Benang

by Kim Scott

  Mortgage it for what was owed.

  The policeman came demanding payment, or Mr Starr would be forced to put the land on the market.

  ‘You his boy, are you?’ said Harry.

  On the allocated Natives Shopping Day at a nearby town Harry, Sandy One and Fanny went to a solicitor to arrange for the land to be transferred to Sandy One. They held their token white man between them. Could Sandy, as they understood, take out a mortgage with the bank to pay out their debt at the store.

  Possibly. It would take some days to arrange.

  The bank manager was puzzled. ‘Will he be able to sign? Is he fit...?’

  Fanny fingered the vertebrae of Sandy’s back, and the old man nodded his firm assent and understanding.

  The police came, and gave them fourteen days to move.

  Starr had sold the land to one of his sons.

  The local magistrate, when a reluctant but Harry-harassed Aborigines Department made its enquiries, agreed that it was not justice. The Starrs had got the land at well below market price by using family as dummy buyers. But it was legal. And he didn’t think Harry would cut much of a figure in court.

  ‘Stay here,’ Harry told Chatalong as he pulled up outside the pub.

  Harry scanned the bar. Faces turned to him, then away. No words.

  Mr Starr sat around the elbow of the bar, facing the door. His face registered a little surprise, and then he nodded—once, sharply—at Harry Cuddles.

  The barmaid would not serve Harry.

  ‘It’s the law.’

  ‘I got an exemption.’ Dog tag, he thought. Dawg.

  There was a pause.

  ‘Oh,’ a man said from within his glass. He drained it, then placed it before him like a tiny column. ‘Listen mate, you might have some bit of paper but we know what you are. You don’t belong here. Not with us.’

  Harry glanced around the room. Most eyes were on him. Starr was looking into his glass.

  ‘I don’t think we’ve met,’ said Harry to the first man. ‘You don’t know me.’ He held out his hand. ‘Harry Cuddles.’

  Harry saw his own hand trembling in the unfilled space between them.

  And then he was striking the man’s face, throat. The man was down. A roaring, there was thunder in his ears, and voices from all around, leaping back from the walls and ceiling.

  His arms were held, and bodies were all about and close. Boots, fists.

  A screech. The blows stopped. A man held each of Harry’s arms.

  A policeman’s uniform stood in the small space before him. The policeman nodded his head and the men let their hands drop from Harry’s arms.

  The policeman spoke into a new silence.

  ‘You’d be best to leave. I’ll turn a blind eye.’

  ‘Why? I got an exemption.’ Harry’s voice was husky, and shifting so that even he could not trust it. He didn’t want to whine.

  ‘Not anymore. Inciting trouble. Associating with natives.’

  The policeman gestured at Chatalong, who bent forward on the wagon the better to see through the doorway.

  ‘You want to lose your kids as well?’

  The room waited.

  ‘We don’t need police to sort this out,’ said the man Harry had struck.

  ‘You’re under arrest,’ said the policeman.

  Uncle Harry let himself be led from the door by the bandy-legged, uniformed one. As they passed before the wagon, he pushed his captor aside and ran into the middle of the street. It was recently paved and the town was proud of it. Harry swung around to face them.

  The policeman dusted himself off as he got to his feet. A few men were shoving one another to get through the door. Starr finished his beer, remained seated. He saw only the backs of men mostly too old, weak or disabled to go to war.

  Harry threw off his coat, stamped his feet, and put his fists up in front of him, sparring. He forced his feet to move like those of a boxer, rather than in the frustrated dance of a child’s tantrum. His pulse throbbed.

  Sometimes the world moved so slowly; nothing changed.

  ‘I can go where I like. I can go where I like. Wadjela. You wadjela. You think I’m a dog (a dawg), or what?’

  The policeman scurried at him, and Harry hit him quick and hard, just the once. Harry picked up some stone, some piece of the reformed earth, and dared the others to come get him. They smiled at him from the door.

