Benang Page 13

  In that mirror he could see the blue sky, a few leaves. And that mirror was like a pool amongst the rough bark. You sometimes saw a bird, a shadow. For a short time during the day it blazed white fire from the sun.

  As a young man he used to study his face, look for someone else looking back at him.

  When he went out setting his traps there was a place where, close to sunset, he could see the mirror winking at him.

  Topsy used Ern’s mirror, just as Kathleen had. It was patchy, and so their faces were incomplete. There were flecks and spots, and there were pieces of themselves missing, and yet each believed that it showed how others saw her. There were increasing areas of blackness, more pieces missing and making her invisible.

  I studied myself, looking for Ern or Will or Tommy or any family. I was looking for a likeness to Harriette, whose photograph I had. I held my gaze. I tried turning away, turning back, as if in surprise, to see what I looked like when caught unawares.

  I looked for ancestors in the mirror. I posed with Grandad’s artefacts. And when Uncle Jack walked in on me I looked at him in the mirror, looked at myself, and tried to hold my expression as it was. That look of surprise.

  ‘You need to throw that away,’ he said. ‘You know, a mirror—or even if it’s water—a mamari, a little devil man, he sees himself in it, that’ll stop him. Make him think too much, dance around, not know what to do. It’s not that different for some of us.’

  we move...

  I had a new game. I had never been one for games, but I was unusually thrilled, I was giggling like a child with the pleasure it gave me to share this one with Uncle Will. I could see, even within the composure and dignity he liked to feign, that it startled and excited him.

  At the same time—and this helped his appearance of composure—he was I think stunned, and in awe of such freedom.

  Previously I had performed it solely for the pleasure of seeing the terror, and—later—the indignation it aroused in Ern.

  I simply indulged in my propensity to drift. In the mornings I would attach strong fishing line to a reel on my belt, anchor one end of it to the house and, stepping out the door, simply let the land breeze take me. I rose and fell on currents of air like a balloon, like a wind-borne seed. The horizon moved away so that the islands no longer rested on its line, but stood within the sea, and it seemed that the pulsing white at the island’s tip was not a mere transformation induced by collision, but was a blossoming and wilting at some fissure where sea met land.

  It was indeed a very long time after this—but it may have begun here—that I realised that I had come back from the dead, was one of those few. I may well be djanak, or djangha—so much so that I stumble at what is the correct dialect, let alone how I should spell it—but even then I had not completely forgotten who I am. I floated among the clouds, and even with a bleached skin, and an addled memory I nevertheless saw the imprint of the wind upon the turquoise ocean. I remembered the call of quails in the dune grasses, and thought of curlews crying from moonlit chalky paths, and the footprint such a bird would leave.

  It was as if sunlight told me of the sameness of granite and sand, and—in the evenings—flickering firelight fed the fire of my life, of my breathing.

  But I was telling of when Uncle Will and Uncle Jack had returned for me, and of when I was accustoming myself to this experience of drifting. I studied the pathways and tracks which ran along the coastal dunes, and saw the white beach as the sandy, solidified froth of small waves touching the coast. I noted how rocks and reef and weed lurked beneath the water’s surface, and saw the tiny town of Wirlup Haven and how Grandad’s historic homestead—as if shunned—clung to a road which was sealed and heading inland.

  So it was not purely mindless, this floating on the breeze. It required a certain concentration, and I chose it not just for the fun, but also because I wanted to view those islands resting in the sea, and to get that aerial perspective. I couldn’t have said why.

  The wind ruffled my hair as I rode its currents toward the islands. At first I worried when I saw boats or any sign of human life marking land or sea, but such sightings were rare along that isolated stretch of coastline and, after a time, I realised that I could not be seen at all, except by my family.

  Grandad used to stare in shock. It scared him. I loved that.

  Uncle Will said he envied my unburdened existence. More pragmatically, he suggested I take another line, and try fishing as I drifted across the ocean.

