They tell us to get a job.
Dad did work on the railways until he got a bad chest from the colds we’re always getting. Darryl was working in a meat store just down from our place, but he almost cut his fingers off with one of those big knives they use, so he gave that job away. It was the first time Darryl had ever worked, heaving those big frozen kangaroos around. I went to take Darryl his lunch, so I know all about it. There were bulllets through the head, the stomach, all over— but the head, mostly. And all those dead eyes watching you, following you all around the room. I wouldn’t work in a meat store.
When Darryl left, he went back the same day and stole the cashbox. He’d seen it standing on a shelf. Those white blokes never learn. But the police came straight to our place and caught him. They always come to Nyoongah houses first. Darryl went to Riverbank that time, but as soon as he got out, he and Louis went breaking into houses. Darryl’s got a joke for everything; he doesn’t care at all.
Our house is like our world. Sometimes it’s dirty and sometimes it’s clean. None of us have our own bed. We share everything when we got it. Out the back Mum’s got a bit of a lawn growing, and she waters it every day. There are always bottles and flagons by the bin because Auntie Nira drinks like a horse. So does Dad and Uncle William too, a bit. Down by what was the back fence, there are two car bodies. Darryl has smashed all the windows now, just for something to do. They look a bit like what we’re all going to be, I reckon. Perhaps that’s why we surround ourselves with old rubbish. We are all going to be old rubbish when we die, or before.
In the house everything’s broken or dirty, no matter how hard Mum tries to keep things clean. I feel sorry for her because I know how she feels. But you can’t keep a house clean with sixteen or more people living in it and only Mum doing all the work.
So at our house we sit around: playing cards or drinking or fighting or laughing. Sometimes a couple of us go and visit our cousins. We’ve got cousins everywhere; we’d be no one without cousins. Always there are some of us in jail, or Riverbank or Bandyup—or some place. The Whittys get around all right, yet we never really get anywhere: we never move. There’ll always be a Whitty family like us.
The one sound I hate most of all is the knock on the front door when the police come. I grew up with that sound. The police are always coming to question or arrest someone. When they came for Jimmy there were five, all with guns. Sweat was running off Jimmy and he was crying for Dad. He was shaking like he was a hundred and ten, instead of only just eighteen. We all laugh about that now: the night the munadj took Jimmy away; because, really, laugh is all we can do about it.
Well, now we’ve got some money and there’s a programme about Charlie Pride on the radio. Everyone is happy and there’s a good movie on TV.
Tomorrow there’ll be fish and chips for tea.
That’ll do me.
COOLEY
I
He shuffled down the narrow, meandering track still dotted with puddles from the morning rain. Overhead raced the heavy grey-black clouds and the wind that tore into the leaves of the trees bit through the frayed old coat of the boy and into his skin.
No one liked him much, this boy: the white children because he was a half-caste, the Aborigines because his parents were both white and he came from a different area, up north. He had only his brother Ben to take his part. Now Ben was up in Perth, playing football for the state, too busy to worry about his brother who was shuffling home from school.
He kicked a stone with his old dusty boot and watched it sail up into the air and land with a splash. That was Ben. Rise up to fame and then come home again. Back to shrieking kids and a grumpy dad and useless whining mum. Cooley spat. Not his mum—she was dead and the boy greatly wished she was still alive. It had been fun on that station, although Cooley couldn’t remember much of it. Only his grandad, old Bandogera, who could tell great yams and knew how to make a boy laugh. He had been only five when his mum died, and Ben had been eight.
The men had come in at sundown, when the sun had turned earth and sky the same deep red. The last of the sun’s rays jumped off the tin roofs of the humpies, flashing in the coming darkness like drops of water. The last of the sun’s fire joined the newly awakening flames of the campfires. Now the stories of the day could join the stories from the night and keep everyone warm with their words.
But not this story.
Even before the men reached the area where the tribe lived, they knew. Old men looked out from the shadows of their eyes. Young girls stood as still as stones. Old granny hugged the two boys to her dried-out dugs and softly moaned.
