The Clay Dreaming

by Ed Hillyer

  ‘God created all things,’ Lambert insisted, ‘and each after its own kind. Every herb bearing seed, every tree yielding fruit, every fish, every fowl of the air…the beasts of the field and every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. They were not “evolved” one out of the other! The foundation of my argument is taken from the first book of Moses.’

  Lambert leant a little forward in his bed, pointing a finger.

  ‘I take the Word of God as my authority. By what right does Mr Darwin make himself a higher authority? He discovers what he finds in the world of Nature…which is itself the Work of God!’

  ‘Father, you are – ’

  ‘Darwin’s theories run contrary to revelation, and against Nature…against all that man’s science knows of its workings! Has gravity a “fixed law”? The elements or their 64 chemical constituents, are they evolved? Fire, from air? Air, from water? Has carbon evolved from hydrogen or oxygen from nitrogen? Or vice versa, perhaps?

  ‘No, only animals and plants…even Darwin dares no further.’

  With one hand Lambert smoothed the top-sheet. ‘No doubt a whale had hind legs once upon a time. One needs only go to the College of Surgeons, where they exhibit his thigh-bones, to see the proof! The poor creature languishes in the condition of a Chelsea or Greenwich Pensioner, his legs and feet quite gone…’

  ‘Eh?’ Sarah perked up.

  ‘Protoplasm! We are to believe ourselves the descendants of…of slime! Oh, his ideas are not new, his precious theory but another revival, as old as Lucretius. The ancients would have it that everything had been fashioned out of mud. Hardly…huk, hchaa…original!’

  Lambert carelessly gathered up a corner of bed-sheet and coughed into it. Sarah hated it when he worked himself up into a state, and not only for the risk it presented to his delicate health.

  ‘This so-called law…of “natural selection”, from which all living beings result! “The struggle of Life”? I’ll show you struggle, my man!’ His great meaty hands clutched thin air, throttling all competition. ‘Bring on your ear-worming catchphrases, and I’ll crush the Life out of every one!’

  Lambert, lover of bird-life, of plants, had at one time approved the works of the eminent naturalist Mr Charles Darwin. The publication of The Origin of Species, however, had come as a shock, the worst in an age of shocks. So much so, he would no longer contemplate eating off the Wedgwood.

  ‘Darwin, you ape. Transmutant! In one fell stroke you have attempted to pave over the Garden of Eden, arrest the Fall of Man, and most unforgivably of all, forgive… You! Forgive us Original Sin? Should I take your words over the Word of God?’ Lambert shook his grey locks. ‘I must then give up my black gown. The old sublime faith in God and heaven is gone!’

  Having half-deliberately made the mischief, Sarah supposed she had to answer it. ‘Darwin is a devout man,’ she said. ‘He does not mean to speak atheistically.’

  ‘Oh, he professes to love his Maker! The Church, my girl, can be too Broad!’

  Lambert Larkin watched her carefully, marking the shifts of colour in her cheek since he had brushed it: first blanching, when he had raised his voice, then blushing brighter than before. With a determination he found impressive she had forced her mood to cool. Only the line of her jaw betrayed her. Her lips were tight; and, he knew, set against him.

  ‘There is evidence of a grand design to be found in Nature,’ said Lambert, more calmly, ‘and in this respect alone, Darwin is correct. It is the Voice with which the Deity proclaims Himself to man. But if a man believes it discovered in this debased sense, then he is doomed forever, a slave to his own wants. He will struggle for life! And a mortal struggle it shall be.

  ‘The theory of evolution,’ he rattled on, ‘overlooks a most important point, and that is the enormous gap existing between the last stage of the animal and the first stage of man. How is it that we cannot trace the steps by which the simiae are advancing, until they approach the condition of men? Show me if you will where the one…’ Lambert laughed at the inherent absurdity ‘…turns into the other.

  ‘Darwinism supposes a human infant, from parents that were not human. How was the child educated…by a monkey? We ourselves, as men, with all of our accomplishments, are scarcely able to prevent our masses falling back into the state of brutes…savage man hasn’t the ability to advance by himself!’

