Nate

I slow as I enter Gachie, a corella following me in. Jesse’s not one to glean revenue from locals, but I’d never forgive myself if I took out a neighbour’s dog, or, worse, one of the town kids who have a tendency to think their bikes own the road. Beth’s invited me over for dinner tonight. After a morning of being scrutinised, she’ll need to let off steam. The morning stretches clear and inviting at the end of the road that leads out of town. After I drop off the groceries, I might go for a drive up Mount Arapiles or to one of the salt lakes. It’s been a taxing few days, and with only five to go till the festival madness gets underway, a little open sky will do me good.

As I pull in to the hotel car park, Lauren’s sitting at a table in the beer garden, garden a little ambitious for this dirt patch and two tubs of struggling banksias. She’s got her laptop open, head bent over the screen.

‘Hello,’ she calls as I get out. ‘Enjoying your day off?’

‘Sort of. There’s always something to do.’

She looks lonely, the wind hassling her hair, and against my better judgement I feel sorry for her.

‘You ever seen a salt lake?’ I ask her.

‘Only in pictures.’

‘Up for a drive?’

‘Hundred per cent.’

‘I’ve got some stuff to unload, then we can get going,’ I say, my sudden munificence giving way to another thought. While we drive I can get a little intel to pass on to Beth tonight.

When I return, Lauren’s waiting for me, a daypack over her shoulder.

‘Jump in,’ I say, pushing the passenger door, which only opens from the inside.

As we pass the post office, she frowns at the clock, still stuck on Gachie time.

‘I’m guessing this is your first visit to the Wimmera?’

‘Second. Last time I was also here for work.’

‘Work?’

She actually blushes, as if it wasn’t obvious from the outset that her presence here was for one reason only.

‘I heard about Freya from a colleague,’ she explains, screwing up her nose. ‘He saw something online and emailed me straight away.’

‘I see.’

I let her stew a little, her face turned to the passenger window. I’d admire the doggedness if it wasn’t Freya we were talking about. The road narrows to a single lane. A stock truck hurtles towards us on the other side, both of us forced to veer onto the gravel verges. Lauren grips the Jesus handle, dust whirling across the bitumen like roadkill.

‘So what’s your specialty?’ I ask her, easing back onto the road.

‘Specialty? Oh … feral children.’

‘Feral?’

‘Otherwise known as the wild child phenomenon.’

‘How’d you get into that?’

‘I read a paper on it in my first year of uni. I found the history of it fascinating. It all started with a debate about the nature of the soul – what it means to be human,’ she says, relaxing into known territory. ‘It’s hard to believe now, but feral children used to be considered a separate species. Homo feri, according to Linnaeus’s classification. Things have come a long way since then. They used to be treated like lab rats or were toured as circus attractions. Sometimes they still are. Depends what country they’re in.’

I nod, remembering a story I watched on YouTube about a Russian girl who’d been abandoned by her parents and raised by dogs. Crouched on all fours, she made sudden strikes towards the camera and bared her teeth – it was unnerving, but impossible to turn away from.

Lauren lets go of the Jesus handle. ‘Their discovery always raises a lot of questions. There’s the whole uncanny valley thing.’

‘As in, not exactly human, but human enough to make you feel weird?’

‘Exactly,’ she says, turning towards me, eyes wide. ‘It’s a fine balance between attraction and revulsion. And then there’s the problem of language, or rather lack of it. People find their silence unsettling, offensive even. Some feel like they’re being judged, while others think the child has no empathy and can’t be trusted. They project onto them the kind of fears they might have about animals or anything they don’t understand, like people who speak a different language or whose culture is completely different from their own. A feral child can act as a kind of Rorschach test of the emotional and mythological temperament of a place and time, of what has been repressed.’

Rorschach test? Repression? Some of the pub theories come to mind. White fox. Desert cults. Lost children. Lost tribes. Plenty of other myths and folklore I’ve heard over the years. There are threads, no doubt about it.

Lauren looks across at me and grins. ‘Sorry, professional hazard. I tend to assume everyone finds this stuff as fascinating as I do.’

‘So you think Freya is a wild child?’

‘Sorry, I know you and Beth are friends, but there’s a confidentiality issue here. From a legal standpoint, Freya is my patient. I know that sounds ridiculously official, but I have to be careful. Freya is in a vulnerable position and I don’t want to do anything that could jeopardise the outcome.’

