Our Shadows

by Gail Jones

  ‘I see,’ she said softly. ‘So, what’s your point?’

  ‘Did it scare you too, Nell, that sense of scale?’

  Scale. Frances was always coming up with a complicated version of something simple. She thought of the Super Pit. Now, that was scale.

  ‘The Super Pit?’

  ‘That too, but I’m thinking of The Great Wave.’

  Nell wondered if Frances was losing it, with her recent phone calls. She was always harking back to their childhoods and wanting confirmation of something or other she had recalled. There was always a particularised inquiry or the elaboration of a facet. So often, inconveniently, these inquires left Nell with more memories, many unwanted, as sometimes happens between siblings. Dr Wright had told her that orphaned or abandoned children often carry lifelong guilt: she wondered whether Frances was only now discovering this feeling, was undermined after Will, and Else, and the dissolution of her good life.

  They agreed to meet during the week, for a coffee and chat. It seemed easiest for both to defer, and let the wave subside between them.

  From their apartment, the rent of which they could barely afford, Nell glimpsed a narrow band of the Pacific Ocean. It was a blue streak, alight as gas flame, in the corner of the window. In certain weathers the glimpse evaporated, and it was an inferred ocean they looked at; but Matt and Nell, easily pleased, were reassured by proximity. When it was obscured, they still heard the gentle thump of the waves; the rhythm implied regularity and a natural order of things. Wet waves and sound waves, she enjoyed them both. They could walk only one block and see the pleating water before them, and then down the hill, into windblast, to see it enlarge and beckon them in.

  Now, in November, there was the gleam of approaching summer and the water warm enough for a dip. Others wanted the prestige of ocean access or a view; but Nell and Matt wanted the elemental charge of something beyond and insurgent. Perhaps this was the sensation that Frances called scale.

  That afternoon, they went to the beach together. Matt dived in first, becoming a blur under surging water, before his head popped up, shaken like a dog’s, and shining.

  The tiny bubble heads.

  Nell still could not recall ever noticing the bubble heads. But she had valued that print, in part because Frances adored it and had been so envious. It hung in their bedroom, above her bed, with Frances on the other side of the room. The curve, the rise, the held breath of halted water.

  Else had noticed their interest in the ocean and chanced upon the print at a sale in Brennans’ store. So it entered their childhoods, this Japanese provocation, this token of something entirely misplaced in the West Australian goldfields. When she thought of it now, it occurred to Nell that this too was its appeal, that it looked so cartoonishly improbable, even as it was suave and compelling.

  Matt waved, sending a small rainbow, and called her in.

  It was still rather terrifying, a swim in the ocean. She’d never quite overcome the feeling that there was something thuggish about waves. Nell dived her best dive and came up as water broke above her. She was momentarily out of breath, dragged into a fierce undertow, rolled like a ball in turbulence and tossed and sunk, bubble-lines at her eyes like rosaries ascending in a scrim, then into surf, then into spindrift, and all of it bleary, all of it rushed, before her own bubble head emerged brimming—oh!—with panicky gasps.

  13

  Hard to reckon, but Paddy didn’t miss the green.

  His countrymen did, and often said so, lamenting this blasted country, and the flies, and the waterless miles of dirt. They hated the red of the earth, and called the heat ‘infernal’, and it made the trudge that much harder, what with homesickness and complaints. Their scurfy faces looked wild under their canvas hats; and maybe Paddy was by now a wild man too, made so by walking and prospecting and living like a pauper, lean and hungry and surviving on the barest skerrick of hope.

  He kept his own counsel, he was a cautious man. Sometimes he thought as he walked of his time aboard the Henry Fernie, sickened and miserable on the endless sea. It had seemed an adventure at Liverpool, when they were all cheery with the leaving. The ticketholders walked up the gangplank like they owned it and the watery feel was a novelty, for a short, sweet while. They didn’t know then how ungodly it was to sail upon open water, to push away from the land. The bog Irishmen felt their insides heave with the heaving waves. Spew everywhere, and the vile mess and the stench of it spreading. Grown men called to Mary or shouted at personal saints. So many days and nights with no earth for their feet to tread. They felt useless and dumb, they felt pitiful and mistaken.

