Carpentaria

by Alexis Wright

  Aboriginal folk living along the back roads spoke in whispers about how they had encountered the half spirits – Men, bedraggled. They hid from the dirt-encrusted cars with the Australian flag flying from radio aerials all along the convoy. It would be difficult to dispute that the journey undertaken by the Fishman’s convoy was as pure as the water birds of the Wet season’s Gulf country lagoons flying overhead, travelling through sky routes of ageless eons to their eternal, ancient homes. It was this sound they heard one day, coming their way, and bush folks called it the breath of the earth.

  The clear day into which Mozzie Fishman’s convoy travelled was so different to yesterday on the southern edge of the Gulf of Carpentaria when a dust storm suddenly appeared in the plains country. It rolled down from the skies, darkening the land, howling like dead people in the night, and swallowed up the weight in the heavy minds of these spiritual travellers while they slept with backs against the wind, so they could be released from the bond of months, even years, on the road, dedicated to religious duty. This was the story for the journey passing through this part of the country. No one in the convoy had been surprised; the dust storm was expected to appear before they reached home.

  The convoy crested spinifex-covered hills, dipped into red rock valleys, curved round the narrow bends, and created a long snake of red dust in its wake. Ahead, the road, a wound cut in the country, was as clear as a day could be for Big Mozzie, who was so happy country and western melodies sprang into his mind from a buried heyday, jumping from his soul out to the world through his steel-grey beard. Listen! He was singing his favourite songs in a full voice, loud and infectious, on the north wind travelling back down the convoy, everyone laughing. The landscape passed by in a yellow-green and red blur of enchanted spirits listening to the riotous choir of yippee yi-ays heading for Desperance, home of the country and western big man, fitted like a stuffed black glove in the bucket seat beside the driver of the leading car.

  Not everyone on earth knew how the religious leader acquired a name like Mozzie. Some small thing that happened sixty years ago when he was born into this world can become the hardest thing to remember. His childhood was of times when big secrets grew in families. Nor did everyone know that once upon a time, his name might have been Paul, or something Old Testament like Joshua, for it was never said. It was best to remain prudent and not invite common talk about a cultural man like Mozzie. The Pricklebushers never asked how people acquired names. Instead, they preferred the jargon of deference, talking in sentences, like, Nobody remembers any old jingalo trivia about names anymore around here.

  Gasbagging talk was what other people did behind your back, whispering if they liked – for it was a free country. This is why the world never fails to astonish, no matter where people live, for there will always be some who sink so deep into the valley of dishonourable pursuits, and chatter amongst themselves about the humble beginnings of the religious and holy, like Mozzie Fishman. One poor old limpy woman and one ageing crippled-up leg of a man, who by chance of miracle, lived into modern times. So what if they had conceived a son at their age? This was what people do, they were in love; there could have been worse freaks of nature. Ten thousand fish still swam in the bay and as many birds still flew in the skies.

  If it was not enough for gossip to fall like the blow of a heavy piece of lead, straight on the heads of this one poor, elderly couple, but they soon had more bad humbug to bother them. They were ruthlessly urged to move their sparse household, a dozen times a day. People were complaining endlessly about the old couple with the troublesome son who was causing half the mischief and running about, they claimed, wherever he pleased. Justice was nothing. They appealed, but seeing there was no use in talking, they would end up talking less and less, and in the end, what happened? Well! They were squatting like a pair of dogs sheltering under one prickle bush to the next, in little yaji nests, and going about bewildered, cowering from one nothing place to another. ‘Shameful and a thousand curses too,’ the old couple complained to the big walakuku humpy people. This was only muttered behind their backs, but the embittered community heard and cursed back. Go away you people! They called out to Mozzie and his elderly parents. Go! You are too much more spreading diseases, if you please.