‘I understand,’ I say but, disclaimers aside, it’s obvious how enthralled she is and unlikely to let Freya be. Sounds like Freya’s only chance is if she speaks, and that when she does she turns out to be ‘normal’, in whatever narrow sense is deemed acceptable. The whole process sickens me.

‘Of course, it all depends—’

‘You said it’s not your first time in the Wimmera,’ I say, cutting her off.

‘No, I came up here once when I was in the third year of my PhD. I was doing some research on William Wimmera.’

She waits. Something about the name is a test.

‘I don’t know who that is,’ I tell her.

‘That’s okay. So, William Wimmera was a Wotjobaluk boy who lived around Antwerp, not far from here.’

‘Where the old mission is?’

‘Yes, though it was before Ebenezer was built. He was taken in by one of the local settlers after his mother was killed. Stories differ about what happened exactly. Seems she was shot during some kind of punitive raid.’

Her face doesn’t alter as she delivers the last line. I return my eyes to the road.

‘What happened to the boy?’ I ask her.

‘He either escaped or got lost when he was taken on a wool-selling trip to Melbourne. Depends what version of the story you read. While he was there, an Anglican reverend called Septimus Chase heard about him and decided to take William back to England. William was only ten at the time. Chase’s plan was to give him a religious education, so that when they got back to Australia, William could help convert other Aboriginal people. The belief was that once he was removed from his own people, he would become a better version of himself. Chase’s sister was put in charge of his education and, though she was encouraged by William’s artistic skills, she found little evidence of a work of grace in his heart.’ Lauren frames the last statement with air quotes and shakes her head. ‘The Chases quickly lost interest in him and placed him in the care of a local couple, where his behaviour started to improve, but he caught some kind of flu. A rushed baptism only made him worse and he died soon after. I visited his grave in Reading while I was doing my research. I remember the date of his death – 10 March 1852 – but especially what was written under it: An Australian boy, who died in Christ.’

She goes quiet, hands gripped in her lap.

‘Why study him? Doesn’t sound like he was one of those feral children.’

‘He wasn’t, but there are interesting correlations between the phenomenon and how First Nations children were treated. These children could speak but they were silenced, in the sense that they weren’t allowed access to their own language. They were often kept in separate sleeping quarters from their parents so they couldn’t be taught in secret at night, or they were beaten if they were heard speaking their native tongue. First Nations languages were considered uncivilising or too simplistic to express the range of human experience.’

To the west the salt lake comes into view, a long silver patch that turns white as the sun appears from behind a cloud. If you didn’t know what it was you could mistake it for the coast. We circle its boundary until we reach the track, the grass so high in the centre strip that it whacks against the chassis. Along the edges, the saltbush is wind-clipped and abundant, and I remember the first time I tried it, the foreignness of it as the rubbery leaf burst between my teeth and released its salt. My father laughing at me, It won’t kill you.

I’ve never heard anything about this boy before, not among all the stories tendered at the hotel, nor the ones taught at school when I was growing up, less than an hour away from where he began his short life. ‘William Wimmera,’ I say, something creepy about the alliteration.

‘Hmm. Most children were given English names, or a kind of doubling happened where a First Nations person would be given the same name as their master and be known as “Black Joe Bloggs”, or whatever. In the case of William Wimmera, there’s a whole Rousseauian thing going on, if you ask me. The boy was overidentified with the place that he came from, a “noble savage” indistinguishable from the land. This kind of othering is common in the documents from that period, though you still see remnants of it today.’

The glare off the lake is potent and I feel it as an assault, along with her story and the way that she tells it, the language calculated and cold. Not long ago, a guy came into the pub, a researcher on his way back from a conference in Adelaide. He had a theory about the correlation between frontier violence and domestic violence – that where the process of settlement was most brutal, traces remained. He also spoke about it with clinical precision – quoted statistics and named big names – maybe a hangover from having just delivered a paper in front of colleagues. But there was a moment when he paused and looked around him. Seemed to recognise that his ideas were grounded in a place.

Tyre marks spread across the gleaming salt, some in a figure eight. We could drive out there and probably not get bogged, the surface solid enough to hold. Then she’d have another story of the Wimmera to take with her. Authentic. Nothing too French Enlightenment. A few loaded metaphors to keep the brutality of what she studies at bay.

The wind rocks the truck as I pull over. It whistles through the wheel rims and tears at a plastic bag snagged on a branch. Buffets the snails that cling to the tips of the saltbush, their shells bone white.

Tell me something untrue, it says.