Benang Page 16

  ‘Alliwah! Aiee! Look out!’

  Jesus!

  The constable jumped back, his head swinging, hands raised as if he had the memory of wings and was about to take off.

  ‘He behind you. There! There he is.’

  He had thought, you know, snake! Or something. But it was just a snail, a snail’s shell, because the creature had withdrawn into itself.

  They were laughing at him. All of them. Mongrels.

  Still, he would take the boy. If something came up, it would cover him. He’d followed recommended procedure. He would keep the small allowance for himself.

  As the constable was about to leave, the boy, without invitation, swung himself up behind him.

  Constable Hall was relieved when, after half-an-hour or so, he told the boy to dismount and was obeyed.

  ‘The horse needs resting,’ he said.

  The boy nodded, and easily kept pace behind. He was still there as they entered Gebalup.

  There was a spare horse for the tracker’s use. The boy could use that. For now, he must see to this one. It would be part of his duties to care for the horses. He could sleep with them.

  Sandy Two did not know what to do, was already learning doubt and indecision. He stayed a few paces back as the constable shouted and swore at a small family group. They didn’t seem very interested, and only occasionally nodded, as if in agreement with the constable’s stream of words. He’d had enough, he roared. He’d had a gutful of their begging; and he lingered over the word ‘gut’ to express his contempt. He didn’t want begging, not in his town. And the townspeople ... He’d had complaints of harassment! The town was bothered—and here the constable hesitated so that his own sense of justice, as well as his disdain, would be clear in the emphasis—by people coming onto private property and trying to sell clothes props, or firewood.

  The constable kicked at a couple of bottles by the campfire. ‘I could arrest you, send you away. There’s to be no drinking.’

  Constable Hall stopped speaking. He looked at each of them in turn. They were all standing, and looking elsewhere, glances occasionally touching. A couple may have rolled their eyes at one another.

  ‘You can’t camp here. I want you out of town.’

  Constable Hall got back onto his horse.

  They had little with them. No horses, no tents. The crude shelters they’d erected held a few bundles; blankets, rags, pieces of glass and billycans. They began scooping up these meagre possessions.

  ‘Out. Out of town.’ Constable Hall dug his heels into the horse so that it took a few steps at them and at least that made them hurry along a bit. An old man stepped aside, keeping his eyes on Hall, and swept his hands about on the ground to snatch a last few things. A woman tucked a child under her arm and jogged to the furthest side of the group.

  The Constable and Sandy Two followed them, drove them as if they were just another flock of sheep, and indeed they did fall into an orderly pattern as they moved. The constable warned them not to come back.

  Sandy Two told himself he had not taken part in any of this. It was just that he was there. Some of those people, they could have maybe been a sister, a brother. A mother. Sandy Two and the constable entered a row of houses. Sandy was listening to the different sound of the horse’s hooves, and reflecting upon what a fine thing it was, to be riding around like this. He shifted slightly in the saddle, enjoying the height of the horse. A horse was not as good as a camel for height, but he liked the gait better. Downhill, a bicycle was best, and Oh! to be mounted on one and whizzing along a camel pad with the wind at your back.

  Two Nyoongar boys came running from between the houses and into his daydream of modern technology. Sandy recognised one of them, Corrigin, from some of the teamsters’ camps. He thought of the younger boy as a little brother. Same people.

  Sandy heard the bellowing of Mr Starr, the shopkeeper, before he saw him come running clumsily around the corner of a house, and his first impulse was to cheer for the boys. He grinned to himself. Starr would never catch them, even though each boy was handicapped by the big watermelon wrapped in his arms. The boys were laughing, and then they saw Constable Hall and his tracker. His tracker? Sandy Two was close enough to read the recognition on their faces, and then some other expression.

  The boys changed direction, their bare feet sending the little stones of the new road flying, but others had arrived, what with the shouting and all, and everyone so watchful that the blacks not make a nuisance of themselves and what have you and just how were you supposed to make a town a place a community anyhow?

