Corroboree

by Graham Masterton

  Joolonga translated, and Yonguldye seemed to be satisfied with that answer, for he walked all the way around them, nodding and sucking noisily at his gums, and then with a hand like a galah’s claw, he beckoned them to follow him into his shelter.

  Dogger hesitated at first, but Eyre took his arm, and they bent their heads down and made their way under the clattering skulls around the entrance into the darkness of Yonguldye’s lair.

  The stench inside the shelter was overpowering. Grease, and sweat, and aromatic herbs, and a smell like decaying fish, which turned out to be an overripe sea-bird which Yonguldye must have been keeping for his breakfast. There were already five other tribespeople inside the shelter; a thin-ribbed boy whom Eyre guessed to be Yonguldye’s assistant; and four women; one of them grey-haired and elderly, with a face which looked as if it had been squeezed in a wine-press; the other three far younger. The youngest of them all, who couldn’t have been much older than fifteen, was unusually attractive, with very long black curly hair tied with twine, and that rare glossy look about her skin which the effects of harsh sunlight and an irregular diet had not yet dried away. Her face was as Aboriginal as any of her tribe but it was unmarked and unpainted, except for two tiny scars on her cheek and the more he looked at her, the prettier Eyre thought that she was. Her breasts were very large for her age, high and brown-nippled; although there was only the lightest fan-like growth of dark hair between her thighs. Christopher noticed the way that Eyre looked at her, and made a point of crossing the shelter in front of him, to obstruct his view.

  ‘Sit,’ said Yonguldye, and they eased themselves awkwardly down on the heaps of greasy-smelling kangaroo hides with which the floor of his shelter was carpeted. ‘Food, and water?’ he asked, and Joolonga nodded in appreciation, although Eyre realised with chagrin that because he was supposed to be a djanga, returned from the dead, he would not be able to eat anything.

  Yonguldye knew very little English. Most of it he had picked up during the bad dry of 1838, when he and his tribe had been forced to camp close to a mission at New Norcia in order to survive the summer. He quickly lapsed into Nyungar, and Eyre had to depend on Joolonga’s translation to follow the conversation. He felt uneasy about that: Joolonga seemed to be in a peculiarly uneasy mood this evening, snappy with Eyre and exaggeratedly subservient towards Yonguldye.

  ‘You have come to ask me to journey to Adelaide and bury the boy Yanluga according to proper ritual?’ Yonguldye asked Eyre, through Joolonga.

  ‘That’s right,’ Eyre told him. ‘He was given a Christian burial; but his soul will never join his ancestors unless he is given the rites in which he believed.’

  ‘You were responsible for his death. Why should you be so concerned about his burial?’

  ‘Because it is my duty.’

  ‘And not simply because you are frightened that his spirit will never give you rest?’

  ‘I am already at rest.’

  Yonguldye nodded in assent. This was obviously a good reply.

  ‘Will I be rewarded for journeying to Adelaide?’ he wanted to know.

  ‘Whatever you want. Food, clothing, knives.’

  ‘Who will give me these things?’

  ‘Captain Sturt. In fact, Captain Sturt will give you many more things if you help him further.’

  Yonguldye looked suspicious. ‘What further help does he want? This is not part of the legend.’

  Joolonga interrupted here, and raised a hand towards Eyre to warn him not say any more. Yonguldye listened carefully to what Joolonga was saying occasionally sucking back the saliva from his toothless gums, and grunting to indicate that he understood.

  ‘What’s going on?’ asked Eyre.

  Joolonga said, ‘Yonguldye has agreed to travel to Adelaide to perform the proper burial rites over Yanluga’s body. He thanks you for your concern for Yanluga’s soul. He says that you are obviously a wise and compassionate djanga.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘He has agreed that in return for your magical knowledge, he will help us to locate a place he knows where there are firestones to be found.’

  ‘Firestones?’

  ‘Opals, Mr Walker-sir. He says there is a place near Caddibarrawinnacarra where firestones can be found; but this is a difficult place to reach, and he will have to guide us there. He cannot describe it to us.’

  ‘Where the hell’s Caddibarrawinnacarra?’ Dogger wanted to know. ‘I’ve never heard of the place.’

  ‘Beyond,’ said Joolonga. ‘Yonguldye says kononda, which means northwest’.

