The calling of cattle was now the music of the land. They had to be careful when they came on cattle camped in shade, because if disturbed the beasts would rise, first gallop off in alarm, then in curiosity turn and follow, bawling to each other, spreading the disturbance, till the original disturbers had to bolt to shake them off — not out of fear of the beasts, but fear of those who attended them. It was a statutory offence to disturb stock. That meant it was also an offence for Aborigines to travel over stock-runs, even if the region might have been their tribal ground — not statutory, perhaps, but no less a law of the land, introduced with settlement and well and truly laid down with the rifle, the stockwhip, and the hobble-chain. It wasn’t that the stockmen, even if they owned the stock, loved their beasts so well as to be distressed over upsetting of their natural placidity, but that disturbance caused them to become restless, to herd, which meant to fight and rut and consequently to lose weight; and weight in saleable beef is the measure of the butcher’s interest in his victims.
That night they camped on the muddy water of a stream that George said was one of the heads of the Caroline River. White cockatoos warned every creature in screaming distance of their presence. Nevertheless, a young wallaby came to drink within easy spear throw. George left it to Prindy. ‘Poor bugger,’ said Prindy, breaking the struggling beast’s neck with a boomerang. Whether or not bovine beasts, being as it were New Australians, responded like indigenous creatures to cockatoos’ vigilance, a mob gathered round them in the night to moo softly and sigh and chew the cud, so many that in the morning they, the indigenous ones, had to slink away in various directions to begin with, to prevent the cavalcade that would have been on their heels. Caroline Station homestead was not far away from here, according to George, who said that he spent a little time there after bringing cattle across from the Princess Alice for butchering for the gold miners. He said, ‘Dat-lot whitefeller, Chinee . . . him proper mad long ’o dat-one goold. He been dig him, he been dig him . . . all day, all night, dig him . . . hot weather, cold weather, rain, no matter.’
‘Wha’ nam’ goold?’ asked Prindy.
‘I don’ know properly,’ George confessed. ‘Dey reckon for mek money. Dat time I young feller I ask old feller . . .’
Queeny protested: ‘Gwan, rubbitch! Mek him money from silber, ain’t it? Dat-one goold for put him rotten tooth, mek him weddin’ ring.’
‘Wha’ nam’ weddin’ ring?’
‘You see on white lady hand . . . some halfcaste . . . and lubra, too. I been get one box from Chinaman before . . . sell him two bob. Woman got him weddin’ ring, da’s mean she marrit . . . all-same some silly bloody blackfeller mob cut him off finger, knock him out tooth.’
‘Goold for mek money,’ said George stubbornly.
Queeny yelled, ‘Don’ you listen bloody mungus blackfeller, boy. Where you see goold money?’
‘Arrhhh!’ was George’s comment. Queeny was even crankier than usual, because the tobacco had petered out and she had not got anything like George’s share in these findings.
What had been done to the country they had passed through, by pigs and cattle, was nothing compared with what the gold miners of forty or fifty years before had done to the region they now entered. It was hereabouts that Civilisation of the land had begun in force where the process known as Opening Up The Country had really begun. Quite literally had this country been Opened Up. Disembowelled would be an apter term. Not a creek but its banks had been stripped to the rock, the detritus and humus gathered over a millennium and more put through the cradle and the dry-blower, washed away, blown away, its rock split with dynamite, its trees torn down for building and for firewood, seeds and seedlings dead for ever for want of earth to root in — because there was gold in that earth, to be got at only by destruction of the earth. Not a quartz-topped hill, some obvious symbol of the wonders of the Dream Time which originally must have flashed to Sun and Moon like jewelled giants, but had been blasted into heaps of graveyard gravel for the gold in its heart. The heart stuff had been taken and ground to powder under the stamps of batteries now lying collapsed in rusty iron tangles amidst harsh thickets of whiteman’s and Chinaman’s weeds, looking like the ground-down molars of old men’s jaw-bones protruding from upheaved graves. That powder had been reduced to cyanided sludge to leach out the last pennyweight of the metal so precious that a country had been stolen for it, and that country heedlessly destroyed along with its owners. They had piped away the poison sludge to silt the creeks and rivers and kill all life that these supported, to spread sterility without effort into places not considered worth effecting it with pick and shovel and dynamite. There were no more grassy flats. All that grew out of the level land, besides the weeds, the stinking-roger, the castor-oil bush, the Chinee burrs, were the slow-decaying parts of the edifices erected by those who had brought Civilisation into the land, their homes for the period of spoliation, their places of trading for greedy exploitation of the fruits of greed, the rusting iron, broken brick, shattered glass, of the shops and pubs.
