TWO

One week earlier.

Millie had delayed dinner for two hours but Jarra hadn't shown up. It wasn't unusual for him to arrive home late. She began to worry. She didn't think he was running around with other women, she worried about his safety. She had found it necessary on two occasions to phone the local hospital to find out if he had been admitted as a road accident patient.

Millie was a sports woman, a track star in high school, but she never pursued her sporting career despite holding the state junior record for the hundred metres. Until recently she played A-grade tennis and basketball; her basketball team had won the previous year's Coca-Cola State Cup. Her mother sacrificed everything for her six children - Millie was her only daughter - and while she would never say anything to the contrary, she was reliving her life through Millie, always giving her special concessions. She learned that a lot of Europeans did this too.

Millie often reminisced about the hard times when she was a girl, especially when she attended high school in Darwin. Like most Aboriginal families they struggled against poverty. Her father often accepted work in another city and was away for months at a time, while her mother took in washing and ironing from families on the naval base; this eventually led to a permanent separation of her parents, though they never divorced.

Half the time, as a child, Millie would leave home in the morning having not eaten breakfast because there simply was no food in the house. Her mother would be near delirium from the anxiety but vowed to each child on such days that she would meet them at the front gate of the school with something to eat at lunchtime. Millie never knew how her mother did it but she was always there, she never let them down. Usually they ate lunch together while the boys ran back into the school grounds. She would ask Millie to tell her details about her day and beam as she visualised every story her daughter told.

*

When her mother fell in love, disaster came to Millie and her family. It happened after a series of coincidences. They were living at the edge of town in a two room shack; her mother, Rita, had gone to the shops and Millie had joined the neighbourhood kids playing cricket on the dirt road near the old wooden bridge. In the distance a car raised dust as it sped  toward the cricket pitch. The garbage bin, which acted as the wicket, was picked up by one of the boys and carried to the side of the road. As the car got nearer it slowed, then stopped in the middle of the ring of kids. A black man put his head out of the window and called to them.

'Any of you kids know Rita Unaburra?'

All the kids crowded to the driver's side of the car.

'That's my mother,' Millie called from the back of the group. 'What do you want her for?'

'I've got a message for her... from your dad.'

'My dad?'

The man pulled the car to the side of the road and got out. He was a tall, thin man with long hair tied back; he wore a pristine white business shirt, jeans and high-heeled, crimson cowboy boots.

'Which place is your place then?' he asked Millie.

'That one,' she pointed. 'But mum's not home. She's gone to the shop.'

The man looked along the road. 'The shop up that way?'

Millie nodded yes.

He sort of murmured out of the side of his mouth. 'I'll go and pick her up... save her the walk.'

Millie said nothing and strolled behind the man as he made his way back to the car. In no time he had wheeled it back onto the road, throwing red dust high in his wake; the car became obscured ahead of it.

The kids reclaimed the dusty pitch and noisily resumed their game.

––––––––

Night had fallen. Millie and her brothers were sitting on hessian sacks on the ground near the front door of their tin shack when their mother stepped from the tall stranger's car. She was laughing!

Stanley Boone moved into the two room shack and made Rita happy.

Millie learned later that Stan had met her father on a cattle station, they had worked together for a few weeks then he won the lottery. He'd won five thousand dollars, not first prize. But it was enough for him to toss the job in and head for the bright lights of Darwin. He bought a used car and clothes and hit the casinos - two days later he was broke. Then he remembered round about where Rita lived.

Months moved past swiftly. Stan never worked - Rita kept him. One year later he had beaten her so badly that she was hospitalised. That's when all the kids went to stay with relatives - Millie went to her grandparents on her father's side.

Millie's nan and pop lived near the river at Ropers Soak. They'd cleverly arranged five sheets of rusty, corrugated tin up into the sloping bank of the dried out river bed and used boxes as a wall on one side, turning them inwards for use as shelving. There hadn't been any water flowing here in Millie's lifetime, but there were underground pools all along the river's course. The men dug for water every so often around here - they knew where to dig.

