by Scott, Kim
If you want land, Alexander Killam said, follow the rivers inland to the mountains. That’s what Cross did. Why Killam himself, if he had the capital … Cross must’ve been last to get a grant, and he had chosen some very good land indeed upriver from Shellfeast Harbour. It was his native friends who showed him.
Yes, an expedition could be arranged. Several of the natives are quite experienced guides, having helped Cross. They know where the water is, can supply your meals. You’ll never get lost, and they’ll deal with any other natives you meet. An expedition need last only a few days, maybe a week.
*
Geordie Chaine took time fitting out his expedition. Made another list, then another. He packed a tent-fly to keep off the heavy dews of evening, provide shade in the heat of the day and shelter from any rain. The old hands of the settlement explained that the topsy-turvy seasons of this part of the world meant rain could fall at any time. He packed a small axe and spade. Guns also. They were but three, he told his companions. Who knew how many savages out there might oppose them? He packed oilskins and tin saucepans for cooking. And tobacco and pipe, brandy, flour, biscuit, pork, beef, rice, sugar, tea, cheese, butter, salt … He wondered if they could get by without horses.
Soldier Killam (as even Chaine now knew him) came by and reduced the load. Not so much food, he advised. We’ll give something like that—needn’t be good quality— to the native boys when we return. If we’re short they’ll feed us out there. But all the same, we’ll need someone to help us carry the gear. Your horses still not arrived?
*
Next morning, Geordie Chaine, Soldier Alexander Killam and Mr William Skelly set off together. Skelly was a stocky individual of rough garb and carried a larger pack than the others. An observer might have recognised that he was not much of a conversationalist.
Wooral and Bobby appeared. Chaine saw two natives, a young man and a boy, brimming with what he called ‘animal health’, their skin shining and their bright smiles dazzling. The man, grinning and holding out his hand as he approached, seemed particularly pleased with himself. Prominent scars lined his chest, and he wore a small bone through his nose.
This is Wooral, said Killam, and Geordie Chaine found himself shaking hands with what must have been a savage, yet one who spoke perfectly understandable English, and who gripped his hand firmly and looked him in the eye.
The young boy also held out his hand.
Delighted to meet you again, Mr Geordie Chaine, he said. His words carried Cross’s accent; it might almost have been Cross talking. Kaya, we say. The boy would not stop shaking Chaine’s hand. His smile was infectious. You like to eat beetle? he asked with that remarkably clear enunciation.
Chaine had some trouble with the boy’s name.
Bobby, Skelly interrupted.
Ah. Chaine remembered him now. His tongue had no trouble with that name.
Yes, that a mooring for me, the boy said, grinning. And shook Chaine’s hand once more.
Alexander Killam had brought along a set of clothes. He had none for the boy, but a prepubescent boy’s nudity was acceptable. He would need clothing on future occasions, though, unless Killam was a poor judge of a boy’s development.
Wooral sniffed the clothes and held them up for inspection. Boots? he enquired.
Chaine held the kangaroo skin Wooral had offered him awkwardly, fingering the small piece of bone used as a clasp when it was worn across the shoulders. Well-worn, oiled and softened, the animal skin seemed too intimate an item of apparel.
Wooral rolled the trousers to his calves in sailor fashion and, seeing Chaine nonplussed by the kangaroo skin, attempted to help him. Chaine shook his head and passed the cloak to Killam who, after some fussing, also declined Wooral’s offer of help and returned the cloak because Skelly laughed, and waved it away. Wooral looked at Bobby and nonchalantly put it back on his own shoulders. Bobby put on the shirt, so large it could’ve been a coat, and bunched up the sleeves. Then, with a tilt of heads to indicate direction, he and Wooral set off.
Chaine, Killam and Skelly glanced at one another, shouldered their heavy packs and followed.
A distant mountain range rose before Geordie Chaine as he crested the hill that marked the boundary of his knowledge of the settlement. The mountain stood like a stage prop in a vast, grey-green plain—a blue cutout against the horizon.