  I liked it best when the breezes were soft, and I watched whales, dolphins, the schools of salmon moving below me. Late in the day the breeze blew me back to the house.

  The very first time he found me so tiny and out of earshot in the sky, Uncle Jack hauled me in like some sort of airborne fish. A sharp tug upended me, and then I was bent double, my limbs flapping with the force of such a retrieval into the land breeze.

  ‘Shit, you made a mess of the line,’ I said.

  He snorted. ‘You fuckin’ silly little shit. What? You kartwarra, that it? You’re something special, you know.’ He was insistent and angry. ‘I tell you you gotta go right back, you got something special there coming out. I can see where you come from all right. You oughta give away that reading and all those papers for a while.’

  He wanted to take all of us?

  Uncle Jack wanted to take us all driving. He wanted to show me some places. We could drive, and camp. We’d take Ern with us.

  ‘Will?’

  Uncle Will nodded.

  Uncle Jack reckoned that the main roads more or less followed traditional runs; along the coast to where his Aunty Harriette had been born. The roads went inland from there, up to Norseton, and back to here. It’s the waterholes, see. They used to follow the waterholes.

  Rain still falls, water still gathers.

  ‘Bring your papers with you if you like,’ he said. ‘Do all that. You can even fly yourself high as a kite, if you like, if you still wanna. No matter.’

  ‘The main roads follow a traditional run,’ he had said. ‘And, you know, we showed all those white blokes.’ He looked at Uncle Will. ‘Your father, he was shown by your mother, and her mother. And there you were wanting to be a pioneer.’

  It disturbs my clumsy narrative even more, of course, this sudden and contemporary journey. It disturbed me at the time also. I was scared, but seeing the reluctance in Ern’s face convinced me it was the thing to do.

  We drove for the afternoon, humming along the sealed road. A ‘run’, I kept thinking; we once walked where now we skim? The wind roared outside our small and stuffy capsule.

  I remembered the little Uncle Will had written—it was not much more than notes scattered among Ern’s well-organised papers. It was all about his father, as, perhaps, is my own.

  Uncle Will had begun a little history of this region, and of his family. His motivation was the publication of a little booklet, a feeble local history, to which he had taken exception. He had written:

  We may see how greatly facts are distorted and these people are most misleading in their trying to put the arrival of their parents in the new field before many others, for the sake of being known as descendants of the first pioneers.

  It was incomprehensible to me: Uncle Will, who had been refused ‘Susso’ in the Depression and told, instead, to go to the Aborigines Department for rations; Uncle Will, who had barely escaped being sent to a Mission or Native Settlement. Uncle Will desperately wanted to name his father as among the very first to ‘settle’ at Gebalup, and he scarcely wrote of his mother. Yet it was she who gave him his rights to be here.

  He was of ‘the first’.

  I thought of how Uncle Will walked. Proudly, cautiously; like one provisionally uplifted, whose toes barely gripped the earth.

  Grandad had written very little, yet he had organised and collected an array of material. Uncle Will had written a few pages from memory, and that was all he had. But I saw the evasion, the desire to compete and to say he was as good as anyone
and that this seemed the only way possible. In his rather formal, affected language, there was this hint of an alternative:

  Can you understand, dear people, why I’m rather diffident about discussing the early history of Gebalup as I knew it as a boy? The descendants have given their forebears images which they wish to see and present to the public in their most favourable light. It would be a continual source of acrimony were I to join in their discussions. So I think it much better for me to write all my thoughts down for the perusal and study of my younger relatives.

  But then he’d faltered, and after a few hundred words had stopped.

  My father had written nothing, and had just begun to speak to me when I killed him. Uncle Will was family, my father had said. Even your grandfather. That’s all you’ve got, your family. Even if, sometimes, it hurts to have them.

  Of course, this was not in any of the material I had read to my grandfather, the so-close-to-smug-in-his-victory Ernest Solomon Scat.