Her three brothers and behind—alone—her husband.
She had been riding flank when the herd spooked and wheeled towards her. Oh, how she had laughed! With her white teeth flashing in her dusky face like the sunlight’s rays catching the windows of the station house on top of the hill. Oh, how she could ride on her huge black horse! She had been a part of the night herself, her stockwhip cracking like lightning over the herd’s back.
But her horse had stumbled and she had fallen. The maddened herd had charged over her like the incoming tide of the irreversible ocean. All that was left was a confused riderless black horse in the midst of bucking red backs.
So Jurparri, known among the white people as Lucy Fluter, died. She was only twenty-five.
The station owner heard the keening of her people and his wife heard the story from the kitchen staff, so they went down the hill. They found her husband standing alone beside the eternally chuckling creek which cared not what happened in the frail world of humans, night or day, life or death.
‘Come on along now, Nat. This is native business.’
‘Couldn’t even find all her body,’ he cried in disbelief.
‘Come up to the house. Have a drink,’ the station owner murmured, and gently led the stricken man away.
He never went back to the camp again. He hardly talked to his two light-haired sons who played with their full-blood cousins and friends at the waterhole or out in the dusty plain.
A year later Nat Cooley married again. This time he married a white woman who came up as cook in the station kitchen. Then they moved down from the north into this little town that hugged the banks of the wide, slow river. It only survived because it was a milk depot on the road to Bunbury. It had a state school where the district children went, supposedly hungry for education, at least until third year, when, if they were good enough, they could go to the high school in Maidstone. There was a petrol station where thirsty cars went and where men could often pick up a juicy morsel of gossip in the dusty sun or drizzling rain, as well as a hall where dances, pictures, elections, meetings and church services were held and a hotel, a general store, and a few houses for the families who worked in the depot. That was Herron River settlement.
Cooley’s dad lived on Packer’s Road in the bush, about two kilometres from town. Every day Cooley, Sam, Linda and Rebecca would walk to the school and back again. Usually, big Cooley had to look after the screeching infants, even though Sam thought he was old enough to look after himself. But tonight he had let them find their own way home, and he savoured the peaceful quiet, broken only by the warbling of an occasional magpie. He reached home when it was dusk. His father was waiting for him.
‘Where have you been, you lazy bugger? Down at the camp with them boong Quinns or Garpeys, I suppose. I ought to beat some sense into you. Leaving the kids to walk home alone, and you coming back late. Now you get and do those chores, else Mr Packer’ll skin you!’
Cooley moved off the verandah and into the dark again. That was his life—work all day at school and work for Packer when he got home. Dad might kiss the ground the bastard walks on and lick his boots, but I couldn’t give a stuff for Packer and his farm, Cooley thought. Geeze! What’s his two sons for, anyway? Cooley spat. But it had been his dad’s idea to give him chores to do. They kept him out of trouble, having to come home after school.
Cooley reache
d the feed shed and, stooping, picked up a pile of boondies. In the small, dark room there were always rats and mice and sometimes, as a bonus, one of the wild cats that lived under the sheds. Cooley sneaked up and suddenly switched the light on. Fast as a spear he hurled his three boondies, killing three rats. Then he booted another one up into the air as it tried to run past him. He laughed at the evening’s entertainment and some of his anger left him. Then he began hauling out bags of oats and bran and bales of hay for Packer’s pigs, cows, and horses. Some day I’ll be a farmer too, thought Cooley.
After he had fed up the stock, he wound his way over to the shearers’ quarters, where he had his shower. Packer lived in the big house a few kilometres further down, in the cleared green valley. His workman lived in the crowded asbestos house in the bush, right near the cattle yards. During the branding season, they were kept awake by the lowing of unhappy voices calling for their freedom and by the tramping of countless captive feet. In the daylight dust settled on everything: Mrs Cooley’s clean washing, her cooking and her house.
