by Barbara Wood
Suddenly she was remembering something from years ago, when she and Sarah had gone down to the river and Sarah had told Joanna that the Kangaroo Ancestor had come through Merinda. She had pointed to a grassy hillock and had said, "That is where Kangaroo Ancestress slept. Do you see her great hind legs, her long tail, her very small head?" Joanna remembered how she had stared hard at the hillock and had indeed seen the sleeping kangaroo.
Was that the answer? To look at the wilderness for natural clues, images? To stop looking at the wilderness through English eyes, to try to look at this place as an Aborigine would?
She stared and stared, and the landscape did begin to seem more interesting. Rocks and trees and creek beds began to shift; they remained still but they underwent a metamorphosis. Suddenly Joanna stared at a group of boulders; could it look like the outline of an emu?
She ran to them, giddy with hunger and thirst, and when she reached them she searched for the food or water that should have been there. But it was only a barren group of boulders.
She looked around again. There, just over there, the way that creek bed curved. Did it resemble a snake? Joanna ran to it, fell to her knees and dug into the hard clay. But no water came.
She stood up and searched the wilderness with tear-filled eyes. Nature seemed to be mocking her, showing her Dreaming Sites that weren't really Dreaming Sites at all. Despair rose in her like heat. She thought of Captain Fielding, lying in a poor, unidentified grave, his dream of living out his years beneath the sun of Fiji as dead as he.
"It isn't fair!" Joanna suddenly cried. "Beth! Where are you? Oh God—"
She dropped back to her knees and covered her face with her hands. When the salty tears fell into her mouth, Joanna was startled. At first she thought it had started to rain, and then she saw the dampness on her hands. She licked her palms and thought of the desperate state she had been reduced to. Her eyes settled upon her leather satchel, with its tarnished buckles and the initials "JM." She thought of the papers her grandfather had so carefully and meticulously written in shorthand, how useless they were to her now. Although a fascinating chronicle of his observations of the Aborigines, they contained no practical information. He had written that the women had gathered food, but he had failed to mention how. He had said the clan went to waterholes, but he had omitted to record the manner in which they had found those waterholes. Just a worthless, cursed bunch of papers.
Suddenly, she snatched up the satchel and flung it away from her as hard as she could. It bounced off a boulder and landed with a thud. As Joanna stared miserably at it, she remembered that the deed was in there, and the opal and the diary. She got up to retrieve it. She looked inside to make sure the fire opal wasn't broken, and she saw her own notes—the translation of John Makepeace's papers. Her eye caught on a sentence she had written: Djoogal's clan belongs to the Kangaroo Totem.
Joanna wondered suddenly if she had been half right—that she should indeed find a songline and follow it. Perhaps she had been wrong in thinking she could just make one up. The right songline had to be here, not just something that resembled an emu or a snake or whatever symbol she chose; she had to know exactly what songline lay across this country. If she was in the ancestral territory of Djoogal's clan, then she must look for the songline of the Kangaroo Ancestor.
She climbed up the bank of the dried creek bed and slowly searched the landscape again, this time looking for the ancient track that the Kangaroo Ancestor must have taken thousands of years ago, when he had come through here, singing up creation. She tried to lay Joanna Westbrook aside, to turn herself into Djoogal, or a member of his clan, or perhaps the girl named Reenadeena. If they were standing here and looking for the songline of the Kangaroo Dreaming, she wondered, what would they see?
Was that it, over there? A rocky formation, thrust up from the earth millennia ago, and which Joanna would earlier have said was a sleeping lyrebird or a fighting bandicoot, but which now she saw might look like two kangaroos, one large, the other small, bent over as if grazing.
There, she thought. Is that where the Kangaroo Ancestor stopped long ago, to rest and to eat?
She began to walk toward it, barely aware of the darkening day, or that she was growing lightheaded, or that her pulse throbbed unevenly in her temples. And even before she reached the formation, Joanna believed she had found a Dreaming Site of the Kangaroo Ancestor.