  ‘If that is so,’ started Sarah, ‘then how do you explain –?’

  ‘If,’ stated Lambert, oblivious, ‘at the Creation, man had been cast out into the savage forest an orphan of nature, naked and helpless, he would have perished long before he learnt how to supply his most immediate wants.’

  Sarah was arrested by a sudden vision of the fugitive Bruce.

  ‘Abel, the shepherd,’ offered Lambert, ‘was anything but a savage.’

  ‘You say the first man cannot have grown from an infant,’ Sarah found herself saying, ‘yet accept the idea of him being fully formed.’

  She stated fact in order to frame a question, a conversational ploy she had learnt in dealing with Brippoki.

  ‘Of…’ Lambert was flabbergasted ‘…of course! There is less of the miraculous in supposing him to have been created a man, than as an infant without human parents,’ he reiterated, spelling it out carefully. ‘I believe it, as I believe in God…because it is impossible to believe the Universe exists without a Cause which is unseen.’ Some small measure of desperation entered into his voice. ‘Male,’ he said, ‘and female…created, thus perfect, and thus endowed… give us the proposition by which we can understand the whole human race! We would have no history, and no civilisation, without faith.’

  His voice fell to a whisper. He searched her face for some trace of compassion.

  ‘Without, all is dark, unintelligible…and irrational. To acknowledge the Lord,’ said Lambert, ‘is to know peace. Secure in the knowledge of His existence, all doubts cease. Why then should a man…or any person…born and brought up in the knowledge of Christ, choose to become an atheist?’

  Lambert had been arguing what seemed the entire afternoon. Sarah was tired of explaining that neither she nor Darwin was in the least atheistic.

  ‘What of these days, and the widespread abandonment of the gospel,’ he went on, ‘through sheer, unlettered ignorance?’

  At some point soon, she thought, he must get short of breath.

  ‘Now is the time when we must be on our guard most of all, the most critical of ignorance and falsehood…rather than running to embrace it.’

  Sarah knew full well what, and who, he was being most critical of. Her mind was made up. She would go to the Royal Institute, and attend Sir John Lubbock, and see what he had to say, on this or any other matter.

  ‘Our responsibilities to our fellow man have become an unspeakable burden. Unspeakable!’ Lambert bemoaned his lot as a preacher out of work and favour. ‘But that is the meaning of doasyoulike,’ he said, ‘free will. To accept, or decline. The choice exists for each individual, as it does for whole societies.’

  He reached for her hand with his, and dumbly she took it up. Lambert motioned for her to come closer, and she accepted. His enormous dry hand went to stroke her on the cheek, and she barely flinched.

  ‘The inferior creatures do not alter themselves,’ he croaked. ‘Man may change, but if he does so, it is by his choice. If he should become degenerate, as he surely does, it is his choice.’

  He gave her permission, of a sort.

  ‘What about the boomerang?’ said Sarah. She felt determined to have her say.

  ‘What?’ Lambert’s hand slid from her cheek.

  She stated, calmly, ‘It is a tool said to be, in all the world, unique to the Australians. Doesn’t that show at least one small step in advance?’

  Lambert gave every appearance of not listening. Whenever challenged, let alone contradicted, he would put in earplugs – more metaphorical than those favoured by Herbert Spencer, but no less effective.

  ‘It cannot be a relic of primeva
l civilisation,’ she reasoned, ‘else how could it be confined to one race only? They have not learnt of it from any invader, for the same reason.’

  ‘Old birds,’ decreed Lambert, turning, ‘are not caught by chaff.’ He had not witnessed the boomerang in action at the Oval, not for himself. ‘The miraculous art of “boomerang”-throwing,’ he said, ‘comes to us straight out of the old fairy-tales. There is sure to be a fairy princess who blesses her hero with wondrous gifts, usually a shield against dragon-breath, or a weapon of some sort. A sword, the blade of which may cut through anything. Armour impervious to all blows… Which would vanquish the other, do you think, if those two miracle forces should be opposed?’

  Sarah began to wonder. Lambert, however, required no answer.

