How I Became the Mr. Big of People Smuggling

by Martin Chambers

  I drove a little further and found a sandy creekbed to camp near. Spanner had given us the best van and some good camping gear, a gas stove, swags and canvas chairs. If we had to we could cram into the back of the van but it was so calm and beautiful I rolled my swag out and lay down on it to show them how to do it. I was still thinking they didn’t speak English.

  I opened the esky to look through what was there and Zahra come over, found ingredients and rice and began to cook while we sat in the chairs and watched. We had left early and I had driven all day with only a sandwich for lunch, and I was about to say ‘I’m starving’, but I didn’t because it suddenly occurred to me that maybe I didn’t know what starving was. Zahra took a lot of care in her cooking and it was beautiful to watch, and I was proud of the fact we had fed them well at the station. We put on a big barbecue and a party. You could tell that these people had become used to hiding, of being inconspicuous. And if you thought about it, that was what they would have to do in the city. But for now we got them all out in the open, cooked up lots of food and fed them well.

  You do things and it is only afterwards you realise the subtle ways things have been, like Palmenter used to rush them to the dongas and we never fed them, they only ate what they had brought for themselves, or if they had money or gold or jewellery, Palmenter would sell them food. And they accepted that. They hid meekly in the dongas until it was time to go. Palmenter would lead them out in groups of five.

  ‘So,’ I spoke slowly, ‘tell me your story.’ I asked no one in particular although I expected Zahra would be the one to speak. I felt as if we had to speak, say something, and I did want to know how they had come to be one of Palmenter’s imports.

  None of them spoke.

  ‘I am Charles,’ I said, pointing to myself. ‘Charles.’

  Zahra looked up from the stove.

  ‘Charles. Hello.’

  The others looked at me but didn’t speak, avoided my eyes. I waited.

  ‘They don’t know if to trust you yet.’

  I shrugged, as an apology, but also to imply I didn’t care if they trusted me. They could trust me, for although I had just given them a false name, that was just in case we were picked up, or if they were caught sometime in the future I didn’t want anyone to know my real name.

  ‘We have a long drive. I think you have to trust me.’

  It was her turn to shrug.

  ‘We come, we leave everything, then we have nothing, we pay everything we have to people who say they will help. Then the police come, or maybe they just leave us anyway, take our money and say wait here and then we wait for days and they do not come back. We hear stories. Bad stories. People say of rape, of slavery, of never being free or if they try to come they are taken away never to be seen again. But we cannot go back so we keep on going. But we do not trust. We do not trust too easily.’

  I didn’t know what to say. Was she thinking I was going to ask for more money? Were they scared I was going to abandon them in the desert? Bad stories? How bad would it have to be at home to run away into rumours of rape or murder or slavery?

  I looked at each of them and saw them for the first time: people, individual people. Up until then, over all the imports and the musters, the choppers and the vans and the girls and all of it, all I had seen was people and cattle and there was not much difference between them. Crowds of each coming and going, groups of each that behaved in ways sometimes so similar. Milling around collection points, not sure where to go, what direction, if it was safe, talking, scuffling, mooing and circling, waiting for the leader to emerge.

  I thought I knew that they had nothing left. No money, no spirit, no hope. Or rather, they had long ago lost the desire to hope after it had been resurrected and then dashed so many times. Not just on the journey, but from before, from the very first when war or famine or politics or terror began to erode their lives, when they first began to realise the only hope was to flee. And now I knew with an organic jolt, that here were four people who had nothing left. I saw it in their faces.

  Tariq looked as if he might have been a nobleman. Noroz was no more than a scared little boy. Emma was ageless. She could have been a grandmother or much younger in years and prematurely aged. Zahra would have once been quite attractive but she was only my age and yet already worn out.

  ‘How old are you?’ I asked.

  She continued to stir the pot.

  ‘I am the oldest.’ As if that were enough or answered the question.

  ‘In my town I am head man,’ said Tariq proudly, as though this had some relevance. He spoke thickly, slowly. He probably only partly understood what we were saying. So far on the trip he had barely spoken, and when he did it was in fragments.

  He didn’t continue, even when we all looked at him and waited. I wanted to know more. Why would a chief need to run away, become a refugee? His failure to continue speaking made me suspicious of him. Everyone knows that the best way for the guilty not to incriminate themselves is to not say much. Perhaps he was not a genuine refugee, perhaps he was one of the queue jumpers. Perhaps they all were. How do you tell? People say the wealthy would just fly into our country and abscond and why would they risk a long boat journey when they could buy an airticket and fly in on a tourist visa? Miss the flight home, no one would ever find you. But looking at Tariq now I realised that he might have been a rich man in his home village, a man of some power, but he was nothing here. The very rich in most places would be a pauper in Australia. He sat there proudly, not speaking; you could tell he had nothing but that. Nothing but his pride.

  ‘Where are you from?’ I asked.

  He looked at me but did not answer. Zahra said something to him in her own language and he turned his gaze from me to her.

  ‘Where are you from? Are you two from the same place?’ I asked.

  ‘No! Look at us!’ she said curtly.

