The Whitest Flower

by Brendan Graham

  When later Kalinga had handed her the razor-sharp quartzite knife, she had not flinched. The women had prepared her for mourning with great concern and tenderness. Now it was her turn. She had felt the cold edge of the blade bite into her, the jagged quartz serrating her flesh. Three times she had done it on each shoulder: making the incisions, running the blade down over her shoulder to the fleshy part of her upper arm. The pain was excruciating, her determination unflinching as the women talked to her, touched her, supported her. But the pain brought with it release from her anguish for the uncried-for Annie, and from her shame at what she had asked.

  When she had finished the munggaiynwun – the cutting of the body – she was tempted to draw the knife down twice more, not on her arms, but on her breasts in a final act of grief. Kalinga, sensing her intention, stayed her hand and took the bloodied blade from her.

  ‘No, Alinta! No cut! All finished now!’

  Now, the munggaiynwun complete, the sorry cuts daubed with steamed leaves of the stinging nettle, her body painted, her hair shorn in mourning, Ellen felt liberated, inured against further pain.

  Now, she was ready to bury Annie.

  First, according to custom, an inquest was held. Annie’s corpse was carried aloft on a wooden birri of rushes and soft leafy branches. The birri bearers halted outside each shelter in the campsite until Wiwirremalde’s hand signalled them to move on, satisfied that he had detected no sign of any sorcery or evil-doing. Only when the old man was satisfied that no one present was responsible for the death of Annie, could the ceremony proceed.

  Annie’s remains were placed on a burial platform and covered with rushes and netting. The raft-like platform was arranged so it faced towards Kangaroo Island, to make it easier for Annie’s spirit to follow the Dreaming path of Ngurunderi and be cleansed by the sea before ascending to Waieruwar. The keening and mourning continued until finally Annie was taken down and placed in a small, beautifully woven sedge encasement – her coffin.

  Ellen spoke to Kalinga. ‘Kalinga – soon I must go from the Coorong and from you, my friends. I must leave Annie here among your people …’ She looked to the myriad of stars in the heavens above Kangaroo Island. ‘But her spirit will always be above me with Ngurunderi, so I will not grieve.’

  ‘Yes, Alinta Annieanikke,’ Kalinga replied. ‘Annie all finished now below here.’

  ‘I want her to rest under the big she-oak by the billabong – underneath the tears of Ngurunderi,’ Ellen said.

  And so it was arranged. The grave was dug within the embrace of the she-oak under which Annie had breathed her last. It was dressed with leaves and boughs. Ellen gently laid the coffin-basket into the grave, removing and keeping Annie’s shawl. Now Annie, born in the green mountainous valley of Maamtrasna, was laid to final rest in the flat grey wetlands of the Coorong. Ellen reverently gathered up a handful of earth from Annie’s grave and passed it to Lavelle. Then she untied the piece of cloth in which, all this time, she had kept the handful of earth from Michael’s grave. Slowly, she let it fall over Annie, the earth from Crucán na bPáiste replacing the earth from the Coorong, which would now go with her.

  Then the women keened for the last time – the same keening as the women of her valley, and Ellen sang a lullaby of the Dreaming, swaying, holding the lifeless shawl against her, dancing as she had danced with Annie so short a time ago. Slowly the women beat their digging sticks, the men joining in with their spears and woomeras. Lavelle took up his fiddle and with it grieved for her, and the visiting didgeridoo-player from the north cast his own hollow sound into the ground until it ran up again into her feet and bones.

  As the rhythms became more insistent, Ellen moved to them, encircling the she-oak. The Ngarrindjeri danced – sailing Annie’s body to the Island of the Dead, paddling Ngurunderi’s canoe until it surged from the ocean and shot across the sky to Waieruwar – the spirit world.

  Now Ellen/Alinta, kringkri fire-woman, was at one with her people, stomping the ground in the konkonbah – the hunt for the giant kangaroo. Then the dance of pinyali, the emu, running from the hunters, but running into their net-traps. As the pace of the hunt increased, the women’s plangkumballin started up, pounding them onwards. Soon the dance had taken over Ellen’s body. She gave herself to its short staccato rhythms, and its thumping rolling crescendos. White against the red-ochred bodies of the young initiates, she danced, her mind altered by the great grief she bore.

