by Rod Moss
He had been smoking the ganja that his son, Devon, had gifted him. Devon had been a late seventh addition to the recent initiations and repaid his father with one hundred dollars’ worth of plant. Payment, in any form, from initiates to senior men was obligatory, though kangaroo meat was the traditional form of payment.
The light slackened. Our shadows paled into one.
‘Rod, which way you goin’?’ Bernard asked.
‘Just home. Gotta fix supper for the kids.’
‘Take me Eastside shop. I want cask of that man in the boat.’ (The wine he preferred still advertised the good life of the Parisian bourgeoisie in the 1880s.)
‘Okay. Only one way though.’
‘Aw, gee. This one make ’im face numb. An’ you!’ He looked to the other men standing around his fire. ‘Don’t be smoke all my mob when I Eastside.’
He unrolled his arm in the direction of the floor where ganja butts littered the dirt.
Arranye decided to camp away from Bernard.
‘He cook, drink and smoke that one. He make ’imself mad. No good that one. Make me too sad. Too much he been take it,’ said Arranye.
I saw Xavier the next day.
‘I been cryin’ lonely for Petrina. She be finish with me.’
We had been through this before. Did he want my advice or comfort? Arranye, and others also, had suggested that he and Petrina were not happy together. Though I doubted they could be apart.
‘Might be I find other wife, Rod. You got one for me? I greedy for woman.’
While driving him to camp, he asked to stop just beyond the cattlegrid. He walked off and reclaimed a plastic carry bag of sex magazines and blue movies from behind a rock.
‘Where did you get them?’
‘Find them in Ross Park. You know. Near school. You want it, video? I got no machine.’
‘No thanks. That stuff bores me, Xavier.’
Not long after, Petrina left Alice Springs to live with her sister for three years in Darwin. She returned for funerals now and then and finally settled back. She was jealous when Xavier eventually took another partner. Occasionally she would have a run-in with him. But it was clear that he’d come to terms with his new relationship and there was no way back for Petrina.
13Renal dysfunction, diabetes and alcohol-induced dementia were endemic among the Arrernte. Sixty Aboriginal people of the 7000 residents in town used the dialysis machine. None of the 20,000 non-Aboriginal residents required it. Aboriginal people were ten times more likely to have kidney ailments. These figures had alarmingly escalated over the past twenty-five years, suggesting massive changes to ways of living underpinned by an economy of sit-down money as being the catalysts. Some people suggested that nitrate preservatives in tinned meat, now a dietary feature, contributed to kidney troubles. Others said that white flour played its part. The enterprising Lutheran pastor Friedrich Albrecht experimented during the 1930s and ’40s at Hermannsburg, and incorporated grist flour from Laura, South Australia, and later brown rice into the mission diet. The vivid health improvements failed to convert to popular taste, and the Arrernte later reverted to the highly processed products. A rash of popular fast food franchises have opened in Alice Springs since the mid-1980s; the fried chicken outlets are particularly favoured by Aborigines, and with the same cholesterol and obesity results as in the non-Indigenous sector.Back
THE FALLING DARK
ARRANYE AND ME
LATE IN NOVEMBER 1997, Adrian Hayes came to tell me my ‘father’ wanted to see me. He was back at Charles Creek. I went early the following morning with the kids, a Saturday, when I often ran his longer errands. The concrete slab houses had been recently painted by Tangentyere with vivid colours and their numbers scrawled in large freehand on the front walls. He lay in the dark confines of the front room of number one house. His rheumy vision was exacerbated by conjunctivitis. He never bothered to brush the flies from his lids and their crap infected them. Boils had formed around his ankles. His legs had pretty much packed up, and he had gone from using a walking stick to crutches.
I cut his hair and beard while he lay, too uncomfortable to move. Whatever caused his boils I couldn’t say, but it would have done him good to wash more regularly at cuff and collar, and change his clothes more often.
‘Someone be eat my tucker line. You might be get it something for me. Meat and bread, my boy.’
He found his envelope of notes from the Tangentyere bank, and held them close to his eye.
