I held my tin and dug until my fingers were raw and my throat was lined with dust and sandpaper and I entered darker sand and then, as the sun began to drop in the afternoon I was working inside a pit. At four feet I struck damp sand, at six feet water.
Doctor Battery crabbed down to see me and we stood and waited until the water cleared. Then he took a mouthful and bent his head back and blew a fountain up into the air and clear water fell back upon his dusty whiskered face. Then he was naked. Then he took a second can and spilled mud and water on his head and ruined chest and body and then I – the shy one with the ugly injury – did the same. No-one asked me to or told me to. The mud was warm, then cool and then I squatted on the ground and drank the living waters of the jila.
There was no English word for this.
We lit a fire. Doctor Battery killed a big goanna with a rock.
We built up the fire with mulga wood and hollowed out places for our bodies and when I woke, cold, in the early morning Doctor Battery was sitting over me. Perhaps he was asleep.
Today was Sunday, never mind. We must follow the path of the snake ancestor (whose name I must not say), continue wherever it led us, into country described in T. Griffith Taylor’s maps as ‘Sparse or Useless’. It had been much abused by cattle whose hard hooves had made cruel impact on the soil which had, in turn, been much eroded. We negotiated the perimeter of violent scenes, like bomb craters littered with fence posts whose monumental mortices announced the folly of whitefellah business. There was no choice but to carry my teacher and surely neither of us was insensitive to the symbolism.
Finally, in late afternoon, I saw smoke and, an hour or so later, a campfire, and then, impossibly, a car.
‘You see him Billy? Jeep.’
I could see a human being, by golly. In all that enormous solitude it was the strangest sight.
‘Maybe you more happy now?’
The human being called to us. ‘Coo-ee.’ I thought, it is not a bloody jeep at all, it is a car. And I forgot all that delirium of water and mud, flakes of which were still adhering to my skin. I thought, I will soon be down in Perth. That was an intoxicating moment while it lasted, but soon enough I saw the damned insignia and recognised the burned out Redex Peugeot I had first seen on the road into Quamby Downs and wondered why I had to suffer such a trek to come upon it. Beside the car stood none other than the man who had robbed me in a game of cards.
Crowbar grinned and his lip lifted as my lip always lifted, the curious muscle Clover had thought was ‘sweet’. He took me by the hand and walked me over to the Peugeot. I was hot and tired and perhaps hysterical. I observed Crowbar pull at the underside of the dash and withdraw a melted mess of wire and plastic connectors and condensers.
The wires stank of fire and burning plastic. I did not wish to touch them, but Crowbar pressed them on me as if they were some special treat, like the meat of an echidna, a delicacy reserved for senior men.
‘ We find his brother Billy,’ Doctor Battery called. ‘Then we make him bloody go.’
Well, of course Crowbar was my blood relation but by ‘brother’ the Doctor meant something else: the brother of the Peugeot would be an identical model, in a wrecker’s yard.
‘We make you jeep,’ said Crowbar. ‘We get him brother. He in Derby. Cost sixty for same wiring. That’s all. He good like bloody new.’
I smelled the smell of oil and rubber and another life. That is, they would take me to the wrecker’s yard and I would run away.
10
Sebastian Laski
Appraiser rare books, maps, early manuscripts.
26 Glenhaven Court, Box Hill, Victoria. Tel: BW-9628
My dear dear Willy-willy, having worried about you for so many years your letter was a source of great rejoicing – he lives! – and, as you might expect, some irritation. Did you never know we loved you? Did you have to make us wait five years? Or is it more? How many times have we wondered what on earth might have befallen you. You were always so wilful and so unprotected.
Your Adelina suffered awfully, as you must have expected, and of course we have kept in touch with her and done our best to help her, in her difficult social situation. As a man who has himself left women, I would not underestimate your feelings of self-reproach, but please understand, none of your upheavals have made us care less for you.
So now you have willy-willied yourself into the wilds of Western Australia. You have discovered an unsuspected father and become a teacher in a rather Gothic-sounding schoolroom. We, who never dreamed we would end our lives in Terra Australis, have some understanding of your present situation. Sometime we can compete on whose life is the least believable.