  The cop was up again, shaking his head as if reluctant in his duty, as if disappointed. As if superior.

  It was Starr who moved forward.

  ‘Harry, this is no good. There’s nothing can be done.’

  He put his pale hands on Uncle Harry’s shoulders. Harry looked over the storekeeper’s shoulder, and taunted the red-faced policeman.

  ‘You fight for yourself? Like a person, like a man?’

  The veins in Harry’s neck were like ropes and his eyes were moist. But he was quietening. He looked into Starr’s face, flicked the storekeeper’s bloodied hands away, and turned and walked. The little policeman trotted after him.

  Some of the townspeople spoke up for him in court, including Starr. Uncle Harry smiled wryly almost the whole time, as if to himself only.

  He said nothing. His family were not allowed in court. He said nothing. He looked at the floor somewhere in the centre of the room, sometimes at a dark jarrah chair with red upholstery, occasionally out the window. He seemed calm, or bored.

  He said nothing.

  Harry Cuddles wore a three-piece suit with wide and expansive lapels. Its stripes were bold and straight. He wore spats and held his smart town hat in his hands before him, and looked down, around; into a different space.

  Six months disorderly conduct.

  Three months resisting arrest.

  Six months assaulting a police officer.

  He said nothing.

  Fanny and Chatalong loaded up the wagon. They wanted to take everything, but were given so little time that they couldn’t dismantle the huts and Fanny suddenly found herself grateful to be able to take even the tent frames. They had hidden Sandy One among the luggage, and hoped that no one would ask after him.

  Chatalong mouthed the policemen’s clipped instructions, mocking them, and Kathleen and he grinned at one another. They left in silence, with the police riding behind, and when they were approaching the edge of the next town, obeyed the policeman’s instructions and turned down a small track just before the railway crossing.

  Mt Dempster’s reserve was between the rubbish dump and the sanitation depot. Whatever the time of day you breathed the town’s shit.

  There were tiny huts, shabby tents, shelters made of packing cases, of flattened kerosene-tins, of hessian-cloth-boughs-bush. They were scattered as if they’d been thrown, or had fallen from the trees which shaded them. There were a couple of hessian-covered pit toilets at one end of the reserve, and Fanny, Sandy, and Kathleen and Chatalong were obliged to camp close to these. The Cuddles family had to find room at the other edge of the reserve.

  Like some of the white people said—not all meaning quite the same thing—there were too many people at the reserve already.

  The old people were apart. Their grandchildren—with no school to go to—ran within the reserve and even into some of the bush surrounding it, and thought that they were free.

  There was a lack of space. Fanny managed to keep her small brood together, and they all slept in one small shelter.

  There was no water on the reserve, and so they braved the dogs and pilfered from the rainwater tanks of the houses closest to the reserve. There were horse troughs in town, but it was a long walk back with an improvised bucket banging your leg, or carrying a sloshing pair on a pole across your shoulder.

  ‘Who is that old fellow, paralysed one. The white man?’ someone in the reserve asked of their campfire partner.

  ‘Dunno. Where is he?’

  ‘Dunno. Can’t be far.’

  But despite the knowing laughter, Sandy One was quite some distance a
way, and bouncing around in the back of a cart, his limbs flopping loosely with each jolt. Fanny held his head on her lap and had stacked hessian bags beneath him. Chatalong was at the reins, and they followed a trail north and around the ranges. Going home.

  They had kissed Kathleen goodbye and left her in the care of the Cuddles family. They would be back for her. With old Sandy as he was, and only the small cart to put him in, there was just no room.

  Fanny needed to get closer to home and to see Harriette. As bad as it was it was still home, and if they broke their ties there, what good could ever come of it again? It was home. She held her husband’s head on her lap. He was alive; she regarded him almost as a hostage. There was a law and this man meant that they might escape it. Their almost-a-white-man.

  The old man’s eyes showed the sky, and the bumpy ride kept his limbs in constant motion, as if he were restless and fitful. Chatalong told him again and again that he understood. How could he possibly be still? He understood.

