The men all began taking turns with the M16. Terry Butterworth was one, laughing uproariously as the gun chattered in his hand. William was amazed to see that even Kevin Goodwin had a go. The accountant, who had looked ill at ease all day, appeared even more uncomfortable now, as he hunkered down on the ground, and squinted earnestly along the barrel. But the gun hammered away regardless when he pulled the trigger, and when Kevin rose, flushed and grinning, William hardly recognised him. It was as if the gun could perform magic on a man. And others were lining up for a turn. There was no talk in the crowd any more, just an awed hush between firings.
The air grew heavy with smoke and gunpowder, and the noise seemed to work its way into William’s head, until the throbbing in his ear became a headache. But he couldn’t turn away. The men, who had appeared so aimless and amiable earlier in the afternoon, had somehow become a pack, a tightly knit gang clustered about the weapons, full of importance and power.
It was only when William noticed orange flashes of flame at the muzzles of the guns that he realised it was getting dark. He stood up then, swaying, aware of sudden pangs of nausea. He took a few steps away from the crowd and smoke. Looking up to the crown of the hill, he could see the looming stones, and amidst them, alone, his uncle standing beneath the flagpole. The old man was watching the crowd, and even from that distance William could sense his disapproval. It all felt strange, the sunny afternoon with its flag fluttering brightly, gone forever. William’s head thumped furiously. Dogs crept about in the fading light, growling with hunger. Somewhere, someone was banging a billy can like a gong. Campfires glowed, and behind him the gunfire petered off to a few last shots, then died away to silence.
Chapter Twenty-six
NIGHT STOLE OVER THE RALLY. WILLIAM LOITERED ABOUT HIS camp, where Terry and Henry were entertaining their friends. They had the barbecue alight, blue flames hissing under the grill. William could smell sausages frying, and steak, and onions, and yet he didn’t feel hungry. His nausea hadn’t gone away. And maybe it was only the smoke from the campfires hanging in the air, but there seemed to be a haze over his vision. The world looked distant and flat. When Terry offered him a sandwich crammed with sausages and onions, William turned it down.
‘You okay, champ?’ the policeman wanted to know.
‘I guess so.’
‘Maybe you should lie down for a bit, before things get started.’
William nodded and went to his tent, curling up on his sleeping bag. But whatever was wrong, it wasn’t making him sleepy. He rolled about, restless. The noises from outside the tent — people talking and laughing — sounded jarring and strange. And the rotting smell was back, as elusive as ever, but undeniable.
Eventually,Terry poked his head inside and announced that the meeting was about to start. William got up. Lying down wasn’t working anyway — the more he kept his eyes closed, the dizzier he felt. He emerged from the tent. All across the hillside shadowy figures could be seen making their way towards the top. William followed them. There was a muttering of conversation, but the speakers were faceless in the dark, and no one spoke to him. He felt very alone. Below the voices and the other sounds of movement, he was aware of the steady clatter of the generator, and below that again, all around, there was the deeper silence of the bush. He cast his eyes to the sky, but there was no moon and the stars were a blur. He blinked and blinked, yet his vision refused to clear. Then the stone circle loomed upon the crown of the hill. The rocks and trees formed black shapes against a leaping brightness. A bonfire had been built at one end of the circle, and was blazing brightly, casting back the darkness. Shadows jumped and danced, and within the ring hundreds of people were gathering, their voices low, their faces reflecting red from the flames.
William felt he had stepped into another world. He could see his uncle now, framed against the fire, standing next to a microphone. A few paces behind him, side by side, stood the other four members of the central committee. The crowd was organising itself in a wide arc about them, settling down on the grass or on blankets or in folding chairs. William remained at the rear, his back against one of the stones. It felt cool and solid, reassuring, and he needed a foundation, for the dizziness would not go away. The crowd, the fire, it all pressed upon him, noisome and stifling. He looked outwards, off to the south. The treetops hung white and grey in the flickering light. Beyond them, dying campfires sprinkled the hillside, and further below still was the wide blackness of the plains. Pinpricks of light shone out there, from farmhouses and sheds where people worked and moved, and far off on the horizon was the glow of Powell, with its ten thousand souls going about their lives. But that was the normal world, impossibly distant, and it had nothing to do with what was happening up on the hill.
