by Mike Ashley
“How do you do?” I managed to get in.
“What-o, a Yank!” he exclaimed in surprise.
“Sir,” I said with dignity, “I am a Virginian.”
“Strewth? Well, if you’re looking to lose it, you’ve come to one helluva place for gash. There ain’t a blooming sheila inside three hundred mile, unless you’re aiming to go combo with the Black Velvet.”
This made no sense whatever, so to change the subject I introduced myself.
“Garn! A narky Bush Brother? Should of known, when you announced you was cherry. Now I’ll have to bag me bloody langwidge.”
If he “bagged” his language, it was to no noticeable degree. He repeated one obscene-sounding proposal several times before I interpreted it as an invitation to have a cup of tea (“go snacks on Betty Lee”) with him. While we drank the tea, brewed over a twig fire, he told me about himself. At least I suppose that’s what he told me, though all I got out of it was that his name was McCubby.
“Been doing a walkabout in the woop-woop, fossicking for wolfram. But my cuddy went bush with the brumbies and I found meself in a prebloodydicament. So I humped my bluey in here to the Speriment Station, hoping I’d strike a stock muster, a squatter, anybody, even a dingo-barstid jonnop. But no go, and I was bloody well down on my bone when you showed your dial.”
“What do you do out here?” I asked.
“I toldjer, I was fossicking for wolfram.”
“Well, you’ve got so many unfamiliar animals here in Australia,” I said apologetically. “I never heard of a wolf ram.”
He peered at me suspiciously and said, “Wolfram is tungsten ore. Fossicking is prospecting.”
“Speaking of Australian fauna,” I said, “can you tell me what a dollar-bird is?”
(The dollar-bird, you will recall, sir, is the totem agent mentioned in Frazer’s account of the rain-making ceremony. I had come this far without being able to find out just what a dollar-bird was.)
“It ain’t no fawn, Rev,” said McCubby. “And you can be glad it ain’t. That was a dollar-bird which just took a dump on your titfer.”
“What?”
“I keep forgetting you’re a newchum,” he sighed. “Your titfer is your hat. A dollar-bird just flew over and let fly.”
I took off my hat and wiped at it with a tuft of dry grass.
“The dollar-bird,” McCubby said pedantically, “is so called because of a silvery-colored circular patch on its spread wings.”
“Thank you,” I said, and started to explain how the bird had inspired my mission to the aborigines –
“To the abos! Strike me blind!” blurted McCubby. “And here I thought you was out to preach at the buggering snoozers up at Darwin. I presoom the whole rest of the world is already gone Christian, then, if Gawd’s scraping the barrel for black-fellow converts.”
“Why, no,” I said. “But the abos have as much right as anybody else to learn the True Word. To learn that their heathen gods are delusive devils tempting them to hell fire.”
“They’re looking forward to hell fire, Rev,” said McCubby, “as an improvement on the Never Never. Ain’t they got enough grief without you have to inflict religion on ’em?”
“Religion is a sap,” I said, quoting William Penn, “to penetrate the farthest boughs of the living tree.”
“Looks to me like you’re bringing the Bingis a whole bloody cathedral,” said McCubby. “What kind of swag you got in the lorry, anyway?”
“Beads,” I said. “Nothing but beads.”
“Beans, eh?” he said, cocking an eye at the huge truck. “You must be more than meejum fond of flute fruit.”
Before I could correct his misapprehension, he stepped to the rear of the vehicle and unlatched both gate doors. The entire van was loaded to the ceiling with beads, dumped in loose for convenience. Of course he was instantly engulfed in a seething avalanche, while several more tons of the beads inundated about an acre of the local flatlands, and rivulets and droplets of them went twinkling off to form a diminishing nimbus around the main mass. After a while, the mound behind the truck heaved and blasphemed and McCubby’s whiskery head emerged.
“Look what you’ve done,” I said, justifiably exasperated.
“Oh my word,” he said softly. “First time beans ever dumped me.”
He picked up one of the things, tried his teeth on it and said, “These would constipate a cassowary, Rev.” He took a closer look at it and staggered through the pile toward me, dribbling beads from every fold of his clothes. “Somebody has give you the sweet but-all, son,” he confided. “These ain’t beans. They’re glass.”
