August could see her dancing, her narrow childish hips, her long limbs weaving in the air. She could see Jedda as she took his arm when he went to run his hand through August’s hair. Where was Jedda going with him? Who was he? She tried to remember but couldn’t. In this wakeful dream, this vivid echo, August peered over the bed, somehow controlling what she could see, and looked at the floor of their bedroom. Below the bunks their cassette tapes were strewn across the rug, she saw the texta marker: Spice Girls, Hanson, TLC. She could see all their books and figurines and one cassette on the pillow of Jedda’s bunk, it read Letter to the Princess. That wasn’t a song, it was their secret recorded messages to Princess Diana of England. They used to record stories for her. True stories? August and Jedda were watching ballet dancers on the television when the news came on that Princess Diana had died. Why, she thought was she seeing this, now? Had she not gone to England for Jedda? she wondered, looking about their bedroom in her mind. Hadn’t she flown to Buckingham Palace for her? Hadn’t she done nothing all those years? Hadn’t she just washed dishes, like when they were kids doing the chores at home? Hadn’t she not eaten properly forever? Hadn’t she wasted herself to stay a girl forever, little girls forever? The cement block of her memory, that smooth slab in her mind cracked, the grey wall crumbled then, and all she saw was Jedda dancing. The music to Jedda’s dance. Chanting girls’ voices: Heads, shoulders, knees and toes, they sang that, Balang gaanha bungang burra-mi, bungang burra-mi, bungang burra-mi … she could see the little girls. August wanted to fall from the bunk bed and hug them, but as her head moved towards them, her neck dropped heavily like a body on drugs, a mind in the sea and she was awake, in the field again. The brolga folded itself through the motions, heads, shoulders, knees, toes … poking into air … pecking into the earth. Again and again the body surged from the dust field, like future and past colliding.
Then the brolga’s mates arrived from the west, a hundred sails flung into the sea of yellow-green. They followed the same motions, bicycling their own sinewy legs, but the first brolga danced the most: it stood forward in the pack, its wings spread out the widest. August could feel her face turn wet. A benediction blanketed the yard in all the words that weren’t needed to be said. It was simply, painfully, the finality of a time. All along they’d wanted peace, or to be happy, and they are good things to want, especially for children, but they’d been drawn again and again into the past, where all pain lives. She wondered if everyone was haunted by being a kid. Haunted by the feeling of being unshielded. They weren’t protected from everything, August remembered, not the words hurled by the other locals in town, not the slurred looks, not the school history books and those lies, not everyone around her whose spirits were shattered in a thousand pieces, and she remembered clearly now – how they weren’t protected from everything at all, not even Uncle Jimmy Corvette who liked to climb into their beds when nobody seemed to notice.
She could hear Gospel music playing around her when it wasn’t. Under the eaves, down the verandah steps and out into that old field ran the music, rustling dormant seeds from pods and pods from branches, and stuck-branches from trees. She looked back at the verandah of Prosperous and could see Nana and Poppy that night, dressed up for the fundraiser and waving goodbye to the girls. That was the year the Gospel came to Prosperous and hadn’t Jedda and August been over the moon? Nana and Poppy had bought a brand-new CD player to add music to the beginnings and ends of Bible study on Fridays. Poppy said it was God’s Will and then he pressed the play button. Younger Nana always agreed with God but smiled and winked at the girls about God’s wishes all the time. They let the music run through every part of that house. They even opened up the windows and August had seen Gospel leaking out of Prosperous like the smoke of something burnt off the stove. Those wailing singing voices pitching camp on that farm.
No-one knew what Jimmy Corvette was then – he was just babysitting that night, wasn’t he? He said he’d brought a movie for them and did they want to watch it? It was on VHS. August didn’t remember what the movie was called but she remembered it wasn’t rated G or PG. The girls didn’t like it, it was confusing, and Jedda and August squeezed each other’s hand under the blanket when Uncle Jimmy kept running his fingers through their hair. August could feel popcorn shells caught between her teeth when he put his mouth on hers. Jedda looked away and then August looked away.
