The Hard Light of Day

by Rod Moss

  Gregory had slept in the wood-box at the Catholic Church during the previous three wet nights and was ‘sick of it’. He slipped the canvas off his swag and strung it between two bushes in case it rained again.

  He needn’t have worried. It was a crystalline evening. Elaine and I took Dominic, Adrian, Gwenda and some kids to Honeymoon Gap for a concert by the Melbourne-based, booming black star Archie Roach and his wife, Ruby Hunter. Tangentyere had organised the affair and it was well patronised by blacks, who easily outnumbered the whites, although Archie was a huge hit with the latter. The ‘authentic’ voice of Indigenous Australia was on offer.

  The local support acts included the Desert Tigers and Frankie Yamma. Archie Roach and Ruby Hunter were on form, but the black audience had little rapport with them, and most filed out the gates after their local heroes had finished. I had hoped to hear more of Yamma, a prodigious, raw talent. He was not a big man, but his chunky frame housed a cretaceous growl that described space, gravel, dust, animals and insects with oppression and longing. I was ambushed by its weight, with a force that gripped my abdomen. If ever the Blues needed a local proponent, it was Frankie Yamma.

  ADRIAN RECKONED IF HE GOT THE BOLT BACK for the .308, we could enjoy a good day hunting. Where was the bolt if it wasn’t in camp? We looked for it at his Aunty Myra’s place. It wasn’t stuck in her chicken wire ceiling with the bits of meat and other goods too valuable for scavenging dogs. Myra suggested older brother Patrick had it. He might be at Charles Creek camp, at the hospital, or Trucking Yards camp. We tried each in turn, encouraged by confident informants until we found him at Amoonguna. He was bent under the bonnet of his car in front of his daughter’s house, spanner in hand. The car wasn’t roadworthy for town, but he used it to commute the 20 kilometres between Amoonguna and the Hayes outstation.

  Patrick said he didn’t have the bolt. The chances of a day’s hunting were fast receding. Adrian kept on hassling, unable to accept that we’d come this far without securing it. We followed an incensed Patrick into the house. He dragged his suitcase of clothes before his car, cursing loudly and claiming ignorance of the bolt’s whereabouts. He was totally stirred as he tipped all his clothes out. He raked his cowboy boots through them, ensuring through his conspicuous gestures and yelling that neighbours would testify to his innocence. Then he undressed down to his boots and cowboy hat.

  ‘See for yourself. I got nothing!’

  He stood naked in the road. Adrian was silenced. We drove back to town, Patrick’s vivid rebuttal having displaced further hunting thoughts. Adrian told me the following weekend that the bolt had circulated to the Hayes outstation.

  That Sunday was 40°C plus. I borrowed a friend’s Toyota pickup. Arranye had talked up an excursion to Uyitye/Wyeecha, an important rainmaking site. He wanted to show it to me and younger family who had not been before. It took two hours to navigate town, picking up family members who wanted to make the trip. We needed ice, bullets and drinks.

  A brute wind whirled upon the crosscut saw of the Eastern Ranges. Mt Undoolya’s great wing shimmered. Its pink gravel veiled down to the plain on which our track wended towards Todd River Station.

  Ten minutes down the Numery track there was thumping on the cabin roof. Dominic was remonstrating with Lizzie, demanding that we return to town. No way was I returning after exhausting my patience during the delays in the camps. He asked to stop. He jumped from the tray, gun tucked under his arm, stalked 20 metres back, then retraced and climbed back in amid a barrage of blows from Lizzie and her pannikin. The ten people in the tray remained silent, as did the two old men, Davey Patywenge Hayes and Arranye who sat up front. Ronja sat between the old men and me, cramped over the transmission. She accompanied me on nearly all such trips and dominated the airwaves with her non-stop singing. They all loved it. She persisted in putting her boots on the wrong feet. It seemed wilful. Arranye claimed he did that too.

  ‘Good job I blind,’ he laughed.

  We left the dirt track through a gate half an hour south of Todd River Homestead, then ventured through some abandoned cattle yards up scrubby Uyitye Creek. Rocks in the lower creek were the height of the hubs. Adrian got out to engage the 4WD. No one said a thing. If I was willing to drive, then drive I would.

