True Country Page 5

  One evening I noticed a steady bass line accompanying the frogs. I walked out into the backyard and realised there was an electric band playing somewhere over near the mission.

  There was no moon and the darkness made walking across the uneven ground difficult. Something large moved near me as I fumbled with the gate. A cow. One of the many strays which grazed on the flats around the settlement. This one clumsily stumbled off.

  The basketball court was lit with four tall floodlamps. Periodically these would be out of action, and it was often weeks or months before they were fixed again. On this particular night they were working and the atmosphere was so humid that they gave a definite circular glow, as if the very white light was working its way out from the globes in ripples. At either end of the court children and youths leapt and shuffled around a bouncing ball. In this strange moist light they were like shadows, and it was difficult to distinguish them. Some called out a greeting as I walked past, but, what with the ball bouncing, and the band playing so loud, it was difficult to hear what they said. Some people were sitting in the darkness by the community office.

  The younger children ran in and out of the darkness, skipping, laughing, tussling, touching me as they ran past. They climbed and leapt the small barbed wire fence beside the old kindergarten, in the mission grounds, where the band was playing. The kindergarten was a low corrugated iron structure in the corner closest to the community office and basketball court. The band was playing under a roofed enclosure extending from the front of the building.

  I walked past and up to the gate where the darkness began to gather again. Then I walked back along the fence line and leaned against a children’s swing just on the edge of the yellow light cast by a couple of small globes above the band. The sound quality was poor, and loud, but they played competently.

  One of the primary school children playing chasey in the dark swooped and leapt into my arms. Beatrice. She put her arms around my neck and squeezed, then hung from my neck with her arms straight and her knees bent to keep her feet off the ground.

  ‘You come for the band, Sir?’ She named the men playing: Milton, Alphonse, Bruno, Raphael.

  It’s not just them boys that play though. They all play, or nearly all. They play all kinds: country and western, rock, some Warumpi Band, Coloured Stone, Archie Roach. All kinds. They play noisy and get the young ones dancing and the frogs singing right along with them.

  They all smoking. Bruno he sings mostly. Milton, he bending over his guitar, frowning at it, his big hand wrapped right round its neck. He tickle and strangle it at the one time. Alphonse grinning but serious, waving that guitar sometimes like a gun. And Raphael like angry, angry hitting those drums too hard. If he not careful Brother Tom take them away, practice or no practice.

  I saw Jasmine dancing with some of the youths, a couple of them from the high school. They were on the opposite side of the pool of light. They were all dancing energetically, even frantically. Jasmine stood out; her paleness, her clothing. She pirouetted, her skirt swirling high around her. I could see her breasts moving under the strapped, light dress she wore. I thought I could hear her bracelets jangling as she shook her arms and head together, down.

  Brother Tom approached from the direction of the church, walking with his short steps, his slightly stooped posture, as if in supplication. He greeted the dancers, Jasmine especially, and continued on, detouring slightly, to me.

  ‘Hello, Bill.’

  ‘G’day, Brother.’

  ‘They are good aren’t they? They play in the church, and after singing practice I let them use the instruments, until nine. To just play, what they want. Then I lock it all up, and they go.’

  I walked home and a couple of children who’d been holding my hands slipped away. I could see campfires flickering before some of the huts across the other side of the basketball court. With the band not playing you could hear voices all around, intermingling with the frogs. The powerhouse noise was indistinguishable from here, and, outside, no air-conditioner roared. The floodlights were off.

  As I came past the office a voice called, ‘Hello, Bill.’ There was a group sitting on the ground with their backs against the wall of the office.

  ‘Good evening.’

  ‘You like that music?’

  ‘You like that practice?’

  I spoke, briefly, across the darkness, with Fatima, Sebastian, a couple of the other older ones. I couldn’t see clearly, and nor could I identify them all by their voices. I wondered if they had been there all evening, listening, watching, talking among themselves.

  It began to rain and I entered the roaring house.