William’s uncle stepped to the microphone.
‘Welcome,’ he said.
Even amplified and crackling, his voice was quiet, and a hush fell over the circle. He glanced at the sky and smiled.
‘Well, we’ve a fine night for it.’
The crowd murmured appreciatively. William looked around at each of the stones, and they too waited, listening.
‘Many of you won’t know this,’ his uncle said,‘but hundreds of years ago, I’m sure that Aborigines used to meet on this very spot. It was a sacred site to them. Now, we’re going to be hearing a lot about Aboriginal history and sacred sites in the coming years, and it might seem strange that we, of all people, should gather at one of their special places. But there’s a message in this. The Aborigines are gone. And that’s the point. This is my property now. This is all your properties,your farms,your houses,your yards — this hill represents them all. We must be prepared to defend what we own.’ The crowd bent forward, approving, and the old man’s voice went low. ‘Australia — every square inch of it — is our sacred site.’
Then Terry Butterworth was clapping, firm and slow, and after a moment all the other committee members joined in, followed by the crowd. The applause swelled into thunder, and William’s uncle waited for the noise to die away.
‘There are those who want to deny the truth of history. Those who want to divide this nation up into camps, black and white, and tell us where we can and can’t go in our own country. Apartheid is what they’re talking about. Rights for some, but not for others. Our government in Canberra is at this very moment debating ways to deny all of us here the basic entitlements of ownership over land, and security in that ownership. Which is why it is so important that we are here, in this place that we have claimed. To meet. To talk. And to make our battle plans.’
More applause, and more cheers.
And so the meeting was underway. Yet for William, nothing felt right. It all looked distorted, and his empty stomach rolled queasily. He sank down against the stone and held his head in his hands. Meanwhile, his uncle gave way to other speakers — first Terry Butterworth and then Kevin Goodwin. They spoke of things with which William was already familiar. The government and Native Title and the rights of people over their own properties. But through his misery, none of it mattered. And on the edges of his sight, away from the fire, the night seemed to be crowding in, heavier and heavier, and utterly black. Then there were other speakers at the microphone, people William didn’t know, and then men and women who simply stood up from the crowd to say what they wanted.
‘…we’re the ones who suffer, not the city people…’
‘…what do they know, they’ve never owned a property, worked it for generations…’
‘…black and white always got along out here, everyone knew their place, but now the blacks are getting cocky, they think they’re gonna end up owning everything…’
‘…they don’t even have to pay for it like we do, they just get it handed over…’
‘…and no one’s listening to us, no one gives a damn…’
They were angry words, and angry people. Their mood reeked of frustration and stale sunscreen and beer. Then Terry was up at the microphone again, discussing the committee�
�s plan to find a property that would be threatened by the new laws, and to set up a barricade around it. Hands were raised, volunteering to man picket lines, while half a dozen people offered their properties for selection. The debate surged back and forth. William felt he was growing seasick on an ocean of talk.
Someone raised the question of whether the men on the barricades should bear arms. Suddenly Kevin Goodwin was up again — still swollen, it seemed, from his moment with the machine gun. He declared that the only answer was an organised militia. William’s head was whirring. A militia? Hadn’t that been Terry’s idea, or Henry’s? But the crowd was inspired.
‘…a hundred men right here…’
‘…do it now, before the bastards take our guns away…’
‘…show them armed men can defend their rights…’
‘…defend our fucking borders, you mean, no one else is doing it, might as well put out a bloody welcome mat…’
‘…it’s open house, it’s Asians and Arabs and God knows who else, and it’s a proven fact, those people bring all their old problems with them…’
‘…you saw it, all of us, today, that was the real Australia for you…’
‘…and what’s so wrong with it, why should we feel guilty…’
But then William’s uncle was at the microphone, his hands raised for calm.‘Let’s not stray too far. Immigration is certainly an issue, but it can wait. As for a militia, if people want one, well and good, but that’s a long-term thing. A response to the Native Title legislation is what we’re here to organise.’
