True Country Read online

  The taxi driver didn’t want to let them in, but Billy persuaded him they were all right.

  I am a white boy, I am a good white boy, safe. But this hurts.

  ‘See you at home, in our country,’ said Billy. Did he really say that? Bruno, smilingweeping from the drink and homesickness, waved frantically. Raphael looked at Billy impassively. His face was swept away into the hot night, the exhaust fumes, headlights, snarling motors.

  The kids were all for driving straight home, non-stop, like a bullet. So they said.

  They wanted to stay in the bus as they drove through Katherine. Black people were drunk, and sitting on the ground outside the pubs, or at the back of car parks, or on the grass near public toilets. People looked at our people, too, as if they were drunks, or not good enough. Think they were savages, or monkeys or something? For all these reasons, and more, our young people felt shame.

  They all wanted to get home. The bus was hot and smelled of unwashed bodies and clothes. Sun streaming through the windows, hum of tyres, roar of the motor and the wind. Nerves stretching like drumskins.

  The kids started to bicker among themselves, and even the adults; Fatima, Liz, Billy were short-tempered. Nearing the end of the trip, Stacie suddenly burst into an explosion of obscenities. They stopped the bus, and Stacie accused Deslie, and he her. They were told to get off the bus until they could behave.

  Deslie went meekly. Stacie stayed.

  ‘Fuckin’ gardiya pricks, fuckin’ Deslie.’

  She raved. Liz tried shouting. So did Fatima. Nothing.

  ‘Leave her, Fatima.’ Fatima wanted to hit some sense into the girl.

  ‘If I was not so old.’

  They were not going to continue on until they had resolved the problem. Billy let the other kids of the bus, if they wanted to. Stacie had to stay. Most of the girls stayed with her, grouped around her seat.

  Billy and Liz tried shouting at her. They tried just letting her curses wash over them, trying to shame and silence her by just looking at her quietly.

  ‘Don’t you look at me. What you lookin’ at? Not a monkey, am I?’

  In the rear-vision mirror Billy could see the boys milling around, throwing stones. Sitting in the shade together. There they were, hundreds of kilometres from the nearest station even. A two-wheeled track, red dust and rocks, disappearing into the distance. Heat, and a grimy, clicking, buzzing quiet. Stacie’s mutterings dying away.

  It was not going to be resolved, not here.

  They spent their last night camping. Stacie and four of her friends retired into one tent as soon as they had eaten. The atmosphere was quiet. In a moment aside Liz wept, briefly, in Billy’s arms.

  Franny said, ‘Fatima, tell us some stories, eh? Ghost stories. By the fire, and we’ll sit up late.’ They did, that last night, and all the tents had to be moved so that their openings faced into the fire. All except for that of Liz and Billy. There was a circle of tents looking into a fire which was kept blazing, and there was one tent outside of that circle, in the darkness.

  All night, noises and screams. Billy and Liz tried to quieten them, but could not because they were so excitable, and getting close to home. They didn’t want to be controlled by Billy and Liz. Stacie was quiet still. Fatima, out of sympathy for the teachers, yelled at them to be quiet and good, because it was not yet their country to do what they wanted. But then her own words frightened her, too.

  The weather was unseasonal, and the heat an oppressive, even intimidatory presence. There were dark clouds low in the sky, crowding in fatly, and glowering. It seemed there had been rain, because once or twice they had to stop the bus, and wade through a creek to check its depth. Their voices sounded thin and feeble in the large space.

  And, as they entered the comfort of their home country and there were only a couple of hours or so to go before they were among the buildings of their village, Jimmy said—Billy heard him—Jimmy hit his fist on the seat with excitement and said, ‘I wish I could go back drunk.’ The boys all agreed with him, laughing at the spectacle, the heroes they’d make.

  And, closer still to home, Sylvester said to Billy, ‘Know what? I look forward to just eating tea and bread again.’ After all the regular and heavy meals.

  Raphael was back, still weak after being drunk for so long. Hating himself again.