Wooral pointed out a few thin and lonely columns of smoke in the distance as he led them along a well-worn path, putting people’s names to them. Smoke merged imperceptibly with haze, the vastness of sky.
We alright?
Chaine had a compass, and Killam said the mountains were further confirmation; this was the direction they’d intended. No harm following Wooral while the going was so easy.
They followed a path, rocky and scattered with fine pebbles that at one point wound through dense, low vegetation but mostly led them easily through what, Chaine said, seemed a gnarled and spiky forest. Leaves were like needles, or small saws. Candlestick-shaped flowers blossomed, or were dry and wooden. Tiny flowers clung to trees by thin tendrils, and wound their way through shrubbery, along clefts in rock. Bark hung in long strips. Flowering spears thrust upward from the centre of shimmering fountains of green which, on closer inspection, bristled with spikes.
Sometimes Wooral addressed the bush as if he were walking through a crowd of diverse personalities, his tone variously playful, scolding, reverential, affectionate.
It was most confusing. Did he see something else?
Soldier Killam gave Chaine the names, pointing out not only peppermint and tallerina, but also paperbark, she-oak, banksia … Blackboy, he said, and Chaine saw the very thing in a grass skirt, standing on a hillside and silhouetted against the sky. Chaine admired what was called Australian mahogany, although sometimes the branches were an erratic, almost wriggling growth with little cup-shaped seedpods scattered among its foliage.
Skelly stayed to the path, looked ahead, did not contribute to the conversation. Perhaps the dry, serrated leaves of banksia provoked him; perhaps their bristling blossoms seemed manufactured, and not the soft nature he knew from the forests of the manor he’d once known. Perhaps he was at home with such bristling spikiness.
In the course of the day their path (and inevitably, as they approached, Wooral’s singing) led them to springs and water holes, often concealed under overhanging rock, covered with a slab, or in one case filled with pebbles.
So it don’t evaporate, suggested Skelly, surprising them with his voice as well as his insight.
Skirting a clearing demarcated by a recent fire, Geordie Chaine wondered what had stopped the flames so suddenly. A change of wind?
Woody flowers rustled, strips of dry bark peeled from branches, leaves rotated slowly as they passed and red sap oozed from trees.
It was a physical relief when the forest thinned, the trees retreated and the path faded as they entered a plain scattered with clumps of trees and a soft and fine grass. A continuing gully was marked by trees winding across the plain. Almost a cultivated landscape, said Chaine.
Wooral showed them where Dr Cross had slept when he travelled with them.
You seen Mr Cross’s book, Mr Geordie Chaine? asked Bobby. His voice had shifted again. You gunna write a Journal of Expedition?
Chaine looked around, and Killam nodded. Skelly was already busy setting up camp. They carried their own shelter and food, and Killam said their guides were more than able to find each of these, wherever they might travel.
We’ll continue in the morning, Chaine said. He looked to the mountain range in the distance, now beginning to retreat as the tongues of flames gathered his attention.
Wooral caught Bobby’s eye. This was not like with Dr Cross.
Well fed, Chaine, Killam and Skelly toasted the success of their first day. Evidently, there was good grazing land to be had. The campfire flames, barely noticed, leapt and crackled.
*
Next morning, when their guides had still not ret
urned, the three men decided they must continue at least as far as that clear, blue mountain range. They had food and water enough for several days yet, and surely it would take only a day or two to reach the mountains. In the future they would arrange for horses, and have no need of guides or assistants who were unwilling to carry the party’s luggage and deserted them as soon as this.
No matter.
Unlike yesterday, there was no clear path to follow, save that leading back the way they had come, but the mountain range beckoned them. They could see its valleys, its ridges and peaks, and the open lower slopes inviting their tread.
*
Some hours later the mountain was no longer in sight.
They had come across what they believed to be a path, but after a time it disappeared, and they could see no further than a few yards in front of them. They were soon reduced to pushing, then hacking their way through dense shrubbery. The sky above was clear, but they had no view ahead or behind. It might have been a maze that held them, except there was no easy going, no way to take even a few steps without forcing. Initially they tried to steer by their compass, but soon resorted to the least difficult way (no way was easy) through this infuriating, frustrating scrub.
