The Hard Light of Day

by Rod Moss

  IN 1998 I WAS INVITED to exhibit for a third time at Araluen Arts Centre in Alice Springs, emphasising works from the preceding four years. This community arts venue incorporated the Strehlow Research Centre with a modest and attractive museum. It had several galleries and an excellent stage and cinema auditorium. The show was entitled Where Do You Come From, Brother Boy? This echoed Xavier’s question to me years before in my lounge room. The hearings on the land claims in Alice Springs were continuing at the same time as the opening. Jenny Green, an interpreter in the hearings, suggested that my imagery might support the claimants’ case for continuity of traditional ways of life. My depictions of the families showed that they belonged to networks of sites that made up their ‘familiar’ region.

  In Alice Springs, whitefellas speak of town and bush: a handy division made easy by the fence line and water drains. But for the blackfella families the bush and the cluster of shopping complexes and light industrial installations surrounded by suburbs were all ‘country’. The parents of the Whitegate kids made them aware of the sacred sites that dotted both town and the bush. I let Myra and Patrick know they might be required to walk around the paintings in my show with the judge. Lawyers, linguists and anthropologists made a cursory visit to the exhibition before the opening. But it was decided there was insufficient time to mount a case for the judge.

  On the second Saturday morning of the show I went to Whitegate to remind Arranye that a photographer from the Weekend Australian would be coming to photograph us late in the afternoon. The author Barry Hill was researching a story on my work and wanted some supporting visual material.

  ‘Rod apetyeye [come],’ said Lawrence, summoning me to where he sat.

  His leg was in plaster. A broken crutch bisected the group of puppies at his feet. He pointed to the images reproduced on his invitation to the show. I was surprised that he had an invitation, then remembered giving half a dozen to Myra fresh from the press in mid-December.

  ‘What happened to your leg that you need those sticks?’ I asked.

  ‘Them Warlpiri mob been beat me. I had two of them. But they pretty good in a group. My mouth was bleeding. And I fell back over one of them I been put on the ground. Others came an’ kicked me. One fella with those American boots, big ones, broke my leg above and under knee. Two place. And here. You see where my lip been stitched? And here.’ He lifted his t-shirt. ‘See where they knife me?’

  A broad scar, still pink, ran from above his hip, around it, and careered into the right buttock. Its curve echoed the one on his knee.

  ‘But I’ll get ’em. I saw their families in the pub. I’m just waitin’ for my leg to be proper. I told them I got five son. And I got my old doctor here,’ he said, swinging around towards Arranye, who nodded from the blankets.

  I spoke with Arranye and hurried off to the exhibition.

  I CARRIED INTO THE GALLERY a book that I’d just purchased. It was titled Dear Spencer. I was halfway through it. On its pages were the letters of Frank Gillen to Baldwin Spencer. Gillen, stationmaster of the Alice Springs Telegraph Station in the 1890s, was Spencer’s main collaborator and informant. Spencer launched his international reputation by publicising field observations about the family’s great-grandparents. Though Gillen shared with Spencer the authorship of several books in my house, he had nothing like Spencer’s stellar career. Now, for the first time, Gillen’s own story had been published.

  I sat at the gallery desk, baby-sitting the show. Remarkably, when I randomly opened it, the pages turned to one hundred years ago to the day, when Gillen’s disclosures were at their most intense. He seemed too excited to order his thoughts into paragraphs. He was desperately interested in and committed to recording the life and customs of the Arrernte. Given the social climate of his time, the discrimination and brutality of the frontier, his fellowship with the Arrernte was noble. Though he didn’t get adequate recognition in his lifetime, I smiled when I heard the old men refer to Gillen as their grandfather, ‘Mister Spencer Gillen’.

  Ceremonial life had been in Gillen’s back yard. More correctly, he’d been in the Arrernte yard, as the land claim hearings were making clear. The hearings contained testimonies of vast amounts of current knowledge deposited with educated Arrernte. Myra, who’d already helped Patrick secure the incision for the Hayes outstation, was a main speaker at the hearings. She won Native Title recognition for Whitegate. Little of the kind of knowledge Myra divulged was performed now in ceremonies. It seemed to me to be a sad and regrettable loss. Overwhelmingly the breakages and mutilations occurring in cycles of debilitating violence had nothing to do with ceremony, and much to do with its absence.

