by Paul Theroux
It was completely in character for this beachcomber to be very fussy and complain about the quality of water in the town. Most tramps I had met in my life believed there was something profoundly unclean about towns and cities, and many of the homeless men I had run across in London – the ones who slept on the common land outside London in camps very similar to Tony’s here in Queensland – many of them had spoken with disgust about the beetles and the filth in the charitable wards and dorms. The grubby beachcomber invariably believes he is living the cleanest life possible on earth, and personal hygiene is always a popular topic with tramps who invariably boast of their fastidiousness.
I said, “Aboriginals aren’t very popular in Cooktown.” “That’s because Australians are racists, aren’t they?” Tony said. “If it wasn’t the Abos it’d be the Italians or the Yugoslavians. They need someone to hate.”
This lucid statement from a barefoot wild-haired man with a dog in his arms, standing in torn pants in the wilds of Queensland.
“There’s some towns in Australia, like Katherine” – in the Northern Territory – “where whites and blacks actually fight all the time. But Cooktown is mainly a peaceful place. I get my beer ingredients there. When the road gets bituminized it will all change.”
“Tony, it seems you’re well set-up here.”
“I reckon I am,” he said, looking pleased. “I’ve got all the necessaries.”
“See any crocs?”
“Only little buggers. There are pigs around but they don’t bother me.”
“Mosquitoes?”
I had mosquito net on my tent. Tony slept in the open air.
“When the wind drops there’s mozzies. But the wind don’t usually drop.” He hesitated a little – it was a sign that my questions were making him anxious.
“Catch you later,” he said – the Australianism that means: This conversation is at an end. And he appeared to be heading back to his camp.
“Aren’t you going for a walk today?”
He was carrying his beachcombing satchel. His shoes were inside, with his water bottle, his hat, and something to eat wrapped in paper. He never went out on the beach without his survival kit, and it gave him a look that was at once shabby and respectable.
He said he had been on a walk but that he had turned back. “The beach was getting a little crowded.”
I looked down five miles of beach on the great sweep of bay and saw no one.
“I saw someone else on the beach. Beside you.”
This was too much for him. He went back to his camp, and I fished from my boat. I caught nothing but it was a good excuse to bob in the ocean all afternoon. At one point I thought I saw some Aborigines fishing in the surf about a mile farther up the beach – perhaps they were the people Tony had seen? – but when I paddled towards them they vanished.
At dusk I made my dinner to the sound of pigeons’ wings – they were making for the trees to settle for the night. There was wind in the upper branches, but it was quiet down below in my camp. Just before I crawled into my tent I saw, clinging to the fly, a large brown spider, about two or three inches long. I flicked it away (“You got some of the most poisonous spiders in the world here, mate. One bite and you’re dead as a mutton chop”) and zipped myself in for my nightly ritual: drinking tea, writing my notes, and after lights out, radio programs from distant lands. This sound of bad news was mingled with the frog croaks from Leprosy Creek.
Dawn was sudden and hot in the still air of Leprosy Creek, the sun striking my tent the second it rose over the mangroves on the distant bank. The sunlight turned the surface of the creek into a blinding sheet of tinfoil. And with this heat and light the birds in the mangrove boughs over my head giggled and whistled. These trees had wet twisted root systems that held the sand bank together, and the murky pools beneath them teemed with mosquitoes. This was a tidal creek and at high tide I was at the creek’s edge. I could not leave my tent without spraying myself with insect repellent. Still, I was happier here at Leprosy Creek than I had been in any Australian city, and I preferred camping in these lumpy dunes to sitting in the Sydney Opera House.
After breakfast (more noodles, green tea, a Queensland banana) I paddled out of the inlet and up the coast. The great sweep of beach was empty all the way to the point, and I paddled along under a sunny sky, thinking how lucky I was to be here, and laughing when I remembered Tony the beachcomber praising the taste of two-year-old kangaroo meat and saying, when asked if there were any crocodiles around, only littoo buggers.