  ‘There’s nothing out there but fried charra,’ growled Dogger. For Yonguldye’s benefit, he had deliberately used the Aboriginal word for ‘emu shit’.

  ‘Nonetheless, Yonguldye says the firestones are there; very many of them. Tomorrow he can show us some of the firestones that his own people have dug up.’

  Eyre said, ‘What about the route to the inland sea? Does he know anything about that?’

  Joolonga spoke to Yonguldye for three or four minutes. There was more nodding between them, and then Joolonga said, ‘He knows of a route northwards, and he says his ancestors came that way, but he has never been further north himself than the place where the magic kangaroo came to slake its thirst.’

  ‘Where’s that?’ asked Dogger, with a sniff. ‘The Queen’s Head Tavern in Kermode Street?’

  ‘No, a place called Callanna,’ said Joolonga, humourlessly.

  Eyre put in, ‘If the magic kangaroo came there to drink, then surely there must be water there.’

  ‘Probably just a waterhole,’ said Christopher.

  Joolonga spoke to Yonguldye further, and this time Yonguldye rose up on to his knees, his ghost-gum spigot sticking straight out from between his legs, and stretched his arm wildly towards the north, again and again, and talked in a furious babble.

  Joolonga said, ‘Yonguldye has seen the ocean himself from Callanna. He looked in the distance and it was there. The sea-birds were flying that way, and he is sure that the shoreline can be reached in less than a day’s walking.’

  Eyre looked around at Christopher and Dogger and his eyes were bright with pleasure. ‘Well, my friends,’ he said. ‘It seems that we may be able to achieve everything we set out to achieve. Yanluga’s burial, Captain Sturt’s opal mine, and the discovery of the great inland sea. We’re going to be rich and celebrated yet.’

  ‘If only you could drink to that,’ said Christopher.

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Eyre. ‘If only I could.’

  Twenty-Four

  That evening, the gorge rang with the chanting and singing of the greatest corroboree that had been held in South Australia since the days before the white men came. That, at least, was the opinion of the old grey-haired woman who turned out to be Yonguldye’s senior wife, and to whom he always referred as unkeegeega, which, whether he meant it ironically or not, meant ‘young girl’.

  Eyre saw nothing that evening of the pretty young girl who had been sitting at the back of Yonguldye’s shelter, but that was hardly surprising. He was surrounded all evening by warriors from six or seven different tribes, all of whom seemed to feel that sitting close to the mythical white-skinned djanga was a matter of great prestige; and all of whom were very curious about his paleness, and his uncircumcised penis. None of them spoke any English whatsoever; and so Eyre was restricted to smiles and nods and indulgent shakes of his head.

  The food came first. Roasted emu, bloody and scorched, but smelling delicious to men who hadn’t eaten fresh meat for days. Mallee fowl, their eggs served raw. Skinks, stripped of their legs and peeled of their skins, and dangled over the fire on spits. And with all of this feast, plenty of cold fresh water and Bunya Bunya pine-nuts.

  Only Eyre had to remain hungry and thirsty; sitting cross-legged in the centre of his circle of inquisitive protectors; while Christopher and Dogger and Midgegooroo sat around a fire not far away, laughing and talking with a small group of Aborigines who had travelled here from Streaky Bay, an
d devouring as they did so whole breasts of emu until their feces glistened and the fat ran in rivers down their stomachs and into their pubic hair.

  Later, the women silently withdrew to their shelters and to their own cooking-fires; and the men performed a sacred dance. Joolonga told Eyre that this was the dance usually seen at funerals, when the body had been interred, and fires were burned for days on end, while the family looked around for magical signs explaining what had caused the death.

  The men looked ferocious and other-worldly in the firelight. Most of them had circles of white painted around their eyes, and skeletal outlines painted on their bodies. They jumped and shuffled and spun around; shaking their spears and swinging their clubs; while scores of sticks were tapped and beaten, and boomerangs were clapped together, and hollow wooden flutes blew that deep, vibrant song that now and forever would make the hairs rise on the back of Eyre’s neck.

  Sparks flew from the cooking-fires into the darkness; dancers whirled and shouted; and from the entrance to his shelter, Yonguldye the Mabarn Man watched the corroboree with the air of an elderly hawk, watching his revelling young.

