The Hard Light of Day

by Rod Moss

  The first thing I noticed as I unsnibbed the car door was Xavier slipping our knife under a blanket. Elaine and I felt awkward about starting our weekend with the issue of the knife, but I was sure we couldn’t let the matter slide. Mercia again started right into Xavier.

  ‘What you stealin’ from Rod for? He’s our friend. Where’s your shame?’

  We began setting up our camp. I struggled to belt some pegs into the pebbly surface for our mosquito net. We hadn’t counted on the swarms of flies in constant attendance. They heavied up Ronja’s eyelashes and Elaine improvised her a net from an onion bag. A few weeks in town and I’d forgotten what a pest they were. Except in the wettest of years, the town’s gradual greening since the 1970s seemed to make for an invisible deterrence to bush flies.

  As soon as the net was erected we retreated inside and watched fifty nyingke/finches flitting beneath a scraggly eremophila. As if by some subtle gaseous exchange, they seemed to have been inhaled holus-bolus by the shrub. Then, with twittering consensus, they would reappear and dash in sudden arcs for the water tank.

  After we ate our lunch, Gregory asked me to drive him 10 kilometres to Kevin Pick’s abode at Todd River Downs Station, in the hope of getting a nanny goat to eat. Kevin’s father, Taffy Pick, was born in Wales and had come to the Centre during the Depression and mined for gold at Arltunga. He married Ada Smith, a part Aboriginal woman, and had two daughters and a son with her. Ada was the sister of Walter and Willie Smith, both legendary bushmen. 8

  We crossed the Todd flood-out to get to Kevin’s sheds. The track was a mix of deep sand, riverbanks and ruts left by Kevin’s Toyota. Gidgee trees grew on the Little Well flank and boxwood on the Pinjee Pound side, where most of Kevin’s horses ran. The grass was lush after the rain and redolent with grasshoppers, on which the artewe, bush turkeys or buzzards, gorged themselves. David shot one from the car. It flew several metres then floundered to the ground. He also shot two kangaroos. The second didn’t fall, so we got out and trailed its blood drips. He could tell from its uneven tracks that it had taken the bullet in the left leg. After 15 minutes, he decided to track it later when we returned from Kevin’s. By then it would have weakened.

  There was an uneasy silence when we pulled up in front of Kevin’s caravan. He had fine, olive skin and bright penetrating blue eyes, the inheritance of his Welsh side. He was upset in the belief that the Johnsons wanted to have him run off the block at Pinjee on the Todd River Downs Station lease. He suspected the Johnsons were in league with the Central Land Council. This wasn’t the case. The government anthropologist had perpetrated this malice, setting him against the Johnsons. But the gossip still had him riled.

  ‘I seen that old man, Arranye, there talkin’ in court. He was makin’ like all youse Johnsons want this place for yourselves.’

  The old man had appeared in court to settle his claim on Little Well. The Central Land Council’s efforts to protect Indigenous interests were constantly buffeted by the Country Liberal Party government (which had enjoyed uninterrupted power for nearly a quarter of a century and ran shamelessly racist tactics at elections). The questions asked in court by the government counsel were couched so that Arranye’s relationship to Kevin didn’t emerge. The questions didn’t allow Arranye to expand very much. Nor did they reveal how he valued Kevin and didn’t want him chased off.

  Though Gregory and the others spoke to Kevin in Arrernte, in which he was fluent, he answered them in English. He belittled Peter, who stood on the far side of the vehicle, away from the rest of us.

  ‘What’s up with you, Peter? You’re pretty quiet there,’ he taunted. ‘You been drinking too much of that cheeky water again?’

  Kevin wanted David and Peter to do some fencing for him. They agreed and Kevin said he would pick them up later that week. We were in the car and about to leave when they finally broached the subject of the goat. Kevin promised to deliver it that night, which he did.

  Returning over the flood-out, we stopped and followed the roo tracks ten minutes further this time. The blood trail thickened. But then we lost the tracks. The animal turned into cushions of heavier grass and its narrow path became embowered in burr-heavy weeds. We had one roo anyway and goat to follow. I wasn’t usually one to salivate around the barbecue, but I regarded fresh roo as the chocolate of meats. I ate breathlessly that evening, with a canine ferocity that tickled Dominic.