  What a blessing it was to arrive at last at Port Melbourne. Solid ground. New world. The relief of a brick wall to piss against and wood without sluice and sway.

  Like the others, Paddy was a skeleton, but relieved to be off the sea. Walking on land had never before seemed so reassuring. He stared with sunken eyes at the bluestone city. It was rich, solid and scarily English.

  Paddy touched land, eastern Australia, on the 23rd of December 1862. He spent the hot Christmas with his uncle, William Lynch, in Ballarat, and within days wrote home, proud as he was of his reading and writing. But Paddy, just arrived, had no words to describe. So in the slimmest of lines he wrote ‘safe’ and ‘good prospects’ and ‘Uncle’s fine house’ (making of the timber cottage a mansion) and kept the vast rough diggings inside his head. The greed of it, visible everywhere in earth mounds and windlasses and wheelbarrows and poppet heads; all the dirt-turning, and dry-blowing, and undisguised lust for colour. As far as the eye could see there was clay and gravel overturned, surface shaped to pocks and mounds, and the men earth-spattered with creek-panning and pickaxing down below. Trenches, holes. No trees left, not one, just this mess and this scrabble of fevered seeking.

  In truth, Paddy was a little afraid of what he’d heard and seen. There were the diggings, a world unmade, like a desecration, but there were also the convicts and the blacks, and the empty spaces further out, rumoured full of death. These topics too he could not fashion with words for those left in County Clare. The world was bigger here and more godless, with the green gone from it and dry, and the bush a fearful wilderness beyond what was still a half-made place.

  And now he’d arrived in the west, after thirty years of prospecting all over Australia. Thirty years. By now he was used to failure and to secrecy and to not speaking his mind. Whatever fanatical dream he’d begun with had shifted from desire to habit, and he prospected because he could be mostly alone and silent, and in spaces remote from the demands of community. He never spoke, not once, of the few years in Melbourne, when he’d tried to make a marriage and a family, when he’d worked as a day labourer with a pickaxe, breaking bluestone for new buildings.

  Thirty years now and still Paddy Hannan was unsettled.

  Surrender, it might have been, or renunciation. Or he might simply have been avoiding the scorn of others by heading west. But this was a calmer time, and he had two companions to support him. They walked together, a brotherhood, he, Dan and Tom. Dan O’Shea was from County Cork, but Thomas Flanagan was from Clare, and like him had lived close, just a few miles beyond Ennis. As a child Tom had also heard of the Mooghaun Hillfort find; even of the crown with ten points and the treasure at the Ennis hotel. His father had seen a gold collar, he said, and Paddy thought with a private delight that Tom’s pa and his own might have stood side by side facing the same direction, as they did now, walking their horses through scrub, on a track into the desert, somewhere north of the new settlement of Southern Cross. They had their pickaxes and their shovels; they had their swag rolls and their water bags and their tins of canned meat. When Paddy saw their shadows walking alongside them, they were conglomerate creatures, lumpish and inhuman, weighed by the tools of their own labour. That a man should be so misshapen by what he carried and sought, and become a thin film of moving black, quivering on the dirt. This vision invoked within him an incomprehensible dread. At such moments he touched
his own ribcage, seeking what was solid there.

  By the end, and by the beginning of the new dispensation, they’d walked 368 miles from the port of Fremantle. A hard time too they had of it. There were watering stations along the way for sore-footed miners, but it was expensive water, and took much of their savings. They envied the camels, which never looked thirsty, and the Afghan cameleers who knelt suppliant for prayers—all together as a kind of team, bowing to the earth in one body—and who baked sweet-smelling flat-bread on cast-iron griddles. And the blacks, who kept their distance, but appeared calm and self-possessed. They were always in small groups, sometimes seen from afar with a dead kangaroo draped on a man’s shoulders or carrying carved wood or the carcass of some reptile or other. These groups were not seeking; they had already found; they were already in place and with ceremonies and secrets intact. Paddy looked on with curiosity but felt an intruder even then. Bashful here, in his Irishness, as elsewhere it was a form of pride.

