“Elizabeth looked straight at me when I opened the door. She still looked hungry … no not hungry. Nothing. Elizabeth was on my father’s lap, he with a blanket over them both and the fire blazing merrily. He was lurching and squirming … she didn’t look hungry, she looked pinched, like someone had pinched her face into a point, pinched her so hard all the blood had gone out of her.
“Now that was no hanging offence, Billhook. No money changing hands there. Those kids just needed a feed. Ha! They got one too. I was a boy of twelve when old Scarface quit his war and I wanted to go to sea with the merchants but father wanted me to complete an education. He must have wanted me to get him kids, too. Still I took to skiving off school and going down to the docks. Watching the ships coming back from the Antipodes and the Americas. Watch those tars disembark and head off for the drinking houses or the brothels or their homes where the wives were. But I was still tied to my home by father’s wishes and the money that went with it.
“I saw Elizabeth one day, at the docks. She must have been about eleven or twelve by then. She looked at me askance and I knew she knew who I was but she didn’t want to say. Her eyes were gone all hard and grey. They were once so pretty and blue. Her lips were so full and now they pressed tight. The pox was about her mouth and she seemed a bit wobbly on her feet, but not in the manner of a drunkard, though she took a bottle from her skirts and tipped it above her head, poured red wine into her mouth so her lips bloomed again. No she didn’t walk like a drunkard. She walked through the piers on air, not quite touching the ground, not wafting in an unearthly way but like the girl didn’t want congress with such coarse things as cobbles and planks.
“She walked through crowds of men. Her skirt was fine red velvet but the hem was ragged and torn. A gift from a john, no doubt. She wore a green waistcoat and a shirt that was white once.”
Bailey stopped, returning to that day in his mind.
“Her hair was orange and her skin pale. She walked by a mob of tars and they all stopped talking. They turned to look after her. One nudged the other and then he caught up with her. She didn’t need to hustle, with those nice baby tits. The man caught her arm and she turned to him with a smile trained to turn upon any strange sailor she needed money from. For the next bottle, I suppose. Something to eat. Tobacco. Some rouge for all that unwrecked beauty. I watched her walk away with the sailor towards the bridge under croft, hips swaying, slim hips swaying like a child trying to be a woman, by the sailor’s side.”
Bailey slugged from the bottle of rum, spluttered and then farted. “So I was right. She was just a whore.” He nodded again towards the tea-tree forest. “Just like those whores. Little Lizzie was always a whore, giving up herself to any scrawny syphilitic tar. She was better off being fed by father had he not lost interest in her when her tits sprouted. But … looking back … that day the Elk came in fresh from the Cape and looking for crew and that’s how I came to be in the colony. Without father’s blessing. Although he victualled an entire navy, he failed to victual me for my troubles.”
He turned to stare at Billhook with scorched blue eyes. “He said something odd the day after I saw him from the hallway. He said, ‘Samuel, what you observed is an ancient manorial right.’ An ancient manorial right. But I’ll never live in a house again, Billhook, let alone a manor. The halls … the hallways do me in.”
18. DOUBTFUL ISLANDS 1826
Jimmy, Smidmore and the captain spent an age in earnest debate, on the beach beside the whaleboat. The captain, with his florid face and waistcoat over his corpulent, barrel body looked as though he was winning. Jimmy’s rags and kangaroo skins, his scarred face and Smidmore’s long hair and turned eye: those things and their predicament lowered their ranking in the captain’s eyes below that of pirates and just above the black women they had, and made grounds for a good deal.
Smidmore and Everett walked back up the hill to the camp where the sealing party waited.
“Two barrels.”
“Two fucking barrels!” spat Bailey.
“And three iron pots, two oars and a mainsail.”
Sal gave a short, ironic laugh.
Jimmy turned and backhanded her so that her head rocked sideways. “Don’t think you’re worth that much, Sal. That’s for all our skins.”
“Do they have gunpowder?” asked Billhook.
“Yep, but they ain’t parting with any.”
Bailey said in his quiet voice, “How do we know this American is telling us any truth at all?”