  Furious winds sucked up the pound, grinding its pomegranate walls, virulent and unsettling. The incubating heat enfolded us in the stubble of our bodies. Ronja got jumpy. I was trying not to panic in front of her and the calm old men. When we got stuck, she got out and walked with Gwenda and Lizzie. I was left with Arranye and Dominic’s advice to back up and charge the sandbank at a variety of speeds and angles. We made it out of the creek. With his machete, Davey cut a trail another 20 metres, but a wall of roof-high boulders defeated us. It had taken two hours to do less than a kilometre. It was too hot for the old men to proceed.

  The women and kids settled there, lighting small fires for tea. I lugged Ronja behind Dominic and Adrian, half an hour up a walking trail. The rocks flanking us were stained like latrines; lichens and calcites lent them a skin of rust and talc. The fig pods had split and were heavy with ants.

  The site was blessedly cooler, in shade and water-fronted. Pardalotes and rock pigeons fed here. Honey eaters of three types. And the crested pigeons, which cooeed and curtsied recklessly close to us. The overhanging gallery was loaded with paintings of awele-awele/bush tomato. Repeated concentric circles were linked with parallel lines of red ochre. Their magnitude was impressive, their code on the ceiling patiently re-fingered over the centuries. I felt like I was standing beneath a circuit board inside a giant skull. There were few such galleries in Arrernte country and I was excluded from the syntax or symbols of the work. The men were not in a position to speak for them, which I regretted. Designated custodians had the responsibility of speaking for sites and for protecting them. Though the basic story might be communal property, only these people could transmit at the level they deemed appropriate.

  Adrian threw a stone into the water and muttered some words of gratitude. Then we men cooled off, fully clothed, in the spring, which was frilled with a green caul of algae. Ronja refused the inviting water and sat in the shade as native wasps darted about her. Martins, all air and grace, ducked in and out of mud nests daubed in the overhang. They scrolled against the sky, pursuing insects that hummed in ascending gyres above the water. The surrounding trees bent towards the pool as if in prayer. It was at the very peak of the valley, a revelation that so much water was trapped at this elevation.

  We ambled back to the women and children. As we tugged at our damper and tinned meat, Arranye spoke of the rain-making ceremonies that used to take place here. As if by theatrical appointment in the blasting blue sky, two cumuli drifted over the mountain shoulder to amplify the old man’s story.

  ‘Is it going to rain?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know. Clouds don’t talk to me,’ Adrian answered.

  Arranye spoke of the Wakaya ‘foot soldiers’ invading from the north long ago, when his father was a boy, and trying to steal the stories pertaining to Uyitye.

  ‘“You got water Dreamin’?” they asked. “We want it.”’

  Without the story they would be denied the controlling powers of the site. The Arrernte resisted. Women and children were bashed to death; the babies were used as clubs. In spite of their aggression, they failed. I couldn’t get a picture of how long this invasion endured, weeks or months. It may well have been that the mining activities at Hatches Creek, or a drought, had forced them south-west.

  BACK IN THE VEHICLE, the descent was easier. We gained the cattle yard. Adrian yelled from the back something in Arrernte.

  ‘Not that way,’ Arranye flared as I motioned towards our recent tracks. ‘Young men want kere [meat]. Might get ’im on grass after their sleep finish.’

  Kangaroos would be moving from the shade of the trees out on the plain now. The temperature had slacken
ed, but it remained hot. A hallucinatory heat. The wind dropped. We left the old men, women and kids under a stand of gidgee by a creek bank and drove on across the scrubby plains.

  The vindictive light lasered the sandy track before the vehicle. As we approached within a kilometre of the bore, the road became slippery with cow shit. The surrounds were bereft of vegetation. The dust thickened where it had been churned over by hooves. Close to the water where their many approaches concurred, it became a great circle of manured mud, darkened by the mire of mating flies. Fifty or sixty cows lapped at the brimming troughs filled by the uncapped flow from the vast artesian basin. Millions of litres a day had seeped out since the bores had been sunk, many over a century ago, to propagate the herds of the early pastoralists.

