Salt

by Bruce Pascoe

  I’ve seen it a dozen times before. They seek her out. For her calm acceptance, the way she’ll flay her heart to ease theirs.

  I look at the owls in awe. How did he know to fly to this branch? And what horrid story has he told her? I’ll never know because it’s not mine to know. He flew to her branch and she’ll never give a hoot.

  I love you, my brothers, and Aunt … well, you know what I’d do for you … put a foam bead on the frame of that canteen door. To stop the final clang that some slabs enjoy.

  Leaving the hall of bright carvings to recover our belts and biros and coins, I find it hard to re-enter the other world, of blank and careless wood.

  I turn once more to the aviary door, reluctant to leave its feathered hope. Restful sleep, my owls of the great forest. Blink a little if you must, but wake restored.

  THE GALAPAGOS DUCT

  Medical textbooks tell us that the Galapagos Duct is cranial passage with a conduit to the brain and connected to the organs of both ear and eye. Fluids within the aural canal can negotiate the Galapagos Duct and influence the brain’s reception and transmission of aural and visual stimuli.

  This conduit’s connection to all three organs provides the opportunity to render the inexplicable explainable. It is an intelligence moderator.

  Take a little thing, like how in 1493 Pope Alexander VI stamped a piece of metal, announcing his authority for the edict that deemed the discovery of lands presumed the right of the discoverer to dominate the savages living within that land. Savages were defined as those who did not believe in the Carpenter of Palestine.

  Now, we have had frequent opportunities over centuries to read this document written on calf skin and to speak about it with our priests and princes. It has been acknowledged by men of the law, blessed, sanctified, assumed into law so that it has diffused in the liquid of the Galapagos Duct, and from there it has seeped into the crimped and slippery labyrinths of the brain.

  There are a great many Catholics and lawyers, so this knowledge has seeped into the minds of our rulers, many of whom have been, or are, either Catholics or lawyers. In fact, combined, they would be a clear majority in our legislative chambers. You can imagine the amount of seeping going on, the trickling up. So we know that we know what the Pope said. We know that assumption of others’ land was related directly to the Christian religion.

  Vegemite, however, causes an imbalance in the fluid of the Galapagos Duct. It encourages unnatural spaces to open between the cells, and a disconnection occurs so that information within the duct is not properly received or is held for too little time in the cranial chamber.

  Advanced science produces many outstanding results, and a small laboratory in Lakemba, Sydney, has identified the ingredient in Vegemite that interrupts the workings of the Galapagos Canal: beer. We know that Vegemite is made from the dregs of brewing, but until the work of the Lakemba chemists we didn’t know that the hypersalts of beer production could cause such dramatic effects. The disconnection means that we lapse into a yeasty dream when it comes to listening to the complaints of the subjugated peoples. ‘Sorry, what did you say? I was dozing.’ The subjugated population repeats itself, but once again the Galapagos Duct interruption victim says again, ‘Sorry, what did you say? I’ve just had a Vegemite sandwich. I’m a bit sleepy.’

  Galapogas Duct Interruption Syndrome (GDIS) is so powerful that it can eliminate entirely the remembrance of death or suffering. Not for GDIS sufferers; their pain is still felt exquisitely in the body and brain. It is the suffering of others that drifts into a distant memory, so distant that the GDIS sufferer guffaws when the savage complains about her death.

  Crucially, because the GDIS sufferer is a Christian, inheritor of the papal bull, he feels charity for the dead and damaged, and so reads books about it in the reading room of his colonial cottage in a leafy suburb identical in almost every respect to the one in an English leafy suburb, which, freakishly, is also called Kew. And of course the books are written by sufferers of GDIS.

  The delusion is caused by the failure of the Galapagos Duct. Under delusion, the sufferer witnessing a lack of education or appalling health is likely to call in the army as a remedy: dispossess the sick and uneducated, take away all their support systems, and deride the authority of their Elders – call them paedophiles, for instance. The GDIS sufferer is likely to call the imposition of this trauma a justified intervention, a necessary punishment.