I’m afraid I snapped at him. “I know it! They’re for the natives!”
He looked at me, expressionless. He turned, still expressionless, and looked slowly around the glittering expanse that spread seemingly to the horizon in all directions.
“What religion did you say you’re magging?” he asked cautiously.
I ignored him. “Well,” I sighed. “No sense trying to pick them all up before nightfall. Mind if I camp here till morning?”
I was awakened several times during the night by a hideous crunching noise from the perimeter of our glass desert, but, since McCubby didn’t stir, I tried not to let it perturb me.
We arose at sunup, our whole part of the world gleaming “like the buggering Land of Hoz,” as McCubby put it. After breakfast I began the Herculean task of regathering my stock, with a rusty shovel I found in a tumbledown station outbuilding. McCubby left me for a while, to go slithering across the beads to their outer reaches. He came back beaming happily, with an armload of bloody scraps of fur.
“Dingo scalps,” he chortled. “Worth a quid apiece in bounties. Rev, you may have spragged the curse of this whole blunny continent. Out there’s just heaped with the corpses of dingos, rabbits and dunnikan rats what tried to make a meal off your bijous. Oh my word!”
He was so pleased at the sudden windfall that he hunted up another shovel and pitched in to help me scoop beads. It was night again by the time we had the truck loaded, and, at that, half its content was topsoil. The territory around the Experimental Station still looked like Disneyland.
“Oh, well,” I said philosophically. “Good thing I’ve got another truckful waiting at Brunette Downs.”
McCubby started, stared at me, and went off muttering in his beard.
The next morning I finally set forth on the last lap of my mission of mercy. McCubby told me he had encountered the Anula tribe on his trek in to the station. They were camped in a certain swale of acacia trees, he said, scratching for witchetty grubs and irriakura bulbs, the only available food in this dry season.
And it was there I found them, just at sundown. The whole tribe couldn’t have numbered more than seventy-five souls, each of them uglier than the next. Had I not known of their crying need of me, I might have backtracked. The men were great broad-shouldered fellows, coppery-black, with even blacker beards and hair bushed around their low foreheads, sullen eyes and bone-pierced flat noses. The women had more hair and no beards, and limp, empty breasts that hung down their fronts like a couple of pinned-on medals. The men wore only a horsehair rope around their middles, in which they stuck their boomerangs, music sticks, feather charms, and the like. The women wore nagas, fig newton-sized aprons of paperbark. The children wore drool.
They looked up dully as I brought the truck to a halt. There was no evidence either of welcome or hostility. I climbed onto the truck hood, waved my arms and called out in their language, “My children, come unto me! I bring tidings of great joy!”
A few of the tots crept closer and picked their noses at me. The women went back to rooting around the acacias with their yamsticks. The men simply continued to do nothing. They’re all bashful, I thought; nobody wants to be first.
So I strode boldly into their midst and took a wizened, white-bearded oldster by the arm. I leaned into the truck cab, opened the little hatch that gave access to the van, and plunged t
he old gaffer’s resisting hand inside. It came out grasping a fistful of dirt and one green bead, at which he blinked in perplexity.
As I had hoped, curiosity brought the rest of the tribe around. “Plenty for everybody, my children!” I shouted in their language. Pulling and hauling, I forced them one by one up to the cab. They each obediently reached through the hatch, took one bead apiece and drifted back to their occupations as if thankful the ceremony was over.
“What’s the matter?” I asked one shy young girl, the last of the procession and the only one who had taken two beads. “Doesn’t anybody like the pretty-pretties?” She flinched guiltily, put back one of the beads and scurried away.
I was flabbergasted at the lack of enthusiasm. As of now, the Anulas had one tiny bead apiece, and I had about six hundred billion.
Beginning to suspect what was amiss, I went and stood among them and listened to their furtive, secretive talk. I couldn’t understand a word! Horrors, I thought. Unless we could communicate, I had no hope of making them accept the beads . . . or me . . . or The Gospel. Could I have stumbled on the wrong tribe? Or were they deliberately misunderstanding me and talking in gibberish?
