Corroboree

by Graham Masterton

  Weeip, who had been listening, said, ‘Joolonga believes that Wulgaru the devil-devil will chase him, because he cut off Mr Chatto’s head.’

  It had been accepted without any discussion between them that Dogger was to join them. After all, Dogger was an experienced bushman, and he had convincingly proved himself to be an excellent shot. He had also come supplied with all his own provisions. That was what he had been doing away from home on those last few evenings before Eyre and his companions had set off: preparing his packs and his food and choosing a horse.

  ‘Right up until the last minute, I was still in two minds whether I ought to come with you or not,’ he had explained over last night’s camp-fire. ‘But then I heard Constance at the front door, talking to those bounty-hunter fellows. She was telling them that Arthur had been staying with us; and that he was about to leave on your expedition with you; and that if they wanted to catch him they should beetle around to Government House just about as fast as those spindly legs of theirs could carry them.’

  ‘It was Constance who told Chatto and Rose where to find us?’ Eyre had asked him, in astonishment.

  ‘Why are you so surprised?’ Dogger answered him, laconically. ‘You know darn well that she didn’t want you to go. She was always so afeared that you’d be killed by blackfellows, or bitten by a death adder, or that you’d run out of water and end up wearing nothing but your bones. She sent a boy to fetch Mr Chatto about ten minutes after you’d left the house. She told him she had some private information regarding Mr Mortlock here, but that she would only divulge it if the magistrate could be persuaded to keep you under a year’s house arrest, for conspiracy, or whatnot. Anything to stop you going. She thought I wasn’t around when she was a-talking to those fellows, but there I was up on the landing, and I’m like our friend Joolonga here. I was trained by practical experience. I can hear a bandicoot break wind from half-a-mile away; and I can certainly hear what Constance is a-whispering-of, even when she’s out in the yard.’

  ‘Well, I’m shocked,’ Eyre had told him.

  ‘Hm, no point in being shocked. A woman will do anything at all if she wants you serious enough.’

  ‘You had every intention of coming along on this expedition right from the start, didn’t you?’ Eyre had asked. ‘All that Constance gave you was a convenient excuse.’

  ‘Constance is a convenient excuse in her own right, my friend,’ Dogger had grinned. ‘Is she a woman or is she a Yara-ma-yha-who?’

  Weeip had giggled. Christopher had asked, with obvious impatience, ‘What on earth is a Yara-ma-yha-who?’

  Dogger’s weatherbeaten face had crinkled up like a dry wash-leather. ‘A Yara-ma-yha-who is a creature with such a big mouth that it can swallow a man up whole.’ He had slapped his leg, and cackled out loud, and then he had said, ‘That could call for a drink, couldn’t it? What do you say?’

  On the beach at Kurdnatta, among the drifting sands, they ate a meal of roasted muttonbird, baked cockles, which Weeip called ‘pipi’, biscuits, and dried dates. Then they drank a little tea, and gathered up their supplies in preparation for their first strike inland.

  Just before they mounted up again, Arthur came over to Eyre and said, ‘Supposing they send the troopers after us?’

  ‘Well,’ said Eyre. ‘Supposing they do?’

  ‘You wouldn’t want more killing, would you?’

  ‘Not if I could possibly avoid it.’

  ‘But you wouldn’t let them take me?’

  Eyre shaded his eyes so that he could see Arthur more clearly. The wind whistled through the spinifex grass, and blew the mane of Eyre’s horse so that it stung his hand.

  ‘I suppose I shouldn’t have asked,’ said Arthur, thrusting his hands into his pockets.

  ‘No,’ said Eyre. ‘We have nature to contend with, just at this particular moment. Let’s concern ourselves with troopers when we have to, but not before.’

  Dogger was watching them, from a short distance away. With his long-barrelled rifle on his back, and his wide-brimmed hat tugged well down over his eyes, he looked like the archetypal Australian bushman. Eyre thought to himself that one day there would be a statue erected to men like him; and it would look exactly as Dogger did now, in bronze.

  They rode slowly northwards under a high sun. There was no sound but the wind and the surf and the jingling of bridles. After a mile or so, Eyre turned in his saddle and listened and realised that he couldn’t hear the surf any longer. Ahead of them lay miles and miles of yellow grassy plain, dotted with saltbush and scrub, and far off to their right the first pink peaks of the Flinders mountains, mysteriously rising in the endless sea of the plains like enchanted and inaccessible islands.

