The Sands of Windee

by Arthur W. Upfield

  Thenceforward every morning two young lubras passed the kitchen on their way to work at the “Government House”, and repassed on their way back to their camp every evening. At Bony they cast curious shy glances, and since he doubted not that both he and they were watched by Moongalliti or Ludbi, or others of the bucks, he made no overtures to them whatever. Regularly, when the men had finished dinner and he was cleaning up, two and sometimes three of the oldest gins came along asking for tucker, and to these Bony made himself particularly pleasant.

  To several of the young bucks Jeff Stanton offered employment at white man’s wages, but this they declined until such time as the corroboree was past. Judicious questioning of the hands, particularly of Jack Withers, elicited the fact that Moongalliti’s tribe consisted of fortythree adults, of whom eighteen were women, and an unknown number of children of all ages. The stockman, the man of the atrocious squint, was at all times exceedingly interested in the blacks, and was chaffed unmercifully by the others, who professed to consider him in danger of becoming a “combo”, or a white man who is married—more or less—to a lubra.

  In any case, to Bony, who comforted his romantic heart with the salve of sympathy, Jack Withers related details regarding prominent members of the tribe which were useful to Bony, as well as obviating the necessity of too much questioning of Moongalliti. For Bony wanted that gentleman to think he was uninterested in the tribe just then.

  And now nearly every day there arrived a strange aboriginal and sometimes a three-quarter or a half-caste. These, Withers explained, were relatives and members of the tribe come in from neighbouring stations for the corroboree. Going about their work in the paddocks, they had come across a sign informing them of the coming corroboree, and there and then asked for their pay and left their employment. Some came in buckboards, others on horseback, and one arrived on a resplendently new bicycle.

  The majority of these late-comers were youths and quite young men. It was common knowledge among the whites and the adult blacks what they were facing. The young fellows themselves made shrewd guesses but appeared resigned. Singly they were induced to go hunting by several of the bucks and Moongalliti, and when purposely drawn near a certain place, which was a singular knob of ironstone twenty feet in height, the young man was suddenly seized by his companions and thrown to the ground. Quite heedless of his yells in their own excitement, they held him fast whilst Moongalliti proceeded to use a stone with a razor edge in such fashion that the yells became shrieks. After various cuts had been made the open gashes were plugged with a compound of mud and healing herbs and bound with rag—it used at one time to be grass-rope—whereupon the now adult buck was taken to an out-camp and kept there until it was time to remove the mud plugging, when the flesh would never again close over the cuts.

  That went on for several days, till every uninitiated youth was made a buck, and then one day the whole of the male population came into the main camp triumphantly escorting the graduates, on whose heads was set a cone of dried mud and grass and their own hair. The gins acclaimed them and the smaller children regarded them with envy. Around the fire that night they felt themselves to be heroes, as indeed they must have been, remembering Moongalliti’s stone knife.

  The stage now was set for the corroboree.

  Jack Withers reported great activity in the black camp. From five to seven gins visited Bony every evening, and one of them, very ugly and fat, to whom no buck at the time was married, regarded Bony with favourable eyes. Deliberately and openly the unscrupulous Bony courted her. Besides her portion of scraps and old bread, he made for her delectable peach pies and crowned her happiness one evening with a great slab of toffee. After the others had gone she lingered and assisted in the clean-up for the day, and little by little Bony obtained—at least in part—the information he desired without giving her the faintest suspicion of what lay behind a few leading questions put to her at long intervals.

  Runta was ignorant of some things but cognizant of others. It appeared that Ludbi was out hunting. He carried a rifle. He was north of the junction of the two roads when he heard a car coming from the direction of the homestead. He heard the car almost stop and move on again, and then suddenly he saw the car coming through the bush and two men fighting in the front seat.

  Runta said that Ludbi saw one of them killed, but how he was killed, by whom, and what happened after she did not know, for Ludbi had held long confab with Moongalliti, and Moongalliti had threatened him—or any one else—with the pointing-bone if he, or she, spoke a word to a living soul of what Ludbi had seen.

