The Dreaming

by Barbara Wood

"No blankets, boss," the old man said. "No baskets." The women were whispering among themselves, and the elder turned to them, then turned back and said, "My wife. She say she can tell your fortunes."

  "Yes," Hugh said with a smile. "All right then." He reached into his pocket and brought out some coins.

  The oldest of the women stepped up to the wagon, looked carefully at Joanna, and then stared hard. She held up her hands and said something in a language Joanna didn't understand.

  "What is she saying?" Hugh asked the old man.

  "She say there is something about your missus. Shadows be around her. Shadow of a dog. Following your missus. She say she see the shadow of dog there, behind your missus."

  Adam glanced around, but Joanna froze. The recurring nightmare suddenly came back to her—the nightmare from the ship, the dog, the funeral; the serpent made of stars.

  "May I ask her a question?" Joanna said. "I'd like to know if she can interpret dreams."

  "Dreams are an important part of their beliefs," Hugh said. "What do you want to know?"

  "What does it mean to dream of a serpent—a giant serpent?"

  When Hugh turned to repeat the question to the old man, the elder suddenly threw up his hands and said something Hugh did not understand.

  "What is it, Mr. Westbrook?" Joanna asked.

  "I'm afraid we've broken a taboo. They're not allowed to talk about the Serpent."

  "I don't understand. What serpent? Wait, please don't let them go! I want them to explain something to me."

  Joanna watched the old man quickly gather the family together and guide them off the road and into the trees. The old woman looked back once, and then she was gone.

  As Hugh climbed back up into the wagon and took up the reins, he said, "I'm sorry, Miss Drury, but there are just some things the Aborigines won't talk about."

  "She knew something," Joanna said. "I wonder what."

  Hugh gave Joanna a puzzled look, then said, "Miss Drury, you're trembling. Is something the matter?"

  "That old woman knows something about me. I could tell by the way she looked at me. She knew about the dog that nearly killed me and that somehow caused my mother to die."

  "I don't think so," Hugh said. "She said she was telling your future. There must be a dog in your future."

  "No," Joanna said, as the wagon moved along into the twilight. "I know what she was referring to." The shadows, Joanna thought. What do they mean?

  She turned to Hugh and said, "What is significant about serpents?"

  "Well, there's something called the Rainbow Serpent, and it's part of their mythology. I can't tell you much, except that the Rainbow Serpent is a creature of destruction. I believe the Aborigines feel it is something to be very much afraid of."

  "Rainbow Serpent," she murmured, thinking of the references to dreams about a "colored snake" in her mother's diary.

  "What was the fight about just now, Mr. Westbrook? Why were those men so upset with these people?"

  "They claim the Aborigines were trying to steal from them, but I doubt that they were."

  "But one of them was going to whip the old man. Why?"

  "Unfortunately, some white people are afraid of the Aborigines. They think they have special powers—supernatural powers. And so they fear them."

  "And do they have supernatural powers?"

  "Some people believe they do. I don't know. I've seen Aborigines do extraordinary things." Hugh guided the two-horse team along the country road. "Who's to say why? White men weren't even in this part of the country as little as thirty-five years ago. We hardly know the race that lived here for thousands and thousands of years before we came. Some of us have made friends with them. I have an Aboriginal girl, Sarah, working at my station—she helps Ping-Li in the cookhouse, and does the laundry. And I have Aboriginal stockhands; they're good workers. And then there's Ezekiel, who's older than time and remembers when his people had never set eyes on a white person. We get along, most Aborigines and myself. But I have to admit that I don't understand them as well as I do white men."

  What had the old woman seen, Joanna wondered, when she looked at me? "Where are they going, Mr. Westbrook?" she said. "The old man and his family?"

  "Nowhere, really. They're just wandering out of instinct. Now that their land has been taken up by white settlers, the Aborigines don't have anywhere to go. I've heard that this road used to be what they called a songline. Maybe that's why we ran into them here."

  "A songline?"

