by Peter Docker
The firing starts. Some kids are playing. Kids are yelling back to their parents when both man-o’-wars open up with everything they’ve got. I see the grape and cannon shot tearing into the flesh of the mob by the river. The marines line the deck, and pour musket fire into the camps. The family groups try to gather up their kids and run, but the cannons are reloading and firing, and there is no chance, no hope. Further up the river, as far as the springs at Goonininup, people are hearing the firing, and trying to flee. But these ships are too fast, too big, too deadly. Some people are mesmerised by the vision of the warships, and are standing staring when they are cut down by withering fire. I see the depth sounders at the front of the first ship, taking soundings, and calling them back at a speed I have never seen before. The marines fire and reload, fire and reload. They point out targets to each other. They laugh at the antics of the wounded Countrymen crawling in blood across the sacred earth.
Then I see the Birdiya of Beeliar. He is running. Not away from the massive warships, but down the beach, straight at them.
I hear him shouting from here: ‘Warra! Warra!’
He is knee-deep when he fits his spear onto his throwing stick, and his body coils for the throw. The Royal Marine commander sees him, and at a shouted order, a hundred musket balls find his body and fling him backwards into the water of the Darbal Yaragan.
I take off at a run. I fall off the big rock – down, down, down, and smack into my body by the fire.
I sit up. The fire has died down. Bright Eyes is sitting up.
‘Brother,’ I say quietly.
He doesn’t hear me. He is faraway. He has his own dream smeared across his eyelids.
‘Brother.’
I take a dry branch, and chuck it on the fire. In a few moments the leaves smoke, and then take, the flames roaring up to expose us to the night.
I make no attempt to meet his eye. We gather our stuff, and run away into the night.
Ghost of History: State of Grace
We’ve been running for days. For weeks. I don’t know. That old sun rises and falls. That moon waxes and wanes. This earth spins. This running is something deep inside of us, down low in the guts. This running is like being pulled along by some whisper-thin cord extending out from our lower bellies, and stretching away before us – pulling us towards our destination as surely as a river is drawn to the sea, linking our feet perfectly to our own spoor that dissolves behind us.
We’re coming down the hill towards Beeliar’s beach camp when we see a big mob of young people all heading the other way, up the hill, away from the water. Everyone is carrying all his or her gear.
I can see Fremantle down there at the beach, wading out to the cutter, which is just out in the deeper water of the river. We go straight down the hill, threading our way through the big mob heading up to the higher ground. My hand traces an arc up through the air and I call out:
‘Wobbegong!’
Wobbegong turns to look at me. ‘Holy Water!’
But I have come to the end of the cord pulling me from deep in my belly, and now my feet are battered and tired, my boots having long since fallen apart, and I go sprawling in the dust, rolling over myself, and finally slapping into the water of the Darbal Yaragan. I am lying there spluttering, and Wobbegong is above me, grabbing me, and hauling me up.
‘Ha! Ha! What took you so long?’
He laughs a full-throated laugh, and pulls me into an embrace. Wobbegong grabs Bright Eyes’ hand and shakes it, and they both start laughing afresh.
‘Come on, we’ve gotta go with the tide,’ Wobbegong says.
With that, Fremantle grabs me and drags me through the water to the cutter. We are pulled up the side by strong hands, and then the sailors quickly apply themselves to the sail, anchor, and wheel. I collapse on the deck. Fremantle sits opposite me, and offers me some damper. I accept it and bite and chew. To me, it is ambrosia. Bright Eyes takes a chunk and hoes into it.
I can’t take my eyes off Wobbegong. His beard is long, his hair is long and tinged with grey, and his bare chest and arms are firm and filled out with muscle. I glance at Bright Eyes, just to check. He seems the same. Some of the other men on the boat I vaguely recognise from the marines – but everyone looks so different. Everyone looks older. Everyone looks stronger, healthier, and happier. Wobbegong catches the little puzzle in my eye and laughs again. No wonder he hit it off so well with the Birdiya, they’re both as mad as cut snakes.
