I’D ONLY GONE A few yards when I became aware of bare feet padding up behind me.
Hazel, her upper body adorned with ochre, feathers in her hair, a friendly frown.
‘Sneakin off, Tempest?’
‘Didn’t want to disturb you.’
She grinned. ‘Disturb us? Heh! Even a tempest’d be peaceful after Rosie. You gotta go so early?’
‘Tom told me to be there first thing. Don’t want to give him or his mates the satisfaction of seeing me late for my first day at work. Especially the mates—’
She studied the distant town, a troubled expression on her face.
Somewhere out on Barker’s Boulevard a muscle car pitched and screamed: one of the apprentices from the mine. Apprentice idiot, from the sound of him. A drunken voice from the whitefeller houses bayed at the moon. A choir of dogs howled the response.
‘You sure you know what you’re doin? This…job?’ Her lips curled round the word like it had the pox.
‘Dunno that I ever know what I’m doing, Haze. I’ve said I’ll give it a go.’
She smiled, sympathetic. She knew my doubts better than I knew them myself; she’d been watching them play themselves out for long enough—since we were both kids on the Moonlight Downs cattle station, a couple of hundred k’s to the north-west. I’d flown the coop early, gone to uni, seen the world. Hazel had never left.
The little community there had hung on over the years, through the usual stresses endured by these marginal properties on the edge of the desert. It had held together, like some sort of ragged-arse dysfunctional family, thanks in large part to the influence of Hazel’s dad Lincoln Flinders and the efforts of Hazel herself.
Lincoln was dead now, savagely murdered not long ago. Just around the time I’d returned myself, come back from my restless travels and fruitless travails. Come home, hoping to find something, not knowing what.
I had a better idea now, though.
We’d taken the first tentative steps to independence: built a few rough houses, put in a water supply, planted an orchard. Our mate Bindi Watkins had started a cattle project, and was managing, in the main, to keep the staff from eating the capital. There was talk of a school, a store, a clinic.
The one thing we lacked was paid employment. So when Tom McGillivray, superintendent of the Bluebush Police and an old friend of the Tempest clan, came up with the offer of an Aboriginal Community Police Officer’s position we were happy to accept.
The only complication was the person he insisted on filling the position.
‘Join the cops, Emily!’ Hazel was still shocked.
‘Not real cops, Haze. ACPOs can only arrest people. I won’t be shooting anyone.’
‘Yeah but workin with them coppers…Old Tom, ’e’s okay—we know im long time. Trust im. But them other kurlupartu…’I’d been wondering myself how McGillivray’s hairy-backed offsiders would react to a black woman in their midst.
‘Bugger em,’ I said with a bravado I wished I felt. ‘It’ll be an education.’
‘Yuwayi, but who for?’
‘It’s only a few weeks, Haze.’
That was the deal: a month in town, working alongside Bluebush’s finest, then I’d be based at Moonlight. I’d just come back from a short training course in Darwin in time to catch the tail end of the initiation rites.
The clincher in the deal—and this wasn’t just the cherry on top, it was the whole damn cake and most of the icing—was a big fat four-wheel-drive. Government owned, fuelled and maintained. The community was tonguing at the prospect; the goannas of Moonlight Downs wouldn’t know what hit em.
We paused at the perimeter of the town camp, looked back at the fire-laced ceremony. A chubby toddler broke free from the women, wobbled off in the direction of the men, his little backside bobbing. He hesitated, lost his nerve and rushed back into the comforting female huddle.
They all laughed. So did we, the sombre mood evaporating.
Say what you like about me and my mob, there’s one thing you can’t deny: we’re survivors. You can kick us and kill us and drown us in bible and booze, but you better get used to us because we’re not going away.
‘So you’re out bush, first day?’
‘Tom got the call last night. Some old whitefeller killed at the Green Swamp Well Roadhouse.’
‘What happen?’
‘Dunno. Probably bashed to death with a cricket bat—deadly serious about their sport out there.’
Green Swamp Well’s main claim to fame—apart from the world’s biggest collection of beer coasters and mooning photos, its tough steaks and tougher coffee—was the annual Snowy Truscott Memorial Cricket Match.
Hazel glanced at the eastern sky. ‘Gonna be a scorcher.’
She was right: the drop of rain we’d had yesterday would only add to the humidity, and the radio predicted a brutal 45 degrees. Performing any sort of outdoor activity today would be like doing laps in a pressure cooker.
We were in the middle of the build-up. That time of year temperate Australia thinks of as spring: after the winter dry and not yet properly into the wet, when temperatures, tempers and the odd bullet go through the roof and the rain is always somewhere else. You’d be out of your mind if you didn’t go a little bit crazy.
‘Look after yourself,’ said Hazel. She kissed me on the cheek, returned to the dancing ground.