  In a hospital, in Perth now, Beatrice clicked her tongue and rocked herself to and fro. Her mother filled a space and a nightgown beside her, and the papers documenting Beatrice’s condition grew larger.

  Fatima visited some of the other older ones: Sebastian, Samson, Moses too. They talked about her trip to Darwin, Walanguh, and Beatrice.

  Liz rang her brother, who was a doctor. He checked on Beatrice’s condition, and what the filing cabinets and computers held on her.

  They didn’t know, not really. Maybe some sort of meningitis, or a brain inflammation.

  Billy told Fatima what information they had, proving his access to the big automatic-doored labyrinths. Fatima listened, and thanked him.

  Franny Sees

  Deslie went with Billy to Franny’s house. Franny hadn’t been to school and everyone said that it was because he’d broken his glasses.

  They went in cautiously, wary of dogs. It seemed too quiet for there to be anybody home. In the doorway of one of the rooms there was a pile of dog shit.

  Franny sat on a single bed, and didn’t notice them at first because he was concentrating on something he held low in his hands. He looked different without his spectacles.

  Billy and Deslie sat on the bed beside him and looked at the object of his attention. He held a cigarette lighter in his hand, and his spectacles in the other. At the edge of one lens, where its frame met the spectacle arm, the plastic was black and misshapen where it had been melted.

  Franny was upset. ‘I can’t wear these, Sir. I try to fix them this way, but...’

  They went over to the workshop at the school.

  ‘Miss Storey, she from where, Sir?’ asked Franny, as they attended to the spectacles held in the small vice. ‘And you, where you from? Who? Your mother? Father? Grandmother? Your grandmother, she from here?’

  And when our Billy came back from far away, searching, he saw Franny peering at him through the repaired spectacles, his eyes swimming behind the thick lenses. ‘You, Sir, people say you is like us. True?’

  Well, not black. Or dark brown, or purple-black, or coffee coloured, or black-brown. Maybe tan. But what is this? We are all different. I am not the same.

  Some Explanation

  Gabriella came back. Another school holiday. She saw her home, the camp. The river. Ocean. It was the same. Oh, maybe a couple of new houses being built, some new white faces; the builders settling into the community and elbowing a place for themselves. Their white faces, those elbows, various white appendages; like ephemeral bush flowers.

  ‘I see now. I see it’s a funny place. It’s how people would like to think of Aboriginal people. Still some hunting, still bush tucker, some dancing, some art. Even a mission, a mission still with power. Clout.

  ‘And then there’s this gambling, and drinking, and fighting. Kids running wild, and sleeping with dogs. The huts, and the campfires in the yard.

  ‘I reckon the people, the government and the bureaucrats, the white mums and dads battling with their mortgages, the sports coaches and the teachers, all the wide world want to see the Aboriginal people like this. But wanting to be helped, wanting to better themselves. Able to be helped even.

  ‘I’m thinking. People been talking to me. There’s Aboriginal people everywhere you know. Even like you, paler. We are all different, but the same. Something the same in us all, that’s what they say. Not many Aboriginal people live like this here. Only couple hundred here, little places like this. But in Melbourne, Sydney, Perth, you know, there’s many. Not maybe like us here, but started off in this way, sometime. We like the forgotten tribe of chosen ones, eh?

  ‘Trouble is, even if I want it, I don’t
feel like all them others, not just because we’re Aboriginal...’

  ‘No. What about feeling, “kin”, identifying with a subset ... like some people you click with? But what do we share, or have in common? Is it a something, a spirituality or a creativity, a propensity to...’

  ‘But then there’s not just Aboriginal people in there...’

  ‘Yeah. I know, but I mean, maybe it’s been kept alive more...’

  But. But maybe we gotta be the same so’s we can make people remember that we belong here. And we got something to tell. Here first. For a long time. This whole big Australia land binds us. And we fragments of a great...

  A Dreamt time. A maybe rented time. A time the fabric of which is tom and rent and now not holding together, like a torn flag fluttering.

  Like a magic carpet falling.

  But we never had.