  Ellen wasn’t aware of feeling anything: no pain, no joy, no tiredness. She was bodiless, floating into the spirit-world with Annie, and Pondi and the Mingka bird, rising with Ngurunderi to be with her child in the white wasteland of the Milky Way.

  Lavelle watched her, troubled. He knew her grief over Annie’s death was immense. Too much for one person to bear with what she had already been through.

  He had respected her sorrow, what she felt she must do, her feeling of kinship with the Ngarrindjeri, her wanting to right the wrong she had done them. He had said nothing, stood back up to now, stood by her. Now he must stop her – she had gone too far.

  He moved towards her. The music stopped at his intrusion. She, trance-like, her arms thrashing wildly, never even noticed, but carried on dancing like some white demonic dust devil, lost to everything but her own insistent rhythm.

  He ran to catch her, to save her before she went beyond the point of no return. He was only a few steps from her when the shots rang out.

  Cries of ‘pandappure’ – guns – erupted from the Ngarrindjeri. As Lavelle reached Ellen, two of the dancers beside her twisted and fell in a final death reel, blood reddening the ochre which adorned their bodies. Pandemonium broke out. There were shouts of ‘Kringkri! Kringkri!’ as the tribesmen dispersed, running, fleeing from the shots that cut them down.

  The gunshots, the noise, Lavelle grabbing her, brought Ellen back. As Lavelle pulled her along, behind her she heard a voice – an Irish voice: ‘Stop the bloody boongs from escaping! Get the lubras and the piccaninnies’. Net them – don’t harm them!’

  She turned, trying to see the owner of the voice – to tell him to stop it all, that it was the burial of her child, that these people were her friends. To tell him that she was Irish – like him.

  ‘C’mon, Ellen! Don’t stop – they’ll kill us! Run for it!’ Lavelle yelled at her, trying to yank her away to safety.

  Before she could respond, the big bay galloped up behind her, the horseman swung his arm and then, like pinyali, the emu, she was netted, unable to claw her way out. She fell, dragged to the ground, as the net-thrower rode by her, pulling her in his wake. In front of her she heard a thud as Lavelle hit the ground, ridden down by the horseman.

  Then the Irish voice, mocking her. ‘What have we got here – a white lubra? Anam an diabhail!’ the voice added in Gaelic, invoking the devil as its owner looked down at Ellen with her body painted in the mourning custom of the Ngarrindjeri.

  The owner of the Irish voice aimed a boot at her, sending Ellen over on to her back, still entangled in the net. Like a wild animal she was, arms and legs splayed, her fury visible even through her white face-mask. The hunter, all six foot of him, stood over her, watching his captive struggle, enjoying her frenzy.

  ‘A bhastaird, get me out of this!’ she spat at the overlander.

  ‘Ah, a fellow countrywoman, so to speak,’ the Irish voice said, poking at her through the loops of the net with his whip-handle. She twisted away from him, thinking that at least he wasn’t a Westerner, didn’t speak like her, or Lavelle. ‘Shame, shame, shame – didn’t get time to get dressed, did we not? And what’s your name, Irish lubra?’

  For a moment she studied this Irishman with the smooth voice. He was in his thirties, maybe the two score. It was hard to tell by a face hardened beyond its years from overlanding Australia’s great bush territory.

  ‘My name is Ellen Rua O’Malley, and this is the burial of my child—’

  He cut her off. ‘Ellen Rua, is it? Red-haired Ellen? And where is this crow
ning glory you were named after, or is it hidden somewhere else?’ he mocked, his whip-handle prodding her thighs. She tried to kick against him, to roll away, but the net prevented her.

  ‘A bhastaird!’ she swore at him again.

  ‘A burial, you say?’ he continued, ignoring her. ‘Isn’t it a fine way for you to be disporting yourself in front of all these boongs – you an Irishwoman and your child buried? Gone native I suppose? Was it a piccaninny child?’ he taunted her.

  ‘McGrath!’ another voice shouted. ‘Some of them got away – we’ll never catch them now.’

  ‘OK,’ the man called McGrath, who stood over her, shouted back. ‘Let them go. Besides, we have an interesting catch or two here.’ With that, he reached down and yanked Ellen, net and all, to her feet. ‘C’mon you boong’s whore – striapach!’ And he spat on the ground beside her.

