True Country Read online

I paused and said to Fatima, ‘She was probably really frightened.’

  Fatima’s hands were clasped at her chest. ‘Yeah yeah,’ she said, nodding vigorously. And then, suddenly, we both burst into laughter. I think we were enjoying the re-creation of the story. It is hard to explain this. We were like two demigods perched on a mountain top, or cloud, and the two of us narrating a story as it was simultaneously performed by the tiny mortals far below us.

  Fatima stopped laughing and said, quietly and seriously, ‘She was frighten I think.’

  We were silent for a moment. Human.

  I continued, paraphrasing. ‘After they’d had their food they said you can go. They gave her some more food and supplies and said, “You can go.”’

  ‘Mmm,’ mumbles Fatima. She does this often, you can hear it softly on the tape, both to encourage me to continue and to confirm the truth of what I am saying.

  ‘They tried to tell her that they’d be happy to see her come back with some of her family. And then she went away quietly, and she looked happy, they thought. Later on she came back. Instead of three or four Aborigines, there were lots of them.

  ‘The Abbot, and Fathers and that went up to them, showing they were friendly, giving them meat and bread and things like that...

  As I was giving these things out I noticed they were becoming more restless and even daring. Twisting, turning, and jumping from place to place, upsetting any order that could have been expected in the group.

  I paused, and looked at Fatima. I shifted around in my chair, to show the twisting, turning, jumping. Fatima nodded vigorously.

  I counted twenty-six. Only five women, no old people, no children, the rest all strong, well built, and some very tall. Someone said drop the weapons and they all put their weapons down, about forty steps away and came towards us.

  ‘Yes,’ said Fatima, slowly.

  I qualified what I was about to read. I was oddly defensive, apologetic. ‘And then, this is what they say here. This might not be true, because it’s just the way they remember it:

  Then we noticed that some of the boys with the Fathers were becoming restless and looking a bit frightened.

  Four of the aborigines went back to where they’d left their spears.

  Fatima was enthralled.

  Peter, one of the boys, came up to the Abbot saying, ‘Father, they want war.’ Then the Abbot realised that he was right. They had circled us.

  ‘Yep, make a circle.’ Fatima sounded impatient for me to continue.

  ‘Then one of the Fathers. No, it’s one of the boys. Liandes, Lianches...’ I attempted to pronounce the name.

  ‘You mean Lianjes,’ said Fatima.

  ‘Huh?’ I asked. I couldn’t hear the sound correctly, let alone re-create it.

  ‘Lianjes,’ she said, impatiently.

  ‘Liantes. Liandes. I can’t say it.’ I sound confused. I was, and I was offended by Fatima’s curt correction. ‘Anyway, you should be telling stories, not me.’

  Fatima smiled when she realised the turnabout in our roles. She offered, ‘Well, you read it first. I’d like to get your ... words you see. I’d like to get those words.’

  I was placated. ‘Okay. You want me to read through it all? And I’ll just change, you know, I’ll just make sense of it.’

  Fatima nodded again, keen to continue and to smooth my ruffled ego. ‘Yes, oh yes. Yeah.’

  ‘So ... Nothing. There were about thirty Aborigines who’d taken part in the attack. That’s it. No one mentions the woman here, Fatima.’

  She slumped, and grinned wryly. ‘No. ’Nother time, too, there was a fight. Big fight like a war, you know, in the mission itself. They talk about that in that book there?’

  ‘Yes, I think so. When the men attacked the mission with spears? There was something about it. The Fathers didn’t know why. They thought it was for food, or women, or just nastiness. They fought them off, and they were real exhausted. They were bruised and battered. And very frightened for a long time.’

  Fatima shook her head grimly. ‘In the mission, in the mission itself, the dog came. They had fish, cooking and frying them. And the dog came on one of the person, on one of the man from there, Father or somebody. They shot it. Shot it. They thought it was...’

  I supplied the word, ‘Wild.’ Now I was the one impatient to hear the story.

  ‘...dingo, you know. Wild dingo.’ She graciously incorporated my word into her narrative. ‘So they shot it. And the people, they say, “Oh, they kill my dog.” This person say they kill my dog. And they all round them up, big mob, and one of the mans throw a spear and got Father Vega here.’ She poked her finger into her thigh, and repeated the word. ‘Here.’ We both looked at her finger as she repeatedly jabbed herself with it.