  After the dancing was over, the tribesmen gathered around, and Yonguldye stepped forward and spoke to them. His speech was long, and involved, and sounded very discursive, because Eyre saw several of the tribesmen yawning and looking impatiently around. It amused him to think that even in a primitive society which had remained almost completely unchanged since the dawn of time, there were still men who gave tedious speeches, and still men who had to stand around and listen to them.

  Over and over again, Yonguldye talked about the djanga, and shook his bony arm towards Eyre; and every time he did so, there would be a responsive murmur from the assembled tribesmen. It sounded like ‘moomoomoomery’, and incongruously it reminded Eyre of Mrs McMurtry, Lathrop Lindsay’s cook on the day that he had gone around to Waikerie Lodge to take Charlotte for a romantic constitutional.

  Eventually, Yonguldye untied from his belt a kind of rattle, made of the skull of a young rock-wallaby hafted with gum on to the leg-bone of a kangaroo. Inside the skull there must have been pebbles, or dried macrozamia nuts, because when Yonguldye shook it there was a hollow, echoing sound, like a man desperately trying not to die of cholera. As soon as he shook it, a short imperative burst of noise, all the tribesmen sank silently to their knees, two hundred bowed black heads against a background of twisting orange camp-fires, and Yonguldye hopped and rattled and danced, and uttered a long, sharp, dry-voiced incantation.

  ‘He is calling on Baiame to bless this meeting,’ said Joolonga. ‘He is telling the people here that this night will be remembered for all time, just as the gods of the dreamtime are always remembered.’

  Eyre said nothing, but watched as the tribesmen began to disperse, and return to their shelters and their fires, some of them high up in the rocks, others beside the creek which splashed through the centre of the gorge.

  Yonguldye called to Joolonga, and Joolonga said, ‘He wants to talk to you before you sleep.’ Eyre thought: thank God he doesn’t think that spirits stay awake all night. Together they crossed the rocky ground to the entrance of Yonguldye’s shelter, and there Yonguldye stared at Eyre and said, in what sounded like formal and dignified language, ‘The story is complete. You have returned from the sunset and now you are here. Tomorrow you will give me all the magical knowledge that you possess; and we will take back all the lands and the sacred places that we have lost.’

  Yonguldye paused, and then he said, ‘You have the stone?’

  Eyre beckoned Midgegooroo, who came forward with his satchel. Eyre reached inside it, and produced the engraved tektite which had been given to him on Hindley Street.

  ‘You are truly the djanga,’ said Yonguldye. ‘Look—there is a shelter for you where you can sleep tonight. Tomorrow we will talk more. Tomorrow we will celebrate your coming, and your departure.’

  Christopher and Dogger had been taken to a humpy shelter on the far side of the gorge. If Eyre knew anything about Dogger, he had eaten and drunk far too much, and had already fallen asleep. Christopher he knew would be awake, and fretful. Christopher always was. But tomorrow they would be able to set out on their journey to find the opal mine; and beyond, to the great inland sea; and that was exciting enough to overwhelm any apprehension that Eyre felt about their safety among the Aborigines. Tomorrow, they would set out on the journey that would make them great men; the journey that would discharge his moral debt to Yanluga; and which would win him Charlotte back. They would be heroes: Walker, Willis, and McConnell. Names to be taught in schools for the rest of recorded time.

  Eyre’s shelter was constructed of gum branches and brush, woven together, Like Yonguldye’s, it was filled with kangaroo skins, in which Eyre could wrap himself up and sleep. His rifle, which he had left in Yonguldye’s shelter during the corroboree, had carefully been laid at the far end of the shelter, still loaded, and respectfully polished for him.

  Exhausted by a day of travelling and an evening of Aborigine celebration, Eyre crawled naked into the shelter and lay down on the coarse-haired kangaroo skins. He thought of going to talk to Joolonga about what they would be doing in the morning; and whether Weeip was safe, all alone on the far side of the ridge. But even with his face pressed against stinking kangaroo leather, his eyes began to close, and within four or five minutes the tapping rhythm of the boomerangs which was still going on outside began to fade from real perception, and reappear in his dreams.