  I pondered these matters as I read Gillen’s letters. In 1984 the National Museum of Victoria published an elegant, coffee-table edition of Baldwin Spencer’s photos with most of the original text pruned to make for more accessible reading. It addressed the counter-culture, and silenced Spencer’s unfashionable, condescending tone. It was a book to fit those sympathetic times. By the mid-1990s the national public mood in regard to Aborigines had shifted from sympathy to cynicism. Gillen’s book reminded me that encounter and patient engagement were continuing antidotes to mounting public anger and cynicism over Aboriginal Land Rights. The shift saw non-Aboriginal Australians giving full blame to contemporary Indigenous Australians for the conditions they endured: the continuing poverty, the alleged misuse of taxpayers’ money and institutionalised welfare dependency.

  THE KIDS CAME WITH ELAINE to spend the Easter holidays in Alice Springs. Her rental arrangement at the house a few streets away still stood. Ronja and Raffi unpacked, played with the dog, then wanted to see ‘Grandpa’ and the Whitegate kids.

  They kissed Arranye and sat on his bed. He was bright but feeble. His frail grace. Everything he owned was under his pillow: his tobacco tin, dentures, sunglasses and cotton pouch of pain capsules. He belonged to his bed now. Bartholomew, stricken with kidney disease and too ill to move far from the shack, slept on the ground nearby and tended their fire. At Arranye’s request, we collected a trailer of mulga from the flats by Pepperill Creek and dumped the dead branches near his verandah.

  Xavier, who I hadn’t seen at Whitegate for months, was warming the backs of his calves by Arranye’s fire. He pointed to the clump of quartz growing on the hill in the middle of camp. Soon, he said, when Ronja played there, she would get her chest empowered. Soon she would be coming on woman. She would feel heat rising up her ribs.

  Arranye spoke of returning to Little Well, which had been appropriately relocated 3 kilometres east, due to Gregory’s death. Government funding had been allocated to build two new metal-clad, three-bedroom houses, which were elevated off the flood plain and had wrap-around verandahs.

  Later that day, Xavier and Lilla lobbed by. They supped on our meagre leftovers, a chicken rice dish with a pinch of curry. He crammed some crusts in his mouth, swamping the lot with a pannikin of tea. Lilla fumbled with a boiled egg, dropping splinters of shell to the floor. When he saw my disapproving expression, sober Xavier accepted responsibility for his drunk wife.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  When Xavier asked me to drive them to camp, I declined. He asked for matches, adding that he would camp on the nearby hill. He played on my pity.

  ‘I’ll be die soon, Rod.’

  ‘Probably not before me, Xavier.’

  But it was true he lived more full throttle than I, as just about all his relatives did, and he would more likely lose his life from misuse than from old age.

  On one of our wood runs, Raffi broke his leg. Instead of opening the door to exit the stationary car, he tried to jump out the rear window and managed to hook his leg. It was put in plaster. Arranye told me to collect the native fuchsia plant so that he could sing Raffi’s leg strong again. The day before the kids were due to return to New South Wales, we were at the hospital to see how the bone was knitting. Raffi was w
heeled to the X-ray room and we were surprised to see Arranye at the end of the passage in a roller bed of his own. Their pillows almost touched through the steel safety rails.

  ‘How much break you been got ’em, my grandson?’

  ‘Two breaks.’

  ‘Then, two song I be give it,’ he said softly, nudging Raffi’s sheets with outstretched fingers.

  The singing would have to wait until Raffi returned mid-year.

  Arranye had been admitted that afternoon. He reckoned he’d poisoned himself by eating sour chicken. Meals on Wheels had left a prepared meal the night before, but he couldn’t eat it then. During the morning, the tray had re-cooked in the sun. He was so hungry he’d taken a few bitter mouthfuls and fouled his gut. When the health worker from Aboriginal Congress Health saw him, it was off to Casualty at the hospital. 14

  I hadn’t seen much of Jude for months until one day around that time our paths crossed near Billygoat Hill. He told me that the woman he’d lived with for a year in Port Augusta had died from drinking methylated spirits. Right now he had two wives and they were living in a flat on the west side of town. One of his current wives was ‘wrong skin’ for him, but the ménage à trois worked.