‘This one might be it,’ he said, pressing a twenty-dollar note into my palm. ‘And might be get ’im papers, and tin tobaccy. Don’t forget it, my eye paste.’
We were silent for a few minutes before he mentioned a recent visit from some Kalahari Bushmen organised by the Central Land Council.
‘Arrernte and African mob been cook meat same way. You seen it. Tie guts up and chuck ’im on coal. Bury ’im. Good tucker, that one. Oh, but they shame us mob. We no longer be like them. Don’t make string from guts like olden times. Only shop one, I suppose. But hard country, Africa. Proper starvation country they got there, poor buggers. We in front of them. We got tap in every house at Charles Creek and them other camps. They still fightin’ for government bore. Only one bore they been got.’
Before leaving, I helped him into the sun. Despite his heavy suit coat and sweaters, he was cold. The sun was a reviver. He called to others for help to shift him throughout the day, following the sun’s arc.
Over the ensuing fortnight, I laundered some of his shirts and strides until the boils subsided. One of the women at the house performed the necessary ablutions. When the boils erupted and formed scabs, I softened them and added corkwood ash to cauterise them. Within the month he agreed to a wheelchair, arranged through Flynn Drive medical service.
I took some fresh linen to throw on Arranye’s swag. He said he wanted to take me to Pwelye Pwelye, Ruby Gap, Chambers Pillars, Rainbow Valley and Twin Caves – quite an agenda for his conspicuously deteriorating body. Despite his voracious appetite, he was paper frail.
NOELLY JOHNSON, EDWARD NEIL and his wife, Bonita Oliver, came one night to the door and touched hands. They told me briefly that cousin Stephen Kernahan’s teenage son had hanged himself with hosing from the basketball hoop at Charles Creek. The police had cut him down. Then Bobby Palmer’s son tried to do the same thing a few days later; he was now in Intensive Care with possible brain damage.
Arranye moved back to Whitegate to join the large sorry camp for the grieving families. All the Turners were there and many of the Stephens. Tangentyere had built a bough shelter behind the eastern tin sheds to accommodate the sorry business. I got the trailer and dragged in several loads of wood for cooking and warmth.
For several days the men sat in three rows, silently, mostly bowed, facing east towards Emily Gap. Arranye looked awful sitting, legs out, on a groundsheet. His eyes were puffy and he leant limply sidewards, as if he were seeking the support of his shed, a metre away. His tale of old people sitting to die played in my head. Mary Hayes, Arranye’s sister, implored him to move to the Old Timers’ Home. He adamantly refused.
Weeks later, Arranye grudgingly accepted to go with his niece, Theresa Ryder, to live at Santa Teresa. I found his teeth and medicine pouch in his bedding and packed some clothes. He anticipated that Theresa would pick him up that morning. I later checked to see if he’d departed as planned. I found him sitting in the fading light, leaning against his rolled swag, all his sweaters and coat on, still waiting. A day later he was rushed to hospital suffering pneumonia.
Ronja, Raffi and I dropped in to see him when he returned to Whitegate. He’d lost his sheen. His side was in constant pain. He thought it was his appendix. His cataracts had reformed.
‘You got more “Tiger Club”, I might rub ’im?’
He had finished the first tub of Tiger balm I’d given him, which he’d put in h
is old army bag crammed with obsolete eye drops, unspecified capsules, Mylanta and tissues. He said he needed another pedicure. I preferred to take him home for this task where his feet could be thoroughly soaked in warm water. But he was too weak to move. We darted home to collect the clippers and returned to find his feet inside a plastic bag full of water. He had asked Bartholomew to fetch it. I scraped out the red ochre from beneath his nails and cut them as his legs dangled over the side of his bed.
Wherever I encountered Johnsons through town I’d hear them say, ‘That ol’ man, Arranye, be fucked.’ I was disturbed. Unless I insisted that they get into my car, then drove them to and from his humpy, no brothers or sons would visit him. Whitegate was still a no-go zone for most of the Johnsons.
Before the end of the month Arranye returned to hospital with asthma and was put on the ‘puff puff machine’.
