Terra Nullius

by Claire G. Coleman

  The day was not getting any longer; it would be well after noon before they could get moving, even if Mick could find a track, which Rohan was beginning to doubt. He had lost almost all faith in the young man’s hunting ability. No matter. Jacky would be far away, and it would do no good to run off without eating, without water in their bottles, without packing whatever food they could get their hands on into their bags. Rohan took the least comfortable seat. He would never allow any of the younger men with him to think they were tougher than he was.

  Chapter 5

  There is nothing more important, to us and to you all, than the economic health of this colony. Without economic independence we can never hope to gain political independence from home; that was a condition that was laid upon us. So long as we are dependent on assistance from home we can never hope to be self-governing. Grazing of livestock and the effective export of the fruits of that labour is the simplest, the fastest, way forward towards that economic power.

  The only thing standing in our way, the main limitation to our growth is the depredations of the criminal, aggressive and intransigent Natives. So long as our livestock is not safe from the immoral and illegal actions of these primitives we will not be a real country. We call upon the government of the colony to assist us in the control of this menace. We need more police, with more discretionary powers. All Natives who endanger our livestock must be arrested and tried for that crime.

  It does not matter which Native killed the stock, without doubt every Native has joined in on the savage, pagan feasting they are no doubt partaking of at our expense. Every man, woman and child is involved either directly or as accessories to the crime.

  If, as we suspect, every Native is involved in livestock killing then every Native must be arrested. The danger must be eliminated at any cost.

  – An Open Letter from the United Graziers Association

  The first moment it was light enough to see, just light enough to avoid walking into the bruised, twisted trunks of the trees, Jacky was away again, this time with a new direction. He kept the light in his face as he wove his way through the trees. There was not much information in as simple an imperative as ‘east’ but lacking more to go on he took what clues he had. At least at dawn, east was easy; Jacky ran towards the sun.

  He had to move fast; they were right behind him. He had to move carefully, leave no tracks, no trace, they were right behind him; he had to run, he couldn’t run, they were right behind him. Leaves were soft on his bare feet. If he ran on leaves he would leave almost no tracks but unfortunately there were no leaves on the ground. He dodged between the trees, stepping when he could on fallen wood, on stones, on bark, not on the earth between. It was a bizarre, jinking, looping, staggering run; he swayed and swerved, he constantly changed direction. He was a flittering bird, a scurrying rat, a leaf in a storm; what tracks he left would give scant clue to his direction of movement.

  Hungry again, he wished he had taken the time to steal some food, though that would have increased the risk. He knew if he had stopped to break into the pantry he would have never found out what he needed to know, he might have even got caught, but that was no consolation when his stomach was screaming. He had no time to hunt, not much of a chance to gather food when every moment of delay could be costly, every delay an unacceptable risk. He could only run, and watch for food as he did so.

  He had not, at first, noticed how the trees had changed as he had run. Jacky did not belong here; the country now was unfamiliar, completely so. It is always possible to identify the country by its trees, and these trees around him, he did not know them. Although he knew in which direction he was running he did not know where he was; he felt lost although he was not.

  It was always a problem for him defining ‘lost’; he had a vague idea where he was but he had no real idea where he was going. East was a direction, not a destination. Jerramungup was a place but he had no idea where it was. It would be child’s play to retrace his steps, to return to the mission, to return from there to the settlement he had escaped from. He was not lost, he just didn’t know where he was going; he was not lost, his destination was.

  Passing a thicket of blackberries he grabbed handfuls, hunger and fear making him incautious, scratching the hell out of his hands and arms. Slaking his thirst, providing needed calories, they were small, sour and hard to get to but far better than nothing. The meal gave him just enough energy to keep running, running east.

  Finding a clean-looking stream, clean enough, he drank until his belly sloshed, until he felt a little ill, until it was almost impossible to keep moving with such a lake inside him. Yet still he moved, no longer even understanding how he kept the will to go on. A bird silly enough to have its nest a short climb above the ground lost its eggs; only tiny morsels but Jacky needed them.

  He ran the day through, walking when too tired to run, ignoring the hunger that he was not quite able to satiate, ignoring the fatigue he knew would only get worse from day to day. Trying to ignore the fear, trying to live on hope, he ran on as the sun wheeled overhead, staggering with unacknowledged fatigue. He ran again until it was too dark to keep running. Finding nowhere warm enough or safe enough to sleep, he lay in the bushes at the base of a tree, shivering himself to sleep with fear and the cold.

  It had been a night of fire and noise, a night of gunshots and screams, of fear, blood and death, mostly death. A glut of death that had ended Johnny Star’s life. Following standard tactics, they had arrived at the Native camp a couple of hours before dawn. They were searching for a fugitive, a murderer who had killed a Settler. It did not matter why the Settler had been singled out and killed, although the Native would surely have some story, some pathetic excuse. Murder would not be tolerated.

  The Troopers had crept carefully into the scratchy dry bush around the camp until they could see the huts, the humpies, the tents, the coals of dying campfires, and the men, women and children lying asleep in the dirt. There were troopers prone on the ground in the scrub, troopers standing behind trees in the dark, peering around them at the camp. Twenty men in all, likely too many to arrest a single Native but you could never be too sure. They were silent, although they were nervous; they had all heard stories of the sneaky Natives and their tricks.

