by Kim Scott
Boong.
Tarbrush in you, that’s why.
White but a black heart.
He never said, No I’m not. He fought. And in the office felt the cane across his own hands.
‘You’ve got to be better than this,’ said the headmaster. ‘You’ve got a chance.’
Harriette said, ‘Yeah, you’re one of us. Mine. You’re as good as anyone.’
She told him the story of the curlew, and took him camping until eventually, after many nights, Tommy heard a haunting call, and what that call means to us.
‘There used to be a lot of them too.’
Harriette taught him to fight. She sat in a chair, and Tommy aimed his blows at her hands. He jabbed lightly, and felt her hands give with the blows, and the fingertips touch his hands as he withdrew.
She was an old woman.
Which was what the police constable said to her also, when he came to tell her that the lease had expired. She was an old woman, and never any trouble so he could turn a blind eye if she could find somewhere else to live, but the boy...
He recommended Sister Kate’s, because it was quality schooling, and at least until they could contact the father...
aunty kate
My grandfather was very generous to Aunty Kate. There were a number of children there, and it was a rarity for a white father to contribute money to her home, as Ern did. And he contributed more than was necessary for just the one son.
At least at Aunty Kate Clutterbuck’s, it had been explained to Harriette, Tommy would get an education. He would get good food, a good bed, and a chance to hold his head high. To be as good as anyone.
When Tommy arrived at Aunty Kate’s, firm hands pulled at his clothes. Those hands spoke of excitement, as did the voices; Uncles booming, Aunties shrieking, as if in ecstacy, their voices tangling and reaching higher and higher.
Look, oh look where the sun has not reached.
He is quite white.
Quite white.
Everyone says that.
And often, on the weekends, Ernest would be among those who arrived at Aunty Kate’s to take the lucky children away for the weekend. It was, however, a rare thing for Ernest to take his own son—our Tommy—away with him.
Uncle Will and Uncle Jack were open-mouthed, staring at me. Old Ern, almost immobile, had closed his eyes. No doubt he wished he could close his ears also.
We were around another timeless fire. I hovered in its little light, smoke clinging to me like fabric, and my voice was shrill like the wind in a small space, or whispered in the different ways of waves, leaves, long grasses.
By now such behaviour seemed almost normal to the old men, even how—more and more—I took on the sounds of a place rather than the words. Although, when Ern opened his eyes, I saw the terror in them.
‘I’ve heard some things about Sister Kate’s,’ said Uncle Jack.
Uncle Will slowly shook his head, no.
Ern kept his eyes closed.
I felt a little shame, then, at how I had treated him. Shame, even, for those occasions when I had cut him, taunted him, roped him in a chair and—holding a glass under his nose—never let him drink.
Dad ... Tommy met a sister at Aunty Kate’s. He didn’t know he had one, alive. Most of the other kids, they didn’t know if they had mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters. Aunty Kate told many, sadly, that their mothers and fathers had died or did not want them.
But Tommy met a girl called Ellen. Just like his own dead sister had been called.
A lot of the boys were called Tommy; a lot of the girls Ellen. He thought it a strange coincidence.
At Aunty Kate’s, at weekends and holiday time, they would all line up.
All line up for the visitors.
Line up, smile for the visitors, and they might take you to their nice homes. To the beach, for fish and chips and ice-cream too.
Tommy’s father was often among the visitors, but rarely selected our Tommy to go with him. But sometimes a stranger would touch Tommy on the shoulder and ask him his name.
He might be taken into the city, or to the beach where he watched the sea flap against the shore. Tommy watched its thin edge lift, caught by the dry breeze. Each little wave feathered, and as it trembled and fell, Tommy saw the sliver of sunlight which raced before the closing water. It always escaped. Which made him see light everywhere, all around them. He could see light; ubiquitous, all but invisible.
Ellen, apparently, used to dazzle with her smile. Every time, the first one to see her took her. Tommy, initially, and even when he realised she was his (half) sister, was jealous.
White people, feeling very important and very generous, arrived in beaming couples. And quite often it was just a man on his own, shoes shining and tie tucked in, and sounding like Tommy in a lolly-shop fantasy: ‘I’ll have one of them, and one of them, and one of them, and one...’ We spoke about it around our campfires. Thought it many times. Someone should have checked these people. They never checked, you know.
Ellen’s used to smile. Tommy’s did too. Fish and chips and ice-cream at the Royal Show!
You might stay one weekend, and the next time it’s call us Mum and Dad. They look at one another, loving it, as soon as you say that. And if it was just the man? Call me uncle. Uncle. Uncle father doctor lover.
Stay one weekend with them, and the next they might be your foster-parents.
There were things I could not say around the campfires. I used to whisper such things to Ern, let him know I knew. Remind him that he did too.
Tommy was alone with his uncles.
You understand how I did not want to talk to Uncle Will and Jack about this?
Tommy was alone with his uncles. Just big boys a couple of them were. And the older man who had selected him at Aunty Kate’s.
It was dark and hot on the verandah, but not so hot as outside. The sun stabbed through the lattice work, and slivers of it fell on the boards. They were whispering, kneeling.
