True Country Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Author’s Note

  I

  First Thing, Welcome

  Long White Walksocks

  The Midst of a Battle

  Kidnapped

  Preparations

  Communion

  Rehearsal

  And it Pours

  Resistance

  Separation

  An Artist

  We may Fly and Sing

  But Who’s Tellin’ this Story?

  Confirmation

  A Beginning

  II

  High Diving

  Some get Together

  Loose Tongues

  First Meeting

  We Drink

  Is This Hunting?

  They Drink

  Fun and Games

  Milton Sees

  Stingray

  Visitors in Great White Boats

  An Ending

  Breakin’

  Aliens

  A Journey

  Franny Sees

  Some Explanation

  The Man for That

  Bornfree

  Not Listening, but Learning

  Not Just Madness

  Amazing?

  Break In and Out

  Forms of Retreat

  What Hollow Ones See

  Desire

  Dangers

  Kinds of Desire

  Something like Homesickness

  Exchanges

  Further Evidence

  Misunderstandings Still

  We are Not as One

  Words...

  ...And Knowing

  Acknowledgements

  The Author

  ‘Is this place real? You wait and see. I’ve been away for a couple of years before. When you’re away you wonder if this place is real.’

  Oh, it need not be real. It is not this reality we are homesick for.

  Billy is drifting in, looking for a place to land. A young school teacher, he arrives in Karnama, a remote settlement in Australia’s far north, in search of his own history, his Aboriginality, and of his future.

  Set in a region of abundance and beauty, where the river meets the sea, Karnama is nevertheless a place of conflict, dispossession and dislocation. Home to the Aboriginal community for thousands of years, it is also an eighty-year-old mission, now in decline, and an isolated outpost of government administration. The desperate frontier between cultures.

  Yet it is here that Billy is able to find his place of belonging. Gradually the outsider is drawn in, his life, his story, absorbed into that of the community. From hunting, fishing and simple friendships, Billy slowly finds himself engaged more deeply, more intimately, not only with the moments of desolation and despair, but also with the great heart and spirit of the people. Finally the exile enters the true country.

  Kim Scott’s haunting first novel paints a vivid and disturbing picture of a stolen country as its hero makes his tentative and fumbling way towards the true one, the ‘reality that we are homesick for’. This vital, often lyrical and always uncompromising novel marks an impressive debut and a challenging direction for Aboriginal writing.

  Australian Book Review

  ...a superb novel, original in conception and wonderfully evocative. The novel is a realistic picture of a disintegrating culture, yet it is exhilarating to read because of the vivid colloquial style. The comic disaster of a corroboree, the savage murder of an Aborigine, the crazed mind of a child in hospital are described with such intense poetic force that we seem to be not merely witnessing them but experiencing them with our hearts and senses.

  The Australian

  With straightforward prose, which is often poetic in its energy and rhythm, Kim Scott captures the ambiguities, the troubles and the rewards which accompany the brutal and the delicate nuances of relations when particles of one culture pass, as if through a not so fine sieve, into the heart of another culture.

  Elizabeth Jolley

  ...it has the rich feel of real life, of hurling the reader among the dust, the drunks, the swirling heat and the kids with watermelon seeds sprouting out their ears ... an intricate story that comes from the heart.

  The Mercury

  Kim Scott faces up to some very serious problems, problems about as destructive as any community could have to confront in peace time. But his book is not depressing. He has an honesty and a wholeheartedness which are engaging, and the Aboriginal narrative voice which he adopts much of the time never loses hope. Whatever happens, the country will be there, and it is the country that one remembers when the story is done. It is an impressive first novel, from a writer who already has his own way of speaking.

  Randolph Stow

  A passionate first novel ... an intricate symphony of voices, all vying to be heard. What is remarkable is that each of them is allowed to speak with supple naturalness, whether it is in the poetic cadences of tribal idiom or in the language of white Australia. This frontier of cultures, allegiances and language has found its ‘true country’ in Kim Scott’s well-crafted evocation.

  Sydney Morning Herald

  For

  Robert Unghango and Mary Pandilow,

  who let me listen.

  Author’s Note

  This novel began with a desire to explore a sort of neglected interior space, and to consider my own heritage. Having turned my attention to that primarily personal territory, and the blank page, I selected some words and images from my little store and scattered them before me. Here, I hoped, might be some place from which to begin.

  Actual place names, I thought, would help anchor it all in ‘reality’ and assist it to become something other than mere personal indulgence. I used details of Kimberley topography, and borrowed from the dialect and past of one community I had lived in.

  It is not difficult, for those so inclined, to trace Karnama back to a specific community. But then it’s no longer Karnama. In terms of its character Karnama could, it seems to me, be one of many Aboriginal communities in Northern Australia. I created fictional characters that seemed appropriately ‘typical’ and who would be most able to assist me in my explorations. Many of them ran away from me. None of them bear any relation to any real person.

