The Hard Light of Day

by Rod Moss

  ‘Then I wake up an’ try to walk to Amoonguna while I bleeding to death. Then a Jesus cloud come low and stop that blood.’

  The Catholic influences still tripped me up. Marlene Hayes had told me her son had grown quickly because he never touched himself. Surely this reflected the Church’s repression of masturbation. Could the weakening connected to hair cutting around initiation time be traced back to Samson’s loss of strength too?

  LATE THAT NOVEMBER ELAINE, the kids and I camped at Little Well with Arranye. It was mid-afternoon when we arrived and the heat had knocked Arranye around. He remained in the shade of the eastern verandah, too weak even to eat his sausage until the sun had set. Raffi toyed with the puppies, while Ronja romped with two older girls making small fires and damper.

  In the late afternoon, at Ronja’s insistence, we dug around the acacia bushes hoping to get some witchetty grubs. There were no promising signs of disrupted soil around the roots. Metallic-green beetles were everywhere. When crushed underfoot they emitted a noisome odour. They were part of the vast traffic of beetles, ants and grasshoppers seething on the ground between the buildings in a commotion of harvesting and consumption.

  Summer showers had sifted over the flood-out. The mulgas flowered. Their yellow flowers fell. This mulga lint was hauled by ants and draped as floreat collars around the throats of their holes. With the onset of the substantial rain the spiky iwepe/procession caterpillars had evacuated their nests, which were spectacular, football-sized, white silky things, spun up in the beefwoods and gumtrees. Arranye told us that the old people had used the nests as dressings, particularly for burns and weeping cuts. The residual caterpillar spikes, which caused inflammation and intense itchiness, helped stimulate circulation for healing. He turned from the kids to quietly add that the spikes had sometimes been used to effect undetected killings by payback men. The victim would have his mouth forced open and a handful of spikes thrust into his throat. The inflammation caused suffocation. The swelling soon subsided and the spikes were too small to be seen.

  When the sun fell behind the near hill, Arranye rummaged in his swag for gifts he had acquired from the Santa Teresa women artists. There were two carved pigeons, one with a straight and sturdy body for Ronja, and a more delicate, curved-neck one for Raffi.

  He pulled a tin of pituri ashes from his coat, sprinkled some on the tobacco and chewed slowly, propping the tumorous mix on his lower lip. He turned to Sebastian Webb, about Ronja’s age, whose swollen right temple he began to massage. He paused to tell Elaine and me that he was a possum licking its wounded young. He sang the possum awelye/medicine song, pausing at intervals to translate. He had witnessed his ancestors’ fingernails being removed prior to participating in possum altyerre ceremony. The song released the sickness just like the possum scraped the juice out of the bloodwood flower. When the sickness ‘fell to the ground’, he stomped on it. He was not at all confused, as I first thought, between his identity and that of a possum. He meant that the creative power ascribed through the possum was joined to him.

  After sunset, the men crowded into the Toyota and went hunting. The kids, Raffi and Ronja included, stayed back with Elaine, the other women and Arranye. We got two kangaroos.

  The night was muggy and our sleep ruined by mosquitoes. The sun still simmered below the horizon as the bird-shrieking trees whelmed with galah gibber. Pigeons paraded in perpetual promiscuity, puffing and preening between our swags. Their activity terminated my final attempt to sleep.

  AS WE RETURNED THROUGH TOWN, Arranye grumbled that David didn’t listen to his advice enough and threatened to sing the soakage dry unless he did. He wanted David to ask him more about the country. Would he advance this knowledge when Arranye passed away, I wondered. On and off as Arranye weakened, David approached me to ask if I would take over Little Well. But it was way beyond my desires and capabilities. I challenged him with Arranye’s assertions, which he admitted hearing, but said he knew all he needed to know.