  Later that week I saw him outside Coles supermarket with one of them. I crept up behind, leant over his shoulder, and plucked a sardine from the tin he was savouring. He reeled in surprise then took me aside. Tears ran in runnels down his cheeks. His wrong skin wife had been drunk, walked in front of a car the day after we met and was killed. As a result, he would be speared or knifed in the thighs from her relatives.

  ‘See you, Rod. It’s all right,’ he said.

  We embraced softly and I wended through the car park to the Commodore. I glanced over my shoulder at Jude walking stiffly away and wondered what lightness, what levity might enter his life.

  Arranye meanwhile had a backache that ran down his leg. I collected David and Big Rose’s husband, Michael Marshall, from Charles Creek to see if they could help. Dominic had started the work the day before, blowing into his hands, rubbing them, and then placing them firmly on Arranye’s back. After a few placements he extracted a sliver of bone, which lay in his palm in a pool of blood. The old man sat up, smiling. Next day, however, he was complaining again. This day, Michael took off his singlet, held David’s hand to double the power, and sucked on the old man’s upper right thigh.

  ‘Hold hands like cup, Rod.’

  He spat into his hand, and then emptied the blood into mine. He dried his hands on his bare chest and told me that Dominic had not managed to get the rest of the bone out.

  ‘I see through leg like X-ray. See it, all tangled ball. I be free it up. I be like vampire, you might be think.’

  MY COMMODORE WAS CLEARLY in its last throes. Driving off the bitumen gave it a hammering, prematurely ageing it. The plastic and rubber trimmings split or exploded in the heat, then peeled onto the road. Front and rear lights shook free of their housings. More than once I had tested the advertised adhesive powers of various super glues. The Whitegate mob had called both the Subaru and the Commodore ‘Aboriginal cars’. As the cars plummeted into decrepitude, they did indeed come to resemble the vehicles in desert communities that had endured comparable battering.

  I’d told Lawrence many months before that I was getting rid of the Commodore.

  ‘Remember me. I ask it first,’ he’d said, when its market value was between fifteen hundred and two thousand dollars.

  I couldn’t deter him with the recent spate of problems. But I went down market.

  ‘Five hundred,’ I said. ‘It’s just got new shoes.’

  ‘No worries. Julie can pay with her next pension cheque. My brother from Santa Teresa is mechanic. He can get that Commodore motor that’s sittin’ there and make changeover.’

  The young blokes tore around camp in it for a few days, dropping doughnuts on the bitumen outside Whitegate. Once, Lawrence waved to me as I walked down Undoolya Road. It was so odd to see the car with all of them in it, minus me. Before a fortnight had elapsed, the pulley fell off. The car waited in camp for the engine and the expertise of the Santa Teresa sibling. Until then it led a brief half-life. For days, Lawrence had sat in the driver’s seat, feet stretched out the door, running cassettes through the car’s most laudable feature. It was the most luxurious stereo in camp. Then it was gone. Benedict had taken it to Atitykala and hit a bullock. The bodies of both the bullock and the car were slumped in the scrub.

  ELAINE AND THE KIDS RETURNED for the duration of winter. She resumed renting the same house; the kids spent time with each of us.

  The consistency of field trips with Arranye slackened as his health became yoked to the town’s medical services. Then they ceased altogether. Some days he was particularly weak. He would doze. Sometimes he woke lucid, sometimes blurred.

  ‘Oh, my son. When I wake, I not know whether I be north or south. Whether people round me talkin’ Kaytetye or Luritja.’

  As a younger man he did stock work. Being of light stature, he was the favourite jockey for the whitefella Hayes on Undoolya Station. He trained horses on the bush track pummelled out of Emily Creek flats. Like many horsemen he carried a reminder of those days. But he fought off the appointment with the wheelchair for years, even refusing my hand to help him to his feet.