  We camped close to Uncle Will’s birthplace on our first night away. It was among ancient sea dunes, and nearby, behind a fence, there was a dam which, Uncle Will informed us, collected fresh water from a small spring.

  The four of us sat around the campfire, sipping beer. It was a cold night and I was clumsy with the vast bulk of my clothing. I had wrapped a long scarf several times around both myself and a log, partly for the warmth, but also because, as Uncle Jack reminded me, drinking grog inevitably set me drifting off ‘something cruel’.

  ‘Somewhere here, eh? I was born somewhere around here,’ said Uncle Will, suddenly.

  ‘It was a hot day,’ he said. We allowed him the authority to tell us of his birth. We assumed the story had been handed to him and not that he was possessed of a most remarkable memory.

  When Uncle Will was born the sides of the tent had been lifted and tied to catch any movement of the air.

  Fanny and old Sandy One arrived at the camp, and then Sandy One went to find the other men and left the three women to attend to the birth.

  What other men? Three women?

  Uncle Will and Uncle Jack had to explain to me who all these people were. Be patient, have patience, their sighs said.

  Harriette and Daniel? I knew about them, Will’s parents. Daniel Coolman of the missing lip and great bulk who was sown in a mine. Harriette, a shadowy but already powerful figure in my little history.

  Dinah and Pat? I didn’t know them. Uncle Pat, they told me, was Daniel’s twin brother. Dinah was Harriette’s sister. Aunty Dinah was the other daughter of Fanny and Sandy One Mason.

  I worried, as any reader must also do, at this late and sudden introduction of characters. Except that for me it was not characters, but family.

  ‘Yeah, well, there’s lots all of us don’t know,’ said one of the old men.

  And then it was definitely Uncle Jack who spoke. ‘It’s hard to know where to begin—except with each place we come to, really. Where we are right now.’

  It was hot, back then, by the tiny pool, here; the heat snapped twigs from the trees, and they bounced off the heavy canvas roof of the tent. Fanny and Dinah murmured to Harriette.

  Deep and rasping breaths. The soak’s water is still. Campfire smoke grows straight to the sky. The women’s breath is very warm, and there is so much moisture, all this liquid pooling beneath the trees.

  The place’s spirit continued to billow. Fanny felt so grateful.

  As the wet child took its first breath they heard the leaves above them clacking and rustling. Will was rolled in white sand.

  ‘This sand is so fine,’ Uncle Will said, looking into our faces and letting it run through his fingers, ‘it’s like talcum powder.’

  When Daniel took the child in his arms the women could not help but smile, he so thick and burnt and gnarled and the baby just a bundled heartbeat, mewing and clutching.

  Daniel was happy. ‘Now, this is the first white man born here. No doubt about that.’

  Uncle Jack was smiling at Uncle Will, teasing him.

  So where was Uncle Jack born?

  He said he’d tell me that later. When we got back to the other side of Wirlup Haven. He hadn’t been lucky enough to know his parents like Will had.

  Harriette, Daniel, Dinah and Pat had come across from Dubitj Creek way (as you can imagine, I spent a lot of time consulting a map as we drove), where they had been carting goods to the goldfields. There’s water all through there, the old men told me, and it was true that my map showed many small and temporary waterholes to which the main road clung. But a new railway line from the capital city had depleted the need for teamsters, and there was various troubles to get away from.

  They tried roo shooting which—in those days—gave them enough cash for what they needed.

  The truth is, the Coolman twins were happy. It was a decent life. Moving slow; hunting, drinking. There was always the chance of gold. They had wives who knew the country; who found water, food, a place to camp. The women could do everything. They could work like men, feed off the land, embrace their men and make them strong. And Sandy One Mason, their father-in-law, that enigmatic fellow they laughed at between themselves, was known by people all around this way; pastoralists, old miners, carriers, all of which could prove helpful when and if they needed to get work again.

