by Ben Peek
He wondered, briefly, if a new Spirit had settled upon him. When the land had belonged to the Eora, the Elders had told Pemulwy that the Spirit of the land demanded protection, that it was angry if he allowed any tribe to take the land, and it was this that had fuelled him in the first years of his war. But he did not feel it anymore, and indeed, admitted that there was a different feel to the land now. Was it possible that it rose out of the quiet houses of the English that he passed, dark with sleep, and with dogs chained to the back doors for protection? Pemulwy did not know, but it was entirely possible.
King lived in a two-story sandstone building in the middle of Sydney Cove. It was where all the Governors had lived, and was surrounded by large lawns, and vegetable gardens that were beginning to show produce. Pemulwy had seen similar gardens around the houses throughout the settlement, but their vegetables had showed sagging green tops, while at King’s dwelling there was more life, the promise of things to come.
Pemulwy slipped over the surrounding fence, and made his way quietly and silently to the back of the sandstone building. Coldness was seeping into his fingers, and he flexed them as he scanned the garden slowly. Once, he had been able to scan the surrounding ground quickly, but now, even with the aid of moonlight, he needed more time. Time to distinguish the shapes, such as the fence palings to the left, and the firewood next to it.
When he was sure that the yard was empty, Pemulwy continued to the back of the house. There were no lights coming from the house, but on the second floor the Eora could make out the hint of something, either movement or a candle. The windows that the English had placed in the building were too thick for him to see through properly.
His hard feet lead him quietly to the back door, which, when he pushed upon, swung open with a faint creak.
Warmth still had its fading grip on the house, and emanated from the sandstone bricks of the narrow hallway that Pemulwy made his way along. Doors were to his left and right, and when he gazed into them, he found a small kitchen, followed by even smaller rooms that were packed like an overflowing parcel with couches and tables, and in the case of one, a piano.
Pemulwy had seen a piano once, pushed into a ravine, and almost on its side, the wood cracked and broken. The dirty keys had still produced a sound when he tapped them, however, and, despite himself, he had straightened the broken instrument and tapped sounds out of it in the midday sun.
Afterwards, he had been angry with himself for indulging in such an English thing. The Eora had instruments of their own, traditional ones that he enjoyed, and ones that he should use. But seeing the piano brought back the memory, and as he made his way quietly up the steps, he felt a faint twinge that he could not go and tap on it to produce sounds again.
On the second floor he was presented with two doors. In the first, he found a large, spacious room with two occupants: a white English baby, lying in its crib, and a large, meaty woman, asleep on the couch that lay next to the crib. Around them were thick curtains, and drawers, and plush toys. Pemulwy, easing the door shut, knew the two to be King’s wife and child.
He truly had lost the taste for the war. Years ago, he would have thought nothing of killing the woman and child, just as the English thought nothing of killing Eora women and children. It would not have been difficult to turn around and kill them still, Pemulwy knew, even as he made his way to the second door that emitted a hint of light, but even thinking of the women he had known and who had died at English hands, he could not find the anger or will to do it.
He would kill King, and that was all. After King, he would find a different way to battle the English.
But why not now?
With a faint sigh, Pemulwy realized that he could not return to the tribe and face James, and the other young Eora, without having accomplished what he said he would. Besides, didn’t King deserve it? Wouldn’t it be a fine warning for the future governors that they sent in his place?
His fingers tightening against his spear, Pemulwy pushed open the door.
In the room, holding a long muzzled rifle, was King. The aging, tall, grey haired man regarded Pemulwy with his bright blue eyes, and then said, quietly, “You’re a disease upon this land.”
Before Pemulwy could react, King fired.
The lead tore into his chest, punching him out of the door, throwing him to the floor. His hands searched for his spear, but he could not find it, and his breath came in harsh gasps. His mind spun, and, in the darkness above him, a figure emerged. But it was not King. Instead, it was the young, smooth featured black face of James.
