That Deadman Dance

by Scott, Kim

  The Sailor’s Rest was the sort of place you had to stoop to enter, and even having done so many would be obliged to remain stooped, so low was its ceiling. Its walls often failed to prevent a drunken body crashing through in a cloud of old clay and twigs. The air was usually a fug of grog and tobacco fumes, and thin shafts of sunlight striking across the room showed smoke coiling and collecting, unable to escape. Of an evening a couple of oil lamps and the open fire were the only illumination.

  Its customers—rough men, soldiers and sailors mostly—were inclined to fight among themselves. For anything else, say for singing, and certainly for women, they’d go to one of the native campfires beyond the edge of town.

  It was often hard to remember how you got there, as both Skelly and Killam knew.

  *

  Cross sent Bobby for Wooral and Menak, but only Wooral came. Bobby didn’t know what was wrong with Menak, or if he was grumpy with Cross and all his people, these new ones who had arrived with the latest ship. Cross said, No matter, but we need a dance performed, a corroboree. These visitors are our friends and we want to welcome them properly, make them feel at home. But only you, our Noongar friends, can truly do that.

  Chaine laughed.

  A lot of Noongars were in the settlement. Well, at the edge of the huts, really—Cross’s bed was closest—where the old people and women and children camped when Wooral and the other young men stayed with Cross. There was space there for the fires and the dancing. People readied themselves with ochre and oil and stories, and waited.

  Chaine and Cross and their friends from Cygnet River arrived just after sunset. The fires were alight, the men painted-up, and people sat in groups, apart. But Menak and old Manit were still not there. Dr Cross and Chaine—those good friends of Wooral and Bobby—brought tubs of sweet rice. Wooral explained that this was for after the dance, and they waited and waited still for Menak and old Manit to arrive. That old woman, Manit, was their best singer. And Menak knew the best dances, the best songs. They knew how things were done properly.

  Bobby and Wooral built the fires higher and higher, but still Menak and Manit never came. Cross and his friend sat down, and the Noongar were happy to have them there, but Chaine was rising up and down on his toes, looking around. He beat two of the boomerangs together, laughing loudly, and tried to get everyone to start.

  The dancers were nowhere to be seen. And then people began moving, arranging themselves. Voices fell away as Menak and Manit walked across one edge of the circle of firelight and went to Cross and Chaine. Dr Cross was seated on the ground, and Manit held out her hand to help him up. She waited for Menak to shepherd Chaine, whose voice was loud in the relative quiet. The two old ones led the men to where they might sit, waving their hands at the guests so that they might also be properly seated among the group of people, a little while ago seemingly chaotic and now so orderly, organised by a combination of age, gender, familiarity and, it seemed to the alert Dr Cross, what they had to contribute. Cross was closer to the edge than the centre of those who were watching, Chaine and then the newer settlers a little further again, all of them grouped together at the outside of the circle. Menak and Manit went to sit with the ones too old to dance, but in a position that showed their centrality.

  Now the young men appeared from behind some bushes, standing in a line just like in that dance from over the ocean horizon, that Deadman Dance. It was very quiet, the wind and the waves hushing them all. Wooral and Bobby were in the middle of the line of dancers, and Bobby the youngest.

  Then came the singing.

  Emu dance first: the men did it together, sat back and took turns, each man with his arm extended, bent at the wrist, and moving like the neck of an emu. No special dances, and not the Deadman Dance, though many were thinking of that one, hoping this important friend might lead them in something like that. And after the dance where men show their strength, standing on one leg, almost motionless but for the muscles quivering under their skin, Bobby started playing. He did his shipboard dance: the rise and fall. The boys caught on, bobbing like things floating in the water and the wave moving along them; and Bobby took little steps side to side, like on the deck of a ship. The men lay down, and Bobby walked across their moving bodies, like the boat in the harbour going from ship to shore. Walking on the waves, see? And then he was staggering side to side and mimed lifting a bottle to his lips: that dance the sailors do.