‘Asthma not my family line. That Neil mob been have it. Not Johnson,’ he railed, disappointed in himself.
Soon he was discharged. I found him back at Whitegate stretched out on his bed, rubbing fat on his legs, singing some snake song.
‘Dominic been come from Amoonguna an’ be give it me,’ he said, holding the tin of fat.
He looked at his feet as if wondering what they were. They were dreadfully swollen, an indication of his ruined kidneys. The wheelchair had arrived but was too heavy to manipulate. The kids made plenty of use of it as a toy vehicle, and most of his male visitors would occupy it as it was usually left next to his bed.
‘Anything you might want me to get from the shop?’ I asked him as I was leaving.
‘Nothing, my son.’
I left him to his singing.
LAWRENCE FLAGGED ME DOWN as I passed his humpy and requested a portrait of his kids. He had painted a map of Australia on a canvas, leaving me to work up the portraits within the shape of the continent. Then Julie dotted up the surround.
Later Lawrence came to me with another one of his paintings and asked me to paint in a centrally positioned Mary Magdalene and, on the east coast of Australia, an image of Jesus, which he supplied. Again, Julie surrounded it, this time with bush foods. Lawrence mentioned that, on seeing these paintings, Santa Teresa relatives started trembling from their power.
Reproductions of Mary Magdalene had recently circulated the Eastern Arrernte community. A religious fervour had gripped Santa Teresa after the discovery of healing water on the mountain behind the church. The white cross astride the mountain signalled the sanctity of activities in the valley below. If the township’s main road could bisect the church and run through its nave up the rocky escarpment, it would terminate at the foot of the cross. The symmetry was impressive: man and mountain somehow in league.
But an auspicious story, one that outstripped any such architectural conjecture, had evolved over the preceding eighteen months. Apparently, a bedridden twenty-three-year-old man from Santa Teresa had a vision in which Mary Magdalene stood on top of some bushes on the hill behind the church, below a cave. To the left of her on some rocks were four purple stars in the shape of a cross. She indicated that if water could be found on the mountain, he should wash with it and drink it to be cured. He told his mother the next morning. With her two friends, the woman set off for the hill where they were embraced by a strong wind, which they took to be the Holy Spirit. To their surprise, they found a stream of water and traced it to the source of a little spring under the bushes. They knelt and said the rosary, then collected and took the water to the young man. The spring waters effected an immediate cure.
People started drinking the miracle water, washing in it, spraying themselves and their bed sheets, sprinkling grains of wet sand between their blankets, or making compacts of the sand to apply to arthritic limbs. Even alcoholism was treated. A woman from Bathurst Island came and was cured of a tropical ulcer. A cancer disappeared. An old man’s sight was rejuvenated. A young teenage boy, who had ridiculed believers in the healing spring, entered his house and saw the image of Our Lady on the wall looking at him and crying real tears, causing him to fall to his knees and beg her forgiveness. There were many testimonies.
Such an incredible momentum had been established that eight Santa Teresa women joined a small group of white Alice Springs pilgrims to visit the Holy Waters in Medjugorje, Bosnia.
Later a whitefella working for the Central Land Council reported that the rusty pipe from the community water tank had been replaced and the holy spring disappeared. The families advised that insufficient prayer had caused the spring to dry up.
As I exited Coles one morning Kemarre Turner was standing near the door with her shopping. I offered her a lift back to her house. She was one of the few women who unhesitatingly sat in the front seat alongside me. Even if men were present, she’d claim the coveted front seat. She asked me inside for a chat. I gazed, wide-eyed, at the sacred images adorning the walls. Numerous icons of the Virgin covered the lounge room wall. Frosty flesh on boneless limbs, heavily hooded eyes, each Madonna, whether sitting, standing, kneeling or floating, was unsoiled by domestic concerns or mortal desires. A large plaster cast of Jesus stood in the corner opposite the TV, which was blurting out an episode of The Simpsons.
Sensing my interest, she asked if I could give her five hundred dollars to finance her pilgrimage to Bosnia.
