Dead Americans

by Ben Peek

  In the years of his war, the Eora warrior had become a fearsome figure in the minds of the English and his fellow tribesman, but he was not pleased with the progress he had made. Burning crops, stealing food, killing farmers on the edge of the townships: these were not stopping the arrival of Englishmen and women and their convicts. If anything, it only dug the farmers on the outskirts deeper into the land. And, as each year progressed, Pemulwy became increasingly aware that he was not winning the war.

  To complicate matters, he was also coming to the realization that it was not the English and their weapons that he was losing too, but rather their clothing, food, and luxuries, such as tobacco pipes.

  And rum.

  Rum was the enemy that Pemulwy could not fight.

  It was the currency of the land, spreading not only through the Eora and tribes inland, but the free farmers and convicts who worked for the English. It was indiscriminate, and endless, a dark, intoxicating river that weaved around everyone, and which flowed out of the hands of the English authorities.

  He had learned of that only recently, when fellow tribesmen moved into the towns, lured by rum and tobacco that they received for erecting buildings, ploughing the land, and hunting. Tasks that tribesmen had done for their tribes, but now did for the English Redcoats.

  Having followed the wayward Eora to threaten and force them back to the tribes, Pemulwy had instead decided upon a frontal attack on the English. The idea had come to him suddenly, a gift from the Spirits that was accompanied by the Elder’s warning nine years ago, about his foretold death. Being a warrior, he pushed aside the doubt, and focused on acquiring English weapons. He would need them.

  The outpost was a long, squat building that resembled a giant wooden goanna baking in the sun, or, in this case, the night. There were no lanterns inside it, but on the veranda, on a wooden chair, slept the white body of an Englishman.

  Pemulwy motioned for the warriors behind him to wait, and he then slipped up to the veranda. The mud around the barracks pushed coolly through his toes, and clung to his feet, leaving muddy prints along the railing that he climbed, and the porch he stalked along before his strong fingers clamped over the Englishman’s nose and mouth and his dagger sliced into the man’s neck.

  The muddy prints multiplied as the Eora warriors joined him, and they pushed through the door, into the dark, half empty barracks and circled the beds that held men. There, nothing more than a concentration of mud marked the struggle and the death that took place in the beds.

  At the back of the outpost, behind a poorly made wooden door, the fading prints ended at the weapons of the English: thirty gunmetal black rifles and fifteen pistols, each with wooden stocks; a dozen sabres; one cat-o-nine-tails; chains and manacles; a dozen daggers; a small cannon on wooden wheels; and bags of powder and bullets and balls for the cannon.

  The cloth and sticks were laid out, and rifles and pistols and sabres and knives taken. The cannon and its ammunition proved difficult, but Pemulwy ordered two Eora to carry it, and their feet, free of mud, made an invisible, slow exit from the building.

  They were ghosts, unable to be tracked in the bush, the only sign of their passing for the returning English soldiers were the dark stains that they experienced with mounting terror two hours later. They knew who it was, in their bones, more spiritual in knowledge than they had ever experienced, as if something in the land was taunting them itself, and they knew what it meant:

  Pemulwy was armed for war.

  Introduction to A Walking Tour Through the Dreaming City.

  There is no doubt that the protests, art, and stories of the Aboriginal culture influenced Mark Twain during his stay. The reader will note that the retelling of their stories and anecdotes throughout the book are always sympathetic, and that the tales he was told could have filled a dozen books equal to this one’s size. Yet, as the book continues, the reader will find that he is particularly interested in the story of Pemulwy. Indeed, his fascination with the warrior was so intense that he took a band of Aboriginal storytellers under his wing, and made sure that the story of the Eora warrior was heard every evening before he performed.

  The great Australian poet and author, Henry Lawson, in his private memoirs (collected, finally, in Lauren Barrow’s biography, Lawson, One Life) wrote:

  ‘Twain’s adoption of an Aboriginal storytelling band was nothing short of shocking. Newspapers were flooded with angry letters from readers and blossomed with poisoned columns from writers. All of these complaints could be summarized into the catch phrase of ‘How dare people pay their hard earned money to see the history of a savage!’ It was quite the scandal at the time. Even I, who had never had a problem with an Aborigine that was based on the colour of his skin, wondered about the quality of the show now that Twain’s ambitions had turned to a local cause.

  Unsurprisingly, Twain’s first shows with the band were failures, weighed down, no doubt, by an unappreciative audience; but by the third show, the great man himself joined the band on stage, and lent his own considerable skills in telling the tale of Pemulwy. During this first performance, he promised that if the audience was not properly respectful, then they would not be treated to Twain’s solo performance later that evening.’

  The shows were, after that, given a grudging praise, but they earned criticism due to the fact that they were not totally accurate on a historical level. In response, Twain replied that ‘history [has] never been respectful to the needs of narrative.’ At the end of his tour, the debate about Pemulwy and his importance to Sydney was such a topical item that many forgot that he did not, as Twain said, ‘attack a King.’