Hack and push.
They tended to follow any slope downward and so, pushing their way through rushes, found themselves knee deep in water and mud and with no choice but to retreat, regroup and—glancing at the compass—try to find better ground. They had no clear view, not even of sky.
All day they worked to escape the confinement of scraggly, twisted, pressing scrub. It was as if a great many limbs restrained them, disinterestedly; as if thousands of fingers plucked at their hair and clothing. Tree roots tripped them.
They climbed trees to get a vantage point, but they bent under their weight, or were too short, or had branches far up the trunk and out of reach. They had no clear sight of anything but the scrub which trapped them until, as daylight was fading, they stepped into open space. There in the foreground was the smaller mountain range and, further beyond and visible to the right, an apparently still larger range. The latter remained blue with distance, but across a small, grassy plain scattered with a few clumps of trees, the earth rose rocky and gnarled, a heavy mass against the sky. An eagle circled.
They had hardly wandered off course at all!
After a day struggling with scrub the party was relieved to have space about them, a place to camp and their goal in sight. They stretched out on sandy, level ground, and their gaze moved from the dying sun and burning sky to the disappearing mountain range, and finally into the heart of their campfire. Banksia cones, they agreed, burn like the coal of home and hold their shape, even as ash. Skelly reached out with his boot and touched one. It collapsed into the ashy bed.
Rain and a powerful wind woke them deep in the night. They tossed and turned in their bedding as their canvas slapped and snapped restlessly until finally, convulsing like a terrified thing, it tore itself from the ground and flapped away on panicking, pale wings. Soon, each man lay in a pool of water. Oh they tried to jolly themselves through, joking of the convenience of bath and bed being one and the same, and resting on elbows and knees with their backs to the sky, but still their skin wrinkled and thinned where bone touched the earth, the rain drummed on skull and shoulders, and their dripping noses only added to the puddle within which they lay. Voices drowned by the sound of rain, of trees creaking, of the roaring wind itself, they crawled to a single tree and huddled in their dripping wet bedclothes. Toward dawn the wind dropped and, shivering, they tried to relight their fire.
They were still trying as day came cold, with a grey and washed-out light. Drops of water fell in clusters from the straggly trees and prickly shrubs with a sound like tiny footsteps rushing and dancing all around them. The low cloud and misty rain thinned, intermittently showing the waiting mountain range.
A high-pitched barking pricked their attention. Bloody Menak’s dog, said Killam, and they watched it scamper back to a group of figures who had apparently coalesced from the clouds, who wore anklets of water drops as they stepped across the plain until they stood in a rough circle around the three shivering men, their sodden bedding and smoking pile of twigs. Dark figures in short cloaks of animal skin moved closer to the three men and Wooral’s hand emerged from beneath his cloak holding a warm and glowing banksia cone. The circle of men brought out similar burning cones from beneath their cloaks, and Chaine and Killam and Skelly felt the warmth enclose them.
Proper fire not far, said Bobby.
The warmth, perhaps even the company, revived Geordie Chaine. They waded through a number of small creeks until eventually the men, as damp as if they were themselves made of clouds and rain, were led to a shelter among towering granite rocks. Their boots crunched dry, coarse sand and a couple of fires warmed a natural enclosure of overhanging walls of stone.
You eat beetle, Wooral told Geordie Chaine, smiling. Now bardi, unna? He held out curls of seared meat on a sheet of paperbark.
With a nod from Wooral, Soldier Killam replaced his wet shirt and jacket with the shirt he’d earlier given his guide. Dry and warm, it was scented with the fire’s sweet smoke.
Killam and Skelly slept. But Geordie Chaine circled the rocks of the shelter. Bobby followed the sound of his crunching boots. See, he said, pointing at an old cowpat which, having dried, had now almost disappeared because of all the moisture in the air. Nearby, Bobby indicated a hoof print, protected from the wind and rain by the wall of granite beside which it was so closely imprinted.
The little dog sniffed the cowpat, looked up at Bobby and Geordie Chaine and wagged its stump of a tail.
