stories about the old folk they lost in the massacre and recall how their mothers warned them to stay out of that area. One man describes how Nyungars will roll up their car windows while passing through Ravensthorpe, and not even stop for food or petrol. The whole region has bad associations and an unwelcoming aura for them. It is a place for ghosts, not for living people.

  Eades and Roberts, 1984, submission to the Seaman Land Inquiry

  The Half-caste: Means of Disappearance

  The modern world has many problems to face. The half-caste is not one of them. He (or she) is merely a passing phase, an incident in history, an interesting event in what we call ‘progress’, a natural transmutation in what we know as cultural evolution. He will solve himself and disappear. That much is certain; it is not problematical. The only problem that enters into it, though it is a palpable misuse of the word to call it that, is how long it is going to take. A few centuries maybe; perhaps much less.

  ...on the ground alone that he is a nuisance to us, we should hurry on his disappearance.

  West Australian, 22 July 1933

  Black May Become White: Work of Elevating the Natives

  The black will go white. It is exemplified in the quarter-castes, and by the gradual absorption of the native Australian black race by the white.

  The position is analogous to that of a small stream of dirty water entering a larger clear stream. Eventually the colour of the smaller is lost.

  Daily News, 3 October 1933

  from the heart

  I know I make people uncomfortable, and embarrass even those who come to hear me sing. I regret that, but not how all the talk and nervous laughter fades as I rise from the ground and, hovering in the campfire smoke, slowly turn to consider this small circle of which I am the centre.

  We feel it then, share the silence.

  Of course, nothing can stop a persistent and desperate cynic from occasionally shouting, ‘Look, rotisserie!’ or, ‘Spit roast!’ But no cynicism remains once I begin to sing.

  Sing? Perhaps that is not the right word, because it is not really singing. And it is not really me who sings, for although I touch the earth only once in my performance—leaving a single footprint in white sand and ash—through me we hear the rhythm of many feet pounding the earth, and the strong pulse of countless hearts beating. Together, we listen to the creak and rustle of various plants in various winds, the countless beatings of different wings, the many strange and musical calls of animals who have come from this place right here. And, deep in the chill night, ending the song, the curlew’s cry.

  Death bird, my people say.

  Obviously, however, I am alive. Am bringing life.

  People smile at me, say:

  ‘You can always tell.’

  ‘You can’t hide who you are.’

  ‘You feel it, here?’

  And, tapping their fists on my chest,

  ‘Speak it from the heart.’

  But it is far, far easier for me to sing than write, because this language troubles me, makes me feel as if I am walking across the earth which surrounds salt lakes, that thin-crusted earth upon which it is best to tread warily, skim lightly...

  Quickly.

  The first thing is the first thing is that we always knew it was not the best way, but that there was no real choice and we had to keep moving if only to get past the bad smell of it all...

  And it is thus—with a bad smell—that I should introduce myself; even if such an aroma suggests my words originate from some other part of my anatomy than the heart.

  Sadly, I can begin only so far back as my great-great-grandparents, for it is they—Fanny, Sandy One Mason, and their boy, Sandy Two—who limp by the government water tank, trying not to breathe at all rather than have this stench invade their nostrils.

  Phew! Phew!

  Something dead. Sandy One cursed the bastard who’d dumped a carcass by the edge of town. A dead
kangaroo, he thought.

  Well ... No. In fact, it was the body of a child. A boy. My family may not have even realised this, although I see Fanny—discreetly, indecently—sniff the air.

  The poor boy had been only a few years old. His name? His name was ... I’m tempted to give him my own name, but his was that of a famous man, an explorer, a pioneer, a politician, and although I intend to write a history, it is not one at such an exalted level.

  However, it is true that the explorer—a Premier Man—had travelled this very way, some years before. Before the gold rushes, and even before the telegraph line which sprang up in his footprints. A very strange thing it was, that telegraph line; such thin wire, trembling with unseen unheard voices, looping from pole to pole across the country.