The next day at breakfast, around the cornflakes and coffee pot, Poppy held the newspaper aloft and announced to anyone listening that a statue of the Virgin Mary was crying blood in a country called the Philippines. August had thought that the Virgin Mary must have known what they were feeling then. August had wondered if she’d ever be able to cry again. She’d imagined when she did it would be of blood, too, but she didn’t think she could squeeze a drop in any case. She’d been changed forever, she felt she were buried that day and all the days after, under a hundred babushka-doll casings, way beneath the wood and varnish. And she didn’t ever want to listen to Gospel music again.
Weeks later was the second time it happened, wasn’t it? But Jedda led Uncle Jimmy Corvette away from August. Jedda saved her.
Her head seemed as if it could feel the rest of her body then, as if things were sinking in and her feeling was seeping out, like a sieve fallen into a bowl of cake batter. She sat on the sandy dirt, crying. All feeling crept over her body, everywhere, like waking up comatose nerves of the skin, the undead stirring. Her mouth, her throat, her nose – even her ears felt as if they were wet with tears. A word came into her mind, fully-formed, she knew what it meant – burral-gang – the brolga. She didn’t know how she knew the word but she knew it. Burral-gang. The brolgas finished their dance. It was her, dancing. Jedda and her friends began to flee the paddock, spindly legs galloping south, away from all of them before taking full flight. August ran her fingers through the dirt, just scratching the surface. Poppy, she said out loud; Jedda, she said on the inside.
She closed her eyes, a dam had broken, broken their little hearts, hearts born as fragile as clay. With her hands flat on the dry dirt and her eyes blinded with tears, she felt as if she were back home, back on the land she belonged to. At the same time, she thought that this was the saddest place on earth.
TWENTY-FOUR
Reverend Ferdinand Greenleaf ’s letter to Dr George Cross,
2nd August 1915, continued
VI
Please forgive my lengthy digressions, I simply wish to illustrate everything in order for you and for whomever this may reach, to have a proper understanding of our Mission life.
There was order and grace to our lives at Prosperous Mission, the township built with the young men who had become fathers, and their children who were growing with the instruction of Godly ways, formal education and most comfortingly, some of their own family members that had remained wild, unwilling to join our Mission, but who visited in peace and goodwill.
Although over these years I knew of and had witnessed the increase of the Native labour system occurring in the plains, and visitors were less frequent. As such – fewer young men lived at the Mission as they had been captured and compelled, I dare say with force, to touch the pen to assignment papers impossible for them to understand. Furthermore, they then become the Bond Service Property of a fellow on a Station. And when they subsequently ran away, which they most certainly did, a warrant was issued for their arrest, the Police were set in motion, then they are run down or ferreted out, sometimes here at the Mission, taken to the Police Depot and chained for weeks before being returned to these monstrous Station men who wave in victory paper copies of the Masters and Servants Act. Thus fracturing those beloved families I’d worked so hard to keep intact.
In the sixth year of our Mission, we had a closeknit, and, in so far as was possible, a protected community of weavers, fishermen, children of God, education and good Providence – our crop of bearded wheat yielded for two years straight. We had births, and, naturally, some of the ageing residents
did die. I was surprised to learn that the Natives had a great reverence for the dead, and I allowed them to conduct their private ceremonies before we hammered together coffins, and marked out a permanent cemetery under a copse of trees. It eased me a great deal knowing that of those who passed at the Mission, all had taken baptism beforehand, some at my assurance, yet with their total acceptance, on their deathbeds.
At the turn of the seventh year of the Mission, a great disruption seemed to take hold of the community of Massacre Plains. Social issues were becoming increasingly hostile; the Government had come down heavily on the immigrant goldminers, and the Worker newsletter had printed three issues within the year, igniting division between what were called the silvertails and the hoi-polloi. Though both factions of society, mind you, were agreeable in their prejudice against the Native.