Amidst the wreckage of what George declared had been the township of Golden Grove, where there was a pool of muddy water behind a weir across a waste of sand that had been the Caroline River, George called a halt in mid-afternoon. There were a few paperbarks and river-gums growing in the sand, all but dead, hanging on to the earth by one root and the sky with one branch. Evidently George wanted to recapture something of the wonder he had experienced in what had been the first town he had seen. ‘Crise,’ he said. ‘Goot time here den. Plenty people . . . whitefeller, blackfeller, Chineeman, Scottyman, Narishman, Germanman . . . any kind. Properly dat time. Ev’rybody drinkin’, gamblin’, playin’-up. By crise, yes . . . properly!’ He sighed.
Evidently the fate of those of his breed who had been dispossessed of something they would have loved as only primitive man can love, his stamping ground, did not occur to him.
The water was bitter with the black concoction of macerated leaves and iron-rust. They drank it, made tea with it, camped in the sand under one of the mummified trees. No birds here to call the end of day. Even the koodooks, the vengeful Shades of tribesmen whose Dreaming Place has been destroyed since there was no calling of them in the night . . . Koodook-koodook-koodook . . . had abandoned it. There was scuffling round them in the early darkness, and tiny eyes to be seen like sparks. George said they were rats. Then in the middle of the night, as Igulgul was rising, they were wakened by a scream amongst the ruins across the way that had them up out of their sacking staring — again: Row-wow-wow —yee-yowl!
‘Pussy-cat,’ said George.
The cats fought for all the rest of the night. The rats scuttled round the sand, trying to get at the bit of ripening wallaby hanging in the sugar-sacks from a bit of dead limb, only to be silently pounced on by Mungus. Igulgul was winking through the few leaves of the tree when Queeny woke them out of the bit of sleep they were at last enjoying, screaming again of the Black Flying Fox of Death: ‘Le’ me ’lone you black bastard!’
They left the ravaged country, to enter another shitty hoof-ripped tooth-torn stock-run, yellow earth and mean trees, a hint of inland, similar to Beatrice River country, on which fact Nell remarked with lively interest. George told Prindy that indeed they were getting near to the Beatrice, that tonight they would camp on the Princess Alice, from the head of which, where the railway crossed, it was only a good day’s walk to Beatrice township. Prindy asked how far it was from here to the railway.
Distance is a relative thing, miles, the mille passuum of the Romans, the thousand paces, having as many meanings as modes of travelling them and moods of travellers. Primitive man’s estimate is hard to beat: No-more long way, little-bits long way, lo — ng way, lo — ng way too much, for rough estimate — for accuracy reference to the passage of the Sun while one walks with purpose. George answered by turning his head to the brassy East, and fixing a point about thirty degrees from the zenith with his lips, swept them down to the horizon: hence two-t
hirds of a day’s brisk walking, four hours, twelve miles.
They came to the Princess Alice River in mid-afternoon, in time for fishing for supper in a big hole where numerous cormorants showed the fishing must be good, a circumstance that caused annoyance to the women, who declared they wanted to go on to the railway. Queeny went so far as to start out for the railway, along the well-defined motor road they found following the river on the southern side — the road from Alice River Station, she and Nell declared, remembered from the old days; but she had to come back, because Nell would not go without Prindy, who ignored his mother as completely as George did. It was tobacco Queeny wanted. George, on the other hand, was not so hungry for the whiteman’s weed as for a bit of fish he called Parunga, best of all fish, he declared, to be found only in the Alice and Queen Victoria Rivers, and always in holes like this. Queeny’s assertion that the parunga was Wahji probably made Prindy all the more interested. George countered that by saying the fish was Wahji only when caught by women and boys, but not so if an initiated man gave it to them. The women cast themselves down in the shade of a big leaning paperbark to watch.
