Walkabout

by James Vance Marshall

  The girl worked things out quietly, sensibly – she wasn’t the sort to get into a panic. The sun had risen there: on the left of the gully: so that would be east. South, then, must be straight ahead; down-stream. That was lucky. Perhaps they’d be able to follow the creek all the way to the sea; all the way to Adelaide. She knotted the four corners of Peter’s handkerchief, dipped it in the water, and draped it over his head – for already the sun was uncomfortably hot.

  ‘Come on, Peter,’ she said, ‘let’s go.’

  She led the way down the gully.

  At first the going was easy. Close to the stream, rocks of granite and quartz provided safe footing; and the trees, sprouting from every pocket of clay, were thick enough to give a welcome shade, but not so thick that they hindered progress. Mary pushed steadily on.

  Soon the gully became wider, flatter, fanning into an open plain. Another rivulet joined theirs, and together the two of them went looping away down a shallow, sand-fringed valley. In the middle of the valley the undergrowth was thick; luxuriant. Brambles and underscrub slowed down their progress. But Mary didn’t want to lose sight of the stream. Determinedly she forced a way through the tangle of vegetation, turning every now and then to give her brother a hand. Ground-vines coiled and snaked and clutched at their feet; the decaying trunks of fallen trees perversely blocked their path; but the girl kept on, sorting out a line of least resistance, holding back the lower branches to protect Peter from their swing back.

  For two hours the boy followed her manfully; then he started to lag. Mary noticed at once; she cut across to the stream and sat down on a shelving slab of quartz.

  ‘We’ll rest now,’ she said.

  Thankfully he collapsed beside her. She smoothed the hair out of his eyes, plastering it back with its own sweat.

  For a long time there was silence; then came the question she had been dreading.

  ‘I’m hungry, Mary. What we going to eat?’

  ‘Oh, Peter! It’s not lunch-time yet.’

  ‘When will it be?’

  ‘I’ll tell you when.’

  But he wasn’t satisfied; not satisfied at all.

  ‘When it is time, what we going to eat?’

  ‘I’ll find something.’

  She didn’t tell him that ever since leaving the gully she’d been searching for berries; in vain. But he sensed her anxiety. His mouth started to droop.

  ‘I’m hungry now,’ he said.

  Quickly she got up.

  ‘All right. Let’s look for something to eat.’

  To start with – at least for the boy – it was an amusing game: part of their Big Adventure. They looked in the stream for fish; but the fish, such as they were, were asleep: invisible in the sediment-mud. They looked in the trees for birds; but the birds had vanished with the dawn. They looked in the bush for animals; but the animals were all asleep, avoiding the heat of the sun in carefully chosen burrow, log or cave. They looked among the riverside rocks for lizards; but the reptiles heard their clumsy approach, and slid soundlessly into crack or crevice. The bush slept: motionless: silent: apparently deserted. Drugged to immobility by the heat of the midday sun.

  The game wasn’t amusing for very long.

  Eventually their search led them away from the stream, into less luxuriant vegetation; into the open bush. They could see farther here; could see to where, a little way ahead, a ridge of low, slab-sided hills were tilted out of the level plain. The children looked at the hills. They looked friendly; familiar; like the foothills of the Alleghenies. The boy reached for his sister’s hand.

  ‘Mary!’

  ‘Yes, Peter?’

  ‘Remember when Daddy took us on top of Mount Pleasant. Remember all the lots of sea we could see?’

  ‘Yes, I remember.’

  ‘P’raps we could see the sea from the tops of those mountains.’

  It took them half an hour to get to the foot of the hills. They rose in a low escarpment, an outcrop of granite and quartz, jutting abruptly out of the level plain. The stream, moat-like, skirted their feet. There seemed at first to be no way up. Then the girl spotted a dark shadow: a gully, cleaving the escarpment like the cut of an axe.

  Except that it faced north rather than south, it might have been the gully where they’d spent the night; it had the same smoothly rising sides, and the same rock-fringed tumbling stream. It took them four hours to climb it.

  If the stream hadn’t provided them with water, and the sides of the gully with shade, they would never have got to the top.