One evening, a group of white men broke down the fences and entered our reserve. Asleep in my hut, I awoke to the great chanting of the horsemen calling out for enacting ‘vengeance’ and suffering an ‘eye-for-an-eye’. I immediately threw on my pantaloons and boots, retrieved the shotgun from its high place upon the shelf and raced to the yard. The girls and women were screaming and running, first to the men’s hut; but on seeing that the White men had barricaded it and set the men’s quarters alight with their torches, they ran towards myself in a swarm. I let them pass, and the women and girls began to pour into my hut for safety. Into the yard, the Native men were leaping from the windows of their own quarters as the fire began to lick and flame. I demanded to know the business these intruders had; however intoxicated they were with spirits, they remained atop their horses, armed with whips and gripping their rifles with alarming certainty. The six of them, yelling over the top of one another replied that our Blacks, ‘Niggers’ they referred to them, had speared their cattle and I knew by their tense faces that I could not resort to reason or Scripture. That they were set on vengeful murder that evening. The Blackfellows meanwhile had scattered from their large hut to camouflage themselves within the bush.
I reached the White men who were still mounted on their horses and pointed my rifle at their beasts. I demanded they take their leave or I would fetch for the authorities. I admit, my hands were shaking and my nerves were unsettled. I felt immensely out of my depth. Keller, without a weapon, was gathering those frightened children who could not fit into my hut into the schoolhouse. I held the rifle at my shoulder, and tried as I might not to shake with it, when one of the White men, illuminated by the fire, galloped his horse around the centre of the square and approached me at speed and, with his boot to my head, knocked me to the ground.
Throughout much of the rest of the ordeal I lay unconscious on the dirt of our very own open square. When I awoke in the care of Keller, the men’s dormitory quarters were sending cinders into the sky. A horse lay by the fire, dead with a spear through its chest. The White horsemen had fled taking two women with them, much to the distress of the female residents whose wails echoed beyond the acacia pines.
Keller immediately informed me that a Blackfellow who tried to stop the kidnap of the women had been lashed with a stockwhip upon the neck and dragged from the pommel for numerous turns, on his back and his front, before being shot. I remember even through the smoke that the scent of blood was strong. I touched the top of my head absent-mindedly, but the smell of blood was not my own. I came from the dirt to assist the injured Blackfellow. I staggered towards the shape on the ground and fell there on my knees and was sorrowed to find it was Wowhely, a good and honourable man about half my age, my friend. On seeing me approach he said he was frightened. A pool of darkness had seeped over his chest and stained the hands of his brothers and my own. I realised that I was only useful for giving prayer. I said to him, ‘You needn’t be scared because the Lord Jesus is always near those who put their trust in Him, those, like you, Wowhely, who are passing through the dark valley.’
A song began to come from the mouths of the men then, it rose up from Wowhely’s lifeless, bloodied body and seemed to carry lit into the night sky, a song that surely caused angels to cover their faces and weep. The next day the Natives held their ceremony in private. The following day we laid Wowhely’s prepared and blessed body to rest in the eternal home of the cemetery. The cemetery that had been swelling in size, growing with the suffering that hung like a pall of locusts over the plains.
TWENTY-FIVE
harrow, plough – gungambirra All you need to work the land well, it’s all here. Even before the Reverend, who thought he was farming for the first time, we knew how to gungambirra.
hole used as a sleeping place – nguram-birrang With our girls we’d head south, down the Murrumby. After the dam was built we’d head north with the granddaughters. We’d camp high on the Darling River. Lots of other families would be there too, their cars rigged with kayaks and canoes, fishing rods, fold-out chairs, four-person tents. They were the loveliest times, those trips away. Seeing something different, having an adventure, finding where the Murrumby ended, and the later years, where it had begun. I’d show the kids how the Gondiwindi slept in the early days, so I’d dig out the ground near the bank and light a couple of fires in the afternoon; while they were going I’d prepare our fire pit for the evening. Then I’d do some fishing upstream. When it was getting real cold and all the kids had bathed and got into their pyjamas and it was time to cook dinner, I’d shovel out the coals from the other fires I’d made and feed them back into the main one. I’d lay a couple of beach towels down into the little gulamon shapes I’d made and then tell the kids to get to bed. Well, weren’t they amazed! A warm little ditch to lie in and tell jokes to each other by the fire until dinner and then bedtime. Joey would be propped on his elbows after the girls had fallen asleep, and me still awake in another, and we’d talk boys’ talk until the fire went out and the Milky Way reeled like a film above us.