  Theresa Ryder urged the palliative care team from the hospital to attend him. Their care was unprecedented in a town camp. Fresh linen, a mosquito net, a urine bag, nappies and a few ampoules of morphine were delivered daily over his final week. The grandchildren were constantly in attendance. Family around him sang his songs.

  The animosity existing between middle-aged Hayes and Johnson men, the legacy of the crash, deterred the latter’s visits. The resentment reared early one morning when I visited Arranye before breakfast.

  ‘Adrian been take that rum from under Arranye’s pillow while he sleep. He don’t know it,’ said Bartholomew.

  I marched over to Adrian who was surrounded by his brothers. I swore at him for his cowardly behaviour, pushing my finger against his chest.

  ‘That was a shitty thing to do. You know he’s in pain. That was his last money he gave me for that rum!’

  ‘That old man shouldn’t be dyin’ here. Theresa should be take him somewhere else. Old Timers’ Home,’ protested Adrian feebly.

  None of the brothers rose to Adrian’s defence. I turned and walked back to Arranye’s bed, where Bartholomew prodded the ashes.

  That last night the moon came crisp and callow, prising through the metal shutters of his shed. Charcoal clouds lipped their way across the hunched rise. Thirty or so people huddled in groups outside. Closer family circled around his bed along with the palliative care nurse. I bit my lip. We were mostly murmuring. Arranye was too weak to keep his eyes open and to engage in conversation.

  Louis Ryder, who arrived in the afternoon from Santa Teresa, was too late to speak with him. Sixty, usually silent and always sober, he was bereft. He slugged at a bottle of whisky, then cried at the moon, periodically pausing to take his penknife and cut his chest and biceps. Each cut ended with an extravagant follow-through gesture. Then he raised both arms above his head and studied the trickling blood. He rambled shirtless through the chilling air, the suppurations forming a glistening map across his torso.

  ‘That my uncle, lying there. That my old uncle. I Louis Ryder. I cut meself right now for that old man. Oh, uncle. I too sorry.’

  He spied me amidst a cluster of men in the greying light, lurched to pull me aside by the shoulders, then in against his stomach.

  ‘You got that old man’s Dreaming?’

  ‘We taped a lot of stories together.’ I was unsure exactly where he was coming from.

  ‘He never be tell me too much. Now you got it,’ he persisted, softening his speech so that only I could hear.

  He held my shoulders at arm
’s length, searching into my eyes. Then he dropped his arms, turned and wandered away.

  I ambled over to Raffi and Ronja and, with them either side, we broke spontaneously into Aaron Neville’s hymn ‘I Bid You Goodnight’. Arranye slipped into a coma. I kissed his forehead and stroked his hair.

  ‘We all love you, old man.’

  Raffi ferreted under the blankets and found his cool, wax-tender hand.

  When Arranye died early that August, he was three score years and ten, the only man at Whitegate who had endured into venerability. Though I was deeply saddened by his passing, his was a life lived as fully as I could conceive, with few, if any, regrets.

  The week he died he delighted in recounting a dream he’d had of the two of us walking in Ruby Gorge, a place we had failed to get to. He also assured me, in spite of constant pain from his ruined kidneys and weakened lungs, that he was all right.

  ‘Why you lookin’ at me so worry? Don’t be worry ’bout me too much, my son. Only worry ’bout yourself.’

  The Catholic Church in Alice Springs, which Arranye helped construct as a stonemason, was filled with Indigenous and non-Indigenous people from hundreds of kilometres around. Father Pat Mullins presided over Mass. There was nothing feigned or pompous about Pat. He’d gone some way to Arrernticising the ceremony, having hymns translated and sung in Eastern Arrernte, the cassock transformed in red ochre with dotting motifs, and the smoking done in church with native fuchsia. The bringing together of the Hayes and Johnsons made things tense. Verbal abuse disturbed much of the Mass, but it was contained. Mullins paused to invite those who wished to say something to come to the fore of the congregation. I didn’t need Theresa Ryder’s prodding to take my turn and speak of his qualities and achievements. I made thanks to the old man’s contribution to my education and his love of my kids. He was remarkable also for an absence of malice. I can’t remember any criticism he made that sounded like a complaint or a cry of injustice. This was despite all the changes and disruptions to his way of life.