  ‘Look like it eatin’ you, Rod,’ he laughed.

  Arranye had once told me that he preferred euro to plains kangaroo. He showed me a birthmark on his calf muscle, the same place where roos were speared. He wasn’t so cautious as to abstain, but he wouldn’t relish it, mindful of his link to the plains kangaroo through his Dreaming.

  We left for town the next morning, while the buzzard boiled in an old flour drum, the offal being fought over by Gregory’s dogs.

  ‘Don’t forget. You tell Ingkerreke mob we be here when you get home,’ Gregory reminded me.

  Gregory was now able to contact the Ingkerreke Outstation Service Centre in town on his new solar-powered radio. Unfortunately for him, the radio was a one-way machine. The town end was not always attended and he would sometimes spend a frustrating day or two trying to get through.

  Whenever they made it into town, they would spend the morning at Coles getting fresh meat to last the first few days. There was no refrigeration so they’d also get tinned meat, usually corned beef. There would be tea, sugar, flour, salt and cooking oil. Once the meat ran out, they were left to forage for lizards to supplement the tea and damper. Gregory didn’t have a gun and his one eye wasn’t good enough anyway. He’d lost an eye as a teenager when playing around a munitions dump in the 1950s. His mate’s finger had exploded in his face.

  If kids were there, they would have their slingshots out for budgerigars and zebra finches. The small birds never ventured far from water and were easy to disturb into flocks, which swelled into a larger target. Dozens of puny carcasses could be pinged within half an hour. Pigeons also provided supplementary flesh. Urbanised whitefellas invariably recoiled from what they saw as cruelty in the Indigenous kids who played with lizards and birds until their last twitches of life had been teased out of them.

  During Gregory’s longer absences from the outstation, such as a recent funeral, the dogs would have to fend for themselves. They were an odd assortment of colours, shapes and sizes. ‘Lady’ was his favourite and boss of the pack. Lady had been resourceful enough to be the sole survivor of two starvation stanzas. Gregory had returned to find the dogs dead around the sheds. He could never gain continuous occupancy of Little Well without a vehicle of his own. Moreover, with his poor vision he couldn’t get a licence, and his younger brothers regularly lost their licences from driving convictions.

  IT WAS HEARTENING TO DEVELOP my relationship with Arranye. He loved Ronja and called her his little tyape akweke or witchetty grub. Without subscribing to Arrernte perceptions, I could resonate with his description of her as an appetising morsel. I kissed and made myself dizzy on the scent of her gorgeous little fat body.

  ‘Too much greedy for that one,’ said the old man.

  Arranye sang his ‘emu walking’ medicine song over a tin of fat that had been infused with utnerrenge/emu bush. He then rubbed it along Ronja’s legs to ‘strengthen them’. The emu bush, with its drooping leaves and red flowers, was easy to identify. An elegantly patterned edible grub, utnerrengatye fed on its leaves. Knowledge of its medicinal properties was widespread among the Arrernte. It was used to brush sacred objects and babies were sometimes held over the smoke of its burning leaves. Young initiates also were smoked with emu bush.

  Many of the kids in camp received Arranye’s emu walking medicine. He regarded most of the Arrernte kids as his grandchildren. They were all little grubs living under the power of the Emily Gap Dreaming. And he related to Ronja in this way too.

  ‘I be spoil them proper,’ h
e would say.

  When the mobile food van rolled into camp, he would hurriedly dig his pockets for coins and pass them around to the kids, who delighted in ice creams, lollies and soft drinks.

  The Whitegate kids often came to our house, with or without adults. They played with Ronja and everything else within reach. Trinkets, toys, pens and papers were shifted within minutes of them entering. And they were in and out constantly, never shutting the door no matter how often I reminded them. There were no doors to speak of at camp. They always asked for fruit. Sometimes we noticed small change had gone after their departure.

