True Country Read online

  We each turned away from the other.

  Maybe. But why? When you, I, we, don’t know quite who we are these days, why try to tell others this, or that something has gone wrong and the world is not quite right? Because otherwise we have to listen to them, be silent, watch their visions, feel our earth vibrate as they hammer it with thick ankles and well-shod feet, probe and jackhammer drill.

  A Beginning

  In the busy classroom, buzzing with student voices, the telephone was ringing. It was an internal connection only, from Alex’s office to the classroom.

  I answered it. Alex said, ‘I’ve just received a telegram for you over the two-way, Bill.’

  ‘Oh yeah.’

  ‘Nana passed away last night love Mum.’

  The students were all silent and looking at me; except Francis of course, who had taken the opportunity to return to his drawings of dark, muscular heroes threatening to take others, to take life, by the nape of the neck.

  Oh yeah, well done Alex. Billy has a classroom full of adolescents. He looks out the window out out out. He doesn’t want to be there. He wants it to be a time when he finally spoke to his grandmother, when she wasn’t ten years sick and she could answer his questions about her young days, her life. How come she doesn’t want people to know she’s Aboriginal and how did she get taken away from her family and does she know of many of them still and where is she from really and why did they send Billy’s dad away and and and ... and Alex stays in his office and forgets what he has just said over the phone and he doesn’t know anything of this and he doesn’t want to.

  Mum says later that Nana was in pain and they had her on strong drugs. She went right back says Mum. She asked for one son, for Dad, no one said that he was fifteen years dead. We let her go. She started to talk in a funny language and she went through all these names and, in the voice of a small child, she started to cry.

  But they took her away. And now she is proper gone. And Billy stands in a noisy classroom and knows that all those things he was building up to asking her now will never have answers. And he’s doing with Fatima, Sebastian, Samson what he should have with her, and even with his father but that was too long ago and he didn’t think then.

  So Billy is doing it with us now, and Gabriella too. We might be all writing together, really.

  II

  High Diving

  One hot afternoon Billy, Liz, the high school kids, they all went for a swim. They went to High Diving, which is just down there behind the mission grounds where the river widens into a big pool before it slides among the rocks and into the rapids of Running Creek. They had to walk past the community office, and past the old people gathered there, sitting in the shade; Fatima, Sebastian, some others. Jasmine came out of the office. She decided she was going too.

  The group moved in two major clusters, divided according to sex. The girls grouped around Liz and Jasmine, with Jasmine the main focus because she was of greater novelty than the teacher.

  They laughed, they shrieked, they studied her earrings and hair. They asked the two women about boyfriends, husbands. ‘Mr Storey hit you ever? What he like when he drunk?’ It was Friday. Jasmine said she was annoyed with the office, with working there, with the people, the laziness and the fighting. These kids wouldn’t be like that when they were working there would they? Oh no, no.

  The girls held their guests’ hands and put their arms around their shoulders. They led them past puddles and over the rusting barbed wire fence behind the mission. ‘See that, Miss?’ They pointed to a metal-framed corridor leading to an opening in a tall corrugated iron wall which also served as part of the fence. It looked like a cattle run, but much narrower. ‘That’s where people, us mob, older ones but, used to get food, line up for food.’

  The boys walked twenty metres ahead. They threw rocks at the coconuts as they went past them, then at the mango trees, at birds, into the river. They spoke of cars, ninjas, of whether Russia or America would win a war, of Arnold Schwarzenegger muscles. They quoted whole lines of dialogue from the videos the camp was watching this week, role-playing with their voices. For their first few months here all teachers understand them clearly when they repeat lines from videos in American accents, but are puzzled by the local English.

