The Waterboys

by Peter Docker

  He searches me, sorts through me like going through his sea-trunk. Eventually, he breaks our intense mutual gaze and looks back to the land rising before us like the sun coming up on a brand new day.

  ‘Get the cutter ready, Mister Conway. I want the gun loaded with grapeshot, and a dozen of your best marines. Men you can trust.’

  He smiles at me suddenly as he feels that sense of destiny come flooding in from his boots up. ‘We are sailing off the edge of the map, here. You could excuse yourself.’

  ‘That isn’t possible, sir.’

  ‘I need loyalty from them, Mister Conway. The Lieutenant Governor is not going to be overly amenable to our presence here.’

  I’m nodding like a schoolboy. We’re coming to the turning point, and I’m going to play Captain Fremantle’s offsider.

  And I’m scurrying off to my 2IC. I tell him to prepare the men. I give him a list of names. I open my mouth and the names come out. They seem to make sense to my 2IC. I tell him there’ll be action. I need men who will not hesitate, who will not question.

  Captain Fremantle is dreaming. Captain Stirling is killing.

  There will be clouds and blood and sparks between them.

  Minutes later, we’re in the cutter, and belting for the river mouth again. I look out over the stern and up to see the little storm following us. Just like the first time we arrived. That’s how it is for us Djenga, constantly arriving, leaving, and arriving again.

  On the shoreline we see Countrymen. They’ve got up from their fires to consider our approach. Maybe they recognise us from the trim of the sail, the determination of our precise course.

  We come skidding in toward the reef, then at the last moment we take in sail and tack south, to come around the reef through the shallow entrance. Two brown hawks circle overhead. I look up to see them coast on over to check us out. Their motion on the wind is determined by their wing and tail angles, which operate independently of their chocolate and white bodies, constantly adjusting the flow of air across the feathers. It is birds who have given us the gift of sailing.

  On the south bank there are several springs flowing out of the limestone and tumbling down into the Darbal Yaragan. We pass through Walyalup and at Dwerdaweelardinup we tack back to the northern bank and beach the cutter. Captain Fremantle is staring back at the southern shore. I cross to him.

  ‘The dogs,’ he says and I follow his gaze back to the shore.

  There is nothing there now. But we have both felt the power of these spirit guardians of the river mouth. On the full moon, they will be ranging up and down the river at Dwerdaweelardinup, howling, and drinking from the freshwater springs in the rock. Fremantle knows full well that those howls can reach out to you across vast oceans; like the songs of the blue whales, they echo around the world in deep watery recesses, unheard by any except those who know how to listen.

  The men are jumping into the shallows and pulling the boat up. The captain and I turn and jump off the boat. As we alight onto the beach with the wetlands beyond, we see a work party of Stirling’s men towards the top of the first hill.

  ‘Mister Conway?’

  ‘Sir!’

  ‘Go and find out where Stirling is. Take two marines. You four, with me. The rest stay with the boat.’

  Fremantle turns and charges up the beach, back toward where we saw the Countrymen, with the four nominated marines shaking out behind him and struggling to keep up.

  I step out in the direction of the work party, with two marines falling in behind me. There is a track of sorts, where the settlers have walked along a kangaroo road. The sand gives way beneath my boots, making my walk laboured. We go across the hundred yards or so to the base of the hill. There are marks on the ground where something has been dragged.

  By the time we get to the top of the rise, the four Djenga have stopped working. There are two soldiers there too, holding muskets. They must be Captain Irwin’s men from the 63rd. When they see me they come to attention and salute, ‘Sir!’

  The Djenga work party look at their soldiers for a moment like they are watching strange insects killing each other in a jar.

  ‘As you were, men,’ I hear myself say, as I try to follow the non-verbal communication amongst the Djenga.

  The head of the work party is a short and chunky red-haired Scot.

  ‘Ye be in the wrong place, young sir.’

  ‘How is that?’ I ask.

  ‘Cap’n Stirling is at the barracks.’

  ‘Barracks?’

  ‘They’re not finished yet.’