  At one stage Ricky Ryder entered the house twice during the day when we were out, taking food and a few dollar coins near the phone. Another time he larked off with Elaine’s bike. I complained to his mother, Jennifer Johnson, and said we wanted him to return the bike. She sent him to guide me to it in the scrub. Reluctantly, we started locking the door after that and being more careful about leaving coins about the place.

  About two months later, Ricky broke a window after finding the house locked. He took some eggs and a few oranges. No great detective work on my part. The shells and peels were on the kitchen counter. I approached Jennifer and Eric Neil, his step-dad, and asked for recompense for the window. They promised to pay me the following pension day. On that day, Jennifer called me over to a card game. She had raised the eighty dollars from her winnings, and counted off four twenties boisterously before the small gambling circle.

  As I left she said, ‘Hey Rod, you got any eggs?’

  We had chickens, but they had just gone off the lay. ‘No.’

  ‘What about between your legs?’

  ‘Yeah. Eggs between the legs,’ chimed Eric.

  The gambling circle erupted in laughter. I stared back with an embarrassed grin.

  IT HAD OCCURRED TO ME that Dominic’s athletic ease and perennial cowboy apparel made him an attractive portrait model, so I invited him to pose for drawing classes at college. He was shy at first but, once he got the hang of it, he loved posing and wandered from easel to easel in the breaks to see the many Dominic heads. His presence yielded terrific work, the students really lifting their standards.

  Dominic wanted to draw the students, but we ran out of time. When I paid him, he handed back half, being money he owed me. Then he asked me to drive him over to Charles Creek to get his rifle. When we arrived, his brother told him the gun was hidden in an ironwood tree, somewhere in the bush near Iltyarrkwe/‘sixteen mile’ creek. We drove north up the Stuart Highway as I kept an eye on the odometer. It was all random bush to me. Suddenly Dominic told me to stop. He wandered a hundred metres into the scrub and, sure enough, there was the gun, stashed for the past fortnight in the fork of the old tree.

  One day I invited the Whitegate men to come to our home that afternoon to watch a TV documentary that was being screened. The subject was the state of the cattle industry in Central Australia, and the men had taken part in two days of filming at the request of the film crew. Dominic still did occasional stock work and wanted to see the film also. I had already arranged with Arranye to take him to his appointment at the Congress Dental Clinic to have his remaining lower front teeth removed. His gums were infected and his teeth had almost fallen out from a lifetime of dental neglect. At the clinic, we waited longer in the queue than I’d anticipated. I felt anxious that we wouldn’t get home in time for the TV show.

  During the next two months we made five visits to prepare a set of dentures. I’d sit next to him and read the captions and dialogue displayed in the health charts stuck on the walls of the clinic. There were enlarged laminated photos of Aboriginal kids eating all the appropriate foods that contributed to healthy teeth – fruits and dairy produce that made the kids have big cheesy grins. One day he gave me a dig in the ribs.

  ‘Might be I get one red apple when I get me eatin’ machine, my boy. You take me Eastside shop, I be get it. Oh that make me happy.’

  The Whitegate mob were ambling up the driveway, right on time, as Arranye and I wheeled in from the clinic. The documentary revealed the strong links between the Northern Territory government and the lease-holding cattle barons but the most disappointing aspect for us was the fleeting grab on the families. Here they were again, being edited as victims into a minute or two of TV time. The most galling aspect was the whitefella Hayes, leaseholder of Undoolya, contemptuously referring to the families at Whitegate as being worth much less than their cattle.

  ‘These blacks took up useful space,’ he said. ‘And what did they produce?’

  I could feel the ripple of resentment in the lounge room. The older generation had helped raise the Hayes now on camera, and respected Ted senior and his son. Although they retained property access for hunting, a rift now existed in the relationship.

  ‘Old Ted Hayes was proper good to Aboriginal people,’ said Arranye. ‘He be give it flash American cowboy shirt at Christmas. Not rubbish one, like you see today.’

  He took a handkerchief from his pocket to wipe away the spittle that had gathered in the corners of his mouth.

  ‘He talk our lingo, right through that one. Always give us feed and proper Christmas party. Whole mob.’