  There was no fear of attack, as was prevalent with some travellers. When the Premier Man John Forrest had come this way less than thirty years before, he and his party had kept a rostered watch each night. A publication of 1900, In Darkest Western Australia, devotes several pages to the threat of attack by the blacks. But when Daniel and Pat met any who were not like themselves they stood close behind the women. It was what Sandy One had advised them. Their faces would echo the expressions of those speaking this peculiar language, as they half-listened and tried to understand.

  They gathered kangaroo skins. Or rather, the women gathered them. A trip back to Kylie Bay every few months meant they were making money. Do you wish to hear how they suffered; of their endurance, hardship, deprivation? In fact it was almost too easy a life. It was practically a relief to run out of grog and so they purposely deprived themselves, brought less of it with them—and even that they sipped with their wives.

  They moved between the coast and the goldfields; between the old and the new telegraph lines; between the railway to the north and the ocean to the south. Finding where they could take a heavy cart. And, always, there might be gold.

  Drinking. Fucking. They wandered, following gossip and getting Harriette and her sister Dinah to take them as far as the goldfields, where they thought they saw their women’s people slumped in the dust, rotting from the inside out. The women brought them back, always, to no further than a day or two from the ocean.

  No gold. Then suddenly you needed a license to sell roo skins. They found themselves ‘Gebalup’ way, near the outer limit of the women’s country, and fell in with the Mustle and Done families. The landed gentry of this story.

  The four of us sat around the fire until late in the night. Perhaps it was the beer, but I felt very heavy, as if burdened. Old people surrounded me.

  ‘Listen to the voices in the trees,’ said Uncle Jack.

  In the firelight the three men looked exceptionally old, ancient beyond their years. Grandad’s face glistened with the tears which now so often came to him. Uncle Jack and Uncle Will’s arrival had given him some protection from me, and I had not harmed him for months.

  The intervals between Grandad toppling, and being propped up again, grew longer. The eyes of my uncles reflected the fire. I remember noticing my own hands, and being frightened at how old they looked in that light.

  ‘Daniel was my father,’ said Uncle Will.

  ‘Our mothers, Harriette and Dinah were sisters,’ said Uncle Jack, ‘and Patrick might have been my father,’ he continued, ‘but probably not.’ The two men looked at one another, hesitated. ‘The Coolman brothers mined with the Dones and Mustles, even took a contract building the rabbit-pro
of fence with some of them. They shared a contract hauling goods between Gebalup and Wirlup Haven.’

  ‘They worked with the Mustles and Dones,’ Uncle Jack went on, ‘and this is a very hard thing for us to understand, and forgive. A very hard thing for us to accept.’

  ‘No doubt about it, they were partners with the killers all right. But I dunno that they helped with the killing, that was long before they got here.’

  The words were coming out—Uncle Jack had started it—but I could see that Will knew the story too. Grandad fell over yet again, groaning as he did so, and this time Uncle Jack—without seeming to take his eyes from the fire—reached across and absently pushed him back into a sitting position.

  Did those two Coolman ancestors help toss the bodies, haul the timber, burn it all? See the limbs crooked and dangling in firelight, the limbs akin to our own but lifeless?

  No, of course not. All that was years before, at the Done’s station. Harriette was only a tiny child.

  ‘Sandy One and Fanny were our grandparents,’ said Uncle Jack, waving his thumb to and fro between Will and himself—‘and that is going no time back, not really.’

  They were to take supplies back to the new lease at Dubitj Creek, and had almost finished loading. Sandy One left Fanny and their child, Harriette, and went to the stables.

  Fanny glanced about, thinking of how the women she knew had got away at sunrise, and how these Dones had no respect for who they took, or how they treated them. Such thoughts left her, suddenly, when she saw an old man at the woodheap. He must’ve been lying there the whole time, in the sun, among the timber, and had only now raised his head. Less than a dog, he had no bowl of water, and a chain was looped around his throat. Like Fanny he would have been able to look down the slope of paddock to the bigger trees where the creek ran, and that strange outcrop of rock.

  Little mounds of earth showed where he’d covered his shit.