by David Vernon
Later that night, Oolburri awoke to strange sounds. She had a tight ache in her head and her belly was churning. She saw both her boys lying on the ground, writhing, vomit and faeces smeared over and around their small brown bodies. She tried to get up but couldn’t. She managed to drag herself on her elbows over to her sons, as the first wrenching waves of nausea struck her. Little Pituri began convulsing but, as Oolburri raised her head from vomiting a few minutes later, she watched him grow still — still as a winter’s night.
• • •
Marianne looks up at her puzzled family. “I checked out this area online. Did you know this was Aboriginal land, that it belonged to people called the Keinjan?”
“Well no, but so what? It’s ours now.”
“I found out what happened here. We can’t stay.”
“Don’t be daft. Selling up isn’t going to change what happened in the past,” Bob retorts.
“But what happened 150 years ago is still here; couldn’t you feel it?”
“What are you talking about? I didn’t feel anything, apart from being hungry and wet,” remonstrated Bob.
“The land must have soaked it up, all that fear and pain and suffering. It’s still here. I could feel it at the swimming hole. This is not a good place to live, to bring up the boys.”
“So what happened here?”
As Marianne describes the unequal battles between the police and squatters with their guns and the local Aborigines with spears, tears trickle down her face.
“They were starving ‘cos they couldn’t find their normal food, with all the sheep here, so they ate some of them. And then when they set fire to the grass to flush out wildlife and for tree seeds to germinate next year, the squatters thought they were attacking, so they slaughtered them.”
Finally Bob understands and his exasperation drains away. He leans over Marianne and wraps his arms around her heaving shoulders, resting his chin on the top of her head.
“Oh sweetie, this whole country belonged to the Aborigines. There’s nowhere on the planet where someone hasn’t been dispossessed. That’s the way of things. The strong and the new overpower the weak and old. There isn’t anywhere we could live that it hasn’t happened at some time, except maybe Antarctica,”
“But Bob, a family died slowly and horribly from eating poisoned flour right here on that picnic area above the creek. They had already shot all the men at Pratten and they made sure their women and kids died too. And it happened over and over again.”
Now the boys are crying with her.
“I read there are only ten people left who speak their Wakka Wakka language. We did a bloody good job solving the ‘Aboriginal problem’ here, didn’t we? We have no right to feel self-righteous about the Nazis,” Marianne weeps. Even so, she suspects Bob is right. Man’s inhumanity to man is universal.
“But how can our boys grow up to be good men in this place, with such evil from the past echoing now?” she asks Bob.
“Maybe it’s the best place for them to learn,” he replies thoughtfully. “Now we know, so we can remember — that’s all we can do for the first people, love — remember them.”
Matty gently squeezes Marianne’s hand, “Yeah Mum, like the Diggers: ‘Lest we forget’.”
Julie Davies now lives in Central Queensland but in the 1980s she and her husband bought a block on the Darling Downs. This story is a fictionalised account of her experience shortly after moving there. Oolburri’s family are constructs but their lives and deaths are based on real events. Julie used mouldy government journals and microfilmed newspapers to do her research back then. It took months, not a few hours on the internet as depicted. Julie does not believe in things that go bump in the night. Her explanation for her experience is that gravity curves space-time and intense gravity micro-black holes are hypothesized to briefly form and dissipate. On that day in that place space-time curved enough for past and present to mingle. Julie has previously been published in the Stringybark Anthology, The Heat Wave of ’76.
Donald Charles at Ziza
— Anne Atkinson
Donald Charles Cameron (1879-1960) had charisma. The soldiers under his command may have had difficulty explaining where this came from but the old family photos of Donald Charles give all the clues. The fading mottled portraits reveal a man bearing an unmistakable air of authority but also an engaging geniality and charm. No wonder his men loved him.
Never were Donald Charles’ qualities shown more clearly than in his performance at Ziza in September, 1918. Here, at a tiny railway siding in northern Palestine, a remarkable military operation took place. That Colonel Donald Charles Cameron should have been involved was not coincidental. The whole thing had his signature all over it.
The ‘enemy’ at this time were the Turks against whom the Australians had been battling since Gallipoli in 1915. The ‘allies’, on the other hand, were the Arab forces who had become engaged in the war with the encouragement of their British mentor, Colonel T E Lawrence. Under normal military circumstances, one would have expected that there would have been a close working relationship between the Australians and the Arabs. But these were not normal circumstances and Ziza was no normal military operation.
Like all the Australians, Donald Charles had a great respect for ‘Johnny Turk’ even though Australia and Turkey had been at war for so long. The Turks, in the Australians’ eyes, were brave and honourable men. It cannot be said, however, that the Australians held the Arab forces in the same high regard. The fact that the Arab tribes were themselves fired by a deeply entrenched hatred of the Turks possibly eluded Donald Charles and his men. They tended, it must be said, to see their Arab allies as torturers and pillagers rather than as brother warriors.