  And it Pours

  Them little kids, half-naked ones, they squatting next to the muddy puddles, black skin shiny with rain. They run with the river, at its edge, past trees caught by that rushing, rising water.

  Up on the flat you can see the water there too. It lying in sheets there, that same grey colour like the clouds and the corrugated iron shacks sticking up in the long green grass. The muddy track through the camp is lined with coconut trees all moving, moving angry like they trying to get away.

  The little ones catch bush mice and small snakes. They squealing, squealing. There’s a willy-willy of children there. Beatrice got a mouse up her dress, she’s jumping ’round in excitement. It gets down and out and races off into the grass beneath one of the coconut palms and the kids scatter little bit, then they all spiralling into that clump of grass. Catch it. They pass it from hand to hand. It slips. They all after it. They all laughing, catch it again.

  Coming home from cards last night Beatrice saw a shape. She thought it was a coconut. It moved. She jumped high, like a ninja. Snake! But Deslie saw it was a tortoise and he got it. He asked everybody who wanted it. Jimmy’s pudda got it and she ate it for supper.

  Hear the sound of the rain all the time, tapping and dripping. Wind not so much now. Smell the dirty water, black water where the toilet tanks have overflowed.

  The gardiya’s new shoes begin to rot already, and their thongs spatter mud over one another. They’re talking about the mud everywhere, and the mould on the doors. Will the mail plane get in? What about bread, proper meat? The pays?

  Brother Tom and a couple of his boys go down to the water pump to fix it. Then they take kangaroo jacks and shovels to help get the Toyota out of the bog in the school. Silly people trying to move it now, can’t go anywhere anyway.

  Deslie, Jimmy, Sylvester and that mob wade, chest deep, across to the airstrip and jump and run and wave and yell on the high land there. We saw them.

  One time, long time, when we were little bit older than them boys, we, Sebastian, Walanguh, Samson, we went upriver just after flood time. And we went across that river just up near that big paperbark, you know, to hunt kangaroos. We got ’em. We had spears, and Samson, one gun. But that water, ’im come up again, come up again. How we gunna get back? One, two, three kangaroos. And one gun, and them spears. So, Walanguh and Sebastian, they cut down one big tree, long tree. We put the wallabies, the kangaroos on it, the spears, the rifle and that. We put it in the water with us all in a line, along that tree. We were gunna go straight across that river, and down it like in a boat, you know.

  Boy, I tell you what, we nearly drowned. We lost everything. Kangaroos, rifle, spears. We all sat there on some safe high land and we did laugh. Laugh.

  Just like now, too, we go down to them flats where all the kangaroos, bush turkey, snake, everything come to get out of the water. Take spear, sticks, just bare hands. You grab kangaroo by the tail and swing him ’round and smash his head.

  The teachers and the new office mob see all the people going down the track and don’t go with them when they’re asked because they’re too busy. Only that new girl, Jasmine, she goes. They laugh when she pulls away from the catches they show her, but the young men hunt harder, and the women notice her there.

  Araselli sees the old Holden panel van in those food days. Everyone does. It’s mostly ora
nge but with a few maroon panels. It not ever get out of first gear even. Motor roaring bang bang, going that way along the track, through puddles, past houses, past basketball court, powerhouse. Then back again. All Sunday they did that. Got bogged three times. Ran out of petrol late in the day. Just before dark time.

  There were plenty of fellas in that car. Alphonse sat next to Milton, the one that was driving.

  Alphonse look up, see Araselli. She see him. They looking, looking deep. It’s not right, not by our Law. They rumbud, and they bit worried now, true, because it not first time for them.

  They worried all right, but they hungry. Hungry, you know.

  Resistance

  By Monday the floods had subsided. I was standing before the class, lecturing, when I saw their attention move, as one, toward the south windows, the camp side. Three men rushed out from among the houses, armed with sticks, and began searching in the grass.

  ‘Sir, kangaroos hide.’

  ‘Okay everyone, all eyes to me.’ It is embarrassing to recall. I was new. I wanted some control. Eyes wavered toward me. But my attention, too, was out the window where the men were searching through the grass. More men came, and some dogs.

