‘No at all. I think of you first as the scientist.’
‘I’m not really . . . just a man, somewhat bewildered by my human intelligence. But it’s nice to have someone to talk to about such things. Now, where was I? Yes . . . Nelly was caught in the sacred precincts, and subjected to the ancient and horrible ritual demanded . . . which consists of breaking arms and legs, literal rape by the participants, and a ceremonial business with the bullroarer. Not only did Nelly catch it, but Blackman, who, apparently, objected. They killed him out of hand. Both were buried in termites’ nests, which I think I told you is a way of concealing murder. It’s interesting to note the tacit admission of guilt here. Why the need for concealment when the killing was supposed to be in accordance with law? It can’t be laid to fear of the whiteman, because it’s traditional. Besides, rarely would the whiteman ever hear of such secret things. Again, in this case, those involved immediately removed themselves from the scene. Perhaps they have to go, through fear of the vengeful Shades of their victims. Anyway, their bolting, when actually no one pursued, was their undoing.
‘Remember I told you the Ol’Goomun-Ol’Goomun came ashore with Wanjin, the Dingo, as her companion and scout? Now, the dingo strain predominates in all blackfellows’ dogs. Nelly had a dog, which she’d suckled at her own breast, having lost a baby. She’s still got him, I think, as her protector, ancient as he must be now. I’ve seen him in town . . . a gross, yellow-eyed, snarling old wolf of a thing, pretty well pure-warrigal. She calls him Mate. Anyway, Mate was not involved in the sacrilegious business at the Ring Place . . . or else he’d have been killed, too. He must have been away somewhere, or deliberately made to stay at home. But subsequently he went looking for his mistress, sniffed her out, dug her out of the antbed . . . and, according to her, licked her back to life. The Cult men, of course, had gone. How she survived, I don’t know. She lost one leg from the knee down, apparently through gangrene. She treated herself, with the aid of the other women of the place . . . using the inevitable pipe-clay. There’s no doubt about the healing powers of pipe-clay . . . although the reason beats me. I’ve tried everything to find a scientific answer. It contains nothing but the common elements of clay . . . except some kind of spore-producing fungi. You’d think it’d make infection worse. In fact it does the opposite. If you sterilise the clay it becomes ineffective. Naturally, to the Murris it’s plain magic. Anyhow, Nelly was able with her treatment to hang on long enough to be found by the boss, Piggy Trotters. He rushed her off to town and hospital. The police moved in for the good old man-hunt.
‘Of course you’ll have met Sergeant Cahoon . . . and no doubt have heard of his henchman, Police Tracker Jinbul. Both have become quite famous since the southern press has taken an interest in the local scene and the local John Darms have been glamorised into a version of the Canadian Mounties. It was out of that case of Peg-leg Nelly’s that Dinny Cahoon, then a plain trooper, or mounted constable to give the official designation, came to fame as the master mantracker. It was a tough assignment. Not being concerned with cattle-killing, Vaiseys weren’t interested, and therefore not the top brass. Dinny had to battle on his own with a couple of trackers. He didn’t have Jinbul to start with. Jinbul was on the other side . . . one of the hunted. He was the youngest of them, but well known as a nuisance round the Alice River. A great man with the girls . . . hence the name . . . gin bull . . . a nickname that became attached to him officially.
‘It was this weakness of Jinbul for the ladies that led to Cahoon’s ultimate great success in his calling. While doing a bit of tchinekin he was betrayed by jealous husbands, and captured. It took a good while for Cahoon to induce him to betray his comrades . . . but he did it, working on his conceit and the unusual detachment that would make him a Snake Man. Dinny plied him with drink and the promise of greater power as a policeman . . . a dookyangana . . . literally a camp destroyer in the native interpretation. At last Jinbul agreed to a plan to go through a semblance of escaping from custody and returning to his mates, eventually to lead them into a trap. The trap was to be baited with the weakness of the leader this time . . . Bobwirridirridi’s weakness for bread and milk. The station chosen was Alexandra Downs, at the junction of the Beatrice and Alice Rivers. Jinbul, back with the fugitives, told the old man he could get him what he wanted through the offices of a black housemaid he was on with there. It worked. They took Cock-Eye Bob, along with the others. How he got away I don’t know. I understand he was actually “on the chain”, as they say. Do you know that they chain Aboriginal prisoners by the neck? Of course, you can’t hold such slim streamlined hands as theirs with any kind of device . . . and ankle-chains obstruct their walking. Not an easy thing to get out of, a neck-chain. He’s supposed to have done it by magic, of course. He got clean away. Cahoon had to take his prisoners up to town and see them jailed without the ringleader. I guess Cahoon would have kept after him, but perhaps with no such zeal as circumstances gave him, and also no such luck. I now come to the Beatrice River Riots, which created those circumstances. How are your feet going? It’s about half a mile to the top gate. Suit you if we go on to it and turn back there?’