By September 1918 the Turks were in retreat northwards. It was against this backdrop that Donald Charles’ Fifth Australian Light Horse Regiment (by now reduced by casualties to about 400 men) was ordered to take the surrender from some 4,500 Turkish troops occupying a defensive position at Ziza. Donald Charles knew that his men would be totally outnumbered but he was also aware that his enemies were dispirited and greatly hampered by wounded and dying men. He did not anticipate major problems.
But when, on 29 September 1918, Donald Charles’s Australians halted some 650 metres north of the enemy garrison, an amazing sight met their eyes. The Turkish troops were indeed there but the hills to the East and West of the Turkish position were swarming with some 10,000 allied Arab tribesmen. Those on horseback were swooping down from the hills firing their rifles in the air and splitting the air with their blood-curdling threats. There was no doubt that they were savouring the prospect of descending upon the hapless Turks once the surrender had been achieved.
The Turkish Commandant now did a highly unusual thing. He sent Donald Charles a messenger under a white flag. This courier carried a letter from his Commandant explaining his concerns about his troops’ safety in the event of a Turkish surrender to the slim Australian force.
This development placed Donald Charles in a decidedly difficult situation. Here he was, vastly outnumbered by both his enemies (the Turks) and also his allies (the Arabs). On the one hand, he had a clear directive from Divisional Headquarters to obtain a quick surrender from the Turks; on the other he felt a strong feeling of sympathy for his beleaguered enemy. And to make matters even more complicated, he knew that ten planes of the Royal Air Force had been ordered to bomb the Turkish position if the surrender were not achieved by 3pm.
There were several options open to him. The easiest would have been to insist that the Turks lay down their arms — which would have abandoned them to the mercies of the Arab allies. A second course would have been to stand by and allow the enemy to be bombed by the RAF.
But Donald Charles chose neither. Instead, he sent one of his men, Captain Boyd with the Turkish officer, into the Turkish garrison to talk with the Turkish commandant on his behalf. Donald Charles did not want to deprive his enemies of their weapons as these would be needed to c
ounter any Arab attacks but he had to have an undertaking from the Turks that they would not engage in hostilities against him.
When the Australian officer returned, he brought with him the official Turkish surrender from the Turkish Commandant, which was couched in these terms:
I hereby surrender unconditionally all my force, guns, ammunition, stores etc. at Ziza, under my command, and in so doing claim your protection for the safety of my soldiers, wounded and sick. Signed at Ziza, 29 September, 1918.
This letter certainly achieved the desired military objective but the terms of the surrender and Donald Charles’ own sense of fair play now placed him in a quandary. His first obligation was, of course, to his own men but he also wanted to protect his vanquished foe. How was he to defend them from the glowering Arabs and from the imminent arrival of the RAF bombers?
A lesser man would probably have left the Turks to their fate — but not Donald Charles. Thinking fast and breaking all the rules, he immediately dispatched to the Turkish garrison one of his officers, Lieutenant Crawford, bearing the Regimental signal stripes. These were to be displayed behind the Turkish lines so as to create the impression that this was a friendly area that should not be bombed. He also advised the Turks to take cover in case the strategy was not successful. Both Donald Charles and the Turkish Commandant must have been vastly relieved when Donald Charles received word (via the primitive, recently repaired, telephone line) from Divisional Headquarters that the raid had been cancelled.
The next few hours must have been filled with escalating tension. The official accounts tell us that there were still occasional isolated Arab attacks upon the parts of the Turkish trenches outside the range of the Australian guns and Donald Charles must have known that his men were itching to take the Arabs on. But he also knew that any action by his troops would inevitably precipitate a blood bath. He ordered his troops not to respond and it is a tribute to the respect in which they held their senior officer that not one shot was fired.
Just as the last light was fading, Donald Charles must have been overjoyed to see the Seventh Australian Regiment led by Brigadier General Ryrie gallop in. General Ryrie, a politician and a boxer in his earlier life, was senior in rank to Donald Charles but he and Donald Charles were clearly ‘brothers under the skin’. Certainly the plan they devised together bore many of the hallmarks of the typical Donald Charles’ approach.
Both men knew, with absolute certainty, that their men would need to join forces with the Turks during the night if wholesale Turkish bloodshed was to be averted. In a plan that could have come out of a Boy’s Own annual, they decided to lead their troops, on horseback, right into the Turkish enclave and stay there until more reinforcements arrived. They requested two Arab chiefs to accompany them but, once they were all inside the Turkish enclosure, they informed their startled Arab guests that any attack from outside the garrison would lead to their immediate demise. It was a bluff but it worked.
The night that followed was, by all accounts, extraordinary. The formal records of the Ziza operation tell us that the Turks and Australians, who had fought each other so bitterly and for so long, came together as respected adversaries. Language was a problem of course but the men gathered round the fires together, sharing their food and each other’s company. The Australians, greatly outnumbered, by their hosts, were confident of their own safety, trusting completely in the honour of the Turks. And the Turks, still engaged in sporadic gunfire with the shadowy Arabs outside the border of the camp, found themselves cheered on by the Australians’ rowdy (and possibly unprintable) encouragement.