‘Have you learnt the Law for water?’
‘I have begun to walk the path,’ I say. ‘Have you learnt the art of fishing?’
‘Before the sun sets today, we will know,’ he says.
How long have we been gone? Wobbegong shrugs as though he has read my thought, and decided that it has no relevance.
‘They are coming for us,’ he says with a smile. But his eyes are as hard as stone.
‘I know. I had this dream.’
Wobbegong pounces on this like an excited puppy.
‘Did you see who?’
‘No.’
‘Which ship?’
‘No.’
He waits. But I am chewing now. Already I can feel the strength flowing back into my body.
‘You want water?’
I nod, and he pushes a wooden bucket across the deck towards me. Perched right on the lip of the bucket is a bright green praying mantis. The mantis has a little swaying motion, like some little dance, completely independent of the movement of the boat beneath us. As I reach for the bucket, she takes off and flies up to the yardarm. I look to Wobbegong.
‘They eat their husbands,’ he comments.
‘Give me a Parisian dancing girl, any time.’
There is a metal ladle in the bucket, so I grab it and spoon some water into my mouth, then offer it to Bright Eyes. The water is cool and clear.
‘From the holy spring,’ I say. ‘The springs where the spirit dogs drink.’
‘The guardians of the river. Fitting, don’t you think?’ fires back Wobbegong, pleased with himself. ‘They called out to me.’
I have another drink, and roll the water around in my mouth, allowing the fresh texture of the living water to caress me.
‘Well, what did you see?’ Wobbegong says.
‘I saw two ships.’
‘Two?’
‘Yes.’
‘Damn.’
‘Indeed.’
‘What rating?’
‘Two thousand five hundred tonnes, one hundred guns...’
‘A first-rater...’
‘And one thousand seven hundred and fifty tonnes, maybe eighty guns...’
‘Oh, Lordy...’
‘You must have really upset someone at the Admiralty.’
‘It’s my brother. Cottesloe doesn’t want me to shame the family name again.’
I see a shadow cross his eye. Something dark and dangerous. He looks away up the river. I’d heard the rumours about Fremantle, how he got his commission – why his family wanted him as faraway from England as possible. But I decided to take him on his merits as a commander. Not my place to judge him.
Now it makes sense. Only Lord Cottesloe could arrange for such overwhelming force to be sent to deal with our treason. If I had command of those two potent man-o’-wars, I could take this whole Country. But this is a thought from the ever-shrinking Royal Marine part of my mind.
We are moving pretty fast now. We have the tide and the wind with us.
‘Where is the Birdiya?’
Wobbegong gestures back up the river with his lips. ‘He has been off with the Holy Men for days. They are singing and dancing. Something really big, you know. Proper. All the mob has been told to move to higher ground.’
‘That’s what I saw in my dream. The water was so high that even the first-rater sailed straight in, over the reef.’
‘Ah-ha!’ Wobbegong jumps up and dances a jig on the deck. His enthusiasm is crazy. ‘You will be getting everyone off Wadjemup,’ he tells me. ‘While you have b
een away walking the water song, we’ve been running the Birdiya’s healing program out there. So there are only the healers, and the new arrivals there. Since you have been gone, some eighteen ships have arrived. Fifteen hundred souls. Some have joined us, but many have gone the way of Irwin, Roe, Dance and Wittenoom – put back in their ships and sent on their way ... And some went the way of Stirling...’
I look out at the shoreline slipping past. A pair of pelicans soars overhead, up high and travelling fast, tracing the river path in the sky with barely a movement of wing.
‘What will you be doing?’ I say.
‘I will take to the Challenger. I used to be in the Royal Navy, you know?’
‘When will the man-o’-wars get here?’
‘Today. The Dreamers have seen it ... And you have arrived.’
‘Is it just you and I?’
Wobbegong looks right through me. I remember that he is from the ruling class of the greatest empire the world has ever known. Even if Lord Cottesloe arranged for his commission, Wobbegong has always been an exemplary officer. Right up until the very instant that he fell into the water at the river mouth of the Darbal Yaragan in Nyoongar Boodjar.