  Ellen was brought back to the Ngarrindjeri camp. There, McGrath’s men had herded the women and children into a circle in the middle. The men, Wiwirremalde in their midst, were kept under guard by overlanders armed with muskets.

  Ellen could neither see Kalinga nor Rupulle anywhere.

  Either they had escaped or were dead. She reckoned that about half of the women and children had fled to the bush, but that only about a third of the Ngarrindjeri men had succeeded in getting away.

  ‘Someone get me a shirt to cover this white lubra,’ McGrath barked. ‘It’s disgraceful what they get up to out here – whoring on the streets of Adelaide and, worse yet, dancing naked in the moonlight with these black savages.’

  ‘Shut your filthy mouth,’ she heard Lavelle shout at McGrath before being silenced by the blow of a gun-butt to his head.

  Overnight they were held thus while McGrath’s men pillaged the Ngarrindjeri village. They took what weapons they could find. They took the possum-skin coats, the intricately woven baskets, the hunting and fishing nets. And they took the Ngarrindjeri women. When one of McGrath’s men dragged out from the group a young girl, the tattoo on her chest signifying she was barely past pubescence, Ellen tried to stop him but was knocked to the ground.

  The women who were taken, Ellen never saw again. Lavelle, from where he was held, knew only too well what ‘sport’ the Aboriginal women were used for, and with what barbarous cruelty they met their end.

  The next morning they were all herded down to the place where the tidal sea water met the land water of the River Murray. This place, Ellen had learned, held great spiritual significance for the Ngarrindjeri, who regarded it as having a special life-force, fed as it was by the two waters.

  Here, McGrath had Ellen and Lavelle bound close together, separate from the rest. The tribesmen and women were crushed into tighter groups, and the actions of the guards became even more intimidatory. The Ngarrindjeri women had become very agitated, as if they knew what was about to happen, and they pulled their children closer to themselves.

  Cries of ‘pulyugge’, which neither Ellen, nor Lavelle understood, went up from the women. At this, the men too, started to make noises and show signs of disturbance. One young man, his thighs well-marked from lagellin – punishment spearings – managed to break through the cordon of guards, but he was shot unceremoniously at point-blank range. In the back.

  Then McGrath strode to the women and children’s group and pulled out six kicking and screaming children of both sexes aged between about seven and ten years. The guards battered back their mothers, who fought to hold on to a leg or an arm of their little ones. The intermittent cries of the women had now turned into continuous wailing, punctuated still by the word ‘pulyugge’.

  ‘What is it? What’s happening?’ Ellen asked Lavelle.

  ‘I don’t know – they’re going to do something to the children – but what I don’t know.’

  ‘McGrath!’ Ellen called out. ‘McGrath, stop this, whatever it is. No true Irishman would harm children. Let them go!’ she shouted at him.

  He walked over and stood in front of her. Then slowly and deliberately he drew back his arm and backhanded her, his knuckles splitting her lip, the salt of blood in her mouth, its red trickle running down her white pipe-clayed face.

  ‘Let them go!’ He pushed his stubbled face against hers, and she saw the hardness in it. ‘Listen, Irish lubra, these heathens are not human. They’re hardly above the animals they hunt, and they’ve held back this country for too long now,’ he said viciously. Then he left her, her mouth throbbing with pain, her heart torn by the evil intent on his face and the knowledge that she could not save the children.

  McGrath turned back to her. For a brief moment she thought he had relented, thought that her words might have stung his humanity, thought he might let the children go.

  ‘What you’re going to witness, boong whore, is what the British Government started here years ago – population control!

  ‘Begin the digging!’ he shouted at his men.

  Ellen watched as the overlanders beat and forced six of the male Aborigines to scrape out holes in the flat hard sand of this holy place. The men were then musket-whipped back into their group.

  Then, one by one, the frightened, crying children of the Ngarrindjeri were crammed down into each sand-hole. The sand was shovelled in on top of them until only their heads remained above the sacred ground of their homeland. The holes were in a straight line about four feet apart from each other, the heads of the children all set looking out to sea, towards Kangaroo Island, the Island of the Dead. Terrified, the children tried to turn their heads to look at each other. To seek even the tiniest comfort from the faces of their friends.