  Those were the days of people rushing around mad with too many modern ideas which did not belong in their heads. Strange things were said by the maranguji doctors about the boy’s blood being full of boiled lollies. Some people, women in particular, who were blood relatives to the maranguji men and women, spoke of collision theories which they had formulated over a quarter of a century of card game talk. These women spoke of what happened to people if you had seven decades of accumulated sugar racing around in your body – like what had happened to the old couple. You could feel the irritability in the air by the way they flapped the cards, feeling the old couple must still be around somewhere, still there some place, and would have to go. Their impatience was the normal way people of the modern world of the white man went about their business, the general attitude to your fellow mankind’s acts of intolerance. Afterwards, complaining of the others who had participated in that marathon gambling and talkback event, they whinged, Their mumbling and grumbling made you sick. It was no wonder why the spirit of the country was raw with unkindness.

  The harmless parents of Mozzie Fishman moved obligingly, repeatedly, only mentioning from time to time, ‘It was no good being so persistently nomadic in modern times for you cannot keep up with people, always jumping about the place.’ No truer word was spoken because jumpiness creates a tidal wave of problems. You have no place to call home: nowhere to send the mail. Nomadism was no longer the answer.

  Wherever the old couple’s boy was seen to be in those miserable days of unkindness, the spies in the Pricklebush swore that they had seen black clouds of mosquitos swarming in his wake. Wherever the boy walked, the Pricklebush resonated with the irritating sounds made by these unusual swarms as they moved around in the air. The boy had to walk somewhere. So, everyone got the chance to see the phenomenon.

  Mozzie Fishman grew out of his childhood affliction, and not a single mosquito followed him around anymore. He proudly claimed that he was conditioned by his parents to be ready to move for the benefit of other people.

  Such tales were alluvium, pay dirt to the Roy Orbison sunglass-wearers who often travelled by nightfall like so many bats, with the windows of their cars wound up, so the devil-devil spirits of mosquitos could not get in and inject them with the dreaded encephalitis disease. Aborigine people were different now, they knew the scientify as well, like the sophisticated naming of what mosquitos carried around in their little bodies. And if mosquitos were bad, the devotees of Mozzie’s convoy would get the Mortein Plus out, like the television advertisement, and hit them hard between the eyes.

  The spiritual Dreaming track of the ceremony in which they were all involved, moved along the most isolated back roads, across the landscape, through almost every desert in the continent. The convoy, which had grown with cars of all colours and descriptions, kept a wide berth from the gawking eyes of white people’s towns, Fishman called them, ‘those who just wouldn’t know even if you gave them something on a stick.’

  The men in this moving mirage of battered vehicles felt they had well and truly followed the Dreaming. Travel had become same, same and mandatory, as the convoy moved in reptile silence over the tracks of the travelling mighty ancestor whom they worshipped through singing the story that had continued for years. The crossing of the continent to bring the ceremony north-east to the Gulf, to finish it up, was a rigorous Law, laid down piece by piece in a book of another kind covering thousands of kilometres.

  ‘Start em up again!’ The Fishman’s voice would ring out each morning. The men would rise from the face of the world where they slept like lizards, dreaming the essence of a spiritual renewal rotating around the earth, perhaps in clouds of stars like the Milky Way, or fog hugging the ground as it moved across every waterc
ourse in the continent before sunrise. The convoy journeys were a slower orbit of petrol-driven vehicles travelling those thousands of kilometres each year. The pilgrims drove the roads knowing they had one aim in life. They were totally responsible for keeping the one Law strong by performing this one ceremony from thousands of creation stories for the guardians of Gondwanaland.

  The feared ceremony crossed the lost dusty roads of ancient times, running across one another like vermicelli, passing through many empty communities. People in these isolated communities had simply gathered up all their sounds and left silence in their wake. The high degree of secrecy and sacredness surrounding the convoy extended in an invisible radius beaming hundreds of miles in every direction. Only an idiot would ask about it. Only a stupid person would stand in the way of the approaching convoy. Unless, they wanted to end up being drawn into the whole realm of this sacred business, for once absorbed by the snake lizard moving along the roads following the path of the great ancestor, you were hit with a ton of responsibilities that common people could not even dream about. Whole communities of hundreds of people living anywhere ahead of the convoy ran straight for the bush when they heard via the two-way radio, the morse code warning that the convoy was getting closer. Must be nobody going to live here anymore.