“If only you had learned to ride a horse,” the young Eora said coldly and levelled a pistol at him. “But no, not the great Pemulwy. It was beneath you.”
Hatred flared in Pemulwy, and he roared. In response, James’ pistol bucked, and the world exploded in blood and pain that he would not walk away from.
Introduction to A Walking Tour Through the Dreaming City.
The Cross (once known as Queens Cross and briefly as Kings Cross before common vernacular was made permanent) in Twain’s day was no different to the Cross of today. As Vella said in his history, it was, is, and always will be ‘a centre-point for low gunmen, violent pimps, prostitution of all kinds, drugs, artists, musicians, crusaders, bent cops, and the best dressed transvestites the world has ever known.’
Twain’s theory was that the Cross was undeniably linked to the English authority that landed in Sydney. ‘It does not matter who you are,’ he said in one lecture, ‘but no one in the streets of [the] Cross is an Australian. Instead, you are nothing more than the pawns of a decaying Empire.’ It was a harsh statement, and as Vella explains, untrue, especially in the light of the fact that the Cross has not changed one iota since Twain made that proclamation.
But there is no denying the influence Twain’s words had. It can be linked directly to the rise of the Democratic Party and Arthur Butler, and, from them, the Republic that we live in now. Through Twain’s words, Butler took control of the voting power of the blue collar working man and organized rallies, demonstrations, and, in the historical protest of 1901, a strike that shut down Sydney entirely.
Of course, Twain couldn’t have known that Butler would make the same mistakes America did in search of the national identity to go along with the new Republic. (At any rate, Twain was busy with other political concerns. Having returned to America, he was accused of lacking patriotism as he publicly questioned the American policy regarding the Philippines.) In his search, Butler and the Republic of Australia were responsible for evil acts, many of which ignored what Twain spoke out on. It is therefore nothing short of a tragedy that we witnessed the Australian Government steal an entire generation of Aboriginal children from their parents and give them to white ‘Australian’ families to raise; we witnessed the Asian immigration made illegal, and a mob mentality encouraged that saw established Asian families beaten and driven out of Sydney; and, perhaps most pedantically xenophobic, we saw schools begin teaching the ‘Australian’ language.
The result led to decades of confused culture, where men and women who did not fit into Butler’s description of an Australian (‘standing by your mates, working a hard day, enjoying a cold beer, and a swim in the ocean’) were culturally shunned and often targeted by hard line ‘patriots’. All of this began to change around the sixties, with the influx of American drug culture that was brought into prominence by American movies and cinema, but it left its scars deeply within the nation, and especially, Sydney.
To walk down Sydney today is to walk in the shadows of the political past (it is in the buildings, the street signs, and the statues that link our cultural understanding together) and to watch a Government, whose history is responsible for the near genocide of the Aboriginal race and culture, refuse to make amends. It cannot but force one to question what Mark Twain brought to Sydney. A few have labeled him the man who broke Sydney, but I think that is an ignorant suggestion. Twain is not res
ponsible for the actions of our politicians, just as the transported English before him were not. Rather, he was responsible for bringing to our attention the idea that we were in control of what we made of our city, and indeed our country.
‘Sydney is the heart of Australia, and it is from here that everything flows,’ Mark Twain said in his final performance, and he was correct. It is a heart we control, that we, with our presence, force the beat of, and which, like a mirror, reveals the best and worse that we, as Australians, bring.
Darrell Barton
Kings Cross,
Sydney.
1803.
Beyond the green door was a cool, dark room. As Twain’s eyes grew accustomed to the dimness, he was able to make out the shapes of shelves, filled with books, and a large oak desk, with a high-backed chair behind it. In the middle of the table, in a large glass jar, was the head of an Aborigine, his mouth and eyes stitched shut, his head floating gently in light brown alcohol.
“The poor devil,” Twain said quietly, approaching the desk. “What’d he do to deserve this?”