Joanna kept track of the days by collecting small twigs. Each morning, before she struck out again, she found a twig and put it into the satchel. Then she left some sort of mark—either her name scratched on a rock, or her initials carved on a tree—with the usual arrow made of pebbles, showing the direction in which she had gone. And by the time she realized that she had left the comparative safety and security of the mallee, and had wandered into the Great Victoria Desert, she had collected fourteen twigs.
She had water now, and food. At the first Dreaming Site she had dug into the soil until she had found brackish but drinkable water. At the next Dreaming Site, where she could see in the outline of a salt pan the place where Kangaroo Ancestor had mated with another kangaroo, Joanna had prized witchetty grubs out of the roots of an acacia and had eaten them raw.
She managed one day to catch a lizard, and that, too, she had eaten raw. And then she remembered that Bill Lovell had told her long ago that the inner bark of a tree is often edible. And this, too, had sustained her.
One Dreaming Site was an enormous hole in the ground which Joanna surmised might have been a meteor crater, caused long ago by some prehistoric celestial shower, because when she checked her compass, the needle spun crazily. The floor of the crater had become a clay pan, and Joanna remembered Sarah telling her about a certain kind of frog that buried itself in clay pans, hiding just beneath the surface between bouts of rain and storing water in its body. She dug into the clay and found frogs, which, when she squeezed them, poured out fresh, drinkable water.
One day, late in the afternoon, she had seen a flock of red-tailed cockatoos fly over, and had thought: They are heading for water. She had followed them and found a waterhole filled with fresh water.
On the fifth day of following the Kangaroo Dreaming, Joanna had come across something that shocked and dismayed her, and caused her spirits to plummet. It was a man's skeleton. The clothes had long since rotted away and the bones had been picked clean, so that she knew it had not been a member of her party. But he had perished alone out here. Joanna found a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles near the skull and kept them. That afternoon, before the day grew dark, she was able to make a fire, using one of the lenses and aiming it at where she imagined the sun to be. Finally, she was able to eat cooked food.
On the eighth day, two eagles flew by, fighting over a baby wallaby which one of them had caught. In their fight, they dropped it, and Joanna ran and grabbed it. She stripped off the hide, skinning it the way she had skinned rabbits for dinner at Merinda, and roasted the flesh in hot coals. The meat lasted for days.
As Joanna followed the ancient songline, she felt herself begin to grow strong, despite her primitive diet and the punishing aspects of the landscape. Instead of growing weaker and more helpless, she felt a curious new strength invade her body. She lost all her hairpins, so that her hair hung down to her waist and she had to push it back over her ears. When the weather began to grow hotter, she undid the top buttons of her blouse, undid the cuffs, and rolled up the long sleeves. She removed her petticoats and, out of some vague sense of modesty, buried them. She mixed water with clay and made a paste that she spread over her face to protect it from sunburn. She tied mulga branches together and wore them as a hat. She bundled the satchel into Captain Fielding's jacket and tied it around her waist so that she could walk with her hands free.
A change came over the terrain. Joanna realized one day that she had entered a wonderland. The desert sparkled. Dried-up water holes formed saucer-shaped depressions in the sand, filled with rainbow-colored mineral deposits that shimmered like ground glass
. Salt pans glowed; the sky was incandescent. And Joanna was overcome with a sense of having returned to the beginning of time—the Dreamtime.
The sun finally came out and she established direction by using her watch. The north-south line ran between noon and the hour hand—and she realized that she was walking eastward, deeper into the heart of the Great Victoria Desert. Yet she knew she could not turn back. Behind her lay desolation and the risk of getting lost, but as long as she stayed with the songline, perhaps she would be safe.
She was also aware of being impelled by another force. This was the songline of Djoogal's clan—she was certain of it. This was the way Naomi and John Makepeace had come, with their tents and hopes. This was the track Reenadeena had followed to take little Emily out of danger. Joanna no longer felt as if she were alone. Spirits walked with her.