‘Sure. I’m a good walker.’
‘You want to keep at it. The average whiteman round these parts couldn’t walk a mile without knocking up. Well, as I think I told you, the rain came in early that year, caught ’em with their pants down . . . the railway construction people, I mean, and the job closed down. That left the best part of a thousand men, non-residents, idle. They were ordered to leave, not only the district, but the country. A cargo ship was called in to pick them up in Palmeston. But it didn’t work as easily this time as last. I’ve said some of the men had been through the meatworks deportation. There were Commos. There’d been a Communist cell in the land since the meatworks days. They took charge. The few police on hand couldn’t do much. Others were sent from Town, along with specials recruited from the Public Service. Dinny was one of the Johns. Now he had a chance to prove himself not only as a bush trooper herding blacks, but as a riot-breaker, which is more important to his masters. How things would have gone without him I don’t know. The mob certainly had the other Johns bluffed till Dinny took charge. He’s as brave and tough as an Irish terrier, and looks rather like one, with the sandy hair and green eyes. He got badly hurt . . . but not till the battle was won. I’m sure he suffered brain damage. Anyway, it made him . . . what with that and his natural Irish capacity to fight and the driving force of the celibacy he lived in, chained to those repressed old biddies of sisters of his as he was.
‘Although he saw the mob off on the special train, travelling like Murris in stock waggons and on flat-tops . . . as I saw them myself in fact . . . his job wasn’t done by any means. The two ringleaders were still unaccounted for. Some men had got away southward by road, not an easy thing in those days. So the three or four police stations on the overland routes were able to screen them. There was no evidence that the leaders, Snowy Mack and Billy Bellairs, had left the country. In fact they had sworn not to go till it suited them. They weren’t wanted merely for deportation, but for jailing on various charges.
‘I don’t suppose you’ve met Tom Toohey, boss of the Beatrice River railway fettling gang? No, you wouldn’t. The only stock he has is creamy children. Besides, he’s a self-effacing man. Like me he’s also beyond the social pale for having a halfcaste wife . . . but lacks the status of having had a white wife who ranks close to First Lady of the Land.’ Jeremy chuckled.
Then he sighed: ‘Poor old Tom and his creamy kids! He’d had such hopes of raising them above the status of boong. He’s always blamed the railway construction for their ruin. But I think he had a hand in it himself, hoping for too much from them. Anyway, the natural awful thing was that his girls became whores on reaching puberty. They’d already started before the railway construction did. One of them was carted off to town with gonorrhoea. The other, Tilly, became Snow Mack’s mistress. It was she hid him and Bellairs at an old place d
own the river where there used to be a White Russian settlement . . . Vaiseys imported Russian aristocrats, émigrés from the Revolution . . . to spite the Bolsheviks, I guess. Mack and Bellairs had a plan to get to Town aboard a train driven by Pat Hannaford. Of course you’ve met Driver Hannaford? Well, Pat’s a Commo, of course. They would hide in Town, till they got legal representation to fight their case. Pat did eventually get them away, but not before there was a lot of trouble. Tracker Jinbul, now practically Cahoon’s shadow, happened to see Tilly Toohey talking to Pat Hannaford in a way that suggested conspiracy to his natural policeman’s mind. He reported to his master. Dinny grabbed Tilly for interrogation. The established method of getting your way with a boong is with a stockwhip . . . as you might have guessed from the incident at supper time this evening. Cahoon chained Tilly up naked under the milkwood used for that purpose at Beatrice River Police Station, and flogged her till she fainted. Failing to get results that way, he tried another method of making these secretive people talk. He stuck a stick down the dunny, and rubbed her face with the shit, forcing a bit into her mouth. I suppose that would be too much for any breed of person . . . unless a coprophile . . . but Aboriginal people are particularly sensitive concerning human excreta . . . magic, of course. You can kill a person with a bit of shit and the right words sung over it. Poor Tilly gave in. But meantime her brothers, Brumby and Micky, little more than kids, guessing the significance of the torture, ran and warned Snowy and his mate, got them away practically under Dinny’s nose by rowing them up the river in heavy rain . . . and put them on the road to my place . . .’