  The question that has interested historians and academics, however, is why Twain went to such lengths for the Aboriginal people and their culture. The press releases, and Twain’s own statements before his arrival in Sydney, gave no hint to this desire. That is not to say that Twain was not sympathetic to native cultures: one can witness in Following the Equator his many generous and wonderful insights to the natives of Fiji and New Zealand, among others; but he never gave them as much attention as he did the Aborigines of Sydney. In response to the question, most researchers have focused upon a particular dream that Twain describes, where ‘the visible universe [was] the physical person of God’. Many writers have drawn connecting lines between this and the peculiar belief of a Spirit World that was favoured by Aborigines.

  For my own part, I cannot say. Certainly Twain experienced something, but what it was, and if it was linked to a spirituality, we will never know. It is possible that this ‘spirituality’ was linked to the grief that he still felt for his recently departed daughter, Susy. Some historians believe that it was this that motivated Twain, but it is too nebulous for me, a reason that is too easily accepted and dismissed under the same reasoning.

  For my own part, however, I will agree with noted historian Jason Vella that whatever Twain experienced, it was linked to the Cross.

  1797.

  Before dawn, on the same night of the attack on the Toongagal outpost, Pemulwy and his warriors—joined by an addition twenty—swept into Burramatta [4].

  The wooden outpost of the English town appeared in the misty morning, looking like an atrophied beast, and Pemulwy slipped up to it silently. With a vaulted leap over the veranda railing, the Eora warrior plunged his spear (brought to him by the additional warriors) into the belly of the lone Englishman on guard. Standing there, he turned to the dark figures of his warriors, white war paint curving like bladed bones across their skin, and motioned for them to sweep into the outpost, where they butchered the ten Englishmen inside.

  After the outpost, they continued into the town, breaking open the pens, scattering livestock, and killing the men and women who investigated the chorus of agitated animal noises that swept through the morning sky. It was there, watching the animals, and his men, and the dirty orange sun rising, illuminating the muddy streets and crude houses of the town
, that Pemulwy realized how poorly he had planned the attack.

  He would die here, on these streets, as the Elder had said.

  Shaking his head, pushing the thoughts aside, Pemulwy gripped his spear and walked down the cold, muddy street. Around him, his warriors were firing into the houses, the battle having already broken down into individuals, rather than a combined force. Pemulwy had feared that this would happen—he had stressed that they had to fight as one, that they needed to remain together to take and hold the town, but his words had fled them, lost in the rush of emotions they were experiencing.

  To his left, the cannon fired; the sound of splintering wood and a peak in screaming followed.

  You will die here.

  Shaking away the unsummoned thoughts, Pemulwy advanced on a white man that emerged from his house. Thick set, bearded, barely dressed, the man raised his rifle, but before he could fire, Pemulwy hurled his spear, skewering the man. The Eora stalked up to his body, retrieving his spear and the man’s rifle, before turning back to the chaos of the town.

  The cannon fired again, and the smell of smoke worked its way to the warrior; before him, bodies littered the ground. They were white men and women and children and between them, dark slices of the country given form, were his own warriors.

  You will die here.

  The thought was a cold chill, working up his spine, through his body. But he was a warrior, and he would not leave. Instead, he rushed through the churned mud and into the chaos of the battle, where he ploughed his spear into the back of an English woman.

  When the shape of the battle changed, Pemulwy asked himself if he had seen the English soldiers arrive before the first bullet tore through his shoulder to announce their presence, or if he had not. In the split second the question passed through his mind, he realized that he had been so caught up in the bloodlust, in the killing, that he hadn’t.

  When the bullet tore through his left shoulder, he fell to his knees, his spear falling into the mud; in his right hand, he still gripped the English rifle. Around him, fire leapt from crude building to building, acting as his warriors had done when they swept into the town, but with a more final devastation.

  They had failed.

  Pemulwy rose to his feet, clutching the rifle.

  Before losing control of his warriors, he had planned to organize a defensive structure, to take prisoners, to prepare for the wave of red coated soldiers that swept into the town.

  The men that will kill you.

  The bullets that sounded around him were organized, and worked in series, punching through the air and into the bodies of his warriors. Across the street, he watched a tall Eora warrior hit by a volley of bullets, his body lifted from the ground. It was the sign, the moment that Pemulwy’s attack was truly broken, the moment he should have fled; but instead, he began running across the street to help the fallen, a bullet sinking into the calf of his right leg before he was half way across, and spinning him to the ground, into the mud.

  Don’t die face down.

  Pemulwy pushed himself up, using the rifle for the leverage. The wave of Redcoats had become a flow of individuals, and he was aware, dimly, that some of his warriors had fled. Around him, six others were caught on the same street, firing into the red tide that worked itself to them like the lines of a whirlpool working into the centre. His warriors dropped slowly, as if an invisible finger, a spirit’s finger, was reaching out and knocking them down, taking their life away as children did with toys in a game.

  A third bullet punched into Pemulwy’s chest.

  Die fighting!

  Roaring, Pemulwy raised the English rifle, levelling it at a red-coated figure in front of him. He took no recognition of the figure’s details, of who he was, or what made him; he was English and it did not matter; he squeezed the trigger, and the soldier pitched backwards—

  Four bullets smashed into Pemulwy in response.

  The Spirit World.