  Imagine, again, seeing all this from above, as if you were flying slowly, just drifting, quiet, way above them. They are walking along, walking along on a narrow two-wheeled red dirt track. Long grass in the middle of the track and long grass around them stretching to the rocks of Running Creek as they walk past it. You are up high so you don’t hear their voices too well, just some little shouts, and the wind sort of singing, and the clank clank of the old windmill there. You are invisible, you cast no shadow. Their clothes are just spots of colours in the vast green which gets drabber as you go higher and see the land away from the river. There is the blue of the river near them, the big green of mango trees and the plantation in the mission. The kids are mostly tight in around those teachers. Black skin looks good in the sun, shiny. Then, nearly at High Diving, the kids break away and start to race to the river. They shed clothes on the run. They dive. They spear the water. They disappear and surface among the reeds by the bank. They climb a tree, and jump. They swing out on the rope there, and drop. They dive. Silent splashes, blossoms of froth, circles in the water. There’re white patterns, different colours in that tiny part of the river where they’re jumping and making bubbles.

  ‘Aren’t they beautiful people? Look, such big smiles,’ said Jasmine as she and Liz sat on the bank. ‘The boys are so spunky, aren’t they, really?’

  ‘I’d say they’re all nice looking.’

  ‘And the babies. So cute! Really! So cute!’ Jasmine clasped herself with the pleasure of their cuteness.

  Billy climbed up the sloping trunk of the great tree which leaned over the river. It was wet and slippery where the kids had been climbing it. He’d watched them virtually walk up it before he’d decided to do so himself. But it was so slippery, and high. He felt a surge of panic. He was bent over like a chimpanzee, using hands and feet. He wished he had claws to grip with. If he slipped here he’d bash himself on the tree, and then on the bank because he wasn’t yet out over the water. And the tree kept sloping up and out. The kids behind were getting impatient.

  ‘Okay, I’m an old man, remember?’ He forced a grin.

  ‘C’mon Billy, move along.’ Liz called out to him.

  He managed the grin again. ‘Hey, I’m frightened,’ he attempted to joke. His joke was taken. He hadn’t realised the tree would seem so high. Liz was already far below. When he was a child he’d always dreamt of flying, but hadn’t known about heights. He’d experienced vertigo one day walking around some cliffs above the sea. From then his childhood dreams included the terror of heights, of falling from cliffs into the sea, falling falling falling; then entering the water without a disturbance, and going down and down past curious fish that watched him, and the bubbles leaving his mouth for the light, shrinking, above.

  He grasped the tree trunk between his knees and continued shinning along it as if it were vertical. The tree moved with his weight as he got to the branches from where the kids leapt. There, Beatrice grinned at him, and, levering her weight with her knees, made the tree branch spring and sway. He grinned back at her, wished she wouldn’t. He sat with his arm firmly around a smaller branch and dangled his feet. Kids pushed past him, rocked and leapt, their dark bodies plummeting and exploding as they hit the water, making a moment’s dark opening in the centre of a circle of white spray and bubbles in the water. He smiled with Liz, kilometres below him.

  Sliding off the branch, he suddenly became incredibly heavy, the water at his feet drawing him. There was an explosion as he hit the water, but he was still intact, himself, and lightened. Brown water around him, bubbles. He swam up elated.

  As he surfaced his eyes met those of Francis. Or rather, his eyes met Franny’s thick-lensed spectacles, which reflected the river water itself and
in which Franny’s eyes swam like dark fish. Billy smiled, Franny nodded. Franny very rarely swam. His health was poor because of some trouble when he was very young. Now he smiled back, and Billy duck-dived into the dark water.

  ‘What are they like at school?’ asked Jasmine, still smiling at the cuteness of the youngest children, who were also starting to arrive at the river and leap into the water.

  ‘Well, they’re way behind most kids in schools. Not all of them, the best are maybe a weak average for their age. But look at the place. Parents don’t read; there’s none of that back-up at home. Why maths? What’s science? You know. Some things, generalising, they seem extra good at though. Special strengths. Maybe like telling stories, joking, sometimes miming. And visual literacy ... I sometimes wonder what we’re doing here.’

  The older boys swam with the river’s drift, and took Billy with them. The pool ended in a clump of pandanus and rocks and became rapids. They climbed out of the river just before the head of the rapids and walked across logs and rocks.