Some supine humans a mile up the beach turned out to be Aboriginals, reclining against a log, kicking their heels – an elderly black man, a full-blooded woman and a boy of about six. The small boy was combing nits out of the woman’s hair. He did it with solemn attention, searching the hair, fingering it, and pinching the nits and lice in his nails, while the woman sat slightly turned away from me. The old Aboriginal man simply sat looking at the sea.
From their patch of shade on the beach, they watched me come ashore. I dragged my boat onto the sand and said hello, and asked them – only making conversation – whether it was all right for me to camp on their reserve.
“No worries, mate,” the old man said. His accent was pure Australian, with more strine in it than almost any of the people, natives and immigrants, whom I had heard abusing Aborigines. “You can do it. Now, your boat – we don’t call that a dinghy. That’s not a dinghy.”
“What would you call it?”
“It’s a wongka.”
This was the first time I heard this term for canoe: I was pleased to get it from an Australian Aboriginal. Later, I was to hear it, or a variation of it, again and again, throughout the Pacific. It is one of the proofs that the Pacific was populated from South-East Asia and not (as Thor Heyerdahl claimed) from South America. In Canoes of Oceania – the three-volume authority on the subject, published in the 1930s – the authors provide extensive detail in describing canoe terms; they write, “The wangka or waka term is … widely distributed over the whole Malayo-Polynesia area … It is found in Indonesia, the Philippines, Micronesia, Melanesia, Polynesia …”
I said, “You speak the language.”
“I do speak it,” the old man said. He was completely toothless.
He was wearing blue jeans and a shirt. He was eighty-two (though looked much younger) and his name was Ernie Bowen. The woman – wearing a torn dress – was his wife Gladys. She was thirty years his junior, but she was toothless as well. The boy was their grandson, Shawn, and he wore blue shorts. He remained intently combing and picking through the woman’s loose hair.
“What language is that?”
“Guugu Yimidirrh.”
He had to say it five times before I could hear the words clearly enough to write them down. The word “Guugu” sounded like “Koko.” He explained that the expression meant simply “Our Word” or “Our Language ” and it was the name for the people who lived here in the area north of the Annan River and south of the Jennie, beyond the headland of Cape Flattery.
Meeting the three folks was a stroke of luck for me, because these people are historically unique in Australia. The Guugu Yimidirrh were the ones whom Captain Cook referred to on 16 June 1770 when in his crippled and leaking ship he wrote tersely in his ship’s log, Some people were seen ashore today.
Captain Cook found them very timid. At first, with the sense of apprehension resembling that of Robinson Crusoe in precisely the same circumstances, he noted, “their foot-marks upon the sand below the high tide mark prov’d they had very lately been here.” Soon he encountered them in the flesh but they were not interested in his presents of cloth or nails or paper. They were delighted when he gave them a fish, which they regarded as a symbolic gift. They worshipped fish, they painted pictures of it on the walls of their caves – they were great painters of their other totems: turtles, demons, naked people, dugongs.
“They were clean limn’d, active and nimble,” Cook wrote. “Cloathes they had none.”
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A misunderstanding over some turtles provoked some musket fire from Cook’s men, then peace-making. And they told Cook some of their words. Fifty words were taken down in Cook’s detailed log, and in this way it was the first Aboriginal language to assume written form.
“What is this?” one of Cook’s men had said, showing an animal he had shot that morning as it had jumped past the camp.
“Gangurru,” an Aboriginal informed him, and a Guugu Yimidirrh word became known to the world. They were particular in their nomenclature. It happened to be a big brown animal that was shown. They had eleven words for the different varieties of kangaroo and wallaby, from the small swamp wallaby bibal, to the galbaala, the large red kangaroo.
They were hunters and fishermen. They had weapons, they made dugout canoes. They had lived in this area for thousands of years. They did not practice circumcision or tooth extraction. Their great fear was of Yigi, an evil spirit which went about at night. For this reason they seldom went out after dark.
