by Rod Moss
FOR LONG PERIODS, Elaine and I seemed content, and no issues were raised. For me, the sheer joy of Ronja and the work of nurturing were sufficient glue for our relationship. I didn’t regard Elaine’s occasional dissenting remark with gravity, especially since our marriage was not argumentative.
In May 1988 Elaine went to Melbourne for a month and I joined her there for the week of the semester break. Upon returning she again voiced her feelings about monogamy and said she needed to show her love to others. She also talked of her need to travel regularly, saying it was in her blood. She felt like a poor relation to her rich friends living interstate, she told me, and felt that becoming involved with the Herbalife pyramid sales company was her answer to creating wealth.
Mid-August and the ants re-emerged along tentative memory lanes. They stuttered in broken files, burdened with nesting detritus. The final weeks of winter would run hot and cold before the unmitigated hotter weather asserted itself. By then the numbers of ants would have accelerated so they formed into continuous black columns. Cockroaches, also harbingers of the encroaching heat, slunk out from their dormancy within bark and woodwork. The roaches scurried furtively, inviting my scornful eye. Gyrating dust whirls erupted, sucking litter 50 metres into their intestines. They augured over tracks, plains and hills, sniffing disdainfully and then spewing their cargo. When I walked the hills, angepe, the crow, veered close to my exposed pate, warding me off its nearby nest of infants.
In December 1988, over the Christmas break, Elaine, Ronja and I travelled to Melbourne. The first day back in town in early January of the new year I saw Jude with Michael Stewart and Bartholomew. They were sauntering down the pedestrian ramp of the Yeperenye undercover car park. Jude broke from them, tearful and distressed. His emaciation worried me, as he wandered unsteadily towards me. He explained that Iris and he were going through hard times. So I asked him to come home. He wanted to see the ‘business book’ and reminded me that, with summer halfway through, initiation ‘business’ would be starting again soon. We talked about marriage and sex and the differences in our cultures. He said our freedom of choice was ‘more better’. But, given the parlous state of my marriage at the time, I didn’t hurriedly agree. He felt he had to leave Whitegate as the pressure from family was too great on him.
‘Iris wrong side for me,’ he told me. ‘If she die, I get this leg poked with spear, I suppose. Whitefella marriage more easy than blackfella way.’
‘Sometimes we debate about staying with each other,’ I answered.
‘But whitefella can just get up and go. He don’t have family come round and make it cheeky for him.’
That might be true in Alice Springs where most whitefella families came from somewhere else, I thought. Well, that’s how Jude saw it anyway. Still, both marriages were problematic.
Days later, Iris turned up after lunch and pleaded with me to look for Jude. She was frightened of the other Johnsons and wanted me to attend camp with her. When we arrived Jude was asleep on the ground in the noonday sun. Ants with singular persistence filed over him without disturbing his slumber. I wanted to leave him be. Despite telling Xavier not to wake him, he spilled a pannikin of water in Jude’s ear. Jude shook the water off then opened his eyes. When he saw Iris, he said he was now a ‘single man’ and told her to leave. She had been snubbed. Without contest, she turned and walked off towards town.
Iris disappeared from our lives within the next month. I asked after her and Jude said she had ‘been finish, somewhere back in her own country’. Whether the secret of her men’s knowledge had been divulged, I never knew.
SUMMER RAINS HAD REPLENISHED the waterholes. We swam a lot during these warmer months in the pool by the Telegraph Station. 9 We would usually pick up some kids from Whitegate and squeeze them into the car. One Saturday afternoon John Hayes, Xavier and Bartholomew joined us. The kids swam with Ronja and me. Close to the car park was an enclosure that held peacocks, emus and kangaroos. The men stayed up at the enclosure and inspected the kangaroos with the kind of professional eye farmers run across their herds. Xavier tried to coax one to a more secluded spot from the car park, behind a hill, so that he could kill it and take it home. John joked that the enclosure provided the camp at nearby Middle Park with regular meat. This wasn’t true. But roos were trapped by the Middle Park campers in the sizeable Telegraph Station Park area, with snares made from fencing wire. These were attached to acacia scrub or saplings along the euro tracks and were checked each morning. As guns could not be used close to settled areas, it was a safe and unobtrusive technique for catching meat.