  Poor Runta never realized that she had told Bony all this, for the threat of the pointing-bone was tantamount to a sentence of death. What the detective had learned through her was both much and little. It was corroboration of his conviction that Marks had been killed, but did not give him the name of the killer. The only additional confirmatory fact he had obtained was that the killer was a white man, not indicated by the fan-stick sign.

  This single fact deepened rather than lightened the mystery. The act being a murder of a white man committed by a white man, what was behind Moongalliti’s sudden failure of tracking powers and his threat of the pointing-bone against any of his tribe who told the little they knew? How came the blacks to be mixed up in an affair entirely white?

  The more he delved into the sand of this case the greater became the quantity of sand which fell in to smother his excavations. To the main issue the mystery of the sapphire and the mystery of Moongalliti’s orders were added. Bony was delighted. He went about his work singing in a cracked voice, and sometimes playing quick jazz tunes on a box-leaf. He smiled on Runta and playfully poked the rolls of fat beneath which somewhere were her ribs. He saw several of the bucks and Moongalliti talking with Stanton one afternoon, saw them take a station hand-cart and proceed with it to the store. Later they dragged it past the kitchen loaded with two bags of flour and a case of jam. The corroboree would be held the next night.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The Corroboree

  AT NOON on the day of the corroboree a bunch of half-naked aboriginal children clustered in the shade cast by a solitary box-tree growing well away from the main avenue bordering the creek. Several of the older boys were sitting in the branches, and children on the ground constantly called out an ever-repeated question.

  All these children had an uninterrupted view of the plain, and the direction of their searching looks was north-east. At all times they could see ten to a dozen thin columns of grey and red dust staggering slowly across the vast expanse from west to east; for the miniature whirlwinds twisted up dust and debris at times as high as two hundred feet.

  And then suddenly one of the boys in the tree gave a shout, and the others became silent. Far out on the plain dust rose and slanted eastward—dust not caused by a whirlwind, a flock of sheep, or a mob of racing horses, but slowly and steadily rising dust from human feet. It arose from one point and remained there steadily, for the marchers were making straight for the outpost tree.

  At five Moongalliti, with his bucks marshalled on either side of him and the women and children behind them, waited at the edge of the timber belt to welcome their adjoining tribe. The strangers came forward slowly, obviously tired, yet excited as well. In numbers they equalled Moongalliti’s people, the chief leading, behind him his bucks, carrying spears and war murrawirries, and behind them the women, loaded as Egyptian donkeys, with their own belongings as well as those of their lords.

  Fifty yards from the home tribe the strangers halted, and the strange chief, Mertee, and Moongalliti, walked forward to meet each other, weaponless. What each of them said at the same time was something like:

  “Oo-la-oo-la-um-yum-oo-la-oo-la!” spoken very rapidly without pause or cessation. They flung their arms about each other’s naked bodies, hugged and danced on their big-footed, thin, spindly legs, and grunted.

  “Oo-la-oo-la-um-yum-oo-la-oo-la!”

  The official wording of the welcoming ce
remony was double Dutch to Bony, standing with some of the men nearby—they having agreed to postpone their dinner for one hour; and it was double Dutch to Jeff Stanton and Marion, who, seated in the big car, watched from a greater distance. The meeting of the two head-men was one of extravagant affection, and after about five minutes’ hugging and “oo-la-ing” Moongalliti and Mertee walked towards the former’s people, with Mertee’s tribe hurrying after them, no longer in ordered array, but a couple of mobs.

  The two mobs intermingled with happy yells and shrieks of laughter, whilst children eyed stranger children gravely, considering whether to fight or be friends. And then, like a slow-moving “whirlie” of black sand carrying in its swirl the flecks of white and blue and red gaudy feminine raiment, the whole rolled towards the creek, flowed down into its bed, surged up on the farther bank, skirted the water-hole, and ranged itself about a mound of glowing embers before settling into comparative stillness—and silence.

