True Country Read online

  There were also newer houses, like the one Deslie stayed in. They were standard urban bungalows and not altogether appropriate to the climate or the inhabitants. But they were larger, and more prestigious.

  One hut we walked past, near a large tree under which important card games took place, had an old woman living in it who sometimes screamed with pain in the night. This morning she sat in the dirt in front of her hut, warming herself in the sun. She stared vacantly into space, her toothless mouth open. She rubbed one plump arm with the other and her breasts hung to the dirty grey blanket wrapped around her lower body. She did not respond to us as we walked by. Deslie glanced at me to see if I was looking at her.

  When we were well past Deslie grabbed my arm and whispered, ‘Devil lives in that house. She got him, that what they say. See that big tree back there? Casino?’ He smiled at the joke. ‘They heard the devil there the other night. And she makes devil noises at night-time.’ He watched me closely to see how I reacted. No wonder she had the hut to herself.

  I nodded and said, ‘Where will these boys be? All at one house still?’

  ‘Mostly Uncle Moses’ house, Sir. One crazy dog there.’

  We stopped at the back door of Moses’ house. A number of the older boys and younger men stayed here. The older girls and young women lived in houses over the other side of the village. Deslie shooed a few dogs away. ‘Where that crazy one?’ he whispered. He waved me back and went cautiously ahead, a few steps, into the house. I followed, several steps behind, equally cautiously. The house had no coverings on the grimy cement floor, and was unfurnished. Deslie stopped at the end of the short passage and, putting only his head through the doorway, peeped into the living room. He tiptoed back toward me, his finger to his lips and his eyebrows raised expressively. He disappeared into a room and re-emerged with a blanket. I saw him step quickly into the living room and throw the blanket like a cast net. There was the sound of a dog snarling, and the snarling turned to yelping as Deslie, kicking at a fourlegged blanket, entered and exited across the frame provided by the doorway. A deep male voice called out, ‘Gedoutmongrel!’

  Deslie looked back, a grin splitting his face, and waved me into the room. The dog, now free of the blanket, was cringing outside. The entire floor, apart from in the kitchen area, was taken up by sleeping bodies. Bruno lay propped up on one elbow under a grimy blanket. He nodded at me, and then rolled over to face the wall and return to sleep. It must’ve been he who yelled at the dog when Deslie came in kicking at it.

  Sylvester was in the food-spattered kitchen. He stood before the stove watching a blackened saucepan warming. It moved me, oddly, seeing this tall boy, his face still emerging from his dreams, look at me with surprise and even something like fear on his face. He was very rarely late for school.

  ‘Come on Sylvester, you should be at school, mate.’ I spoke softly.

  He put on a show of confidence and replied in a croak, ‘Just makin’ tea, Sir.’

  I began to move around the room lifting the corners of blankets from over heads. ‘Oops, sorry mate, you’re not one of the school kids.’ Eyes closed again gratefully. ‘Sorry mate, I’m looking for school kids. But you should be at work by now anyway, eh?’ The faces lifted and frowned, smiled sleepily, closed eyes, and returned to the horizontal. Alphonse walked into the room looking dazed. He nodded a greeting, mumbled something about no sleep, and lay down in a corner.

  Deslie stared at him for a moment, then continued looking through the bodies under the thin blankets and coats. He whispered loudly, ‘Sir, here’s Franny. Get up Franny! School. Sir’s here.’ Deslie was happy.

  Sylvester looked into my face. ‘I thought it was early still.’ I patted his elbow. ‘For you, no worries. But you gotta get there now, eh?’

  I stepped over the bodies to where Deslie and Francis were. ‘Come on, Francis. Time for school, mate, you should be there.’ I had to speak loudly because of his poor hearing. He fumbled for his thick-lensed, smeared spectacles. ‘We’ll give you tea and something when you get there.’ I tried to be stern, but it was ridiculous really. And upsetting. They might have been up all night, dropping in and out of sleep. Watching videos. Or playing cards. Or, a large group like this, just talking and telling stories.

