by Scott, Kim
There had always been a particular rhythm to their visits, and now this new pulse, at first feeble, began its accompaniment. More sails were noted, and more things detected: a cairn of stones, for instance, and within it—once the stones were dismantled—some markings on thin bark inside a container of glass. Smoke rose on the islands, as if a signal by someone approaching.
In later years it would be horseshoes, the remains of saddles, a revolver, buried food and bodies … But all that is for the future. Bobby’s family knew one story of this place, and as deep as it is, it can accept such variations.
Gifts? they wondered. Then, these visitors? Where they from? Where they gone?
The wind, blowing to the horizon and back.
They danced like dead men, cruel brutal men.
But they were never dead.
Bobby Wabalanginy believed he was a baby then, and still only a very young boy when yet another ship came close and spilled people upon the shore. Bobby spoke as if it had just come to him and was on the cusp of memory, inside the face of a wave of recollection about to break.
Was it really Bobby? No matter who, it was a very young, barely formed consciousness, and watching from some safe place somewhere else.
These men had yet another strange tongue, oui, and Bobby Wabalanginy must’ve gone on their boat with his special Uncle Wunyeran—or perhaps it was Wooral or Menak or some other of those old people—because he remembered that first sensation of the deck shifting under his feet, rolling with the swell. And Bobby made that a dance, too, a small stepping shuffle one way, then the other, to and fro. Not quite the dance of strangers, not quite a dance of this country, people would smile as they shuffled and swayed to Bobby’s strange tune.
Some of his extended family learned seasickness from another ship’s visit, and something of its speed: how home could recede, and rush back at you again.
Menak and Wooral and Wabakoolit and Wunyeran all went on ships, Bobby would say in his old age, mouthing names that sounded so strange to many of his audience’s ears, names of people no one else could remember. White people asked us to go on their ships, Bobby emphasised, and Wunyeran was first to wear the sailors’ clothes. He went on deck of a ship anchored at the mouth of the harbour, and people stood on either bank calling out to him, and to the sailors, too, but they were deaf, they could not understand anything of what we said, we may as well have been seagulls squawking.
Silly things were traded—a shonky axe for a mirror, a spear that would never fly straight for a hat. Each party was delighted with the novelties, and there was strange food to be tasted.
Bobby Wabalanginy heard the stories so many times they lived as memory, and now he told them as if he was the central character: the gifts, the sails, the Deadman Dance, the whale and his mother, the shifting deck beneath the enclosed wind rushing them out past the islands to the horizon and back.
The most famous journey was that of Menak, a very wise man, said old Bobby, forgetting his own youthful opinion. And he would perform the story of Menak’s deception and betrayal and revenge. The character of Menak’s enemies was easily shown: he enacted their slaughter of seals (and it was this, the laying out of bodies, that had first inspired Bobby Wabalanginy’s version of the Deadman Dance). As his audience listened on the sandy beach inside the harbour, not far from where they’d disembarked—the very place Menak had returned to after terrible days out on the horizon—they could see one of the islands, blue and distant, way beyond the harbour’s entrance.
Old Bobby Wabalanginy remembered Menak the storyteller—the old man with his many ridges of scars and his high forehead catching the firelight, sharing his younger self with Wabalanginy, that most avid of listeners.
Bobby Wabalanginy shivered, because now he was the old man, and the young ones never listened as he had. Sometimes he was talking to himself, but even then he imagined that he was Menak recounting his adventure. It became Bobby’s story to his listeners.
Faces swam back into the firelight, toward those eyes glittering in the dark hollows of old Bobby’s face, and Bobby was once again saying he had been out there, out to the islands that—now that darkness had fallen like a blanket over them—his listeners could not see.
And if I tell you about those islands, Bobby said, you know we don’t always see them from here, with leaves and trees and rocks between us and them. You know them as well as Menak did then, because before then he had never been out there to see the sun rise from a horizon further away still, and ocean all around and between him and this very shore where we now sit and where he was born.