  We passed the bore and turned east. Then, on the cusp of surrender, Dominic tapped the cabin roof. Having spotted roo, I had to avoid ditches, ruts and trees, and ensure that guns were kept on the quarry side of the cabin. Despite vigilance on the shrubby plain, I still ran into creases which jagged the wheel and wrenched my spine. My left knee, unused to so much clutch work, burned with pain.

  The power pack of the bullet on the open plain caromed against distant ridges. The vapour of scorched gun oil filled the cabin. In the rear vision mirror I could see the young men coated in dust. They shot three female adults, who tossed their progeny from their pouches as they fled. The deaths weren’t quick, clean shots. The roos were hit more than once. They teetered, jerked and swayed to die beyond the Toyota’s reach in heavy scrub. They were easily chased then clubbed. Unless it hit them in the head, the .22 proved inept.

  ‘It only for rabbit,’ confided Edward Neil.

  Young Malcolm gathered two joeys and befriended them. A pink embryo parched to death was kept for the dogs. Three-year-old Ronja, as witness to this hunt, made a vegetarian pledge.

  As we returned to camp, Edward spotted two arleye/emus ambling through the ironwood and raised his hand for me to stop. He asked Malcolm for his yellow t-shirt and slowly waved it against the passenger door. The lead bird lifted its head and cocked it at various angles, assessing the curious, moving mustard swatch. It wandered so close that Edward shot it with his first round. Despite the false clickings from Edward’s gun, the animals gazed nervelessly at us, awaiting their fate. Dominic jumped down, broke its neck and tossed it amid the tangle of roos in the tray. He caught me frowning at the ancient .308.

  ‘That not for roo. That for man. Make ’im mince. He don’t come home an’ smile at his family after gettin’ this one,’ he said, almost apologetically.

  The bolt of the .308 kept falling off. Like Edward’s .22, it required two or three squeezes of the trigger. The .22 was heavily bandaged with insulation tape to hold the barrel to the butt. These guns had been sung over and empowered. Dilapidated, ‘customised’, they were valued for their collective memory, their stains, sweat and scratches.

  Cooking the roo was more elaborate than I had understood. The gidgee was uprooted, providing a ready-made ground oven in the red sand. It was the premium ember, slow-burning and holding heat. The meat was laid on a bed of gidgee leaves to avoid sand contamination. Edward adjusted the embers in the pit throughout the two-hour cook. He initially singed the fur and pan-fried the entrails as entree, of which everyone partook. The tails were rubbed with the half-digested, worm-riddled belly grass for hunting luck. The warm blood broth, cut from the groin, was passed around the group. The butchery was incisive. Each activity was undertaken with the ritualistic, wordless dignity that accompanies sensible habits. Gwenda helped Ronja to drink from the pannikin.

  ‘Big daddy be drink, marle akweke. You be drink it too. Make it healthy and strong girl,’ said Gwenda.

  It was dark by the time we’d eaten and got back into the Toyota. We drove home on the rim of sleep, bodies slumped against each other’s, aching from the heat that had polished us all day. At home, my left knee was painful to straighten and just as painful bent. Ronja rattled through the highlights for Elaine.

  ‘Daddy got lost and broken on a bumpy road. I cried because Mummy and baby was home, and because little kangaroo is dead. We drank blood which make us healthy and wrong. When Daddy get bigger, he will have a gun in back of the car too.’

  I doubted that.

  THE FIRST STAMPEDE OF WINTER RAINS had come and with them a dramatic drop in temperature. The wet had flushed insects from their hiding. A cacophony of birds, usually dawn warblers, drilled the air all day. Shoals of grey, curly leaf litter eddied into nests beneath the witchetty scrub, freckling the low hills.

  Lizzie Johnson was back in hospital, needing nursing throughout the night. She had lost control of her bowels, had an inactive thyroid gland and muscular atrophy. One night she managed to get a taxi and stood at our door in her hospital pyjamas. I nursed her to sleep, promising to locate her husband, Dominic, whom she had tried to find since that morning. She breathed deeply like a candle sucking air from the lounge. She woke me to assist her to the toilet. Dominic was at Whitegate when I drove her to camp after breakfast. I left them together. She was angry that he had ‘spoilt her hundred dollars’ on the taxi. I had heard Whitegate residents complain of exorbitant taxi fares and of drivers not tending change on large bills. But no. Lizzie was ropeable about spending a portion of her pension in pointless pursuit of her partner.