  ‘Of course.’

  One of the other men steps forward, a young man from Kent with a scrappy beard.

  ‘Are you the one?’

  ‘The one?’

  ‘The one who’s always with him?’

  I look to him, and a wild cry wants to tear out of my throat but I clamp my jaw shut tight, and swallow the fire down. It burns my throat as it descends to the pit of my belly to smoulder. The dream of the river of blood with Captain Molloy, the shadow-ghost of 44 and his bloody thoughts, circles me slowly.

  ‘Captain Stirling?’ I hear my strangled voice ask.

  They all look at each other with nasty little grins on their nasty little faces.

  ‘Captain Fremantle,’ he corrects, a strange look crossing his countenance.

  ‘How do you know this?’

  ‘There was a rumour, that Captain Fremantle would come back ... That you would come back...’

  The Scot looks sharply at the Kentish. I watch this play between them.

  Down in front of us is a massive rivergum. In the topmost branch sits a crow. Wardung. He looks at us, then looks away upriver, and calls out his fading pattern, ‘Aaarrr! Aaarrr! Aaarrr!’

  I follow his gaze and look upriver.

  ‘Captain Fremantle has gone to speak to the Countrymen.’

  ‘The who?’ asks the red-haired Scot.

  I look straight at him. Then take in the four of them. The two soldiers, as well. Something isn’t right. The way they’re all looking too hard at us. Something too formal and yet too casual in their body language.

  ‘The owners of the Country,’ I hear myself say plainly.

  Several of the Djenga shift on their feet.

  ‘We’re the owners now.’

  I look from the red-haired Scot to the two soldiers who are now levelling their muskets at us. My own two marines look to me.

  ‘Did you buy this land?’

  The Djenga glance at each other. They look like they’re about to giggle.

  I gaze at my boots and see a tiny caterpillar making its way from my ankle to my toe. This little fulla’s green body is see-through, so that his tan-coloured insides are visible to me. He has feet at the front and back of his body but nothing in between, so he moves by creating this high, tight arch with his back, then reaching out into the unknown with his front grabbers, then bringing the back end in, and then repeating the whole process.

  I don’t look up at the rifle barrels pointed at me.

  ‘You men better lower your weapons now.’

  They respond by lifting their weapons to their shoulders.

  ‘They have their orders from Cap’n Stirling,’ says the Scot.

  There is a big commotion down at the cutter and I swivel my body from the waist to observe the action. Captain Fremantle is down there with a big mob of Countrymen. They’re pushing the cutter off the beach, and fullas are jumping into the craft. They quickly get the cutter out and up goes the sail. Already the good captain is only wearing his white shirt, and the Beeliar Birdiya wears his Royal Navy jacket. As the boat takes off, the strange ship-fellows of the marines and the Countrymen mingle on the wooden deck. The Countrymen are all over the boat, investigating wood and rope and canvas. They look out, and yell. The forest of spears and muskets with bayonets are stacked around the centre mast. One marine takes up his post at the gun in the bow.

  Captain Fremantle suddenly looks up at me, as though he’s just remembered my
presence, or he felt my eyes upon him. I stand here with the two muskets pointing clearly at my belly. He makes no gesture but holds my gaze for a minute, maybe more. It’s as if we are standing only a few feet apart.

  Down below me, west of the beach, is the ceremony ground where we first met the old Countrymen. Where I went from water to flesh to smoke.

  ‘It don’t appear that Captain Fremantle has got your back, Lieutenant Conway,’ says the Scot. ‘Cap’n Stirling says he’s gone native. He’s dangerous. You better have your men lay off those muskets.’

  I nod to my men and they hand their muskets to the Djenga.

  ‘And your sword, Lieutenant Conway?’

  I hesitate, concentrating on keeping my breathing even.

  ‘That’s if that is your real name,’ adds the Scot with a snarl.

  I look to him. Now he has my attention. I feel like I know him. He reminds me of Mitch the Blood Nut. When I do speak, my voice is surprisingly calm. Thank God and St George for my English officer-class upbringing.