  As I continued to write, the story developed in ways which I had not anticipated. None of the events or situations of the narrative are intended to correspond to any real occurrence. And although in a few instances, aspects of certain actual events are suggested, they are used as stepping off points for the imagination, and this work remains wholly fictional in every aspect.

  We carry in our hearts the true country

  And that cannot be stolen

  We follow in the steps of our ancestry

  And that cannot be broken.

  ‘The Dead Heart’—Midnight Oil

  (then why) ... this sense

  of gain and loss, the now I am

  not there, then, despite the giveaway

  smile? I am a born exile, or they

  are tokens of infinity; and distance

  like love is a necessary fiction.

  ‘Distances’—Charles Boyle

  I

  First Thing, Welcome

  You might stay that way, maybe forever, with no world to belong to and belong to you. You in your many high places, looking over looking over, waiting for a sign. You’re nearly ready, nearly there.

  You’re trying to read a flat pattern, like the sea, the land from high above. Or you might see your shadow falling upon this page. And maybe that’s all you’ll see and understand.

  Or you might drift in. Fall or dive in. Enter.

  Wind drift, rain fall, river rush. The air, the sea all round. And the storming.

  You alight on h
igher ground, gather, sing. It may be.

  You listen to me. We’re gunna make a story, true story. You might find it’s here you belong. A place like this.

  And it is a beautiful place, this place. Call it our country, our country all ’round here. We got river, we got sea. Got creek, rock, hill, waterfall. We got bush tucker: apple, potato, sugarbag, bush turkey, kangaroo, barramundi, dugong, turtle ... every kind. Sweet mangoes and coconuts too.

  There is a store, school for our kids and that mission here still. That’s all right. Yes, you might never see a better place. Our home.

  When it’s rainy season rivers fill up and food and surround us.

  Is like we are a forgotten people then, on a maybe shrinking island; a special place for us alone.

  You might fly in many times, high up and like reading river, hill, tree, rocks. Coming from upriver and the east, you flying flying fly in looking all the time and remembering; you flying quiet and then you see this place. You see the river. You see the water here, this great blue pool by High Diving where the kids swim. You see the mission grounds all green, and the houses all quiet and tiny from up in the air. You notice the dark mango trees, and the coconut trees standing tall along that airstrip road. That airstrip is like a cross, because there’s two airstrips. The old people built them in the war, with the army and the fathers, when those Japanese bombed this place. They make a cross for someone like a sky pilot to land on.

  But, first time, you in a plane. You go over the gorge and you see the landing where the barge came in long ago. You see that and you see where the river goes into salt water, and the islands scattered blue offshore. Then the plane banks and maybe you see nothing just sky, or maybe the trees the road the rubbish then in front of you the gravel coming up and bang you are landed.

  Welcome to you.

  Long White Walksocks

  Two white men would have been at the mission workshop, crouched beside a four-wheel drive. They stood up together, looked at their watches, and squinted into the sky. One was tall like a tree, the other one short with a round gut. They spoke, and got into another vehicle.

  Many kids and young people, dark ones, were over near the store and the basketball court. One tall boy leapt into the air, hovered, and tossed a basketball toward the backboard. The orange ball gently arced and descended through the hoop without touching it. The boy rolled over onto his back, laughing. He looked into the sky, and pointed up and to the south-east. All the kids stopped their games, and looked, and they pointed too. Their eardrums, even those that were perforated, or congested, or—in one or two cases—hindered by sprouting watermelon seeds, trembled with the drone of airborne engines.

  Next to the lumpy and cracked basketball court was a corrugated iron shack with rubbish and graffiti scattered along the wall. People were sitting on the ground there. A man put his head out the door. ‘Teacher plane,’ he said.

  ‘Teacher plane teacher plane. Gissa ride, gissa ride.’ The utility, coming up now, pulled over. Bodies poured in, all sizes. The same was happening to other utilities there. Boys standing on the trays, young women sitting holding their babies, people cross-legged on the roof of the cabs. The old people, sitting around the office and out the front of the houses along the road to the airstrip, watched them drive by. The corrugated iron resonated with the rumble of the plane flying overhead, the cars driving past, the shouts, the barking of dogs.

  I am flying. I was coming to a landing.

  The plane had flown in low, under the rain clouds, navigating by the rivers and coastline. My wife, Liz, still held the small motion sickness bag and could only smile weakly at me. The pilot shouted, but because of the roar of the engines and the earmuffs I wore I couldn’t hear him. He pointed ahead and I saw a small settlement. There were tall, deep-green trees, buildings glinting in the sun, and a blue pool where the river slowed and widened.

  ‘Ah, that’s it?’

  The pilot nodded. We’d been flying for an hour and a half. In the plane with us were Alex and Annette Seddum and their eight-year-old son, Alan. Alex was to be the principal of the school we were flying to.

  The boy squeezed his hands between his knees and wriggled. ‘We nearly there?’ and he turned and called to his mother, ‘At last we’re nearly there at this place whatever it’s called.’

  Annette smiled at him. Alex patted the boy’s head and turned his own furrowed brow away.