They had no word for love. For the Guugu Yimidirrh friendship was everything, the strongest bond in the world. Marriage was regarded as a bond of friendship, not love. This surprised the missionaries, who thumped them over the head with the Christian Bible and turned many of them into Lutherans. Yet even the missionaries could not change the language, and the expression “I love Jesus” they rendered as “Jesus is my best friend.”
Cook was deeply impressed by these people. And even though he had just come from Tahiti, islands of “dissolute sensuality,” he was startled by the Aborigines’ utter nakedness: “They go quite naked both men and women without any Cloathing whatever, even the women do not so much as cover their privities.” Joseph Banks, the botanist on the Endeavour, reflected that the Aborigines were like people before the Fall – peaceable, well-fed, nomadic, naked: “Thus live these I had almost said happy people, content with little nay almost nothing.”
After repairing his ship, a process that took six weeks at the riverside, Captain Cook set sail, the Guugu Yimidirrh watching him, and he took up his log again.
“From what I have said of the natives of New Holland they may appear to be some of the most wretched people on Earth,” he wrote. “But in reality they are far happier than we Europeans, being wholly unacquainted not only with the superfluous, but with the necessary Conveniences so much sought after in Europe; they are happy in not knowing the use of them. They live in Tranquility. The Earth and the Sea of their own accord furnish them with all things necessary in life …”
A hundred years passed. Then gold was found on their land. They were slaughtered for being cannibals. They fought back but when their numbers were reduced they dispersed. It was assumed that they would die out. They fled to the north shore of the river, and to the coast where I was camped: “Swampy stony country that no white man would want.”
One day in the 1880s, in the town of Oberfalz in Bavaria, a Lutheran pastor read a German edition of Cook’s Travels. The Guugu Yimidirrh people were described (“clean limn’d … Cloathes they had none”). This pastor, Johann Flier! – his name and mission were eventually known to every Aboriginal in the area – received God’s summons to seek out “a totally untouched heathen people.” The fate of the Guugu Yimidirrh was sealed, and it was wahalumbaal to their customs and habits.
German missionaries descended upon these innocent people and this stony Cape Bedford coast. Fifty-one hymns were translated into Guugu Yimidirrh. Luther’s Catechism went into the language. And a missionary named Pastor Poland started on the New Testament, but before he got to Luke the catastrophic 1907 cyclone hit the coast, leveling the mission and scattering the pages of the translation.
The Guugu Yimidirrh people prayed. Nothing happened. Then in the 1930s a great shortage in China of sea-slugs – so-called sea-cucumber and bechedemer – and trochus shells gave the people something to provide for the outer world. The Cape Bedford Aborigines revived and, in a small way, prospered.
When the war came, and Japanese planes flew over the heads of the Guugu Yimidirrh people, they were evacuated, and their German missionaries were interned as possible Nazi spies.
In 1942, Ernie Bowen was in that evacuation to Rock-hampton – so he told me. Born on Cape Bedford in 1907, the year of the great storm, he had spent most of his early life fishing and diving. Diving was his real trade, for the trochus shells – the source of all the buttons on fine clothes until the plastic industry rendered them unnecessary.
I asked Ernie to tell me about the evacuation which uprooted nearly six hundred Aborigines from this place.
“See, Lutheran is a German religion,” Ernie said. “And the war was on, mate. Some of your mob was here, too. Yanks. They was all over. They thought we might spy for the Germans – there were real German missionaries here.”
“What was the trip to Rockhampton like?”
It was a distance of some fifteen hundred miles, for people who had never left their traditional land.
“Terrible, mate. One day and one night on a ship. No food. People crying – didn’t know where they were going.” He stopped speaking and looked at the sea. He had an old man’s clouded eyes. “After the war we came here – not to Cape Bedford but to Hopevale Mission.”