‘It’s a game. You close your eyes and we’ll put a lolly in your mouth. Don’t bite it but.’
And one time it was not chocolate.
And it was a different voice.
‘Suck on it.’
Suck on it.
Well of course Tommy didn’t want to open his eyes. They were pulling his pants down and that.
Afterwards he got some white chocolate. One of them held his hand as they crossed the street.
‘The girl is better, I reckon,’ said one to the other.
‘Whatshername? Ellen?’ And they all laughed.
Next time they said suck it suck it, Tommy bit. And how the uncle howled.
At Aunty Kate’s when they lined up, our Tommy kept his head down. He looked at the ground, watched shoes pass by, pause before him. Sometimes a finger under his chin, lifting.
‘Look up!’
‘He’s so pale, isn’t he? You would scarcely know. Oh, those eyes. What unusual colouring. They all have such beautiful eyes.’
Perhaps some were happy to sit in the baths of bleach. Some Ellens and Tommys wore a peg on their noses when they went to bed, and not because of any bad smell.
But, there’s no denying what we smell here, my friends, my family. It is that familiar stench.
Then one day, a finger under his chin forced him to look up into the face of his father. Ern. The old man.
The car door opened as they walked to it. A new mother. She had opened the door, and now opened her arms to him.
‘This is your new mother, Tom. You’ll be living with us in the city.’
‘But he’s such a good-looking boy,’ the mother said, turning to Ern. ‘And you’d never know.’
Tommy’s new mother was tall and had long yellow hair, dark at the roots. She smoked cigarettes, one after the other, and held the slender white cylinders between the tips of her two largest fingers. Her fingernails were hard and bright against the pure white of the cigarettes, and her knuckles deeply lined.
But other than this,
all Tommy remembered of her was that she was the first of a series of women his father offered as mother. They never stayed, and Ern would be angry afterwards, and be away, and Tommy would return to Aunty Kate’s, or some boarding school.
At one of these boarding schools there was an orphanage for black kids. They were kept apart. Tommy was always looking away. Why was he not with them, as he was at Aunty Kate’s? Because of his skin colour? But, at Aunty Kate’s they were all quite fair. Because of his father? Because of Ern?
In the school holidays the other kids would leave. Tommy would spend weeks almost completely alone, except for sport, when one of the brothers would allow him to join the kids at the orphanage.
Someone said they knew him. ‘You a Coolman, eh?’
And when one of the children at an adjoining farm went missing, the brothers took several of the older boys down to the dam. It was school holidays, and so it was only the boys from the orphanage; and Tommy.
The boys were sent into the water, and told to dive and feel around in the mud with their hands. There was a boy missing, see. One of the farmer’s boys.
They must have looked like cormorants as their heads came to the surface, sleek and shining. And black, except for that one, which was fairer. Fair hair, light brown skin.
The dam water was light brown also, and it was impossible to see anything once under it. The boys halfheartedly moved their hands about in the mud, hoping, no doubt, to not find anything.
But Tommy found something, and at first it felt like plasticine, or clay. It was firm, yet squishy. He came to the surface, took a breath and went down again. His hand traced a limb.
At the surface he waved a hand, but no one saw him, and he had to gather his courage to shout as he trod water.
Tommy was shivering. He was sick. He felt as if the water had contaminated him.
I know that I render Tommy as an anxious thing, introspective and shy. Not so. In reality he was a cheeky boy, with a swagger to him. He kept to himself, so far as any boy in a boarding school can.
He was at a boarding school where the names were those he’d heard of, of fathers and grandfathers who had not claimed their other children. Mustles, Moores, Dones, Starrs. These were the ones who took the land, cut and cleared it, sowed foreign seeds. The winners.
Tommy wished to be a winner.
But just now Rod Mustle had him backed against the troughs in the laundry.
There were gnarled mallee roots stacked to one side of them, on the other side a copper trough sat upon its fireplace.
‘You stay at school in the holidays, don’t you?’
‘Me dad’s working, he’s away out bush.’
‘The only ones staying on holidays are the coons.’
Tommy felt the trough at his back. Rod Mustle was old enough to have whiskers.
‘You know old Harriette Coolman, don’t you? What, she your grandmother? Aunty? You’re an Abo.’
Rod was grinning and pushing him.
‘You should be over with them. Your daddy don’t want you.’
There were some others with Rod now, and Tommy was crouching, edging back to the cramped dark space beneath the troughs, and brandishing a mallee root he’d snatched from the pile. The boys were kicking at him.
Tommy moved at them to give himself room to swing and to keep them from grabbing a similar weapon for themselves.
Good. One of them was crying and hopping about clutching his leg.
Then Mustle was on the ground at Tommy’s feet, and the other boys had their hands up before them, and were backing away from him. This crazy boy.
The brothers came running. They coaxed him out with cunning, soft voices. And then his ears, his very head, rang with their blows.
Tommy had another stepmother, and there was another maid. She must have been only a few years older than Tommy. Tommy would hear his stepmother calling to her.
‘Ellen.’
And, ‘We’ll send you back, you know.’
