The Clay Dreaming

by Ed Hillyer

  – For your war will be great with them, and this is what your war will be about. In the first place, as soon as I am gone you will all mark your faces with the marks that I have showed you all, which is the marks that God gave you all in your mother’s womb. But the mark they have put on their faces is a mark that the devil told them to put on because then I should not know them. So this will be one dispute. The other will be about their ingratitude to me in running away from me when all of you were young. But they shall fall into your hands to till the land for you.

  So the old man died, and to this day the New Zealanders make war one with the other about what their first fathers told them.

  Sarah hunched over her notebook, the better to see it by candlelight.

  Brippoki, who had calmed himself with the urgent sipping of more tea, watched her intently.

  Probably she should have relented and re-lit at least one gas lamp, except that would present her too clear a view of Brippoki’s near-nakedness. His bare buttocks, earlier, had been distraction enough.

  Clearing her throat, she resumed the narration.

  The mode of burying a chief –

  ‘Rangatira,’ Brippoki affirmed.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You already knew that word, didn’t you.’

  She waited him out.

  ‘Went from Guniah up Lake Wallace,’ said Brippoki, ‘to Wuhrm-numbool.’

  His mouth seemed to writhe with distaste.

  ‘Him took us cross the large water,’ he said. ‘Rangatira.’

  None the wiser, Sarah at least felt persuaded that he knew the word’s meaning, and recognised the implicit connection to Tippahee from the Memoirs. She continued reading.

  The heart is taken out of the body and buried in a wood, where no one must go, under the pain of death, only in those times when they go to bury the heart. The body is tied together just like a fowl put in order for roasting, then is taken to a large lagoon where it is decorated with bows, and for six or seven days and nights all sorts of romantic scenery is performed. Their dresses are made of flax and dog skin that grows in that country, the outside of which is worked most neat, with a variety of birds’ feathers. Their heads are also dressed with feathers, the sight of which is a most beautiful view. But their prayers is most affectionate and dismal to relate.

  The whole of them men women and children go to the side of the corpse and scar themselves in a most dreadful manner with glass, till they are so sore that they can bear no more. The blood runs from their bodies in a most desperate manner, and their cries is melancholy. At the concluding of those ceremonies the whole multitude fall in ranks like soldiers and taking their distances from the corpse about four hundred yards all stand hand in breast, and then the whole body advance in one motion with all their implements of war, and springing from the ground at the same time, so that you can feel the earth shake under your feet for some distance from them. They advance to the corpse three times and retreat without turning back. They shout all in one voice, in a most dreadful manner, pronouncing all vengeance against all souls in the next life that shall molest this soul of their departed friend till they all die and come to assist him in battle.

  This is their belief, that when they die they are at war one with the other.

  Humming or moaning a dismal tune to himself, his wild eyes no longer focused on anything much at all, Brippoki exhibited symptoms of increased restlessness. Sarah hurried to bring the troublesome text to a close.

  The women and children are most desperately frighted in those practices, though they perform the same duty as the men, some laughing, some crying and some singing. Then the body is taken into the woods, where it is put on a stake, where it remains till it rots. And this is the end of the funeral in New Zealand.

  They also say that once, when they had a very heavy battle with the savage race, that they saw a cloud descend from the heavens and a most dreadful storm arose which was the cause of their gaining the conquest over their enemies.

  After I had been amongst them seven months I consented to be marked in the face, whereby I received my wife with all the power that country possessed.

  There was more, but not much more, and this seemed a natural point in the story at which to break. Sarah’s notation from the day was nearly exhausted, and so was she. Still, she wanted to know what Brippoki made of the Maori, in hope of hints at least towards his own people’s belief system.

  Whilst she yet formulated how to tackle such a delicate topic, Brippoki dashed for the window and disappeared. Sarah threw down her notebook, angry with herself for allowing him to escape without so much as a word. His nerves were obviously frayed near to breaking by her reading of the transcript.