  Suddenly a kangaroo broke cover. It was a small one. With its body almost parallel to the ground, and visibly straining for speed, it disappeared from the right side of the frame provided by the classroom windows on that wall. The students leapt from their seats yelling, ‘Sir, ’ere, ’im this way!’ I had moved to the south windows and was peering awkwardly in the direction the ’roo had disappeared, like a child trying to see within a television screen. They beckoned me from the other side of the room, at the other windows, where the kangaroo, having circled around the western end of the building, could be seen coming from that way, left of screen. Some of my students called again, impatiently, ‘’Ere!’

  ‘Too boggy for ’im that way,’ someone explained, excitedly.

  ‘Go Jamesy. Aiee!’

  ‘Ha ha! Get ’im fat man!’

  ‘Throw it. Now. No. Now!’

  A middle-aged man, with his big belly bouncing above his small shorts, chased the kangaroo. He had a large stick in one hand. He threw the stick. It missed. The classroom was noisy with the hooting and shouting and laughter. Some of the older men jogged across the muddy ground, way behind the kangaroo. A pack of their dogs raced past Jamesy, spinning him around like a top with their speed and excited barking.

  ‘Look at ’im. Alphonse! The powerhouse!’

  Down by the powerhouse Alphonse, by far the youngest of all these hunters, waited, stick in hand, as the ’roo approached. But his dog broke off toward the ’roo, which veered off at right angles and headed for the scrub further to the north. Dogs now formed two sides of a yapping triangle behind it. Our class was silent for a moment. I had been shouting also.

  The dogs’ barking grew fainter and they fell out of formation. The men strung out further behind them slowed, and stopped. They mouthed excuses and allocated blame, and the kangaroo disappeared into the scrub. The kids agreed that it had got away.

  ‘Righto, back in your seats.’ And they did. We did.

  Separation

  For our first few months in Karnama we had no vehicle. I fancied we were forted, restrained nomads, waiting for the roads to dry out enough for us to bring in a vehicle of our own. It was stinking hot, so hot that the fifty-metre walk from home to classroom sapped us so that we felt our bones would melt. And Liz and I saw one another, the other teachers, the students, the parents, all the time, everywhere. One of our students, Deslie, turned up at our home at six in the morning a few times in the first weeks asking whether it was time for school to begin yet. We, gummy eyed, half naked, milk and cereal on our lips, mumbled, ‘Not yet.’

  Father Paul lent the school a four-wheel drive. Alex commandeered it and he, Annette, and young Alan used it to look around, and to get out to the beaches.

  On weekend mornings we peeped through our curtains as they rattled and rumbled out of the yard.

  ‘Wish the mission had lent us two vehicles,’ muttered Liz. ‘Still, maybe they need the break more than us.’

  So. On the weekends Liz and I walked to the creeks or the river and swam with the kids. We watched as they used grasshoppers and frogs to catch catfish. We would spend a couple of hours outside and then retreat to the roaring air-conditioning, Liz particularly pink and perspiring. We threw rocks at the coconuts, attempting, with little success, to knock them to the ground. A couple of the kids might shinny up the trees to collect some. The younger children ran and tumbled beside us, pointing at all our shadows, stolid, winking, now different, now the same. Occasionally an older student would question us, but they were shyer, and, although curious, had learnt more. They were pushed away before the stream of incessant chatter and giggles, and the demands of the younger ones tugging our clothes and hair and stroking our skins.

  We’d sit inside, looking out the windows at the afternoon rain, the red mud and the intense green, the thin bodies of semi-naked children skimming and spraying through the puddles and sheets of water, their black skins glistening and their cries thin in the thunder. The coconut palms and mango trees in our yard writhed against a great grey sky split by lightning. And the solid rain, and the clearing of the air just before darkness. So I remember it.

  It was exotic, but it was claustrophobic too, and when Milton invited Liz and me to a nearby waterfall one weekend we were thrilled. We went in the old Toyota Hilux he’d bought from a previous principal at the school.

