by Julie Janson
‘Hi, I have to go to town. I’m sorry to disturb you.’
‘No worries, I was just coolin off; come on.’ He put on his hat and he looked into her eyes as he slid up his fly zipper very slowly. He did up his turquoise belt; his torso was paunchy but strong. His eyes on hers. She felt very strange. He couldn’t stop smiling. He ran his fingers through his thin blond hair; he was handsome but repellent. She watched him hook and tighten the belt; he looked up, his tongue licking his cracked lips.
‘What?’
‘Nothing’.
She heard Mayda giggling and the other girls whispering. Hubert bowed to the girls and actually flexed his chest.
‘You want a tickle too?’ he chuckled. The girls flew off into the bush.
‘What?’
‘Just a joke – can’t you take a joke, teacher? Lighten up a bit.’
‘I have to meet the Department inspector in town. Can you fly me in?’
‘Your funeral. I’ve only had my licence a few months; I can show off my new plane, well second-hand. It’s a Cessna 150 with Omni Vision rear window. Real flash.’
Later, they climbed into the plane. Hawks circled. A jabiru took flight with a flicker of black and white plumage as the Lanniwah stockmen shooed cattle off the runway. Jane gripped the seat as the Boss started the engine and taxied down the red mud and took off.
She watched the purple and red escarpment, cliffs where Jedda had jumped. Wild, white waterfalls and flooding plains were dotted with pelicans, brolgas and boab trees bulbous with water. A herd of water buffalo chewed on pink water lilies. Wild brumbies leapt through water as the plane flew over.
Jane was nervous in Hubert’s presence. He picked his scabby knuckles and shifted his stomach behind the flying gear. He smelt of tobacco and Brut aftershave.
‘So how’s it goin’ for yous?’
‘Okay. The school is pretty demanding, fifty-two children from four to eighteen. None of them can read or write.’
‘Must be hard without your hubby.’ He looked back at her, his hairy eyebrows twitching.
‘No, not really.’
He gripped the controls and motioned with blubbery lips to the horizon. ‘There’s the Arnhem highway; we’ll be right, just foller her up.’
‘Are you an owner of Harrison?’
‘Narr, just the hired manager, second in command. I’m a ‘yes’ man’.
Hubert was deep in thought. He said he wanted a cigarette and a beer and some company of men who knew his world.
‘Yeah, the back bar of the Crocodile Hotel, where only men in blue shirts drink.’
‘Will you buy a place?’
‘We’ve got four kids, there’s not enough money to make a go of it – never will be. It’s the federal government’s fault, or somebody’s, and the cost of trucking two hundred beasts to an abattoir is bloody ridiculous – how can a man make a living? The station makes no money – it’s like a terrible mistake. We go through the motions of mustering, what for? Just to count the beasts. The Brahman calves suck their mothers dry, until they’re skin and bone. We’re like that, exhausted and sucked dry from looking after that tribe. Edie struggling to give medical care in isolation. Watching in despair when a young ’un is dying because she ran out of antibiotics. How do you think that flaming feels? Digging a little grave, but we do it, me and the cattle boys. And for shrunken old people too – shallow graves for people who lived their life under cardboard. No, I don’t like this life, but where else do we go? To what? It’s the love of these dark people that keeps us here. What is there to keep you? You don’t know these people. You’ll move on, like all the fly-by-night teachers – you won’t look back, will ya?’
‘I don’t know yet.’
‘We keep the flame of English civilisation alive.’
‘Do you ever suspect that this country doesn’t belong to you? That white people are trespassing?’
‘Bugger that.’
He looked down at Jane’s legs, nice long brown legs.
‘Gee, you’d taste alright.’
‘Pardon?’ she said.
‘Look, I used to be embarrassed about all this stuff, but I like to suck a pussy, sweet and salty, more than anything’, he said.
‘Too much information, Hubert’, said Jane.
‘I’m sorry if I offend you, but I have imagined it, you know. Just a quick suck. Look I tried a bit in Singapore, but narrr, not yellow ones. Just you and I up here at two thousand feet in a tin box. I could show you the joy stick.’
‘Well, at least you’re honest. Can we change the topic?’