  ‘Yes, I read that. The Fathers were very frightened.’

  ‘I wasn’t born yet,’ said Fatima, ‘they told me, the old people, when I was little.’

  ‘In the book they didn’t say anything about the dog being killed.’

  Fatima shrugged, ‘Yeah, well.’

  ‘They didn’t mention that.’ I laughed.

  Fatima laughed with me, then stopped. She said, suddenly in earnest, ‘I am just telling you. Because I know, because people told us. Father Rosenda told us once, about what it said in his book, about what was happening in there and it was not right. We didn’t say, but...’

  On the tape you can hear my excitement as I continue, attempting to pick up the line of her thoughts, ‘Yeah, see that’s why I want to talk to you, and the others maybe, because the book doesn’t ... it just tells you what one eye saw, they don’t tell you the background, like about the dog...’

  Fatima said, curtly, ‘Yeah, because they don’t want to.’

  I considered it a moment and returned it as, ‘Well, they don’t know. They don’t want to, and they don’t know.’

  Fatima accepted this. ‘They don’t know. The dog came in because they were cooking whitings, and that dog smelled the fish and he came to them. And they shot one dog from that man. There was a big fight in there and they was shooting, shooting, shooting...’ Her voice trailed off. ‘You know, firing?’ It seems she felt unsure of herself, talking like this. And it hurt, imagining it again.

  ‘And got some of our people in the leg. But they didn’t know. So one man got the spear and he killed Father here, right here.’ She pounded her chest. ‘Father Garaldi. So he was wounded, and he went to his home monastery and he died in there.’

  It’s hard to say. Dislocated? Yes, I felt dislocated by her tone, her sincerity, the nervousness she displayed in talking about this. And, suddenly, still calmly seated at the table, and with the pages fluttering about us, it was as if we were both wrapped in her memory and ascending into the stratosphere like one of those paintings of the Ascension in one of Liz’s books.

  But no. Not yet. There may have been a small jolt. Fatima shifted in her chair.

  ‘Well, it should be like I say it in that book,’ she continued. ‘That book might tell you different, this one or this one might tell you ’nother way.’ She pointed to the books on the table. ‘If you find it, it might tell you that way. So I tell people, like I do now, to you, the right way it happened. The true way, and what we people think. You can do that too, maybe.’

  ‘I hope so.’ Quietly.

  ‘But you might find lies in this book. Or you might find things true. I don’t know which one, in this book maybe. I don’t know, because we don’t read sometimes, you know. We only go by the pictures to see. Some of us are not really fond of reading, see? Some are not true, what he says, the books.’ She patted one of the books on the table before us. ‘These ones, you can have it because I got too many libraries in my room.’

  ‘Wonderful,’ I said, ‘thank you Fatima, wonderful.’ It seemed a significant offering.

  ‘You can have it.’ She patted the books before her. ‘You know more better, you. You might read. And this tape machine, I take that eh? I can listen on it, maybe do some talking on it.
You can write what I say, what we say, all together. Some of us? So people will read it, and know.’

  ‘If I can Fatima, if I can. I’ll write it. Yeah, I’ll do that.’

  I helped her down the stairs. She leaned on me and we walked to her home slowly, at her pace. I left her at her door with her dogs leaping all around her, and strode home through the school grounds.

  I was taking huge strides, barely able to keep myself from breaking into a run, and leaping for the joy I felt within me. I felt I was about to take off, and soar. That’s what I thought, even then.

  Communion

  A knock at the door. The child Beatrice stood there, puffing. ‘Aunty Fatima said to come now.’ Urgent, arms swinging from her shoulders, trying not to run on the spot. Excited.

  ‘Come in Beatrice.’

  Beatrice came into the kitchen, looking around and up, at the cupboards, the clean stove, the jars of spices.

  ‘It’s cool in ’ere, eh? Mr Seddum’s house cool too, like this one. I been there.’

  She leaned her chest against the kitchen counter and ran her palms along its top. Beatrice watched her hands circle and skate and spoke, suddenly, to Liz.