If the children wanted to go for a swim they had to walk five kilometres to the pink clay dam, if it was full. The Packer children had only to walk three hundred metres and they were at the waterhole for which the farm was named: ‘Yolganup’. It was cool, with fresh yellow-brown water and there were reeds all along the bank where wild ducks, swans and long-necked grey cranes made their nests. The banks were of sticky, warm, black mud that made good mud bombs, or, plastered over white bodies, prevented sunburn. The banks were riddled with gilgie holes and the trails of big tasty marrons or turtles.
But the workmen or their families were not welcome there, though occasionally the Packers condescended to let them come. That was no fun, though, because it was the Packers’ waterhole and everyone had to do what the Packers said. Often as not, a fight would break out between angry Cooley or his independently minded brother Ben and the sneering Packers until at last the Cooleys were banned and the Packers’ white mates churned the water to mud and scared away all the nesting birds from the old waterhole whose name they couldn’t even pronounce and wouldn’t know what it meant anyway.
Cooley returned too late for supper with his family, so he ate his cold. While the others watched television he had to do homework.
The next morning they set off for school again, with the three white children messing around; Sammy throwing stones at puddles and trees and the two girls crying out, ‘What’s this, Reg?’, ‘Carry my case, Reg’, ‘Give me a piggy-back, Reg’, and scaring off the magpies.
As they reached the school-ground, Morry Quinn and Shaughn Garpey, the two Nyoongahs, yelled, ‘Here comes ole Mum Cooley,’ and ‘Look ’ere, the walkin’ talkin’ skeleton comin‘’, while they laughed and lounged with their younger brothers and sisters under the shade of a depleted, wounded old peppermint tree that had survived the ravages of children for some forty years. Even now, young Leo Garpey scratched his new love’s name into the flesh of the trunk, finding a space among the names left by previous generations of inspired carvers.
Cooley moved over to the group and spat on the ground.
‘What about a weed, bud?’
‘Yeah, Mum,’ said the short, stocky Morry Quinn, and his face lit up in laughter again. A faint smile played around Cooley’s mouth. Always laughing, Morry was, until he got angry. Then the person who had caused his anger was in trouble—like that third year boy last year whom he had picked up and thrown out of the door then off the verandah, because he annoyed him too much, or like that Rocky Gully cricket player who had his jaw almost broken this summer. Morry was boss here.
‘Molly Clare give a bit to me last night. I made ’er squeal,’ said Shaughn, in his solemn tones. He was big and sleepy and peaceful.
Morry turned laughter-filled eyes on his mate.
‘You and Molly’s suited. She’s a slut and you’re a garbo. Garbo Garpey, what ya reckon?’ he said, and this time Cooley laughed, as everyone eventually did when around Morry.
They made their way across the pot-holed playground towards the far boundary of the bush. They crawled through a tunnel in the honeysuckle creeper that covered the wall of the toilets there, and, reaching out long tendrils, had enveloped and transformed two old bushes. Morry leant against the sunny brick wall, the king’s seat, while the other two sprawled in the dirt. This was the Aborigines’ spot and had been since time forgotten. The white boys took themselves down to the pipes if they wanted a drink or a smoke or a game of cards before school.
‘Gnummerai, Koordah’ the king ordered, and a crumpled packet of cigarettes appeared in Shaughn’s yellow palm. The two southwest boys lit up while Cooley rolled a smoke.
There was always that difference—in small things—that kept him apart from these dark southern children. Morry and Shaughn were cousins, with people all over the state. From as far north as Geraldton to as far east as Menzies and Norseman there were brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts. They had their own stories and legends and fears.
The stories that old Bandogera had told him had no place here, even if he could remember them. The songs that his mother sang to him, these boys, almost as dark as she, would not understand, nor the dances his Uncles Banjo, Yarraman and Cockle had danced around the fire as they told the day’s stories at night, their mouths open in shouts of laughter and their brown eyes melting in tears of joy down their faces as they chased an elusive goanna or got out of the way of a charging bull or were bucked off a horse—or all three in turn. Or at other times, when the big corroboree was on, when men spent hours painting and preening and everyone waited with great expectations for the dance to begin—with all the tribesmen there, their horny feet pounding on the red dirt, the red dust rising up to their bodies, scarred in manhood.
