by Kim Scott
Fanny, looking into the fire, wailed and wailed.
Daniel made the coffin himself; it was a question of money. Such was the extent to which the old man had shrunk that it seemed a child’s coffin. Daniel’s hands—once so cunning and clever—now held and hammered tentatively, could not grip the saw, let the chisel slip. The small coffin seemed too small for the adult-sized grave they’d dug.
Sergeant Hall joined them at the graveside.
The graveside.
I have visited gravesides; my father’s, grandfather’s (eventually), Uncle Will’s, Uncle Jack’s ... and so many after that. Each, at the time, seemed a full stop. But I have continued on. I continue them on, in various ways.
Oh, how wonderful it would be to end my life like that of my ancestor, Sandy One. But just as I know this story will not conclude with my death, so I can assure you of this; there will be no final orgasm.
a place for jack
Sandy’s death made one less mouth to feed, so much less work for them all. Daniel, however, deteriorated further.
‘Ve are naking no infrovents,’ he would say. ‘Vat vill ve ve avle to leave the voy?’ He sat on a rough stool at one of the doorways, taking the sun or shade as he could.
Harriette took the rifle, the old mare and a cart, and came back with meat. A small vegetable garden provided most of the rest of their requirements.
Sometimes Fanny went hunting with her. They killed kangaroo, bush turkey, tamar, wallaby ... An enquiring mind would have thought it strange that they used such a large cart, and untidily left so much on the tray in the way of boxes and blankets and hessian. It was almost as if they were concealing something.
Daniel sat at the house front, and tried to smile at everyone he saw. At least he could resign himself to his melancholy when the women bundled him, bloated and wheezing, on board the wagon. They went off for days at a time, then. To the east, along the coast where the posts of the old telegraph line still ran.
They camped by creeks where there were pools of shallow flowing water, and Qualup Bells standing among the grass. The women found yams on the sandplain; big, pale yellow and juicy. Daniel was alarmed at the number of children they sometimes had with them on these occasions. He was nervous, all the time looking about and keeping watch.
It was Harriette who had taught Will to hunt and shoot.
Will was a little behind his mother, both of them on their bellies, and he had his head level with her feet. She had told him not to lift his head until she signalled, and he kept his eyes on her hand.
Will always remembered the painstaking care and caution of that long crawl to his first kill. A gentle breeze moved into their faces, and the animal was staring into the sun.
Harriette watched the roo the whole time, and the roo seemed to stare straight back at her, but each time it lowered its head to feed, Will and his mother wriggled forward. They froze as it raised its head, and waited while it scratched, swivelled its ears, looked directly at them once again.
Harriette signalled Will forward.
Freeze.
Forward again. She motioned him beside her.
Will took the loaded and cocked gun into his hands and sighted along its length. He thought the kangaroo looked beautiful. It was a grey, and he was close enough to see its liquid eyes shining in the late, low sun.
The rifle hurt Will’s shoulder but he was satisfied to see the roo fall dead, and hear his mother praise his marksmanship. He was proud to feed the camp.
Literate Will, just out of school and a keen reader, thought of Hiawatha.
Hiawatha, eh?
His mother helped him carry the kangaroo to the camp. He was almost a man.
Hiawatha, eh? Fanny also asked what he meant.
One time, on the old trails, Sandy One and Fanny had met a man. He wore only his scars, and a hairbelt. His hairline was plucked to show a smooth, high brow. The sight was an anachronism already; and he stayed to the trail, even though the hoofprints and wheel ruts made it hard going. But as there had been no fires for a long time it must’ve been hard travelling whichever way. What was remarkable was that he did not stay out of sight.
He carried an envelope wedged in the fork of a stick. Just him, the stick, the message.
He stood, breathing deeply, and studied the wagon, its horses, the dark woman and children, and the fair but familiar man.
Fanny and the man spoke in their age-old language. Sandy, looking back, caught Fanny’s eye. He understood much of what they said, waited to be called.
But the man jogged away, following a tangential trail. There are in fact many paths; some only ever marked by feet, some which became wheel worn and linked water to water, others were traced by telegraph lines. All are linked by the very oldest of stories, although many of these have been broken by the laying down of lines of steel, or have been sealed with black tar.
Fanny’s eyes went to the wagon, her feet took several steps after the man, but then she stopped. There are many trails.
My grandfather’s sources have occasional references to such letters carried by natives.
The messages must have seemed important, like sacred things, to put people to so much trouble.
This man kept the message away from himself, knowing well the damage it could do if its words fell into your ear. It is best to keep it away from yourself; at least until you learn to understand it, to have some chance of controlling it.
I think I understand their concern. Sandy One, and the children; Dinah, Harriette, Sandy Two. All had listened to the language held in this forked stick, as did their children, and theirs in turn, and theirs...
I sometimes feel as if I have been sealed within such an envelope. It makes it hard to stay at ease with yourself, hard to speak out from the heart.
