Benang Read online

  Once again the constable found himself thinking, it showed what the blacks could be. Might be able to do. It depends, he’d wait and see. Careful breeding might ... but they could still regress. These women, the children. Perhaps it was true, he thought, that British blood was enough—even from men such as these.

  The constable was asking for help again. But of course, he was neither humble nor contrite. After all, he represented justice, and a good influence on the boy. The thing was, he’d lost another tracker. They were useless, he explained. There was no accounting for it, and they were as unreliable as, as ... He couldn’t finish the comparison.

  ‘There’s some grog’s been stolen. It’s been happening lately. Reckon if I could borrow the boy, I can sort it today...’

  ‘I dunno...’ said Sandy One. He offered Constable Hall a drink, and moved the conversation to other things. Like when was the constable going to get a decent office and cell built? What pressures the constable must be under, what difficulties he must face in the pursuit of duty, how he must be looking forward to his family joining him...

  ‘Yeah, I need a miner’s homestead lease,’ said Sandy One Mason, apparently meandering through small talk. ‘It’s not a camp. I’m prospecting, I’ve found good stuff here. There’s even a bit of water.’

  ‘What,’ Constable Hall asked, ‘in among the dunes there? It’s just sand.’

  Sandy said he knew it was unusual, but there you are. It’s luck, everybody knew that. Some people found gold when their horse kicked a nugget.

  ‘It’s not good for my family. I’ve gotta support them, show them a future. I still cart when I can, but it’s Daniel who lines up the work these days. But, anyway, sure,’ continued Sandy One, laughing. ‘Young Sandy will help you out. Give him a call when you’re right. Like I said, we’re here for a couple of days and he doesn’t want any of our grog, anyways.’

  Daniel wished his own brother was here. It hurt that his wife’s brother could do this work, this black-tracking. His clumsy lips made ‘back-tracking’ of the expression.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Sandy One said to his son-in-law. ‘They need a good tracker, simple as that.’

  It seemed that the offenders had kept on the move. All day long Constable Hall followed Sandy Two on a meandering path. Every now and then he was shown a small piece of glass, a bottle top, some broken twigs, a collection of footprints until, finally, they were approaching the town from the opposite boundary to where they’d started. They found the remains of a small fire in a dry gully surrounded by scraggly mallee. There were a few bottles and some broken glass scattered about.

  ‘Looks like that’s it.’

  After a day spent walking in a great circle around the town, they had arrived at a pile of warm ash.

  ‘They’re cunning, eh?’ offered Sandy Two.

  The constable asked Sandy Two if he could tell the identity of those involved by their footprints. Sandy said that he couldn’t, but would Constable Hall be interested in hiring another fellow as tracker? Sandy Two knew one—didn’t know him well or anything—but he lived about here, this fella. He’d have a better idea. He was much better at it.

  So Harry Cuddles got the job.

  Starr, the shopkeeper, was trying to knock on the tent flap early the next morning. His ineffectiveness and foolishness made him even angrier, and he shouted and stamped his foot. He called out Constable Hall’s name repeatedly, turning around and around on his heel as he did so and Hall had to yell out to him from where he sat.

  ‘I’m on the bloody dunny, don’t lose your shirt.’ He with no pants on himself.

  Starr was an impatient man, a growing man in the town, a member of various clubs and the Chamber of Commerce, the Roads Board and who knows what else. He was yelling across the (aromatic) space which separated him from the policeman long before Hall, tucking in his shirt, came walking across it.

  Mr Starr had found his bicycle at least a hundred yards down the street from his house, and what’s more it was damaged.

  Also, his wife’s purse was missing, with a considerable number of coins in it. Two natives had been seen in the vicinity late last night. They really should be kept out of town.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Sandy Two Mason and Harry Cuddles. Your men, aren’t they, constable?’

  Writing it up in his Occurrence Book later that evening, Constable Hall shook his head. At noon he had arrested and locked up the Aboriginal native Harry Cuddles, Police Tracker, and charged him with having, on the night of the seventh instant, been in possession of one bicycle, the property of A Starr.