  ‘In these same fairy-tales,’ he said, ‘we hear of arrows that always return to the archer. Next you will tell me their cricket bats have the powers of Harlequin’s wonder-working wooden sword!’

  In masquerade theatre, transformations occurred whenever the hero, Harlequin, manipulated his ‘slapstick’, two pieces of wood joined together so as to produce the appropriate noise when hitting another prop or character. This often provided the cue for a change of scene: ropes to be pulled, canvas flaps to fall. With cardboard, string, and endless afternoons, Sarah had patiently replicated such conjuring tricks in the toy theatrical productions of her childhood.

  Lambert had had no time for them, even then.

  Waving his ‘wand’, he affected a ridiculous, high-pitched voice. ‘“This bat receive, with fairy favours graced!”’

  ‘You would not make so light of it,’ snapped Sarah, ‘if you had seen the wonders their team captain, Mr Lawrence, can perform with a cricket bat!’

  She felt foolish even saying it.

  ‘Pantomime tricks!’ he shouted. ‘Fiddlesticks! The present Australian savages are incapable of inventing the boomerang. It is the invention of their forefathers, ergo, their ancestors were superior.’

  ‘Which would win, do you think,’ said Sarah, ‘if the Armour of God were pitched against the pious sword of the Israelite?’

  Lambert’s face went beetroot. ‘“This is an evil generation, they seek a sign. And there shall be no sign given it, but the sign of Jonas the prophet. For as Jonas was a sign unto the Ninevites, so shall also the Son of man be to this generation.”’

  His words were a fulsome curse. She dared equate the Bible with fairy-stories? Lambert lost all self-control; he began to lurch about in the bed, all coherence lost in a cacophony of coughs and splutters.

  Sarah ran out of the room, only to return seconds later with a glass of water. She physically restrained him from collapse, pushing him back onto his bank of pillows, calming his fit, and then bringing the moisture to his lips. At length he was quieted.

  She sat on the bed with him, herself reduced to a bag of nerves.

  Lambert’s eyes were tight shut. His lungs laboured for a time, rattling towards recovery, until he was able to take in sufficient breath to speak again.

  Black smears under his eyes, he turned on her. His voice was a rasp.

  ‘“The Greeks…ask for a reason… Jews look for a sign.”’

  Sarah, in a daze, was unable to respond.

  The weight of his body was so much lighter than she imagined.

  As a child, when he has only a number for a name, Kertameru is punished for the things he does wrong, and knows the reason of it. As Parnko, a boy who grows towards becoming a man, he is taught Bugaragara, the Way of the Law. But when the white men come they break every law, every law including their own, without punishment. Ngamadjidj take their land, take their lives, take their gins, and gift nothing in return. No penalty is paid for their wrongdoing – instead, reward!

  Truly, God is good and kind. If they pray to him, he forgives them everything. The white God must be stronger than Bunjil, than the Truth, the Way and the life. Blackfellows, the guli, must have greatly displeased the Ancestors to deserve such dreadful punishment.

  Following the disruption of his initiation rites, Brippoki wanders the hills and desert of his former homelands, alone and disorientated. His spiritual rebirth aborted, he is hopelessly lost, in the most profound sense. The land itself transformed is strange to him.

  Whether Black Cockatoo or White Cockatoo, Gamadj or Grugidj, the guli have always sung their territorial boundaries – Songlines, working like birdsong. No fixed frontiers exist, but rather points of exchange between different songs – a comparing of notes. Across each territory, swamp or desert, there are many different tongues. Although the words change, each song may be recognised by its melody.

  Songlines interrupted, the tracks all but kicked away, they stumble in the footsteps of their Ancestors. Sickness in the land produces sickness of the mind. The melody is forgotten.

  Brippoki’s own Songline will always be imperfect, for having been cut short. Although he is a man, full-grown, and scarified as such, his transformation remains incomplete. Without No name, no man, he can never be admitted bourka, an elder. He will never be wise, or old. His secret shame is become his open curse.

  Mindeye the destroyer comes, Mindeye the avenger. The props that hold up the sky are cut. The World is soon to end, the sky falling. These are the last words of the elders, as they die. Yet the Emu’s egg still rises each morning, and at night rolls back into the black hole of the earth. Gnowee still searches for her lost son. The Law is broken, but the World carries on – without its people.