Catching the parunga required special technique besides the Singing of him. The great fish had a special weakness, an appetite for cormorants, the scourge of all other fish. Occasionally he would get one in a dive. What they needed was a cormorant. The fishing flock of about a dozen had moved upstream a bit at the arrival of the party, to sit in a line on the branch of a big submerged tree, watching. George got Prindy to walk slowly towards them along the water’s edge, pretending to fish with his spear, while he himself, under cover of another tumbled tree trunk, went up the bank and worked his way along until he was just beyond them. He aimed his boomerang. The birds started at sound of its whistling rush, turned — too late. Two went down. Prindy came running to retrieve them. One disappeared as he was swimming out. He got the other. George told him to climb onto the tree and wait for him. George came out with spears and his sugar-sack. He took hibiscus string from the bag and tied it to the dead bird, tossed it into the water. He was certain that the other had been taken by a parunga and that all they had to do was to wait. They waited so long that Queeny and Nell collected witchetty grubs they found in large quantity in rotten flood timber and pencil yams, and having got a fire going to cook them, called Prindy to come and eat. Prindy ignored them.
It was sundown, with the hole becoming a lake of blood white-spotted with the reflexions of all the cockatoos in the country gathering in the trees to mock, and Queeny joining in with peals of nasty laughter — when there was a flurry in the green darkness down below, and spearman and henchman grew rigid again as countless times they had for flickering instants, but now held their poses — a great toothy cave of a mouth rising to snap — tuk! George’s barbed spear shot past the floating bird. The mouth clamped over the spear. Spear vanished. George looked at Prindy with a grin: ‘He come up by’n’by.’ He looked up at the cockies, round at the women. All were silent. A blue crane high in a tree croaked whatever his opinion was, and then went flapping off, perhaps to spread the story of it.
The cockatoos yelled again when they saw the haft of the spear appear down by the bar, wag feebly. George said quick, they must get him, before he drowned and sank. The water was quite shallow where they got him, gasping his life out with his blood. He was a type of cod, a good three feet in length, and of such a weight as to need the pair to carry him and cause the heavy spear to bend. The cockatoos raised a great shout about it. The women only stared.
The fishermen cut great fillets from it and grilled them. Prindy offered the first piece to his mother, but to have her refuse it, saying shrilly, ‘Dat no-goot tucker.’ Prindy said his uncle had said he could give it to her, and that would make it right. She persisted, ‘I don’ wan’ . . . and you leave him ’lone too . . . poison dat one . . . mek you blow up and get him sore all over. Don’ you eat him . . . don’ you, now!’ But Prindy gobbled the fillets with his uncle, remarking over and over on its tastiness. The rest went into a ground oven, to taunt the hungry women all night with its sweet savour hanging over the camp like a taunting ghost.
Queeny, usually the last to rise, was first up next morning, bustling in the half-light to get her things together. Nell was up a little later, roused by the movement, likewise Prindy, to whom she said shortly, ‘Come on . . . we go now.’ She grabbed his arm, pulled when he would have turned to George, who still appeared to be asleep. Mungus came leaping into it, kai-kai-kai-ing in disapproval of trouble he suspected between his people. George grunted out of his sacking, ‘You go, Kookanjinni.’ Prindy looked surprised, bewildered. Without a word he took up his belongings. Queeny was already up on the road, calling, rousing the sleepy cockatoos.
It was luxurious going, following a silky pad after making your own road through the wilderness. How long since a motor vehicle had passed would be impossible to say, because cattle also used the twin tracks in what would be daily movements to and from water. The road pretty nearly followed the river, as would be necessary in the old days when waggon horses needed watering. Obviously there were short cuts across the bends. But that would mean picking their way again. No need to hide their tracks, when invisible stock, already calling themselves together for the daily plod, would soon obliterate them. So easy was it that by mid-morning Prindy, in the lead with Mungus, declared that he could hear motor car ahead, the sound not coming towards them but crosswise to their going. Then the others heard it — droning, constant, waxing and waning on the wind. Then suddenly — poom! It was a good way off. Still the air quivered to it, the leaves of the trees whispered, birds called alarm. It happened again, twice. The dust could be seen rising. Prindy explained to the women.
It was Mungus, out in front, who picked up the tracks first — a single pair of human footprints. Eventually he knew whose they were, by his quivering interest. Prindy also recognised them at once. As the others came up, looking anxious, he said, ‘Ngangula.’
Queeny exclaimed, ‘How dat bloody old bastard get ’head o’ we?’
Prindy said, quite seriously, ‘Might-be he fly.’
‘Don’ be jitty,’ snapped Queeny. ‘Man can’ fly!’