  ‘Aunty Fatima said, Aunty Fatima said you bring some plates and like you have, like gardiya have with soup, you know, you say, spoons and stuff.’

  I moved and stood beside Liz. On the other side of the kitchen counter we could see only Beatrice’s head and arms. She was a glove puppet performing.

  Then she swirled before us, was transformed in the open space beside the door, and left. She leapt from the back verandah, her long skirt like a sail filling on the mast of her bare black body, and skimmed across the grass to the gate. She turned and called back, ‘Youse are eating at Fatima’s aren’t you tonight, and she’s got food for you?’ She ran back to us. ‘Hurry up she said I was to get you and to hurry up.’

  We walked across the small school grounds, the grass under our feet soft and still wet from the afternoon rain, and Beatrice running ahead and back and all of us laughing in the warm moist air as the sun crashed and slowly exploded.

  The school gate was locked. We climbed over it and jumped into the red dirt on the other side. Beatrice grabbed Liz’s hand as if to lead her. Before us was a corridor of corrugated iron huts, and scattered in front of each were blankets, pieces of foam mattress, and a few old beds with wire bases. Long green grass grew beside and between the huts, away from the walkways. Scrawny dogs curled up near the bedding growled as we walked past. There were old tins and plastic, large stinking turtle shells, and fires flickering here and there. Behind, coconut palms were silhouetted against a sky darkening and growing stars.

  Fatima lived close to the school and next to Milton’s family. Milton was the school gardener that Murray had said was a good worker. His old Hilux was parked on the track between his family’s and Fatima’s hut. A gas lantern perched upon the car’s tailgate gleamed in the deepening twilight.

  ‘Good evening.’ Milton’s voice came softly from the shadows, the deepening darkness of a hut door.

  ‘G’day Milton. You eating with us?’

  ‘No, no...’

  Beatrice released Liz’s hand and, two steps ahead, said, ‘Wait,’ shouted, ‘Fatima I got ’em.’ Liz and I stood holding hands, smiling bemusedly. Beatrice leaned against the tall fence around Fatima’s hut and, with her nose and fingers through the chicken wire and creeper, talked to the excited dogs barking at her from the other side. The fence sagged a little further with her weight, and rocked back as the dogs leapt against it.

  Fatima stood on the concrete at the door of her hut. ‘Billy, Liz, you are here. Shut up Patches. Fat Boy I’ll sting you. You wait there, near that table, there. Milton you see.’

  The dogs cringed around her. I turned and saw, in the lamplight, a card table erected on the sand. Between it and the Hilux sat an old man, cross-legged, on the ground. A woman lay on her side beside him. Milton’s voice rushed ahead of him as he approached. ‘You eatin’ with Fatima tonight eh? This is my father, Sebastian, and my mother, Victoria.’

  Sebastian reached out. We shook hands. Victoria turned to us, nodded, mumbled hello. Liz kneeled on the edge of the blanket which Victoria lay upon, and Victoria moved to give her more room. I sat on the ground before Sebastian. We made a sort of small circle beside the card table. Dots, a short line, a square.

  Milton crouched with us. He said, ‘My father could tell you lots of stories.’ Looking at his father he pointed toward me with his lips, then continued, ‘This fella likes stories, you never know no one like it.’

  Victoria looked at the crumpled comic pages by her side and folded them up into the pocket of her skirt.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘Fatima’s been talking to me about the old days and the old people and that.’

  Sebastian’s cigarette had gone out, and he placed it behind his ear. His face was lit by the lamp in a way that made his eyes dark holes in his face, his cheekbones high and taut. Despite the awkward light I saw the cigarette butt fall from his ear and catch in his white hair as if in a spider’s web, or, in that light, a tattered halo. Victoria shifted onto her hip and glanced at a magazine picture she had taken from her pocket. She tore around its edge, tidying it, and put it away. We cast glances out of the circle.

  ‘Get out! Get out dogs, down! Somebody get this gate now.’ Fatima, with oven tray held high, had one of the children who drifted in the darkness around us open the wire mesh gate and let her through. She placed the black enamel dish gently down on the table. The child leaned against the closed gate, watching. Another small shadow came up, perhaps two.