‘Holy Water.’
‘Wobbegong.’
Wobbegong laughs again.
‘You seem so happy. Radiant,’ I say.
‘Do you believe that Jesus was morose in Gethsemane? I believe he was ecstatic.’
‘A state of grace,’ I agree.
‘You never judged me, Holy Water. Even before.’
‘Not my place.’
‘I shamed my family.’
‘Then you don’t need shame from me.’
‘I will have to pay for what I have done. I don’t mean Stirling. There is no hiding from who you are.’
I look away, to the shoreline going past, and to the mass of waterbirds feeding in the shallows.
‘This is right, Holy Water.’
‘I’ll not kiss you in the garden.’
‘You will if I ask you to.’
I look over to Bright Eyes watching us.
‘I saw one, you know,’ Wobbegong says.
‘What?’
‘A wobbegong.’
I look to him. For a moment, his skin is rough like leather, and blotched with brown, and gill slits flair open on his neck. I see this through my many spider eyes.
Then we are just two whitefullas who have stepped off the edge, turned our backs on everything that was so painstakingly taught to us by the Empire, riding down a big river in a little boat, on the underside of the world.
‘Wake me up when we get to Wadjemup.’
‘Sleep, my brother, sleep.’
And with the run across the Country seeping out of my body like the tide going out, and the water humming beneath the hull, I close my eyes and drop off. This time there is no dream to be had. No dream to strive for, or be sucked into. History is a dream. It is crackling all around me like a wild bushfire. It is bubbling through me like an underground brook first breaking through to the surface.
Ghost of History: Wobbegong and Holy Water
It feels like seconds later when Wobbegong is shaking me gently by the shoulder.
‘Brother,’ he says, in the exact tone of voice I used to Bright Eyes beneath the mammoth blue-grey seeing-rock of the interior.
‘Coorda,’ he repeats.
I open my eyes, and the cutter runs straight up onto the white sandy beach, and comes to an abrupt halt. The sailors are already taking in the sail, and readying the boat to be turned around, as I get up, and go over the side. In another time, a lot of orders would have had to be shouted for such a process to occur. Now, no instructions have to be given in clipped accents and then relayed down the line in rougher cadence; everyone simply knows what needs to be done, and is getting on with it. Fremantle doesn’t even look back at the crew, as if he knows that they are onto it. Fremantle is already up the beach, and in conference with a Nyoongar fulla there. The entire beach has an air of quiet resignation about it, and resembles an orderly evacuation prior to the arrival of hostile forces, that we have both seen many times in Europe and South America. That the whole operation is orderly, and being enacted with military precision, is the surprise. Offshore there are several ships riding at anchor, with two longboats rowing in to where the cutter is already beached, and everywhere, people are quietly going about the business of preparing to depart.
As I approach Wobbegong, I realise that he and Bright Eyes are conversing in Language. Already the new society has become bilingual.
‘Holy water – you need to get everyone off the island. You have the Calista, and the Sulphur,’ Wobbegong says, indicating two ships riding at anchor out in the little bay, in closer than the Challenger.
‘The ships will transport them down the coast to a camp we have set up south of Manjaree. Then you follow them in the cutter. I will draw the man-o’-wars up the river in the Challenger, where we will destroy them in the deep water below the cliffs past Niergardup.’
I remember well the pelican dancers at the pelican place, Niergardup.
‘I am coming up the river, as well,’ I say.
‘We have trained for this, Holy Water. All hands know what they have to do.’
‘And I know what I have to do.’
Wobbegong gives me a look. For a moment we are back around that fire at the camp near Manjaree, trying desperately to explain to the Birdiya, his brothers, sons, and nephews, that white people will turn up and destroy everything good about their world.
‘You’re right, Holy Water. We’re only up against two of the most powerful warships ever commissioned. There can’t be much risk.’
‘We do have the twenty-six guns of the Challenger.’
‘Twenty-eight.’
‘I stand corrected.’