  Constable Hall collected his wits enough to shout.

  ‘Halt!’ He rose higher in his saddle, his legs thrust straight into the stirrups, and his lips protruding like a howling dog’s. Sandy Two dug his bare heels into his horse and, as if in response to the Constable’s shout, was in motion. It was a reflex action; he rode as if he was mustering and so it was he who cut off the boys’ path of retreat.

  He didn’t think what he was doing. It was just wanting to be part of the pleasure of a chase.

  Starr and his neighbour got to them. Starr clouted the smaller one across the head. The blow lifted him off his feet, and he rolled up only as far as his hands and knees. The neighbour grabbed Corrigin, and clamped an arm around his throat.

  One of the precious watermelons had split. Red flesh and black seeds were strewn across the bone-hard road.

  Sandy Two moved his horse to shoulder the man who was choking the struggling Corrigin. The man stumbled so that his grip on Corrigin’s throat loosened, and he snarled up at Sandy Two.

  Constable Hall slid from his horse, and handed the reins to another man who had just arrived and seemed eager to have a swing at one of the boys. It seemed most probable that the cheeky little half-uniformed bastard on the horse would be first.

  Hall wrapped the reins around the fellow’s bunched fists. ‘Give him the reins,’ he said to the man, gesturing at Sandy Two as he did so.

  The man looked at the constable, at Sandy Two. He dropped the reins, and walked away, muttering.

  Constable Hall and Mr Starr gave the boys a good strapping. Sandy Two got himself out of sight, but he could not close his ears, and he was reminded of other strappings.

  Fanny and her very young son Sandy Two had stood at the door of Mustle’s stables. They had been searching for the girls, since there was a spree on, and that was always a dangerous time. Mustle had taken a stirrup iron from the wall, and its leather was fastidiously looped around his wrist. He was using it to beat one of Fanny’s countrymen. He swung the stirrup, and the iron made a dull, muffled sound as it ripped bare flesh. The man was curled on the ground, and exhaled heavily with each blow. No other sound left his lips.

  Mustle suddenly turned and Fanny and her boy saw his flushed face and how his throat, where the shirt had unbuttoned, was bright red. He patted the pistol at his belt and walked right past them.

  They heard his voice at their backs. ‘Eh, Fanny. Where you keeping those daughters of yours?’ He gave a little snort of laughter.

  Sandy Two had always liked to sit up on horseback, and get a good view. He liked the way objects, the horizon, shifted in your vision with the horse’s gait.

  He saw a man, still quite distant, wobbling toward him on a bicycle. The fellow could ride a bike, that was clear, but his balance was affected. Ah, he was drunk.

  A cart rushed out from behind a building, busy busy hurry hurry. A two-in-hand. Frisky horses. Mr Starr was driving. Gunna give that fellow on the bike a fright. Sandy Two was interested in this.

  The bicycle had remained on course for a good while, held by a deep wheel rut, but now it lurched and its rider fell, sprawling as a drunk does. The skull made a popping noise as the wheel of Starr’s cart ran over it.

  Starr reined in his horse. The man lay still on the ground. It had happened so close, so all-of-a-sudden. Sandy Two saw Starr’s angry face looking into his own, and the fallen bicycle, and the man splayed across wh
eel tracks which continued irresistibly into the background.

  Starr looked down. So did Sandy. There was the body with its limbs lifeless as a doll’s, and its crushed mess running into the wheel ruts of the street. Sandy and Starr looked at one another. Starr’s cart had done it, but Starr glared at Sandy Two, wanting to blame him, wanting that black face to be the crushed one.

  Well, Mr Starr was furious. At the fool for doing this to him, at Sandy Two for seeing, and staring so vacantly.

  ‘Get the doctor,’ he said.

  Sandy Two was already away, and heading for the hospital. He raced at its steps with that crushed skull, those floppy limbs bouncing in his brain. He only dimly saw the bulk of the matron standing at the entrance.