  She shut the window.

  In the wake of Brippoki’s abrupt and thankless departure, Sarah reflected sourly on the text just read. After all of his ramblings in the Australian Bush, Druce glossed over a perhaps more important period in his life almost too hastily. He made no mention of his flogging, subsequent desertion, nor indeed – as per either ship’s log or the 1810 Memoirs – Te Pahi or Tippahee by name. Still unsure of Brippoki’s motive even by this point, Sarah had elected to follow the author’s dubious example. She held on to the hope that, if relevant, she could always bring it up later.

  The speed with which Druce dealt with his time in New Zealand, it was all very abstract, reading more like a dry report…including not a single personal comment, anecdote, or day-to-day event. What a wasted opportunity. She had no real way of knowing what had passed between them; certainly nothing to indicate why the Maori king, or chief or whatever, should grant Druce his daughter’s hand in marriage.

  Sarah wondered to what extent events had suited Druce’s purpose, or inclination. It might well have been the case that, in this instance, Druce was the gull: a European considered of use to the natives, and no more.

  Her own experience was enlightening, but frustrating. Within an hour or two’s investigation that same afternoon she had apprehended more of the Maori of New Zealand than it seemed she ever might with regard to the Aborigines – even at first hand.

  Enjoying her final hour in the library, Sarah had consulted closely two very different books. She devoured the papers of the Church Missionary Society, principally an article by the Reverend Samuel Marsden in their Missionary Register for 1816, on Maori beliefs. Then, from the horse’s mouth, OLD NEW ZEALAND: being incidents of NATIVE CUSTOMS AND CHARACTER IN THE OLD TIMES by A PAKEHA MAORI (Frederick Edward MANING); and a rollicking adventure it was too.

  They were, admittedly, a rare breed, but as it turned out there was a word, or phrase rather, appropriate to men like Druce – Pakeha Maori, ‘European Maori’.

  In almost any public forum, the native inhabitants of New Zealand were generally equated with the Aborigines of Australia: the Admiralty clerk, for one, appeared to make of them no distinction. Sarah could scarcely admit to understanding Aboriginal behaviours, and yet had felt compelled to study the Maori as encountered by Joseph Druce, who had lived among them, as one of them.

  The Pakeha Maori were said to live in a half-savage state, or savage-and-a-half state, being far greater savages than the natives themselves. This, according to a man who should know: ‘The New Zealanders,’ Maning had written, ‘will not be insulted with impunity, nor treated as men without understanding; but will resent, to the utmost of their power, any injury attempted against them.’

  In truth, the islanders shared more in common with their European invaders than did either race with the Australian Aborigine.

  On the few occasions where she found the two native races held up in direct comparison, what seemed most immediately obvious were the differences between them. The Maori were quite unlike the native Australians. They dwelt in hilltop forts, called hippah, and cultivated the surrounding farmlands. A warlike race, they lived in a state of constant feud with their neighbours. They would contest, and to the victor the spoils, the defeated tribe surrendering their land and property to be enslaved
– or worse. The Maori were certified cannibals. The last words of a dying chief at Hokianga, North Island, were reputed to be, ‘How sweet is man’s flesh!’

  She had seen Brippoki eat some revolting things, but surely this could not be true of either him or his people.

  The natives of New Zealand recognised the concept of leadership: they were ruled by tribal chieftains, their ‘rangatira’ – men like Te Pahi.

  It was said that Te Pahi, on his visits to see the white governors in Sydney, had come into a good deal of contact with the Aborigines of Australia. He held them in a contempt as great as they had respect for him and his kind, if not an outright fear of them (one of Te Pahi’s sons had menaced an Aboriginal group with his spear, and every last one of them fled). Witnessing their displays of weaponry, he had approved the boomerang, but condemned their use of a parrying shield. He judged the pace of their combat ‘too slow’. All in all, the Maori warrior chieftain had condescended to the Aborigine character.