Since we have seen you I have suffered a small stroke, nothing too bad, but I now drive with a type of doorknob stuck to the steering wheel, if you see what I mean. It will be no trouble at all to take a spin up to Bacchus Marsh, and if there is someone there to help me load the books it will be a simple enough matter.
My question is, what should be their final destination? This will be no ordinary library, I am sure, but you have not said what you want done with it. Dorotea and I have (interminably) discussed its fate and now have an excellent idea. I will write to you as soon as I know it is, as they say in Melbourne, doable.
I was hunting for the etymology of ‘Quamby’ which seems to be Aboriginal, but not from that part of the world. How on earth did it move from Tasmania to the Kimberley?
I look forward to your answer and, just to please an old friend, a fuller account of all your triumphs and disasters.
We both send our fond wishes, dear Whirly-whirly.
Sebastian
11
In Sydney the crowds would be waiting for us, warriors clad in mud and grit and streaking windscreens. TO HELL AND BACK etc. First we had to cope with the Snowy bloody Mountains. Excuse my French.
The first two hundred miles were simple, due east along the highway. At Orbost we cut north into the mountains: another two hundred miles with snow already on the ground. ‘To drive more than 25 mph would be unsafe,’ said the police.
Dreary Orbost was slick with rain and cow droppings. We filled the tanks and I was informed by my partner that I could not navigate. It was not my strength, he said. In all our years together he had never spoken to me like that.
I drove. I drove well. The misty windscreen would not clear and I had no choice but to wind down the windows and speed along the mountain roads with the insides of my nose like a pack of frozen peas. Titch had been reincarnated as his father, drunk on glory, impatient, fidgety, already imagining the trick he would perform when we had passed the finish line. He failed to call a hairpin and I travelled sideways above a lethal drop.
He shouted. He blamed the map. And on we went.
I was criticised for being too fast. At the same time I was too slow. He forbade me to stop in Cooma where there was a post office where I could have talked to Beverly.
On the giddy road to Adaminaby the windscreen was scratched and streaked and dark. There were steep descents with snow and rain. Coming down Talbingo Mountain the brakes were fading and I was nursing the handbrake and using the gearbox to hold the speed in spite of which I was nudging forty, then fifty, then sixty miles an hour on greasy road.
‘Jesus, Irene.’
I thought, we are going to die.
Gently, gently, I edged against the guardrail but then there were no guardrails to slow us and I could hear the clay and rock walls of the cutting, ripping at the screaming Holden body.
Titch was rigid silence.
I flicked onto the wrong side as I came through a pass. My babies, my babies, you will spend your lives as orphans, with warts and ingrained dirt and lonely Christmas Days.
Titch’s eyes: wet jelly, serve him right.
At least I have not murdered Willie.
I lost all traction and was sideways to the double line, bouncing off a mountain drain. There was a drop of a thousand feet. I stalled. White mist. Then nothing visible but four wh
ite rabbits which turned out to be the feet of a draught horse in the middle of the road. The mist opened to reveal, far far below us, a low wide building with Talbingo Hotel painted on its corrugated roof.
Titch left the vehicle and commenced a damage survey like an insurance assessor.
As I opened the door, the horse began to pee.
Soon we descended to the pub where they let me use the phone, right in the bar. I held the big black receiver with both hands shaking, listening to the operators talking to each other, one in Cooma, one in Bacchus Marsh.
‘Why that’s Titch Bobs’ number,’ cried Bacchus Marsh. ‘He’s away on that Redex Trial.’
‘Is that so?’ said the Cooma operator. Is that you, caller? Are you the Holden?’
‘Oh Mrs Bobs,’ cried Miss Hoare from the Marsh. I could see her as everybody saw her, with her pleated skirt and thick stockings bicycling up Gisborne Road, going home for lunch. ‘Have you won yet, Mrs Bobs? We’re all so proud.’
‘Where are you?’ my unhappy daughter asked.
‘How are you?’ I asked, knowing Miss Hoare would repeat everything we said.