As a child Uncle Will sometimes called himself Hiawatha, which was as good as any book could put it, back then, for him.
And if I had a gun, then, in the days before Uncle Will and Uncle Jack came to me? I might have sighted along its stiff barrel, at my grandfather’s liquid eyes. Tried not to think of my father’s eyes, draining like whirlpools as he dissolved, disappeared, went away beside me.
Daniel Coolman walked slowly, very slowly, down the street. Jack Chatalong walked beside him, felt the earth shake with each footfall, and restrained himself from skipping and running in circles around and around the big man. He didn’t do cartwheels, didn’t stop to sit and rest and then only race to catch up when Daniel—finally—reached the door. No. Jack Chatalong kept to Daniel’s very, very slow pace. He had even stopped talking, and kept his tongue between his teeth because Daniel had said shut up.
Mr Starr pushed the till closed and looked up as he heard the door open. A grotesquely swollen man manouevred, with some difficulty, through the door. The man’s beard was poorly trimmed yet fastidiously combed. A half-caste youth trailed him, stepping from side to side to see what lay ahead. The boy darted out and moved a chair from the monolith’s path.
‘Okay then, whadoo I owe ya?’ Starr smiled at his parrot, and scratched its crest while he waited for the two of them to reach the counter.
Daniel Coolman. Starr had heard he was not well.
It took more time than Starr wished to hear Coolman out. He listened to the laboured breathing as much as to the slow speech, and observed the moustache which moved in and out with Coolman’s breath. He noted yellow teeth, absent consonants. It seemed that it was not only the production, but also the conception of words that gave Coolman difficulty. Indeed, it was not until the youth, glancing regularly at the big man, summed up their situation that Starr finally understood completely.
‘Okay then.’
Starr inserted a piece of cuttlefish into the bird’s beak.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But it will have to be at our family property, that’s almost at Kylie Bay. We’ve a wagon going across in a few days. Friday. He can go on that, and I’ll send a note with him.’
Mr Starr watched them go. That man had married Sa
ndy One’s daughter, hadn’t he? She and her mother did a lot of domestic work in the town. It freed up our own women for better things, so his wife said.
It just showed you what people could achieve.
Uncle Jack had to go. The smelters had closed. There was so little work in Gebalup now. The Starrs had all sorts of enterprises; fruit and gardens, licenses for stripping and carting bark. Jack was a fast learner.
I think of his skill with horses and stock, and consider him at work in the orchards, pruning the fruit trees which—in what seemed yet another manifestation of the possibilities of place—grew in such a spot.
and salmon fishing too
To the Chief Protector of Aborigines and Fisheries
Dear Sir,
you will probably hear by this mail from the Resident Magistrate here of a boy named Jack Chatalong who was given in my charge by his—I believe—uncle, although he may be the boy’s brother-in-law. The point is that the man is a small farmer and businessman in Gebalup, and is married to a half-caste native woman, who is a marvelous example of what these people can achieve. Her garden and house would shame that of many white folk.
The youth has been in my employ for the last 3 months in my orchard at Dalyup and riding about after my stock being useful but some of my neighbours appear to have been misled by a deliberate lie that he was visiting the blacks camp and that the boy should be sent to school this is the complaint and I deny the whole of it.
In consequence of this I got the police to bring him in to town and an inquiry was made by the Resident Magistrate Mr Mustle—to which the result you will be made acquainted with. the boy is now held by the police after my clothing him as he was quite bare of clothing when came to me
I am willing to keep him and clothe him and give him some pocket money too when required I hope to hear from you that he is not under your control having a white uncle who is perfectly able to watch his interests.
I might say the boy is just about 15 and quite willing to live on my farm
As he gets older its my intention to give him a wage.
I am sir your respectfully
A Starr
To the Chief Protector of Aborigines and Fisheries
Mr Neville
I would be obliged if you would kindly inform me where I could send a boy supposed to be a half-caste under the following circumstances. He was brought up before the bench and charged as a neglected child. Constant complaints have been received of him frequenting any black camps that are set up before we are able to move them along and that he is becoming a nuisance and an embarrassment. I have put him in the charge of a storekeeper and sent him to school. I think it would be better to send him to some institution if possible, but as he appears only about 1/4 black I do not know whether he would come under your dept.
Yours,
Mr C Mustle
Dear Mr Starr,
The Resident Magistrate, Mr Mustle, has written to inform me that he has arranged to have the youth Jack Chatalong sent to school and placed in charge of a storekeeper, who I presume to be yourself.
As you seem concerned for the boy and his welfare, and as we are an inadequately funded department with many demands upon our resources, and as there must be some allowance for judgement in these matters I am able to say that he need not be under the jurisdiction of this department.
I wonder if you could be so kind as to inform me of the catches of salmon along that coastline at this time of year?