  Constable Hall had obtained information from Mr Starr, and from a very contrite Sandy Two who told him that he just hadn’t thought, you know. He’d met Harry walking the bike, and of course he wondered where he got it from, but he didn’t really stop to think about it. He liked bikes, and he was excited to see Harry with one. He rode it around the recreation ground, showing off really, and he told Harry to ride it. Harry tried but he fell off. That’s how it got damaged, see. And then they run off, because Harry told Sandy where he got the bike from; just outside of Starr’s place.

  They were worried, because of their respect for Constable Hall, you know. How he’d treated them and all, and seeing as how he’d given Harry the job. Even now, said Sandy Two, he had a headache and felt sick just from letting Constable Hall down.

  Mr Starr came in to see Constable Hall. He was pleased to note that there was some justice being achieved. Oh, and the purse? His wife had found it. It’d merely been misplaced.

  Starr glared at Sandy Two and told Constable Hall that he was being fooled. ‘Don’t trust him,’ he said. ‘His father’s a native and his mother’s a bush gin. Think about it. He’s not like you and I.’

  At the hotel a few nights later, Constable Hall could not help but complain. He was drinking, a man was driven to it. Well, what could you do? A big bunch of darkies in from the goldfields, again. He’d chased them out of town. He’d had to arrest some. ‘I do believe they were ready to fight me,’ he said.

  The bar took it up like a chorus, and they knew all the words:

  They were drinking, men and women both,

  the women were prostituting themselves...

  (the chorus licked its lips, shifted its gaze, adjusted its trousers)

  It was a serious and growing evil.

  Many of these native women...

  (to the sombre tones of the Chamber of Commerce)

  are suffering from syphilis.

  A serious and growing evil.

  They were beggars, were shameless, and bothered white people, white women, trying to get them to buy clothes line props, chopped firewood, possum skins...

  ‘I gave them a taste of the whip,’ intoned the constable, contentedly, before lapsing into his official style. ‘It seemed most expeditious.’ And then there was that trouble his trackers had got themselves involved in earlier in the week...

  ‘They need to be protected,’ someone said.

  ‘They make a nuisance of themselves.’

  ‘It’s not their fault,’ said a scrupulous man. ‘It’s unscrupulous whites that have taught them to drink. You get them, like this week, coming in from somewhere else—they’re not from around here, you know—they hang around town in groups, begging, and trying anything they can to get a drink.’

  ‘Yes. Yes.’ There was consensus.

  The drinkers in the bar were prepared to act as Hall’s advisors. They knew there was sometimes stuff in the papers about the trouble in the north or, rather, parliamentarians talking about troubles, but really what else could you do? They seemed to be handling things all right up there. It had been the same down here, you had to be firm with the blacks. Whereas nowadays, these bastards down here, most of them, well ... And now there was another Royal Commission on in the city. Well, that Roth better come up with something useful. More money wasted.

  ‘It’s useless. They’re useless. They’re dying out.’

  They shared
their complaints, and the mail passed to and from the relevant authorities.

  Even by the campfire, and camped among the dunes, Uncle Will wanted to explain the 1905 Aborigines Act to me. My back was cold, my cheeks hot, and I was the smell of campfire smoke, of banksia and seaweed, of the fish we’d eaten.

  ‘It made such a difference,’ he said, ‘that legislation.’ But I was bored by talk of legislation back then.

  ‘There was people learning to live in two cultures.’

  ‘Except that one was being eradicated. All that death. And anyway,’ said Uncle Jack. ‘You could still try, keep trying. We could.’

  I could see that Ern was listening to them. Something in the set of his jaw, and his dry eyes. He knew about legislation. Though, of course, I’d hardly seen mention of it in any of his papers. A different focus, I suppose.

  ‘You could be moved anywhere, told who to marry, where to live, had to get a permit to work, not allowed to drink or vote...’ Uncle Will was on a roll. ‘It separated us all.’