  Also in the back seat that day was Ricky Ryder, now a teenager, who had joined us for the trip back to town. I dropped him near the railway crossing where he saw some of his mates. Almost immediately a couple of CIB officers pulled up next to us, identified Ricky, reminded him he wasn’t supposed to be in town until the following month and shoved him in their unmarked vehicle. I tried to explain to the officers how Ricky was illiterate and innumerate, and unable to read the dates on his court notice. If anything, I had the impression he was returning with the understanding that his court date fell during the coming week. My words fell on deaf ears. I felt useless and that I’d betrayed Ricky, who was being taken as a consequence of breaking and entering shop premises. He had been ordered to remain at Little Well for a set period, otherwise he would be imprisoned until the date of his court hearing.

  There were no remand facilities in Alice Springs for teenage offenders. Until the late eighties, a place endearingly dubbed ‘Little House’ had acted as a low security detention centre for young offenders. But it had been under-resourced and was now closed. Ricky was subsequently convicted in court and sent to Berrimah prison, south of Darwin, as the new Alice Springs jail was still under construction and would not open until 1996.

  A large police force, disproportionate to the size of the town’s population, was needed to service Alice Springs. The cops dealt with overt violence, vandalism, thefts from shops and homes, and car thefts. Men who wanted to return to their distant desert communities would steal a car as immediate transport. There were numerous traffic and public drinking offences. The police were omnipresent in Indigenous lives. On court days, the seats in the foyer were filled. The steps outside and the lawns opposite – ironically set between the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island Commission offices and the court – were full of blackfellas. Of the dozens of Aboriginal offenders I knew, few disputed any miscarriage of justice. Xavier and others knew that, once apprehended, they’d be paying for crimes defined as such by white law. This is not to say they favoured the police. They found the court jargon and protocols confusing, alienating and far from transparent.

  Some time later, in March 1997, the Territory government adopted mandatory sentencing for offenders such as Ricky aged between fifteen and seventeen. Incarceration was being used as a first, rather than last, resort and effectively targeted young Indigenous males. It made for the systemic ‘prisonisation’ of significantly large numbers of blackfella youths. Statistical evidence compiled three years after its implementation gave no support for mandatory sentencing as a useful deterrent to crime, and it debased the discretionary powers of the judiciary to fit punishment to crime. Moreover, the numbers of first-time offenders still grew at an alarming rate. Unlawful entry offences and property damage in Alice Springs had both risen by 21 per cent. Indigenous people made up 77 per cent of the Territory’s prison population. I didn’t feel too compassionate about the continued theft of both Raffi’s and my bikes. Nor did our insurance company. But stealing two cartons of eggs, receiving a bottle of spring water and taking a pizza from the fridge of an ex-partner to feed one of your five hungry kids were real examples of some of the convicted offences under the rubric ‘you do the crime, you do the time’. The timing of the legislation came just as Aboriginal customary law was being recognised as part of a package for addressing young offenders in the communities.

  THE SHEDS AT THE HAYES OUTSTATION, Antulye, had been smoked after Alphonse’s and Graeme’s deaths, then skittled and rebuilt in different positions. Patrick Hayes had pumpkins growing from the roof run-off. The place was being more consistently used for the first time since the car tragedy. A new house was being planned for the site. Quite a grand place for the family. Lawrence Hayes drew its plan in the sand. There would be an accompanying bore and tank with laundry and shower. Two black-lipped dogs, their ears pinned protectively along their scalps, looked on fretfully and glanced up when Lawrence stopped scratching the ground, as if their
complicity was required.

  Ronja and I stood warming ourselves by the fire in front of the verandah. Eva, Julie and Gwenda were tending embers, reheating roo leftovers in oily pans. Peter sat at some distance from us in the abject, bitter easterly. He looked catatonic perched on a plastic chair with a hospital ID bracelet on his wrist and wearing the pale blue hospital pyjama top. Lawrence said Peter had absented himself some weeks earlier, and reckoned he should have stayed in hospital. I hadn’t seen Peter for months. He was almost unrecognisable. He looked pathetic, deep in the clutches of alcoholic dementia.

  Weeks later when I returned to photograph the newly completed building he was in the same chair. The men mentioned that they had started drinking at dawn. Peter stared in my direction, then stood and leant on my shoulder. He had pissed his pants. He didn’t want to stay there and asked to camp at my place. His condition worried me, but I declined to take him on as he needed full-time care. Then a sudden tide of clouds swept over us. The drop in temperature sent a chill up my spine. The gathering anvil darkened the range, then rushed over the ground towards us. I motioned to Dominic that I wanted to go. I felt impatient and helpless and was frustrated by Peter’s immediate family sitting around him, just looking on. He’d absconded from hospital and no one was suggesting he return there.