There was one way to find out, and that without more ado. I turned the truck around and drove pell-mell back for the station, hoping mightily that McCubby hadn’t left yet.
He hadn’t. The wild dogs were still committing suicide en masse by dining on my beads, and McCubby wasn’t about to leave until the bounty business petered out. I reached the station at sunrise again, when he was out collecting the night’s scalps. I leapt from the truck and blurted out my problem.
“I don’t understand them and they don’t understand me. You claim you know most of the abo tongues. What am I doing wrong?” I reeled off a sentence and asked anxiously, “Did you understand that?”
“Too right,” he said. “You offered me thirty pfennig to get my black arse in bed with you. Cheap barstid,” he added.
A little rattled, I pleaded, “Never mind what the words said. Is my pronunciation bad or something?”
“Oh, no. You’re mooshing perfect Pitjantjatjara.”
“What?”
“A considerably different langwidge from Anula. Anula has nine noun classes. Singular, dual, trial and plural are expressed by prefixes in its pronouns. Transitive werbs incorporate the object pronouns. The werbs show many tenses and moods and also a separate negative conjugation.”
“What?”
“On the other hand, in Pitjantjatjara, the suffixes indicating the personal pronouns may be appended to the first inflected word in the sentence, not merely to the werb root.”
“What?”
“I don’t like to bulsh on your linguistic accomplishments, cobber. But Pitjantjatjara, although it has four declensions and four conjugations, is alleged to be the simplest of all the bloody Australoid langwidges.”
I was speechless.
“How much,” McCubby asked at last, “is thirty pfennig in shillings and pence?”
“Maybe,” I murmured thoughtfully, “I’d better go and minister to the Pitjantjatjara tribe instead, as long as I know their language.”
McCubby shrugged. “They live way the hell the other side of the Great Sandy. And they’re no myall rootdiggers like these Anulas. They’re all upjumped stockriders and donahs now, on the merino stations around Shark Bay. Also, them boongs would prob’ly wind up converting you, and that’s the dinkum oil. They’re staunch Catholics.”
Well, that figured. And I was beginning to suspect why Herr Krapp had been defrocked.
My next move was obvious: to hire McCubby as my interpreter to the Anulas. At first he balked. My expense fund was so depleted by now that I couldn’t offer enough to tempt him away from his booming business here in dingo scalps. But finally I thought to offer him all the beads in the second truck – “Enough to kill every dingo in the Outback.” So he rolled up his swag and took the wheel (I was dead tired of driving), and we headed again for the Anula country.
On the way, I told McCubby how I intended to introduce the blackfellows to modern Primitive Protestantism. I read aloud to him Sir James Frazer’s paragraph on rainmaking, which concludes, “ ‘After that all he does is to sing over the snake and the mimic rainbow . . .’ ”
“All he does!” McCubby snorted.
“ ‘Sooner or later the rain will fall.’ ” I closed the book. “And that’s where I step in. If the rain doesn’t fall, the natives can plainly see that their sorcery doesn’t work, and I can turn their clearer eyes toward Christianity. If the rain should fall, I simply explain that they were actually praying to the true, Protestant God without realizing it, and the rain-bird had nothing to do with it.”
“And how do you cozen ’em into doing this rain-bird corroboree?”
“Heavens, they’re probably doing it all the time. The good Lord knows they need rain. This whole country is burned crisp as paper.”
“If it do come on to rain,” McCubby muttered darkly, “my word, I’ll fall down on me knees.” What that signified, I (unfortunately) didn’t surmise at the time.
The reception at the Anula camp was rather different this time. The abos swarmed to greet McCubby; three of the younger females in particular appeared to rejoice at his arrival.
“Ah, me cheeky little blackgins,” he said affectionately. Then, after a colloquy with the tribe’s elders, he said to me, “They want to offer you a lubra, too, Rev.”
A lubra is a female, and I had expected this hospitality, knowing it to be a custom of the Anulas. I asked McCubby to explain my religious reasons for declining and went to work to set up my tent on a knoll overlooking the native camp. As I crawled into it, McCubby asked, “Going to plow the deep so early?”