  I admit I am not absolutely sure of the boy’s name, or even why the body was left there. I merely happened upon the incident in my fitful attempts to supplement Grandad’s research and my Uncles’ memories. Kylie Bay’s Board of Health had written to the Aborigines Department asking for funds for the disposal of the body of said child which, having been deposited within the town area by blacks, posed a hazard to the town’s health.

  I feel a certain kinship with the boy, but my kinship with Fanny and the two Sandies becomes all the stronger with the realisation that, when I began this project, I too breathed in the scent of something discarded, something cast away and let drift and only now washed up. It was the smell of anxiety, of anger and betrayal. Of course, it may equally have been the rank odour of my grandfather, his puke and shit. Or perhaps some olfactory nerve was triggered by the thought of a boy, left limp and lifeless and more like me than I care to admit.

  But I anticipate myself. I do not wish this to be a story of me—other than in the healing—but of before me. I wish to write nothing more than a simple family history, the most local of histories. And to make certain things clear.

  As reluctant as I am to face it, I may be the successful end of a long line of failures. Or is it the other way round?

  So ... So, by way of introduction, here I come:

  The first white man born.

  the first white man born

  As I see it, what we have to do is uplift and elevate these people to our own plane...

  A O Neville

  As the first-born-successfully-white- man-in-the-family-line I awoke to a terrible pressure, particularly upon my nose and forehead, and thought I was blind. In fact, the truth was there was nothing to see, except—right in front of my eyes—a whiteness which was surface only, with no depth, and very little variation.

  Eventually, I realised my face was pressed hard against a ceiling.

  I pushed out my hands and shot rapidly away from it. Thus, I fell. Still groggy from the collision with the floor, and once more floating toward the ceiling, I kicked out and managed to hook my feet in the wrought-iron bedstead. It was an awkward and clumsy process but I succeeded in securing the bedsheet (which must have fallen from the ceiling), and inserting myself beneath it. And there I lay, secure but trembling, staring at my hands which gripped the sheet so tightly.

  I couldn’t stay trapped like that. Summoning my courage and tentatively experimenting, I discovered that I merely had a propensity for elevation. I would rise in the air only when I relaxed, let my mind go blank.

  I felt so weak but, obviously, it was not from the effort of supporting my body’s weight.

  Hovering before a mirror, I saw a stranger. It was hard to focus, but this much was clear; he was thin, and wore some sort of napkin around his loins. Dark blue veins ran beneath his creamy skin, and his nipples and lips were sharply defined.

  The image shifted, and changed shape as I have seen clouds do around granite peaks above the sea. But it was terrible to see the shapes, the selves I took.

  I stood motionless against a setting sun; posture perfect, brow noble, features fine.

  Saw myself slumped, grinning, furrow-browed, with a bottle in my hand.

  Was Tonto to my grandfather’s Lone Ranger. Guran to some Phantom.

  There appeared a footballer, boxer, country and western singer.

  A tiny figure, sprawled on the ground in some desert landscape, dying.

  And then I saw myself poised with a boomerang, saw myself throwing it out to where the sky bends, saw it arcing back again but now it was my tiny, cartwheeling mirror image which was returning, growing, merging with other crowding, jostling selves into one shimmering, ascending me.

  I closed my eyes, and when the crown of my head gently nudged the ceiling I must have looked like some elaborate light shade. Perhaps that was what my grandfather meant when he said I was brightest and most useful in an uplifted state.

  It was easy enough to come down again. I kept my eyes closed, and let the voice in my skull run through what I now realise was the thinnest of narratives, my father’s few words. Thus, it was anger which returned me to earth. Well, to the floor at least.

  I dressed myself carefully, opened the door.

  I wanted to be bold, but walking felt very peculiar. Had I ever known how? I held my shoulders back, placed each foot precisely and, flicking my toes and flapping my arms, desperately tried to propel myself forward. It was very difficult to maintain balance, and although perhaps it should have been laughable I was, in fact, desperate and tearful because—more than anything else—I wished to appear as normal as possible.

  I mastered a way of walking, and my light tread—despite being little more than a series of soft touchdowns—sounded the floorboards like a drum.

  It must have been morning, because I was blinded by light as I opened the last door.

