Black Marks on the White Page

by Witi Ihimaera

  ‘You know who we all hear about all the time now?’ he asked us.

  ‘International mining company. Look how we got to suit international mining people. Rich people. How we going to do that?’ Now, even we, any old uneducated buggers, are talking globally. We got to help United Kingdom money. Netherlands lead air problems. Asia shipping. United States of America industry, and we don’t even know German people. ‘I says,’ he says like he is singing, ‘we mobs got to start acting locally. Show whose got the Dreaming. The Laaaw.’ He liked to emphasise ‘The Laaaaw’ whenever he was heating up around the ears on the subject of globalisation.

  We whispered among ourselves. Ignore him. Clap your hands over your ears to put an end to his blasphemy. Don’t listen to him. Still he was not finished with us. He went on ignoring our pleas, and in the end demanded, soft as silk, he knew who he was playing with. All satiny voice, he said it was time now to end our cowtailing after the white people. It was finale time. Hands up. Who we got to follow? The white man, or the Fishman? This was the ultimatum. Well! He made us that wild. Of course, we got no choice — we got to go with culture every time. We should have known he was leading up to all of this destruction. But we? We were like following dogs, and we were happy to do it, not think, because we were acting solely and simply on pure rage.

  The soundwaves coming off the explosion in the aeroplane hangars at the biggest mine of its type in the world, Gurfurritt, were just about as tremendous a sound you could ever expect to hear on this earth. Like guyfork night. Booom! Booom! Over and over. But one hundred times more louder than that. Ripped the lot. We were thinking, those of us lying on the ground up in the hills smelling ash — what if our ears exploded? What would deafness sound like? We should have thought of that first.

  Sometime during our precious time on earth we could have asked a deaf person what it was like to not hear the sounds anymore, before we go around deliberately destroying our own good hearing on wildness. Oh! But there was no going back because no one was going to reverse where the rotten hand of fate was heading. So, even though we were shaking in our old work boots, thinking we got busted eardrums, we watched the fire rage like a monster cut loose from another world. It might even have come from hell. Even the devil himself would have least expected us weak people to have opened the gates of hell. But we watched full of fascination at the fire’s life, roaring like a fiery serpent, looking over to us with wild eyes, pausing, looking around, as if deciding what to do next. Then, we could hear it snarl in an ugly voice you would never want to hear again. Alright, watch while I spread right through those hangars like they were nothing, hungry! hungry! Get out of my way. It did that roaring along, exploding through walls and rooftops which looked like toadstools bursting open, then once those flames shot outside, going a million miles an hour up into the sky, sparks just landing wherever, like a rain shower, out in the grass somewhere around the back.

  The fire spread out the back of the hangars in the dry grass, and then it came burning around to the front again, fanned by a gusting southeasterly wind. Then, the monster smelt the spilt fuel on the ground. It raced through that, quickly spreading itself over the ground weeds, until it found the fuel bowsers, then it paused, maybe the fire had thoughts of its own and could not believe its luck. The fire just sitting there was as awesome a moment as you could experience for our men waiting in the hills, sneaking a glance from over the boulders they were hiding behind, peering through the black smoke, thinking maybe their luck had run out and what next.

  It looked as though the fire was going to peter out. The fire was just sitting, smouldering, not knowing where to go next because the wind was not blowing strong enough to fan it in the right direction. Our men looking from the hills continued staring at the little flame flickering there, fizzing out. What could they do? It looked like defeat was imminent. And that same old defeated look, two centuries full of it, began creeping back onto their faces. But, it was too late now, they had a taste of winning, so they projected their own sheer willpower right across that spinifex plain, calling out with no shame, Come on, come on, willing the little flame not to fizz, believing magic can happen even to poor buggers like themselves.

  Somehow, someone started yelling, ‘Look, look, it is starting to move.’ The unbelievable miracle came flying by. A whirly wind, mind you nobody had seen one for days, just as a matter of fact sprung up from the hills themselves. It swirled straight through from behind those men, picking up their wish and plucking the baseball caps which came flying off their heads, together with all the loose balls of spinifex flying with the dust and the baseball caps, the whole lot moving towards the fire. When it passed over the open rubbish tipsters the mine had lined up along the side of the hangars, it picked up all the trash. All the cardboard boxes, newspapers lying about and oily rags, spirited the whole lot across the flat towards the line of hangars on fire.

  It happened so fast when the fiery whirlwind shot into the bowsers and momentarily lit them up like candles. Well! It might even have been the old Pizza Hut box someone had left on top of one of those bowsers that added that little bit of extra fuel, you never know, for the extra spark, or it would have happened anyway, but the wick was truly lit.

  The finale was majestical. Dearo, dearie, the explosion was holy in its glory. All of it was gone. The whole mine, pride of the banana state, ended up looking like a big panorama of burnt chop suey. On a grand scale of course because our country is a very big story. Wonderment, was the ear on the ground listening to the great murmuring ancestor, and the earth shook the bodies of those ones lying flat on the ground in the hills. Then, it was dark with smoke and dust and everything turned silent for a long time.