  Uncle Jack let him talk, and then said, ‘Yeah, well. You’re probably right. I remember Uncle Sandy, even though you knew him years later after he’d been in the war. He was his own man, even then, and knew he was as good as anyone. But I reckon he must’ve thought he was too good for everyone; Nyoongars, wadjelas, the lot.’

  Uncle Jack paused, and sat up very straight. ‘But I reckon no one ever told him about the killing around here, that his brothers-in-law teamed up with the killers. Not until he met up with that fellow on the run. Cuddles, was it?’

  There are so many things it is difficult to speak of, adequately.

  ‘No,’ Uncle Will said, very sadly. Thinking of his father, and himself, I suppose. ‘No one ever told me that, either, about all the killing. Until you, Jack. Harley. It’s not easy to listen to that.’

  stormy birth

  My ancestors—Fanny, with Sandies One and Two—had followed a rocky ridge, and when they could see it continue into the sea and gradually became little more than a tumble of rocks and bubbles they turned away, and descended to the shallow bay its persistence had made possible.

  There were massive cloudbanks on the horizon, and when my family looked back around the coast to where they had begun they saw the tiny and isolated islands of home huddled close to the mainland, seemingly less substantial than the clouds.

  The setting sun had coloured the sky and tinted the sandy crests of the old dunes but—even as the sky rapidly darkened—the ocean shimmered with the blue light of day held within it. And gliding toward them across that strangely lit surface was a low, white-tipped, violet cloud. No. No, it was not a cloud. Inhaling in surprise, my family realised that a vast fleet of jellyfish, driven by their white sails, was silently invading the bay.

  A storm raged for days. Young Sandy Two huddled beneath the small wagon and moaned with the wind as trees writhed and flailed about him. The rain drummed the earth, the shrubs, the wagon above his head. Sandy Two opened his mouth and drank from the runnels hanging from the edge of his shelter.

  Once, he undressed and went out into the wind and rain and let it lash and sting him until he was almost numb. Then he dressed beneath the wagon, wrapped himself in canvas and blankets and talked and sang to himself until he was warm again.

  He awoke in a pale, thin light, and even though his mouth was stale, and his body aching, the new calm of the air communicated itself to him. He saw his father crawl from the shelter of tarpaulin and saplings and trees, and walk away through the dunes.

  The two Sandies walked along the devastated beach. The air was still, and the sea rocked this way and that, and rose and collapsed heavily upon the sand at its edge. It seemed as if birds had lost their wings, sea creatures been spewed from their element. The beach was a ruffled crowd of various birds fastidiously picking their way among the debris. A flock of parrots raked their beaks through a pile of seaweed, and—still further away—two sea-eagles feasted on a dead dolphin.

  Colour had been washed from the sky, and the ocean was dirty with torn weed and sediment. Even from the beach father and son could see the ocean striking the island, and vast blossoms of white rose and fell onto its stony back.

  It must have been the smell that distracted them, made them wander—perverse and curious—through the dunes and toward the grove. Despite the relative shelter there, some trees had been ripped from the ground, and others clung tenaciously to their roots by little more than a strip of bark.

  It was certainly the smell—well, call it a stench—that brought Sandy Two back to his senses from the drifting daydream state he’d been inhabiting. There was a great mound of bodies, lying in a heap. Skinned kangaroos, obscenely naked. The two men followed small footprints to what was left of a tiny shelter, constructed too close to the carcasses to be comfortable. And in the ruin of that poor shelter lay a woman and baby. The woman and child were certainly not comfortable; not with breathing, not with life.

  The mother was Dinah—daughter to one Sandy, sister to the other. The daughter and sister of the two men lay staring up at them. Apparently she did not see them, because they came close enough to discern the reflection in her eyes; of the one kneeling, the other partially obscured and framed by what was left of her shelter, and still she did not react. Dinah could only see—or so her boy would one day speculate—dead and yellow leaves, scabby twigs and, beyond that, torn and thinning clouds racing across the sky.

  The baby at her breast was wrinkled and thin, its umbilical cord loosely knotted. Sandy One saw flies at his grandchild’s eyes, and could discern its bones. Mother and child lay among blood, shit, the stale mess of birth.