  At a short distance from the fire the banquet was set out on sheets of bark, flattened petrol-tins, and disused saucepans and colanders rescued from the station rubbish-heap, arranged in a circle. Jeff Stanton’s flour, mixed with water, had been baked in the likeness of rocky slabs, doubtless of rocklike hardness as well. Quartered kangaroo, sheep’s offal, goannas, yabbies from the water-holes, bush yams, and enormous emu legs, lay in mixed profusion, piping hot, around the rock-bread.

  Forming a circle outside the food circle, the bucks sat cross-legged. Behind each buck sat his woman or women, and again behind them the children. The widows and spinsters—there were remarkably few, for a reason that shall be mentioned—crept to the side of their more fortunate sisters who shared with none the love and thrashings of their lords.

  No toastmasters or other makers of ceremony being present, no time was lost in useless civilities. The bucks seized those items of the menu which tempted most their individual palates, and for a while those behind them listened with ill-concealed impatience to smacking lips and crunching teeth. And then from the inner circle there appeared to slide yard-long bones with great lumps of meat still adhering to them, whereupon shrill feminine cries raised in argument and the yells of clamouring children on the outermost human circle competed with the yelps and barks of a hundred dogs of all sizes and mixed pedigrees which hemmed in the diners with a cloud of stifling dust.

  It will now be understood that the spinsters and widows experienced a lean time, since what they got had to be snatched from the hands of wives who had babies and children to feed from what they left.

  At the chiefs’ table was shown a little more decorum. They ate from one dish a mixture of Bony’s bread, two legs of mutton, a great quantity of white, slug-like tree-grubs called bardees, two small piles of honey ants swollen to the size of peas with the native bee honey showing through their transparent bodies, yams, and one enormous goanna some six feet in length. Behind them sat their respective wives and families.

  One by one the bucks stretched themselves and sighed. One by one they lit most evil-smelling pipes or roughly made cigarettes, and at a gutturally spoken command the remains of the banquet—and the remains were by no means small in quantity if lacking in quality—were passed to the women, who broke up into groups and fed. One by one the women stretched and sighed, and lit old pipes and cigarettes—charged chiefly with cow-dung—and, a little while after, one by one the children sighed and stretched and rolled over on their backs. All hands slept torpidly, whilst the countless dogs scratched among them for scraps and bones.

  That night none of the gins sought Bony for food and a little “bacco”; even Runta’s love had failed, weighed down by the lead of an enormous meal; and Bony, seated on a petrol-case at the kitchen door, sighed and smoked innumerable cigarettes.

  The sigh was not inspired by the absence of Runta, nor by relief at her absence. He sighed because it was one of those times when within him war was waged between the spirit of his father and the spirit of his mother. During these times of spiritual strife his black ancestry invariably almost won. The one influence that decided the battle in favour of the spirit of his father was his love for things beautiful and his loathing for things ugly, an influence passed to him by both his parents. Although his base complex urged him towards native savagery, he could find in it nothing of real beauty, nothing of the beauty he had discovered in the white man’s art, in the white man’s striving towards ideals of cleanliness and purity and achievement.

  This night Fate offered a salve for his spiritual wounds. He was reading at a late hour Mendel’s treatise on Heredity in Flowers, when at the door of his room appeared the almost naked form of Moongalliti.

  “Goo’ day-ee, Bony!” he said cheerfully. “Gibbit bacco.”

  Laying down the book, the half-caste examined his tin, and, finding it less than half-full, gave it to the chief and from a box obtained a full tin. He was wondering what lay behind this visit. Then:

  “Mine fren’, Mertee,” Moongalliti mumbled, and there beside him stood the visiting chief. For a while all three were silent, when suddenly Moongalliti said: “Mertee, he tell-um me plurry liar. You let um see sign, Bony.”

  Bony understood, and, rising to his feet, pulled up his shirt and allowed them to see the initiation cuts on his chest. Mertee, apparently satisfied, grunted; then Bony turned round, and the ensuing silence was at last broken by Moongalliti’s triumph.

