Every Secret Thing

by Marie Munkara

  Juta, the favourite daughter of a powerful and much feared law man called Jalana, had always been different. A wilful and spoilt child, deceptively angelic by appearance though considerably devilish in manner, she was much indulged by her doting mothers and adoring father. Unfortunately the victims of her practical and sometimes quite painful jokes didn’t share this view, including her promised husband’s family who uncomplainingly bore the heaviest casualties of her reign of terror. Juta had decided very early on in life that conjugal bliss with the wise Djamu, her promised husband, was not for her and her vicious attacks were her way of letting everyone know it in no uncertain terms.

  And so it came to be that in her thirteenth year, despite their repeated attempts to leave the girl with Djamu, Juta’s family settled on the fringes of the cattle station that employed many of her family members as stockmen and ringers. The station, which had been built on the banks of the river that traversed their spiritual and cultural homelands, was a source of great interest to the inquisitive girl who up until that time had only ever known about life in the bush. This had not gone unnoticed by the station owner’s wife who, noting the girl’s ready eye and her keen curiosity in the ways of the white world, taught Juta to read and write. Something that Jalana heartily disagreed with. As far as he was concerned you didn’t need a book to tell you how to catch a goanna; nor did you need to hang around the white station mob whom, he lamented, would be his daughter’s undoing.

  But reading and writing weren’t the only things that the doe-eyed Juta was good at. Harold, the fiancé of the station owner’s daughter had already found this out, having succumbed to her charms on a number of occasions. His first encounter with Juta, when he’d waited impatiently on the riverbank for her to emerge naked from the billabong and retrieve her clothes, would go with him to his grave. But Wing Wong, the temperamental Chinese cook who was married to her aunty, had designs on Juta too. And not wanting to disappoint anyone, Juta had an arrangement going with both of them.

  But Juta soon tired of cranky Wing Wong and lovesick Harold and cast her roving and very pretty eye in the direction of Harold’s old school mate Roger who was visiting from Sydney. So in the end it came as no surprise to anyone, except Juta’s father who was oblivious to his daughter’s dalliances, that her fertile young body became implanted with the seed of one of the three handsome Lotharios.

  The baby, a fat little girl, was delivered on the banks of the river by Juta’s two grandmothers. Accompanied by an orchestra of croaking frogs and the crashing sounds of thunder, Juta was only too happy to be done with the whole tiresome business so she could sleep. And sleep she did as the storm moved on. The three-quarter moon emerged from the clouds and grandmother Nancy peered closely at the face of little Tapalinga* in the firelight.

  *Star

  It was hard to tell who the father could be. The child had what appeared to be Roger’s eyes, Wing Wong’s face and light-coloured skin that could only have come from Harold’s chromosomes.

  It was all very confusing. But the resemblance to the three men was even more striking a week later when Juta emerged from the birth camp with the grandmothers and triumphantly marched to the homestead with her little surprise tucked under her arm. But this was all the station owner was waiting for and love-lorn Harold was given his marching orders. If the baby had been born black like her mother Harold’s little fling could have been brushed under the carpet and a word or two about the need for discretion dropped into his hopeless ear. But to have what might be the half-caste child of the fool running around under his daughter’s nose was taking things a bit too far. And even though it was no secret that he’d strayed a few times with the delectable housemaids Dora and Cora, it just wasn’t cricket to rub people’s noses in it like that. Gutless Roger had prudently departed when news of the impending birth first became known, and Wing Wong was nowhere to be seen which suited Juta fine as she sat kissing Tapalinga’s tiny little toes and listening to her parents argue over what was to happen to their wayward daughter now.