  As it was the sun was setting as they clambered on to the rim of the hills, and saw the country to southward stretching away in front of them, bathed in golden light: a magnificent panorama: a scene of primeval desolation: mile after hundred mile of desert, sand and scrub. And in the far distance, pools of silver; pools of glinting, shimmering light; pools which shivered and wavered and contracted, and seemed to hang a fraction above the horizon.

  The boy danced with delight.

  ‘Look, Mary. Look! The sea. The sea. It isn’t far to go.’

  She caught hold of him and pulled him against her and pressed his face to her breasts.

  ‘Don’t look, Peter,’ she whispered. ‘Don’t look again. It isn’t fair.’

  She knew what the pools of silver were: the salt pans of the great Australian desert. She sat down on the thin tufted grass and started to roll and unroll the hem of her frock.

  After a long time she got up, and led the protesting Peter back to the gully. At least there was water there. She told him that tomorrow they’d walk down to the sea. Tomorrow they wouldn’t be hungry any more.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  SUN-UP brought the kookaburras, the gang-gangs and the finches. It brought warmth and colour. And hunger.

  The girl woke early. She lay on her back, thinking. Outwardly she was calm; but inwardly she was damming back a gathering flood of fear. Always she had protected Peter, had smoothed things out and made them easy for him – molly-coddled him like an anxious hen her father had once said. But how could she protect him now? She knew that soon he’d be awake; awake and demanding to start off for the ‘sea’. It would be too cruel to tell him the sea wasn’t there. She’d have to think of something else: have to tell him one of those special sort of lies that Mummy said God didn’t mind. Her forehead puckered in concentrated thought.

  Too soon Peter was awake.

  They spent the morning searching for food. It would be foolish, Mary said, to start walking seaward without having something to eat; without first collecting a stock of food for their journey. The sea might be farther off than it looked.

  They searched mainly for fruit, but for a long time found nothing. They examined the tawny leopard-trees, the sapless mellowbane, the humble-bushes with their frightened collapsing leaves, and the blood-woods with their overflowing crimson sap. They skirted the kurrajungs and the bottlebrushes and the eucalyptus; then they came to a group of trees of another, rarer kind: graceful, symmetrical trees, covered with thick silver foliage and – miracle of miracles – with multicoloured globules of fruit.

  Peter gave a whoop of delight, and rushed headlong at the longed-for food. For a second Mary hung back, thinking of poison; then she too was leaping and snatching at the balls of fruit. It was a chance they’d have to take.

  The fruit – called quondong by the Aboriginals –was about the size of ping-pong balls, and ranged in colour from greengage-green to plum-red. The redder fruit, they quickly found, were the riper. To the starving children they were ambrosia; sweet and juicy, thirst-quenching and nourishing. They ate, and ate, and ate.

  For a long time they sat in the shade of the quondong trees, the trees that had saved their lives. They were too happy to talk.

  After a while Mary got up and began to pick more of the fruit: their cache for the trek to the sea. She hummed contentedly as she collected the quondong, storing them first in Peter’s handkerchief then in the folds of her dress. Soon Peter also got up; he wander
ed across to one of the trees and started lazily to gather the fruit. Working their way from tree to tree, the children drifted slowly apart.

  Though the edge had gone from his hunger, Peter wasn’t altogether at ease. He kept looking nervously at the surrounding bush. He had a strange sort of feeling: a feeling of being watched. Several times he looked up quickly, certain there was someone there; but the bush slept on in the heat of the sun: silent, motionless, apparently deserted. Unconvinced, he sidled back to his sister.

  ‘Mary!’ he whispered. ‘I think there’s someone here!’

  ‘Someone here! Where?’

  Disbelieving she swung round. The quondong fell to the grass. Only by snapping her teeth together did she stifle a scream of fear. For there, less than four feet away, so close that she could have stretched out an arm and touched him, was a boy. And he was ebony black and quite naked.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THE girl’s first impulse was to grab Peter and run; but as her eyes swept over the stranger, her fear died slowly away. The boy was young – certainly no older than she was; he was unarmed, and his attitude was more inquisitive than threatening: more puzzled than hostile.