  In the distance, scores of big red kangaroos flew through the grass; sending up sudden bursts of pipits. There could have been more than a hundred of them.

  Dogger drew his horse close up to Eyre’s, and pointed towards the Flinders. Those are the mountains I was telling you about. There, you can see them for yourself now. That’s where the Aborigines go for their ochre. It’s sacred, as far as they’re concerned. Magic. They dig it up, and then they mix it with water; or sometimes with emu fat; and they use orchid juice to stop it from running.’

  He rambled on, occasionally taking a swig from his bottle of French brandy, telling Eyre about the day that he had ridden into the Flinders and seen a thousand emus gathered together at once. ‘I watched them for hours. I thought perhaps the end of the world had come. The strangest sight I ever saw.’

  Eyre said, ‘What will Constance say, when she finds that you’ve gone?’

  Dogger sniffed. ‘Ah, she won’t mind. Well, she may. But what can she do about it? Besides, I was beginning to get suffocated, back there in Adelaide. It was like having a pillow pressed over my face. Too cosy and too polite for my liking.’

  He was silent for a while. Then he said, ‘Besides, she never loved me. She never believed that I was good enough.’

  ‘That’s not what she told me.’

  ‘You? You’re her darling. As far as Constance is concerned, you’re the best thing that happened to her since her cousin Ada drowned in a vat of maroon dye and left her fifty pounds.’ He sneezed, and added, ‘I’m not blind, you know, Eyre; and I’m not deaf, either, although I’m sometimes drunk. A man knows what goes on inside his own house.’

  Eyre looked at him cautiously, uncertain if he ought to say anything or not. He decided that it was probably wiser to keep quiet. Whatever Dogger’s suspicions about him and Constance, his desire to come north on this expedition had plainly outweighed any husbandly outrage he might be feeling. He seemed more contented now than Eyre could ever remember him; sitting easily in his saddle, his eyes narrowed towards the horizon with an expression of deep and happy hunger, as if he could devour the distance just by staring at it.

  Gradually, the sun began to sink on their left, and their shadows began to lean to their right. The Flinders Ranges, pink during the hottest part of the day, now began to glow a curious iridescent mauve. Eyre could see clumps of native pines on the foothills, and white, contorted gums. The ground itself wriggled with dry creekbeds and eroded gullies, most of which were bushy with bright lime-green acacia. More kangaroos fled across the plain like frightened waiters.

  The grass began to give way to mallee scrub and clumps of sharp spinifex. Joolonga urged his horse a little way forward to catch up with Eyre and Christopher, and said, ‘We should make camp soon, Mr Walker-sir. We have ridden far today. Tomorrow the land will become more difficult.’

  ‘Another half-an-hour,’ said Eyre. ‘The horses seem still quite fresh.’

  Christopher said, ‘The horses may still be quite fresh, but I’m absolutely exhausted. I feel as if my backside has grown to twenty times its usual size.’

  ‘In half-an-hour we can make four miles,’ Eyre told him. ‘That will be four miles fewer to ride tomorrow.’

  Arthur put in, ‘That’s four miles further away from Jack Ketch, as far as I reck
on it.’

  They stopped at last. The plain was dark and warm; although the sky was still luminous and light, and prickled all over with stars. The horses shuffled and scraped their hoofs; and Weeip knelt on the ground, busying himself with a firestick. Christopher had several times offered him lucifer-matches, but he had only stared at him mistrustfully, and shaken his curly head.

  Eyre and Christopher walked around the campsite to stretch their legs. Eyre had sores on the insides of his thighs now, and his penis had become tender from grit which had lodged under the foreskin. There was a dryness in his mouth and throat quite unlike any dryness he had experienced before; he felt as if his tongue had turned to rough, brushed-up suede, and his sinuses had shrunk and shrivelled like cured tobacco-leaves. When he blew his nose now, his sinuses produced no phlegm. There didn’t even seem to be any moisture between his eyeballs and his eyelids; and his eyes, like those of the rest of the party, were crimson from dust and glare.