  Dominic came closer and cupped his hands over my left ear.

  ‘I want you to help me with my car, brother,’ he whispered through nicotine-stained teeth.

  We’d passed it on the way in – a red Ford sedan at the front gate. Dominic had starter leads but the insulation rubbers were missing and slight shocking unavoidable. I got out and studied Dominic’s terminals. Both loose. And not a spanner between us.

  ‘Dominic. I can’t help here. Others are waiting. I have to go,’ I huffed.

  ‘No, my brother. You just come behind. Give it bump. Look. I got wheel there.’

  Sure enough, he’d removed the lock and through its housing attached the spare tyre with fencing wire. He was well prepared for such starts.

  ‘Bump start, brother,’ he persisted.

  ‘No way am I going to ram your car, Domo. Anyway, I’d only get bogged in the heavy sand,’ I said and made haste to my car.

  FOR SEVERAL WEEKS I’d been chasing fifty bucks that Bernard Neil owed me. He had recommended I find him the next pension day. This meant interrupting a huge card game in the middle of the Todd riverbed. There were eight players and twice that many spectators. Kinfolk had borrowing rights on the takings and sat or stood close to their respective relatives. Breaking his concentration was not easy. Robbie Hayes stood outside the circle.

  ‘Bernard be in trance. He be thinkin’ card numbers.’

  It was a winning trance. I called his name repeatedly. Others chimed in. He slowly turned. Without speaking, he felt in his shirt pocket, then passed a fifty from a crumpled cluster. Walking back to the car, I passed an older woman who asked if Bernard had given me anything. I waved the fifty before her.

  ‘I might be sleep with him tonight and get some of that card money meself,’ she said confidently.

  11Father Maloney and a dedicated lay Catholic, Frank McGarry, established Little Flower Mission between 1937 and 1942. The town residents pressured the mission to move their black constituency. The army was concerned about sexual congress between its men and Aboriginal women. Officials feared sexually transmitted disease would spread to the troops. So 186 Arrernte, three-quarters of whom regarded Alice Springs as their tribal home, were moved in army lorries. Re-settlement was left to the church. During peak occupation of the Arltunga chapter of Little Flower Mission, in the years 1943 to 1944, the population was 400. A mere two dozen Arrernte actually originated from there. Alice Springs was a staging post for the defence of the northern coast and up to 8000 troops camped in the fledgling town. Up to fifty-six trains per week serviced the troops. The road to Darwin had been sealed by the army. War permanently refaced the town with population, commodity wealth and new technologies. Arrernte and other Indigenous groups Australia-wide were recruited to the forces. Around 150 were enlisted in Alice Springs alone. Some received cash for their labour for the first time – a huge departure from ration economy. Until then they had received flour, tea, sugar, blankets and some meat for their labour.Back

  12Jenny was amongst the 1970s urban intellectual diaspora, seeking to redefine itself in Aboriginal Central Australia. Conservatives disparagingly regarded them as White Aborigines. The linguists, lawyers, health workers, teachers and art advisers were mostly aligned to the sense of social conscience and justice articulated by the Whitlam Labor government (though some of Labor’s policies had been foreshadowed by the previous Liberal coalitions). The new idealists formed the ranks of the Alice Springs Peace Group that demonstrated about the role of the Pine Gap defence surveillance station and helped shape land conservation awareness. Without their continued presence and experience in Central Australia, I doubt my position at the college would have been created or that I would have endured here. By the early 1990s, white women were commonplace in Alice Springs and remote communities.Back

  SAFETY NETS

  RONJA HELD BY

  PETRINA

  ARRANYE HAD SEEN A BLACK CIRCLE around the sun. There were photos of it in the local newspaper. Twice this happened that week and only a few times ever in his memory. Each occasion had signalled serious rain. One afternoon Lawrence Hayes was sitting with him and beckoned me closer to ask in a whisper if I could see the Rainbow Snake in the sky. The dark edge of the rain cloud scrolled against the lighter clouds in a menacing pleat.