  It was better walking back to school, in the warming sun, with the boys waking and starting to want to talk and help me spot other kids who were late to school. Deslie whispered, ‘Alphonse been with Araselli, Sir.’ His eyes were large.

  You see them. Teacher out front and them boys sleepy walking behind him sort of in a line waking up. He turn his head back and talking soft to them. He get ’em there. He’s all right that fella, good teacher. He Nyungar, or what. Is he?

  Someone, maybe Geoffrey, might yell out to him. ‘Hey you! Sir. Teacher. Mr Storey. Billy! Beatrice here.’ Or, ‘Jimmy here. Get to school you!’ He laugh, and say, ‘Well you get them to school then.’ He might point his thumb at them big school boys with ’im and say, ‘I got my flock.’ Them boys smiling then too.

  Walk past that Djanghara mob, they all sitting there and Albert, he not at school no more, he yell out, ‘Sir! Cyril here!’ and Cyril he act grumpy and don’t wanna go to school. He walk out soon enough, walking slow but, and get in that anykind line and he nearly smiling by then with everyone watching him like that. They get to school, and Sebastian he’s seen ’em, they’re not lined up, they’re all round that teacher bloke then, talking touching ’im, that Bill.

  His missus, she go and get the big girls sometimes. That other teacher, boss one, he gets the little kids when he goes with ’em on the basketball court and does exercises. Run around the camp singing out for the lazy ones with all the kids running behind him singing out too, copying him. Noisy ones, them.

  Ah yes. And that Alphonse and Araselli. You know, Alphonse, that tired one back there. Deslie see him. It’s no good, they been together. Everyone know, even young ones like Deslie. She be getting big belly.

  Confirmation

  After school finished each day most of the students worked for a couple of hours in the mission gardens. After they had finished there some of the older schoolboys would often come over to the school for the remaining few hours of daylight. They came to play guitar, or fix their bicycles in the workshop, and to talk a little. Francis came to sit in the air-conditioned classroom and draw pictures. He drew comic heroes, and characters from popular films whose muscles rippled and oozed violence. He was a quiet and dreamy boy.

  The day after I had first met Gabriella I stayed late at school with some of the students who had decided not to work that afternoon in the mission garden. Sylvester came on his BMX. It astonished me that such a tall boy could ride one without chipping away his elbows and knees. He wanted to do some work on it, probably further raise the seat and handlebars. Francis wanted to draw an Aboriginal version of Arnold Schwarzenegger, or Robocop. Deslie looked at comics.

  When I got home Liz, Fatima, and Gabriella were there, talking. Fatima had brought Gabriella over earlier that afternoon. Gabriella had a lot of reading to do while she was on holidays, she said. On previous occasions she had gone over to the mission to read. The church was good during the day, but hot.

  She liked it in Melbourne. She had friends there, and a tutor who was very kind. She got homesick the first year, but Father Paul had told her off and frightened her so that she couldn’t go home. And then he had brought Fatima to see her after they had been to see the Pope in Alice Springs. That had helped make her stay. And she was glad. That’s true. She said she was glad now.

  Liz invited her to visit the school while we were holding classes. She could come and go as she wished. She was a good role model, and helpful in many ways.

  She arranged to join the older students for sessions in traditional handicrafts, which was when some of the community elders came and worked with the students doing slate and boab nut carvings, making tapping sticks and didgeridoos, or designing silk-screens based on the rock paintings in the area. Not sur
prisingly, most of us enjoyed the time spent collecting materials, but, until Gabriella volunteered her services and joined us, many of the students were reluctant participants. As Sylvester voiced most strongly, ‘This is stupid, this is blackfella stuff’, and got Sebastian shouting and shaking with the desire to strike him.

  When Gabriella participated it helped the students consider it worthwhile. She was very skilled. Her slate engravings were extremely detailed, the many intricate lines rendering life and depth, and she produced different hues by her use of the various ochres and by scratching to different depths. She worked quietly.