  "I'm not sure I can explain it to you," he said. "Songlines are part of the Aborigines' sacred lore, their beliefs. It's taboo for them to speak about sacred things, especially to a white man, and so there is little we know about them. But as near as I can determine, songlines are like invisible tracks. They mark the routes the Aborigine ancestors walked, thousands of years ago, and on up until fairly recently—thirty-five years or so ago, anyway, even less in some parts. Songlines are sort of like invisible roads, crisscrossing the continent. Apparently way back the ancestors walked all over Australia, and as they walked they sang out the names of everything they encountered. They believed they were singing the world into existence. The Aborigines believe that song is existence—to sing is to live. And that is why, too, to the Aborigines, everything in nature is sacred—rocks, trees, water-holes. Even," he said, leaning toward Adam, "even little boys who won't talk!"

  Adam gave Hugh a wary look, and then a shy smile.

  Joanna watched the countryside slowly surrender to the night, and with twilight came a strange kind of silence, a settling of the world. Joanna wondered about the Australia of those far-off times. Was there something from back then, some ancient magic embodied in her, in her family, as her mother had seemed to believe?

  Joanna's grandparents had been here at just about the time Hugh Westbrook said the native people had begun to lose their ownership of the land. Had an elder, much like the one she had just encountered, spoken some sort of curse on John and Naomi Makepeace and their three-and-a-half-year-old child, Emily?

  She tried to imagine what kind of invisible lines the ancients might have walked, what kind of songs they might have sung. She thought of her mother being born here, living here as a child. She thought of the Aborigines they had just passed. Perhaps it had been a person like one of them, thirty-seven years ago, who had taken the child Emily to the authorities, and put her on a boat for England. Had it been the woman who kept appearing in Lady Emily's memory-dreams?

  They must have still had dignity then, those Aborigines of her mother's childhood. But the natives she had just seen appeared to be a sad and dejected group, moving slowly along out of instinct, with nowhere to go, no destination—on the move because of some vague dream, an inherited compulsion that, Joanna now speculated, might be not unlike the compulsion that had brought her here. The compulsion that had pressed her mother to want to return to the place where she was born, in the hope of retracing the patterns of her life. Her own family's song-line, in a way.

  Joanna peered ahead into the darkness, and saw the thin ribbon of road disappearing into it. She imagined that this road might become her own songline, and wondered: If she followed it far enough, would she come to the end—and to the beginning?

  They set up camp at a site called Emu Creek, where other families had pitched tents and lit campfires. A smoky pall hung over the campground; children laughed and ran about, and the aroma of coffee and bacon filled the air.

  "Who are all these people?" Joanna asked as they sat beside their own fire, waiting for the tea to boil.

  "A lot of them are shearers," Hugh said, stirring the tea in what he had called a billycan. "Shearing season is about to start and the gangs are on the road. The rest are families headed out to farms in the west and up north." Joanna looked around in wonder. The night air seemed to pulsate with life, its rhythm invading her and sharpening her excitement. So many people on the move!

  Hugh found himself noticing how pretty Joanna looked, how gracefully her bod
y leaned toward the fire, and he was surprised to realize that he was comparing her to Pauline, the woman he was soon to marry.

  He looked over at Adam, who was exploring the perimeter of their tiny camp. "The boy seems to be a little better now," he said to Joanna. "I just hope this journey won't be too hard on him. It'll take us four or five days to get to Merinda, depending. I'll make a bed for you and Adam in the wagon, and I'll sleep here by the fire."

  "There is something strange about his not speaking," Joanna said. "He hasn't said a word since we left Melbourne. It's as if he has withdrawn inside himself and is hiding there, with a secret that he can't bring himself to tell. If only we knew how his mother died. Perhaps it would explain his hysterical episodes, and why he won't talk."

  Hugh looked at Joanna and he wanted to say: You have secrets, too, which you aren't telling.

  "Tell me about this place you're looking for," he said. "You said it was called Karra Karra."