  ‘If you attempt to remove my sword, I shall be forced to defend myself.’

  ‘It would be a shame to kill an Englishman,’ says the big Scot, ‘a real shame.’

  This time the others do snigger. Behind them, I notice the big ceramic grog flagon on the ground.

  Down on the river, the cutter disappears around the corner, towards Garungup.

  ‘I am going to draw my sword.’

  I lock eyes with the Scot. My hand goes to the hilt of the navy cutlass.

  ‘Shoot him!’ he says, way too loud. I notice the tiny white bubbles at the corner of his mouth.

  In the next moment, the two soldiers and the two armed Djenga suddenly sprout branches, bloody and dead straight, from their upper torsos. They look as surprised as me as they topple slowly into the sandy earth. The Scot and the Kentish turn to face the threat, just in time to receive terrific blows to the head from nulla-nullas, delivered by Countrymen at full sprint. In three blinks I’m standing on the sandhill with my two marines, surrounded by two dozen Countrymen – armed and quivering with adrenaline. Bright Eyes is there, beaming at me. The warriors quickly dispatch the Djenga with their nulla-nullas and retrieve their spears. I realise that I am quivering too.

  Twenty-eight: Whale Song Blessing

  I lie still and try to orient myself to the space. My body feels light. Almost empty. I’m propped up against a large boulder. I remember a big scramble at the meeting. I remember being carried. I remember some firing. Small arms only. In front of me is Mularabone’s back. He is as still and settled as the rock at my back. He is the rock at my back.

  ‘Where are we, coorda?’

  ‘They’re here,’ Mularabone flings back at me over his shoulder.

  My hand grabs for a weapon that isn’t there and I don’t really want. Instead, I grip the rocky ground to prevent myself from floating away.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Troopers searching for us.’

  We’re up high, the plain stretching out before us to where the sun goes on his daily journey. In the half-light it’s like looking over the ocean. Way out to the north a small wave crashes over a stand of desert oak, sending lazy foam arcing into the sky. Maybe a hundred metres or so in front of us is a rock formation rising out of the surface of the sea. My eyes are drawn to the rock formation. I know this is where Mularabone is looking, even though I can’t see his eyes. There is something about that big rock. It is huge, as big as ten of my father’s vehicles stacked on top of each other. I focus. The rock is the perfect granite shape of a southern right whale, frozen in the act of coming up to breathe.

  My eyes investigate the form, searching for anything not adhering to the whole shape. This is how we were trained in the cadres – fault picking, The Sarge called it, may his soul find peace. I find nothing. It is like I am swimming in a shallow bay with her, this massive aquatic mammal with a brain almost as big as my whole body. My eyes play over the beautiful and colossal contours of her body.

  And then she breathes! The very moment I have that thought, she breathes. A puff of dust shoots up into the air, accompanied by the distant, releasing hiss of air-brakes as the rock whale ripples into life. In almost slow motion, her enormous, barnacled head lifts from beneath the surface of the blood-red soil and looks directly at us. It is her eyes that give away her gender, beautiful, long and curved, fine rock eyelashes that hover, and then blink. She speaks, and her words reach across the space to us with a mother’s gentleness. I see her words go into Mularabone. His body receives them like me sipping water from Old James.

  Her words tumble into me and lodge themselves down deep.

  A shot is fired from a big weapon. A terrific explosion tears the night open only a few hundred metres to the west of the Rock Whale Spirit Woman, and the vicious white-light shockwave arc cuts across the desert floor, the gentle ocean waves, and she is gone, that Rock Whale Spirit Woman. All that is left is the granite, still as rock in the perfect frozen moment just before she breathes, and descends. The water truck below us burns fiercely, washing the now empty valley with oranges and reds. Now we see the Water Board troopers, who fired from the cruiser with their spotlight.

  We flatten our bodies into the earth. Moments later the inquisitive pool of light plays across the boulders above our heads. We breathe while the light source moves on. They’re heading down into the little valley where the dry creek bed is. We watch them stop at various dead campfires where the old Countrymen had been. Gone now. Even from here, we can hear Jack swearing.

