The Crocodile Hotel

by Julie Janson

  One child had a baby clinging to her back as she crouched with the others behind a thorn bush. The rider flicked the dirt in front of them with the whip. The human shapes were dwarfed against the wide horizontality of barren landscape. He saw her and wheeled the horse around, galloped towards her, jumped the fence to the caravan and dismounted. He was a barrel-chested Chips Rafferty in the The Overlanders. He rolled with a cattleman’s gait and was joined by his rake-thin wife, Edie. They walked towards Jane.

  ‘Gidday, Mrs Reynolds, welcome to Harrison, I’m Hubert and this is Edie.’ His voice was laconic but direct. Jane felt out of place, out of her mind. Her heart was beating as cockatoos screeched all around in a close burst of noise, jarring in the clicking stillness and heat – the terrible inescapable heat.

  Jane stretched out her damp hand. ‘Good to meet you, Hubert, Edie.’

  Edie peered from under her wide-brim hat, her red permed curls swinging to her shoulders.

  ‘Your husband not with you?’

  Jane felt the first lie rise up like vomit. ‘He’s working; he might come later.’

  ‘Later, eh? Oh yeah, when?’

  Edie shot an alarmed look at her husband, who licked his dry mouth and stuck a cigarette paper to his lower lip.

  ‘Not sure’, said Jane.

  ‘So, you reckon you can handle it by yerself? That’ll be worth watching.’ said Hubert.

  ‘I’ll be fine. I’m a graduate.’

  ‘Where was it? Oxford University or something?’ said Edie.

  ‘University of Sydney.’

  ‘You’d better watch out for wild buffalo. If you see one, climb the nearest tree.’ Hubert grinned.

  Jane laughed but the sound stuck in her throat. They were serious. She beckoned Aaron to her side.

  ‘And don’t stand in the doorway. A mob of blacks could come past and you’d be a sitting duck. They’d shoot ya. They’re not all bad, but give them a whiff of the booze, they go mad. We prepare for attack.’

  Jane kept nodding like a toy carnival dog, looking blankly around for evidence of dangerous blacks but all she could see was kilometres of scrappy mulga trees, grey dust and vast nothingness. Hubert looked her over as if she was on sale, coughed, spat a gob of phlegm at a passing red cattle-dog, and then leant back against the fence smoking, tracing the dirt with his boot. There was a long uneasy quiet; no one seemed to know what to say. She sensed some foreboding of a thing that might happen, a fear of the future in that place. It slunk around in grey dirt, a kind of evil.

  ‘Stick to the rules and she’ll be right’, said Hubert.

  ‘Yeah sure, perhaps you could write them down.’

  ‘No alcohol, it’s dry out here. You haven’t got bottles of whisky in that bag, have ya?’

  ‘I wouldn’t.’ She hoped her bottle of Johnnie Walker hadn’t broken.

  ‘I would have to confiscate them and drink ’em myself.’ He laughed. Edie gazed at Jane’s Tibetan dress and dangly earrings, and sniffed.

  ‘Come over later for a cuppa. You can use the old Toyota; you’ll need it.’

  ‘Great’, said Jane. She eyed the old Toyota’s rough appearance but would later be delighted when the engine started. This car would save her life. She realised that despite first impressions, maybe the Barkley family were solid country people who would take care of her and Aaron.

  ‘You know, I can’t stand women who talk with a plum in their mouth’, said Edie. Jane was compliant. ‘Nyeah, I know what ya mean.’ She mentally noted that she would have to speak through her nose for the rest of the year. Hubert ruffled Aaron’s hair. ‘Ya can come up and see me gun. Ya’d like that, I bet. Hey, another thing. I don’t want you goin’ up to the blacks’ camp – it’s their place. Ya got that?’

  ‘You’re the Boss’, Jane said.

  ‘I’ve staked out the whole one square kilometre for the Aboriginal camp, on the directions of the owners from Singapore’, he said.

  Oh, the luxury, thought Jane.

  ‘The blacks don’t want you. They’re like children. We take care of them. Look, they do it tough in the Wet, so I give the old blokes my best lures. I got time for ’em. We help ’em out, but if they step out of line, I’ll take the bullwhip to any of ’em. Whip ’em good!’