  He dreamed of murmuring voices, and silhouettes of blackfellows, like the strange lithographs of W.H. Fernyhough; black profiles and stylised poses. He heard rattling and shaking, and the whistling they called bimblegumbie. And all the time there was the over-and-over motion of boomerangs, vertiginous and sickening, like riding on a swing-boat at a fair.

  He awoke with a shock. Someone had touched his thigh. He twisted his head around so quickly that he tugged the muscle, and hurt himself.

  Black against the midnight sky was the shape of a girl, on her hands and knees. She had crawled into the shelter and woken him; and now she was waiting anxiously to see what his reaction would be. He recognised the long soft curly hair. He recognised the sightly slanting eyes. He also recognised the faintly herbal smell of Yonguldye’s shelter, which she carried on her skin mingled with the aroma of sour grease and young-womanly perspiration.

  ‘What do you want?’ he whispered. Then, when she didn’t answer, ‘Minago?’ which was the same question in dialect.

  She covered her mouth with her hand, to tell him that he should be very quiet. Then she wriggled up close to him, and lay down beside him on the kangaroo skins, and whispered back, ‘My name is Minil. I speak English-language. They taught me English-language at mission-school. I was the class top at English-language.’

  ‘If you speak English, what are you doing here?’ Eyre asked her.

  ‘I was at the mission-school at New Norcia when Yonguldye and his people stayed there. When they left, I followed them. I wanted to find my own people. No longer cooking and washing and learning Holy Scriptures. I wanted to be free like Yonguldye and his people.’

  ‘But?’ asked Eyre.

  ‘But?’ Minil frowned. ‘I didn’t say but.’

  ‘You say no but; but there is but in your voice.’

  Minil was quiet for a moment; then she said, ‘Yonguldye is a strange cruel man. Now I wish to leave him, go back to mission-school. Mrs Humphreys.’

  ‘Are you married to Yonguldye? Are you one of his wives?’

  She shook her head. ‘He does not like me. He says I have devils in me. But he makes me work hard, cooking for him, making magic powder. Cure powder, for sick. Sometimes insect drink.’

  She hesitated, and then she said, ‘Wait,’ and wriggled her way back to the entrance of the shelter. She came back straight away, with a wooden bowl full of water and a large curved piece of flaking bark, in which she had wrapped four or five large chunks of cold roasted emu breast.


  Eyre propped himself up on one elbow, until his head was almost touching the main supporting branch of his shelter. But he was too hungry to worry about whether or not he might destroy his temporary palace. He crammed the half-cooked meat into his mouth, chewing it as quickly as he could; and then washed it down with gulps of cold spring-water. He belched twice; but he couldn’t have felt less ashamed. He had sat there all evening, stark naked, watching hundreds of other people eat. Now it was his turn.

  Once his hunger had begun to abate, however, and his chewing had slowed down, he turned to look at Minil with suddenly awakening suspicion.

  ‘I’m a djanga,’ he said. ‘You realise that I don’t usually eat this stuff. I’m only doing it so that I won’t hurt your feelings. You realise that, don’t you? Normally, in the spirit world, we survive on … well, on clouds, air, things like that.’

  ‘You are not a djanga,’ said Minil. Her nipple was pressing against his right arm, and he was beginning to feel surges that had nothing at all to do with Yonguldye, or Captain Sturt’s opals, or tonight’s corroboree.

  ‘Of course I’m a djanga,’ he insisted. ‘It’s in the story. The djanga returns to earth from the land where the sun sets; accidentally causes the death of a young Aborigine boy; and goes to the clever-man to seek forgiveness. That’s me; that’s why I’m here. Seeking Yonguldye’s forgiveness.’

  ‘Yonguldye knows that you are not a djanga,’ Minil told him.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Yonguldye knows that you are not a djanga. He knows that you are nothing but a white man. You cannot be a djanga because djanga never eat.’

  Eyre chewed even more slowly. ‘Sometimes we do,’ he said, in a petulant voice. ‘Just to keep in practice.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Minil. ‘But you are not one of them. And anyway Yonguldye believes that the old story foretells the landing of the white men, not the coming of the dead. A white man will kill an Aborigine boy; perhaps by mistake, perhaps not. But he will travel through the desert seeking a medicine-man who will forgive him for what he did.’