In the morning, when the New Zealand Brigade finally arrived, the Turks happily laid down their arms and were marched off to Amman in the North as allied prisoners of war.
It has been stated that the Ziza engagement is possibly unique in the annals of warfare in that it involved the defence of enemies from attacks by allies but it is also remarkable for another, and perhaps more important, reason. It transmuted a situation which could have ended in dreadful bloodshed into a celebration of common humanity.
I shall always regret that I was never able to ask my great uncle Donald Charles about his part in these momentous events. But in his absence I incline to the view that in this case it was personality, not the pen, that proved mightier than the sword.
Historical note: Donald Charles at Ziza tells the story of a fascinating military operation that took place during the First World War. Donald Charles Cameron was an Australian Army Officer whose leadership of a small Australian force left an indelible imprint on the historical record. I would like to express my thanks to my uncle, Somerled Cameron, and to my cousin, Susan Cameron, who first made me aware of the Ziza story. Further information about the events described may be found in the official records relating to Donald Charles Cameron and the Australian Light Horse during the First World War.
Anne Atkinson is a retired Social Worker now living in North Queensland. She is a proud Australian who has always been interested in human interest stories — especially those based on real life events.
Encounter
— Laurence de B Anderson
On the back block the evening set in; the birds began to call as the light came up the cleared country from the west. Michael Monahan ruffled the coals with a stick, his dark hair swinging forward with each motion of his bare arms. Davy who unlike his brother was blonde and slight, skinned the rabbits on a stone the other side of the fire. Smoke filled their bark shack. They preferred to eat well for two weeks, then endure a fortnight of austerity before the next convict muster five miles away in Dredge. Even so their diet had gradually improved: Michael had started growing potatoes down by the creek and Davy was snaring rabbits, which were becoming more common by the week. So tonight there were two rabbits, a damper and some onions set to fry in rabbit fat. They ate well and did not speak much. Light drained westwards and the breeze died. Just at the point it became completely silent, before the night sounds took over, there was a noise outside and clods came scattering down onto the hut’s sloping wall.
“I’ll go bail it’s Minamut!” said Davy, his eyes alive with excitement.
Michael sighed, then continued to lick his plate. “Just don’t be giving her every damn thing,” he said.
“A rabbit and the good gift of myself.”
“Ach! Away with you then, ochone.”
Davy pushed open the door. An aboriginal woman stood there in the gloom. She was quite light-skinned, wearing a cloak of kangaroo fur and a knee-length dress of some material that may once have been blue. Her ringleted hair, prematurely grey, flowed like a shawl about her upper half. The deep-set eyes showed no emotion. On her back she carried a small fair child. This boy was as quiet as the night itself. Both were very thin.
“Ah, hiya, Minamut,” said Davy, crouching in the doorway and wiping his hands together. “I have something.” He felt about and produced two rabbits and something wrapped in paper.
Michael shook his head. “You’re hiding food from me now, is it, Davy?”
Minamut took the rabbits and walked off.
Davy grinned. ‘See you then, Michael, if you’re sure you don’t want to come along.” He tossed the small parcel back into the hut.
“No,” said Michael shortly, and pulled out his pouch and smoking cap from the boughs above him. Making animals of us all, he muttered. He was getting tired of playing father and mother to Davy, but was sometimes tempted to just behave the same way himself. But his mother had taught them certain standards, and he would be damned if he would let her memory down. He crossed himself and muttered a Hail Mary. Idly he opened the little paper-wrapped object — it was one of Davy’s little carved wallabies.
Davy followed the shadowy woman up the hill. “Hey, wait!” he called, heavy with his meal. Fearing she would go altogether, he exerted himself to catch her, worried about snakes as he scrambled up.
She had stopped beside a boulder and put down the child a few yards away. “Do what you want
,” she said.
In a mildly hurt voice he said, “You know, we could make it better. We could talk a bit, you know. I could go get us a blanket!”
She shook her head adamantly. She pushed the boy away again, as he was tending to come back. “You hurry up now.” Turning away, she bent over the boulder and hiked up her skirt in the near dark.
Davy looked at the charcoal-thin legs ascending to blackness and haloed there by the bunched cotton dress. There was a moment of comfort for him in there and nothing more, but the excitement in his lower half could not be denied. He stepped hastily out of his trousers and walked forwards. Whatever you might think, Michael. He put his hands around her waist, and entered her softness.
Slamming his white thighs against her, he wondered for a moment at the child standing off and watching him with big dark eyes. Davy, mounting to his climax, turned his head away and closed his own eyes.
A moment later he backed off, then ashamedly got back into his trousers. Minamut’s face never changed. She bent to pick up the food and stood facing him. Reading the distaste on her face he grinned out of his usual habit of contrariness, wiping his hands down his shirt. She beckoned to the child and he went silently to her; then hand in hand they wandered off.