  Jane saw his bravado, but he seemed a frightened man: it was all show. He turned to her and winked. No, he was obviously a racist shit and she would have to deal with him. She was mildly terrified but she pictured confrontations.

  Edie was a midwife who with two Aboriginal health workers ran a no-nonsense clinic in an old house on the station. The Lanniwah women gave birth there and she had delivered some hundred babies. In her racism, there was also compassion.

  ‘We know where we stand in the Northern Territory hierarchy. Hugh’s a cattle manager but we’re not owners’, said Edie.

  ‘The government doesn’t give us much help when it comes to transport costs, even when we’re in drought. The bloody helicopter costs drive cattle prices sky high. It’s tough. You know, actually we’re like social workers out here, eh Edie – help the dark people get their welfare cheques,’ said Hubert.

  Jane smiled and kept looking at her dusty shoes.

  Edie had married Hubert and adapted quickly to distaste for blacks. She spoke to Jane about her last pregnancy, the adored only boy who was born in Katherine Hospital.

  ‘After one day, I saw my baby was in a plastic crib surrounded by picks.’

  ‘What are picks?’ asked Jane.

  ‘Pickaninies, Aboriginal babies’, said Edie.

  ‘I took my precious new baby out of that hospital quick smart. Hightailed it back to Harrison.’

  Her ‘black girl’, Gertie, washed and scrubbed for little pay, just tucker.

  Jane watched Gertie; she looked like her grandmother. She smelt of rose talcum powder. Her grandma had been born to serve, trained by nuns in an orphanage to polish floors on her knees. She had been fed smears of pink watery jam on sledges of bread. Granny had an education in reading, writing, bed making, pot scrubbing, floor polishing and dishwashing. Like the Children of Canaan in the Bible, to be born black was to be condemned to life as a servant. Such children were half-castes – the brood of black concubines and descendants of ex-convicts. A double stain – double shame.

  Jane’s great grandmother had her children removed by the Benevolent Society. Benevolent to whom? The English masters and mistresses who received the unpaid indentured servants? Jane had inherited a fear of authority, the police: it had been passed down the generations. There was uncertainty about her place, her right to belong. Jane knew that her family had grown afraid to acknowledge their Aboriginal blood. When her father worked for white people, he had drunk his tea in a tin cup outside their houses on the step, to keep his dark germs away. As a dark child amongst six fairer siblings, he had waited outside the lolly shop, while his whiter brother bought sweets. The sign read, ‘No Blackfellas Allowed In Here’.

  It was time to come out and own her heritage, to stop apologising for the distant Aboriginal ancestor. To say loudly that the Hawkesbury was her country, that her grandmother was born there, and her great grandmother, and her great great grandmother. She was a descendant of the Buruburongal clan of Freemans Reach Blacks’ Camp near Windsor, a member of the Kangaroo Skin People. Jane had been tired of being told it was not her land, no such tribe – she didn’t exist – by a mob blown in from the North Coast.

  ‘Are you okay? You dreaming or something? You’re miles away.’ Edie said.

  ‘Just thinking about something.’

  ‘Gertie’s a house-trained domestic so she’s valuable, and she knows her place. Gertie can do your washing if you like.’ Jane shook her head and kept her eyes down.

  ‘We run the power with a generator and we got a two-way radio, but you can’t use that. You come to us for maintenance of the water supply, mail, fuel and food. Any questions?’

  ‘No, all good.’ Jane began to move away but Edie whistled her back.

&n
bsp; ‘People in Sydney don’t understand what we go through. We lie awake at night wondering if we’ll be murdered in our beds. You don’t understand how we’re stopped from getting rid of the fear. They’re a real problem; one day they will all die out. It can’t come too soon.’ Jane nodded, speechless: if she spoke out now, she would have no choice but to leave, to go back to the mattress in the share house. To poverty. She felt gagged, full of polite meaningless phrases. She would have to wear it.

  Jane sat with Aaron on a small hill overlooking the billabong at Harrison and a jabiru, all black and white, lifted off from bright pink water. A kind of ecstasy descended. Hubert drove by in his cattle truck with a perplexed look on his face: What the hell are they doing out there?