  So silent it was that every trooper was startled when the captain screamed, a blood-chilling wail, a battle cry, a death cry; no words just pure aggression as if he had tapped into the frenzy-killer in his brain and connected it straight to his vocal chords. When he fired his gun in the air for emphasis, the Natives stood almost as one and made to run, lurching up from the ground, surging out of the huts. They tripped and stumbled as they made their ragged way; there was no order, no pattern, no sense to the stampede.

  ‘Fire,’ the captain cried and the startled, nervous, half-trained troopers, used to obeying orders without question, did exactly that. They fired into the fleeing crowd. Men, women and children fell among spraying blood. The survivors were sprayed with so much gore they looked like they too might have been shot.

  Johnny was with them as they chased the terrified, fleeing survivors, in the almost dark, in the glowing red light of scattered coals from campfires, in the light from burning humpies. Some of the Native men grabbed their primitive arms and tried to fight back but men with ancient weapons cannot stand against men with modern guns. They were gunned down. The flickering, fluttering firelight cast enough light to see the violence but not enough to see the details. Johnny ran with the others of his troop, guns empty – who could be bothered reloading? – running buoyed by their bubbling laughter, knives in hands slitting throats and piercing bellies.

  Dancing flames and leaping sparkling coals, leaping running figures and glinting sparkling blades. A red dawn of fire, coals and blood, the blood transforming from black to red where the sunlight hit. People, his people, dancing around the camp holding flaming branches casting fire into the Natives’ meagre homes, their meag
re Native belongings, their meagre Native flesh.

  He saw a babe, taken from its screaming mother’s arms, wailing as it was dashed against a rock with a sickening thud, its head spurting blood onto the stone, its still shuddering body cast onto the flames of its burning home. Its wailing mother, falling to her knees, was unable or unwilling – her shaded eyes already blank – to resist as her throat was cut. The father – he assumed it was the father – screamed defiance right until a blade pierced his chest, screamed defiance and pain from bubbling frothing lungs.

  He saw a man running, his tattered rags of clothing afire, chased by laughing troopers, trailing smoke and flickering light. He saw a gutted man still living, holding his entrails with desperation as his eyes slowly faded. He saw a woman shot, bent over her child to protect it, then a man shot bending over her to wail for her life. He saw death: death walking and death running, even death dancing. He saw death in the blades and death in fire and smoke.

  Running in the terrible light, in the metallic smell of blood, of raw meat, in the noise of death – no longer thinking, blind with unaccustomed emotion – he didn’t see the corpse he caught his foot on. When he fell, he landed with his face on something soft; he did not want to know what it was that had saved him. As he rose he had no choice but to look. In the first light of dawn he saw a Native – a child, stomach opened like a hunter’s prize, like a corpse on an autopsy table, like a gutted fish, like a pig slaughtered for meat. As he wiped the blood and entrails from his face, he retched; he did not want to vomit on the dying child below him. His mind came close to breaking point as he watched the last light, the last glimmer of life, leaving the child’s eyes.

  Trying too hard to wipe the blood from his face he bruised, abraded, battered his own skin. Near him another trooper was actually laughing, a cold reptilian snigger, finding something funny in Johnny’s face-down fall into a corpse. Johnny’s hand twitched towards his handgun, he fought the urge to draw on this stranger who had once been his friend. Surely none of his friends would laugh in that hell.

  When it was light enough they piled the corpses to rot, not bothering with burial or even with cleansing fire. They regrouped: many men were grinning; others, abashed, looked like they wanted to be sick. Johnny saw no sign of the horror consuming his soul in anyone else’s eyes. There were souvenirs: one man held a spear, others held scalps; one man was told to throw the severed head he was carrying onto the pile of bodies. ‘It will only rot and stink,’ the captain told him. ‘You know that from experience, Captain,’ someone quipped, and most of the men laughed.

  One man, with more forethought than the rest, held a squirming Native child, less than a year old, too shocked, too tired to wail. ‘It will be a great pet for my girl,’ he said. The others laughed.

  ‘Wish I had thought of that,’ said the man next to him.

  The abattoir smell of corpses not yet beginning to rot made Johnny’s head swim. The breeze shifted, blowing the smoke from a burning hut in his direction. He smelled the smoke, then his stomach churned; under the smell of smoke was the smell of food, of roasting meat.

  In the full light of dawn, the coals of smouldering fire, the blood of Natives, turned the world red. In the silence after the battle, after the massacre, even the last flames that still had something to burn seemed afraid to crackle. There was no noise of footsteps, no noise of bodies pushing through bush, not even the sound of breathing. The grieving world held its breath.

  Almost exactly one week later Johnny walked away from camp in the middle of the night. He took nothing with him but his stash, a few notes he had kept in an empty ration tin and his sidearm, for it was dangerous out there. He told nobody he was leaving, gave no explanation, not being certain he could explain it if he tried. He could not tell anyone. He was absent without leave, he had technically stolen his firearm. By leaving he had become a criminal. Leaving behind his old life, leaving behind his old name, only suited to his old life, he became Johnny Star.