Jimmy had already thought it out. “If he’s lying and Boss turns up at King George Sound looking for us and a good market for skins, then we’ve got the skins on Fairy plus the skins we get at the Sound, plus we got two barrels of rum for our own trouble. Fair enough. If he don’t, we have some rum we can sell on if need be. Always said I won’t work for no man again.”
Jimmy told his own story of working for the whalers. That he’d come out from England on a whaler that wrecked on a reef on the north-east coast. They were marooned for two months before rescue. During that time, they caught seal and ate it raw, drawn its blood to drink. One of the men made a boat from sealskins, paddled off towards the mainland never to be seen again. After their rescue, the whaling company Jimmy the Nail had worked for started fitting a new ship and hiring crew in Hobart. The captain didn’t hire Jimmy the Nail when he went asking. “Reckoned I was bad luck,” he laughed. He gave up on the whaling life and went to live on Kangaroo Island. “No more working for the man.”
“Organised that one well then, didn’t yer,” commented Bailey.
Billhook was unconcerned with the story or deals between the whalers and the sealers. His motivation for journeying to the colony was never based on commerce. But he also understood that a drop in the market for seal meant his people would not be able to buy as many guns as they needed to fight off Te Rauparaha. He walked away from the small knot of men and women, his mind worrying at the Ngati Toa invasion, at not being able to see his father’s body, at his missed chance to settle Kelly in Van Diemen’s Land. He was on the wrong side of the wrong country, futile and powerless.
“We’ll be off to King George Sound, then?” he heard Smidmore say.
“Yep, on the morn. No need to hang around here, workin’ for the Yanks. Best to be away. There’ll be more people through the Sound too. We’ll get back to Van Diemen’s alright from there.”
The sealers began breaking camp in the afternoon, pulling the shelter sails away from rough, peppermint bough frames and folding them neatly in the boat. They rolled any surplus sleeping skins around cleaned guns and into tight wads of fur and steel. They collected bladders of water from the spring. Smidmore went over the boat, checking every rope, clew and block. The sealer women gathered seed from the acacias and rushes, for they knew they may not make landfall for days and then, not for long enough to forage. They dug through the rough soil by the reedy hollow with their sharpened sticks for grubs that were tasty and fat and checked their lizard traps for the last time.
In the evening, they drank rum around the fire and ignored the carousing noises drifting across the water from the whaling ship. The women threw three of the black lizards they’d caught onto the coals, belly down. The child gasped as the lizards’ carcasses stiffened in the heat and stood up as though they were about to run out of the coals, their heads moving from side to side. Jimmy snorted with laughter. “Bet she never gets sick of seeing that.”
Smidmore gave Sal a flask to drink from and she and Dancer passed it between themselves. Like some of the men, both women had swollen eyes and grazes from the previous night. Sal touched Dancer’s face and Billhook heard her mutter a question. Dancer shrugged and smiled ruefully, showing dark gaps where her teeth had been incised. Later, as Billhook huddled into his skins, he heard Dancer singing the chanting story that she sang often in the eve; the child and Sal patting the earth in rhythm. No one talked about the child, nor did they argue for whether or not to take her to King George Sound. Why would t
hey? She was coming too.
19. PALLINUP 1826
Dancer took Weed out shooting. She walked ahead with the gun slung over her bare shoulder and Weed picked through the scrub that was so much taller and different to her own country. The small red-berried bushes looked familiar but she knew not to eat them. Dancer reefed at some reeds and examined the tubers. Weed nodded at her. Dancer broke away the roots from the foliage and stuffed them into her bag.
The sealing crew were one day’s sail from King George Sound, Jimmy told them, when he put into a tiny cove at the end of a long, wild beach. The cove was harboured by a granite outcrop. Beyond the sweep of loose sand blown along the bay by the sou’-westerly, an estuary lay quiet and black among the paperbarks. While Everett and Neddy filled the water barrel from the spring, Billhook carried the net over his shoulder, corks bouncing against his bare back, and swam it out into the centre of the inlet, hoping for bream. Swans honked and took off in a flurry of black water and feathers, all red beaks and flashes of white under wing.