  The least likely response to any Indigenous problem will be to examine the facts of the cultural history. The GDIS sufferer avoids any exposure to the knowledge that land was stolen from a fully functioning society, the longest living culture on earth, the birthplace of social development. He or she will run screaming from the fact that the oldest villages on earth have been found in Australia. They will avoid the inconvenient truth that fish traps at Brewarrina are probably the oldest human constructions on earth, that a midden at Warrnambool is as old as 120,000 years, 50,000 years earlier than the time at which the Out of Africa theory suggests humans first left Africa. They will consider it a nuisance that the oldest ground-edge axe in the world was manufactured in Western Australia 50,000 years ago, and feel no sympathy that the proponent of this discovery, American ethnographer Norman Tindale, was laughed out of the country by Australian archaeologists. They will meet with paternal incredulity those who suggest that in light of recent archaeological finds, bread was likely invented by a woman at Kakadu 65,000 years ago.

  The GDIS sufferer remembers none of this, and still mows his lawns in Kew and Kensington, comfortable – smug, you might say – in his belief that he ‘inherited’ a land from a people innocent of any civilised quality.

  So profound are the effects of GDIS, and so soporific, that when Vegemite is removed from the diet and the interruptive agent in the Galapagos Duct is diffused, the sufferer may begin to hear the plaints of the dispossessed and a point of enlightenment may pierce the mists.

  As the environment worsens, resources are depleted and capitalism collapses – as it almost did during the global financial crisis, under the weight of those calamities and the opportunism of stupidity of adversarial politics – we will search frantically for a solution, a straw to clutch in order to stop us from drowning.

  Inevitably we will turn to our eyes back to the earth. We might gnash our teeth for a few more years as we live on our reserves and blame the poor, blacks and Muslims for this state of affairs. Eventually we will have to admit that we depend on the earth and not the reverse. Hopefully we will agree that our predicament was caused by the hubris of the Bible, a hubris that deemed the earth was simply there for our wasteful domination, and that all humans were ripe for domination because we declared the Christian European to be God-like and all others savages.

  When in panic of the looming peril we turn to the skills of the First Peoples, we might look at the economic system that survived in Australia through millennia. We will find the grains and tubers that, due to having been domesticated in this land, need no more water or fertiliser than the land provides.

  Most of the grains are gluten-free and most of the tubers do not produce sugar but fructans, a gentle substance that promotes digestion and robust health, as the first European adventurers noticed.

  We will turn back to these plants not because we regret the invasion and are trying to make recompense; we will turn to them because we must, because they will represent the necessary elements of our survival. Then, perhaps, we might begin to wonder how to ensure our survival as a nation, and we might wonder what form of social development will protect our precarious existence.

  We might look to Aboriginal governance. If we consider that governance and become familiar with its age, complexity and persistence over time, adopted generation after generation by young people who were convinced of its intrinsic fairness, we will wonder at the massive philosophical achievement of those old, patient minds who insisted that a good society would ensure that everybody is housed, everybody can participate in the cu
lture, and everybody, when old and frail, will be loved, supported and listened to by the young.

  And we will realise that the world’s most profound philosophical statement, bingyadyun gnallu birrung nudjarn jungarung, is replicated exactly in the earth, rises from that earth, and that it includes us as a component, not a conqueror, as a modest deliberator, not a dominator.

  LEFT-HANDED WOMAN

  There’s a woman at Cape Otway and I can’t get her out of my head. I think of her every day. I know what she eats, I know what she looks at when she wakes each morning. I know the most intimate things about her. I know that she is left-handed. I know that she is meticulous, and I’m sure she has a son. I know all these things, but I dearly want to know what she thinks.

  I discovered her bedroom and kitchen and, like a thief turning over the contents of her drawers, I began to know her secrets, the things only lovers and family should know. I am ashamed, but men under thrall do not always act with honour.

  Is she beautiful? Her aunty certainly was. I’ve seen a photograph of her. The mischief in her eyes, even at eighty. But the woman of my fascination is probably more discreet, or at least I imagine her so. Because of her things, how she goes about her life. Or is that the romantic notion of a man under her spell, a man aching to see her, to ask her just one question, to look into her eyes, if even for the briefest moment?

  What right do I have to dare crave this woman’s attention, to lie awake at night wondering about her? My claim on her is that she is an Australian and so am I. We have both slept, loved and eaten within sight, sound and smell of the bay she saw every morning. She is my countrywoman. Dead now, murdered, but if we had met we would have been able to talk tides and fishing, fruiting and waterproof seams.