  Dinah stared deep into the eyes of Sandy One, the father, and saw herself, the remnants of shelter, the hollowness of him and his promises.

  Sandy Two turned away, and there were two shivering children. The girl was perhaps four years old; the boy a little younger. His nephew and niece. The girl was a quiet one, but not so the boy. Despite his years he could talk, he was happy to talk, and he talked as he warmed in their arms. Their names, his sister’s and his, were Kathleen (my sister) and Jack, Jack Chatalong. Chatalong you see, because of talking so much. I talk a lot. I don’t know why.

  The girl was quite fair. A surprising fairness. How the white skin wins.

  They had been kangaroo shooting, it was three men, and his mother helped; she cooked for them but then she began having that baby, and the men left. His mother, the boy said, trying to explain, looked after the kangaroo shooters. Oh, they pulled sandalwood too. She cooked for them. But she got sick, it was the baby, and there was a storm and the men got blown away. He smiled. This seemed satisfactory. He kept talking.

  They had been lifted into the sky...

  Sandy Two saw his father nodding, and two blood-spattered men were lifted into the stormy sky. The men were laughing and, having waved a little goodbye, randomly fired into the sea, and into the birds and kangaroo hides dancing around them in an ever upward spiral. It was the ending of a spree. The men’s crotches bulged, thinking of the mother.

  Sandy One continued to hold his daughter’s blank stare. His son picked up the boy, pulled the girl close to him. Flies buzzed and covered the mound of carcasses with a black and living skin.

  Unbidden, unwanted, the memories of earlier sprees must have returned to the two men.

  These are not things handed down to me by Uncle Jack or Uncle Will yarning around a campfire; they are things you might prefer not to say, not directly, to any younger person in your family.

  Sandy One and Fanny had learned that it was best for women and children to keep away from the homestead, from any homestead. If there was a white woman it was sometimes easier, but it was never safe.

  Especially when there was a spree. When there was a spree, stay clear away. It was not safe.

  It was that combination of things called Christmas. It was a spree. A party.

  Fanny must’ve been reminded of the hanging tree, and occasionally she heard shots
from the direction of the homestead. The buzzing of flies replayed in her head. The girls were still upset.

  That buzzing. She had found a sister, uncovered and dead on the ground. The stench, the buzzing of flies had led her there. She made a mound of earth, left some things...

  Sandy One came back drunk and stupid and snarling at her, through a fug of vomit and alcohol. ‘It was three bullets, they put three in her.’ Someone. She was rotten with the pox, the bitch, and a hazard to everyone. He spat, was sobbing, lay down snoring.

  The boy was fine, was still back there, somewhere.

  Sandy Two had gone with his father, so that he might help him home again.

  He remembered white light flashing, popping, and music. Everyone laughing yelling looking at him.

  There was a house, of mud and stone with extra rooms of thin timber, hessian, iron. Sometimes they put a sign up above the door, especially for the parties.

  Men came from other stations and from the ’fields, days away. There was a big tank of grog on the back of a wagon. A spree, they whooped. A spree, a spree.

  Sandy Two stepped from among the women and children at the woodheap and followed the red-haired Coolman twins beneath the sign— Tavern—and into the homestead.

  Christmas. Oh, there was a crowd of white men. Sandy Two trailed the twins, miming them, so that he was the very essence of their back-slapping, winking selves as they swaggered into the noisy crowd. Laughing faces turned to the three of them.

  Sandy Two performed as if he was with his mother and the others in the camp, but the laughter and shouting under this low roof was so much louder and uplifting. The twins were unaware of him and—warming to the crowd’s response—they enthusiastically shook hands with everyone, and their gestures became all the more extravagant as if it was they, now, who were miming the boy. Men held out their hands a second time, and repeatedly winked at each of the twins, and gave them yet another drink to pour into their upturned mouths until, eventually, the twins had nowhere else to move. It was a small room after all. It was not really such a crowd. They turned to one another, turned back to the ruddy, laughing faces and realised all eyes were upon a space just behind them.