During a morning’s camp visit, Mercia begged me to drive Joseph to hospital. Was he vomiting blood again? I had thought he was hunched in copious sleep at her side. But Joseph was unconscious and difficult to drag into the back seat. He had rolled into the campfire during the night and his ugh boots had fused with his flesh. No one volunteered to help us because, as I discovered later, the families didn’t condone their marriage. He had a wrong ‘skin relationship’ with Mercia.
At the hospital, the doctor pinched the skin on Joseph’s wrist and watched it tent up before puncturing it with a needle. He wrongly gave him bicarbonate sodium, then corrected it to glucose. His cavalier disregard for this error disconcerted me. He’d obviously hoped I hadn’t noticed and waved away my worry.
‘It’s all the same for this bloke. He needs whatever we put into him.’
All I knew of Joseph’s medical history was that he suffered from diabetes. I told the doctor and went home, not wanting to watch the separation of flesh and footwear. A few days later, I was amazed to hear that Joseph had been returned to camp the following afternoon.
THE NEXT WEEKEND I TOOK MERCIA and a car load of kids, including Ronja, to Little Well. When we returned late on the Sunday, we were stunned to discover that Joseph’s foot had been amputated because gangrene had set in. I was outraged. If he had not been returned to camp so quickly, if he had been more adequately diagnosed, maybe he wouldn’t have had to lose his foot. We went to see him in hospital. Mercia tried to lift his spirits, talking about his bravery and about the meat caught on our weekend trip.
I was so angry, I wrote a report of the matter and gave it to a local investigative journalist to help him with a story on incompetence at the hospital. Years later, after forming acquaintances with health workers, I reviewed my naivety. I heard their frustration while servicing the town with its large number of Aboriginal people. Inadequate resources equated to understaffed facilities and doctors at the hospital rostered for 24-hour shifts. One doctor friend told me of his sense of irrelevance and absurdity when working at a bush clinic. He felt he was merely a ‘pus and blood’ doctor, tending the many wounds and infections.
A few weeks later, I ran Joseph from the hospital ward to camp for the day, to sit with his brother, Arranye – the first of several weekend trips. Though he was still jaundiced, he was more vocal. There was a strong easterly at work when we arrived, which Arranye said was good for getting rid of flies. The planet Mars was exceptionally red these nights and the old man was interested to hear my whitefella stories and myths of the warring star – Mars the battle god, the intensifier of the senses who heightens fellow feeling into action. Arranye told me Arrernte felt the same way about that ‘star’, and when it was so bright, young people were warned not to mix with others.
At 3p.m. when I returned to take Joseph back to hospital, he had a red cord tied around his head. Older men used red cords and headbands when they were involved in transmitting traditional knowledge. Dominic refused to help with getting Joseph and his wheelchair into the car. Joseph summoned Jude, but he lacked confidence in collapsing the chair and strength for lifting. Joseph swore relentlessly at him for lacking initiative, and getting his instructions wrong.
‘Not leg. Arm. Didn’t you go to school? All you understand is Coolabah. You silly black cunt!’
It
embarrassed me to hear Jude humiliated in my language. And I felt concerned for Joseph, for his justifiable anger, and for his inability to help himself now.
MERCIA SUCCEEDED IN GETTING a housing commission house a dozen houses up the road from us at number 22. This was intended as a retreat for Joseph, and to enable him and his wheelchair easier access to and from the hospital. Soon, just about everyone from Whitegate, when not actually lodging in Joseph’s house, was visiting us. We found this terribly demanding. There was no respite for Joseph and no respite for us. We sometimes took to hiding on the kitchen floor of an evening, to avoid a third or fourth set of people lobbing in for a cup of tea or a lift to Whitegate. Both Elaine and I got progressively intolerant as the visits wore on into the night.