  The next day, Jane shooed the curious Brahman cows from her door and led Aaron over to the Boss’s house. Edie licked her cigarette with her pink tongue, and welcomed them.

  ‘Get Missus Reynolds a chair.’ Gertie stopped washing a pile of dishes and dragged a plastic chair to the table. Edie was attractive in tight white moleskin pants, like Annie Oakley. She had two girls and a small boy – pretty, pale children. They were curious and looked longingly at Aaron. They soon had him under their collective wings, and giggled and played on the floor amongst clattering Lego pieces.

  ‘Elisha, get a coffee for the teacher.’ Edie puffed another cigarette. The eldest girl held a mug with Pablo instant coffee under the hot water tap at the sink, mixed in a spoon of sugar and powdered milk and gave it to Jane.

  Jane sipped. ‘Lovely.’ She looked at the house: corrugated iron and fibro on steel stilts, broken flapping fly-screens. There was poverty in the dirty white walls and plastic chairs. A Laminex table and bench with the School of the Air radio and piles of battered books sat against another wall, and a Hammond organ with sheet music, and flypaper that dangled near her face.

  ‘It’s a relief to have a woman to talk to. Gertie doesn’t count, she’s black and thick as two short planks’, Edie said. Gertie gave a vicious slam to the wet clothes. Jane looked out the window and saw Hubert over by his tractor with a young Aboriginal girl sitting on his lap and he was tickling her.

  ‘So, how long you been teachin?’

  ‘One year.’

  ‘Experienced then.’ Edie nodded and smirked.

  A pink galah flew through a window, perched beside Edie and bent his head for a scratch. Jane felt helpless, like a child, possessed by the older woman. She shook her golden hair. ‘You’ll have to tie that hair up, the kids are crawling with nits.’ If Edie had suddenly thrown the coffee mug out the window and screeched like an orang-utan, it wouldn’t have surprised Jane.

  Jane knew nothing about the Territory; her experience as a student teacher had been at Leichhardt Boys High School, dealing with boys from the Mediterranean – hairy, dark, with gold chains. ‘Hey Miss, you got nice boobs’, When they saw their new student teacher, the boys in tight grey shorts had almost taken out their dicks and beaten them on the desk. She learnt to throw boys from the classroom. To pinch ears and throw chalk.

  ‘Will your children enrol with the Lanniwah tomorrow?’

  ‘No, my kids do School of the Air’, said Edie. Jane nodded in blank relief. She called Aaron but he wouldn’t come. Edie watched as Jane tried to pull Aaron away from his new friends. It was a struggle of wills, but the child won, so Jane went back to her caravan and suddenly felt very alone.

  Hubert opened the corrugated iron store twice a week. It was a large building with a small flap that opened for a shop window. Hubert towered over the women, his ledger ready to record each debt. The women queued for hours in the heat for Western cowboy clothes, plastic toys, jeans, cassette players. Hubert had no competition, and robbing Aboriginal people was a sport in the Northern Territory.

  ‘These people, they can’t get their unemployment money without us filling out the forms – they can’t read.’ In reality, Hubert took it all and ran it through his expensive store. He stood at the window and wrote down every item, the powdered milk, packets of tea and flour, a tee shirt, and Donald Cook’s baby carrots.

  As Gertie hung out washing, Jane handed her some pegs. ‘What do they pay you Gertie?’ asked Jane.

  ‘For one week, might get ten dollar. Enough for bingo. None left for save’, said Gertie.

  ‘You win much?’

  ‘Yeeai, lotta prize’. Jane mentally calculated the small fortune flowing from two hundred unemployment cheques and child endowment. Someone was being ripped off.

  Lanniwah women walked past her caravan and waved to Jane. They went the long way around the Boss’s house to avoid the snarling cattle dogs. The Boss had trained these dogs to only attack dark skin. Away from the dogs, the Lanniwah children ran and cartwheeled with joy. Jane could imagine running amongst them with Aaron, everyone laughing, just in the fun of being alive.