‘A joke. I wouldn’t touch anyone but Edie. A man has to have control in this country, or he could go troppo.’ His hand brushed her thigh as he leant forward to adjust the landing gear.
‘Don’t please’, she said. Jumping out of the plane was an option. She was suffocating.
‘Sorry, gotta get ready to land.’
He looked very hot and shaky. He had only had a few flights without the instructor; it was a bugger of a thing to land. Jane sensed his fear and felt scared as well. The plane shook and moved from side to side. In the distance the town loomed, Jane held on tight to the vinyl. The air sock bloomed out and beckoned them in, then a man in a battered bush hat waved them down. Thank heavens. They bumped and crunched along the gravel runway, an eagle rose in front of them. Holy hell. Hubert gripped the throttle.
They were about to land and the man at the Katherine airfield waved them down.
‘Easy does it, there she goes, nice and smooth.’ There were huge bumps; they touched down at the airfield. Hubert’s hands shook violently and he reached into his pocket to light a Marlborough, hand cupped against the wind, bushie-style. He looked at her and smiled. Jane watched him; that cupping of the hands always reminded her of her dad. She loved to watch men roll a cigarette and light up: it lit up memories.
Later, Jane left the Education Department office with a pile of books on teaching literacy, and coloured sets of Cuisenaire wood blocks for maths (‘four arithmetical operations in one box’). Jane was received as a heroine, a respected and successful teacher. She was smiling. She would be made permanent, a job for life, no fear of unemployment, no grovelling for money. It felt fantastic.
Jane stepped out onto Katherine’s main street. Lanniwah men sat in the shade, their heads hung low, waiting for something or someone, a feed or a drink or tobacco or land rights or a woman or the Gunjible police.
A trip to the supermarket, oh joy – air-conditioning! Jane sighed with the relief from the stifling 40 degrees heat. She sat on a seat and watched the white families filling their trolleys with ice cream and nappies while Lanniwah women shopped with one small bag, their babies clinging to their legs. Dark faces looked with hidden envy at the supermarket plenty; young Aboriginal girls roamed the aisles and longingly handled lipsticks and cheap jewellery while the store managers stared at them, willing them to leave. Jane bought a toy red MG car for Aaron, a bottle of Jamieson’s whisky and a bag of oranges. She longed for more fresh food, but Hubert had given strict orders about the weight.
The last time she had seen salad was at an education seminar at a nearby cattle station school. Aaron had gone up to some teachers and asked for an apple. He had brought it back to Jane’s table and she had cried. It was too much. Still, Hubert had made it clear that the plane could not carry much, and grog was a problem in a dry community. She pushed the bottle deep in her bag. For many years, the elders had forbidden grog: she felt like a criminal.
Hubert took her parcels and books and helped her across the road. He averted his head as her cotton dress billowed upwards.
‘Yer meeting go alright?’
‘Yes, they gave me reading books. They aren’t sending any expert out to help with reading. I wish they would.’
‘That’s the trouble with you young teachers, not up to the job; you might as well give up.’
‘I’m not doing that.’
‘You’ll get used to the isolation; we been
doin’ it for twenty years.’ She nodded as he heard the clinking of bottles. ‘Urgent supplies is it?’
Hubert took her to the Rose Café for lunch, and she was surprised at his gracious behaviour. He ordered a ‘surf and turf’ and she ate some barramundi. He began an endless dribble of clichés about outback living. Hubert was on a high; he said he liked being seen in town with an attractive young woman: it would make the other cattlemen jealous. They winked at him as they passed. He reached for his cup of tea and nodded back – let them imagine an affair if they liked. Jane smiled again; her lips were stuck to her teeth. He name-dropped, he reminisced, he didn’t draw breath.
‘My family were old Queensland pioneers, they opened the country up. We fought the Kalkadoons, wiped the buggers out.’ He grinned. Jane watched the hairs in his nose flicker; he was panting. Why did he think it was right for his forefathers to have ridden into this land of high red cliffs and shot every Aborigine? Who gave them the right? They had stolen it all, murdered every person who stood in the way. She could hear a voice in her head shouting. Jane thought that perhaps it was time to tell him that she was of Aboriginal heritage. No, perhaps not.