  A week later, when he collapsed from hunger and thirst, when he closed his eyes knowing he was going to die there, he was surprised to wake to a Native holding his mouth open with a strong hand, pouring cool fresh water down his throat. The water was the most delicious thing he had ever tasted and he moaned in protest when it was withdrawn. Only a moment later his stomach revolted to the water, nearly violently emptying itself as wave upon wave of nausea racked his body.

  When he woke again, not even knowing for sure he had slept, the Native was seated, cross-legged, staring intently at him, talking. Johnny didn’t speak the language but he assumed that what he was offered next was food; it looked like food, like meat, so he took what was offered and ate it.

  It was almost tasteless – an unseasoned hunk of some Native animal, scorched in a fire, but to him at that moment it might have been the food of the gods.

  The Native watched him, impassive, as they always seemed to be. Johnny finished the hunk of meat in his hand.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, his voice audibly breaking with emotions he could not begin to express. Johnny, unexpectedly, regretted that he had never bothered to learn the Native language; he had to hope that the Native had learnt his. Had the Native understood his thanks, did the Native know he had saved his life? There was no way to know.

  Why was this creature, this Native, this person – he surprised himself with the word – saving his life? A distant relative, maybe even a close relative, of the people he had helped massacre only weeks ago – did he not hold a grudge? Did he not know what sort of man Johnny was? Or was this how Natives behaved, helping the helpless even if those helpless could be their enemy? Were they that stupid, that foolish?

  Johnny was not accustomed to this much thinking, it was making his head hurt. Were people like that, kind to others? Certainly his kind would help their own, yet they would be disgustingly, foully cruel to the Natives. Obviously they did not consider Natives people, thought them less than animals maybe. Yet, here was a Native, a wild Native for all he knew, saving his life. Did that mean the Native considered Johnny to be his people, or was he really so stupid it did not occur to him to allow Johnny to die? Did the Natives fail to draw that line, the important line that had driven Johnny’s life before, defined all Settlers’ lives: the line between ‘Us’ and ‘Them’.

  The Native stared at Johnny with his dark, deep-set eyes; stared at him as if to try and read the lines in his face, see the pain in his eyes. Satisfied, or maybe deeply dissatisfied with what he saw, he turned to walk away.

  ‘Please . . .’ Johnny’s voice was uncertain, fearful. He thought he sounded embarrassingly like a child. ‘Don’t go.’ He could not fathom the reason for his plea – the food and water had given him enough energy to move on, to continue in whatever direction his life was taking him. Maybe he was lonely, wanted someone, anyone to talk to; maybe he wanted to find humanity in the Native before him. Maybe – he hated himself for this thought – he was looking for the humanity in himself.

  Was it the tone in his voice? Whatever it was it worked; the Native stopped and turned back. Johnny pointed to himself: ‘Me Johnny,’ he said slowly, laboriously. The Native stared at him as if he was the stupid one, as if nothing he said was making sense. ‘Me Johnny,’ he said, even slower and more precisely.

  The Native – tall, muscular, dark – stared into Johnny’s face with hollow eyes, suddenly flashing a wry smile. ‘My name is Tucker,’ he said in an intelligent drawl, ‘and I will never know why you Settlers always think us so stupid that we can’t learn your language.’

  Sister Bagra was deeply disconcerted and she did not like it. She stood a little too long outside the door where the stupid girl – the one who had found Jacky – was meditating, staring at the door as if by will alone she could render it transparent. She could not be certain – she was certain she could not prove it – yet she believed the girl had helped the Native boy in some way. She did not – could not – belie
ve the girl’s protestations. Hence the order to time in contemplation and prayer, hence the closed door, the door that should be locked just in case.

  Maybe some time in thought, in meditation, would bring out the truth, or at least make her feel guilty enough to prevent more such lapses.

  What was that girl’s name again? Certainly the younger sisters tended to merge and blend until they seemed all the same to her. Surely she should be able to remember their names at least. The main difficulty was the tendency of the younger sisters to lose faith. Too many of them left the mission, asked for transfers to other missions; the life at the school was clearly too much for most of them. What, therefore, was the point of getting to know all of them, any of them well? This one, this almost nameless girl was even harder to remember than the rest of the faceless nameless girls. Regardless, she would need watching to ensure she was not losing faith. Mel, that was her name. Sister Mel. Sister Bagra would have to ask the other women to keep an eye on her.

  If she could trust anyone else to watch the girl.

  The mission was silent as she strode the halls, searching for more security breaches, for more failings of faith. She could not even hear noises from the kitchen; surely someone was preparing the gruel for the children, the more substantial meal for the nuns. Turning on her heels she strode towards the kitchen.

  There was a malaise in the mission: the nuns losing faith in the work, beginning to question the teaching of those children. She agreed they would never rise up to the intelligence of the race who now ruled the land but they could surely be risen above what they were before. If they could be improved, it followed that they should be. This is a noble cause – Bagra’s belief in that was deeply embedded, unassailable, unshakeable.