  Milton was a tall, gentle man, much the same age as myself, thirtyish. When he spoke to you he tilted his head to await a reply, and looked carefully at your eyes. His eyes were soft, and their whites were more of a creamy colour.

  He and Alphonse, his cousin-brother, drove us to a waterfall. Liz and I took a picnic meal for the four of us. I was surprised at where a vehicle could go. It scrambled up a rocky slope that must have been an apprentice cliff. From its summit we looked back and saw the different green of the imported trees of Karnama lining the river, and the river’s pool glinting there, and the narrowing where the rocks began and the river, compressed, drove its force still, even now, and despite the dry weather we’d had for weeks. And that weather, of course, explained why we could drive, just, to the waterfall. We drove through solid walls of grass too tall for us to see over. It was like being a ghost, going through that grass, except that it bent and parted, rising again behind us and rustling and sighing as it did so.

  Then we were there. We peered over from the top of the waterfall. There was only a small rocky creek flowing into it, one we could cross using stepping stones, but the flow was strong. It reached the top of the cliff and shot out, smooth and silver, and poured, roaring, down a five-metre cliff. At its base was a green pool, almost perfectly circular in shape, surrounded with pandanus and strong reeds and rocks. We clambered down the rocky cliff, feeling the waterfall’s mist upon us. We sat under the fall, and screamed, and yet were silent in its thundering solitude, and we listened to it drum incessantly on our skulls and flesh. We swam in a deep pool, lay in the cool of the cliffs surrounding the pool, and talked until the light softened.

  Milton told us he often came up this way to collect white ochre for some of the community artists to use. ‘Snake shit,’ he said, ‘they say it’s snake shit, you know, not ordinary snake shit. You sing when you dig it up, and you leave some. When you come back ’nother time there will be more there. If you sing. That’s true,’ he insisted, ‘I didn’t believe, for sure, but I tried it that way. It’s true.’

  Another weekend we went to a cattle station about twenty kilometres away. It took an hour to get there. Alex and his family followed us. From the back of the ute I watched them sliding and slipping through the mud. Fortunately they didn’t get bogged.

  Milton pulled up outside the station home. ‘Mad bastard this one,’ said Milton, and then he and Alphonse were silent. The station manager, a powerfully built man in a stoc
kman’s uniform, silenced his barking and snarling dogs as he walked out to us. He and Alex greeted one another and introductions were made. The manager turned to Milton and Alphonse and said, ‘You blokes can go down to the single men’s quarters if you want to hang around, eh?’ Milton and Alphonse nodded and did so. The single men’s quarters were about three hundred metres away.

  Over tea the manager chortled about how the blacks were frightened of his dogs and how the dogs hated them. He was leaving soon. His wife was silent and watched us with large eyes. He told us the Aboriginal community was taking over the station.

  ‘That’ll be one hell of a cock-up,’ he snorted. ‘I’m hoping that they’ll make Ricky the manager, he’s a good worker, he’s worked with me the past two years and I’ve taught him what I can. One of the other mob reckons this is their country though, so they’ll probably grab it and he won’t stick it then.

  ‘Face facts,’ he paused, snorted, shook his head. ‘It’ll be a cock-up. They can’t work together, they don’t know how to work land like this.’

  We all went to a rock pool down the river and lay in the rapidly running water there.

  It wasn’t until the next day, at school, that I realised Alphonse had stayed in the water the whole time only because when he first went to leave the water’s edge the manager’s dog had grabbed him by the ankle of his jeans and only let go when Alphonse returned to deeper water. At the time I’d thought it was just play and had laughed with the others. Alphonse had only grinned at us.

  An Artist

  The school lessons in traditional dancing, begun so early in the school term and in such a burst of enthusiasm, continued chaotically. The date of the official visit, and the dance, loomed. Previous principals had arranged display dances for important visitors and been promoted out of the school. Alex intended to maintain this tradition. But was he worried? Yes. We were all concerned.