  ‘Somewhere out there is the man they call Yonguldye,’ said Eyre reflectively, ‘I wonder where he is tonight? I wonder if he’s sensed that we’re looking for him? They say that a Mabarn Man can feel you coming from twenty miles away.’ Christopher slowly untied his scarf, with one hand, and then dragged it away from his dusty neck. ‘I can’t imagine how we’re going to find him. One man, in country like this. It goes on for ever.’

  Eyre was about to turn back to the fire when a slight movement in the darkness caught his eye. He gripped Christopher’s wrist, and said, ‘Ssh; there’s something there.’

  ‘As long as it’s not a bunyip, or Wulgaru the devil-devil,’ Christopher whispered; but all the same he stood still, and listened.

  The fire crackled. Arthur was talking to Joolonga in an intensive murmur, something about ‘I’ll lay you odds. Well, I will. I’ll lay you fifty-to-one.’

  Christopher frowned. ‘It’s nothing. Come on, you’re just tired. Probably nothing more frightening than a mallee fowl, raking a bit of extra soil on to its eggs. Got to keep the babies warm at night, after all.’

  He strolled back to the fire, and asked Weeip, ‘What’s on the menu tonight, young man? I’m famished.’

  ‘Me too,’ said Arthur. ‘I could eat a bloody horse.’

  Dogger spat into the fire. ‘Don’t make jokes about it,’ he said. ‘One day you may have to.’

  ‘Well, that’s charm itself,’ Arthur retorted. ‘Gobbing in the fire like that. Good luck for you there wasn’t no pot on it.’

  ‘What are you, the Governor’s chief advisor on campfire etiquette?’ Dogger demanded.

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake stop arguing,’ Christopher complained.

  ‘Well, damn it, here’s a man who’s been flogged, and locked up in jail and here he is trying to teach me manners,’ Dogger protested.

  ‘My old mother taught me my manners, not the government of New South Wales,’ Arthur shouted back at him. ‘And you wouldn’t catch my old mother gobbing in the fire. You wouldn’t catch none of my family gobbing in the fire. My Uncle Joe fell in the fire once, and burned half of his ear off, but he never gobbed in it, not once.’

  ‘What would you prefer?’ Dogger snapped at him. ‘Would you prefer me to throw my ear in the fire? Would that be polite enough for you? For Christ’s pity, years in those prison made you soft in the head.’

  Eyre said, ‘Quiet,’ and then, when the two of them continued to argue, he barked, ’Quiet!’

  They stopped bickering; and for one hallucinatory second, Eyre glimpsed four skeletons running through the scrub. He could hear nothing: no sound of feet running on hard-baked dust. No rustling of spinifex grass. Not even the soft clattering of spear-shafts. But he knew they were out there, daubed in their white pipe-clay bones; their faces reddened with the sacred ochre.

  ‘Joolonga,’ he called, quietly.

  ‘Yes, Mr Walker-sir?’

  Joolonga came up and stood beside him. He smelled strongly of fat and sweat and stale lavender-water.

  ‘Joolonga, is anybody following us?’

  Joolonga stared at him. The campfire was reflected in his eyes, two dancing orange sparks.

  Eyre said, ‘Are any blackfellows tracking us? Blackfellows painted like bone men?’

  Joolonga looked out into the night. It was much darker now already, and the last luminosity was fading in the west, ushering in, for this day at least, the black wing of Narahdarn, the messenger of death. ‘This is a kybybolite, nothing more,’ he told Eyre, in a soft, hoarse voice. ‘A place of ghosts, and unhappy spirits.’

  ‘Twaddle,’ snapped Eyre.

  ‘No, Mr Walker-sir,’ said Joolonga, calmly. There are men like ghosts; just as there are ghosts like men.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Yonguldye already knows that you are seeking him out, Mr Walker-sir. The bone-men you have seen are Yonguldye’s messengers, the ghosts from Yonguldye’s camp.’

  ‘If they know where Yonguldye is, why don’t they guide me to him?’