‘Great tall men, all painted up with bones in their noses, big broad shields. My grandpa had one, hung on the lounge room wall at his Riverside property. You know, he had an Aboriginal wife before my grandma. Lots of coloured kids, he treated them well. Winba, his first son: my God he could ride, had such big feet he had to cut a hole in his boots, big black toes stickin out. In fact, he bloody inherited the property, ha! Not my father. Riverside goin to a blackfella!’ Jane was listening now.
‘What happened to the Kalkadoons?’
He chewed his meat and laughed. ‘They were thrown off cliffs, hounded into rivers, some escaped to cause a bloody lot of trouble – should’ve killed the lot of them.’ He bit into a hunk of white bread. As he chewed, she realised that he had false teeth. She was not sure what to say; she ventured, ‘That’s a terrible story – nothing to brag about. Why do you whitefellas think it’s funny?’
Hubert put down his fork.
‘Hold on, don’t get all righteous on me! It wasn’t me. Trouble is, too many look for handouts, won’t work. Still, I know a few good blokes – Old Pelican, he’d give you the shirt off his back if he had one.’ He roared with laughter. Jane sipped her orange juice.
Jane couldn’t eat. She wondered if only Aboriginal people were in possession of memories. Most white people would question the fact that the country had been settled by massacres. If you repeated it again and again – that lie about peaceful settlement – well, it must be true. History books were full of colourful drawings of Leichhardt and his camels. It was a painful falsified history. There was no memory, just half-truths and obedient teachers repeating lies in class. “It doesn’t hurt to read pioneer stories to children.” Blank faces held passionate views denying the ‘black arm-band’ view of history. They said, “We have nothing to be sorry for”.
‘You hear about in 1882 a man, jabbering in German, was seen carried by two Aboriginal women near the Gulf, but the cattle men overlanders shot him and his Aboriginal wives anyway. People thought he might have been Leichhardt himself after forty years living in the bush.’
The Northern Territory newspaper was in front of Hubert’s face. There were fabulous statistics about Territory growth. Compared to last year, the Territory was leaping forward – more beef, better beef exports, live beef – ‘Eat more beef!’ There were stories about mineral exploration. Even Hubert was caught up in the fervour. ‘Harrison has been earmarked for iron ore. I’ve alerted the Singapore mob and they’re excited. I’m the man; I first saw the lightning flashing along the ironstone out there. It’s wasted on cattle and blackfellas.’ Jane didn’t have an opinion, so he continued: ‘What’s underneath the ground is the real money, a real winner, a gusher!’
‘For whom?’
‘The owners, of course. I’m just a manager.’
She hummed; he continued: ‘We can open the place up, turn this town into a city, and attract workers. They’ll have to improve the freight, maybe another railway. We can fill the roads with trucks full of iron ore, maybe even gold and silver.’ His eyes gleamed with imagined wealth. ‘And uranium, that’s got to be out here somewhere; that’s the future – nuclear.’
Jane’s mouth gaped open; she couldn’t understand his passionate enthusiasm for foreign companies’ wealth or for a nuclear industry.
‘If it’s all mining, where would you go with your cattleman skills?’
He smiled. ‘I’ll have work – people eat beef but no more mustering with stockmen. It’s all helicopters and motorbikes now – we don’t need Aboriginal workers.’
Jane imagined Orwell’s words ‘Our new, happy life’ as she picked at her chips. She sucked her fingers then noticed Hubert’s eyes grow large as he looked at her breasts. He sucked in his belly and smoothed his thin hair. She sensed his arousal and closed up her dress. Hubert paid the bill and held open the door to the street.
‘Are you finished with town business? Can we go to the airport?’ she asked.
‘Narr, I got a few more hours at the Stock and Station Agents. You’ll find something to do. Go get a facial or something. You women like that. But I can walk down town with ya.’
She imagined the future for the town: more white men crowding the front bar of the Crocodile Hotel, the back bar teeming with out-of-work Aboriginal men and women loading cases of beer into shopping trolleys while their thin children ate chips and drank Coke from baby’s bottles. Jane thought about Hubert’s rave and could see the potential for the town going the way of so many mining towns: Aboriginal people, denied their land and locked out of employment, turned to prostitution and alcoholism.