  Of course I recognised they looked different but who knows what people look like from these places? Australians don’t all look the same. Tariq had a high forehead and a big nose. His skin was dark, almost black, blacker than his hair that was in dirty short curls against his head. Zahra’s hair was black and straight and long, and she held it back with a coloured scarf. Her nose was a button, small and cute, sitting like it was hiding between her big cheeks on a round face. Her eyes were wide too, large and angry, she looked nothing like Tariq but she was pretty in her own way and seemed ready to take on the world.

  Noroz said something in another language that Zahra must have understood.

  ‘True,’ she said, and then something directly to Noroz who listened carefully and answered.

  Their conversation was slow and I understood they were using what little of some common language they had including the occasional English word but I understood nothing of what they were saying.

  ‘Do you speak English?’ I asked Noroz.

  ‘A little,’ he said.

  ‘He says he must also send money back for his family,’ explained Zahra. ‘Like me, he is the oldest. We only had money for me. My sister is ten. When I make enough money in Australia I will go back to get her.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. I thought it was odd that she would make this trip with the plan already in place to do it a second time with her sister. To leave her family, to spend years away simply to save enough money to do it all again. It didn’t seem like the plan of a genuine refugee. ‘What about your parents?’

  ‘They kill our parents. My brother is twelve when they take him. They don’t kill him but they kill our parents. My sister and I hide in the house, look after ourselves. People give us food. We sell mother’s jewellery, I carry water to houses of the old people and they give some food. Then the foreign workers find us, move us to camp and give us food but we run away, go back home. But it is gone. Burned. Chickens and goats gone, all gone. But the money we hide under a rock in the chicken pen is still there. We take it and go to the refugee camp where some people tell me about this trip, how they find a way to go to Au
stralia. I ask if we can go with them to Australia, but it costs money, they say. I don’t want anyone to know we have money, but they tell me it is one of the workers at the refugee camp who knows how to get a bus, then the boat, then to here. I only have enough money for me, so my sister will wait there for me. It takes all the money for the bus and the boat, but now I am here I will get good job and money for my sister.’

  She spoke the whole story without emotion, as if she were describing the plot of a movie, and I wondered if someone had put her up to it.

  ‘Where are the people you travelled with? You know you just can’t come and go from Australia like that.’

  She looked at me for a moment as if to say, ‘Well, you are driving us to Melbourne, aren’t you, so it’s working so far?’ and she was right, except that Palmenter Station was now closing down. I suppose that with enough money people can do what they want. Same the world over.

  She had said she would go back to get her sister. I idly wondered if there might be a need for an exit trip soon. All these illegals who make good and then desire to leave, go back home wealthy. Full boats both ways. Or maybe, more likely, they discover Australia is not so good after all and want to leave.

  ‘They go with another boat,’ she said eventually, in answer to the first part of my question.

  She served the food. Although by her story I guessed she must only be fourteen or fifteen she showed all the signs of having been the homemaker for some time.

  ‘Where is home?’ I asked.

  ‘Home is gone. Burned.’ She said it as if clarifying something for the inattentive listener to a story.

  As she spooned the rice and beef onto plastic plates I handed them around and looked carefully at each of them. I saw again that they were quite different, that they were obviously from different places. Up until then, despite all the groups of imports I had seen come across the dirt into the homestead, all the vans leaving full of expectant faces, they all looked the same because I never looked at them. I never, or rarely, spoke to any of them. What country were they from? Did they all leave loved ones back home? What horrors had they fled? Or were they just well-scripted players in some queue-jumping system that Palmenter had orchestrated? Up until then they were all from some unnamed war-torn country like Iran or Afghanistan, or from Africa, itself just a single starving country full of black-skinned refugees fleeing violent war lords or famine.

  The food was good. I was about to say so when Noroz spoke again. Zahra translated for us.

  ‘He says that his father sold their last cow to get the money for this trip, to send him, and he must send money back to them.’ Noroz spoke again, pausing long enough for Zahra to translate. ‘His mother cannot walk and it is too far to the refugee camp. His father walks for two days there and then two days back with whatever he can carry, whatever they can give him. He walks there and back once a week so he can feed her. They have no milk now. The rains don’t come so there are no crops.’

  We ate in silence. It just didn’t seem right to say that the food was good, but it was. Cookie had done us proud. The beef was from our own cattle. The tomatoes and garlic and capsicums, chilli, eggplant, were from the vegetable patch under the water tower. It’s easy to grow stuff in the desert, all you need is water and sunshine. I wondered if all their stories were bullshit and if they thought I was some sort of underground immigration worker whose evidence would be used to verify their story later on or, if true, I wondered how they felt about eating big delicious meals under a star-clustered outback sky while Noroz’s mother and father huddled starving under a rainless African sky.

  I finished and noticed that Emma was eating slowly, picking at the food and eating only the rice.

  Noroz looked at me and shook his head.

  ‘Emma doesn’t talk much,’ Zahra said to me, then said something to Emma, who looked up at me, then the others one by one.

  ‘I’m not supposed to eat beef.’

  Sometimes it takes just some simple action like the slow eating of plain rice when hungry for you to realise that what people are telling you is the truth. She didn’t have to act this out. There was no point in any of them continuing any act for my benefit.