  To Mark Twain, the spiralling staircase was endless. The rickety, wooden panels sliced through the inky black world around him, dropping until his perspective refused to believe that he was still seeing a staircase, and his body trembled from fright.

  There was no way to measure time. His body did not grow weak, or strong, and, more than once, Twain believed that he was stepping on the same two steps. When he mentioned this to Cadi, the Aborigine laughed, a warm, smooth, calming sound.

  “Would you believe,” he said, “that I am walking along the beach of my past? The sand is pure white, the water blue, and the horizon beautiful.”

  Unhappily, Twain muttered, “So this is for us tourists, huh?”

  “In the Spirit World, you see what you expect to see.”

  Twain stopped and turned to face the Aborigine. The bones that had been so prominent on his skin were now sunken, having turned into a smooth white paste that covered his muscular body. His skin was no longer scarred, and his eyes, once closed, were open.

  “What happened to you?” Twain asked, not surprised by the change.

  “This is my world,” Cadi replied. “Why would I look dead here?”

  Twain began to respond, then shrugged, and said, “I don’t suppose you’ve got a smoke?”

  Cadi shook his head. “No. It’s not a habit I’ve ever seen anything good rise from.”

  “Right then,” Twain said, and continued his repetitious walk down the spiralling stairs.

  Eventually, a light blinked into life in the inky black. Twain wondered, upon seeing it, what Cadi saw, but refrained from asking. He had not liked the Aborigine’s previous response—it had made him feel young and foolish, that latter an emotion he worked hard to avoid. He continued down the steps, drawing closer to the dot, which in response, grew brighter, turning from yellow to gold.

  Finally, Twain reached a position on the staircase where he could make out the features of the dot. It was a small, brown bird, the kind that Twain had seen many times. As he drew closer, he discovered that it was caught in mid-flight, unable to move, to rise or fall.

  “I’m not the only one seeing this, right?” he asked, unable to conceal his irritation. “Or is this a private showing?”

  “I see it,” Cadi responded quietly.

  “What is it?”

  “A bird.”

  “Thanks,” Twain muttered dryly. “What does it mean?”

  Cadi smiled, but it was a small, sad smile. “This is the last Aboriginal myth, which took place before the turn of your century. In it, an Eora warrior, my first revolutionary against the English, is lying in an English hospital, shackled to the bed, dying.”

  “So the bird is his fantasy?” Twain raised his arm, reaching for the bird. “It’s not terribly original.”

  “You misunderstand. This is the Eora warrior. On his seventh day in the hospital, he turns into a bird, and flies out of the window to return to his people.”

  Twain’s fingers touched the bird, and its beak opened, and a small, angry chirp pierced the inky blackness, startling him. With a second chirp, the bird bit Twain’s finger, and, flapping its wings, flew around the spiral staircase, and off into the darkness.

  “The Aboriginal tribes began to die after this,” Cadi continued sadly. “They were always my favourite, but it was a mistake to take one of their men as a champion. I poured into his spirit everything that the Aboriginal culture had, everything that gave them form and purpose. It was a mistake. There was nothing for the others, and he, alone, could not change the inevitable. He could not defeat the English.”

  Twain sucked on his finger, and muttered around it, “It doesn’t sound like any of your so called revolutions worked.”

  “No,” Cadi agreed. “Gone are the days when the disenfranchised could change a path. I must rely on a celebrated kind, now.”

  “And that’s me, is it?” Twain asked, shaking his hand.

  “You are a celebrity, are you not?” the
Aborigine asked.

  Twain shrugged, and then nodded. “Yeah, I am. But why bother with me? Just make your own kind and leave me in peace. People react better to their own kind.”

  “The Eora are Sydney’s own,” Cadi said softly. “But no Englishman would embrace them, just as no Aboriginal or Irishman would embrace the English. So tell me, whose kind should I make a celebrity out of?”

  Twain began to reply, then stopped. He could think of nothing to say in response, and instead said, “Well, if that’s the case, why even bother?”

  Cadi was silent. Twain watched him look around, wondering what, on his beach, he was gazing at, for nothing was offered to him but the endless black and a spiralling staircase that stretched endlessly.

  “If you could save your daughter, Mark Twain, would you?” Cadi finally asked.

  Stiffening, Twain replied hotly, “Of course—”

  “What if she was no longer the daughter you remembered? If she did things you didn’t agree with, or understand. What if, except in name, and dim memory, the presence of your daughter was a totally alien thing? Would you still offer to save her?”

  Swallowing his anger, Twain nodded in wordless response.

  “Then we must continue onwards,” Cadi said, pointing to the stairs that he did not see.

  1802.

  Pemulwy could not stop the English. They continued to spread, a white herd of disease and invading culture that knew no boundaries.

  Once, the Eora warrior had believed that the strength of the English would unite the tribes, would force them all to fight, but it was not the case. Each week, young men and women left the tribes, lured by the items in the towns, and stayed there. Their family and friends would then journey back and forth, visiting, partaking in what was offered. Weekly, the base of the tribes was eroded, worn away not by individuals, but by the inevitable march of time, which Pemulwy, for all his strength, could not stop attacking even himself.