Yours,
A O Neville
Chief Protector of Aborigines and Fisheries
tommy
We very rarely saw any other people as we moved along that coast. We preferred it that way. I was very nervous of company, and perhaps my uncles were wary of the four of us being seen together; a cripple, a freak, and a couple of old Nyoongars.
It is an isolated stretch of coastline. We never took these little trips in the holiday periods. Even when Uncle Jack began taking me to visit relations, we were rarely away for much more than a week at a time.
On the rare occasions when we did encounter others, it was usually Uncle Will who’d talk with them, if we could not ignore them altogether.
We went along small and fragile tracks, with roots rising from the sand. One or the other of the old men drove, so slowly that the car would stall when the track got soft. Then we’d reverse out before getting too badly bogged, and gently try again, inching our way along by compacting the sand a little more each time. Spiky, tough shrubs scratched at our arms if we leaned them out the car windows.
I think it was only once that we came across anyone we knew. There were two women playing cards, sitting in the shade away from their rusty station wagon. They looked up, it seemed resentfully, until Uncle Jack called out to them from the back seat. He went over to them, called us across one by one. We left Ern in the car.
‘Harley,’ Uncle Jack said, ‘this is your Aunty Olive, Aunty Norma.’ The women looked at me.
‘Yeah, I remember your father, Tommy,’ said Olive, after a time. ‘He used to come and see us all the time when he was working on the roads out this way.’
‘Tomcat,’ said Norma, laughing. My father would’ve been about her age, if he’d lived.
‘Yeah, he was a Nyoongar all right,’ said Olive. ‘A lot of his family thought they were too good for the rest of us.’ She glanced at Uncle Will. ‘Your people are from here, you know, but Jack would’ve told you that.’ She looked again at Uncle Will, as if expecting he might say something.
‘Now your father,’ said Uncle Jack, taking the initiative. ‘He lived with Harriette when he was little, didn’t he?’ He was asking me, he was asking Will, he was asking the women to contribute.
Ah yes, my father. The few words it must’ve taken a lifetime to find, and which he gave me just before...
You recall the photo sequence, again? The one which we are nonsensically asked to read from left to right—and which shows my father as perhaps the first white man born. But new legislation, referring to the day before his birth, prevented Tommy being our first white man born, and put him in danger of understanding himself in ways that would only deform and oppress him. His grandmother gave him pride, and a sense of his spirit, and then Ern and Aunty Kate conspired to keep him ashamed and on the run.
It was only when he was grown—when he was an adult, with children—that he began to listen again, and to try to put words to how he felt, to who he was.
I have so very few photos of him, and the one above—the family photo—makes nostalgic, secure viewing very difficult. Thus my desire for alteration. After all, what does it matter what my father looked like, save that he was among those who:
...are almost white and some of them are so fair that, after a good wash, they would probably pass unnoticed in any band of whites...
and that he was one of a:
...family quite white enough to walk down Hay Street and attract no particular attention.
What does it matter, save that he could pass, that we could be anyone, and from anywhere?
I used to read the large letters on the back of my father’s overalls as MR D. Does this reveal my own attitude to authority, a conferring of respect? Or merely a propensity to rearrange the alphabet in my own interests?
He worked for the Main Roads Department, as one of what was known as the Boongs Gang. Ever ambitious, perhaps needing to prove himself, he got to be Leading Hand; and as one who could pass unnoticed, it was he—like a dawg—who brought the grog back to camp on paynight. As the boss, it was he who stood up to fight the challengers around the campfire late in the night, and took the curses of the men he roused next day.
And the Main Roads Department took him along what we recognise as familiar paths, similar paths to the Premier Man all those years ago, similar paths to those trodden forever, paths still there and clear. And even though he was breaking up the crust of the ground, and even though he was resealing it so that it might be travelled as quickly as possible, still it taught
him. That place, and some of the men he worked with, taught him. The country taught him, even as it diminished under the exhortation that a million acres be cleared each year.
He scratched at old trails while, around him, massive, clunking chains dragged across the earth. There were great explosions, and it rained earth and mallee roots and small dead animals. Animals fled, they scampered in a mostly tiny-footed stampede away from chains, ripping machines, explosions. Smoke and dust spread further than you could see.
Of course, it is never easy to say what you are learning, nor to pass it on to others. I remember him on his knees, having shucked the MRD overalls, and sparring with me.
‘You hafta learn to stand up for yourself.’
‘You belong here.’
He showed me—what was I? A few years old?—how to hold my hands and fists, and to watch their eyes. And yet it must’ve been short years later that I heard him saying you can’t keep winning, you’re not gunna win all your fights, it’s best not to fight if you can, but when it happens it is whoever hurts the other most, first, whatever way, who wins.
Not so many words to remember. Not a lot of words to live by.
And then Grandad came to get me, and I went to boarding school, and in the holidays to live with him in the boarding house he owned. My grandfather was perfecting a process. He must’ve suspected that he’d failed with my father, and that this was a last chance to get it right.