  The boys explained to Billy that, by swimming hard, you could get across the rapids to a large tree which hung over the river about fifty metres along the other bank. They demonstrated. And were swept away laughing at one another, looking back at him as their heads bobbed in the sinewed, sharp-edged water. It seemed the tree and they leaned together, and they clasped it, each boy stretched from hand to foot with the torrent, and sometimes hand-in-hand with another boy. They climbed the tree gracefully, they flowed up it, and leapt into a still and deep pool in its lee. They duck-dived back into the current at the edge of the pool and somehow, underwater, swam against the river back to the base of the tree.

  Billy watched for a time. He entered the river and struck out for the other side, stroking as if sprinting but going sideways. He got close to the other side, and lined up the tree. The river buffeted him, pulled him under its surface, tossed him up, came into his throat, and then the boys grabbed him as he came to the tree reaching up with his hand and his head going under again. Teasing him, their laughter bubbling with the river, they pulled him to them.

  They showed him how to move against the current underwater.

  In the strange and changing sepia light he clasped the reeds on the stony river floor and pulled himself along with them. The dull roar in his ears, the sharp slippery reeds in his hands, his body stretched by the same current which pressed his hair to his scalp. Quite alone for those moments, calm and moving against the current, beneath it.

  Then rocketing up into the noise, white light, the laughing faces greeting his reappearance.

  They played hide-and-seek in the river and reeds. Sylvester would duck-dive and disappear. Long minutes later, in a stiller part of the river, Billy would hear a voice calling him, but would not be able to find the speaker until, there, Sylvester parted the reeds and Billy saw just his nose and twinkling eyes above the surface of the river.

  Billy followed Sylvester underwater. In the yellow river light Sylvester pointed to passages under trapped trees, and where you could surface for a breath and not be seen because of the twisted branches and reeds knotted together.

  Billy, his lungs straining, followed Sylvester as they pulled themselves along the bottom of the river. He watched the pale soles of Sylvester’s feet as they waved, flapped, glimmered before him.

  ‘You know, Sir, they call me crocodile. I was a crocodile.’

  Billy returned to the pool with some of the younger children who’d come down to the head of the rapids. He picked his way across the boulders to the other bank and took them back to the still water, but allowed the older girls to join the boys in the rapids. After experiencing the competence of those he’d just been with, he could hardly disbelieve the girls’ assurances that they were capable swimmers.

  Jasmine interrupted Liz. ‘What about Milton’s kids?’

  ‘Oh, they’re probably the cleverest, school-wise, for their age. They’re only young though, yet,’ Liz said.

  ‘Yeah, Milton’d only be in his late twenties. Spunky, don’t you think? And his wife, Annie? They both seem impressive. Well educated, they seem.’

  ‘Relatively,’ said Liz. ‘They went to private schools. Perth, Darwin, Broome. Maybe it helps to be sent away, have your world opened up. Like Moses. Almost like, maybe it helps to be taken away from your family and that. Not like they used to do, but ... this place is so tiny, so insular and isolated. To go away is an education, important, and if you know you’re coming back and still loved...’

  Billy swam gently to the bank to keep an eye on the youngest kids. In this heat he felt he could stay in the water forever. Tiny children, five and six years old, emulated the older ones by leaping from smaller trees. Billy swam with a younger child holding his shoulders, floating behind. Little Louella, standing on the bank, called to him. ‘Me too?’ He held out his hands, and she leapt into them. He let her into the water, chest deep to him, and she struggled and spluttered. Someone called out from way up in the tree, ‘She can’t swim, Sir, that one.’ And Billy, tardily realising this, grabbed at her and lifted her into his arms again. He taught her to float on her back. Tiny children climbed up into his arms, stroked his cheek, feeling the stubble there. They drew their fingers through his hair, pulled at his earring, investigated him; the difference in smell and touch between him and their adults. The similarities. They did the same with Liz and Jasmine. They dived off Billy’s shoulders into the water, and he picked them up and threw them into the air so that they landed in the water, splashing anykind.