“Where is that?” “Just inside.”
He explained that this legacy of Johann Flierl was an Aboriginal settlement of a hundred or so houses at the end of a dirt track in the reserve.
“May I pay the place a visit?”
“You’re welcome, mate,” he said, and looked closely at me. “Where is your swag?”
“My swag is behind that point,” I said, showing him.
“Do you own some land around here?”
“I don’t own anything except these clothes and a vehicle. If the white man wanted to walk in and take the reserve he could do it, like he did in Cape Flattery.”
“But you’re being paid some money by the Japanese who are mining up there, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Is it enough money?”
“Yes.”
Gladys looked up from the busy hands of her grandson – he had tangled her hair and he held the skeins of it in his little fingers. She said, “The government is on our side. The white people were much worse before.”
“In what way?”
“They were very rough.”
Ernie glanced down the coast and said, “It’s all hooligans in Cooktown. Some of those Aboriginal boys drink too much.”
I told them I had seen a humpy on the slopes of Mount Saunders.
“Must be a fisherman,” Ernie said.
“You call it a humpy?”
“No. We do call that a bayan.”
“See many crocs around here, Mr Bowen?”
“Lots of crocs in Leper Creek.”
“That’s where my swag is,” I said. “I was told the crocs there are little buggers.”
“There’s some big buggers too.”
“Is it Leper Creek or Leprosy Creek?”
“Leper Creek. Because long ago there were some lepers there, with the disease.”
“Do the crocs bother you?”
“The salt-water ones we call kanarrh and they grow very big. They took some people here – they usually take women. Don’t know why, mate. Maybe because they’re weak.”
I said, “Or maybe because the women are doing the laundry in the creek.”
“Maybe,” he said. “If there’s four or five people swimming the croc won’t take anyone, but when they get out of the water the croc will take the last one.”
“What would you do if you saw a croc when you were swimming, Mr Bowen?”
“If I saw a croc, heh, I wouldn’t swim.”
Gladys said, “Sit with us. You can sit here.” And she patted the end of the big log.
I sat with them and said, “Do you speak English when you’re with your people?”
“No,” Ernie said. “We do speak Guugu Yimidirrh, mate.”
“That’s good.”<
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“Yes. It is good to have a language. Now listen. I can say” – he spoke some words quickly, a muttered rumbling that sounded like worrojool gangaral – “and you wouldn’t know.”
As he had spoken, Gladys jerked her head out of her grandson’s hands, and blinked hard, and looked away.
“What wouldn’t I know?”
“I said, ‘Kill that white man,”‘ Ernie said, looking pleased, “and, see, you didn’t know what I said.”
He had a twinkle in his eye.
“It is good to have a language,” he said.
Gladys still looked pained.
“American Negroes, what language they do speak?”
“English.”
“They don’t have their own language?”
“No.”
“What a shame. It’s only right that they should have one. What language people do speak in America?”
“English mostly.”
This perplexed him a little. He said, “In Germany the white people speak German.”
I said, “Mr Bowen, are you a Lutheran?”
“Yes, mate.”
“Still diving?”
“I left that years ago.”
“Did you kill turtles and dugong?” “So many times.”
“How do you kill a dugong?”
“Spear it with a harpoon, turn it up and hold it against the boat and drown it. Oil is good for your aches and pains. Good meat, too.”
I later found out that the Guugu Yimidirrh are among the last people in Australia still allowed to hunt the endangered sea-cows, the dugong, and the endangered green sea turtle.
We talked a while longer, and I asked for directions to the Hopevale settlement. I would have no problem visiting, I felt, if I knew someone there; and Ernie and Gladys said that I could come any time.
“I’ll drop in some time,” I said.
“That’s good, mate.”
“I think I’ll get back to my swag,” I said.
But Ernie was not listening to me. He was staring in the direction of the point, where there was a single palm tree.
He said, “That palm. Never seen that palm before.”