  ‘Fatima, did you, it’s great, did you cook this?’

  Sebastian clucked his tongue and rocked gently on his haunches, his shaking hand slightly raised. Victoria sat up. We all gazed at the dish which held roast chicken and vegetables.

  ‘No,’ Fatima laughed. ‘I got, the Sisters, they cooked it for me. I got no oven here and they did it for me. I asked them. I knew you were coming and I wanted good food for you. I asked you. I told that girl Stella for mother, to tell you ... You got plates and ... we haven’t got, so you go first and...’

  Liz and I had each brought a soup bowl, dinner plate, and knife, fork, and spoon. The others had no utensils. So we all ate with our hands.

  Figures went by on the edge of the lamplight, and came from the darkness between the fires flickering further down the alleyway. Some called out, but Sebastian, Fatima, or Victoria grunted at them and they disappeared. Once or twice an older person came into the circle of light, had a mouthful of our food, and left. Milton joined us in the meal, but only after much insistence on the part of Liz and myself.

  Sebastian had some disease, and his hands shook uncontrollably. He spoke more and more, as the night wore on, of old times, and of the mission.

  Fatima brought out a watermelon shell filled with fruit salad. We used the bowls and spoons Liz and I had with us for this. Liz and I ate first, then the others, using the same utensils.

  ‘Me, Walanguh, some other fellas, we got rid of Father Pujol. He had to go. He was a hard man but he cared for us Aborigines. In the old days them missionaries look after us. They tried I reckon. Over Dresfield way people had gelignite. That politician’s mob, they put gelignite up people’s bums, yes. True. Blew them up. People was shot.’

  Sebastian was a silhouette in the hard lamplight. Shaking, shaking, sometimes almost shimmering as a fire nearby blazed, and the stars so high above him.

  ‘Early days this lot gardiya been shoot ’em Aborigine, you know blackfella? They been shoot ’im and see ’im. Ah, that man drop. White bloke see ’nother one, ’nother Aborigine, and he go to shoot him too. He running running and the white bloke go to shoot.

  ‘Bang! Bang! Not the gun shooting, a bang like a big bomb, and that Aborigine bloke disappeared. Gone! That was Walanguh that one, Walanguh when he was young, eh?’ He looked at Fatima who nodded and grinned her confirmation. ‘He had the power that fella. Th
at dead one, Dada that was, nothing. He had no power. With power, they can disappear, fly, you know. Sing things.

  ‘Early days they been make magic. They can sing lightning too. Anything.’

  Fatima had cans of cool drink she’d kept on ice. She and Liz sat at chairs by the card table and drank Coca-Cola. Milton and I prompted Sebastian to continue. He spoke on. The dogs moved in closer to Victoria who drew her finger through the dust and occasionally smiled up at one of us. A young couple somewhere close shouted at one another.

  Next morning at school Beatrice ran up to Liz and embraced her. ‘You ate supper with Aunty Fatima last night didn’t you? You had them things? You had chicken, and potato, and cool drink didn’t you?’ She looked around at the beaming faces of the other small children around her and then back up to Liz. ‘And I came to get you, didn’t I?’ She hugged Liz tighter.

  Rehearsal

  In the wet season there were frogs everywhere. They were large and bright green. Their bulging, lidded eyes stared back at us from the toilet bowl, from the steps of doorways, from the tightening black fists of children. Partially submerged, they stared from puddles as if playing at being crocodiles. They were pleasant to look at, but slimy to touch. They disconcerted me. I would crouch to study one, and wonder at the delicate hands, and it would remain motionless and seemingly at peace. I would resolve to feel that slimy skin one more time, and before I had even reached out, the animal would be gone. Such startling and sudden speed. I might see it in mid-leap, thin and stretched, nothing like the complacent squatter I thought I knew.

  They climbed into the drainpipes and the guttering and they sang. Their croaking was amplified by the pipes and they seemed to croak all the more because of it, as if intoxicated by their voices and the volume of their improvised solos.

  So it was noisy. The frogs. The rain. The bellowing of the stray cattle in the evening. The air-conditioners and overhead fans. The powerhouse with at least one of its three diesel engines growling twenty-four hours a day.