  ‘But not yet,’ Fanny said to Chatalong. Not yet, they could not go into the town yet. Not even for a daughter who would help her. They turned the horse for the coast, running south-east of the ranges.

  Next morning, when they stopped, it was in that bay where the land ran out and dissolved into the sea. Chatalong thought of his mother, the kangaroo shooters, the rifles and the rum. He realised how the men had treated him, how they had disregarded him.

  Fanny lifted a small thin shard of rock from where it rested at the base of a wide, flat depression in the granite. She drew water from the waterhole beneath it, and replaced the lid-like rock.

  She held the cool water to her husband’s lips. ‘Not far. Remember?’

  Water welled in his mouth, ran into his sandy-grey beard. People died not so far from here.

  Sandy One coughed; he made little eruptions. Snot bubbled and ran from his nose. His limbs jerked as they had in the wagon.

  They were miles away—had passed their old mine, and were almost at Gebalup—when the cart bucked. It balanced upon one wheel, and Fanny threw her weight—you would have to say the wrong way—and then over it went.

  A wheel continued spinning, but the one beneath the wagon was broken, and the wagon itself had split and collapsed at one corner. It wasn’t a wagon anymore. The horse was already small in the distance, and the traces trailing it could no longer be distinguished. The sound of the horse’s pounding hooves became the rumble of the one wheel and that sound continued to diminish until, eventually, even it stopped.

  They propped Sandy One against the wreckage and, after considering the cart’s shafts and planking, cut two strong limbs from a tree. Fanny wove bark and twine between the poles to support Sandy, then they each took two ends and set off along the thin track.

  The trailing end of the poles bounced across rocks and indentations, but they flexed enough to allow the old man a reasonably comfortable ride, and Fanny had pulled his hat over his face to shelter him from the sun.

  Chatalong looked back at the parallel lines the two poles had scratched in the earth. He was reminded of the railway, and these lines led back to a heap of junk with one motionless wheel at the top.

  Harriette stayed in the house, and Chatalong led Daniel out of town to where Fanny and Sandy One were concealed among the scrub. There was no moon, and on such a cold, clear night the stars were insistent. Sandy One would have been watching them for hours, perhaps feeling the night condensing upon his cheeks and lashes. Licking his lips.

  Fanny and Harriette embraced silently in the house, even as they felt that space closing in about them. Daniel watched them with his lips pressed tight, and Chatalong had long ago learnt that when Daniel said shut up then...

  Well, he hoped they would be needing him now.

  steel fences

  Grandfather, Uncle Will, Uncle Jack and me; with each trip we edged a little further east from Wirlup Haven. We made that early trip to the death place and, having traversed that, we went a little further each time. We moved along the coast, mostly, and further and further from the railway that first fenced off the corner of this continent.

  Ah, the railway. Once it was shining and new, and so was the Chief Protector, Mr Neville when he first travelled it. By the time my own grandfather and the Travelling Inspector of Aborigines skimmed its parallel lines, some ten or fifteen years later, its shiny metal had dulled except where the wheels rolled.

  The railway shunted a new generation of pioneers to the smoky frontier, and allowed the Chief Protector to make his inspection in much greater comfort than the first Travelling Inspector, who had only the assistance of camel, cart, and native boy.

  I found the notes of all these various inspectors among Grandad’s research files. I fairly made them rustle about my ankles as I hovered in that room, kicking my legs amongst them to disrupt their neat order. Perhaps it was unfair, even petty of me.

  When I write like this—of railways, and fences, and of extensive pages of notes—I give a nod to my grandfather; to his lines and his discipline, to his schemes and his rigour. And I further acknowledge, and nod to, the demands of Historical Fiction. And I nod with the resentment which those I will call my people felt, still feel. Nod nod nod.

  I hope you are not falling asleep.

