Now the Cooleys have moved on. The Packer boys left school to run the farm and Rachel Layne hangs around with Ken Packer. You can’t love a dead boy, and it can’t hurt him now. Morry and Shaughn go down to the bridge with the other Nyoongahs, and no one notices the empty seat in the classroom. Maybe next year, in the football season, people will ask, ‘Where’s Cooley?’ but it’s unlikely.
So everyone has forgotten Cooley. Even big Ben, who got married over east and didn’t come home after all. Grass grows between the stones on Cooley’s grave, and a wildflower or two. Here lies not a Polly Farmer, Lionel Rose or Namatjira; only a small-town half-caste who tried to raise himself out of the dirt and who was kicked back down again. Only a half-caste, whose restless spirit couldn’t let him laugh and live like his mates Morry Quinn or Shaughn Garpey—people who didn’t care what happened day by day, as long as they ate, fought, smoked, had a girl or two—people who didn’t mind living in the nothing town as nothings.
Only a half-caste who had been pushed around and beaten, humiliated, made to eat dust from the dust of his degraded life. Who, on his first day at school, as a six-year-old, had been pushed around the circle of grinning white boys. They had kicked open his new case and broken all his new things, then rolled him in the dirt that was to become his life. They had bloodied his mouth and nose and blackened his eye. That had been Cooley’s introduction to the white man’s institution of learning and his’ first taste of white man’s law.
He had even been treated with suspicion down at the Aboriginal camp, by the old rusted railway. They had talked to him, but the shutters had gone down behind their dark eyes and the boy had never learned their secrets.
He had leaped high for the mark on cold grey days, sent long, graceful kicks up high in the air and listened to the shouts from the crowd as his thin, long fingers plucked the ball from the sky. He had dreamed of the day when big Cooley, Number One, main actor, ran out on the field in the state football team.
Only a half-caste who had lived in a world of football and dreams. Who had hated with all his heart, who had had his soul eaten out by white man’s ways, but who had been killed by a black man.
Only half-caste Cooley lies here.
GLOSSARY
BANDOGERA (norwest) bush turkey
BAROI/BARDEE a grub somewhat like the desert witchetty grub, only smaller
BOYA money
BOONDIES rocks or stones
BUDJARRIE pregnant
BUNJI ‘to bunji around’ is to go from person to person, conning them and so forth. A bunji (man or woman) makes love to anyone.
GABBA wine; literally ‘blood’
GILGIES/MARRONS fresh water crayfish resembling the eastern state ‘yabbie’
GUNYAH bush hut
KOODGEEDA (norwest) snake
KOOMPH urine; urinate
KOORDAH/COODA brother, friend
KWON posterior
MARDONG when someone really loves you and wants to go with you
MONAYCH/MUNADJ police; literally ‘the man with chains’
MOONY sexual intercourse
MOORITCH/MURITCH good — nice or pretty
NULLA-NULLA Aboriginal weapon resembling a club
NUMMERY/GNUMMERAI narcotic bush hence cigarette
NYOONGAH originally the Bibbulmun people of the south-west but nowadays any part-Aboriginal person
ORGA, YORGA, OR YOK women
TUPPY vagina
TCHOO/TCHOO-CHOO expression indicating shame or embarrassment
UNNA ‘isn’t that so’ or ‘is that the truth?’
WADGULA/WETGALA white people
WINYAN/WINYARN not altogether there in the head
WONGI really the people from Kalgoorlie way, but any full-blood Aboriginal
WOODARCHI evil spirits, small hairy men with red eyes, some say, or else a featherfoot
YARRAMAN (norwest) horse
YORRN an expression of sorrow
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