hollow tree set on fire, smoke coming from top – dural My ancestor, a great-great-great-uncle of mine, took me for a walk one day. ‘We’re going for dinner,’ he told me. I must’ve been about eleven and was quite used to time travel by then. So my great-great-great-uncle, who said his name was Cooradoc, pointed to a dead tree, its branches had broken off and the entire trunk was grey. Uncle Cooradoc tapped his axe on the dead tree and a scurrying noise came back. Then Uncle made a fire with flint stones and the long grass, and cut into the tree to make a hollow. He handed the fire to me and said to hold it there in the dead tree. Faster than I’d seen a hungry goanna, Uncle scaled the tree. He told me to let go of the grass then, which was a good thing because my fingers were beginning to singe. So the fire blew up the hollow fast and the next thing I know, Uncle is climbing back down with a possum in his fist. ‘Dinnertime,’ he said, and smiled. ‘That,’ he said, pointing at the tree aflame, ‘is dural. And this?’ he asked, holding the possum between us. ‘Bugari,’ I said.
Holy Spirit – mudyigaali One day I decided that I might kill a man. I was at the end of my thinking, and at the end of your thinking even the unthinkable becomes an option. Well, I rested on my knees like I had when I was a boy. I prayed and asked and tried to find an answer from the mudyigaali but none came. I went down to the riverbank and screamed to the spirits too, but they wouldn’t come, this was still the time of the whirly-whirly. The next morning, I dragged August outside. I didn’t hurt her, I just needed to do something. Earlier, when the morning star was still visible I’d boiled water in the steel saucepan. I’d let it cool in the moonlight, I’d sat a quartz crystal in there even. In the morning, I’d forgotten, and Elsie’s friends had turned up for morning tea. Well, I was quite desperately sure on the thing I thought I might do. So I took August out by the back of the shearers’ sheds and baptised her, or what I thought was baptism. I said, ‘Sorry, Augie, it’s to protect you, darling.’ And I poured the water from the saucepan onto her hair. Poor thing, she cried, children do that when the world gets loud and confusing. Well, I gave her a hug and sent her on her way and bought her something
later that day from the paper shop. It was a little case with miniature books inside by Beatrix Potter. After that I planned the murder I was going to do. I couldn’t square that away with anyone though, not Elsie, not the ancestors, not the mudyigaali itself – it was something in that part of my soul that belonged only to me.
horses, place of wild horses – yarramalang When I was mustering, we’d saddle up at sunrise, have tea and johnnycakes and take off and work until sunset. Some of the stations were more than ten thousand square clicks in size. That sort of country reminds you why people think of this land as wide and blue with endless yonder. I’ve seen it with my own eyes! The only change in routine was colt breaking or heading back to Massacre’s smaller farms for shearing season. I didn’t use a stockwhip myself, I had a kindred spirit in a pair of kelpie mutts. Those dogs would sleep with me in the swag even – three heads poking out the end each morning. Me reading them a passage or two before the day of work they had to do. They worked just as long as us jackaroos, those dogs. Once we were moving a few thousand head of sheep north and we had to cross some wild country. Well, there was a beautiful green valley that opened up as we went north. The bloke I was working with was keen to follow it a way lower to cool off. I gave in but warned him just a quick dip and then we’d have to go. We started down the valley and there we saw them, about twenty wild yarraman, which meant we wouldn’t be cooling off after all, not with the dogs and the chaos that would have scattered the herd. Isn’t anything more beautiful in the world I reckon than a pack of wild animals. That’s what those places are called, yarraman heaven – yarramalang.
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