  People quickly came down from the skies where they were walking the tightrope of existence and armed themselves with rifles for protection against the zealot mob. Women and kids who were not allowed to see anything of the convoy on the road headed straight to the sand hills or ran into dense mulga scrub – covering up all tracks behind them. This was where everyone sat quiet as a marsupial mouse not doing a single anything, just whispering, that’s all, until word came at last that it was safe to return home. Not all men or all older boys wanted to be dragged away into a religious pilgrimage that would heave them far from their homelands for endless months, maybe even years.

  As time went by, hundreds of sick people would have waited on the hot, parched road for the Fishman to come and take them away. They were the ones who said they had thought they were going through life for what it was and then, all of a sudden, some other terrible thing happened, and their life would never be the same again. Fishman would pick them up and they would go on pilgrimage to the ancestral resting places, until the end came. Fishman treated sick people with reverence. They had his respect and he buried those who died properly, in a sacred resting place. Why? Fishman explained he helped his people because there was no good whitefella government governing for blackpella people anywhere. And the sick pleaded to go with him.

  When Fishman came across the sick people waiting beside the red dust blowing dead spinifex balls up the road, he would stand for a long time on the outskirts, just looking at their ailing communities as though he was expecting the people hiding in the bush to come back. The pilgrims would stand around their cars watching the wind blowing past the empty houses – studying the lives of ordinary people. The young men tapped their car roofs to the tune of I got you babe, all eager to move on, as soon as the petrol supplies were replenished. It was on these occasions, so close to the empty communities of fellow countrymen, that the Fishman felt a much stranger, frightening sensation of what was left of his own humanity. These times when he stared into space were the times when he talked to himself.

  Mozzie saw visions when he drifted off with the hot temperatures or the silence and began speaking to himself. The men would overhear him saying things like ‘The skies have become a sea of hands.’ ‘There are too many, everything moving too fast and thick like a nest of worms twisting, hands turning, convulsing hands, attacking the place like missiles.’ Nobody claimed they ever saw what the Fishman was watching, while looking where he looked, following his eyes glinting in the sun. Some old wise men moved closer behind the Fishman in case, they said, ‘We might capture his line of vision.’ They were determined people the old wise men. There was also a lot of nervousness in the convoy. But the more inquisitive wanted to know what he saw. So, Fishman explained. He said it was hard to keep up with all the hands sliding everywhere, created by a special luminance caught in the fractures of light. He described how he saw hands touching everything in the community. ‘Hands too many,’ he whispered, coughing, ‘running like mice all over every dwelling, trying to reshape, push, mould, trying to make things different. White hands.’

  Must be how they would like it, hey? What do you think? Mozzie always had someone available to give a little back-up commentary.

  The old wise men were astounded by the vision of white hands. Perhaps it was presumptuous for them to assume they ought to be black hands of black people when most other people believe the colour of spirits is white.

  Fishman would be taken over by these visions, and would speak out very loudly, as though they were all witnessing the monumental event, like they had all been thrust into the front line of a war zone where the attack he was witnessing was deafening, and he would be shouting out the bits and pieces of information: ‘See this, see that.’ It was as though he could not hear himself speak. And Fishman? He cringed, lowering himself, and stepping back, arms wide, as if he were trying to keep everyone safe and out of the line of attack. He never liked what he saw in the visions because it was too frightening, he said. Sometimes he saw thousands of these hands at work. He could see them killing Aboriginal people. He believed the hands belonged to all kinds of white people, some dead, some still alive, and he knew because he was able to recognise hands, that some of those hands belonged to people who were still living and still sitting themselves on top of traditional Law.

  ‘You know what?’ Fishman asked, as he did, before explaining what he saw.

  ‘No!’

  ‘Their unconscious thoughts have been arrested in a limbo of unresolved issues which must be preventing their entire spirits from entering the afterworld. Their hands and thoughts have been left behind. They are locked up in their own injustice.’