  Joanna reached into the bag that she had set by her feet, and brought out a yellowed piece of paper. "This deed is very old," she said as she handed it to him. "Unfortunately, the ink has faded. We weren't able to make out when and where it was signed."

  As Westbrook looked the paper over, he could make out certain phrases:—"Two days' ride from ... and twenty kilometers from Bo—Creek." There was an illegible signature and an official-looking seal. At some time in its history, the paper had been exposed to water; the date of the deed was nearly obliterated. "It's impossible to tell from this document where the land might be," he said. "But you say it's near a place called Karra Karra. That is most likely an Aboriginal place name, and a lot of those names have been changed over the years, some of them so long ago that the original names have been lost."

  "I shall find it somehow," she said, as she rolled up the paper and replaced it in her bag. "I must."

  The tea was boiling, and as Hugh poured it into two enamel mugs, he said, "I can't help feeling, Miss Drury, that this Karra Karra means something more to you than just being a piece of land you've inherited."

  She called to Adam that he would have to go to bed soon, then she said, "Yes, I think it might be a lot more than just that, Mr. Westbrook. It might be the place where my mother was born. That was something she wanted to find out all her life. My mother and father were the only family I had, so it's important to me to do those things for her that she was not able to do."

  Westbrook tasted his tea. "My mother died giving birth to me. After that, it was just my father and me. We were rootless, we never had a home. We traveled around the outback taking jobs where we could, moving from town to town like forwarded letters. He died when I was fifteen. A horse threw him, he was killed instantly. We were on our way to a shearing job. I buried him under the only tree for miles around. And I've been on my own ever since."

  He paused, took a sip, and said, "That's why I told the authorities in South Australia that I would take Adam. A child needs a home, a family."

  "He's lucky to have you, Mr. Westbrook," Joanna said.

  Hugh looked at Joanna for a moment, seeing moonlight reflected in amber eyes, then he said, "What did you want to ask the old woman back there about a giant serpent?"

  "It has something to do with my mother." Joanna found herself reaching into her bag again and bringing out a book. "My mother had nightmares, and often they were about a giant serpent. One of the strange things is that after her death I too began to dream of a monstrous snake. It's all recorded in here."

  She handed the book to Hugh, who opened it to the front page. He read the inscription: "To Emily Makepeace on the day of her wedding, from Major Petronius Drury, her loving husband, July 12, 1850."

  "It's a kind of memory book," Joanna explained. "My mother started it as a diary, but then she thought that if she recorded her dreams, and any memories, however brief, that came back to her, she might be able to work out the blank places in her life. And also the—"

  Hugh looked up from the book. "And also the what?" he said.

  "I don't know that you want to hear about it. I'm afraid it's going to sound so odd."

  Hugh smiled and said, "Go ahead."

  Joanna spoke more quietly. "My mother believed that there was some sort of a ... curse on her family. She had no proof of it, it was just a feeling she had."

  "What sort of a curse?"

  "I don't know. She didn't know. But she thought it might have been Aboriginal."

  Hugh stared at her, then said, "Please go on."

  Joanna spoke hesitantly, telling him about the rabid dog that had come into the military compound where they were living, and how Lady Emily had stepped in to save Joanna from its attack, how a soldier had killed it just in time. And then how Lady Emily had developed the fatal symptoms of rabies a few days later. "She believed right until the end that it was the curse that had done it—a poison, she called it."

  "A poison? Why a poison?"

  "I don't know. She said she had dreamt it. She also believed that the curse had been passed on to me."

  "Do you believe that?"

  "I don't know what to believe, Mr. Westbrook. But I can't shake the feeling that ... something, I don't know what, surrounds me. Maybe it's just some kind of bad luck, or whatever you might call it."

  When he gave her a dubious look, she said, "The ship that I came out on was becalmed, in a place where the captain said it had never happened before. We were stopped for days on the ocean, Mr. Westbrook. Our water supply was threatened."

  "So? These things happen."

  She sighed and said, "Yes, I know. And I know it sounds outrageous. But I had a dream, back in India before I left. I dreamt it all—what was going to happen. And it turned out to be exactly like the dream."