  The sacred places are gone. With no country to call their own, there can be no more corroborees. Instead they gather around that great hole in the earth, the hole at the centre of all things, and await their turn.

  Finding no words that can express or assuage his grief, Brippoki begins a tuneless keening. His afternoon’s labours have produced a length of string – two-ply, woven from two separate strands, and strong. As it lengthens he winds it between two short sticks, driven into the ground and fastened cross-wise.

  Time is endless oneness, like a circle, a loop unbroken. If a man is clever, he can find or forge a link to cross from one side to another. Equally, another one who is sly might reach out to redirect his present course, which he follows according to the signs he meets. They may also have the power to alter his destiny – for good, or more likely for ill.

  Whether from within or from without, hope and anticipation, or anxiety and fear, characterise each stage of a man’s life. To find the correct way forward, and protect him against the evils of another, requires a powerful charm. He takes up the string.

  There, made his min-tum.

  Grandfather chimes struck the hour of eight o’clock. The daughter hesitated on the landing outside her father’s closed door; wanting neither to go in, nor to face him, but bound to do so.

  ‘You haven’t touched your dinner,’ said Sarah.

  ‘I do not want it,’ said Lambert.

  His words stung deliberately.

  ‘And take out my po,’ he said. ‘You are forever allowing it too full.’

  Insult to injury. In mute protest Sarah hung back.

  ‘“CHILDREN,”’ he said, ‘“obey your parents in the Lord.”’

  ‘“Honour thy father,”’ she answered in kind. Sarah knew this lesson chapter and verse. ‘“And, ye fathers, provoke not your children to wrath.”’

  ‘“…but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord,”’ replied Lambert.

  The catechistic game sometimes played when she was a child had taken a serious turn. She could never win. Sarah would not stand to hear the next part from his lips: SERVANTS, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh.

  Storming downstairs, she cursed beneath her breath. Charles Darwin posited that the majority of our qualities were inherited. With every proximate step she prayed Darwin wrong.

  CHAPTER XLVI

  Wednesday the 17th of June, 1868

  REGENTS IN EXILE

  ‘I mourn the pride

  And av
’rice that make man a wolf to man.’

  ~ William Cowper, The Task

  The air cools. Colours shifting in the western sky, the light gradually fades. Somewhere above the smudge of no horizon twinkles the first star of evening. Soon his brothers will join him, ready to run their nightly course.

  Brippoki is glad to greet the end of days filled with sickness and thoughts of home. Hunger gnaws at his belly. Taking up his boomerang, he approaches a suitable tree, sizes up the odds, steps forward, and releases his weapon with an almost angry stroke. It strikes the ground in front of the tree and leaps high into the branches, but fails to strike any of the birds roosting there. They scatter noisily, and his main chance is gone.

  He climbs the trunk instead, and recovers a rotten egg to roast on his fire. Whilst clinging there, he hides some of his shits in a fork between the higher branches.

  Since the waterhole has dried up, pigeons no longer fly into his traps. With reluctance, he approaches the canal. To enter unknown waters is to risk the wrath of Ngook-wonga, spirit of such places. All same, he selects lengths of stick sufficient to protrude above the waterline, and, in that denuded region where he has plucked the bulrush root, drives them deep into the riverbed. He then retrieves the spear barb from his nostril, and takes up his dilly bag for a net.

  Fish are scarce in these polluted regions; his catch is so small there seems little point in gutting them. Brippoki throws them on the fire whole, turns them once, and then scrapes away the scorched scales with a rusted spoon he has found. He devours them warm but almost raw, washed down with a single gulp from the abandoned egg.

  The time to move on has already come and gone. Soon, he will have to.

  Travelling between canalside and Guardian, Brippoki makes sure to vary his route. He favours stone or tile, keeping to rooftops and hard ground where his steps leave less trace. With each passing day of fine weather, it becomes easier. On occasion he walks on the sides of his feet, following well-worn grooves left by the innumerable carriages.