Dancer and Weed crossed the dunes, Dancer snatching at the reeds in the hollows as they passed. They walked over the brilliant white sand towards the peppermint forest. They arrived inside a bubble of green; a cool, scented grove, the fallen leaves making a soft, damp floor in the hollows and sprinkled with the purple flowers of a twining pea-like plant.
One of the groves smelt of roo and Dancer stopped to examine some scat. She had only shot – too small to bring down a boomer. She shrugged and looked up the hill to where the big gum trees grew. If it were anything like her home, that hill would be where the sea eagles built their eyrie, with an eye to the ocean and the inlet alike.
Dancer had shaved her head the previous night, cropping her woolly locks close to a berry fuzz but leaving a ring of hair that bounced like possum fur. Her black scalp shone through the bristles. She’d removed her wallaby frock on board and thrown it over her sleeping skins. Now her only adornments were the strings of tiny Vandiemonian shells at her throat, her belt of several layers of hair string, a powder flask, a pouch of heavy shot, a gun and her bag.
Cockatoos worked red gums in black, shrieking mobs. Dancer and Weed stopped on the edge of the forest to watch them as they ripped away grubs from shaggy bark, or clawed at the gum nuts and pulled the seeds from their casing. Dancer whispered that she had not seen so many birds like these before, and Weed nodded.
Dancer poured some shot down the barrel of the gun, tamped in a wad and primed the frizzon, closed it down. One shot, she had, before they took off. She raised the gun and sighted the densest mob of birds. The shot boomed through the trees. They saw the leaves splash with sunlight, sprayed with pellets. The birds rose in panicky clusters, shrieking into the sky. Weed cried out and Dancer stroked her head, grinning.
Three, four cockatoos flapped in the reedy undergrowth beneath the trees, their heads in the dirt; a crimson flash of striped tail feathers. Weed climbed a tree to retrieve the fifth bird. Dancer walked about the reeds, picking up the flapping birds and snapping their necks. She fumbled in her bag for her knife and cut down some vines and tied them around the birds’ feet, slinging them together in one bunch.
They walked back through the still peppermint forest and over the dunes where wind whorled middens and skeletons of ancient and yesterday’s feasts into busy little pockets. The birds’ wings swished against Weed’s side. The roar of the sea and the wind hit them at the last dune. They stopped at the spring to drink, the hard sand around the seeping water busy with the men’s footprints. Weed looked at Dancer’s bag. She gestured that she wanted to look inside.
Dancer smoothed the white sand to a blanket or the sheet of a sail. She put her bag down. Made from the hide of a whole kangaroo, its shoulder strap was the animal’s hind legs, the body was the body of the kangaroo and the flap that covered the opening was the kangaroo’s neck. Dancer had sewed the sides with the sinew from the same kangaroo’s tail. It made excellent sewing, she explained to Weed in a creole of Pallawah and English, strong and easy to split into plenty of ply. Weed nodded seriously and fingered Dancer’s work. Then, item by item, Dancer laid the contents of her kangaroo bag on the sand blanket.
A num’s flint, a white man’s flint, for lighting fires and guns. Several gnarled lumps of reed roots. Two needles made from the leg bones of tammar, flattened at one end and sharpened at the other. Dried sinews of roo tail, rolled into a neat hoop and tied off so they wouldn’t unravel. Lumps of resin – tree blood. Dancer patted her stomach and rolled her eyes, showing Weed that she should eat the resin when she had a crook belly. A stone the size of a cockle shell. It was hard and pocked and lay heavy in Weed’s palm. Dancer pointed to the sky. “Star,” she said. Two knives. A metal knife whose blade felt like the star stone, and the knife that Dancer made herself from very hard wood, with a kangaroo’s tusk embedded in gum. The tusk was filed sharp and she used it for scraping skins. She told Weed that it was a better knife than the white man’s steel for scraping skins but not as good for other tasks. Two digging sticks she showed her; sharpened at one end and worn smooth and oiled by Dancer’s labouring hands at the other.
Finally she brought out a possum pouch and from the furry pocket she removed three back bones; too small for a kangaroo. Dancer put the vertebrae on the possum pouch with her slender fingers, so they didn’t touch the sand. Beside it, she lay her tooth, pointing to the dark gap in her mouth. Then she lay smaller bones into the soft fur, tiny vertebrae, blackened by fire. Even the child Weed could hear Dancer’s heavy silence and she knew not to reach out and touch the relics.