Oh, he could remember that! In his mother’s thin arms, as black as snakes. He could remember that love. One day I’ll dance as well, for my mother and sisters and a wife as black as you, Mummy. One day I’ll have the sign of manhood ripped into my chest by a piece of sharp rock or broken glass. I shall cry tears of blood and learn the ways of my mother’s tribe. Old Bandogera will initiate me into the ways of my country and I shall dance in the red dust made by my uncle’s feet.
Cooley sat in the brown dirt and smoked his lumpy cigarette and listened to strange birds in this green bushy land. That was all past now.
‘Done ya ’omework, Reg?’ said the king.
‘Aw, yeah. Bit.’
‘Hey, Reg, I seen Ben got two goals in the footy game yesterday.’
‘Yeah, we’ll kill them crow-eaters. I seen Jimmy Quinn’s photo in the paper, Morry,’ said Cooley.
‘Yeah. Us blokes are fuckin’ muritch’ said Morry lazily, then put his ear against the wall. ‘Shh, youse mob. Coupla yorgas comin’ in.’
They fell silent and moved slowly up to the wall. Carefully they pulled out a loose half brick and all looked in. Molly Clare and Diana Grey were there, giggling at girls’ secrets, not even guessing at the black eyes watching them. Diana was changing into her sports clothes and admiring her blossoming body. As she bent to pull up her shorts Morry shot her with his shanghai and Shaughn let out a piercing wolf-whistle. Cooley only stared until he was dragged away by Morry’s dark hand after it quickly slammed the brick back into place.
They scuttled out through the bushes to roll in abject merriment on the ground.
‘Oh, shit! You see ’er jump?’ Cooley said, and set off laughing again.
‘Like a rabbit, unna?’ gasped Shaughn.
‘That was somphin’ not to miss. Diana Grey’s big pink kwon,’ whooped Morry, the happiest of all.
They all tried not to laugh as the two girls stalked out and stared suspiciously at them. Then the bell went. The dusty children lined up on the hard cement playing area and glanced anxiously at the grey sky. They were a tatty lot, the Herron River state schoolchildren. All carried bags as grey as the sky above. They were about as happy as the sky looked, too. Only one or two had the complete u
niform, though most wore some part of it. Morry Quinn wore his elder brother’s hand-me-downs. At the end of this year his clothes would go to Jonny, then to young Ricky.
The principal glared down at the upturned faces. The dark faces of the Quinns and Garpeys (Morry grinning up at the teachers with his hands in his pockets and his little compact body in a slouch), and the sharp brown face of the half-caste Cooley, with his hook nose and sly, slanted, sneering eyes, contrasted with the blotchy white faces of the farmers’ sons and depot workers’ children—as did the olive face of the storekeeper’s daughter, Annetta Milano.
The principal said prayers and they raised the flag to the tune of ‘Advance Australia Fair’, just as they had done countless times, so the ceremony had no meaning any more. The children mumbled away and passed sly notes. Staccato coughs sounded from all areas of the assembly.
Then the kids trooped inside the dusty classrooms with creaking floors. Ned Grey scowled at Cooley.
‘See you after, you filthy black prick,’ he said, and Cooley was scared. Diana must have told on them.
The three Aborigines sat up the back. Shaughn decided to have a sleep. Cooley began catching up on the adventures of Vampirella and Morry copied out Cooley’s homework. It was only English now but maths straight afterwards, and even Morry was a bit in awe of Big Merv McKenzie, who had a black belt in judo and taught maths.
It began raining and Kathy Sumpter lit the old black heater. She brushed herself against Gary Degill and wriggled her pretty hips so the boy went red. Poor Gary, so shy, so studious. The only third year student who looked like passing the exams.
There were those who said that Kathy Sumpter lived for just one thing, ably told in one of the Herron River change room songs:
I up and pumped ’er
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