‘Maybe you could give me the money for the airfare, Rod,’ she suggested.
‘I don’t have that kind of money, Kemarre.’
‘But you’re a famous artist, Rod.’
‘I don’t know about that and whatever fame I have hasn’t brought me much money. Look at my car!’ I laughed at her naivety and shrugged off her persistence.
AT THE START OF THE NEW YEAR 1998, Elaine went to New South Wales for the summer, taking the kids with her. She kept the lease on the house she was renting, and arranged with her co-tenants that she would return to re-occupy her part of the house in early April. After being down south for a few weeks, she changed her plans and said that she would resume living in Alice Springs at the advent of its pleasant winter.
The summer rains had either evaporated or percolated into the sands of the Todd River. The grass shoots that had pierced the soil so eagerly were now weary and singed. Verdant circles survived within the radii of the council’s reticulating sprays. On these patches, several groups sat solemnly. I recognised some of them and slowed the car as Big Rose motioned me to her party. She whispered news of another Hayes youth who had committed suicide. I walked around the small groups touching hands. Nijas Ryder and Eric Neil jumped in the car.
‘Take us Whitegate to tell Arranye,’ said Nijas.
Back at Arranye’s camp they shook hands with him and were busy consoling other family, as I assisted Arranye to the car. I hadn’t seen him since before Christmas, nor groomed him since mid-September. Emboldened with sufficient strength and irritated by nits, he asked for a trim and said he wanted to have a break from his camp. Aboriginal Congress Health had replaced his first set of wheels with a lighter model. I folded it into the back of the Commodore.
‘Only a little bit walking now, my boy,’ he said apologetically. ‘You got it rubbing oil for leg? My leg all dry.’
At home I left him on the verandah in the cane chair and went to the kitchen for some cooking oil.
‘Got to give it oil like motor car engine,’ he grinned, as I splashed it over the scaly skin of his calves.
‘You sittin’ alone in house? You still got single man’s quarters there? Where my grandson?’
‘With his mother and sister on the south coast of New South Wales.’
‘Oh, when him an’ marle akweke come back home?’
‘They might come for a few weeks at Easter.’ Just talking about the kids being so far away brought tears to my eyes.
After the shearing we got some ice, bread and tinned meat. I slipped him a banana. He was looking far better than at any point
in the previous twelve months.
‘One more year, I been got ’im, my son.’ He grinned matter-of-factly.
AT DUSK THE NEXT DAY Xavier appeared with Lilla Miller, his new wife. He said that Ku Klux Klan activity made him too frightened to keep camping west of the river. He was staying at Whitegate for temporary refuge.
‘Anything happen today?’ I asked.
‘Man be find dead. Might be Ku Klux Klan again,’ said Xavier, referring to the young man’s body discovered north of Heavitree Gap.
This was the first I’d heard of KKK activity, although talk escalated through the remainder of the year. Where the tag came from, I do not know. I doubted that an organised, racist group existed, and was almost certain that no affiliation with the notorious clansmen of the southern United States was involved. However, there had been a racist precedent further north in Katherine. In 1989, SPONGE (the Society for the Prevention of Niggers Getting Everything) was formed in response to the Jawoyn people gaining control of the Nitmiluk National Park and establishing a tourist venue in Katherine Gorge. There were reports of Rights for Whites marches, threats against blackfellas in the streets, gunfire over people’s heads, and people being thrown from the bridge. The whitefellas resented what they perceived as funding inequalities and feared a land grab.
Xavier told of black women being picked up and driven to Wongardi swamp and raped. One woman had two fingers amputated. He reported that a carload of hooded men ran into a lamp post outside CAAMA studios in pursuit of two young black women. The police attended the accident, but he’d heard they were only charged with reckless driving. Arrernte feared going to the police because they felt some of the junior officers were implicated in KKK activity.
The following day I read a newspaper article about the young man found near Heavitree Gap. He was reported to have suicided, but his body had lain undiscovered for two days and had been properly cooked in the 45°C heat. The expanding fat had split the skin, giving it the appearance of bodily violence although it had been flayed by thermal aggression.