  Sometimes, my grandfather’s chin used to drop to his chest even as I spoke to him. He snored, and I recited in the brief and relative silences of each inhalation. Such a strange rhythm it gave my prose.

  My grandfather’s mentor (snore), the Chief Protector (snore), on accepting his new position (snore)—for it was about this time (snore) that he seriously took over an inefficient Aborigines Department and proceeded (snore), in his rigorous and zealous manner, to whip beat cut the whole thing into shape (snore)—took an inspection tour.

  I hovered in the firelight and smoke of our campfire, sometimes even in the thin torchlight beside a gas barbeque, and recited to the old men of my family. I mimed the great blind beast of a train, even attempted to mime the cut and slash—and simultaneously, the detached observation and control—of rigorous, scientific activity. In short, I performed many graceless and blundering acts.

  Making my contribution, I hoped. I hope.

  Once upon a time Grandad rattled and snorted along the Great Southern Railway. How crucial this railway was in facilitating the development of the wheatbelt, this lucky land’s prosperity, and the alienation of so many of us.

  Nod, nod.

  And how strangely fortunate we very few were—only my grandfather would disagree—that the railway at Gebalup went only to the coast, and never connected with the rest of the lines reaching out from the capital city. Thus it remained as ineffectual as the rabbit-proof fences either side of us. We slipped away, made some sort of escape as the line from Gebalup to Wirlup Haven shrivelled and floated on the surface of the earth.

  In other places, Chief Protector Neville would stand impatiently at the carriage door as the train slowed, and disembark before the train had stopped. He would run a few steps, then slow to a brisk walk and begin this specific inspection with scarcely a loss of momentum.

  He asked the police—who were, after all, his employees—to take him to all native camps within the vicinity. Squawking, they flew to announce his arrival, and perched sullenly above us.

  Chief Protector Neville made notes. He spoke to various authorities, to all those white men with knowledge and experience of The Native Problem.

  He had ideas, this man. Ambition. He wanted to establish settlements for the natives. The result? Considerable savings in the cost of the maintenance of natives in the Great Southern and South West districts ... children that are growing up can be turned into useful workers instead of becoming a nuisance to the inhabitants of every town in which they are settled ... concentration of the natives at Carrolup will be a great relief to the residents of those towns near which they are presently camped, and will be to the ultimate advantage of the natives themselves.

  In the various camps he visite
d there were numbers of half-caste children, some of whom, he wrote, are as white as any of our own children, and should be under proper care and supervision.

  Of course, it was within the power of the Minister under the Act to place natives within a reserve, but Mr Neville—having taken on the position so recently—insisted that he would rather the natives went to his settlement of their own free will. It was very early in his career.

  Regrettably, as he explained to various small meetings of concerned citizens, there are ... families that will have to be moved ... they are a burden on the department, and the children are not being properly looked after ... mostly in the case of women who have lost their husbands.

  In one or two places the natives were particularly intractable, and would consider no other proposition than that of sending their children to the local school. Mr Neville did not want a repeat of difficulties associated with the so very recent troubles at Gebalup and a host of other schools.

  Mr Neville did, in fact, use the Gebalup example to explain to the Minister that there was no chance of their children receiving an education in their local schools. It must be at a native settlement. The difficulty, our Chief Protector confided to his minister—adding that he was sure that the Honourable Minister would recall that this, to a lesser degree, was also the case at Gebalup— is that two or three of the natives with big families are in possession of town lots, whereon they have erected huts in which they are living, and they naturally do not wish to shift. These townsite lots overlook the town and are splendidly situated.

  My grandfather was so taken with our Chief Protector, not only because of his vast reservoir of civilisation, his rigorous and scientific mind, his energy and organisational drive, but also because he was a man of letters.

  About the time of this railway tour and about the time a few of my family were so kindly offered the sanction of a town’s designated reserve, our Chief Protector wrote to the superintendent at Carrolup and enquired whether it might be possible to take charge of any orphan half-caste children ... should the department desire to send one or two to the settlement?