‘No. You’ll have to take that up with the department. They bank the money for you. Rest assured, Ellen, it’s for your own good. Now.’
The maid fell pregnant, and left, as did the latest stepmother, although without the accompanying pregnancy. Ernest swore, and lashed at his boy. ‘I should just dump you.’ And I suppose it was at about this time that he began his little probings, in just such a lull between maids or wives. The same probings that he tried on me, but Ern had softened by then, and had not the steel in him.
Anyway, there was yet another boarding school. And Ern arranged for another maid.
In the school holidays Tommy boarded a train to Lake Salvation where the railway finished. He wore a school uniform, one from some long-ago school, and held out his ticket. Tommy would visit his grandmother.
Harriette’s children rarely came to see her. A daughter in Lake Salvation would sometimes come, when her husband was away.
Harriette lived in a tent. It was a tent among a few others, just outside the tiny town. Their tents were out of sight of the road, but close enough to it when you needed a lift. Everyone, but the children especially, would run off the road and hide if they heard a vehicle coming. If it was the great black Maria that came cruising then you better stay hidden, because if they put you inside that you never come back.
There were other children living in the tents and bush shelters. Tommy went with them to collect water from the dam in a nearby paddock. Two of the men worked for the farmer there who’d bought the property from the Dones.
In summer the dam was muddy, and the children used old food cans to scoop water from the clear, thin layer on the surface. Then they poured it into bigger drums to carry back.
Harriette stuffed Tommy’s good shoes with newspaper. She wiped the mud from them, and hung his school uniform from a nail.
They ran from the road, maybe a little too late, a group of them, the kids, walking along some miles from the camp. The vehicle stopped. The children were hiding in the bush, and they watched the policeman. He came striding in among the trees, straight for the one little girl too slow too innocent to get herself hidden properly. The policeman and her were just the other side of a bush and fallen log Tommy had hidden behind.
Tommy heard the struggling, the panting, the sobbing. He was a little boy himself, yet felt the shame of doing nothing. He pressed himself into the dirt. The policeman groaned, lifted himself to his feet. Stumbled back to the vehicle.
The girl lay as if lifeless. Tommy and another supported her, carried her back to the camp. The old people took her from them, thanked them.
What could they do?
Maybe it was just one of his whims, or because he wanted to finish off a job or see an experiment through ... Really, I don’t know why; it is what I am writing for, to try and understand. Anyway, Ern was back in Gebalup. He stood at the front door of the house he knew and listened to someone tell him that no, no, no one of that name lived here.
They did not know where she had gone, and they looked at him with contempt.
He looked around Wirlup Haven, Gebalup. He went to the police station. The local Protector. His story was a difficult one.
He had left his boy where? With who? They looked at him suspiciously. They thought it was a disgrace, or perhaps they were embarrassed for him.
It is true to say that even though I write of him as a character in this long story, that I could never understand my grandfather. Even in the long time of his paralysis, and while he was under my care, and even while I tortured him and learnt his weaknesses, I could never understand him. And so it is hard to say why he came back to find his son, this one child from among all the others he sent back while they were still defined as part of their pregnant mothers.
He found Tommy among all those children who were now ill and vomiting from the muddy water they’d drunk. He took Tommy from among all those who were about to be sent to various missions and homes in an attempt to teach them how to become white people, or at the least to understand their plac
e.
Harriette had once again slipped away.
Harriette went to where her daughter lived. The daughter, under the protective auspices of Constable Hall, had married a white man. So she was not a native, now. And she and her husband took Harriette in, continuing a pattern set by Harriette and her own mother. With good fortune, they thought, Harriette could escape being classified as a native.
She would lift her chin. ‘I don’t come under the Aborigines Act. I don’t want their assistance. All I want is to be left alone. I am much better without their protection.’
And for Tommy there were all those years of just him and Ern, just as there was for Ern and I. There was a long procession of schools, as Tommy followed Ern as he travelled the state, building for government. Tommy cut the letters into his skin, and carved the words Mum, Love, Ellen, and then poured the ink into those words so that they would sting and stay. He used to wish that he was darker, somehow, so that he was not the man that his father was. Not destined to be such a one, so tight and hard and cruel.
This I understand too well. Once, I heard him say that he should have married a darker woman first up, a real dark woman. But there you go. And where would I have been then?
Dad used to wish that he was darker than all his sisters Ellen.
I went to see a woman called Ellen, once. My mother? An Aunty? I didn’t know. Oh, this was after Ern had gone, after Uncle Jack and Uncle Will had died. I went alone. She recognised me, somehow. Said she’d heard of me. At first she wouldn’t open the door.
Her hands shook as she held the door open, not inviting me in. ‘The sun,’ she said. ‘I play bowls, and I get so burnt.’
Her hands were shaking.
‘Yeah, your father,’ she went on. ‘He used to come and see me. He used to try and look up all his family. Really, but,’ she said, ‘I dunno why he should want to go back, after all that had happened. Why should he want to go scuttling back to blackfellas.’
She said that those wadjelas were her real parents. Because they were the ones who raised her, looked after her, brought her up.