  When at night he and his mates made a campfire, sombre with exhaustion, sipping tea between sentences, talking of this and that, the old country and the new, the incense of native sandalwood was a cheer and a treat. He felt a serenity he’d never known before. He’d heard of marauding blacks, and conflicts, but couldn’t quite imagine it, in so much space, space for everyone, with so wide a sky above. The southern heaven was a second, more mysterious heaven, huge and high. It blazed with shapes and patterns he’d not seen before. If he was a learned man, a scholar, he might one day study what it meant; but saw now the river of trembling light he knew as the Milky Way, whiter than ever, wider and immense. He felt both smaller and larger in his own human soul. When he lay on his back, it seemed as a church to him, this sky, this inexpressible extension. Looking up, he no longer knew where his body centred. There was nothing providential he believed in beyond his own deliverance here, seeing another sky, with a full belly, and free.

  Once, after they’d missed the track and were parched and afraid, three Aboriginal men led his team to a waterhole. The men wanted nothing in return, and afterwards pointed them in the right direction and then headed off to tend to their own affairs.

  Three white men, three black men. Paddy thought the black men generous. Dan had been especially anxious: he stared at the rows of scars carved into their chests, the jagged hardwood spears, the red veins in their deep, desert-swollen eyes. But the water was a gift, they all knew it, and made in peace and goodwill. Paddy offered some flour, but it was tasted on the tongue and refused. Only the older man spoke. It was heathen language, and to Paddy sounded rough and coarse, as though it contained grains of sand, or slow-rolling shingle. A mouth with the earth in it. But the tone, he well understood, was of one man helping another. He had an impulse to shake the man’s hand, but instead touched his forearm, lightly. There was a moment of pause. He’d never touched a black man before and felt himself flush and quake. His whiskers were itchy. He felt sweat at his neck. With equanimity or indifference, the old man received his light touch. Then, taking his time, with no rush at all, he turned back to his country, Kaprun country, and his companions turned with him.

  The formality of the encounter was something Paddy understood.

  Paddy Hannan from County Clare was a practical man. He believed he had an instinct for whom to trust and distrust. Here, where thirst might kill, where men were mad for grubbing and mining and wandering in someone else’s desert, comfort had to be taken when it was offered. He was grateful to have been helped in this way, by showing a need. The good Samaritan. And for the moment he touched the black man, this stranger, to whom he was also the stranger. This man who saw and knew of their thirst, and, without asking or expecting anything in return, offered his secret whereabouts of water.

  Whereabouts, Paddy thought. This other, larger sky and a new whereabouts. It was a word that his mother had liked to use.

  So whereabouts? she’d ask, commenting on this, or that. Hereabouts?

  14

  The day of the find was clement and bright, with the dry grasses singing.

  June 1893.

  Some called it speculation, or speccing, but to Paddy it was just walking the earth, looking for a glint of the sun. A speck. He’d done it for so long, bending to ground his perspective, when he wasn’t pickaxing down below or winching and dry-blowing above.

  At first, they each found a nugget or two and knew that—yes—this was it, this was a fine alluvial band. Soon they were boys again, all agitated excitement with the scale of the find and the need to exclaim. Dan and Tom had eyes big as saucers, Paddy said. How they laughed together that day and found everything urgent and comic. The crows were now comic, the sound of wind, the sky.

  Boys, they were as boys, and the flow of feeling excited them.

  ‘Three kings!’ shouted Dan.

  By this time speccing miners were wandering everywhere in the region, seeking out a place to dig and remain. The three men knew that they must keep their find to themselves.

  That first day they found over one hundred secret ounces. Already a fortune. It was near a place that would be one day be called Mount Charlotte, and at a site that would be the 30 Mile, then Hannan, then the town of Kalgoorlie. Paddy was chosen to ride to Coolgardie to register the claim. By law they had only seven days to do it, and he read and wrote well; they wanted no faults or mistakes.