‘Lily Lagoons?’
‘That’s right. As I told you when you came out, I’ve always maintained it as much as a refuge for all creatures needing it as a retreat for myself. But I’ve never had occasion to shelter whitemen on the run before. Well, Cahoon was stumped by the trick. He may never have found out that the Toohey boys had been involved, had they not gone to him and confessed that they’d warned the Commos. They didn’t tell the exact truth, however, and certainly not for the reason they gave for confessing, that is that they were sorry to have done no good thing. Determined to avenge their sister, they lured Dinny alone to a shed in the railway yards where they said the pair were hiding . . . and there gave him a belting that put him in hospital for a month. But for his own thirst for revenge, he should have stayed there longer. In fact he would have died from his injuries, if they hadn’t sent down a special train with a doctor and nurses to attend to him. There was no Flying Doctor then.’
‘What happened to the Toohey boys?’
‘They came out to me, too. They were, of course, entitled to whatever protection I could give them. Brumby, the elder, had been out to me before, through trouble while working with the construction gang. After lying low for a while he went back and lost himself in the crowd. Mack and Bellairs were already there . . . on sufferance. They’d been frank with me, and I equally so. I said I wasn’t going to jeopardise the condition of those dependent on me by involving myself so as to get into trouble with the police. I have to make only one slip-up . . . and the bureaucratic bastards who’ve been after my hide ever since I showed contempt for their phoney values would have it off me and pegged out. I told the two I have no time for their philosophy, which I regard as essentially inhuman, for all its preaching humanitarianism . . .’
‘Good on you . . . I hate bloody Commos, too.’
‘I wouldn’t say I hate ’em. They haven’t done this country any particular harm that I can see . . .’
‘Give ’em half a chance and they’d take it over.’
‘Off Lord Alfred Vaisey and his coronetted cobbers? I’d lend ’em a hand.’ Bishoff said quite savagely, ‘Communists are low-down, scheming, ruthless, soulless bastards!’
‘You certainly feel strongly about them. But I think you exaggerate in applying such epithets to the local talent. What I’ve seen of ’em, they’re either big-mouthed Pommies with eyes on a political career, but not understanding the Australian way of going about it, that is with bullshit, and therefore getting nasty . . . like the local Party bosses, Scotty McClaggity and Geordie Jenks . . . or larrikin types with a streak of oddness that compels ’em to have some sort of respectable purpose for their larrikinism . . . like Pat Hannaford.’
‘You surprise me telling me Hannaford’s a Commo. I met him boozing in at the pub in Beatrice, while the train was camped the night. He struck me as a wag. There’s no place for humour in Communism.’
‘As I was saying . . . with the larrikin type it’s more a game than anything else. For example . . . Pat had cooked up for this pair I had, a mad scheme to smuggle ’em up to Town under the coal in the tender of his engine . . . put ’em in a big tool-chest. That’s what they told me. I said I’d give ’em the hospitality customary in the land . . . shelter for twenty-four hours and rations for the road . . . and if word came from Hannaford, I’d see they got it.’
‘Thought you said you wouldn’t get involved?’
‘I didn’t. I wasn’t supposed to know they were fugitives from justice. When their twenty-four hours were up, I hunted ’em off to Corella Bore, on Vaisey property. They were supposed to work their way from there to the railway North of Beatrice, and wait somewhere for Pat to pick ’em up. I wasn’t the slightest bit involved legally.’
‘How’d it work out?’