  The singers tried hard not to laugh, and sometimes took up the rhythm and sound of some other dance, some safe dance, to get everyone back to a less cheeky repertoire. Time and time again they took the dancers back to the test of strength, one man standing motionless with the muscles quivering under his skin while the others stomped the ground, releasing all their strength into it.

  Bobby improvised as soon as the singers relented, sang for himself until the Elders took it up, and in his dance was rolling side to side, awash on the deck. Then he was walking, plodding—all the young men joined in, a single line behind, doing the journeys Cross took them on, walking walking walking ever outwards and away. They gathered around Bobby like curious spirits as he plucked flowers and feathers, and turned the pages of a book. Faces turned to Cross, and he did look embarrassed, too. And after each improvisation, everyone still laughing at Bobby and his cheek, the singers brought the dancers back, and again it was Bobby everyone looked at, standing on one leg, his muscles quivering and jumping under the skin. Bobby stayed and stayed and never moved from that one spot until the singers finally released him. All that concentrated power, and he just a boy.

  Menak was very pleased with him, everyone could see.

  The singing and dancing stopped, and the crowd became like water again, moving and collecting, and Dr Cross as if following some tiny gully rolled away on his own.

  *

  In the morning and the days to come there was not a Noongar to be seen.

  They are a mobile people, Dr Cross tried to explain to the new settlers. And there is an order to their movements, according to season and the laws of their society. They do not yet need us. They will return, he said, and later wrote it down as if for reassurance.

  Sailing, sailing just the same almost on the land as on the sea, Bobby came back on a dry wind and found the water holes drying. He went with his Elders as they set fire to the reeds, then a day or two later walked easily to the water for the frogs, tortoises, gilgies, the ducks and swans. The wind swung and brought family from further inland, and fish came close to shore as if to meet them. There were salmon in the face of waves, cobblers and flathead against the ripples of sand. Possums distracted one another, male and female, and were easy game. Kangaroos and wallabies and quokkas and tammars, heavy with young, came to where the grass sprang up with the first rains after Bobby made fire. They were easy, too. There was never trouble with food and shelter, and even less now that the sailors stayed longer ashore. Bobby had seen them back away from a wall of flames, and heard how they thought it a miracle when the flames turned back on themselves and died. Sailors, who should be able to read the wind.

  Bobby waded in the shallows of the harbour, eyes scanning the sand ripples beneath the water, his vision at that in-between space, ready for the contrast, the counter movement, the shadow or flick of a tail that broke the pattern. He believed it was on an occasion like this, the same coincidence of natural rhythms—movements of sun and wind, of fish, birds and animals—that his uncle had died. He formed the name inside his skull. Wunyeran. Him and Cross like brothers. And Dr Cross? Dr Cross was coughing same as Wunyeran did.

  Dimly, Bobby remembered his own mother, coughing.

  Dr Cross’s cheeks and nose were flushed. Bobby had seen blood on his handkerchief and a lace of pink foam on his lips. Dr Cross was a wave, breaking just a little, and what was inside and beneath was spilling out.

  The marri trees oozed their red gum, were heavy with flowers.

  A ship under little sail moved into the harbour, slowly, and anchored way over the other side in
the deep water beside the huts. Where the horizon people stayed. Horizon people? Some of them been here forever now. And Bobby had been over the horizon himself, hadn’t he? Again and again, had sailed away and back from between the islands, from where the sun rises and the whales also come. Him and Menak both.

  Dr Cross’s sheep huddled together, their collective back to the wind and rain. Chickens ruffled their feathers. And although it was daylight and he had many things to do, Dr Cross lay curled in the corner of his little bush hut, coughing. This was his new home, his homestead. Kepalup, the Noongar called it, because of the spring filling the river: the place of water issuing forth, water welling.