  The young children swam in knickers or shorts. The eldest boys in their jeans. The older girls swam fully clothed. Jasmine and Liz came in and swam in their bathers and the little children draped from them as they did from Billy. The kids noticed the women in their bathers. All that flesh. Like swimming in your undies, the older girls said. That’s what those people do.

  When they all left the teachers came along last, shepherding stragglers. Some of the older ones—Deslie, Jimmy, and others—helped collect up clothes the little children had left behind. They sniffed them, and knew to whom they belonged.

  Five minutes’ walk and up at the camp they were hot again. Dusty, the smell of cow shit; and the rubbish trapped against the wire fences, blowing across the land, spilling from the bins. Jasmine agreed to come over for a drink with Billy and Liz later in the day. And, perhaps, dinner also.

  In the office later that afternoon, after Jasmine had returned to work, Samson came in and sat on her desk. ‘We go swimming some time, eh? I take you to a waterfall I know. Beautiful. Everyone that see it want to take photo. You wear your bathers that you do, with your cheeky bum, eh?’

  At High Diving the river beneath the tree is calm again. The tree is still wet. The water still flows toward the rapids, and leaves fall and drift away, and bubbles break the surface now and then. Bubbles from the mud, or turtles, or little crocodiles maybe.

  Some get Together

  Gerrard said, to the other boss ones, ‘Better have a meeting soon.’ Just them mob but, eh? He say, very calm and clever, ‘So we can work things out. Talk about the problems here, and how we can work together best. In other places, communities like this, I’ve done it. It helps.’

  So they sitting there in Alex and Annette’s house, drinking coffee, hiding faces behind cups, eyes looking round quick like they nervous animals; looking here, there, this way, that way. Sip the coffee; slurp, slurp. Who we got here? Gerrard, Father Paul, Alex, Annette, Murray, Liz. Ah yes, we not there maybe, but we know that mob, we hear things.

  Gerrard makes his chair look too little. He too big that one. Long legs up next to his ears like a grasshopper maybe perched there, ready to hop in. Father Paul, sleeves rolled up over his strong arms. He gripping his cigarette tight, laughing loudest. He gunna work with all these new ones, he gunna be patient this time. Murray fidgeting, he move little bit this way, little bit ’nother way. Then he find a nice comfortable place, and he sit still with his legs apart and his beer b
elly resting good there. He looking at his scrubbed red fingers, eating his fingernails. Alex and Annette sitting together; they glad they all in their house. Alex’s legs crossed. One foot swinging swinging, fingers tapping. He a clock, you know, trying to make time his way; this second begins ... Now! Another one ... Now! Little round Annette sitting right closest next to him, sideways, hands in her lap. Liz writing their words down in a little book.

  So. They having a hard time here in Karnama. Maybe this is not the place for them.

  Gerrard would have shifted in his chair. ‘Well, let’s make a start then. I’ve run these sorts of meetings before, where the senior personnel get together. Perhaps we could take turns chairing them from here. I’ll start, today. The idea is just to throw things around; talk about what’s bothering you, problems, who’s causing trouble, what’s not getting done. That sort of thing.’

  ‘Where to start, eh?’ said Father Paul, sympathetically. Laughter. Alex and Annette held one another’s gaze for a moment.

  Gerrard made a suggestion, and they all said ‘Aye’, and put their hands up in the air.

  Gerrard talked. He named some people. He said he was having trouble getting people to work punctually, or arriving at all. Getting them to finish jobs, even halfway properly, was impossible.

  Annette elbowed Alex. ‘Exactly,’ he said, slapping the back of one hand in the palm of the other. ‘Exactly. Our cleaners, our gardener, our AEW...’

  ‘Using the terms loosely,’ interrupted Annette.

  ‘The problem,’ continued Alex, ‘is to get them to work on time, turning up regularly enough to learn how to do a decent job.’ He sighed.

  ‘And, the kids. Half the time—no, more than that—they haven’t been fed or cleaned, and they fall asleep in class. What are their parents doing? Playing cards? Drinking?’