  ‘Go away.’

  He tried to explain: the crushed head, the bicycle, the wheel ... How he had met Mr Starr’s eyes.

  ‘Go away. I will not listen.’

  And she no longer needed to, because Constable Hall was approaching with Mr Starr, and a body in the cart behind him.

  The matron waved her hand dismissively at Sandy Two.

  ‘Be off.’

  The townsfolk held an Indignation Meeting. Everybody was there; the members of all the clubs, including the newly formed Australian Natives Association. Daniel Coolman, as a new member, was among them. Some people had to listen from outside the building. You could crawl under the floorboards, or stand beside a window.

  There were a number of concerns. The way the mail was delivered, for instance. At the post office, they just opened the window and tossed it out onto the verandah. Then it was elbows up, hip-and-shoulder stuff. It was rough-and-tumble when the townsfolk gathered to collect their mail. Women and children had been jostled and pushed aside. The secretary of the football association, in his excitement, almost interjected that—yes!—his members particularly enjoyed it.

  Well, you know, it was an Indignation Meeting, but it was also a social occasion and they didn’t get enough of these, not as a community.

  Mr Mustle, the president of the Australian Natives Association—those citizens (white, of course) born in Australia—suddenly called out across the meeting, challenging any other club to a tug-of-war. It caught people by surprise a bit, and no one likes that. The Oddfellows and the two football clubs answered his challenge immediately. Men were laughing and jeering at one another across the room before the chair had time to interject and point out that their discussion was inappropriate.

  And then the mood suddenly turned, because someone called out, ‘What about the people—yes, these niggers, but there’s plenty of white men among them too—who are camping on town lots?’ Mr Starr pointed out that the Roads Board, of which he was a member, had resolved to request the police to remove campers from town lots to the area set apart for same. It was at the edge of town. They had even resolved to write to the warden—who was also of course the resident magistrate—to request the police to take action to this end.

  And the roads! Well ... Voices were raised. Shocking. Shocking, a disgrace, shocking, abominable, shocking. Shocking.

  What about the water! They needed a new dam built, that was for sure. What was the government doing? And who was to ensure that the teamsters refrained from camping on the catchment areas above the reservoir just out of town? Shouldn’t they also be utilising the designated camping areas?

  Those teamsters, some of them like to live with the blackfellas anyhow.

  Daniel Coolman was not thinking of himself as a teamster anymore, that’s for sure.

  Constable Hall was put under considerable pressure at the meeting. Nevertheless, his Occurrences Book merely noted that the gathering was lively, well attended, and that everything past correct and orderly. He had underlined these last words. The date was particularly beautifully written.

  Of course there were other would-be writers in an expanding town like Gebalup, with so many new arrivals each day. Most, like other newcomers, began prospecting alone, and then worked for one of the companies. So although there were other writers, it was really a town preoccupied with matters of commerce.

  Commerce, and writers; the Chamber of Commerce in the nearby town of Kylie Bay joined forces with Gebalup to write to the Aborigines Department regarding:

  ...the position of the unfortunate aborigines that are at present in these towns. For the past years we have been free of them, but owing to various causes they have returned again and threaten to take up their abode in our midst. It is a pitiful thing to find them as they are here now begging for bread, rations only being allowed to the children.

  I saw the police ordering them off the town as they become a nuisance to the people.

  The Chief Protector, predecessor to Mr Neville, replied:

  It is clear that before long something will have to be done towards gathering the natives onto reserves. However, we must wait until the enlarging of the law enables us to act towards the natives with more parental authority. There is a new bill being proposed which will give us the power to locate natives on certain areas.