And old Bobby would kick the fire with his big heavy boots so that sparks leapt into the air. Poke it with his silly old spear. Grumpy old Menak had been right, and it hurt Bobby to admit that to himself again. It hurt to be Bobby Wabalanginy the old man, remembering, but it never hurt to be Bobby Wabalanginy the child or Bobby the young man, or even Bobby Wabalanginy the yet unborn.
Menak always began with the scene of his return, and so Bobby did too, telling of when he was but a baby and the black man and white man first lived together here in this very place and why he had remained unafraid and been so trusting.
*
Menak fell from the boat, waded in the shallows, stumbled across the sand to the grove of peppermint trees just as quick as he could because he did not know these people who had brought him back from the island. They seemed almost the same people who stranded him out there in the first place. He was confused. Yes, frightened.
With some distance between himself and the strangers, Menak collapsed into the burned-out hollow at the base of a favourite tree. The smooth charcoal, the cool shade and the scented carpet of dried leaves soothed him. He looked back from within the sheltering frame of leaves and branches at the strangers so busy on the shore.
Oh …
And as he spoke, old Bobby would reach up and pluck leaves from a peppermint tree, crush the leaves in his palm, inhale and pass his hand under the noses of his listeners so they might share the scent.
Breathe it in.
Oh, poor Menak, one moment lost in salt-grained sunlight, dizzy in sparkling blue sky and sea, then his feet felt beach sand again. He smelled these leaves, Bobby told his listeners, and his pulse come strong straightaway.
Strangers had rescued him, but it was also strangers that left him out on the blue island that when you get up close is solid rock in the middle of water and sky. The sealers took him out there and left him. They killed his cousin-brother, took the women.
Menak had been on boats before, but not so small as this one, and this time some magic had confused and weakened him. He’d forced himself to swallow the first mouthfuls of that drink they’d shared. Their food had made him thirsty.
He’d trusted them, ate and drank and fell among soft sealskins singing their songs and embracing them like brothers, faces so close that Menak saw his reflection in the blue eyes of the other.
He laughed as the boats left the shore; even sitting he felt unsteady, perched on the ocean’s skin like this. Each surge of the oars unsettled him, but then he got the rhythm of it and when they put up the sail and the power of the wind hauled them along slicing the sea’s surface, the bubbles and foam were laughing same as the blood in his veins. His blood was thickening as they approached the island, but Menak sprang from the boat and onto the shore of what he had really only ever known as a blue shape on the horizon. Really, he should have been frightened, shouldn’t he?
In truth, it was hard to recall exactly.
Somehow separated from the others, he was on his knees vomiting. And then the women’s screaming sent him rushing, stumbling back to the boats. To where the boats had been.
His brother’s body was floating in the water, too far from shore to reach. The strangers and their boats further again from shore, and the women with them. Menak’s woman.
Menak’s shouts made no difference, and the boats grew smaller and smaller.
The water around his brother’s bod
y was dark and oily. That body, isolated and far from shore. Ocean all around, out on the horizon; like Menak was, too. Like he’d been banished as far as the stars, banished within sight of a home unreachable.
Thirsty, he could find no good water and was vomiting again. Aching head, a furred mouth, a weak and heavy body.
He made fires so his countrymen would know he lived, and the smell of smoke and salt air surrounded him as he followed the body drifting around the island. Suddenly it came alive and began thrashing frantically in the water. Then Menak saw the shark. His brother’s body rose above the water and for a moment Menak held the blank gaze, then the body broke apart and disappeared.
A sail grew larger, a ship sailed past. It was as if the sea, the horizon, kept spawning them. This one stopped well inside the island, held by a rope thrown splashing into the sea, and next morning it entered that gap in the land, went onto the flat bed of ocean surrounded by hills, and among the laughing women of that harbour, his home. Menak watched small figures traipse up one slope.