  Only after some half an hour’s reading had it even occurred to Sarah that Te Pahi was one and the same man as Druce’s father-in-law, Tippahee, the so-called ’king of New Zealand’.

  It seemed telling that, for a fellow living in Australia a goodly portion of years, Druce not once made the slightest reference to its natives, nor even his least association with them.

  Sarah did not have to try so very hard to imagine what it must be like, to be so thoroughly disregarded.

  A New Zealander, asked by Maning what God was like, had replied, ‘An Immortal Shadow.’

  An intelligent spirit or shadow, according to the Reverend Marsden – what Druce understood as their concept of the soul. Frederick Maning, the Pakeha Maori, disagreed. The idea of a supreme being never occurred to them, he wrote, and the word the missionaries used for God, Atua, meant – indifferently – a dead body, a sickness, a ghost, or a malevolent spirit.

  Hell was Te po, world of darkness or night, or perhaps Reinga, a realm across the seas; the Maori appeared to have more than one hell.

  Sarah glanced towards the table and the trussed corpse lying there, the bound and burnt offering a Maori chief in miniature.

  ‘If one half of the world does not know how the other half live,’ wrote Maning, ‘neither do they know how they die.’

  The Maori seemed to her to spend the better portion of their lives killing and dying. No wonder they needed many hells. A plethora of conceits in control of their spiritual lives drove them to a great many acts utterly horrific to her sensibilities.

  Muru were their complex rights of plunder – easiest to encompass if compared to the Aboriginal notion of justifiable revenge. The strongest manifestation of this principle was the mighty Utu, ‘satisfaction’ or ‘payment’, although the purest summation seemed the more wrathful ‘retribution’. Lex talionis, in other words, the code of the Babylonian king Hammurabi: an eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth…life, for life.

  Tapu, or as she guessed it, ‘taboo’, smothered their lives like a spider’s web, in both this life and the next. Tapu involved everything held most sacred among the Maori: birthright; a certain level of class distinction bound up with rights of ownership; and the prosecution of any trespass. To avenge breach of tapu, or at the command of a witch, their own dreadful Atua entered into a man’s body and slowly ate away at his vitals; an infestation very much worse than woodworm, just as Brippoki had earlier suggested.

  The means of guarding oneself against the shadowy terrors of tapu were almost too terrible for her to contemplate. The matua (elder relation) of a Pakeha slain by a Maori had then swallowed his eyes!

  Sarah shivered with disgust.

  She disposed of Brippoki’s gift, the dreadful pigeon carcass, and, moving room to room, shut up the house for the night.

  Lambert slept soundly.

  Glad, Sarah prepared for bed herself. Catching sight of herself in the bathroom mirror, she tried one more time to visualise Druce’s tattooed visage – marked in the face, like a divine fingerprint; the mark of Cain.

  She took up her Bible from the bedside table.

  And Cain walked with Abel his brother: and it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him.

  And the LORD said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother? And he said, I know not: Am I my brother’s keeper?

  And he said, What hast thou done? the voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground.

  And now art thou cursed from the earth, which hath opened up her mouth to receive thy brother’s blood from thy hand…a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth.

  And Cain said unto the LORD, My punishment is greater than I can bear…and it shall come to pass, that every one that findeth me shall slay me.

  And the LORD said unto him, Therefore whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold. And the LORD set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him.

  AND Cain went out from the presence of the LORD, and dwelt in the land of Nod, on the east of Eden.

  Sarah extinguished the candle, and lay staring into the sudden plunge of darkness. Cain was marked, not for death, but so that he would be spared: in that way, his punishments might be everlasting.

  CHAPTER XLIV

  Tuesday, June the 16th, 1868

  DISINHERITANCE

  ‘Wolves shall succeed for teachers, grievous wolves,

  Who all the sacred mysteries of Heaven

  To their own vile advantages shall turn

  Of lucre and ambition; and the truth

  With superstitions and traditions taint.’