Then Dancer began talking in her language. Knowing the child may not understand all her words, she stroked the white sand into swatches and marked it with her knuckles or finger tips as she talked. She told the little girl the story of how she came to the islands to live with the white men.
She told of the day she was stolen. When she was not really a grown woman and the worst thing she had in her life was hating her sister for her lucky betrothal to a man that Dancer loved. Her jealousy made her hateful, made her behave in a cold way to her favourite sister.
So they sat apart in the sand this day, bare bottoms chafed by middens of shell and crunchy dried kelp. They gathered the tiny shells: pointed cones and blue with the skin of the sea. Where the little mariner shells washed into the high tide eddies, beyond the black rocks where the inlet flushed out to sea; that was a good place to sit and gather and gossip and work, yes.
Babies scattered the high tide harvest with their little fists. Some of the other women chanted, sang and laughed. They picked at the shells, finding the perfect one that shone in the sun and threaded them onto stiff, dried strands of kangaroo tail sinew.
Bommies surged over submerged rocks just offshore, making white hills in the bay, and the wind was hard that day. Sheets of sand blew along the beach and stung Dancer’s skin. Babies screwed the sand into their eyes and their mothers showed them how to make tears and wash them away.
Dancer’s sister threaded the shells onto sinew and tried to draw Dancer’s attention but the cool silence from Dancer held her away. So she kept threading, breaking tiny holes in the outer lip of the shells with a fish spine, then poking through the thread. The little shells sat at angles to each other in a neat rhythm, in and out, in and out, like the spine of a snake. The shells caught the sky and reflected the silvers and greens, an undersea journey in something the size of Dancer’s little fingernail. The older women were swathed in them. Dancer and her sister had two strands each. Now Dancer wrapped another strand around her neck and tried to tie off the sinew. She asked one of the women to help her, and her sister, who wasn’t asked, looked on.
After the necklaces were wound around so many necks and tied off tight, they rose and dusted the shell fragments and sand from their bodies, leaving patterned marks in their skin. Clatters of tiny sea creatures and their jetsam fell to the sand. The older women slung babies over their shoulders and inserted their chubby limbs into furry po
uches. Dancer and her sister carried the bags full of shellfish. Their feet plunged into the deep, course sand. Older children struggled behind them, their hair blown into urchin spikes.
The two sisters climbed the rocks first at the headland and picked up the salt lying crystallised in small bowls of stone. Dancer’s body felt scorched and fragile against the stone, after the soft sand. Her monthly bleed made her flesh tender to the hardness of the granite. They filled empty barnacles with sweet flakes of salt, put them in their bags.
The women caught up with the sisters. As they rounded the last boulder before the next beach, Dancer’s sister laid her hand upon the stone, as though she were patting a beast. Dancer looked at her hand, her pink, pearly fingernails and gentle knuckle wrinkles against the orange flare of lichen. She saw the curve of her sister’s breast outlined by the wild sea and her round little stomach. The nasty creature within Dancer surged again, trying to fight its way out.
Dancer saw the boat and her sister stood, stiffened and alert, but very still.
A face rubbed out Dancer’s view with her huge wild eyes. Another woman cried, “Ghosts! Num!” and the little children and women were all backsides and bobbing hair as they bolted back over the rocks towards the necklace beach.
A boat. Sand, just as it was everyday but marked now by a huge creature that had dragged itself from the sea. As big as a whale but made by men. A boat. Men’s footprints crawled straight from the boat to the freshwater crack in the dune. It was not good that the sisters couldn’t see the men.
Dancer knew what the red men looked like. She saw some when she was younger. Their noses came first, sniffing and pointed. They looked like strange animals and their eyes had nastied when they saw Dancer’s aunties. Some women went missing after that and when they returned they wouldn’t speak of what had happened to them. They never spoke of what happened, but as Dancer began her bleed, one of them quietly showed her how to fill her vagina with sand to protect herself if the Ghosts ever stole her.
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