But William could sense an impatience in the crowd now. An ugly stubbornness. What had happened to everyone? He stared about, trying to focus on faces, but recognised no one from the sunny afternoon. This was a different collection of people, here in the ring and the firelight.
More voices were yelling.
‘…Kevin’s right, they just ignore us now…’
‘…but once we’re armed they’ll listen. Any fucking blacks come to take my farm, I’ll…’
‘…they’ll only ruin it anyway, they don’t know how to run a property, they never did anything with this country…’
‘…the old settlers knew it, they didn’t get all weepy about it, they just did what had to be done, and if it took a gun…’
‘…pity of it is, they didn’t finish them off when they had the chance…’
‘…you know they were cannibals, they were barely even…’
‘No.’ It was William’s uncle once more, standing sternly at the microphone. The crowd grew quiet sullenly.‘This is not what we’re about. We are not now, and have never been, a racist organisation. This is not about Aborigines. I’ve got no problem with them, not as a race. But there’s no turning back the clock. That’s why I’m angry about this legislation. Not because of the Aborigines. But because the legislation is stupid. It ignores reality. It tries to make criminals out of honest people who have worked hard for their land, it tries to say that we stole this country, when in fact we earned it. The new laws will tie us up in a sentimental mishmash of impossible rules that pretend history never happened, that somehow we’re back where we were two hundred years ago. We’re not, and the laws are wrong. But I will not have racist talk here!’
The crowd wasn’t convinced. More disagreements broke out. People demanded that Kevin Goodwin be given the microphone. Through the veil of his nausea, William saw his uncle and Kevin arguing fiercely, but he couldn’t hear the words. Nearby, a child on its mother’s lap was crying. Everywhere William looked he saw red, angry faces, or others that were bewildered. He couldn’t stand it any longer. It was as if the sickness in his head had spread out across the gathering. He lurched away from the stone and out of the circle. His eyes turned skywards for a moment and he saw the flagpole spearing into the night, but the light from the bonfire didn’t reach the top, and the flag that hung there was black.
William reeled on, gravity propelling his legs down the hill. He passed right through the empty campsite and across the car park. And onwards still, into a welcoming darkness. The ground levelled out and trees rose thickly about him. It seemed that he had descended into a fold between the hills. Finally he came to a rutted channel in the dark, a gully along which water would flow when it rained, though now it was dusty and dry. And here he cast himself down, grateful, his face to the heavens. Yet even with solid earth beneath him he still felt he was spinning. The stars wheeled above, his skin was sweaty, and his head ached and throbbed. But eventually the vertigo began to fade. He lay very still, listening. From far off he could hear the whine of the generator, and the sound of voices from the hilltop, but it was very quiet there amongst the trees, and for a time he simply let himself drift, his mind empty of thought.
Gradually, however, an awareness came over him. The quiet had been a relief at first, but the longer William lay there, the more it seemed to weigh him down. There was still the distant clamour of his uncle’s rally, but he could sense the silence as a greater thing, hanging above. It enfolded the entire hillside. It spread far into the sky and out across the night. It was the night. It reached back along the spur and up into the mountains, to where dark and empty chasms plunged. It spread westwards too, to where the House loomed above its ruined garden. And further, all the way across the plains, across endless miles of paddocks and crops, where nothing moved or made a sound, and where the darkness clustered around lone farm houses, and people hid away from it, huddled in front of their televisions.
The air had turned cold.