Or would it be a new beginning, with land rights, respect, and training for Aboriginal people so that they could take part and become a new middle class, royalties distributed fairly and education paying off with high paying positions in mining and agriculture? She saw them more likely sidelined in humpies on the outskirts of town, like they had always been.
They walked down the street in blazing heat. A paddy wagon drove by and two police officers got out and strolled over to the park. Several Lanniwah youths ran off into the trees and bounded over a fence. Some elders watched with bored expressions as the police approached. One old man was peeling the gold tissue from a Benson and Hedges pack with a razor blade. Jane wanted to get close to the scene. Hubert held back and leant against a wall to light a cigarette. She walked up to a metal seat in the shade and sat down to watch the theatre of cruelty.
The police were young; they leant down to speak to an old man and his wife. Jane strained to hear. The old man gestured towards the running boys with his lips and shook his head; he seemed to be saying that he knew nothing. One of the police pushed a flagon bottle with his foot, the old man covered it with a blanket. The police drove off. Jane walked over and knelt down.
‘You okay, Aunty? You got trouble with police?’
The old woman looked up at Jane through cloudy eyes. She smiled with no teeth and said, ‘Yeeai, bulliman all humbug.’
Jane nodded and gave the woman ten dollars. ‘You get tucker.’
The woman smiled.
‘Yeeai, I get bread and baloney.’ She tucked the money into her bra and Jane heard Hubert laugh.
‘You can’t save the whole world, Jane.’
Jane thought about what it was like, this living in a police state. She had seen plenty of police action in her life. One day in Taree, she had watched her Koori cousins put in a paddy wagon; she had frozen to the spot. The boys gave cheek, dared to speak back: they were defiant young hotheads. Jane had run up the road to defend them, grabbed the arm of the arresting female officer and tried to pull the boys out of the wagon. She had been arrested as well, shoved against the vehicle and handcuffed. She yelled: ‘You can’t arrest us, we’ve done nothing wrong! You’re picking on little boys, why don’t you pick on someone your own size
?’ Hanging out on the street were unemployed white youths who guffawed at the scene as the police drove her away.
Jane had seethed at her impotence and later hammered on the cell door. A big copper had stared at her. ‘What do you want? Oh, it’s a phone call, is it? You want to call your solicitor, do you?’ She nodded. ‘Give me a break’, he said.
‘You and your cousins have been charged with resisting arrest; assaulting an officer and using obscene language’, he smirked.
‘I want to make a statement’, said Jane.
‘Well, when you are bailed. Got two hundred dollars on you? No? I thought not. You better call Armidale and get free help from the Aboriginal Legal Service. Good luck!’ He had slammed the door.
Jane had heard a constant refrain from her father: ‘Stick up for the underdog. If you are the only person in the room who believes something, then stand your ground.’ No one had stood up for them, they had spent the night in gaol, and in the morning, her Uncle Bill had arrived with bail money.
Jane sat down next to the old woman, but Hubert had finished his smoke.
‘For Christ’s sake, Jane, move on. You’re a teacher, not bloody Christ. Let’s go get a drink, you’d like that, I bet.’ Hubert took her arm and pulled Jane to her feet. They moved off towards the shops.
‘I just wanted to help.’
‘Flamin’ Mother Teresa you are. Oops, lady present.’
CHAPTER 8
Making Friends
Hubert went off to do some business and Jane bought a city newspaper, she read, ‘Viking Two space vehicle orbits Mars’ and ‘South Vietnam and North Vietnam united in Socialist Republic of Vietnam’, so all her uni Moratorium protests and guerrilla street theatre were not in vain. It seemed so far away from her current universe.
Katherine was made for white people; it had neat flowerbeds and shops with shiny clean windows. It had an Anzac memorial for dead soldiers, but none for the massacred Aborigines.
There was an address by the local historical society in the old airfield museum. The speaker said it was necessary to forget the past and to reconstruct it as a peaceful settlement. The local non-Aboriginal Katherine community liked historical re-enactments about pioneers with children dressed in lace bonnets dancing English folk dances. The memories to be preserved were of brave white men and lonely women battling savage blacks who were treacherous cannibals, who stole everything, and could not be trusted. Yes, that was a comforting story. Still, some of her ancestors were pioneers; she remembered that she was also one of them. It could be confusing.