  ‘You think they heard it in Desperance?’ some young lad whispered carefully through the settling dust, because he did not want to frighten anyone by making the first sound of this new beginning. It was so incomprehendingly silent he needed to speak to hear himself talk because he was thinking of his family and the noise of his memories of them was the only sound he could hear.

  The sound of this young voice being the first sound was a relief for the others who had been thinking they were listening to the sound of their own deafness. However relieved and pacified they were to hear speech, everyone kept listening, listening for what else remained missing — Ah! It was the noise of the bush breathing, the wind whispering through the trees and flowing through rustling grasses. We needed to hear the birds chirping, the eaglehawk crying out something from the thermals high above, but the eerie silence lingered on. The birds were nowhere to be seen or heard, not even a singing willy-wagtail lightly flittering from rock to rock wherever anyone walked, or a mynah bird haggling at your feet. We looked into the dust and smoke-darkened skies and saw no twisting green cloud of budgerigars dancing away in thin air. The wind had dropped. Silent clouds passing overhead cast gloomy shadows over the peaceful trees, while grasses and spinifex stood stock-still as though the world had become something false, almost reminiscent of a theatre setting. We men floated somewhere between the surreal stillness, and the reality of the ants, lizards and beetles and other insects moving through the rocky ground as though nothing had happened. No one spoke or answered the boy, because we guessed the explosion must have been heard on the other side of the world, let alone in Desperance.

  One will never know what really happened that day. Fishman never stopped smiling about it. He said his recipe was top secret. He was regarded with awe whenever he came into anyone’s presence because it was a privilege to know the Fishman. He was respected for what he had inside of his head. Too right! Nobody could know the highly confidential material in case someone like Mozzie had to do it all over again some day. Ignorant people would always ask, How did you stop the mine? And he would look at them for a long time with his steady eye, like he was making up his mind whether they were worth letting in on the secret. Finally, he would say, I have decided to give you the truth, and the truth was the very same words he had always used about w
hat he would do to the mine from the day it got set up on our traditional domain. ‘I put broken glass bottles on the road to stop the buggers — that’s what I did.’ Somehow, this was the truth. Truth just needed to be interpreted by the believers who could find the answers themselves just like the Fishman had done. At the same time he offered another piece of advice, which was, a smiling man would live for a very long time. And he did.

  A FRENZIED MEDIA FROM the bustling world of ‘Down South’ fuelled up, to fly back and forth over the mine in their helicopters like flies. Unlike any fly, the journalists saw the Gulf through virgin eyes. It was a place few Australians had been to, let alone those of any other country tied up with the Gulf of Carpentaria. It was a world apart from their own. Anything in this new world could be created, moulded, and placed on television like something to dream about, or a nightmare.

  What stirred their souls was the pureness of silence and the intriguing sense of loneliness each had discovered on their arrival in single-engine charter planes at the aerodrome of Desperance. There, hours could go by, and the only thing happening was the sound of the weather funnel rattling against a steel pole — Twang, Twang! Twang! Under these circumstances, for the fascinated news people romancing the Gulf, no story became too big or too small, to give to the world.

  Televised on-the-spot reports of the dead ore body, lying across the ground like a fallen hero, filled the TV screens across the nation. Splashed into every news broadcast was a badly composed identikit picture of Will Phantom which bore no resemblance to him. A lot of people in Desperance started asking questions. They wanted to know who that person was that they saw on television every night, who was running around calling himself Will Phantom. It was a good question, because mix-ups and things like that did not help, if Desperance people felt they were complete strangers to one another, and they could not understand the truth of television. For mind you, they were still recovering from the shock of the mine. There was a thin feeling in the air. A tension. It became as though anything could snap at any moment over the very idea of life itself. Anything could fall from a loose hinge into full-blown hysteria.

  The multi-million-dollar mine, from infancy to its working prime, was probed, described and paraded to network viewers. Interviews and footage of scenery went jig-jogging along in soap opera intensity, before finally shifting to pan, and viewers were encouraged to dissect what had become of this showcase of the nation. They watched forensic scientists fully covered in white protective clothing, risking their lives, hunting through the rubble. Who could even breathe while watching these brave men and women slowly prod through each piece of debris in this solemn post mortem, carried out with the meticulous thoroughness of an ant? It became a televised spectacular, just like the death of an icon, woven with the interactiveness of Nintendo. Viewers could call up. They could hear their own voices via satellite and underground cable, coming back to them from the mine itself on television. Ordinary people living thousands of miles away, who had no former interest whatsoever in the mine or its location, joined the growing numbers of bereaved viewers gandering at the still untameable, northern hinterland.