  The Dones and Mustles had been writing ever since the Travelling Inspector’s report several years before, when they had uncharacteristically felt compelled to argue for justice on behalf of the Nyoongars residing on their leases:

  ...you will see the unfairness to us of maintaining any of these natives who follow us here from our other properties when a fund is set aside for some at any rate of them. We shall feel compelled to turn a number of unprofitable natives adrift with recommendations to apply to the local Resident Magistrate for their maintenance. We absolutely refuse to keep them at our expense when we are already taxed to provide a fund for that purpose, which the constitution prescribes must be spent upon the natives, and which our natives in equity should receive their proportion...

  Part of the long-ago Travelling Inspector’s complaint had been that the Mustles and Dones were claiming rations disproportionately, and using them as wages. The pastoralists knew how to threaten a department, and the town. It needs very few natives to upset the well-being of a new and insecure community. The one community’s progress is measured by the other’s decline. The power of the one community is increased by the feebleness of the other; or better still, the complete absence of an indigenous community—as the Mustles, my own ancestors the Coolman twins, and my own grandfather Ernest Solomon Scat have been so keen, in their various ways, to prove.

  I would like you to consider the initiative we see demonstrated here, in these letters of the forefathers; the pioneering, entrepreneurial and opportunistic spirit which soars when there is money to be gained. The initial lease cost them nothing, and the purchase and exchange of rations provides a necessary stimulant to the economy they are creating. Their friend, Mr Starr, advises the department that he could be of assistance because, as the Travelling Inspector has indicated, it is not quite ethical of the pastoralists to provide rations as payment for labour; especially when the number of black labourers does not accord with the quantity of rations being supplied.

  But, I digress. This is a simple family history, not a treatise on the economy.

  Next mail day Constable Hall insisted that the public queue at the verandah’s edge. The window flew open, mail spewed out, the window quickly slammed shut. Sandy Two read out the address of each letter and parcel, and passed it to Constable Hall who then handed it to its rightful owner.

  There was almost another Indignation Meeting right there on the spot.

  ‘So, the boy can read? Where’d he learn that?’

  ‘Constable Hall! I haven’t got all day to stand here!’

  ‘Some of us need to get replies written to go back with the coach.’ (This last, surely, just to brag about the speed with which the speaker could write, and to show that upstart little darky.)

  A woman became very heated. She didn’t want that boy touching her mail!

  ‘Yeah.’ Heads nodded at one another in agreement. ‘Hear hear.’

  ‘Surely there’s better things for
you to be doing, Constable.’

  Sandy Two looked up. He saw his father ambling up the street behind his donkeys. The dray’s load towered above the little man, and there at the very top, peeping over and meeting his gaze, was Fanny. His mother was so high, so very high above the ground. Sandy Two dropped all the letters back into the sack and tipped his head at Constable Hall by way of goodbye.

  headache

  They had brought another load of forage for the police horses. Fanny stayed on the wagon, and looked down upon the constable, her man and her son.

  It was Sandy Two who told the constable they would be around Gebalup for a couple of days, waiting to load up with ore to take back to the coast.

  ‘Let me know if you need a hand with anything,’ he said to Constable Hall, waving over his shoulder and grinning as he swaggered back to the wagon where his father waited.

  Constable Hall walked around to the back of the timber yard next to the police office.

  Daniel Coolman had taken over his twin brother’s property. Pat Coolman had not been seen for, what? A year? More? The twins had taken up with Sandy One Mason’s daughters, apparently. Daniel Coolman had married one of them—Harriette—a few years ago at Kylie Bay. The other daughter, Dinah, had been last seen with Pat Coolman. Sandy One said they were still together, roo-shooting somewhere.

  There were five adults in the shade of a lean-to. Plus two, three, children. Constable Hall was struck by the sight of it; white men and gins, niggers right next-door.

  The men were drinking.

  ‘We’re already married here,’ said Sandy One, anticipating the policeman’s opening words, ‘so you don’t need to bother us on that score. The women don’t even sip this stuff,’ he added, his consonants hissing and clicking. ‘This is my son-in-law,’ the little man said, flinging an arm around the burly red man.