  ‘It’s like political, isn’t it? Make people remember, face up, know...’

  Remember? Billy does. Father and uncles and all coming home happy drunk one 1967 day, laughing and singing in the backyard and they burnt all the fence pickets on the fire and the fames leapt danced flickered across the neighbour’s face which was like a pale moon rising, frowning, over the skeleton fence. Next day Billy’s father, giving him boxing lessons so he could fight back anybody, told Billy he was Aboriginal. That’s why Nana looked different like that and you could see it and she was taken away from her home a place a special land somewhere up north and he should be proud of this part of us that makes him what he is.

  And he was. He was proud. That little Billy was proud at home and he told himself it was like being an American Indian on the movies. Part Cheyenne, or Sioux. But he went quiet with this information like a Featherfoot scouting because too much noise may bring trouble and you never can trust.

  He has been quiet.

  Gabriella has been looking at him. Her face is very serious and gentle, and Billy feels grateful, even before she speaks.

  ‘You writing up the old people stories yet? You’re the man for that all right. Billy, you’re the man for that.’

  The Man for That

  But Billy was not sure he was the man for that. Oh, he wanted to be. He wanted to be some sort of seer, a teller of tales, the one who gives meaning, and weaves the unravelling and trailing threads of the lives and histories here together so that people can be held up and together by the integrity and sense of the patterns. He who sings the world anew so that you know where you are.

  It might not be true to do that, if it could be done.

  And, in truth, he had barely started even transcribing the words of his sources. Oh, he had read one or two anecdotes to the students. They had looked at the words on the page and recognised the syntax of the voice that Billy read. They were surprised at it, and laughed. Sebastian, too, had come to the class to listen and elaborate if necessary. He had wondered at the rendition Billy gave, the rhythms of his speech altered a little, and the different timbre of his voice.

  Billy thought it may be like magic. He thought his audience realised the power of literacy. This man can tell the same stories, use the same voice almost. Better maybe. Billy wanted to have power and magic like that. Like they said some people used to have, in the old times, when people believed.

  When Gabriella said, ‘You’re the man for that,’ did she mean, ‘You’re no good for anything else’? That’s what the gardiya thought. It was a waste of time. Although Alex was interested. ‘You mean they listen when you read?’ But the others? Nope. And Liz, she had trust, this one from another old land. But maybe that was just her love for Billy.

  Sebastian, Fatima, Samson, even the kids; they seemed happy that he wanted to do their stories. They wanted these things written down: that they worked hard to help build up the mission, that they were clever and proud, that they still knew some of the old ways, and the old ways were good. The old people wanted to make it happen that the young ones got power in the white man’s way also, and did not drink or fight so much, and could be proud.

  Did they think there was still magic in story words?

  And Billy saw the drunkenness. It was real. And the wife bashing. The rubbish. He saw people manipulating the young government workers who visited, and then afterwards bragging; Samson, Moses, sometimes younger-but-learning-fast Raphael, bragging about getting a flight out and coming back with beer and wine, or about the new Toyota they were getting ... He saw the things Gabriella was now seeing too well.

  Samson, since Gabriella’s last visit, had been officially appointed the community ranger. A man had visited the community for a couple of days, and Samson had been the first to speak to him. Samson had so impressed and charmed the man, the more so when he knew there was a vehicle involved, that he got the job.

  The missionaries tried to dissuade the government agent from his choice, but they failed.

  So it was not long before Samson and his boys were sitting proud in the cab of their new Toyota, their women and kids in the back. Samson had also been given a khaki uniform. He pulled the wide brimmed hat down tight on his head, and carried a notebook in his shirt pocket which he pulled out and scribbled in regularly. Could he write? He lost the pen, and that was the end of that.

  See? He was like a clown really, acting out, and some white people laughed at him. And that Toyota, his boys or someone rolled it and nearly killed some kids who was in there, and other childrens scratched their names in the paint so that before long the inside of the doors under the windows was bare metal.

  The old people, would they like all these things written down too? You need history to understand all this, don’t you? But you can get and guess that elsewhere.