  Ellen shouted and screamed at McGrath. ‘You bastard, may you rot in hell for this! For the crucified Christ’s sake – let them go! Don’t let them drown.’

  McGrath smiled at her in his strange, hard way.

  Would they even survive that long, she wondered, until the river and sea swelled to cover them? Would their small bodies be able to withstand the weight of the close-packed sand crushing in on their lungs, bruising the few short years of life they’d had out of them? She struggled at her ropes, until her arms were bloodied. Lavelle, too, strained and fought to get free, but it was no good. The two of them were forced to watch helplessly, shamed by their colour and race.

  ‘McGrath!’ cried Lavelle. ‘For pity’s sake, let them go. Take me instead – I’m wanted for horse-stealing back in the Barossa. You’ll get a reward!’

  McGrath came over to them, his interest aroused.

  ‘Horse-stealing, is it? You spoke too soon, buachaill – now we get paid for handing you over, and we still get rid of the piccaninnies!’

  Then he grabbed a musket from one of the others and viciously cracked it against Lavelle’s already injured jaw.

  ‘That’ll teach you to keep your mouth shut!’ McGrath sneered.

  Meanwhile the wailing and keening of the Ngarrindjeri women rose to a crescendo of grief as they watched the faces of their little ones grow pale with terror. Helpless, the mothers listened to the pitiful crying sounds rising from the mouths of their children.

  Ellen searched frantically for sign of the rising waters. The children would never last, she thought. Thankfully they would fall unconscious before long, be spared the agony of waiting, wondering, seeing the water seep towards them, then feeling it lap at their lips, rise above their noses, until there was no air to breathe any more. Only water, the drowning killing waters of the Coorong.

  Still the cries, the sobs of ‘pulyugge’ rose, renting the air with grief. There was something about the way with which the Ngarrindjeri women screamed this word that cut into Ellen’s nerves. It was as if the quartzite knife of the munggaiynwun had screamed again into the raw tissue of her shoulders. It was as if the screams signified something beyond the impending deaths of their children, something more horrific.

  McGrath’s brogue, now more clipped, cut through the din and a great fearful hush arose from the people.

  ‘All right! All right!’ he called, and again Ellen’s hopes
were raised. ‘Pulyugge is it? Pulyugge you want?’ the Irishman taunted the Ngarrindjeri. Something about the way McGrath said the words plunged Ellen’s soul into despairing blackness.

  ‘All right then, boys – let’s show them how good we whitefellas are at pulyugge. Winner gets the white woman. Furthest wins – first bounce. Let’s play pulyugge!’ And he waved his arm above his head as a signal.

  Before Ellen could comprehend what was happening, six of McGrath’s overlanders lined up about thirty running paces behind each of the Aboriginal children, their eyes fixed on each pulyugge – each ball – ahead of them.

  McGrath raised his pistol in the air.

  ‘Steady, boys – no going before the gun!’

  Then the shot rang out, and Ellen saw the men start to run, their heavy boots crunching into the sand. They ran straight, picking up speed, altering their stride, measuring, adjusting their approach to the targets ahead of them. Terrified, the children tried to turn their heads to see what caused these tremors in the sand, the shuddering impact of boots that, in seconds, would thud into the backs of their necks severing sinew and spinal column, spinning them through the air towards the ocean, kicking them – for the prize of the white woman – into eternity.

  Ellen closed her eyes against the absolute horror of it all, her body retching, convulsing, her lungs refusing at first to function before they forced out the throat-tearing non-human sound she made – ‘Nooooooooo!’ – as one by one the heads of the Ngarrindjeri children sailed towards the Island of the Dead, their bodies remaining behind in the sand, life seeping out of them into the sacred place of their Ancestral Fathers.

  Ellen was saved from unconsciousness only by a great shout going up from every place around her. This was not the death-wailing of the women, nor the screams of terror which accompanied the grisly ‘game’ of the overlanders. This was a mighty shout of liberation. She opened her eyes, still dazed, to see the six ‘footballers’ dead on the sand, the barbed death-spears of the Ngarrindjeri transfixing them. Almost simultaneously she felt someone behind her, at her hands. It was Kalinga.