  He wasn’t the least bit like an African Negro. His skin was certainly black, but beneath it was a curious hint of undersurface bronze, and it was fine-grained: glossy, satiny, almost silk-like. His hair wasn’t crinkly but nearly straight; and his eyes were blue-black: big, soft and inquiring. In his hand was a baby rock wallaby, its eyes, unclosed in death, staring vacantly above a tiny pointed snout.

  All this Mary noted and accepted. The thing that she couldn’t accept, the thing that seemed to her shockingly and indecently wrong, was the fact that the boy was naked.

  The three children stood looking at each other in the middle of the Australian desert. Motionless as the outcrops of granite they stared, and stared, and stared. Between them the distance was less than the spread of an outstretched arm, but more than a hundred thousand years.

  Brother and sister were products of the highest strata of humanity’s evolution. In them the primitive had long ago been swept aside, been submerged by mechanization, been swamped by scientific development, been nullified by the standardized pattern of the white man’s way of life. They had climbed a long way up the ladder of progress; they had climbed so far, in fact, that they had forgotten how their climb had started. Coddled in babyhood, psycho-analysed in childhood, nourished on predigested patent foods, provided with continuous push-button entertainment, the basic realities of Me were something they’d never had to face.

  It was very different with the Aboriginal. He knew what reality was. He led a way of life that was already old when Tut-ankh-amen started to build his tomb; a way of life that had been tried and proved before the white man’s continents were even lifted out of the sea. Among the secret water-holes of the Australian desert his people had lived and died, unchanged and unchanging, for twenty thousand years. Their lives were unbelievably simple. They had no homes, no crops, no clothes, no possessions. The few things they had, they shared: food and wives; children and laughter; tears and hunger and thirst. They walked from one water-hole to the next; they exhausted one supply of food, then moved on to another. Their lives were utterly uncomplicated because they were devoted to one purpose, dedicated in their entirety to the waging of one battle: the battle with death. Death was their ever-present enemy. He sought them out from every dried-up salt pan, from the flames of every bush fire. He was never far away. Keeping him at bay was the Aboriginals’ full-time job: the job they’d been doing for twenty thousand years: the job they were good at.

  The desert sun streamed down. The children stared and stared.

  Mary had decided not to move. To move would be a sign of weakness. She remembered being told about the man who’d come face to face with a lion, and had stared it out, had caused it to slink discomfited away. That was what she’d do to the black boy; she’d stare at him until he felt the shame of his nakedness and slunk away. She thrust out her chin, and glared.

  Peter had decided to take his cue from his sister. Clutching her hand he stood waiting: waiting for something to happen.

  The Aboriginal was in no hurry. Time had little value to him. His next meal – the rock wallaby – was assured. Water was near. Tomorrow was also a day. For the moment he was content to examine these strange creatures at his leisure. Their clumsy, lumbering movements intrigued him; their lack of weapons indicated their harmlessness. His eyes moved slowly, methodically from one to another: examining them from head to foot. They were the first white people a member of his tribe had ever seen.

  Mary, beginning to resent this scrutiny, intensified her glare. But the bush boy seemed in no way perturbed; his appraisal went methodically on.

  After a while Peter started to fidget. The delay was fraying his nerves. He wished someone would do something: wished something would happen. Then, quite involuntarily, he himself started a new train of events. His head began to waggle; his nose tilted skywards; he spluttered and choked; he tried to hold his breath; but all in vain. It had to come. He sneezed.

  It was a mighty sneeze for such a little fellow: the release of a series of concatenated explosions, all the more violent for having been dammed back.

  To his sister the sneeze was a calamity. She had just intensified her stare to the point – she felt sure – of irresistibility, when the spell was shattered. The bush boy’s attention shifted from her to Peter.

  Frustration warped her sense of justice. She condemned her brother out of court; was turning on him angrily, when a second sneeze, even mightier than the first, shattered the silence of the bush.

