The Crocodile Hotel

by Julie Janson

  Now, Jane searched for a new family amongst the old Lanniwah women. She sat on their blankets in the bough shade by the store, their glaucoma eyes blinking as they chatted mostly in Lanniwah language.

  ‘Some bird dey signs – dat crow up der mean it rain real heavy soon’, said Old Lucy. She nodded at Shirley and sure enough, it started to sprinkle from a cloudless sky. A willy wagtail was a messenger that you didn’t want frolicking in front of you. Death was coming to someone. Old Lucy sat on a new red blanket and finger knitted dilly bags from hand-rolled string … She held Jane’s hand and stroked it. Jane felt like the old woman could read her spirit. The hippy teachings of the 1969 ‘Summer of Love’ helped: ‘Be here now’. It had a resonance, but of course the hippies had been stoned on marijuana and there was none of that at Harrison. Jane sat for hours with the old women as they stroked her wavy golden brown hair and marvelled at the holes in her ears filled with silver and turquoise. She waved vaguely at Hubert who scowled from his veranda. He sure wasn’t enjoying a summer of love.

  Old Lucy’s eyes widened, as she looked sightless in the direction of the big house. Jane didn’t know what she was seeing in her memory but Lucy’s expression altered as her hands traced the direction of her ancestors. Jane could see that Lucy was living the story; it was as real as the listening children were.

  ‘He moving down river, he camp then move blue lily lagoon. Then another mob lizard come, they got cheeky and bitem painted goanna. See that rock, it got ring inside: sit down place for big snake too.’

  Old Lucy tossed back her head and began to sing, her tremulous voice in a minor key; the song tinkled in the quiet air and then rested on one high note. She clapped the rhythm on her wizened thighs and Jane picked up Old Lucy’s hand and held it for the song’s duration. Jane stood up and thanked Old Lucy, said she would bring her up some tucker.

  ‘I bring you ice cream from freezer; you like that?’

  ‘You granddaughter for me, dat right’, said Lucy.

  Next day, Jane again waited patiently outside the camp. She wanted to be noticed, to be invited in, the Lanniwah way. Burnie stood up from his corrugated camp and walked in cowboy boots and hat to welcome Jane. He smoothed a place by his fire.

  ‘Sittem here; you my daughter’, he said.

  For all time now, she was classified as Lelli, a sister to all Lelli moiety women. Likewise, for Jane, men would be her classified sons, brothers or potential husbands. She was disturbed to find out that David was classified as Bulli, a husband. Jane would have to careful not to be seen alone with him. People would talk and laugh at her. She was beginning to find it stressful. Why couldn’t they just be normal and follow modern Australian law and not have lots of wives. It was looking like some Arabic custom, where the old men got the girls at all ages and everyone had to respect them and obey no matter how ridiculous and unfair it obviously was.

  Jane realised that in the moiety system, everyone was some kind of relative. However, she would often be in the dark – the system was complex. Although, once she had accepted her position, everyone would know what role she had in relation to them: she had sisters, children, fathers, brothers, mothers, and her belonging was forever.

  Beatrice was loud, tall and skinny, she was married to an old fellow who had four wives, she was number one and had a commanding presence; she took Jane’s Tibetan necklace into her hand and murmured with admiration.

  ‘Where dat from?’

  ‘Tibet.’

  ‘Where dat? Near Borroloola?’

  Jane sighed at the prospect of describing the geography of the world outside Lanniwah country. Where to begin? Perhaps with the nearest town, Katherine, then up the Stuart highway to Darwin.

  Beatrice had heard about those places. Lot of cars, lot of white people, lot of trouble with grog. Then across the sea. But Beatrice said: ‘Across dere, dat home of the dead.’

  Hmm … Jane nodded and tried to explain that it was also a place where other kinds of people lived, dark skinned like her.

  ‘More tribe?’

  ‘Err, yes, but many different ones.’ Jane tried to draw a map of the world but it seemed downright ridiculous to Aunty Beatrice.

  ‘Who dis Sex Pistols?’

  “Punk rock, music, sort of.’

  ‘Anyway, where dat Jesus from?’

  The missionaries had been through, leaving behind a mysterious story about a bearded white man who was going to come back some day and save them.

  ‘Yes, maybe it’s true – hard to say.’