  Cross’s body shook with each cough and he pulled the rough woollen blanket more tightly around him. He lay on kangaroo skin, a kangaroo skin was his door, and he thought of his wife and children arriving before he’d built a hut big enough for them to live in, let alone to store all the goods he’d asked they bring. The price of skilled labour was exorbitant. And perhaps they would not want to live out here by the river, so far from the settlement.

  They would not.

  He’d made a mistake. How could he provide for his family once they arrived, and not simply fritter away his wife’s inheritance? Yes, he had land—good land—and sheep arriving by ship. His friendships with the natives would help enormously, but there must be give and take, not all the benefit going one way. But his strength was going and so, too, his interest, motivation …

  What had possessed him? Now men bragged of the land they’d been granted, and never thought that it was seized, was stolen. Why must it matter so much to him that the lives of the natives would be altered forever and their generosity and friendliness be betrayed? He could not change that; what made him think he could do anything, or show another way to go about it when he would not even be able to make an independent life for himself and provide for his own loved ones? He had friends among the natives. He was barefoot, was dirt, grime and pale, peeling skin. He was cold, even though he’d greased himself as Wunyeran might. His fire gave off more smoke than heat. Had he the strength, he would have taken his violin from the chest where it lay among so many other discarded things, and played himself back to health.

  If I should die, he’d told Chaine, bury me with Wunyeran. And were that to happen he’d arranged that Chaine buy his land—they’d agreed on a price—so that at least Cross’s own wife and children might benefit, for someone must benefit from this enterprise, this grabbing and selling of land.

  Cross had thought to be part of a new kind of society, but his wife and children would be better off to never go aboard a ship, and if it was too late for that, to turn around and sail home at their first chance, sail back to money in the bank and away from here.

  He was not strong enough for this.

  The trees in the misty rain looked like drawings: trunks and limbs darkly shaded one side and their leafy, drooping heads dissolving at the edges. Cross drifted, buoyed by the rain, and moved by currents as if the heavy damp air was in fact ocean. He was far beneath the surface and did not know up from down as darkness moved in around him. The sound of his coughing was very distant and faint, although his body continued to shake with each loud, plodding heartbeat.

  Part II

  1826–1830

  Bobby never learned

  Laughing and loved, Bobby Wabalanginy never learned fear; not until he was pretty well a grown man did he ever even know it. Sure, he grew up doing the Deadman Dance—those stiff movements, those jerking limbs—as if he’d learned it from their very own selves; but with him it was a dance of life, a lively dance for people to do together, each man dancing same as his brothers except for the one man on his own, leading them. It was a dance from way past the ocean’s horizon, and those people give it to our old people. Used to be an Elder would be on his own, facing all the others as they stood tight together, shoulder to shoulder, but Bobby changed all that. Still just a young boy when he first joined in, he made everyone laugh, but there was something about the way he danced that made them all move back and give him space so that he ended up like the Elder, the only one on his own, the only one standing against everybody else, commanding them.

  The dance? You paint yourself in red ochre, neck to waist and wrist, and leave your hands all bare. White ochre on your thighs, but keep your calves and feet bare, like boots, see? A big cross of white clay painted on every chest.

  Each man takes a stick about the size of an emu’s leg, and sometimes you wave it about, sometimes carry it on your shoulder as you walk up and down very stiffly, sometimes hold it away from yourself with your arms outstretched. Everybody doing this together, exact same thing on the exact same beat. Everyone in line, and when you move—stepping a fast and even cadence, one after the other and all men moving the same—you stay just an arm’s length apart.

  Sometimes, even though it’s a dance, you just stand dead still while one person out front moves his hand very fast, bends his arm at the elbow until the fingertips quiver beside his face. Then he stops dead still and everyone facing him does it the same, but all together. Over and over again, the many copy the one. And people clap—oh that is a wild and stirring rhythm—and they whistle. All point their stick into the air—like a rifle, of course—and bang bang bang like the boom boom boom of thunder or ocean swell meeting rock. But sharper, and the echoes roll on and on in the silence after.