It was weird seeing the Whitegate mob in a ‘money house’ lounge room playing cards. There were the many dogs, just like at Whitegate, no furniture and swags all over the floor. I was called several times to unblock the toilet and sink, to show various people how the gas stove worked, and to change light bulbs. This overuse would rapidly age the house, I explained. At one point, Joseph was so exhausted by all the visitors that he wheeled himself to our front door and asked me to move him back to Whitegate.
One night, a handful of kids sought refuge with us from Noelly Johnson. I wasn’t there when they came running in to Elaine. They were still sitting quietly together on the floor when I got home. Elaine had rung the police and they had gone to number 22 to quell Noelly’s marauding. My respect for the police grew during this period.
Mostly the police came to our place to hoist Xavier and Petrina away. Having already been ejected from number 22, they would sleep noisily in our yard instead of returning to Whitegate. Xavier would fall asleep, his teeth grinding loudly, only to be aggravated out of it by Petrina’s arguments. I’d get up and tell them to shut up if they wanted to stop here. After the second or third warning, I’d let them know that I was about to ring the police. Xavier as often as not asked me to ring them, so he could get a good cell bed and a feed at breakfast time. To our mighty relief, neighbours objected to the all-hours partying at number 22 and the house soon passed from Mercia’s hands. This was our most negative interaction with the Whitegate mob.
On Ronja’s first birthday, Joseph returned to hospital to have his leg amputated above the knee. He had a false leg fitted but his health degenerated very quickly. His gathering pallor was indicative of his demoralisation and failing blood. He became dependent on regular use of the dialysis machine.
Eventually Joseph returned to camp and was confined to bed. The nurses told us there wasn’t really much more they could do for him, and he might as well be around his family. Mercia, who had some training as a nurse’s assistant, knew how to inject the insulin, and assisted him with his assortment of drugs. She had quite a pharmacy tucked away in her handbag.
XAVIER HAD BEEN IN BUSH ‘BUSINESS’ CAMP in his country at Harts Range. One day he appeared at our door, his hair matted with red clay. Ronja couldn’t stop staring at him. Xavier got self-conscious and asked me to tell her to look away, then to cut his hair. His coyness surprised me. After I cut his hair, we shoved the locks into a plastic carry bag.
‘Keep that business hair. Might be need it some time, when I got more business,’ Xavier said.
He told me he wanted to shave for my next painting and suggested he strip to his jocks and stand with one leg resting on the other knee – the stereotyped image of blackfellas that could be found in kids’ textbooks from the 1960s. This stance was still used to advertise Indigenous culture in some of the souvenir and art shops around town. If I were to follow his suggestion, I thought, it would have to be as an ironic comment on the demeaning paternalism of such an image.
Not long after this, Bernadette Turner arrived at our house with her mother, Kemarre Margaret Mary Turner. (The Turners, Neils and Johnsons are related families; Arranye’s late wife was Kemarre’s sister.) Bernadette could barely walk for the pain in her soles. I propped her on the couch and massaged her feet for twenty minutes. She talked about Arrernte healing foods and was interested to learn from Elaine and me about traditional whitefella healing plants.
Kemarre mentioned her asthmatic condition and her periodic need for Ventolin.
‘What did people in olden times do for lung sickness?’ I asked.
‘That yerrampe or honey ant,’ replied Kemarre. ‘That’s still the important one. Arrernte never speak of eating honey ant. We only say we “suck their bums” or “lick” them. We suck it and then throw away the head. They are the best thing for chest complaints. When you dig up their nests, you can see all their little tunnels there that look like lung with tubes runnin’ to it. Just like human being.’
They later called a taxi to go to Aboriginal Congress Health, but the medics couldn’t give Bernadette a clear diagnosis and she walked in pain for months. Throughout, Kemarre insisted that the pain was caused by a ‘wrong way’ relationship that Bernadette had with a man from Jay Creek settlement, 45 kilometres west of town. She thought he might have taken an item of Bernadette’s clothing and sung love magic over it. Kemarre wanted him to come and sing the complaint and the lingering bad feelings away. When Kemarre discovered that he was now residing in the Arnhem Land community of Maningrida, she flew there to ask for his help. He didn’t comply.