Bobby wondered if he could explain what his people were saying. Could he? Sheltered like an insect among the fallen bodies of ancestors, he huddled in the eye sockets of a mountainous skull and became part of its vision, was one of its thoughts. Moving across the body, journeying with the old people, he drank from some transformed, still-bleeding wound.
Bobby Wabalanginy and his Uncle Wooral heard the frogs and the birds singing and the voices and even the drooping leaves, and the sky told them there was rain to come, that they must be moving inland.
Wind and rain hide the hunter while the kangaroo scratches his chest, rotates his ears inward and looks away, awaiting the spear. Birds nest. Striped emu chicks appear. There are possums everywhere in the tall trees.
The plains run with water, streams joining old paths leading all the way to the sea, not just to King George Town where those people camp all the time now. Not everything or everyone moves that way.
But these new prints in the earth came from there, these prints made by the bellowing, blundering devils the horizon people brought with them. What they want? What they offer?
*
The Chaine party were shown a creek, and were told it would lead them to the coast close to King George Town. They never really left the mountains behind because they saw them from each hilltop and agreed that, although quite unremarkable in the country of home, they made a grand impression here, floating like blue islands in this otherwise flat landscape. They crossed plains of dense mallee and areas of long, rippling grass, and the creekbed offered knotted groups of trees and deep pools of water at irregular intervals.
Good for kangaroos, Wooral had said. Bullock, too.
There were many small, dry and obviously intermittent tributaries and patches of soggy, recently burned land. One creekbed, descending a rocky slope, became a sequence of small deep pools stepping from one level to the next. An eagle in a large tree beside one pool, its nest surprisingly close to the ground, returned their gaze.
Perhaps it was fatigue. Geordie Chaine moved in some other atmosphere: the air moist, the light thick and honey-coloured, and his breathing so shallow he wondered if the air needed to be eaten, swallowed rather than inhaled. The many and varied voices of frogs, the harsh rustling vegetation and the wind moaning in trees, the impertinent, abrupt birdsong, the improbably
bounding wallabies …
He heard a cow bellow, the sound strange in this wilderness, then a high-pitched barking. Chaine fell behind the other two men. He smelled roasting meat, and blundered on until he heard someone coughing and then there was Dr Cross sitting by a campfire outside a small hut, Wooral and Bobby beside him, Killam and Skelly on their feet looking back over their shoulders at him, Chaine.
He scanned the clearing: a cow, tied to a tree and with a bell on its neck; a rough pen full of sheep; a tiny hut with its crude door of kangaroo skin. A vegetable garden. The strong smell of shit. Something tapping in the wind.
I’ve taken this land, Cross said. My land. The three at the fire got to their feet and Chaine and Killam shook hands with them all. Skelly stepped back, but the Noongar man and boy held their hands out to him and when Cross followed their lead he shook all their hands.
Bobby shook hands with Wooral, with Cross and Wooral again.
Skelly kicked at a chicken scratching near his feet.
A single heart beats
Alexander Killam agreed with Skelly’s judgement— agriculture was not worth the effort and trouble. Poor soil, the topsy-turvy seasons. The natives think stock is theirs to spear, and there is the trouble with the fires they light that can race across country like charging cavalry.
True, his pilot duties did not keep him overly busy; he’d been able to take several days off just now, hadn’t he? On average, only about one ship a week came into the inner harbour, although others anchored in the sound and still more at other sheltered bays along the coast. That was the key. Already he had smuggled rum ashore, and sold or exchanged fresh vegetables for things he knew would be valuable.
There were plenty of whaling ships. Perhaps Mr Chaine should put his mind to that enterprise? Alexander Killam had the Sailor’s Rest. Not that there was much rest to be had, unless you counted being dead drunk and laid out in the gutter to one side of the steps. But the whalers who came into the harbour found it amenable enough. The crew of a whaling ship pretty well doubled the population of the community and although they reckoned they found the settlement quiet, it nevertheless provided them with a diversion after their long days at sea. They’d delight in occupying one of the drinking houses, looking for excitement, a fight, women.