  You see, I found where she slept, where she cooked, where she sewed her winter clothes, discovered that she was left-handed, and her son too, most probably. On the Cape Otway cliffs in the longest unbroken occupation site in the world I found her seamstress’s kit. I saw that she had five different needle sizes in two different shapes and could dress the end and edge of her needles to keep them in perfect order so that the seam she sewed was completely waterproof. And when I went to use her implements I also discovered she was left-handed.

  Later I found her son’s hammer and axe. Well, I am only guessing that they were her son’s, but given the incidence of left-handedness in any human population and that the man and woman lived at the same time, the chances are they were mother and son. He was also a meticulous craftsman. The hammer he made from a piece of limestone is among the most beautiful objects I’ve ever handled. But it is not as beautiful as his mother’s sewing kit. This is no bigger than a matchbox, but on the two flat surfaces there are graded holes, grooves and notches to hone needles, cut thongs and yarns and dress needle points. The person who made it was deft and proud. I can imagine her heart filling with pride at her ability to care and provide for those she loved. She was proud, beautiful and left-handed.

  It was information of a far too intimate nature for a stranger to know. I turned and looked out over the view from her doorway and sat down almost involuntarily, shocked that I had entered such a private zone. The tide was going out and revealing the pools where she had gathered her crayfish, abalone, skutus, urchin, sea lettuce, sweep and whiting. I knew that already because I too had fished there and taken home the same bounty so I could sit at my table among my family and feel proud. I used her recipes: the chargrilled rock lobster, the sweep stuffed with peppercress and bower spinach, the abalone poached on coals with sea rocket and bush-pepper garnish, echidna and yam in the earth oven cooked to perfection in Lomandra baskets resting between clay heat beads.

  It was impossible that my countrymen and women could find this most womanly of women inhuman. The failure to understand that this woman could bake and sew and keep a neat home, provide for her children and be true to her husband, and most of all know and love her country, binds me and my fellow Australians in the grip of an ignorance she never knew.

  I wake at night dreaming that I could take food from that woman’s hands. Take the food she offered me; not her land.

  PUBLICATION DETAILS

  Versions of the following stories have appeared in the previous publications: ‘An Enemy of the People’ (as ‘Elbows on the Bar’), ‘Franks Is Dead’, ‘Left-Handed Woman’ and ‘True Hunters’ in Bruce Pascoe, Convincing Ground: Learning to Fall in Love with Your Country, Aboriginal Studies Press, 2007; ‘Andrew Bolt’s Disappointment’ in Griffith Review, no. 36, Winter 2012; ‘Big Yengo’ in Griffith Review, no. 42, 2013; ‘Choosing’ in Review of Australian Fiction, vol. 2, no. 1, 2012; Sections of ‘Here Is a Story I’d Like You to Tell’ (as ‘Smiling in the Dark’) in Andrew Rule (ed.), Man and Beast, Melbourne University Press, 2016; ‘Honeypot Two Shots Two Pots and Miss Hermansberg’ in Anne-Marie Smith (ed.), Culture Is … : Australian Stories Across Cultures, An Anthology, Wakefield Press, 2008; ‘Lament for Three Hands’ in Southerly, vol. 71, no. 2, 2011; ‘Peaceable Kingdom’ in Southerly online, 19 September 2016; ‘Pittosporum’ and ‘The Bridge Near Nowa Nowa’ in Bruce Pascoe, Nightjar, Seaglass Books, 2000; ‘Primary Colours’, ‘Soldier Goes to Ground’ and ‘Thylacine’ in Bruce Pascoe, Night Animals, Penguin Books, 1986; ‘Reaping Seeds of Discontent’ in 3010: Melbourne University Magazine, issue 2, 2016; ‘Rearranging the Dead Cat’ in Southerly, vol. 71, no. 2, 2011; ‘Rene of Rainbird Creek’ in Meanjin, vol. 65, no. 4, 2006; ‘Sea Wolves’ (an edited version of the 2016 Lin Onus Oration given at the University of Melbourne) in Island, no. 149, 2017; ‘Temper Democratic, Bias Australian’ (an edited version of the 2017 Stephen Murray-Smith Memorial Lecture given at the State Library of Victoria) in Meanjin, vol. 77, no. 3, Spring 2018; ‘The Headless Horsemen of the Drummer’ in Meanjin, vol. 68, no. 2, 2009; ‘The Imperial Mind’ in Griffith Review, no. 60, 2018; ‘Too Upsetting’ in The Monthly, July 2016; ‘Water Harvest’ in Bruce Pascoe, Dark Emu, Magabala Books, 2014.