  The six-hour journey to the mission up north to meet her new husband was incident free as Juta and five-month-old Tapalinga, escorted by the station owner and two of her aunties, sat listlessly looking out the window while the truck lurched along the rough track through the scrub. Incident free, that is, until they arrived at the pub in Katherine where they were staying the night. Harold was in residence there, it seemed, and plastered to boot, and had been for the last five months since he had left the station with his tail between his legs. And it was only when Harold was weaving his way through the beer garden to take a piss and get another bottle of O.P. rum that he noticed Juta. Stopping beside her, he bent down to look at little Tapalinga who was happily cooing in her mother’s arms. Yes, she was definitely his child; she was too white to be that damned Chinaman’s.

  After some stern words and threatening gestures from the station owner, Harold wandered off to drink some more and ponder the fate of his child and the woman who still had her delectable arms and legs wrapped tightly around his hopeless heart.

  Harold and Juta never saw each other again although Juta did admit once or twice to no-one in particular that she had been quite partial to Harold, the man who had taken more than her clothes that day at the billabong where she had floated languidly among the waterlilies under a sky of endless blue.

  The meeting between Juta and Caleb had gone better than expected as they politely shook hands before being marched off to their separate quarters to sleep. They were heading back to the mission the following morning but they still needed to keep an eye on the wayward girl in case she got to Caleb in the night before she was made a decent woman. She was a handful alright. Having experienced Juta’s wild temper when he’d attempted to prevent her from belting her aunty, Father Green was only too relieved that her stay was going to be brief while Father Macredie was beginning to wonder what the hell he’d gotten Caleb into. And it was on their journey back to the mission that Caleb and Juta in the back of the truck with little Tapalinga snoozing on a blanket had a chance to have a good look at each other. Neither were disappointed with what they saw and it was with a stirring of excitement that the wilful girl watched the road falling away behind them as she headed into the unknown.

  Tides of Change

  They say that just one man can make a difference. Well, that certainly happened when Brother Alphonso returned from his trip to the Big Joint blissfully unaware of the influenza pathogens that were quietly hitching a ride in his nasal passages. Now Brother Alphonso was one of those fortunate beings who provides transport for viruses and bacteria and other little nasties, but doesn’t succumb to their unpleasant ravages himself. So no-one was more surprised than he when the mission mob started to fall. And what a miserable lot they were, the more that fell the more it became incumbent upon the lesser afflicted to nurse them. Until in the end everyone was laid low in varying degrees – except Brother Alphonso, of course, who was run ragged by the constant demands of the sniffling and feverish invalids. But time heals, or so they say, and one by one the mission mob began to get back up on their feet again. Runny noses dried up, hankies were washed and put away, and order was restored once again.

  But while the mission mob lay hacking and coughing in their beds, praying before crucifixes and sweat-soaked scapulas for salvation, no-one thought of the bush mob. The cheeky viruses, having unleashed their fury on the mission mob, had quickly gone further afield in search of new victims. And what rich pickings there were! The little critters found their way into the unsuspecting noses and lungs of the bush mob. Snotty-nosed kids coughed into each other’s faces while the grown-ups wiped the gooey mess away and then handed it right on to the next person. And all the while none of them had any idea what was happening. Had they offended a bad spirit perchance? Or were the mob from the other place making bad magic so they could sneak in and steal their women? No-one had any idea at all.

  And
then they started to die. The old ones and the babies and some of the ones in between. Even old Tarrti who, between fits of coughing and fever and screeched profanities at the bad spirit that was making her sick, had eventually succumbed and became silent.

  As the bush mob were dying in their droves the nuns who were now busy administering the sick instead of being sick, couldn’t help themselves. They would oft times be heard to mention – just in passing, mind you – that this is what God does to people who don’t have faith. He punishes you when you don’t believe so obviously the bush mob had been very bad indeed. The bush mob were unable to defend themselves against this new threat and became afraid. In order to appease the wrath of the mission mob’s God they all began to go to church so they could personally ask this God to leave them and their families alone. And blow me down, the sick started to get better.

  Father Macredie, the master of propaganda himself, took every opportunity to capitalise on this fact in his sermons.