‘It didn’t. They’d just set out for the Bore, when the Toohey boys turned up. They were scared . . . the boys . . . thinking they killed Cahoon. They wanted to hide up in the Painted Caves . . . back in the wall of the Plateau there. They knew the country well. Their idea was to hole up till the rains set in in earnest, then make their way across the Plateau to the northern coast, and there eventually to get picked up by Jap pearlers. Brumby had worked with the Japs. I guess they could have made it. However, when I told them about Mack and Bellairs, they went after them and generously offered to take them along. That pair would only have made a disaster of it. They all came back to get the extra gear to make a foursome of it. I argued against it. I must say the Comms showed themselves equally generous in involving themselves in what looked like murder. I advised them to get back to civilisation and take the rap for their own simple bit of trouble, and leave the boys alone to battle out their destiny as blackfellows. But they wouldn’t budge from their idea of helping the boys out of the country and away to the protection of the Party.’
‘Did they make it?’
‘They didn’t have to. I’m sure they wouldn’t have anyway, what with the country they had to traverse, two hundred miles of the roughest in the Continent, and the wildest . . . at such a season, with its fevers, its pests. As likely as not, the blacks, guessing they hadn’t protection of the dookyangana, would have murdered them . . . or at least betrayed them at some mission station. But it happened that just as they were about to set out, who should turn up but Hannaford himself, with the thing all cut and dried.
‘It was rather comical. As you know, with all the old crippled things we’ve got there, even although we’ve got no dogs, it’s about impossible for any visitor to surprise us. We got the usual signals from the lookouts . . . butcher birds, pee-wees, cockatoos . . . and rushed to get our guilty ones away . . . only to find that the potential enemy was none other than old Barbu, the hawker. He came driving his ancient van, drawn by the ancient horses . . . at a pace that for him was astonishing. Added to the general oddity of the situation was the fact that Barbu has long been barred from Lily Lagoons, because of his secondary trade as bird-trapper. The first thing he did was to beg my pardon for the intrusion and say he would never have made it but for fear of his life. Seems Pat Hannaford had commandeered him and his van at the point of a knife. Pat had first tried to drive the team, but not having a throttle or brake, made a complete mess of it. Pat had chosen the rather mad means of travel so as not to attract attention. It happened that he was the driver of that special medical train brought down for Dinny Cahoon. Means for a perfect get-away.
The doctor was operating on the spot, but wouldn’t be permitting Dinny’s moving up to hospital till it could be done with absolute safety. Finding that his boys had vamoosed, Pat got it out of Tom Toohey where they had gone. Now he wanted a motor vehicle to take ’em back to sneak them onto the train, in a couple of big railway tool-boxes this time, amongst a load of stuff from the construction being taken up to Town. I took him and the four fugitives myself, dumped them at the Racecourse. The odd thing about it is that for all the risk I took, the Commos still class me with the enemy. Only a week or so ago, Pat Hannaford called me a Fascist for refusing to subscribe to a collection he was making for the International Brigade fighting in Spain.’
‘Stalin’s boys, eh?’
‘I suppose so. But on the other side they’re just as bad, aren’t they . . . Hitler’s and Mussolini’s boys? Poor Spaniards! Actually my objection wasn’t on political grounds, but to preoccupation with evils on the other side of the world, when we have enough under our noses . . . the treatment of the Aborigines, for a start.’
They reached the gate. Turning, Jeremy said, ‘Well, I’ll have to finish the yarn on this leg, or I never will.’
‘Did the Commos get away?’
‘Oh, yes . . . and the Toohey boys. Hannaford picked them up at his first watering point North . . . Granite Springs. There’s a cutting there blocks off view of the engine from the back of the train. Then up in Town, the Comrades smuggled them aboard the West Coast steamer.’
‘Seamen’s Union, eh?’
‘I dare say. As Pat hadn’t anything to do with that part of it, he couldn’t brag beyond what he’d done himself . . . and the Comrades in town are typically tight-lipped. But get away the fugitives did . . . without leaving a clue for Dinny Cahoon when he woke up with his zeal for man-hunting doubled or trebled by what I’m sure was a brain lesion . . . Cock-Eye Bob’s undoing.’
‘How’s that?’
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