‘You better come home,’ Edith said.
‘We’ll be in Sydney tomorrow.’
‘You tell Ronnie then. You tell him, Mum. Aunt Beverly has done a bunk. We’re being looked after by the cousins.’
Through the window, through the mist, I could see my husband.
He had a bucket of warm water out and was cleaning up the battered car. Idiot, I thought. Leave the mud on. Edith told me that Beverly was with that ‘Uncle chap’, whoever he was. I said I would find Beverly straight away.
Miss Hoare put me through to Constable Lurch of the Bacchus Marsh police. He was the chap who had taken home his ten-pound redfin.
‘I don’t see what I can do for you, Mrs Bobs.’
Why would I expect him to be snotty? He had been nice to me before, and here I was, putting the Marsh on the map. ‘Can you find my sister?’ I asked.
‘I don’t think that’s my job, is it?’
I was startled to hear his peevish tone. I should not have been: I was addressing him as if he was my servant. I was in the newspapers and thought myself superior. This was how he heard me when I explained that Beverly had left my kids alone.
‘We could say the same about you Mrs Bobs.’
‘I’m in the Redex, you know that.’
‘Endangering the welfare of a minor. That’s it, isn’t it?’
Oh Jesus, forgive me for needing you, I thought. I was agitated then and everyone could hear, on the phone, and in the beery bar of the Talbingo Hotel.
‘Please Constable. I’m sorry. I think she has a boyfriend.’
‘Yes, we are aware of that Mrs Bobs.’
‘Is there nothing you can do?’
‘Just leave it with me Mrs Bobs.’
I could have asked him what he meant. I could have apologised for being on the front page in the Melbourne Sun. He hung up and I had to wait for the Cooma operator to call in with the cost and the publican saw my distress and poured me a shot of whisky.
I drank, booked another call and you could rely on Miss Hoare to recognise the number when I said it.
‘Bachhuber, W,’ she cried. Together we heard the phone ringing in an empty house.
‘Are you alright, Mrs Bobs? You sound distressed.’
I thought it best to terminate the conversation.
12
In the pale light of dawn I was cleverly enticed out onto the verandah of the teacher’s residence from where I beheld the Redex Peugeot. Clustered around it were Battery and Crowbar, Oliver Emu, Charley Hobbes, my entire class as they always looked before their morning showers, their skin still dusty, hair matted, their camp clothes a yellowish sick grey.
It is true, as I must have said, that Crowbar was a black man with my physiognomy, but he also had a slim-hipped cowboy swagger all his own. He was my disturbing Other and he was an athlete, folding his whippy body behind the steering wheel where, obviously, the key awaited him. The metal monster backfired, blew flame, and then it was rocking on its springs inside a cloud of oily smoke.
Forever after the Peugeot would be fondly called the jeep. It was now stripped and burnished, with the brutal appearance of a rocket or a racing car or that great Australian machine gun, the Owen, with its grim metal magazine. I mean, the stock car had become a war machine. It had no windscreen. Fire had blistered its paintwork and turned it as iridescent as an oil slick. Its innards were as sour as smoke. The floor was metal, the gearstick had no knob, just a rusty rod waiting for my hand.
This was a presentation of sorts. Crowbar pressed the keys on me.
Then Susie Shuttle (my star student, interpreter and assistant) came forward to present a painting on behalf of all my students: a portrait of ghost-haired me, the Peugeot, a bearded serpent.
I prepared to make a formal speech, but the motor coughed and stopped. The tank was dry.
‘Tipon,’ said Battery.
‘Siphon,’ said Susie Shuttle and I understood they could sell me more petroleum as required.
‘Plenty more juice,’ said Doctor Battery and I adjusted myself to his gait as we all made our way to school, strolling past the wire-fenced homestead where Carter’s kids were at ‘School of the Air’. Each day the poor creatures sat before a pedal radio like little gerbils on a wheel and as my lot now ran and tumbled through the soupy air, I could hear the boss’s kids singing their school song. Parted but united, Parted but united / Is our school motto and pride of our heart.