  Old Lucy took Jane for a walk to the metal ring in the tree, Old Lucy stroked the rusted metal but said nothing; she just looked into the distance. They walked back to Lucy’s fire and she talked slowly so Jane could follow. The Aboriginal-English ‘Kriol’ was becoming familiar; it was like Papuan Pidgin English.

  The sun set, darkness came and still Jane sat by the fire. Aaron fell asleep in her arms. She touched Lucy’s scarred arms and upper chest. The old woman smiled.

  ‘Dis special mark for me.’ She took Jane’s fingers and rubbed them against her scarred dark flesh. ‘Like boomerang mark might be woman stick, dis mark for touch, make it ancestor step on ground’, Lucy said. Jane stroked the marks, saw the pain of the incisions made with a sharpened stone. Each cicatrice formed in this way told a story. For Old Lucy, each scar was mourning for a family member long dead.

  Jane learnt about female marrnkeetj, clever women who could get out stones put in a body by bilka, clever men. ‘Do dat without breaking the skin. Dey keep special stones in cold water. My people dey bin long time dis place. Alla time walk about dis place. Know all the special place, yeeai? Dat one near dat hill, real special, you can’t go dere? Men place’, she said.

  Jane sat quietly and pointed as Lucy looked up into the night. ‘That’s the Southern Cross’, said Jane.

  ‘Look dere. Two sisters dey travel across sky, dey run from old kangaroo. Then dere? dingo star, you callem Sirius. He cheeky fella, he chasem woman.’ Old Lucy rolled with laughter, and made a penis of a stick and jerked it up and down. Jane nodded.

  Jane nibbled at a wild plum – she spat quietly, it tasted terrible – then sweet bush banana and sugarbag wild honey. The black honey clung to her fingers. The wild food held stories and meaning that described the country. The women each held their Dreaming stories about the country and Jane’s mind filled with the landscape’s geography, every small tree, every rock, all of it, in a mythic song cycle. Every gift of bush fruit from a child or old person, every warning not go near a certain escarpment or tree was a kind of lesson in cosmology.

  Now it was Beatrice’s turn to teach. She took Jane by the hand and sat her by her fire, raked the coals with her stick and made tea. Dogs with no hair curled up beside her. Beatrice’s long hair down her back was tied with a pristine blue ribbon. Her back was bent in half and she walked with a stick. She had a reputation as a clever woman and wasn’t old, maybe forty, but already a magician.

  Jane produced sweet biscuits from her bag and opened them for her.

  ‘You like Monte Carlo?’ Jane sat quietly and showed Beatrice her photographs of her family in Sydney and Taree.

  The next night, Jane opened the school for adult art classes. The adults came to the electric light, the chance to sit at desks and touch books and paints and pencils. Their paintings were full of lore. Old Lucy painted pictures of large red stones over and over again and her paintings always showed men in black hats … Sometimes, tears ran down Lucy’s face. These stones were like the eggs of giant emus: they rose out of the grey earth in isolated plains. Jane respected the old woman’s stories, her interweaving of Dreamings and history – they were one and the same.

  One afternoon, Jane walked towards these stones; they seemed to rumble. The earth was alive, something was rippling underneath. These stones travelled underground across the land, they tumbled in the old people’s dreams. Jane touched the red ochre colour and leant against the rough surface; the rock loomed over her, and she felt as i
f she was watched. These rocks loomed up against the sky. Her father had pointed out the grey stone cliffs along the Hawkesbury River; they were inaccessible by ordinary people; there were burial places there, he said. Old skeletons of Aborigines thousands of years old. Her dad Samuel knew things about the old people: he had once been the witness to uncovering a Darug woman’s bones who had a gypsum cap of clay and her crossed arms hid a small child skeleton, two thousand years old, as old as Christ. It had been reburied in a paperback shroud but had haunted him for years.

  In class, the artists saw the earth from above, the bird’s eye image of existence, red bursts of song and shape and spirit and sometimes sinister. Some of the older people painted the men’s bullroarers and women’s dancing sticks as seen flat against the earth. Space was expanding ever upwards and it brought deep emotional outpourings to talk about the phenomena. Many pictures were stark depictions of loss, of land stolen and lives taken.