  Joolonga shrugged, and took out his pipe. ‘This journey means more than you understand, Mr Walker-sir. What you have decided to do has deep meaning both for your own people and also for the Aborigine. Both peoples see this journey with hope; both peoples see it with fear. Captain Sturt wants to find his inland sea, and his precious stones in the ground; but he is worried that the respect you will give to Aborigine magic may make it more difficult for him to take all of the land and the riches that he wants. Yonguldye is pleased that a white man is recognising the ancient beliefs from the dreamtime; but he also fears the other white men who will come after you. That is why his ghosts are following you. But, neither people can prevent this coming-together. It is something that must happen. It was prophesied in the dreamtime, and the story of it was written in the caves at Koonalda, in the desert called Bunda Bunda.’

  Eyre felt as if the ground had shifted under his feet. Offbalance, perplexed, as if Joolonga’s words had possessed the power to create a supernatural earth-tremor. The more he talked to Joolonga, the more unsure of himself he became; and the more he began to feel that as they journeyed forward into the interior, the further they were leaving behind them not just civilisation but time itself. Joolonga spoke like no Aborigine he had ever met before. It was not simply his wide European vocabulary that impressed Eyre: it was his ability to express Aboriginal ideas in white man’s language, to make his own people understandable.

  He had an inner perception, a clarity of thought, which even to Eyre was unexpected and disturbing. Eyre had never believed what most white settlers believed: that the Aborigines were idle, ignorant, savages; dirty and destructive; not even reliable enough to keep as servants. He had always seen magic in them, and understood something of their significance. But Joolonga was very different, and with each day they travelled deeper into tracklessness and timelessness, the difference became more apparent. It was like looking into the face of a wild animal, and suddenly realising that its eyes were knowing and human.

  Joolonga said, ‘Have you seen the bone-man before?’

  Eyre nodded.

  ‘Did they give you any signs? Any hand-signs? Or perhaps a bone?’

  Eyre unbuttoned his shirt pocket and took out the stone talisman which the Aborigine warriors had given him on Hindley Street. He passed it to Joolonga, who made a protective sign with his hand before he touched it, rather like the sign of the cross. Then he examined it carefully, turning it over and over in his fingers.

  ‘It is a magical stone,’ he said at last. These marks on it show that it belongs to Yonguldye, the one they call the Darkness. The stone has the power to draw you towards its owner, It is quite like the Kurdaitja shoes, only it works the other way.’

  Just then, Dogger came up, with his hands in his pockets. ‘What’s this, a Methodist prayer evening?’

  ‘Not quite,’ smiled Eyre.

  ‘Well, tuck’s ready when you are,’ said Dogger. He caught sight of the stone which Joolonga was turning over in his hand. ‘Wha
t’s that, a tjurunga? Let’s take a look.’

  Without comment, Joolonga obediently handed the stone to Dogger, although he kept his attention fixed on Eyre. Dogger joggled the stone up and down in the palm of his hand, and then said, ‘You know what this is, don’t you? You know where it came from?’

  Eyre shook his head.

  ‘It’s a shooting-star, or a piece of one. You can find them at the Yarrakina ochre mine, up at the place the blackfellows call Parakeelya. They think the stones were once the eyes of emus, back in the dreamtime, and that they give you power over all birds.’

  Eyre looked at Joolonga. ‘Didn’t you know what it was?’

  Joolonga’s eyes were glittery but uncommunicative. ‘I have never been to Yarrakina, Mr Walker-sir. I have never been further north than Edeowie.’

  ‘But surely you’ve seen one of these stones before?’

  Joolonga said nothing.

  Eyre said, ‘If this stone came from Yonguldye, then it seems likely that he must have been camped near Yarrakina. Perhaps he even sent it on purpose, to guide us.’

  ‘Well, it’s quite likely,’ Dogger sniffed. ‘The blackfellows travel from hundreds of miles away to dig out the ochre at Yarrakina. It’s supposed to be first-class magic; the best ochre you can get.’

  Eyre took the stone back, and dropped it into his pocket. ‘How far is Yarrakina?’

  ‘Couldn’t tell you exactly,’ Dogger admitted. ‘I only went that far north because I was hunting emu.’

  ‘You came all the way out here to hunt emu?’

  ‘Well, I was a younger man then,’ Dogger told them. He hesitated, and looked embarrassed, and then he said, ‘Also, some sheep-farmer over at Quorn had told me that some emus have diamonds in their crops.’