“This is my first revolutionary,” Cadi whispered from the darkness around him. “The Eora warrior you saw earlier.”
“Where are you?” Twain said, scanning the room.
“I am here.” Cadi stood behind the desk, the darkness making his bones more prominent, as if there was no skin at all behind them. With his bony hands, the Aborigine stroked the glass jar of the head, as if it were a child that he could pick up and hold close to his chest. “After he had been killed, King had his head removed, to make sure that he would not rise again. He did it that very night, in his backyard.”
Twain shuddered. “Where are we?”
“We are in London, in Joseph Banks study. King had the head sent here afterwards, to study, to learn what it was that made him hate them so much. In doing so, he took everything I had given the warrior, and isolated it from the Aboriginal people, destroying the last remains of his power.”
“Surely something could have been done?” Twain asked, approaching the desk.
“No,” Cadi replied coldly. “The warrior himself was the symbol. I realized the mistake afterwards, and rectified it with my Irishman, but in this case, the Eora’s skin, his entire body, was the symbol that could unite them.”
Twain stared at the floating head. After everything he had seen, everything he had been forced through, he wanted the head to leave an impression on him, to suggest to him the quality of the Aboriginal people who lived in Sydney and the white men and women that lived in the city too. But mostly, he wanted the head to explain the figure that had taken him along this journey with intensity that bordered on fanaticism. But the longer he stared, the more it resembled but a simple head.
“Do you understand why Sydney needs a new heart?” Cadi asked, passing through the table to stand before him. The head of the Eora warrior appeared to float in his stomach, part of the spirit.
“Yeah,” Twain said uncomfortably, wanting to step back, but unable too. “I understand why you want one, but maybe you’ve looked at it wrong. Maybe things aren’t as bad as you say. At any rate, there’s nothing I can do about that.”
“That’s untrue,” the other replied quietly, an underlying menace in his voice. “You bring with you a culture that can be embraced. A symbol for a revolution that can wash away the old hatred, and bring a new beat to the city.”
“But—”
Cadi’s bony hand plunged into Twain’s chest before he could finish. The pain was immense: it spread through every fibre of his body, terrible, and inescapable. It was death. He knew that. He would never see his wife or daughters again, never write another word; it was all over . . . and then, through the pain, he felt the beat of his heart fill his body like the sound of a drum, beating the tempo of his life . . .
It stopped.
Cadi pulled his bony arm out of his chest, the flesh and bone parting until it released the still beating heart of Mark Twain.
Seeing it, Twain’s consciousness failed, his legs went weak, and he began to fall.
“I will not let the English win,” said Cadi without remorse, his voice reaching through the pain and shock.
The ground rushed up to Twain. Black and solid, he could not avoid it, he could not escape it, and he did not want to escape. Let it be over, let it finish, let him go. He could still feel his heart beating, but it was no longer his own: it was stolen, ripped from him to be placed into a city he barely knew. It would do no good. The spirit was wrong: revolutions were not done with symbols and stolen cultures, they were seeded from within, grown from what was the land and people, created anew. Change would rise in Sydney only when the city was its own creature, when the people in it embraced it, when they understood all that had happened. Change could not be forced; to do so would result only in a cosmetic, shallow, tainted beast—the exact kind Cadi fought against. Realizing this, Twain wanted to cry it out, to tell Cadi that it was futile, that he was wrong, that he had to acknowledge the past, that he had to accept it and resolve the issues that arose from it; that only by doing this could he destroy the rotten hands that held Sydney in its stranglehold; but he could not cry out.
The black slab of the ground raced up. Mark Twain dreamed no more.
* * *
1. In the story, Jigalulu’s spear does not kill the shark. Instead, the shark flees, breaking the spear but leaving the stingray spines imbedded, thus forming the fin that warns men of a shark’s approach. While this is most certainly an Aboriginal story, the notion that the Eora of Sydney believed the stingray to be a sacred creature is not. The idea can be found in Tim Flannery’s the Birth of Sydney, where he also informs the reader that the largest of the stingrays taken from the Harbour weighed, when gutted, 200 kilograms.