  We flew over a large curved pool in the river, and saw the mission with its lawn and buildings and plantation. There were small huts and large trees, and a scratch of a track that dipped through creeks. It scratched past the powerhouse and the school, turned the corner of the basketball court near the mission gates and continued, lined with coconut palms, past corrugated iron huts to a gravel airstrip in the shape of a cross.

  Not far from the airstrip the river flows through a gorge before widening to a mangrove-lined mouth and into the sea. The plane flew low and banked to make its approach to the airstrip. I saw the white ribbons of water which poured from the rocks and were shredded and swept downstream. That river is always a torrent at this time.

  As we lost altitude the scratch became a dirt road barely wide enough for two vehicles. It went cautiously through the bush between the gorge and the airstrip which we saw before us, through the settlement and then out the other side of it. The bush was littered with old car bodies, tins, plastic, all sorts of rubbish. We landed with a crunch and the gravel spat at us, the engine roared, and we were taxiing over to a crowd of dark bodies waving from the back of four-wheel drive utilities.

  We all waved back from inside the plane. It was very hot and humid on the ground. We shouted at one another over the roar of the engines.

  ‘Quite a reception.’

  ‘Good eh? Friendly.’

  ‘Look how many in each car.’

  ‘Gaw, they’re really black aren’t they?’

  Yes, whereas these people in the plane looked even paler than usual. My wife from travel sickness, the others from what? Exhaustion? Apprehension?

  The pilot turned off the motor and said to the mostly pale faces around him, ‘What do you reckon? Think you can teach them?’ He opened the doors for us.

  Annette pointed to two white men. ‘Look, Alex, there’s two men there.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘that must be the project officer. One of them will be anyway.’

  It was. His name was Gerrard. The other was Murray, the mechanic and general tradesman for the mission and community.

  We all shook hands, a small group circling in the space between the plane being unloaded and the welcoming crowd. Small children shyly zig-zagged toward the long white walksocks among us.

  We new teachers sat in the back of the utility with our few boxes and cases. Our clothes stuck to our flesh. We tightly gripped the sides of the tray, worried we’d fall as the ute bounced along the track. A number of other vehicles accompanied us, and we rattled in a great cloud of dust and noise. We came through the corridor of coconut palms and, smiling stiffy, regally waved back at those who watched from the shade of the huts.

  Many of the younger children held lengths of nylon fishing line, the other ends of which were tied to cans dragging behind them.

  ‘Hey, I used to make toys like that when I was a kid. I’d forgotten.’ It was true. I’d forgotten.

  The half-naked children turned, their faces splitting into grins, and waved also. Old car bodies rusted in long green grass. Clothing was strung out on low barbed wire fences around some of the shacks. In one yard a circle of people sat under a big tree, hunched over a game of cards.

  What were they saying?

  ‘Who dem gardiya?’

  ‘Teachers.’

  ‘Look out, ’m fall off not careful.’

  ‘Wave ’em, look at ’m they wave. Think they pope, or what?

  ‘Look at that one, blondie one, that short one.’

  ‘See that hat? That John Wayne maybe, ridin’ Toyota.’

  ‘Aiee! That
red hair girl, mine!’

  Screams of laughter.

  Fatman Murray turned into the backyard of the teachers’ housing behind the school and the front wheels of the Toyota went through the grass and sank deep into the mud.

  ‘Shit.’

  At a card game someone fanned his cards out on the top of his belly. ‘Coonce!’

  I win.

  The Midst of a Battle

  So, a beginning has been made, and the person I was then might have wanted to compare it to the beginning of a game; have believed it is like a basketball tossed up to begin a game. But what if the basketball were to continue rising? What if, amazingly, it continued rising, away from the control of whistle and game, and right up past one returning aeroplane? It would startle the pilot, that’s for sure, and leave him blinking and shaking his head for the rest of the flight. It would leave him wondering and not knowing whether to believe his eyes, the laughter in his ears, or what. How could he explain it to others?

  The ball stops rising, is poised, about to plummet. What would you see now, so removed and high above, up there with that basketball?

  My first impressions of Karnama were from above, over a map. I looked at several maps. Karnama was labelled either ‘Aboriginal Community’, or ‘Mission’, depending on the age of the map. On each map there was a small red symbol of an aeroplane hovering over my destination. And there were variously drawn lines; lines of different colours, of dots, dashes, or dots and dashes, each indicating a different path, whether it be ‘unsealed one lane road’, ‘4WD track’, ‘river’ or ‘foot trail’. It was like a treasure map.

  And then, the reality. A large ‘X’ helped mark the spot.

  School started the day after our arrival. We hardly knew where to begin. The kids seemed friendly and affectionate. They were all Aboriginal. Karnama had no television, radio, telephones, and only a weekly mail plane. There were few books in the community, but many videos. Few of the adults could read and write, and the students had very low levels of education. We had trouble pronouncing their surnames, and understanding their English. Our students were shy, but curious to know about us, and somehow very concerned for our welfare. One youth especially, Deslie, would even guide us around the large wet-season puddles.