‘You been tell him ’bout hangel.’
‘Dat-one hangel long o’ ’Eaven . . . no-more dis country. He daid feller.’
Prindy said, ‘Dat-one Pookarakka can fly.’
His mother said shrilly, ‘Rubbitch . . . dat old man he on’y gammon . . . bloody rogue. You finish long o’ dat-lot now.’
Prindy turned away with a silent Brrrp of the lips, went on in old Njorgunga’s tracks.
Mungus smelt George before they were anywhere near him, or perhaps more truly his cooking, because for a little while he trod warily, sniff-sniff-sniffing the breeze. Prindy with spear poised watched as warily. Then Mungus gave a yelp and dashed ahead and would not stop on the hissed order. Prindy ran after him while his mother cried in subdued voice for him to come back.
There was George sitting amongst dried cow-dung in the shade of a mangan plum, with a good coal fire, the billy boiling, and chunks of baked fish laid out on bushes. ‘Goot-tay,’ he said casually as Prindy came running up. ‘You want him breakfas’?’
He had no weapons or dunnage of any kind with him. When he saw Prindy looking about, he said, ‘Been plant him.’
As the women came up, Queeny demanded, ‘Wha’s matter you foller-in’ up we, old man? We finish long o’ you.’
Nevertheless they all ate, while butcher birds gathered for the scraps.
They set off again, with George leading, not bothering to take short cuts, as he must have on his own. Their progress towards civilisation was soon to be measured not only by the waxing sound of it, the roar and rumble, but by the smell, the dust, the smoke of gasoline and dieseline and gelignite. Then they could see it, as a red haze hanging over hills to southward, whither the road was turning them. Now there was dust to be seen dulling the natural sheen of leaves evolved to reflect a blasting Sun
and now tending to wither under it — dust, dust, dust — on everything. The guts of animals that ate the grass must be full of mud. It stung the eyes — or was it the fuming exhalations of the kuttabah’s mechanical monsters?
The country was becoming rocky, the banks of the river high, the stream more rapid in its little flow. Signs of civilisation in the form of tree-stumps, rusty cans, bottles, spent cartridges. Then suddenly there it was across the river, a very different place from that Nell and Prindy had looked out upon from the train half a year earlier — the couple of railway cottages, the shed in which their porcine progenitor lay dying. Now along the river bank stretched a township of tents, tin sheds, bush houses, laid out in orderly fashion, as it were in streets. As the timber on that side had been mostly felled, but was still thick on their side and thicker for regrowth from the stumps, the party were able to see without being seen, especially as the place was almost deserted and its few inhabitants preoccupied. Three or four people wearing white aprons, one a woman, were to be seen moving rapidly between a big tin building that was obviously the kitchen and a bigger one of bush materials that by the long table and line of bottled condiments and covered dishes was seen to be the mess room. Several dogs were sitting watching at respectful distances, and kites and crows from the few remaining trees.
Queeny said, ‘Wha’you-call-yim Renchouse, eh? Dat woman white.’
The woman was really red, face and fat arms, as she moved back and forth through the slit of blazing sunshine between the two buildings.
Nell said, ‘Close-up dinner time, I reckon.’
Almost as she said it, the rolling mechanical roar that came like the sound of surf on a shore, waxing, waning, stopped dead. They turned towards the silence. A few minutes of nothing but the surge of the sou’easter in the trees. Then mechanical sound again, the steady drone of an ordinary motor vehicle. There was increased bustle in the Renchouse. Soon there was the roaring of a truck going into low gear, its whining down a declivity, its howling up another. Out of the screen of spared trees a big red truck came rolling, its tray packed with yellow men, trailing a cloud of yellow dust that the wind swept across the river to smother more leaves. The truck drew up at another long bush shelter. The men leapt out of it, beating the dust from their clothes, went into shelter, to wash at a trough. Another truck, of indeterminate colour but with a similar load of men, rolled in behind. Soon a mob of red men were at the table, wolfing like starvelings, so that the clatter of their dealings with their provender was to be heard by the watchers, even though they were somewhat upwind of them. Prindy declared that they were eating roast beef and puddin’. None of the party appeared to envy the men their provender. It was when the meal was done and the mob sat back and filled the mess room with blue smoke that there was swallowing and sighing. Half the men retired to their tents.
Poor Fellow My Country Page 75