  ‘I like it,’ she told us. ‘At uni too, I can do painting. It’s like this. I get sucked in, and I forget time and where I am. You know, one day I might paint me a little island, a little place for me to live in there. Fly down into it, just go of the end of my brush, and stay there, eh?’

  And sometimes, in the evenings, she came to visit Liz and I.

  Once or twice she even came to read some of the stories and poems she’d written for her English classes to the students. She liked English classes, she said. She liked writing poems. She wrote a lot of poems about Karnama and what it looked like—you know, the waterfalls in the wet, and the river, and when you were flying in after a time away, and the mangroves on the beach as the tide was coming late in the day.

  She said they gave her Aboriginal Literature to read. Her voice inserted quotation marks. She said it was dreaming stories, and they weren’t so good to read, not like being told them. Or they were in a language that she didn’t understand and then in English which made them sound silly, or as if they were only for little children. Or it was history stuff. Or sometimes just like any old story, but with black people. Or off-white people. We laughed.

  We agreed that English as people spoke it here was good for talking, and that the old people told stories well. But it wasn’t so good for writing, maybe? There were not enough words, different words. You needed to hear the voice. And other people couldn’t do that so well. And you needed other things; like hands waving in space, and lips pointing, and drawings in the sand.

  Liz suggested Gabriella might like to work on her assignments and do her reading in our house during the day while we were at school.

  Gabriella said that each time she came back to Karnama after a time away she was happy, because she missed the people and the country so much. But she was sad too. In the late afternoon she might sit on the barbecue near the basketball court, and the paper wrappings and plastic bags blew around her with the dust. She played basketball with her old friends, and the others liked to beat her to demonstrate how Karnama was good for you. But it was like going backwards sometimes, and even further backwards each time she met up with old friends. The bridging course she did at uni didn’t connect these two worlds. So it seemed. So she said.

  Around the camp, she saw the rubbish spilling out of the smelly drums. She saw the kids coming to school late and knew that children elsewhere did homework, and had desks at home and little bags with packed lunches. She saw Brother Tom give the kids money for their week’s work on the gardens and the kids gorging on cool drinks and lollies, and clutching twentydollar notes. Later in the week they were hungry.

  I’d found the school journals which previous principals had composed. I took them home to read, one at a time. Gabriella read them also, when she sat in our house during the school day, in the lonely quiet.

  In 1976 an ear, nose and throat specialist visited the community and the principal of the time wrote that, ‘He detected no major problems ... Several children were found to have watermelon seeds in their ears.’

  At night-time cockroaches crawl in and out of their ears.

  Pages had stains on them. Tea, whisky, sweat. Tears? Principals sat, in turn, before their ledgers and wrote. They turned to their journals reluctantly, because the bureaucracy demanded it. Their entries were usually short, often confused, angry, bitter, though cautiously so. Who might read this? Without exception each principal’s journal concluded with barely disguised relief and a litany of their supposed achievements at the school. These last entries were scrawled, as if in haste.

  It startled, what you read, what you saw through those fogged spectacles, those sweat-stung eyes. Wives shouted into your face with the veins on their throats protruding dangerously, and they packed their bags repeatedly, and repeatedly wept, and threw shoes, smashed plates, spat. ‘My wife has combined professionally and successfully with me in every way, although we have had some difference of opinion and she finds it difficult living in such isolation.’

  Pigs broke out of the mission and trampled down the school fence. Sometimes, perhaps, it was wild pigs. They rooted and trampled through the flowers and over the lawn. You saw the mess early in the dewy morning, and cursed, almost wept. Snakes were killed with blackboard rulers as students watched and cheered. You chased camp dogs out of the school grounds where they’d cut out a foal from the wild horses that came up to the camp surrounds, and had it trapped inside the school fence, bleeding, frothing, trembling with terror. So frightened, so exhausted was it, that it let you touch its warm muzzle.

  But the young donkey that staggered around with fat oozing from its wounds where someone had hit it with an axe, and its anus raw and distended from being jabbed with pieces of wood, you shot.