  Blinking, I saw my grandfather’s back, and we were both looking out over a view of ocean, island, headland reaching in from the right of the window frame. The old man turned his pale and lined face to me.

  ‘You’re back,’ he said.

  He stroked my jaw with the back of his hand, ran his finger along a scar there.

  ‘My son. You look so much better. You still don’t remember, do you?’

  His face shone with relief. Or was it the reflection of success?

  Oh, I remembered all right, and I get better all the time. But I kept quiet. You might call it my native cunning.

  In the window’s frame I saw the ocean pulse against the tip of the island. It blossomed, disappeared. Again. Again.

  My heart was beating calmly, my own pulse lulled me.

  I was between the sheets of my bed, and my grandfather’s eyes, in that face so close to my own, were brimming.

  He moved his lips, trying to speak, then reached out and patted the back of my hand. He was fighting back tears. I stayed mute, did nothing.

  ‘You’ll be all right,’ he slurred. ‘We’ll get you back on track. Everything that’s mine is yours, you know that.’

  Oh.

  I let him hear my voice.

  ‘Thanks. Thanks, Dad.’

  I knew that would get to him. He smiled, and a tear ran down his cheek. It was like one of his beloved bedside scenes.

  I had come back from the dead. Obviously, I was not in the best of health; I was pale, my memory was poor, and it was as my grandfather’s child that I sensed an opportunity. The old man wouldn’t last long. Well, I’ve been raised to this, I thought. It is survival of the fittest, and let the fittest do their best.

  raised to this...

  When I was seven years old my father gave me to his own father to raise.

  My grandfather owned and managed a gentlemen’s boarding house. He and my father shook hands at the rear of the building to finalise the transaction.

  Hands parted, and I followed my grandfather between walls of corrugated iron, teetering crates, empty glass bottles. Struggling with my plastic bags of clothing and breathing the air of unwashed laundry and indifferent cooking, I followed him up rickety and creaking stairs until eventually we emerged from gloom and into a wash of light. Before us an array of tables, set with cloth, cutlery and condiments, patiently
awaited the arrival of those who would be served.

  Grandad thought this would be a good place for me to start.

  A doorway to my right led to a room with a desk, filing cabinet, television and bed. My grandfather introduced me to his business partner, Aunty ... I can’t remember the name. There was a succession of them over the years. She sat up in bed, wearing a thin dressing-gown, and with receipts, money, accounting books and magazines scattered across the bedclothes. The desk was beside the bed and supported a worn typewriter, a box of chocolates, and an ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts and chocolate wrappers. The solemn visage of the Queen observed a crucified Christ pinned to the opposite wall. Aunty looked at me from between the two of them, and gave a very quick smile.

  I was led to an old verandah enclosed with glass louvres. My room. There was a bunk-bed with a desk beneath it, and three walls lined with the books I was to read in the long weekend and holiday hours before me. How familiar I became with them, their smell, the way words can blur, and shift, and welcome you among them.

  In that room I always woke with dawn light on my face. One step brought me up against the louvres, and a view of the shabby, flaking backs of other tall buildings. Below, in the middle of a small concrete enclosure, a tiny, stubborn rug of buffalo grass defied the cars which nosed up to it. A tap hung over a little drainwell.

  ‘We all have to make our way in this world,’ Grandad said, ‘on your own. I want to give you an even chance. You will never get that with your father.’

  Grandfather—Ernest Solomon Scat—told me that my father had agreed it was for the best.

  At first, adjusting to the new circumstances, I had an unfortunate run of bed-wetting, but once cured of that—with an ingenious system my grandfather designed whereby an electric shock was administered to my penis each time the sheets became wet—I was off to the very best of boarding schools.

  I suppose it was effective enough.

  In the school holidays Grandad trained me in all the tasks required to run a boarding house, and ensured I did extra studies. He made up a timetable. I served our gentlemen guests, and cleaned up after them, and made their beds, and washed their dishes, their clothes, their sheets ... Except when it was a necessary part of my duties I tried to avoid the boarders, many of whom were alcoholics.