When a second boat nosed onto the beach of the island two days later he knew it was the only way he might return. Apart from those who’d stranded him, the faded men from the horizon had been friendly, but of course Menak was wary. He watched them stand on the beach, looking around.
He had no choice but to go to them.
The sail unfolded, snapped open in the wind.
It was an anxious beginning, but as the shore grew larger he also expanded. Brothers waited for him on the beach, and the boat landed him there and then sailed around to the harbour where the mother ship waited. There was no sign of the boat that had left him on the island.
But where is Wunyeran? Menak asked his people.
*
Where were you, Bobby, what about you? the tourists asked. Sometimes he would throw off his policeman’s jacket and heavy boots and drape a kangaroo skin over his shoulders and—since they wanted a real old-time Aborigine, but not completely—wear the red underpants. At night he would set fire to his boomerangs one by one, and throw them into the night sky. As they came spinning back over the heads of the crowd, roaring with flames, the women shrieked and tried to bury themselves in the arms of their flinching partners who stood their ground and grinned in solidarity with the winking Bobby.
One day a statue of Wunyeran gunna be in the main street of this town, Bobby told his listeners. Maybe not in my lifetime, but I say shame on King George Town that it’s not there right now, because Wunyeran he welcomed the first white people that sailed here, just like I welcome you now.
And oh yes everyone smiled with Bobby.
He looked around to see if any of his people or the constable or shopkeeper were among his listeners and then, hunching his shoulders and beckoning his listeners closer, he said, This is my country, really. This is my home. Straightening up, in a loud voice, he said, You welcome here. You know, Wunyeran never grew to be an old man. Soldiers buried him just like his black brother Menak told them to, and when Dr Cross died (Dr Cross was like the Boss of King George Town back then), they laid him down in the same grave as his good old friend, Wunyeran. A lot of bad things been done here—we won’t speak of them now, my friends—but that was a good beginning.
The old man pointed up that slope, finger quivering at the end of his long, thin arm. That town hall rests upon the hearts of two fine men: Wunyeran and Dr Cross.
He dipped his boomerang in something liquid—whale oil?—touched it to the fire, and threw it at the ground not far from them. It bounced, flame curved in its flight and came spinning back, flames roaring. Even the men ducked and ran a few steps this time.
Wunyeran was a friend of everyone! shouted old Bobby Wabalanginy. He had no fear.
*
It was true Wunyeran had a certain charm, and an easy, soft laugh that was like an arm gently pulling you close.
People had seen the sealers sailing their little boat from shore and to the island. They saw Menak’s signal fire and made smoke to answer him. But no one knew how to reach him. And then the ship—not a single-masted whaleboat like the sealers’, but a brig—anchored in the harbour.
People watched.
Wunyeran went to charm them, see what he could find out. Were they enemy? Would they help?
Wunyeran was a young man then, the bone not long through his nose. (And Bobby would lift his head, flare his nostrils, show the tourists the fine bone nestled in his own.) Not alone of course, not on his own, not after what had befallen Menak and the others. He went along the beach to where the white man camped, and an older man and a baby went with him. They had no spears with them, and the old man carried the baby.
The baby would be all grown up now, of course, old Bobby said.
How old?
He paused, waited until all eyes were upon him and met each gaze. Oh, same age as me, exact same age as me. See, Wunyeran was my very special uncle, like we say Kongk, but extra special uncle is Babin. My special friend, and already I was travelling and going from friend to friend in my family. But yes, that baby is me, Bobby told them, and made his audience think of how long ago but how recent it was. He offered himself as a fine image of the passing of time.
See, he said, no threat in two men and a baby. Nothing to fear from little Bobby, that’s for sure. Sure enough, to be sure be sure, old Bobby would say, winking at one or two in the crowd, Wunyeran was invited aboard and Wunyeran charmed them, amused them, never said a word about his older brother out on the island. Lot of our men liked to go onboard a ship then. But now look what happened! One of the small boats—not a ship, but a smaller one, a whaleboat—took a woman away, and left our men way out on the island. And what did Wunyeran do? He got himself onto the very next ship that arrived.