  ‘See,’ he would say, ‘you have embraced God and he has forgiven you and made your children well.’

  Slowly the bush mob started to ‘believe’ because this was something they couldn’t dispute as they’d seen it with their own eyes. But if they had only known the truth – that their bodies had no resistance to a virus that they’d not encountered before and only the strong ones had survived the onslaught – then things might have been different today. But none of the mission mob respected the bush mob enough to be honest with them. They continued to lead them on with their stories. But see where deceit gets you, because it wasn’t obvious at first, not even to the trained eye, but an unconscious shift slowly started to take place in the collective psyches of the bush mob. These once seraphic beings now yearned to emulate the ways of their white invaders because they had been told so many times that they were nothing and so now if they couldn’t beat them the only avenue left open was to join them.

  Trips on the mission lugger to the Big Joint by some of the more adventurous and the stories they returned with only served to increase the grist to their gently grinding mills. And so this phase of evolution became the new age of accumulation and loss. Because with all things there has to be a balance – a yin and yang, a yirritja and dhuwa*, a Shiva and Shakti. And the more new stuff was accumulated the more old stuff disappeared down the gurgler never to be seen again. Could this be attributed to Intelligent Design, one wondered, or was it a covert ‘soul seeking’ Creationist ploy?

  *Arnhem Land moieties

  And so to appease some of this strange new hunger for the new age the mission mob organised regular barge loads of cast-offs from the outside world so the bush mob could have a little piece of muruntani Dreaming all for themselves. Cast-offs such as clothes and toys and assorted oddities like hot water bottles and hair curlers. Was it really for them, the bush mob wondered, no strings attached? They picked up the corkscrews and bicycle pumps wondering what in hell they were meant to do with them anyway. Some of the more creative found uses for the more peculiar items but that preoccupation eventually died away as the bush mob focused on seeking out the more practical items.

  Alas, the poor bush mob were so taken with this unprecedented generosity that they didn’t realise that there were strings attached, strings that had been bound so tightly and insidiously around their souls that they’d be lucky to ever get them back again. The almighty God that most of the bush mob now believed in, was nothing more than the grim reaper of human souls with the mission mob as his helpers and the cast-offs the sad compensation for the relinquishment of their own beliefs. And even though the tenth commandment mentioned that you shouldn’t covet your neighbour’s house or wife or donkey or anything else, the church must have decided that coveting someone’s soul was an entirely different matter. And even though the eighth commandment stated quite clearly that it was very naughty to steal, the mission mob ignored this too and stole the things that were dearest to the bush mob’s heart. They stole their resistance to change and they stole their belief in themselves and they stole their children. Because each black soul that was harvested and each child that was appropriated was another rung higher up the ladder to heaven for Father Macredie and his crew and another step closer to salvation from this cesspool of earthly temptation and sin.

  And so the bags of flotsam and jetsam continued to stream in from the Big Joint and the bush mob became quite skilled at scrounging and fighting their way through the mountain of discarded goods. Family were pitted against family in their pitched battles to gain supremacy of the cast-offs. After the skirmishes, clothes of every description, from lambs wool jackets to cocktail dresses were worn triumphantly on black bodies of every shape and size. Methuselah, who had always had a penchant for head ornamentation, was reputed to go to bed wearing his red beaded cloche for fear that someone would steal it from him. And perfectly serviceable calloused black feet that had trodden the good earth for countless generations were now happily clumping around in ill-fitting, odd shoes. Noah looked particularly striking in his ladies’ fawn leather casuals and could be heard blissfully clopping along the pathways with his wheelbarrow of gardening tools, while Epiphany looked a picture in her rubber galoshes as she squeaked around the presbytery with her mop and bucket.