  The face of a scientist, speaking behind his glass-fronted mask with a muffled voice which had to be transcribed into English on the bottom of the television set, like the SBS channel, became the anchorman for the task that lay ahead. On the first day he reported that a fire had spread from the main transport hangars to the fuelling bowsers. It was lucky no one was killed. On day two, the wash-up at the end of the day was like at the beginning, this was a major explosion in the remote Gulf of Carpentaria at Gurfurritt, the biggest mine of its type in the world. The scientists viewed viewing what lay on the ground were trying to discover what caused the explosion. There had been no fatal casualties. And so on. After a week of the hooded scientist, another bald, Mars-faced scientist appeared on the television screen. He was at home with a sad expression on his face which popped out of fawn-coloured clothes. He gave the scientific explanation on the news: ‘The fire at Gurfurritt mine initiated from a grassfire. Spinifex exploded and the intensity of the fire it created quickly spread to the bowsers. (Pause.) This caused a major explosion to the underground fuel tanks. I understand that this explosion spread through the underground fuel pipes up to the mine. This action quickly reached the main fuel tanks, which caused another major explosion, causing major damage to the mine and machinery.

  ‘The fuel line to the mine operations connected to the main fuel tanks caused further major damage to occur. The intense heat rising into the atmosphere from the initial explosions generated a chain reaction of explosions throughout the mine. (Footage to air of mass destruction.) An incidental fuel leakage running throughout the 300-kilometre pipeline to the coast caused it to be extensively damaged. (Pause.) This damage was caused by an explosion throughout the buried pipeline which was only running at a third of its capacity at the time of the incident. The force from this simultaneous explosion uncovered the entire pipeline and pieces were found many kilometres from their original site. (Pan shot: bits of pipeline sticking out of the ground and throughout the surrounding bushland like an exhibition of postmodern sculpture outside the Australian National Gallery or Tate Modern in London on the Thames.) At the end of the pipeline, there was extensive damage at the dewatering plant where storage tanks were destroyed.’

  WHEN THE EXPLOSIONS STOPPED, the Fishman’s men picked themselves up from the ground. They agreed that only the greatness of the mighty ancestor had saved them. It was a miracle they were still alive after the earth shook so violently underneath them, they had thought it would go on forever. A heavy red fog of dust and smoke hung in the air as they moved away, their visibility limited to just a few metres. The fine dust fell slowly, and when it settled on those men who were trying to regain a sense of the enormity of what had happened, they took on the appearance of the earth itself. One by one, camouflaged by dust, they began spiriting themselves away, quickly, carefully, as dust covered their tracks, back to the lagoon of the dancing spirits.

  The ancestral trees at the lagoon danced wildly in the ash wind around the Fishman sitting on the ground staring red-eyed from weariness in the direction of the mine. He had been sitting in that position for hours visualising what was happening at the mine, waiting for his men to return. Their return seemed to be taking forever, and those extraordinary followers watching the master were making other rare discoveries. They were convinced that the Fishman had shrunk in front of their very eyes. They were sure he was growing smaller and smaller with every passing second of precious time. The chances were, if he continued to shrink, there would be nothing left of him by the time they would be compelled to flee. In this perilous locale, they nodded, he would become an obscure beetle left crawling around the edge of the lagoon.

  It was true, Mozzie Fishman did seek obscurity. His instinctive trait was to crawl away from adversity, at least metaphorically, into invisibility and nothingness. What caused this peculiarity of his tangled personality was something that went berserk in what he called his stupid brain, whenever he had anything to do with white people. It seemed it was white people who could tug on his conscience, making him degrade himself like this. The truth was, Mozzie Fishman was shrinking, waiting for his men, Oh! Great spirits of God, let there be no casualties, he longed, moaning to himself. He was so full of the anxiety and, shrinking up into a beetle, he could not see the young men who ran through the bush hoping to evade capture, jumping for cover as skilfully as hares.

  Yet, on the other side of his mind, he fought like a rabid dog to maintain an octopus vision of himself, where all arms led to great glory and success. In this view of the world, there was no room for doubts to interfere with the great spirits of destiny whose permanent home was etched into the land itself, in this place. No one tampered with these arms of destiny which belonged only to Mozzie, as though he had put out a single hand to catch a true stone after it was fired from a shanghai. His general mood was downhearted somewhat and for
lorn, yet in spite of the world of calamity he had created, he felt calmly sated as he sat alone in contemplation.

  BLACK ICE

  GINA COLE

  PASSANG TOUCHED HIS NUMB cheek as he left the dental surgery. He felt no connection with his own skin, as if his hand floated on the cold surface of someone else’s flesh. Passang’s name in Sherpa meant ‘Friday’. He was born on Friday, same as his older brother, Passang, and his younger sister, also Passang.

  A taxi swerved in to the kerb next to him. A startling manoeuvre, but since the car was a taxi he was unsurprised. The passenger door flew open, and alcohol fumes wafted out from the dank interior of the vehicle. A drunk white man with dishevelled red hair and ratty teeth slurred and cursed at the driver, a man of indeterminate racial heritage, maybe North Indian, western Turkish, northern Chinese or Croatian. He sat impassive, his tweed cheese-cutter meeting the edge of black horn-rimmed glasses.

  ‘You are a Muslim prick,’ said the passenger.

  ‘Why?’ said the taxi driver.

  ‘Because you come over here and … why don’t you just fuck off back to where you came from?’

  ‘The camera is recording you.’