It was not easy talking back then; you shook hands and grinned, danced and mimed and laughed, but you never knew what the other fellow was thinking, not really (do we ever, dear friends?). Wunyeran was still learning that people on larger boats (people like yourselves) were of a better class, were a different kind of people altogether to those who had only a single whaleboat.
Wunyeran stayed onboard. That was his job, to stay with them, find out what he could. He made himself useful, even went ashore again with a man repairing boats and helped him heat and spread the pitch. Watched how it was done, because everything interested Wunyeran, that’s how he was. And he kept very alert.
Meanwhile, as you know, Menak had come ashore.
Menak and a small band of brothers painted themselves up, as people do on important occasions. They grabbed their unbarbed spears and headed for the far side of the harbour where a smaller boat had landed and men were felling trees and collecting water: all morning people had been following the movements of these latest visitors, reporting back.
Menak’s party was about the same size as that on the other side of the harbour. They moved off at a jog, calling to Wunyeran from the bush as they passed where he was helping repair the boat.
Wunyeran smiled at his companion, tried to explain that he must leave but he had so few words then, so everything was mime. He placed his hands palms together against his cheek: I’m tired. Wiggled his fingers in the air: goodbye.
Calm, see. No sign of stress or fear, and no sign that payback was about to happen. But he quickly got out of the way.
On the other side of the harbour the man never even knew they were there until Menak drove a spear through his thigh. The man screamed and fell to the ground, clutching at the spear and groaning. He tried to drag himself away, kept his frightened eyes on Menak and clawed at the soil. Menak watched him, trying to understand. The man was frightened, yes, but how come in so much pain?
The man’s companions came blundering through the bushes and pulled up short when they saw Menak and the others. The man slowly dragged his wounded self across the space between the two groups as they glared at one another.
Menak lifted his chin and snorted contemptuously. Turned on his heel and walked away. The strangers reached for the
ir companion, and did not follow.
Good.
Menak and his brothers made their way around the harbour. They saw two strangers walking the water’s edge, another repairing the upturned boat on the shore, and one of the speared man’s companions running wildly back around the harbour shore to where the ship was anchored.
Menak made his way up the slope to the rocks above the spring. The sun was almost gone and, from where he stood, the water of the harbour was as calm as a rock pool. His eyes followed the narrow and sandy strip of land that separated the harbour from the less sheltered waters of the great, open bay until it met with the rock ridge to the south; that ridge reached out toward the islands to the east and ended in a bald dome of granite. A giant might need only one, two leaps to reach the islands from that bald headland, but would have to swim to get to the land way over the other side of the bay. So much blue, so much water and sky, and the island he’d been stranded on like a whale dying was the knee or heart of a great giant resting below the ocean.
When Menak got back to camp not so many steps later, Wunyeran put his arms around his waist, lifted him from the ground, and turned him around in a circle.
They talked and sang deep into the night, light from their small fires splashing them, shadows like pools in the silvery moonlight, and again and again their words led them across the ruffled ocean by a path of moonlight to the very island Menak had stood upon.
*
Several days later the boat that had stranded Menak returned and went straight to the ship anchored little more than a spear’s throw from shore.
It might have been a battle, it might have been a long initiation journey he was about to overtake, such was the discussion and preparation, such was the trouble and ceremony Wunyeran undertook later that particular morning. People sang with him and the scented smoke curled around them as if they were mountain peaks. Then a small group of men walked down the slope, but only Wunyeran went along the beach to where the strangers camped on the shore closest to their ship. He carried no spears and his slim body was bare but for a kangaroo-skin cloak slung over his shoulders and a hair belt circling his waist.