Eventually Bernadette was diagnosed with worm infestation, which was soon expelled with hospital medication. News of the worm invasion was not irrelevant, Kemarre remarked. She said it would have been this same bloke who had put it there.
INCREASINGLY ELAINE BROUGHT UP the issue of her need for extramarital relationships. In the meantime, she fulfilled her ‘travel needs’, which financially depended on my job stability and put a strain on our single income that could not stretch to include me in any of Elaine’s travel plans. The cost of her trips was an issue that we always debated. I resented being stuck in the working week routine while she was away. I also resented being without Ronja, particularly because she was changing so rapidly.
We underwent marriage counselling, which did little to reconcile the place we shared in each other’s lives. Instead, it opened up a Pandora’s box. There seemed to be no end to the faces that certain friends and I apparently wore for her – mother, father and infant sister. This was the psycho-jargon used during our counselling sessions. We could not reach agreement on loyalty or our ideals on raising our child in a family unit. I was pro maintaining our sense of family, keeping that priority front and centre. I felt powerless. Elaine continued to maintain her right to travel and I inevitably conceded.
After these few months of counselling, Elaine and Ronja left for England for seven and a half weeks. Part of the holiday was to be spent in Greece with Ruben, Elaine’s friend from Melbourne. He paid for her flight between London and Athens.
In early September Elaine and Ronja returned via Darwin. For the first couple of days, Ronja didn’t seem to know what to make of me. But it felt great to be reunited as a family.
Three weeks later Joseph died in hospital. Gregory arrived with the bleak news of his older brother’s death. I was hallucinating in a fever, hardly able to move, the weight of each thought pounding in my temples. I dragged myself from bed and joined him and Janet on the lounge. He proffered his hand and slid it with gelatinous ease along my palm. Blood from a sorry cut seeped through his trousers onto the couch.
Before I’d absorbed the loss of Joseph, Gregory added that his son Hilary, about twenty, had had his throat cut in a fight in Darwin. Gregory was frightened to go and collect his pension cheque from Tangentyere. The woman cashier at the bank, his cousin, was obliged to thrash him for his ‘negligent parenting’. He worried that she would kick him in the kidneys again for letting Hilary go to Darwin. They were still sore from early in the week when he’d broken the bad news to her.
I drove Gregory and Janet to Kemarre’s home, to ‘sorry cry’ with M
ercia for her deceased husband. Crying in a family group like this was the best way to cope with the grief of lost loved ones. And that was the Arrernte way. The place was full of people, perhaps thirty or more. Bertie Neil, who occasionally visited Whitegate, stood with some of the Turner men at the back door. We touched palms then he led me down the hall to where Mercia sat crowded with her sisters in a bedroom that was all curtained up in respect. The only noise, wailing and whimpering, came from this bedroom. My fevered brain gelled with the delirium in the room. Bertie fell to his knees, put his arms around his sister and cried. I was surprised to find myself falling to my knees as Bertie rose, and crying against Mercia’s neck.
I went back to the car to drop some of the family members at Whitegate. Big Bertie stumbled from the house, heaved himself through the back door and shook the car with his weeping. Gregory and Janet were still crying. Bertie made a point of the profundity of his grief.
‘I been up all night cryin’. I been too much cryin’.’
On and on he went with his competitive crying. As the car stopped, he groped his way to sit with other family already in ‘sorry camp’. Twenty or more Johnsons, Hayes, Webbs and Ryders gathered around the Neil humpy. There was little movement. Few people looked anywhere but at the ground. And save a cry now and then, there was silence.
Joseph’s death bludgeoned me in a way I didn’t expect, collapsing the statistics of early Aboriginal mortality into emotional reality. Mercia didn’t handle her husband’s passing well. She was seen escorted around town in a car. It was deemed bad form to move about before the funeral. She should have been sitting, mourning. Second, the car hadn’t been smoked, as all personal effects should be, to help free the spirit of the deceased. In response, at the Santa Teresa funeral the coffin was deliberately placed in the ground the wrong way round and some people turned up disrespectfully drunk. This event spooked Mercia into continual restlessness and nervous fidgeting. Within eighteen months she died from an illness.