  ‘One time, daughter here born, Susan, white man skin. I takem her from Protector Man, alla time runaway, he drive up my place might be stealem her right off my titties. Husband good Wunungah like Ray. He catchem dingo scalp for money. We walk walk. But dat man findem us and takem her. He policeman, he tie her up wid yellafella kid.’ Old Beatrice said, and tears dropped on Jane’s hand.

  ‘I hear you, mother. Sad time’, said Jane.

  ‘Takem long way, nomore seeum. You tellum alla people bout dis. Learnem Lanniwah way.’

  Beatrice went into her paper-bark house and came back with an exquisite hand woven dilly bag entwined with soft white feathers. She placed it in Jane’s hands.

  ‘Thank you Aunty; it’s beautiful.’

  ‘You pay me twenty dollar. I go bingo’, said Beatrice.

  Jane laughed. ‘Okay. Aaron will bring it tomorrow.’

  Aaron cuddled up to Jane by the fire.

  ‘Tell me a true story about Grandpa Samuel, like when he was a big boy like me and he ate the galah stew and it was too bony’, said Aaron.

  ‘Okay, but then we go home and you go to sleep – we have a big day at school tomorrow’.

  CHAPTER 5

  Billabong

  Leroy and Ricky drove along red paths with their tin trucks made of tin lids and fencing wire. Aaron led the bunch until Robert knocked him over and stole his truck. Ricky yelled at him. Aaron didn’t care: this life was unheard of freedom, no strict child-minding centre in Balmain, no hand washing or compulsory sleep time. He was learning to swim – all of the children could swim because they learnt as toddlers and could swim in the billabong before they could walk.

  The Lanniwah country was beautiful. Near to her caravan the billabong pool was pink in the sunrise, water dappled like a Monet painting. Piles of small bones and white feathers lay around the shore, pandanus palms fringed the pool and a waterfall cascaded from black rock outcrops.

  Every afternoon when the heat in school was terrible, the billabong was lifesaving. Jane and David led the children to swim for hours. Jane and Aaron paddled by the shore, Mayda and Shirley dived into the blue lotus lily pads. Aaron clung to Mayda’s neck, dived and laughed; it was complete joy. As Jane swam underneath the cool water, a long necked tortoise’s eyes glinted. Small fresh water crocodiles poked their snouts up from the blue water; when they saw Jane, Aaron and Leroy, they submerged.

  ‘Look, Mum, crocodiles. Will they eat me?’

  ‘No, they’re freshies. They eat birds and fish, not you – you’re too big’, said Jane.

  But, um, she rather wondered if this was correct: perhaps a really big one, say one and a half metres, might attack a human. Oh great, Aaron eaten before her eyes, how would she explain that? The middle of a pool was a worry: her dad had said to not swim across the middle, a bunyip might live there.

  She lay on her back and watched David dive to the bottom, his dark skin glistening beneath the water. He swam under the lily pads, and a green python slid into the clear water. Lizzy and Mayda paddled back with lily stems in their teeth and they showed Jane how to peel and eat them like celery. David emerged dripping, and spoke quietly:

  ‘You happy for this place?’ He had streams of water rippling down his body.

  ‘This country is amazing! It puts its arms around me’, said Jane.

  White cranes, spoonbills and azure kingfishers flew out from the pools nearby as the sky turned pink and the water gleamed pale orange. Melaleuca trees with their peeling bark and grevillea blossoms, fragrant and sticky.

  ‘Dat great ancestral woman’s push digging sticks in earth and out come water and all life and they havem babies, hundred tribe and you know dat blood, after birth bringem Dreamtime serpents. Dey smell dat fresh blood’, said Lizzy. It was a great mystery and as commonplace as the rain, earth or sun. A woman was sacred because only she could give birth. The girls laughed.

  ‘Mens real jealous of us because we can have baby’, said Shirley.

  ‘Is that why women can’t go near the men ceremony?’ asked Jane.

  ‘True, dey keep sacred things for themselves. Dey frightened dat womens want to take them’, said Lizzy.

  ‘You no go to dat men’s sacred place. Dey spearem you, sure thing: dat Old Pelican he magic man – watch out’, said Shirley.

  On the way back from a walk, the bigger girls pointed out caves.

  ‘You no go dere, Missus Jane, for mens, not for womens. Dey killem you’, said Mayda.