  But along with the change in fashions came a very distinct shift in emotions. People were beginning to feel jealousy and hatred towards their fellow men and women in a way that had never been experienced before. It was the jealousy that is spawned by greed and the hatred that is bred by overwhelming desire to possess something that doesn’t belong to you. Angry exchanges were becoming commonplace and stealing from each other, even from their children, became rife. And then finally after all the skirmishes had been won and lost, the possessions which had been so loudly fought over became objects of disinterest and were left in the dust where they fell. No-one cared. The bush mob had become selfish and demanding – and they knew there was always plenty more where those things came from. Just ask the mission mob.

  And it was with some concern that the mission mob started to notice the growing numbers of discarded possessions littering the landscape. A headless doll here, a broken hair dryer hanging from a tree there, shoes lying where the owners had taken them off and walked on. Maybe one or two of the mission mob did feel some guilt over their hand in helping to create this mess, but most just tutted and lay the blame at the door of the poor hapless bush mob who had never been shown the right way or the wrong way to live like a muruntani. Maybe the mission mob thought the bush mob were all psychic and instinctively knew what to do, or maybe gleaning souls from the unwary was so time-consuming and tiresome that they had little energy left for anything else.

  But the bush mob, oblivious to the mess that they had helped to create, didn’t care about their discarded possessions, the cast-offs of cast-offs which now lay all around the place. As far as they were concerned if they didn’t want them anymore then they didn’t own them and that was the end of that. And so a rubbish tip had to be built to accommodate this new phenomenon called littering. The bush mob were told to take their discarded possessions to the tip when they didn’t want them anymore. But only some people listened and when those who didn’t listen still threw their rubbish where they felt like it, the good rubbish people got the shits and threw their rubbish anywhere too and then they ended up just like the bad rubbish people.

  This was the sight that greeted young Juta (who was soon to be known by her mission name of Judy) when proud young Caleb brought her home. Caleb’s parents Fatima and Augustine had been allotted one of the first houses built by the mission for the bush mob and it was with some trepidation that Judy looked at the rubbish scattered around the yard while Caleb did the introductions. She had never seen such a mess in all her life, nor had she ever seen such a motley crew as those that awaited their arrival. Maybe Djamu wouldn’t have been such a bad prospect after all, she thought as she eyed off her new mother-in-law resplendent
in a tweed hunting jacket with the sleeves cut off over an ankle-length powder-blue ball gown. Her father-in-law looked no better in his green cotton slacks held up with a bit of rope and pink bunny rug tied around his neck like a cape. But underneath the rather outlandish exteriors beat hearts of pure gold and Judy soon grew to love these people as much as she loved the family that she’d left behind.

  So after the initial shock Judy quickly settled into her new way of life. Caleb, the carpenter, would head off each day to work at the mission, leaving his sweet young bride in the capable hands of his mother. Being the good mother-in-law that she was, Fatima took it upon herself to teach Judy some very important life skills, such as how to find the best cast-offs when the new barge load arrived. Maybe it was her impish sense of humour or perhaps she had been born with really bad taste, but whatever the reason Judy became quite renowned for her bizarre outfits, something she took great and everlasting pride in.

  Fatima was also a very practical person and she passed on to Judy many useful household tips, such as how to fashion a dipper from an old corned beef tin so you could extract water from the little spring that had been installed in their new house. The bush mob called it kukuni*. Endless fun-filled hours were spent by children and adults alike pulling the chain that made the little waterfall appear, and many flotillas of leaf and stick boats disappeared down the kukuni never to be seen again. It was only when Sister Clavier and Sister Damien had paid a visit to the newcomer and Judy went to get some water to boil the billy that the true purpose of the toilet was revealed to the innocent girl.

  *fresh water

  Oh contraire! Would these simple beings never learn, the nuns wondered as they declined their cups of tea and scuttled off with their hankies over their mouths. Neither poor Judy nor the bush mob had ever made the connection between the long drops* that they were familiar with and these new contraptions. Nor had anyone from the mission bothered to explain their use; once again it had been assumed that the bush mob were psychic and knew exactly what to do.