“I just want to take off my clothes,” I said. “When in Rome, you know. See if you can borrow one of those waist strings for me.”
“A nood missionary?” he said, scandalized.
“Our church teaches that the body is nothing,” I said, “but a machine to carry the soul around. Besides, I feel a true missionary should not set himself above his flock in matters of dress and social deportment.”
“A true missionary,” McCubby said drily, “ain’t got the crocodile hide of these Bingis.” But he brought me the horsehair rope. I tied it around my waist and stuck into it my New Testament, my pocket comb, and my spectacles case.
When I was ready, I felt very vulnerable and vaguely vulgar. For one as modest and introverted as I, it was painful to think of stepping out there – especially in view of the females – in my stark white nakedness. But after all, I consoled myself, I wasn’t quite as stark as my flock. On the Sydney doctor’s orders, I would have to wear my bandage contrivance for another week.
I scrambled out of the tent and stood up, dancing delicately as the ground stubble jabbed my bare feet. My, all those white eyeballs in all those black faces! McCubby was staring just as intently and unbelievingly as everyone else. He worked his mouth for a while before he spoke.
“Crikey! No wonder you’re Virginian, poor cove.”
The abos began to crowd around the point and babble and measure the apparatus as if they contemplated getting copies to wear. Finally, a trifle annoyed, I asked my still-goggling interpreter why they were making so much fuss.
“They think you’re either bragging or humbugging. Dinkum, so do I.”
So I told him about my operation, that I had endured it because it was an Anula custom. McCubby repeated this to the mob. The blackfellows nodded knowingly at each other, jabbered even more furiously, and came one by one to pat me on the head.
“Ah, they approve, do they?” I said with great satisfaction.
“They think you’re crazy as a kookaburra,” McCubby said flatly. “It’s supposed to bring good luck to fondle a zany.”
“What?”
“If you’ll take a pike at the men of your flock,” he suggested, “you’ll note that the custom of circumbloodycision must of went out of style some time back.�
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I looked, and it was so. I found myself mentally composing some un-Christian remarks to make to Major Mashworm. So, to elevate my thoughts, I proposed that we try again to distribute my gift of beads. I don’t know what McCubby told the blackfellows, but the whole tribe trooped off eagerly to the truck and came back with a double handful of beads apiece. Several of them made two or more trips. I was pleased.
The brief tropical dusk was on us now; the Anulas’ cooking fires began to twinkle among the acacias. I wouldn’t be able to accomplish anything more today; so McCubby and I set our own billy on a fire. We had just settled down to our tucker when one of the abos came up smiling and handed me a slab of bark heaped with some kind of native food. Whatever it was, it quivered disgustingly, and, looking at it, so did I.
“Emu fat,” said McCubby. “Their favorite delicacy. It’s in return for them beads.”
I was ever so delighted, but the dish was nauseatingly difficult to get down. It was like eating a bowlful of lips.
“I’d wolf the stuff if I was you,” McCubby advised, after a visit to the natives’ fires. “They’re likely to come and take it back, when they give up on the beads.”
“What?”
“They’ve been boiling ’em for two hours, now, and it seems they still taste gritty.”
“They’re eating the beads?”
He saw my consternation and said, almost kindly, “Rev, all these boongs live for is to eat for to live for to eat. They don’t have houses and they don’t wear pockets, so they got no use for propitty. They know they’re ugly as the backside of a wombat, so they got no use for pretties. In this crook country, finding food is cruel hard. If anything new comes along, they try it for food, in hopes.”
I was too weary even to worry; I crept into my tent desiring only to “plow the deep,” in McCubby’s phrase. As it turned out, though, I got precious little sleep. I had to keep evicting a procession of young black girls who, I presume, had a childish desire to sleep under canvas for a change.
I arose quite late in the morning, to find all the Anulas still huddled, groaning, in their wagga rugs. “You won’t see any rain-debbil corroboree today,” McCubby told me. “Them rumbustious beads has got ’em all just about keck-livered.”