2. The word means father, and in this case, applies to Governor Arthur Phillip. Phillip’s title was given because he was missing a front incisor, which, in one of the tribes native to that part of Sydney, would be knocked out of the mouth of a boy during the ritual of manhood. Therefore, it was assumed that Phillip, who led the returning spirits, was part of the Eora.
3. Governor Philip officially named it Toongabbie in 1792, who took the name—and the land—from the Tugal clan living there.
4. In 1791, Burramatta was renamed Parramatta by Governor Phillip, the name rising from Phillip’s spelling and pronunciation of the Aboriginal word.
5. Historian Robert Hughes, in The Fatal Shore, notes a line of clay pipes that were made the week after Bold Jack Donohoe’s death at the hands of the authorities. They were modelled after his head, and came complete with a bullet hole in the temple, where he had been shot. They were bought, Hughes noted, by emancipated convicts and free settlers, but not in recognition of the lawfulness of Jack’s death. Rather, they were bought as part of the celebrity cult that surrounded the favoured outlaw, and highlighted the local resentment towards the English officers.
6. About the Aborigines, King wrote, ‘I have ever considered them the real Proprietors of the Soil.’ Australian history, however, would not remember him, or these words. King would be remembered, instead, as a politically weak man who married his cousin.
7. In 1808, the Rum Corps would depose of King’s successor, Governor Bligh, and rule the colony for two years while treating it as their own bank to become rich, landed gentry. When removed from power, none of the Corps would be executed or severely punished; their leader, John MacArthur, a common born Englishman, would instead be remembered as the man who laid Australia’s financial backbone with the wool industry he begun.
Johnny Cash
(A Tale in Questionnaire Results)
1. Benjamin Li.
2. 12/8/56.
3. China.
4. Between Seattle and Beijing.
5. Divorced, two children, one dog, seven tropical fish.
6. I ran the Occult Research Division of Br
andyCorp.
7. Eight years.
8. Before that I was primarily a freelance contractor, but I spent seven years in the employ of the Reagan Administration and, later, three in Fox Networks.
9. Nick Carlton was the owner of BrandyCorp.
10. Rarely.
11. I reported to the managing director, Amanda Tae.
12. As I said previously, I had very little contact with him, but it was obvious that Mr. Carlton was a Magician. I do not know what God or Goddess he took his power from, if any.
13. No. I watched Ronald Reagan cut the wet, bloody heart out of a living, virginal thirteen-year-old girl to feed an Astoteele demon at dinner. At the end of the night, the President had formed a pack with the demon’s family to ensure that a low-grade hypnotic suggestion would be processed through his voice whenever it was electronically played. So in comparison, no, I did not have any moral objection to Mr. Carlton.
14. BrandyCorp did not sanction any religion.
15. Supposed Son of God.
16. Well, three days after I dissected him, he did not get up.
17. Why would I want to eat the flesh of a fake messiah? Don’t be stupid.
18. John Doe (he refused to give his real name) was still alive when he was bought to me. He had a broken leg and bruises from the plastic bullets that had been used to incapacitate him. Otherwise, he was a healthy thirty-two-year-old Caucasian male.
19. Angry. We had stopped him from attending a sold-out faith healing event in Florida that had been organized to by the Republicans.
20. Mr. Carlton did visit him. Twice, in fact.
21. Their first conversation was about Johnny Cash. They shared a cigarette through the bars of Doe’s cell, and discussed the line in the song ‘the Man in Black’ about Jesus, Love, and Charity, and how Mr. Carlton thought it was out of place in a song he otherwise agreed with. But yet, he said, flicking the tobacco off his fingers after he rolled a cigarette, he still wore the black. The second conversation, a week later, was private, and ended with Mr. Carlton ordering his execution.