  “Plurry liar, eh?” he said cheerfully.

  Again Mertee grunted. Bony rearranged his shirt and, sitting back on the bed, slowly began to remove the tin-foil from the airtight tobacco-tin. Moongalliti took a huge pinch of tobacco from his tin and began to chew. Mertee obtained the tin with determination, and presently he also was chewing. After a little while Moongalliti said:

  “Wot you say, Bony?” He pointed first at himself, then at Mertee, and finally at Bony. “Orl same. You come alonga sign stone? You’m tak’ place sun get-up. Mak’ Ludbi an’ Warn an’ Quinambie orl same us?”

  Bony slowly smiled, his blue eyes alight. Why not? Why not for one hour be as they were? Why not ease his soul-hunger of the craving to dive deep into the mysteries of their cult? Still smiling, he left with them. The moon was almost at its zenith. They walked along the creek-bank beneath the leafy box-trees, as their gods always walked in the fairy world of silver and shining dewdrops. At the camp three youths joined them, and the party went on along the creek for half a mile, then turned out on the plain for a further half-mile, reaching then the hummock of ironstone.

  Bony and the chiefs scrambled to the summit—the three young men stayed below. On the summit the three began to remove a thick layer of weather-corroded stones and rock rubbish, and after nearly twenty minutes’ labour uncovered a level floor of rock squares approximately four yards each way. The rock squares were much broken and chipped, bearing witness to the centuries that had elapsed since they had been laid. Yet on the eastern side was still to be seen, chipped deeply on the squares, a perfect circle, large enough to enclose a standing man’s feet. The preliminary labour completed, old Moongalliti pointed to the circle; and Bony, thrilled to the core, bathed in the glorious moonlight, threw aside his white man’s clothes, and naked stood within the circle. He faced to the east and held up his arms in a sign.

  The precise ceremony that followed cannot be described. No white man knows, and no black man yet has been a traitor. An observer on the ground below might have seen the three young bucks join the three on the summit. He might have seen those six figures moving about, and assumed, when three figures only could be seen, that three laid themselves on the square of squares. He would have seen naught else, nor heard a single cry, yet in the morning three young bucks wore on their backs a plaster of mud and herbs kept in place by swathes of old rag.

  How came that cult, with a resemblance to Freemasonry, to Australia? Who and what kind of a man was he who brought it? Did the cult date from times when the Lemurian continent joined Australia to India? It was a mystery too deep for even Bony to pe
netrate.

  He fed his men on time the next morning, debonair, shaved, and cheerful. He cut up sheep’s carcasses with a glittering butcher’s knife as expertly as probably he had cut human flesh with a sharp stone but a few hours before. The battle of influences for the mastery of his soul was ended, and he knew once again, within as well as without, the blessed tranquillity of peace.

  And indeed, it was a day of peace. The blacks lay in the shade, gorged and slothful. Even the children were less exuberant, and the dogs yelped only in their nightmares.

  It was long after midnight when uproar broke out in the blacks’ camp. It awoke Bony, who, standing at his door, listened and smiled and felt glad that he was Bony after all. He guessed shrewdly that in the blacks’ camp one of the bucks had been flagrantly caught in the act of making love to another buck’s gin, belonging to a tribe not his own.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Aftermath

  DURING THE NIGHT the uproar down the creek broke out sporadically, and when dawn lightened the sky Bony, with Jack Withers, who was as much interested as the half-caste, made their way to the scene of the commotion. They found the two tribes on opposite banks of the creek, the women and children behind the men, the women screaming shrilly and their lords howling guttural threats.

  “Wonder wot’s stung ’em,” said the man with the awful squint.

  “Woman! Woman undoubtedly is the cause of it,” Bony opined. “Ninety per cent of murders, riots, and private fights are caused by woman—peace-loving woman.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if you ain’t right,” Withers said in his slow drawl, as though Bony’s statement conveyed an entirely new idea. “Ole Moongalliti looks terrible narked, and Mertee ain’t lookin’ too cheerful.”