  "Well, that's odd, but it does happen sometimes. I don't see why you need to think you were the cause of it. Miss Drury, did you know at that time that you were coming to Australia?"

  "Yes."

  "Then perhaps what you had was a nightmare that's quite common to people who are about to travel. A lot of people are afraid of sailing. Ships are lost at sea rather frequently; it's a dangerous way to travel. Your mind was worried, that's all."

  "Most people dream of shipwrecks or drowning, Mr. Westbrook. Not of being becalmed."

  He flipped through the diary, and noticed that some of the earlier pages contained recipes for medicines and remedies. "Your mother appears to have known a lot about medicine," he said.

  "We moved frequently; my father was an officer with the British army. And very often we found ourselves in places where there was no doctor. My mother learned from the local native healers, she read books, she taught herself. She took care of my father and me, our household servants, and sometimes even wounded soldiers."

  "How did she become interested in healing? Was her father a doctor?"

  "No, I think he was a minister. A missionary, actually, to Aborigines somewhere here in Australia."

  "I see," Hugh said. Noticing that her cup was empty, he said, "Here, let me refill that for you." When he handed the cup back, he said, "So that's why your mother thought the curse, or poison, was Aboriginal—she lived among them for a while, as a child."

  "She suspected that she might have, but she couldn't remember—except perhaps in her dreams."

  "Maybe that's where she inherited her interest in healing—from the Aborigines. They were a very healthy race when the white men first came here. They knew how to take care of just about any ailment. In fact, you told me your mother used eucalyptus oil in her remedies. Until very recently, the eucalyptus tree wasn't even found outside of Australia."

  Just then Adam came over to Joanna, and Hugh said, "Speaking of which, Adam doesn't look too well. What's the matter, son? Does your head hurt?"

  Joanna put her hand on the boy's forehead and discovered that it was hot. "Do you have a headache, Adam?" she asked, and when he nodded, she said, "I'll give you something that will make you feel better." She took a small ivory box from her bag, and when s
he opened it, Hugh saw an array of tiny bottles. Joanna poured a few drops from one into the rest of her tea for Adam. "What's that?" Hugh said.

  "It's willow-bark extraction. It will ease his pain and reduce the fever. He must have banged his head very hard on that pier. Here you go, Adam. Drink this down, and then to bed with you."

  After Adam was settled and asleep in the back of the wagon, Joanna said, "Has he always had trouble talking?"

  "I don't believe so. Whenever Mary wrote to me, she always said Adam was a happy, healthy boy. But the authorities in South Australia said he was mute when they found him, and they were unable to get him to speak."

  "We have to encourage him to talk about what happened. But slowly, in his own time. Could we possibly write to the authorities for more details about him? Perhaps if they can tell us what happened, we might be able to find a way to help him over it."

  "I'll send a letter as soon as we get to Merinda."

  "It is kind of you to take Adam, Mr. Westbrook. I think that, even more than most children, he will need a strong sense that he belongs somewhere."

  "When his father died, I wrote to Mary, inviting her and the baby to come and live at Merinda. But the farm had been Joe's dream, she said, and she wanted to keep it going. I sent her money, but perhaps I should have done more."

  "Well, you're helping her now. You're taking care of her son, and I'm sure she is somehow aware of it."

  "Perhaps. The Aborigines believe the dead are always with us. They go back to the Dreaming, but they are still with us."

  "The Dreaming?"

  Hugh picked up a stick and stirred the embers. "It's a concept white men have little understanding of, myself included."

  Joanna stared at him; she thought of one of the memory dreams her mother had described in the diary: "I dreamt again about waiting at a cave. I am small, I am being held in someone's arms. I see women emerging from a dark red mouth. Is it the cave? They are dark, they are carrying things, they are singing. A white woman appears, and I realize it is my mother. She is naked; how pale her skin is, compared to the other women. I call to her, but she doesn't look at me. She has a strange expression on her face, and I am suddenly very afraid."