by Peter Docker
Macca walks past the group of cops still pointing their weapons at the departing figure of Smokey.
I’d get well fucken back if I were you, Macca says under his breath as he slides past.
Macca arrives at the Land Rover. Izzy slides across into the driver’s seat, and starts her up. They roar off.
Smithers sits up.
Someone is swinging a fifteen-pound sledgehammer at the base of his skull. Each time it hits he feels like he is driven a little more into the concrete floor. He listens. Nothing. Just the sledgehammer. And that’s inside. He slumps forward. His head in his hands. He hears a sound from out near the front door. Desert wind. He turns, and looks into the cell. Mort is hanging by his neck from a belt looped up through the top bar of the cell window. That bar shouldn’t be there, thinks Smithers. Mort has a bloody hole in the centre of his chest. Smithers doesn’t know who he is. He has a vague memory of someone else being here. An Old Man maybe? He rubs his eyes. They are sore as if he’s been sitting by a fire all night, burning green wood. Smithers notices the .38 lying next to him. He picks it up. There is that sound again. He looks back to the front door of the station, and Smokey steps into the cell area. Smithers takes him in, the bomb vest, the hand-held detonator with thumb held down on the red button, and the bleeding. Smokey sees Smithers and stops. He steps again, and looks into the cell. Mort is hanging there, bloody hole in his heart. He looks back to Smithers. Smokey looks as if he wants to smile, but can’t. Eventually he manages with great effort to relax the tiny muscles at the sides of his eyes, just to soften them a little. Smithers is watching his thumb going all loose on the detonator.
Smokey’s hands come up from his sides. Out. Reach out. Like Jesus. Like he’s reaching for something. Feeling for something. A song, maybe.
Acknowledgements
Special thanks: Jane Cunningham, Pauline and Bill Johnson, Simon Gilby, Lynette Narkle, Aaron Pedersen, Richard Frankland, June Oscar, Patsy Bedford, Trevor Jamieson, Alice Haines, Lockie McDonald, Dorothy Dimer, Amos Pennington, Steven Sinclair, Young Miss Trott, Tara Wynne, and Georgia Richter.
I would like to acknowledge a number of sources referred to in this novel which, although they are often approximations, are nonetheless drawn from or influenced by the following: Laurence Binyon’s ‘For the Fallen’ (p 24), Geoffrey Wright’s Romper Stomper (pp 34–35), William Shakespeare’s Hamlet (pp 72 & 166), James Cameron’s Terminator (p 145), George Lucas’s Star Wars, (p 150), Louis Armstrong’s ‘Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off’ (p 168), Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather III (p 169), Steven Greenberg’s ‘Funkytown’ (p 169), The Bible, Matthew 16:18 (p 172), Jim Cox’s FernGully: The Last Rainforest (p 180), Ned Kelly’s Jerilderie Letter (p 175), Trevor Jamieson’s Ngapartji Ngapartji (p 197), Peter Faiman’s Crocodile Dundee (p 206), Ben Michael’s ‘The Company Tit’ (p 209), Tupac Shakur’s ‘Ghetto Gospel’ (p 212), Kev Carmody,’s ‘River of Tears’ (p 214), The Wachowski Brothers’ The Matrix (pp 182 & 233), Enid Blyton’s The Famous Five (pp 240 & 241), Rob Riley (p 240), Nelly’s ‘Ride Wit Me’ (p 246), Al Jolson’s ‘My Mammy’ (p 251), John Hillcoat’s The Proposition (pp 284–285) and Henry Hathaway’s True Grit (p 295).
Also available from Fremantle Press
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‘...a deeply sensitive and at times intensely visceral engagement with contemporary indigenous culture ... it is also a powerful historical document, which has at its heart the struggle of a non-indigenous author trying to find an authentic position from which to discuss the indigenous culture...’
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