The Carter girl was serious and studious – she disapproved of me – but twice at dinner her little brother had undercut his father with a traitor’s wink. I would have loved him in my class, particularly now. It is not grandiose to say I might have saved his soul.
Since my visit to the jila, the station had been given over to the thrills of horse breaking. At the same time the white wall of my cave had become the site of an erupting diagram which kept me mixing ink and improvising brushes from twigs and bark. The chart was bold and blue and forked. It showed the blacks at Quamby Downs were not one mob but many language groups, two dispossessed of their ancestral lands and all of them systematically humiliated by the pastoralists. I could not have taught this by myself. I learned it from them, and they from each other, and from Old Mick and Peter Stockman and Oliver Emu’s grandfather Doctor Battery, who still lived on the country of his people. Most of my pupils never would. Their ancestors had been slaughtered, their country made unreachable. And of course I had finally seen that all Aboriginal culture was based on country, on journeys, or tracks now cut up by fences. So then I understood that Quamby Downs was a sort of prison where it was often impossible to honour the moral and religious obligations of singing country, and then the cause of the people’s awful lassitude was obvious. They were exiles, denied the meaning of their lives.
If Garret Hangar had seen our messy diagram he would have been greatly inconvenienced by having to fire me on the spot. Indeed, the Western Australian education department had given specific instructions that I was not to reinforce ‘backward beliefs’. They paid me twenty pounds a week to erase the past, to modernise the blacks, to make them as white as possible in the hope that they would grow up as stockboys and house lubras and punka wallahs.
Having regained their natural authority, the old men made it clear that they would rather not have a woman as their intermediary, but that could not be helped. It was from Susie Shuttle that I learned the story of the wedge-tailed eagle riding on the snake’s back and making the great river whose name I have now forgotten. It was she who likened the jilas to the ‘knuckles’ of a goanna spine, each one a link in an ancient story not shown on any strip map. The rainbow snake made Geikie Gorge which she taught me to call Danggu. Now I had the jeep, she said, Uncle Crowbar would take us to see it and would put fat on the rock at Danggu. He would thus ensure there were plenty barramundi. He would show us the marks on the gorge wall from the great f
lood.
It was clear to me that Susie, with her energy and barely hidden fierceness, was destined to be one of those schoolteachers who are talked about for generations, so it was shocking, at the end of every school day, to see her change back into her camp clothes and assume the robes of dispossession.
My day finished as it always did, with me sweeping up the footmarks and the limestone dust. Doctor Battery, I noticed, had stayed behind. Perhaps he had a story he would not let women hear. In any case, he had something on his mind which he would reveal when he was ready. Now he squatted in the shadow of the supplies cupboard.
I winked at him.
He scratched his long chin.
‘Damn good jeep,’ I said.
He nodded.
I told him: ‘Now I can bugger off down south.’
His mouth stayed straight.
‘Thank you,’ I said.
The old fellow took out his baccy pouch but now he held me with his good eye. ‘You reckon you pinch that jeep?’ he suggested. Well, he had ‘pinched’ it. Now I would too. I judged it time to smile. Then I turned to hang the broom on the wall unaware that the old devil was creeping up behind. When I turned, I got an awful fright to find him in my face.
He slammed me against the wall and I felt the powerful spring of anger in his arm. ‘Lochy crash angry,’ he said. ‘Nothing funny. You bloody white boss,’ he said and I smelled his camp smell, his heat. ‘Same thing always. Blackfellah give present. You give nothing back.’
‘I carried you,’ I said.
‘I carry you,’ he mocked. He spat, nicotine yellow, a great gob on the classroom floor. ‘Bloody kartiya,’ he said and turned away, his limp exaggerated by the violence of his temper. He was heading back for the cover of the camp but I did not intend to let him go, until, that is, he stooped to pick up a length of corroded pipe and then I changed my mind.
The camp may have been my place of birth but it was driven by rules no-one could explain to me. Why, for instance, would a man stand still while he was speared in the thigh? Why would the loser of a fight be set upon by a crowd of women and then do nothing to defend himself from their fists and feet? Why this? Why that? I had already exhausted everyone’s goodwill.