On the fifteenth day of following Kangaroo Dreaming, as she was starting a fire with the spectacles and preparing to roast some witchetty grubs, a shadow fell across her. She looked up and saw that the sun had been blocked by a man standing over her, a spear in one hand.
Joanna stood up slowly and saw that he was not alone. Several other men stood behind him, also carrying weapons. They were naked, their bodies rubbed with fat and ash; they wore hairstring bands around their heads and waists, similar to the one Sarah had made for Joanna years ago, during the typhoid epidemic. They stared at Joanna with expressionless faces.
"Are you members of Djoogal's clan?" she said.
They did not reply.
So she said, "Karra Karra?"
Still no response.
She felt the heaviness of the hot noon air, the vast expanse of the desert stretching away from her into space. She smelled the grubs roasting in the coals and recalled how they had tasted raw. She remembered catching and eating a lizard, and how she had sucked bitter water from acacia roots, not minding the dirt on them, nor the fact that she hadn't a proper napkin with which to wipe her hands. And so it seemed right, she thought, to be standing here in this alien landscape, staring into these deeply set, reddish-brown eyes and feeling no fear.
Without a word, the men turned and began to walk away.
Joanna stared after them. And then she realized that she was meant to follow. Quickly picking up Captain Fielding's jacket and the leather satchel, she went after them.
When they reached the encampment, the sun was a molten disc on the western horizon. Joanna entered the scattered collection of miamias—small shelters made of eucalyptus boughs—and campfires and marveled at both her own fearlessness and the Aborigines' seeming indifference to her presence. She walked past women who were cooking, skinning animals or nursing babies, and they smiled at her as though this were a common occurrence. They, too, were naked. A few young girls, Joanna saw, wore skirts made of cockatoo feathers, but everyone else—men, women, and children—went about completely unclothed. Ironically, Joanna felt embarrassed by her linen blouse, long skirt, and boots.
The men stopped walking. They turned, and the leader pointed with his spear. Joanna looked to where he was pointing, and she saw a young white girl lying across an open pit of steaming eucalyptus boughs.
"Beth!" she cried, running to her.
The girl was unconscious, badly sunburnt and, Joanna found when she touched Beth's forehead, fiery hot with fever. And she had seen that shocking, unmistakable pallor before—during the typhoid epidemic and on the dead face of Captain Fielding. As Joanna lifted her daughter in her arms and held her close, the native woman who seemed to be taking care of her said something Joanna could not understand.
I am too late, she thought. Too late.
TWENTY-NINE
S
ARAH WAS IN THE SOLARIUM, PREPARING OINTMENTS MADE from comfrey and calendula, surrounded by hanging plants, small trees, creeping vines and bushy little herbs in clay pots; overlying the rich scent of loam and compost were the delicate fragrances of pink rosemary and lemon verbena, and the heady aroma of melted beeswax. When Joanna had departed for Western Australia six months ago, Sarah had promised to take care of the healing garden and to keep up the medicinal stores. She worked here every day, nursing seedlings, pruning and transplanting, harvesting leaves and stems and roots.
She often wondered what Joanna and Beth were doing at a particular moment, and if Joanna might at one point give up waiting for Hugh to return, and come back on her own. He was supposed to have gone back to Kalagandra weeks ago, but he was still here at Merinda, fighting a fly-strike that had reached epidemic proportions.
As Sarah checked the consistency of the melted beeswax, her hands suddenly paused, almost of their own accord. She gazed through the glass wall at the billabong lying flat and silver beyond the trees, and she thought: Philip is coming.
She quickly extinguished the flame beneath the beeswax, removed her apron and hurried through the house to her bedroom, where she tidied her hair and brushed away the leaves and tiny flowers that clung to her dark brown wool skirt. As she hastily changed out of her calico work blouse into a pale blue silk one, she realized that her hands were shaking. She was both excited and apprehensive about seeing Philip. Since his return to Australia, they had been cautious about their time together. Sarah knew that, for the sake of Philip's success as an architect in the district, they must be careful. Servants talked; so did station hands. And everyone knew that he was still married. They had not made love again.