  Before Aboriginal people were given citizenship and voting rights in the 1960s, many lived on cattle stations such as Undoolya. Arranye and the older Hayes men had plenty of contact with their country and continued their cultural responsibilities. But equal citizenship helped make a case for equal pay, which made it impossible for the cattle industry to sustain such a labour-intensive means of farming. The beef industry had been synonymous with Aboriginal labour. A number of factors contributed to the picture today. I could sense that life in camp now, waiting for the fortnightly unemployment benefit – or ‘sit down money’ as it was often called – was more disruptive.

  Until that afternoon, David had never been to the house. He sat cross-legged on the carpet, a partly smoked tailor-made cigarette tucked behind his right ear. When the show finished he went outside to re-light his smoke.

  ‘Young fella,’ he beckoned to me.

  It surprised me to hear David address me so when I was probably ten years older than him. But in Arrernte kinship I was in a son relationship to him, just as I was with his brother, Arranye. I filed through the door after the others, and over to where he stood beneath the grapevine, flicking ash.

  ‘ Kwementyaye [Kevin Pick] more fair to work for. He not cheeky for Johnson mob. I be catch horses for him. Night horses. Creep up on them in dark and rope them legs. Four hundred dollar that Kwementyaye be give it. Four hundred this month and any month I be work it.’

  As sunset approached, the men squashed inside the car. Arranye sat up front, sunglasses on, both hands resting on his stick nestled between his legs. David jammed in beneath the hatch and I lowered it behind him.

  ‘Oh my son. That TV talk make me too much sorry. Might be better thing when we get Loves Creek Station runnin’. My number seven bore there, near Limbla.’

  The Central Land Council was helping to concentrate political action and create balanced dialogue in the process of accessing land on Crown and pastoral leases. With the Council’s assistance, the Johnsons were hoping to take over the Loves Creek Station when the whitefella Bloomfields vacated their lease.

  ‘David and Gregory got Little Well. I been help them get it. I gotta be get that Number 7 bore. Oh, sweet water there. Can grow it pumpkin, watermelon, anything you like it. Put in chicken and nanny goat.’

  He got out and shuffled towards the glow of his fire, the other men dispersing to their own camps.

  6The original buildings were constructed for the people operating the Alice Springs repeater station in 1872. Today there are four beautiful stone buildings, which were rebuilt from the old foundations. In one of the buildings, there were photographs of the various families that had worked the station at the turn of the nineteenth century. There wa
s one photo of Arrernte standing on the large rock on the eastern flank of the Athereyurre/waterhole. Otherwise, the black history of the place had been minimised. There was no mention, for instance, of the Aboriginal Ordinance of 1911 that empowered the Protector of Aborigines in 1932 to round up kids of mixed descent and place them at the station. This paucity of information was redressed in the late 1990s when the Stolen Generation controversy was in the public domain.Back

  7Amoonguna was set up in 1960 by the government as a showcase for its assimilation policies. High on the agenda was the removal of blackfellas from the town, after dark. All blackfellas, that is, not just Arrernte. The resulting mix of cultural groups created its special brew of difficulties. Offensive vagrancy, grog abuse and violence were established practices at the settlement according to newspaper reports of those times. The same complaints about blackfellas made in today’s papers were articulated just as vehemently then. The journalists had changed. But the blackfella family names endured into the current policy of self-determination.Back

  8Walter, the subject of Dick Kimber’s evocative history, Man from Arltunga, was born in 1893 and bred in Arranye’s country. He created the well by dynamite at Uluralkwe/Little Well in 1929. Though of mixed descent, he was a major law man and teacher, an Ingkarte. Like Walter, as a youth Arranye frequently journeyed from Oodnadatta with Afghan cameleers, servicing various pastoral properties. Willie, Walter’s brother, later took the lease on Todd River Downs Station, at Pinjee, from old Ted Hayes. Willie’s nephew Kevin Pick, who had worked the horses for him, now occupies the station. The Johnsons made a successful fight in court for the tiny excision of land at Little Well, after a neighbouring pastoralist, one of the Bloomfields, bulldozed the well to discomfort them.Back

  ROCKS AND HARD PLACES

  ARRANYE, RONJA

  AND ME IN

  ARRANYE’S SHED