  Them Djenga still impatient after all these years.

  Then Mularabone is grabbing me and pulling me gently backwards, until the fading light of the early evening is replaced by the real darkness of the tunnel. This is the vast network of tunnels north of Uncle Birra-ga’s mural cavern. There is a scraping behind us as Mularabone completes the closing of the tunnel opening. He comes back down to me.

  ‘You right, coorda?’

  I stand straight up. The movement surprises both Mularabone and myself.

  ‘Yeah. Let’s get into it.’

  Mularabone goes past me, ripping the top off an ML, casting garish green shadows on the rock walls around us.

  ‘What was the meeting for?’

  ‘To prepare for the big ceremony down south.’

  ‘Jack get anyone?’

  ‘He’s definitely off his game, your brother.’

  We walk. The greenish light from the ML makes me feel like I’m under water, walking along the bottom of a river. The tunnel we’re in goes down, down for another hundred metres or so, before it levels out. It’s cool and dry underground.

  ‘He’s like a dog with a bone, your fucken brother, coorda.’

  ‘I’m not my brother’s keeper, coord.’

  ‘I spose we gotta expect him.’

  ‘Cause of the two brothers?

  ‘Maybe.’

  We walk. In this part of the tunnel we can walk side by side.

  ‘What about that Whale, hey?’ I ask.

  ‘She had a calf we didn’t see,’ says Mularabone.

  I nod, the feeling of protecting that child in the back of Jack’s ute flooding through me.

  ‘I feel different.’

  ‘Old James did a healing on you, bro, don’t you remember?’

  My memory is a strange series of burbling creeks, converging on a river whose name I can’t pronounce. A dream I just can’t get back. The water is murky, or there’s not enough light to see by. I remember song phrases going round and round, and cool, hard hands touching my body, right inside my body, inside my veins, my creeks, inside my webs, right inside me. Old James drained out my blood like it was contaminated grain, threshed it, and winnowed it, before funnelling it all back into me. I remember drinking water from a piti. Very particular water from a special wellspring. Living water. I remember Old James spitting out his water, his cool, dry hands on me, or in me, I can’t decipher which.

  ‘She gave us a blessing, coorda.’r />
  ‘The blessing was from the calf we didn’t see.’

  ‘The child.’

  The tunnel closes in on us. I glance sideways a few times, like I half expect the Rock Whale Spirit Woman to be down here with us, and to burst out of the depths of the rock/water all around us. The moment I think this thought, the very rock we are walking on vibrates and the whale song breaks over us like foamy waves.

  Ghost of History: The Soul of Our People is Burning

  We hear the singing long before we get there, broken in parts by the gusting wind. The Countrymen in our group, and even the marines, are glad to hear that singing. We feel like we’re coming home. It’s early evening when we finally traipse into the camp at Goologoolup, the place of the red clay where the Waakul came down. The wind has blown us all the way here. On the other side of the world it is called late August. Here it is the time of Jilba, the time of warming after the cold, wet, westerly gales of Mokur. The half-finished barracks stand out, the red clay of the bricks such a strange colour to see up in the air, stacked on top of each other, rather than underfoot. There are fires everywhere, the smoke curling away down the hill towards the island in the river.

  All along the way we had to stop while Bright Eyes took great pains to tell me the name of a place and its chief assets. We couldn’t move on until he accepted my pronunciation. At the last few stops, the marines joined in and were also trying out the new language and the new names, to help me get through. I’ve always thought of myself as pretty fit, but I’ve struggled with the twelve mile march through Country, whilst the young Countrymen seem to cover the distance with so little effort that it doesn’t seem right.

  Fremantle is at a fire with a group of Countrymen. He sees me approach, jumps up and runs to me like a child.

  ‘Mister Conway!’

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘I’m glad you made it.’

  He looks like he’s going to hug me but then suddenly he doesn’t. He stops and stares at me. Behind him, everything goes quiet, and all eyes turn to us.

  ‘I want you to meet the Birdiya,’ Fremantle says.