Fortunately, Philip was very busy, having received commissions to build mansions for the Camerons and the McClouds, which called for him to make frequent trips into Melbourne to consult with suppliers and spend days at the brickworks and lumberyards. His spare time was limited; opportunities for Sarah to be alone with him were few. He had come to dinner at Merinda several times, and he and Hugh and Sarah had gone to concerts in the park in Cameron Town. But the one thing they both longed for—the freedom to love each other, and to make love—lay beyond their grasp.
Now he was coming to Merinda, alone and unannounced. She sensed his presence in the drive; Sarah could almost see what he was wearing.
She hurried down the hall and opened the door before Philip could knock.
They stared at each other.
"Hello, Sarah," Philip said, smiling.
"Hello, Philip. Please come in. It's good to see you."
He removed his hat and looked around the foyer. Then he kissed her on the cheek, lingeringly. He looked at her for a long moment before saying quietly, "You look beautiful, Sarah. How are you?"
She took in his handsomeness, his tallness, his slightly crooked nose, and she ached for him. "I'm well," she said. "I think about you all the time."
"I try to stay away. I can't concentrate on my work. All I can think of is you. All I want is to be with you."
"I, too," she said, and touched his arm.
"I came by because I got a letter from Alice today. She still won't give me a divorce. She doesn't want me to go back to her, but she is afraid that a legal divorce will hurt Daniel. When he's older, she said."
Sarah nodded. She understood the social stigma that divorce placed on a woman, just as she was aware of her own situation, the stigma of being a married man's mistress.
"How is it going with Hugh?" Philip said, wishing he could say other things to her.
"Hugh is camped up by the north boundary," she said. "He hasn't been home for three days."
"It's still bad, is it?"
"Yes, I'm afraid so."
"I passed Mr. Ormsby on the way here. He says he thinks he's going to lose Strathfield if the fly-strike goes on much longer."
"Yes," she said. "I had heard that."
They fell silent again. In the nearby parlor, a clock chimed the hour.
"You can go out to the camp if you like," Sarah said. "Hugh would be glad to see you."
"I think I will." Philip reached into his pocket and brought out an envelope. "When I went to the post office this morning to pick up my mail, the postmistress asked me if I would be passing by Merinda,
as there was this important-looking letter for Hugh." He showed it to Sarah.
She read the return address—it had come from a Commissioner Fox in Western Australia. "It's from Kalagandra, and it isn't from Joanna. Philip, something's wrong. I can feel it. I've felt it for weeks. We must get this letter to Hugh at once."
Hugh laid aside his pen and peered through the window of the tent. He watched station hands mill around the temporary camp, helping themselves to tea from the billycan that was continually on the boil. Hugh thought of it as a military camp, and of his men as soldiers. They rode out every day to inspect sheep, to shoot them and bury them, to crutch animals that might be saved and run them through highly unpleasant insecticidal dips. They came wearily back into camp, filthy and tired; they drank the strong tea and ate Ping-Li's sandwiches, and then rode off again to face another battle in a frustrating war. Hugh was also weary. He would have liked to take a break, but there was still a tremendous amount of work to be done.
As he had feared three months ago, when the warm weather broke a horrific wave of blowfly had suddenly appeared on the western plains, sweeping over stations like death clouds. All over southeastern Australia sheep were dying in the thousands, while graziers from Adelaide to the Queensland border were racing to find a way to stop the epidemic.
As Hugh picked up his pen to resume writing, he paused to look at Joanna's photograph on the workbench. How he missed her! He wished he could have stayed in Western Australia, or that he had been able to return to her weeks ago. He wrote to her regularly, keeping her up to date on this endless battle with fly-strike, but he hadn't heard from her. Storms had been reported in the Bight—boats had been lost, some of them carrying mail. There had also been a maritime strike, bringing sea travel and shipping around Australia's southern coast to a virtual standstill. And Hugh knew that the telegraph was unreliable. Bush fires burned down the lines, and renegade Aborigines occasionally chopped down the poles.