  A bang and a boom end the bright, whistling music. The neat, sharp dance stops. First time ever we saw that dance it was as if dead men had come back to life and, having lost everything once, were more serious and intent and all of one will. Boom, and boom again, coming from the sea.

  But Bobby changed all that; he made the dance his own. One day when Menak and his woman companion Manit were leading the music, Bobby stepped out from among the others, stiff-limbed and moving jerkily to the sound of his own frightening whistle; a tune like the one we knew, but different all the same. The singing began to copy his, and all the other men—even the Elder—started to copy his actions, too, but then their minds went blank, their vision barren. They stepped back, they quailed before Bobby, went down on their haunches and clumsily backed away as he went among them, slapping playfully, hardly putting his hands on them, but laughing and grinning like a crazy man. Each man he touched lay down as if he was dead. Dead.

  People loved the experience of it. To have had no will of their own but only Bobby’s, briefly.

  By the time he was a grown man everyone knew it had never been dead men dancing in the first place anyway, but real live men from over the ocean’s horizon, with a different way about them. There was difference among them, too, as a grown-up Bobby learned too late, but this was something people argued about.

  Different? No, they’re all the same.

  Bobby would get to know them well; too well, as many said. He knew and was a friend to men like Dr Cross, Soldier Killam, Jak Tar and Kongk Chaine. Not forgetting Brother Jonathon and Convict Skelly. Some names so strange that no one could say them back then, until Bobby showed them how.

  And, as an old man strutting around with his boots and gun, Bobby would tell anyone who listened that he was there when they did the Deadman Dance that very first time. Sure, not even a baby, but everyone knew his mother got him when the whale came up on the beach. All the people moving in the water around the still live whale had seen the tiny shadow, that flicker in the water as the light died in the whale’s eye, and the old man—Bobby’s father—took hold of his stone knife and cut the whale. Even then there were sails upon the horizon.

  Bobby said he first saw the Deadman Dance from the ocean, not from shore. Right there, and he pointed to the deep water close to shore where we’d all seen the whales come (but not quite like then, and not so many now). And Bobby was barely a baby in a hammock of possum fur slung from his mother’s shoulder, his head rolling side to side with the rhythm of her stride. Perhaps he was still too young to know that Menak and Manit were with him, or even to know a
ny individual other than his mother, but Baby Bobby sensed the sails and while other babies could hardly see the world beyond their mother’s breast, his baby fists clenched and clenched again trying to grasp something else.

  So Bobby told it, anyways.

  His little cluster of people had travelled with the wind at their backs, touching the earth lightly, buoyed by the journey their old people had made over and over before them. The place was beginning to shrivel in the heat, to shimmer at the edges, and withdraw back into itself: rivers shrank to a chain of pools, frogs burrowed deeper underground into silence, flowers and leaves withered as roots and tubers grew.

  Smoke showed the family group’s trail, their return to the place of their youngest child’s creation and to this very centre of home by the sea’s edge. First there was smoke, and then, much later, their figures crested a hill like they were sliding with no feet, like they were gliding on heat waves, moving above the ground toward the water.

  The wind swung around as they walked toward their old camp, the clouds gathering in the western sky. The smell of ocean and approaching rain refreshed them and their arrival was like entering an embrace; a ridge sheltered them from the open ocean to the south, and white sand surrounded a circle of enclosed ocean this side. There was a bubbling spring, a river pausing in the sand dunes, paperbark trees waiting like old friends ready to help repair last season’s huts.

  Familiar.

  But something had changed.

  A collection of objects lay in a pile beside their old campfire and, even coated with ash, their smooth surfaces screamed. Such hard and bright things—Bobby would learn the words, we all would: beads, mirror, nail, knife—were passed around as the rest of the family arrived. Look, feel, smell them; and oh the sharp taste of steel. Some said they remembered them, from the time of the dance. And the footprints without toes.