  Early the next Sunday there was a rap on the door. I dragged a towel about my waist and answered it. Noelly Johnson put his hand on my shoulder and spoke quickly.

  ‘My sister, and your sister, that old man’s daughter, been pass away. Domo, got no wife.’

  A file of people followed him: Patrick and Eva Hayes, Joe Cleary, Rosita Ryder, Raphael Turner and some kids. We all touched hands. After they departed, Elaine consoled me. Given her condition, she said, Lizzie’s death was a blessing.

  I drove over to Whitegate to grieve with Arranye, who was sitting in the old men’s quarters with Harold Wheelchair Ross and Edward Neil. I stroked his back, saying sorry. He conjectured that they would move camp to Pepperill Creek. Myra was stunned. She felt it was too cold at Pepperill Creek. Edward suggested we grab my trailer and collect wood, which we did. As I eased the Commodore near a copse of struggling ironwood, the resident galahs launched off, a galaxy of pink and grey above the remonstrating limbs. My thoughts were heavy as I dragged the wood to the trailer. I was infused with thoughts of Lizzie, lost and inert. Edward scolded me for not noticing a nest in one of the branches I had tossed in the tray.

  That night I felt meaningless and terrified, wishing to be otherwise, anything else. The moon had been hooked off stage. Would the night’s slow, sucking tongue make me big and solid again? I wandered around the back yard. I felt the pressure of my relationships, the fragility and brevity of life. I was caught in the endless night’s suffocating slick.

  Gregory and his crew were camping at Mt Swan, near the intersection of Larapinta and Lovegrove drives, still waiting for Lizzie’s funeral. It was not uncommon for the deceased to remain frozen in the morgue for more than a month. It was contingent upon relatives chipping in to pay for the service. It could also take weeks for the families to agree on location, a very sensitive issue. The cost of a funeral in town was about twice that at Santa Teresa (where most of the family’s bones lay).

  I drove with Raffi to Gregory’s camp. Half a dozen improvised shelters were spread on the flatter platforms of quartzite sand stepped between the scrubby hill. Dominic and David were smoking together in the storm drain at the base of Mt Swan. They squatted in silence around a small fire beneath the bridge.

  Raffi’s baby talk created a trickle of laughter from the women. It was perceived as telling Janet to get away from him, alaye, in Arrernte. Dominic strolled over. When the laughing subsided, he remarked that their camp was situated close to the path of the dog Dreaming. He pointed to the nearby puppy dog, a large sandstone rock sitting on a slight rise next to Larapinta Drive.
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  ‘Winter light make country good-looking,’ he remarked.

  Sunrise and sunset were particularly propitious for Dreaming stories. After sundown, the dark made the shapes and outlines swell with myth and assume their spiritual presences.

  ‘Story come out in half light,’ Dominic added.

  As I fastened Raffi into his car restrainer, Dominic hovered behind me. He was nursing a baby kangaroo inside his shirt and believed he could get money for it. He’d heard of a whitefella who lived near the Cultural Precinct that had paid for two. Could I help him sell it? Though I didn’t doubt his story, I wasn’t aware of any roo trade in town. I only knew of joeys being voluntarily adopted by foster families, then released back into the wild when strong enough. Coincidentally on my way across town to Mt Swan that morning, I had seen five or six women loitering on the town council lawns. I slowed down to absorb the scene. In bizarre convention, they carried slings with protruding muzzles, tails and topsy-turvy legs. They were the foster parents of orphaned roos. I suggested to Dominic that we take the joey to the council lawns.

  A uniformed woman, her sleepy marsupial eyes magnified by thick lenses, backed away from us. Before we could tell her of Dominic’s intent, she blurted out her tale of rearing orphans and releasing them at Simpsons Gap, only to hear that the local blackfellas had killed them. ‘What a waste,’ she concluded, avoiding eye contact with Dominic and clutching her ‘baby’ to her generous bosom. She hadn’t noticed the roo crammed inside his shirt. He sensed a rebuttal and turned to the car.