  ~ John Milton, Paradise Lost

  Under more cloud than sky, Brippoki lies flat on a bed of leaves within his shelter of branch. He is inert. Deadman’s stories of the South Islanders have impressed him mightily – a warrior race so fierce, they take their battles beyond the grave.

  Dull heat and lack of sleep drifts his mind back to warmer climes, and the days before he is simply ‘the one from Brippick Station’, all alone in the World – there, perhaps even more than here. Days when he is no longer a boy but not yet a man; when he is only a boy; when he is a baby; and before he is born.

  The Wudjubalug, his people, are proud desert folk. They belong to the land, as the land belongs to them. They give thanks daily for the sunlight and the breeze.

  Many stars gather about the moon, when he is only a boy. Hunting is good.

  Then their land is gone. No land no more. The whitefellows come, Ngamadjidj. White men come, and never stop coming. They take the land and don’t want the blackfellows on it. Shoot them blackfellows, long time, plenty, plenty. All round, by Christ, blackfellows coming up deadfellows.

  For the water, the grass and the trees, they come. They bring strange animals to eat the grass and drink the water. The trees they chop down and chew up to make their houses, and put up their fences. They bring new grasses – yellow grass, ear grass. His people try to lead them away from the sacred sites, but they take them anyway. Fences grow up, and blackfellows are told to keep away. No more burning the grass. No digging for roots or cutting trees for firewood. Blackfellows are shot on sight, and even in the cold and wet their gunyas are burned as a punishment.

  No kangaroo no more, no hunting. Less stars now, in the night sky.

  His people move on, deeper into the desert. Ngamadjidj come after. They got all the trees, got all the grass, and now they want to take the rocks! Digging holes deep in the earth, they expose all her secrets. Bring the Lowerworld closer.

  Brippoki turns the bright burning coin over and over between his fingers.

  The whitefellows were wicked before, with iron sticks in their hands. Wanting for gold makes them even more wicked.

  The earth soon becomes tired, and her people starve.

  When he is only a boy, his people, they got no use for the white man’s Dreaming. Where they walk freely provides all they need. No need for things.

  With the land taken away
, they begin to hang about the whitefellow houses. No more hunting for them. They are sent to a ‘reserve’, where the land is nungkarpa, shit. Everything around them comes from shit, or turns to shit. They make their gunyas, mia mias, out of it. They wear shit and they eat shit. Lost, without status, clinging listlessly about the croppy settlements, his people become rag-wearers, bone-pickers, fringe-dwellers reliant on charity. Ngamadjidj laughs at them – worthless, drunken beggars grovelling for scraps.

  The No learn to need for things, wanting billy-tea, wanting sugar, flour for damper, jerky; and rum, lots of rum. Rum helps them to forget the pain, the sickness, the bad liver, No country. Forget everything.

  Wudjubalug land stretches from Jerry Warrack to Woppoon, and there, lubras, but no men. The men are up country. There, no lubras, only old gins. Men forget their women, and the women forget their men. Mothers forget their little ones, and the fathers forget their senses. No fuck, no childhood, no learning any more.

  Good marriage must come of good skin – from bad skin comes only bad marriage. As the peoples become less, it is harder to make a good match. To have no land is to have no life. Rum is gifted instead; rum, for gin. No good children now no country. Newborns are killed to save them starving.

  No more children come, just shit, disease and booze. They die, like flies; when he is no longer a boy, but not yet a man.

  Sand turns to clay, to stone. No more No way. That just how it is. Clouds, passing.

  Sarah was taking quite the chance, leaving the house soon after an early dinner. Lambert was too preoccupied with his reading or his memories to either notice or care what she did, so long as she was not too late returning.

  St James’s Hall, Piccadilly, on the warm evening of a warm day; impulse had brought her here, impulse and The Illustrated London News.

  ‘CALENDAR. Tues. JUNE 16: Meeting of the Anthro. Soc., 8pm.’