  CHAPTER 3

  Identity

  On her first night in the caravan Jane was restless. What if no one turned up for school? Would the older women take to her? Make her feel welcome? Jane could hear strange rasping howls. She got up and checked the door. Small trees reached out and ran their branch fingers along the aluminium … Semitransparent geckos’ eyes twitched. Urgh. She pulled the sheet over her head, wanting to sleep, to be ready for school but the night air suffocated as sweat pooled in her belly button. Forty degrees with just one small fan, and no air conditioner, no television, no communication, not even a radio.

  She hated being alone, like herself as a lonely fourteen-year-old girl with her father dead, mother absent, brother mentally ill, sister far away. She stewed and tossed under the plastic ceiling. Maybe someone would report her for being unfit to teach. She thought about her Aboriginal blood. She wondered if the Lanniwah would accept her.

  She woke up at dawn; the cattle station was awake. She heard men rounding up animals. Jane looked through the window of the school caravan.

  Jane and Aaron swam in the fresh billabong; it was exquisite. It was like the place where her Darug great granny had been born. Great Granny had called her land nullaburra country, the wood duck place at Freeman’s Reach … Running fresh water was in the family blood, but it was the salt water that had called her father. He went fishing with the long fishgig he had made of bamboo. A Ned Kelly rig. It was a fantasy that they were a functioning family. It was all dysfunction really. Kooris who fought with each other and other mobs. Jealousies, old burning resentments, feuds with other mobs. Girls raped by cousins, some uncles stinking drunk. Children who looked suspiciously like another man’s child. Not nice people. However, generous – they’d give you anything you wanted. Grandma Reynolds cooked roast lamb dinners for thirty, all welcome. She would yell out for them to come, booda, eat! The girls would wait on the men of course. Playing jokes on each other, grown men flicked rubber-band pellet guns and shot each other with potato slug guns, kerpang, right on his ear, gotta laugh! Playing harmonica, or for heaven’s sake a gumleaf, her Dad’s lips would be pursed against the green. It sounded just like a violin.

  The Aboriginal Teaching Assistant opened the school, she watched him as she walked up the hill to school. She wanted the first day to be full of promise; she would show them all that she was competent and capable of being head teacher – there were no other teachers. This was a new life and she would forget about the past

  Jane stopped at the tin door to the school and the Aboriginal Teaching Assistant was waiting for her. Jane gulped. His thick rich eyelashes – like those of all the Lanniwah people – fluttered downwards as he twisted his fingers nervously. He was handsome, looked fresh and relaxed in his blue checked shirt; he smelt of Old Spice. He had beautiful hands with pale palms. Around his neck, he wore a shark tooth on leather and on his wrists were coloured strings and beads. She could see his shirt lay open to reveal some small raised scars, cicatrices, marks of manhood. David watched her; she felt his eyes on her, and she blushed. She couldn’t imagine how he would place her in his microcosm. He smiled at her hippy image, her
long neck and slim body, her brown eyes and cascading golden hair, her silk batik kaftan.

  He introduced himself: ‘I’m David Yaniwuy. I’m the Teaching Assistant’.

  ‘I’m not like the Missus Boss. I am not here to order people about. I am a teacher, I will be learning as much as the children will learn. I am pretty ignorant about Lanniwah culture. You will have to teach me … I hope your people will accept me as a friend’, said Jane. David smiled and he searched the floor for some answer to her strange speech. She felt his unease at her closeness as he manoeuvred to place a desk between them. There was a long silence; Jane straightened the pencils. He coughed and finally spoke:

  ‘I only had this job for one year, that how long Harrison Station school been here. Last teacher got bit by a King Brown snake. Nearly finished him up.’ David said.

  ‘Maybe you can show me how not to get bitten by a snake or run down by a buffalo’.

  Jane watched him walk over the hill to the camp and call the kids. He had the gait of a man brought up horse riding, with bowlegs and a subtle swagger. If his eyes ever met hers, there was a fleeting something, that flickering recognition of a mutual frisson. This was dangerous. Oh, look out. Jane pushed it aside, she would have to work with him and she didn’t want to jeopardise his position with the Department of Education, or her own. Yes, she would be an upright moral woman, very, very professional – that sounded right.

  Jane’s main worry was that she had no training in teaching basic literacy. She saw bright-eyed children peeking in at her from outside. Several had snotty noses and running ears; all had scabs all over their legs. Jane piled boxes of tissues on her desk.