William sat up, hugging his arms around himself. It was coming. A moment, a thing — he was suddenly alert to its approach. His limbs ached, and the pain in his ear was piercing, but he found that he could see everything around him with chill clarity. Every tree, each individual leaf, was a crystal-edged shadow. The black bulk of the hills rose against the paler darkness of the sky. A thousand stars blazed noiselessly high above. And yet everything might have been frozen, the trees, the hills, the stars, paused in an instant of expectation. Even the insects that crawled in the grass had fallen still. The small animals that burrowed in the earth or hunted each other across the ground had ceased their activities. The night birds that stood sentinel in the trees, black eyes shining, had become stone. Every creature was motionless. Up on the hill people argued and fires burned, but all around them the land stood deathly still in anticipation.
And in answer, something came to William out of the night.
At first he saw only a glimmer of light. It was a flame, somewhere off to the east of him. It was hidden by the trees … No, it was moving amongst the trees, passing from shadow to shadow between the trunks, a flame that flickered and flared. It appeared to be some distance off, and it wasn’t moving quickly. It was as if someone was carrying a fire as they walked, unhurried, picking their way alongside the dry bed of the water channel. But the flame was unearthly too. It wasn’t focused around a single point, but seemed to change in shape, to swell and shrink and remould itself endlessly, and yet hint at something familiar. And he could hear no crackle of wood. The fire was utterly without sound.
An unreasoning fear shook William. He’d seen this thing before. It was the light he’d glimpsed moving in the hills, all those months ago, from down on the plains. And it wasn’t anything to do with the rally on the hilltop, or with the bonfire in the circle of stones. It was something else entirely. Something, William was certain, that trod the night even when there was no one else there. He was shivering now. He stood up, ready to flee, but in the same moment, off through the trees, the flame paused in its progress. William hesitated, holding his breath. It was aware of him. Whoever or whatever carried the flame, it had seen him now. William hung motionless in the darkness, staring. And then the flame shifted slightly, and resolved into a shape, and finally, irrevocably, he saw. It wasn’t a man carrying a fire, as he’d first thought — it was a man on fire. And yet the figure didn’t scream or struggle,but stood perfectly still. William could discern arm
s and legs wrapped in flame, a torso that streamed silent fire. And a head, tilted calmly to one side, as if to ask a question while it burned.
He was running then. Blindly, away from the water channel and back up the hill, through the campsite and onwards, to where people and safety lay. The thing didn’t pursue him,but he knew that if he glanced back it would be waiting. It had looked as if it would wait forever. What question it might have asked he did not know, nor want to. He kept running. And as he approached the hilltop, he felt the air stir at his back. A wind was gathering, from out of the west. It gusted, ebbed, then blustered again, so that if there had been a cloud in the sky, William would have thought a storm was on its way. But there were no clouds. Up over the hilltop the wind tumbled, blowing William with it. And then he was amongst the circle of trees and stone, and in the light of the bonfire.
But the bonfire was guttering, and the crowd had broken into milling, arguing groups. Men were shouting, and women and children were drifting away, and dust, whipped up by the wind, streamed between the stones. Dogs snarled and snapped at each other. William couldn’t see anyone he knew. Not Terry or Henry, or even the accountant. Where had they all gone? And then he caught sight of his uncle amidst a knot of people, saw the anger on his face, the wild gestures of his arms. It was as if he had been set upon by his followers. Had a madness come with the wind? William ran to the old man, tugged on his hand.
‘Uncle John,’ he begged. ‘Uncle John…’
His uncle tore his hand away.‘Not now, damn it.’
‘But I saw … down there … I saw…’
‘I don’t care what you saw!’
‘There was a man on fire!’ William wailed.
John McIvor stared down at his nephew then, and for an instant William saw a stunned recognition in the old man’s eyes. But it was only for an instant, for suddenly, to William’s horror, there really was fire. It came rushing up over the brow of the hill. He shrank back, transfixed by the sight of a great burning cross towering into the night. It flared hungrily in the wind, and the men who held it aloft were all robed in white, their heads covered with hoods,black holes of emptiness cut out for eyes. They cried and yelled with alien voices, and the crowd drew apart from them, aghast.
The White Earth Page 20