  Lawrence had his own hailstorm Dreaming, he added. And his older brother, Jack, had lightning Dreaming and kept his long sleeves rolled to the cuffs to conceal his arms. During storms the veins on his inner arms went bright blue.

  ‘If he hit you then you be unconscious. No worries.’

  ‘That cloud make it big rain,’ chimed Arranye. ‘Proper sit-down rain, that one. You see black circle on edge of rainbow? That snake eat its own tail. Big rain been come. Lhere Mpwarnte [Todd River] be flood time.’

  As usual, we’d had many months without a hint of rain, then came several deluges. Gneiss, stacked in loose compact with quartz sands, proved an echo chamber for the gurgling run-off. Even the birds were underscored by the liquid chatter of these unseen rivulets. The claypans around town were lakes. They stewed in the emerging heat. The air was muggy and choked with flies. A muzzle of emerald grass surged over the usually barren slopes of Mt Gillen’s snout.

  Mud massed on the shores of the claypans. Fairy martins flitted between the water and their overhangs, 500 metres distant, serenely perforating the sandstone cliff with their beaks. Occasionally they grouped and brazenly approached Raffi and me as a whoosh of white confetti about our heads. Between the water and us, the mud was pocked with scores of cattle hooves. We peered into the nearest holes and caught the glint of spider webs capping each depression – a vast silver weaving. Flies squatted silently inside each depression, stupefied by cow shit. My cuffs were freckled with ginger spiders. Shell-backed shrimps also flourished and we took a handful in a jar of slurry to show Arranye, who hadn’t seen them for years. He only knew their Southern Arrernte name.

  I invited him to supper. He was in great form, yapping on the verandah while I cut his hair before we ate. He insisted I place a plastic carry bag under his chin to catch the kwarte anye/lice eggs. He slowly rolled a smoke and struck several matches before igniting it. Drifts of ash fell on his trousers, peppering them with several small holes. As I cut, he recounted a marvellous story for Raffi and Ronja, which he sang to kids at Whitegate, about a young girl and boy who were abandoned when their parents were killed by gumulunya, the devil man.

  I shaved off his beard which rejuvenated his spirits.

  ‘People at Amoonguna be laugh at me I so young. I be go all way through. Not like some younger mob who build big fire. Bi
g fire be burn down. Aren’t there to cook with in morning-time like small fire. I been got small fire, be gettin’ younger all time.’

  He produced a specimen bottle from his carry bag.

  ‘Is that eye medicine you got there, Arranye?’ I asked.

  ‘No. Can’t be chuck this one ’til soil all wet. Might jump back on me eye like that little beetle.’

  Suspended in the solution were his cataracts. He was keeping the tiny gobs of skin until it next rained. Trachoma and cataracts are major health issues among desert Aboriginal people. Twice I’d taken Arranye to Aboriginal Congress Health to get his eyes checked. He had scanned the eye charts; the letters meant nothing to him. I explained to the doctor that he was merely affirming the location of the chart on the wall. Whatever, he got his drops and a prescription for glasses. The doctor told us that Arranye would have to wait until his eye was completely covered by the cataract before it could be scraped. Then, with little warning, he was admitted to hospital for eye surgery. The army’s medical team had come to town. Swank army tents were erected on the hospital lawns to deliver the service to several dozen Aborigines. A surgeon removed the brumous blue film on both his eyes.

  Now Arranye recalled the Warlpiri man from Willowra in the next bed.

  ‘That old fella more older than me. He got it young promised wife. Been run away with ’nother young fella. That old blind one, proper tangled up. Can’t do nothing ’cos he be blind both eyes. Come in eye tent on two stick. Then he get good eye. Chuck away stick. He say, “Might be I get that young mob with spear now.” They still deadly at seventy paces, them old people. Good turnout they got there for eye, I reckon.’

  He was yet to obtain glasses which took us weeks of visits to opticians, clinics and funding bodies.