We stand grinning on the beach, while somewhere out to sea those terrible warships are bearing down on us. Wobbegong grabs me firmly by the shoulders. He looks into my eyes, like he is trying to find something that he lost a long time ago. Something small and vital. Trying to find out who I really am. Maybe he’s always known.
‘Thank you for coming back,’ he says. ‘I’ll see you on the other side.’
I’m looking into his eyes, trying to find him. He’s spent his life running away from something, and now he’s running towards something. Wobbegong turns, and strides back down the beach to a waiting rowboat. We are two men who are all alone, but together in this thing forever. He is almost at the boat when he turns around.
‘Holy Water!’ he sings out. ‘Holy Water! The Birdiya is teaching me to dance. Look! Carpet Shark Dance!’ he yells, and breaks into the step the Birdiya has taught him – throwing his shoulders into the swaying, patrolling movement. Bright Eyes yells out with joy, and starts to clap out a rhythm. I join in. We are shedding our Empire skins. Even the two Djenga sailors waiting by the rowboat are clapping and stamping along with the great man’s exuberance.
‘Wobbegong!’ Bright Eyes calls out. ‘Wobbegong!’
Wobbegong beams up at me. He is not running towards something – he is swimming towards his fate. Swimming through the holy water. He finishes with a flourish, and then waves the dance off, turns, and jumps into the rowboat without a backward glance.
The two Djenga sailors in the wooden boat apply themselves to their oars, and the little rowboat pulls away towards the Challenger. Wobbegong sits upright in the little rowboat. That Royal Navy is still stamped all over his posture – I doubt he could slump, even if he tried. He is still shirtless, but he has donned his Royal Navy captain’s hat. He stands up to buckle on his cutlass.
On his ship, I can see that Wobbegong has had the HMS scratched off, and now there are three large concentric circles painted in red before the name Challenger.
Ghost of History: Mutiny
I turn, and walk with Bright Eyes back up the beach. There is a cluster of limestone buildings, and people moving everywhere. There is a big mob of Djenga, maybe three hundred s
ouls, sitting in the shade just above the beach. They are just sitting, not really talking, or doing anything in particular – but just sitting. There are a lot of men, with some family groups scattered throughout. This is nothing like the confused scenes on the docks of London, Liverpool, Portsmouth or Plymouth, when these people left England.
There are also many armed Countrymen moving around, some with spears, some with muskets. There is no mistaking we are on a war footing. The armed warriors go about their business with quiet dignity and discipline. If I were still a junior officer in the Royal Marines and these were my men, I would be proud of their conduct. Standing here on this beach at this time, I cannot say for sure whether or not I was ever an officer in the Royal Marines. Those memories seem faded now. The sense of calm is all-pervading. I have faced the prospect of battle many times, and I know that it is not always like this.
‘Let’s get them into the longboats – thirty to a boat,’ I say, ‘and start to ferry them out to the ships. Fill the Sulphur first; then she can get underway as we load the Calista.’
Bright Eyes gives me a funny look. Maybe my voice went all ‘Royal Marine’ on him. I half expect him to reply, ‘Ayeaye, sir’ – but he just grins and turns away. He speaks rapidly to a group of warriors sitting on the beach. They respond by jumping up and moving to the mass of Djenga in the shade, and start getting up two lots of thirty. Down on the beach, the sailors ready the two longboats. I catch Bright Eyes’ bright eye, and indicate with my lips the two longboats on the beach, then do the question sign with the fingers of my right hand. He nods and grins back: yep – only two longboats. That is a bit of a setback; Wobbegong must be using the other longboats somewhere in his crazy plan. That’s if there really is a plan to anything.
I go up past the waiting Djenga in the shade. There are four massive mia-mias made from bent-over trees, and filled out with interlaced branches for the walls. They have openings in the front, and fires going in front of these openings. There is a group of Nyoongar women wearing skins sitting around one fire, cooking some fish. It smells good. I go over to the other group, which is all men. I am quickly waved down to sit by the fire, and offered some fish by the men.