  Jane looked at the secret place; she had heard that there were ancient paintings on the walls, ochres from thousands of years ago. The caves also contained painted bones. The women had said that old people travelled over the country from Rainer Mission to paint the bones and keep them safe from dingoes.

  ‘Dat rainbow snake was angry, not like her babies killed’, said Lizzy. Jane had seen photographs of men dressed in tall kapok ceremonial head-dresses.

  ‘Old dingo men’, whispered Mayda.

  ‘Like long time olden time?’

  ‘No, last month. Ancestor people but, you know, dog, like great grandfathers, dey real people, live now’, said Mayda.

  ‘Bamatji, you callem ironwood, magic power! You sleep under em you not wakem up.’ Shirley smiled.

  CHAPTER 6

  Massacre Story

  The children had gone home and Jane watched David as he packed up the schoolbooks. She saw Old Pelican walk past the school on his way up to the store. She put down her files and sat on the teacher’s desk looking at David, casual and friendly. Her heart fluttered.

  ‘You reckon I could have a talk with the head man today?’ said Jane. Old Pelican was like a chameleon. He would wear a cowboy hat and boots, looking like a stockman, and then sometimes she had seen him looking very old with a white beard, he seemed frail and gentle. He seemed to be changing all the time. ‘A shape changer’, David whispered.

  ‘He kill lotta people. He’s a clever fella. A werrnggitj can be man or woman; they good magic, can make someone well. They heal blood. Heal sick people with stones and have spirit with them, get inside people. He can stop that big rain if he wants; he sings backwards. Sings the rain to stop. Powerful old man.’

  Old Pelican’s camp was apart from the others. He lived in a large paper-bark covered bough shade, a dead wallaby hung with milk cans from a pole. A suitcase was full of neatly piled blankets. The old man sat on an old bedframe while Jane stood back. Old Pelican called out.

  ‘Yeeai. What you wantem?’

  ‘Thank you for meeting me. I’m the new head teacher and I want to know what you would like me to teach the children’, said Jane.

  ‘You teacher, you teach ’em. What you ask me for?’ Jane couldn’t argue with his logic. Old Pelican looked mystified.

  He stood up with difficulty and motioned for Jane and David to walk to a nearby flowering tree near the store. He pointed to a heavy metal ring rusted into the bark.

  ‘Dat for chain.’

  Jane nodded.

  ‘We takem bones away.’

  ‘What bones?’

  The o
ld man tilted his worn hat back from his face. The silence was long and pointed. A white cockatoo flew over them and settled into the tree. Jane felt hot and out of place.

  ‘Yeeai, I there. You see em red dirt near store?’

  ‘Yes, it’s bauxite, isn’t it?’ she said.

  ‘Dat red for reason. I bin little fella. Dem white stock men, maybe twenty of em ride in here. People scared, not seen many Wunungah before.’

  ‘Whitefellas and black police, Queensland boys’, said David. He held his head low, staring at the ground. The atmosphere was intense. Jane squirmed.

  ‘Dey think dey gunna get tucker. Dis Wunungah got baccy might be. One fella, he say “We gotta cut wood, why dey do that?” Alla time chainem up, no good. Big shackle chain on dis ring. I little fella, I seeum bag on yarraman, horse, think maybe got damper, bullabingie; we hungry’, said Old Pelican.

  Jane nodded, not sure where the story was going.

  ‘They want tobacco from Wunungah’, said David.

  ‘White settlers did give out flour and sugar’, she said.

  ‘Dey roundin Lanniwah up in 1928, dey askem all come and chop up wood with an axe. Dey chop and chop big lotta wood, want em make big fire maybe. Then something funny happen, Wunungah holdem gun like dis.’ Old Pelican mimed the gun against his shoulder.

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Mummy say we gunna die for sure.’ Old Pelican rubbed his hands over the metal ring. ‘Chained ’em up. Just here. Nothin grow now.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Dis place, red dirt, see? Here. Blood. You lookem.’ Old Pelican looked up at her and directed her eyes to the earth. She was confused: his language was hard to follow.

  ‘I’m sorry’, she said. She wondered if that was it. Should she go now? Time drifted on this plain.

  Old Pelican rolled a smoke with gnarled black hands and breathed it in.