  ‘Sorry,’ was all I could say. Cookie had provided us ample food, steaks, stews, cold meats. All beef. Tomorrow at the roadhouse I would buy something else.

  I let them sleep in the back of the van that night. I rolled my swag out but didn’t sleep. I lay awake thinking of stars and destiny and what it took to change the course of things. These were the same stars Lucy and I had seen that night on the grader bonnet. Each of the stars was different in just the way each person was different, and they didn’t shine or fall because of the place they were in, they carried it within them and the more you looked the more those differences showed, until, like Tariq, you saw that one of them is a chief and will always be a chief and then you began to wonder which star you were and then you know that if you were in a different place you would not shine any brighter. If I were in their place and they in mine I could not have made their journey. They were made of better stuff than I. Perhaps if we had been in each other’s places they would have succeeded in escaping from Palmenter Station and Palmenter would be alive and not lying dead and buried under this selfsame field of stars.

  All through the night I lay as the stars wheeled around the sky and the longer I thought about it the more everything seemed to be in the right place. Humans have no more say over the flow of destiny than they do over the arc of the stars. As bad as their life had been there was nothing I could do about it. We each have our own journey to travel, our own destiny, and if I could help a little and offer kindness that was all it was. It was right that I was here looking after Tariq the chief, just as it was right that Palmenter was gone.

  12

  I guess it was a bit much to expect that Lucy would rush to meet me, that she would throw her arms around me and we would hug and kiss and make up. In truth, we only knew each other for a few weeks. I had recently arrived at the station, I was naive; she was on the run from something, desperate and vulnerable. And a long time had passed, three years. Three long years or three very short years. Looking back, it seemed as if those three years had dissolved into nothing and along the way I had come so far. I was now a rough and ready outback jock who knew more about some things and almost nothing about other things that I should have. I had seen and done things that people should just not do but it had all happened so gradually, incrementally, with each next step no big remove from the last. When you stand at the end of those three years and look back, you think, ‘My God, what have I become?’

  Lucy too had her own three years. Of life in detention. A long slow wait while unknown, unseen people decided her future. A wait that weighed on her and those around her as they tried to forget their stories – but that, and the food, the small attempt at a garden, the English lessons, that was all there was to talk about. So there was no forgetting, no new life, and no identity other than a case number.

  We are all who we are because of our history and if we forget one part of it we lose our sense of self. It was years later when I visited Sierra Leone and Guinea that I understood how we absorb our homeland and why the Aborigines say they get sick if they cannot live on their country. They say they belong to the country, not the country belongs to them. But on that day sitting with Lucy I thought that it would be necessary to lose both history and country in order to start again and that they could be as easy to shed as dirty clothes.

  She didn’t rush to meet me. She didn’t know how hard it had been to get permission to see her. Funny how hard it was to get into a place where all those inside wanted to do was get out.

  ‘Hello,’ she said, suspiciously.

  ‘Hello.’

  I was standing near the table and she was holding onto the door as if deciding whether to come in or go out of the room. For a while I thought she was about to turn away but suddenly she came in and sat at the table. That was all there was in the r
oom, a table and two chairs arranged as if it was an interview. I sat down opposite. We didn’t speak for some time.

  ‘How are you?’ I tried to soften my voice. ‘Are you okay?’

  It was a mistake to come. Unlike here, there was no time limit on visits and now I was going to have to talk and make conversation and then make some reason to leave and it was going to be awkward.

  ‘Did HE send you? I haven’t said anything. Please leave me alone. Is this because I come up for review next week? If you do anything to stop that–’ she was getting angry, demanding, but then she changed, began pleading. ‘Please, please, I didn’t say anything. I promise, I not say anything. Never. Please, please,’ she sobbed.

  ‘Whoa, slow down, Lucy, Lucy.’ I remained seated. I had an overwhelming desire to rush around and hug her. But I thought she might hit me, or scream, or something. She seemed to be blaming me for something. ‘What’s the matter? I won’t hurt you. I promise. Never.’

  She sat quietly sobbing. What had this place done to her? She was different than I remembered. She spoke differently. Was it possible she didn’t remember me?

  ‘It’s Nick. Remember? Nick.’

  She nodded.

  ‘Yes. I remember. Did he send you?’

  ‘Who? Palmenter?’

  She nodded again.

  ‘Why would he send me? I came to see you. I came myself, I wanted to see you. I didn’t know what had happened to you, you left without saying goodbye, no note or letter or anything. You had gone and until, well, until now I didn’t know you were here. I thought you had ... I dunno.’ Truth was until I read that file with Palmenter’s handwritten note I didn’t know how or why she left. Had Palmenter removed her? How? Perhaps Arif had not been the first. Perhaps those five who perished on the south perimeter track were not the first. A little fearful thought that I refused to let out niggled at me sometimes. But thinking it would have made me insane and there was some small part of me that knew that if it were the case, the best thing for me was not to know and not to think down those lines. But now I could admit to it: I had been afraid that Palmenter had shot her and buried her out at the pit and that was why it was so important to see her again. To verify that Palmenter was a bastard who deserved what he got. What I gave him.