  In Karnama Billy would like to have been a mechanic. Then it could have been he that people came to be nice to, and to flatter, so that he would fix their car. Or a builder. A good welder. A pilot, to cheaply fly the people out, and not permit them to bring crates of alcohol back in, and to be respected for that.

  Like Father Pujol, he always go to the airport when people flew in. He welcome them, and help them with their things. Then he drop their bags, like accident, their bags fall on the ground and he listen for the sound of breaking glass. Then just look at the person. ‘Oh, sorry. Maybe it’s good that broke, eh?’

  But Billy was the man to write the stories, stories in which he didn’t belong. The old people told them better. Even the young kids. No one here read books, except at school. And except the gardiya, who read stories of sophisticated and ruthless people, or histories peopled by heroes.

  The people who belonged here liked to talk and listen around a campfire. Yes, they liked to listen. And now they watch videos all through the night, and recite lines of dialogue, role-playing with one another.

  Here, then, was Billy. The man to write up stories.

  It surprised him in class, how Deslie, especially, took to listening to him reading. Even before school. Billy sat in a beanbag, and Deslie beside him, and they read. It was as if it was parent and very young child.

  It was funny, really, how they got on so well. He who couldn’t read or write, and he who wanted to read and write everything too much and maybe too hard.

  Bornfree

  ‘Deslie’s on the roof,’ said a figure at the doorway, silhouetted against the night.

  Billy and some of the kids, watching a video in the classroom, had heard nothing. Deslie was on the roof. Why? They couldn’t hear him still.

  And then it was like in a video itself when Billy went out with a torch and climbed up and shone it onto Deslie. He lay flat on his back, his eyes showing the high black sky and its stars. The torch a yellow comet rocketing forwards, taking up the sky.

  They helped him down gently. He was not like a person, more like the outside part only and hollowed out. He bumped against the wall and he resonated slightly, like a drum.

  He is killing his insides with that petrol, sniffing it.

  There are some things to tell about Deslie, because he is a different one. He is no
t from here. He comes from Beagle Bay, and we call him Bornfree. He got that name when he was a little one, because he just ran wild and no one looked for him.

  He nearly never went to school. His mother and his father, they drank all the time and they just left him, let him go. His mother killed someone one time, in a fight, with a bottle. She went wild, and broke, and they took her away, to Fremantle or somewhere.

  Deslie grew, and filled himself with the bush. Like the other kids say, like Sylvester said to Billy, ‘He a proper well-trained blackfella that one.’ He catches fish like the best men here, and many times he goes out fishing or hunting on his own. He dances. Our other kids are too lazy.

  Billy liked to hear Deslie talk about when he was a little boy. The teachers, or other bosses, would try to get Deslie to school, but he would run away from them. He saw them coming; he inside in the shadows, looking at them through a doorway or window, they pale and shimmering in the bright sunlight as if over-exposed and their colour gone. Their hands jerking, heads turning toward him as he moved. He’s off. Gone! Whoosh! Thunder in his ears.

  Sometimes he’d flee on a horse, little bloke like a flea on a horse, eh? Bareback, no saddle, nothing; bare legs gripping, bare feet flapping, fingers in that old horse’s mane. They might shout at him, but after a time they didn’t really want to get him.

  Lots of times he met up with the old people in the bush and helped them. He liked that.

  But then his cousin brought him here to live with him and his family. People worried about him, he was sniffing petrol, going too wild all round. He went to school all the time here, because they made him. But he was not clever at school. Couldn’t read or write, not even his own name, but he was clever enough to trick the other kids, and teachers, too, most of the time.

  Like when the class played Hang the Man, that spelling game. Deslie, he copied a word from a book and showed it to Billy. Billy sat at the back of the class when they played this game. Someone might guess a letter and Deslie would just look around the class like he was teasing. When he glanced past Billy, Billy would nod either yes or no, and hold up his fingers to indicate whether the letter was the first, second, third, or whatever. Deslie then checked the word, and copied the letter onto the board in big letters.