  Within two weeks a thousand men had arrived in the area, all speccing for themselves, all mad keen with the wanting. Teams of camels, water tanks, tent makers and miners. The singing dry grasslands disappeared. Everywhere was dust and rubble and an opening-up of the earth. Grit hung around them and settled in their beards and eyes; it crusted the slopes of their tents and floated in their tea. The air itself was misty powder and orange light. Open ground became tracked and pitted and gullied and what few trees had existed were soon mutilated, and disappeared. When the bronze sun fell, at the end of the day, it was over a greedy desolation.

  Paddy woke in the middle of the night to the sound of miners carousing, a drunken song, an argument, two or three men in a fight. Someone banged on a tin bucket to quiet them. Shouts and curses, scathing in their force. Inside him, truth be told, Paddy felt ashamed of the transformation. The wished-for boom had blown the quiet world apart. Outside his own tent were a rabble, all foul with the same purpose, all fixed by the same nervy ambition. Rush, they called it, and the acceleration terrified him.

  It had once seemed a dream, by which all would profit, and at first Paddy Hannan believed this was so. But there was something abroad in gold-seeking that bent men’s characters out of shape. Mean and cunning men joined the decent and hardworking, and he soon heard of murders, and sacrileges, and sins. Aboriginal women were being taken, and Aboriginal men slaughtered. Greed infected the relations between the Christians and the Mahomedans. There was talk of shootings and rumours of bodies in a bonfire; of blacks tied to trees with salt in their mouths, so they would lead miners to water when released. There was talk of poisonings, to take the land more easily, and a massacre further north that included women and children.

  In the untranslated space between miners and Aboriginal people, the power sat with the rough emergency of gold. White men said ‘Wongi’, but they called themselves Wangkathaa, and were composed of eight tribes: Maduwongga, Waljen, Ngurlutjarra, Nyangaynatjarra, Bindinni, Madatjarra, Koara and Tjalkatjarra. These were words Paddy Hannan did not know. If he heard them in passing, they would have been Babel to his ignorant ears; empty syllables blowing by.

  Though prospecting suited him, wealth did not; he’d lived long with so little. His brief marriage to Bella in Melbourne had lasted only three years, so he’d spent decades without a home or a wife. Without the barest possessions that most men take for granted. He had his tent and his swag, and his two close friends, closer and more reliable than God. He’d walked desert miles, and he’d often suffered. He’d had to shoot his favourite horse and his dog was killed by a snake. There had been pneumonia and dysentery and the bout
of typhoid that almost killed him. There had been dark moods in his brain, foggy with grief and disappointment. And there had been times he wanted nothing more than to be a brown hawk, gliding high, swift, flashing its strong, fanned-out wings.

  Nowadays, these unearthly feelings recurred. To be nothing more than a hawk; possessing nothing and finding nothing but the arc of a quiet wind. Sometimes this seemed to him a childish thought. He ought to put away these childish things. But at other times he wanted this fancy with a kind of desperation: a flight, to flee, and the whoosh of a gusty elevation, pulled into a sunset of thin coral light.

  15

  Towards the end, Will wanted perpetual television. Propped on pillows, feeble and only half-watching, he devoted himself to its dazing power.

  Daytime television: Frances found it infuriating. When he coughed and his body shuddered beneath her hands, he would not allow her to make a fuss and kept his face shielded. He was often breathless and made gasping sounds to disguise his slow suffocation. Advertisements came and went, merry voices blasted, visions of new cars in dreamy places curved irrelevantly into view as she held him forward to bang his back and release the muck in his lungs or wiped at his brow and lips with a moistened cloth.

  In an attempt at humour, Will called the television ‘America’.

  ‘Visiting America.’

  Like her grandmother’s Someone Else, there was no rescue in the naming, no distance or release. She saw that he needed this glut, this ravenous world, to balance his own ravening body. The sense of analogy dismayed her. Both knew by then that Will had been sent home to die, and that she had him back for a short time, a mere visit, before he slipped out of reach. They never spoke of this knowledge, but it sat silently between them, when she counted out his pills, or watched him recede with morphine, or spoke in a soft voice about next year as if it would actually be shared.