  Mary raised her eyes to heaven: invoking the gods as witnesses to her despair. But the vehemence of the second sneeze was still tumbling leaves from the humble-bushes, when a new sound made her whirl around. A gust of laughter: melodious laughter; low at first, then becoming louder: unrestrained: disproportionate : uncontrolled.

  She looked at the bush boy in amazement. He was doubled up with belly-shaking spasms of mirth.

  Peter’s incongruous, out-of-proportion sneeze had touched off one of his peoples’ most highly developed traits: a sense of the ridiculous; a sense so keenly felt as to be almost beyond control. The bush boy laughed with complete abandon. He flung himself to the ground. He rolled head-over-heels in unrestrained delight.

  His mirth was infectious. It woke in Peter an instant response: a like appreciation of the ludicrous. The guilt that the little boy had started to feel, melted away. At first apologetically, then whole-heartedly, he too started to laugh.

  The barrier of twenty thousand years vanished in the twinkling of an eye.

  The boys’ laughter echoed back from the granite rocks. They started to strike comic postures, each striving to outdo the other in their grotesque abandon.

  Mary watched them. She would have dearly loved to join in. A year ago – in her tom-boy days – she would have. But not now. She was too sensible: too grown-up. Yet not grown-up enough to be free of an instinctive longing to share in the fun: to throw convention to the winds and join the capering jamboree. This longing she repressed. She stood aloof: disapproving. At last she went up to Peter and took his hand.

  ‘That’s enough, Peter,’ she said.

  The skylarking subsided. For a moment there was silence, then the bush boy spoke.

  ‘Worumgala?’ (Where do you come from?) His voice was lilting as his laughter.

  Mary and Peter looked at each other blankly.

  The bush boy tried again.

  ‘Worum mwa?’ (Where are you going?)

  It was Peter, not Mary, who floundered into the field of conversation.

  ‘We dun’no what you’re talking about, darkie. But we’re lost, see. We want to go to Adelaide. That’s where Uncle Keith lives. Which way do we go?’

  The black boy grinned. To him the little one’s voice was comic as his appearance: half-gabble, half-chirp; and shrill, like a baby magpie’s. Peter grinned back
, eager for another orgy of laughter. But the bush boy wanted to be serious now. He stepped noiselessly up to Peter, brushed his fingers over the boy’s face, then looked at them expectantly; but to his surprise the whiteness hadn’t come off. He ran his fingers through Peter’s hair. Again he was surprised; no powdered clay, nor red-ochre paste. He turned his attention to the white boy’s clothes.

  Peter was by no means perturbed. On the contrary he felt flattered; proud. He realized that the bush boy had never seen anything like him before. He held himself very straight, swelled out his chest, and turned slowly round and round.

  The bush boy’s dark tapering fingers plucked gently at his shirt, following the line of the seams, testing the strength of the criss-cross weave, exploring the mystery of the buttonholes. Then his attention passed from shirt to shorts. Peter became suddenly loquacious.

  ‘Those are shorts, darkie. Short pants. You oughta have ‘em too. To cover your bottom up. Haven’t you any shops round here ?’

  The bush boy refused to be diverted. He had found the broad band of elastic that kept the shorts in place. While he fingered it, the white boy prattled on.

  ‘That’s elastic that is; keeps your shorts in place. It stretches. Look!’

  He stuck his thumbs into the waist-band, pulled the elastic away from his hips, then let it fly back. The resounding smack made the bush boy jump. Thoroughly pleased with himself Peter repeated the performance, this time adding a touch of pantomime, staggering backward as if he’d been struck. The black boy saw the joke. He grinned, but this time he kept his laughter under control; for his examination was a serious business. He ended up with a detailed inspection of Peter’s sandals.

  Then he turned to Mary.

  It was the moment the girl had been dreading.

  Yet she didn’t draw back. She wanted to; God alone knew how she wanted to. Her nerves were strung taut. The idea of being manhandled by a naked black boy appalled her: struck at the root of one of the basic principles of her civilized code. It was terrifying; revolting; obscene. Back in Charleston it would have got the darkie lynched. Yet she didn’t move; not even when the dark fingers ran like spiders up and down her body.