  Children broke into teachers’ houses and stole jellybeans and were ‘dealt with’ by parents and the mission. Mothers brawled in the office over a fight their children had been in, and sent books, chalk, pens, rulers, paint tumbling. One of them returns and threatens you with a club. You write to the police, there and then, as she waves the club around your doubtless twitching eyebrows, and you point to the words you are scrawling and keep saying, ‘Police. Government.’ The children you had dismissed crouch outside the office window and listen to the club whirring past the lips which chant the threats. ‘Police. Native Welfare. Government.’

  Tiny children throw rocks through windows, and knives at teachers who follow them home hurling feeble reprimands.

  Teachers collapse with dysentery, pneumonia, hepatitis.

  A principal admits—in a surprising, perhaps unforgivable, lapse from the professional journal self—that he wants to be out of Karnama, that he can’t wait until he has ‘done his time ... It is sometimes hard to stop oneself swearing before the children.’

  Generations of children kill countless beautiful birds with gings and unerring stones while hordes of teachers shout at them and write about it in their ledgers.

  Father Pujol screams that the school must not conduct traditional handicrafts or do anything that will encourage native ways.

  In 1965 an indignant principal writes at length, under a single globe in a hot insect-ridden night, of an eight-year-old girl ‘sexually involved with several old men in the old people’s camp on the other side of the river where they stay because otherwise the mission shoot their dogs and because of their lack of dress. She apparently enjoys this pastime and many of the children watch their actions.

  ‘I have decided to ban the children from the old camp altogether and with mission help may be able to clean up this mess.

  ‘Those camps are places of disease, filth, and full of uncivilised people. It is obvious to me that for the good of the children’s education they must not associate with the old people.

  ‘P.S. Mathematical tables appear to be a big success. Children do know their tables quite well.’

  I came home and Gabriella was sitting at the dining table, staring at the mango trees in the front yard. The air-conditioner roared. She was silent, just looked at me as I entered.

  ‘These books,’ eventually she spoke, waved her arm over the journals. ‘It’s interesting to read them. But I don’t like them. I don’t like the people that write them.’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘but I feel sorry for them, a bit. They shouldn’t have been here.’

  ‘Why are you here?’ she asked me.

  ‘Because I wanted to. I t
hink I wanted, I’m of ... my grandmother ... My great grandmother must have been Aboriginal, like you, dark. My grandmother is part ... my father told me, but no one...’

  ‘Ah, we thought...’

  ‘So, maybe that’s a part. But I don’t feel Aboriginal, I can’t say that. I don’t understand. Does it mean you feel lost, displaced? But doesn’t everyone? And I just wanted to come to a place like this, where some things that happened a long time ago, where I come from, that I have only heard or read of, are still happening here, maybe.’

  ‘Some people said that they thought you might be, like when you danced the other day. True. Fatima and Sebastian said. But because you’re a teacher we didn’t think.’

  I gave a little laugh. ‘Yeah, well.’ It seemed a silly thing to talk about.

  ‘But these books, these journals, I see things a little bit like they do, I can understand it a bit. But they are like devils, djimi, like the old people say when they first saw gardiya, white people. They said they are like the devils that live in caves, with their pale skin and shadows clinging to them. I think it’s sad here really, pathetic even maybe. People don’t know, and they pretend. They don’t know what they can do, or believe in. Little bit of this, little bit of that. But in Perth, Melbourne, Sydney, Aboriginal people don’t necessarily think like me either...’

  ‘Gabriella, I think ... Yes. A breakdown maybe. Could be an evolution of sorts, there’s something in common that must be offered...’

  ‘You think? What can we do? Look at it. Put the little bits together like one of the paintings? You know, how I’ve been brought up, I don’t know anything of the old ways, a few words, this and that. But there’s something there, that’s what I reckon. Should we try and put it all together and believe in it? Or try and rediscover things, like that Renaissance thing? Do like they say Walanguh could, you know, sing for this new world.’