  These were the kinds of visions which made the Fishman decide on new rules. His number one rule was that the convoy was never to enter a community together. He of course never went into a community while on the road. Only a few were allowed to go into a community if the purpose served the convoy.

  Frequently after his visions, Mozzie would complain of chest pains that only affected him in these empty human places. His followers would begin moving him back to his car, sighing to each other in relief as the other vehicles returned from the community, and the senior men ordered the convoy to move on. Then, turning to whatever ailing people were waiting on the roadside, Fishman would say, ‘Come with me and be released from the cages of poverty.’

  On the road, Fishman picked up anybody, even if there was no room left in any of the vehicles. ‘Get out and walk,’ he emptied cars of young men. ‘Make do,’ he ordered others. ‘Catch us up.’ Fishman’s visions did not die with the distance placed between him and his men. In the following days on the road the pilgrims drove while listening to the crying of the frightened voices of the sick people, pleading not to be taken to a whitefella hospital where they would be treated rough, like they were strangers: ‘We are not taking you there, we are not going to.’ It was hard to build trust.

  More times than not, the convoy would stay clear of communities they passed on the roads, because visiting was too stressful, particularly on the old people who would dream about what they had seen for days afterwards, about how they saw a whole industry of invisible hands at work on those places. By staying away from them, they felt they had won a battle because this was what Mozzie told them. His voice winning down the roads – winning he claimed, over the cold and heartless ambitions of politicians and bureaucrats who came flying in from faraway cities and capitals to destroy the lives of Aboriginal people.

  They say, people in the right circles – academic people, who use their brains to talk about such things as cult movements – that there are not many religious zealots as big as the Fishman in the Aborigine people’s world of today. It might
be true. He might be too big, or it might be equally true to say that his reputation was more dazzling and more amazing than the actual man.

  Norm Phantom, a close friend of Mozzie Fishman, who was himself a big man of the contemporary times, said quite plainly he never wanted to have any part of his friend’s convoys. He said Mozzie got on his nerves. Everyone knew in the Pricklebush camps that Norm Phantom was a follower of spirits out in the sea. The Fishman, on the other hand, was a failure as a water man. Two minutes on a boat and he would be hanging over the side. But Norm could not deny Fishman his unbeaten title of water divining. The men travelling with the Fishman saw this miracle every day. He would get out of his car, sniff, and, without fail, detect in the dry air the moist smell of water coming out of wet ground and plants a hundred kilometres away, or of a hidden soakage in the flat spinifex plains. ‘He never used a forked stick either,’ the Fishman’s followers bragged in the Pricklebush contest of whose extraordinary gifts were bigger and greater, but it could have been that he simply knew the country that’s all, like the back of his hand.

  ‘Fishman is the most uncommonly uncommon person walking alive today.’

  ‘So he only used his nose then?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Big nose like Pinocchio?’

  ‘No, not like Pinocchio.’

  ‘Well! How does he do it?’

  ‘He just sniff the air like an animal.’

  Everyone had a story to tell of the Fishman this and that. But it was not all glamour on the religious road. He extracted a big price for his pilgrimages into the redneck country of small towns and vast cattlemen acreages where he and his whole shebang were considered an affront to white decency. Pure white nanny-goats running down the dry riverbeds and phone callers echoing to each other: Can you see what I see? Dead keen to excite each other up, those isolated white folk, any stranger to the entire continent would have thought Mozzie’s convoy carried a huge deadly chimera of a virus from the third world. Oh! Joyless one day life turned out to be in the openness of the cattleman’s kingdom, when a blot of strange-looking blacks appeared like an eyesore on the horizon. Who knew why there were boongs squatting down on the riverbank? the maddened men announced as they did what they normally did: defended their boggle-eyed kin with rifle fire. This was why Mozzie Fishman knew he could not stay with the white people teaching them about reconciliation, and moved the convoy on. He never saw himself as a target and would never get used to the idea of being used as target practice either.