Millie walked alone at the side of the country road for the five miles to her grandparents; and the closer she got to Ropers Soak the more she was filled with hopelessness and despair. Near  the camp shacks, she asked for directions to her grandparents from the kids who played under the trees; they pointed to a shack fifty yards away. Her bare feet slipped on the steep slope as she climbed up to her new home.

'Hello, anyone in there,' she called, trying to sound cheerful.

Now she saw her nan strolling down in the river hollow and they waved to each other. Inside the lean-to, her pop stirred.

'Wake up pops it's me, Millie.'

Millie's mother died a few days later from an infection she'd picked up in the hospital. Antibiotics were not effective against this new mutant strain of bacteria.

Millie lived and studied on the river bank while going through her final year at school and for almost a year after that. Then she moved to Darwin and got a job. This was about the time that she met Jarra outside a supermarket.

Yarra and Millie had been betrothed when they were about ten, when both families lived in the community, before they became town fringe dwellers.

*

Finally, Millie heard the unmistakable sound of their car coming down the street. She sighed loudly from relief as the station wagon rolled to a stop under their elevated house. Bounding to her feet she scurried to the kitchen, placed a plate of chicken and vegetables in the oven, set the temperature and ran to the front door.

Her timing was perfect: she pulled the door open as Jarra stood startled, reaching for it. 'I know... I'm sorry, I should have called,' Jarra acquiesced and surrendered. Opening his arms wide as he stood on the verandah not venturing inside until he was sure it was safe to do so.

Millie reached out and pulled him to her and hugged him. She would never scold him: she understood. She worked with him every day. They agreed she would have an eight until two work day in an attempt to keep some sort of normality in their domestic life - Millie was five months pregnant with their first child.

Home for thirty seconds, Jarra began steering Millie towards the bedroom but she managed to ward him off. She insisted he eat the meal she had taken the trouble to prepare. Their sex life had not been hindered at all just because Millie was expecting. They had become extremely inventive.

––––––––

Jarra Mariba was twenty-nine years old when he finished law school: he had started university later than most people because he had waited until his tribal initiation was fully completed. Jarra was from the Djaru tribe, he married Millie (Millibini), a Lungga woman, two years previously just weeks after his return to their community. They had known for years that they would be wed, they were betrothed as teenagers by their parents.

Jarra was a tall, well built, black-skinned man who smiled a lot. His exquisite teeth, so white, so dazzling were a disarming weapon.

He studied for his law degree at Sydney University, afterwards - following the Aboriginal trend of recent years - he returned to his homelands to assist his people as they approached the next millennium. Jarra wanted to help remove the legal obstacles Australian governments, state and federal, deliberately placed in the path of aborigines.

When the federal government pastoral leases expired on his tribal lands and the wealthy land owners and multi-nationals wanted to renew, the traditional land owners turned to Jarra to represent them in legal hearings and at numerous government conferences. He was honoured to do so. One particular contract related to the Lord Ludley leasehold property, a cattle ranch. Said to be the largest property held by one person in the world - twenty-one thousand square kilometres in one lot - the Ludley cattle ranch was the size of Wales.

The seventh Lord of Ludley employed seventy-three local tribesmen until industrial laws required he pay them the same wages as his white workers. In addition he had to give them compatible working conditions and lodgings to his white workers. Previously, he had paid his Aboriginal workers a quarter of the European mens' wage and the blacks lived in a camp a hundred metres from the main house. Subsequently, he fired all the blacks except for eight; four of those were women who worked in his home, and in the bunk house, as 'domestics'.

The Australian media lapped up the imagery: the oppressed traditional owners of the land against the imperialistic aristocracy of Great Britain. It placed the Australian public one step away from the fray, it was excellent theatre, great sport, and they eagerly spectated while the courts refereed.

Jarra was in constant demand for media interviews. Despite popular sentiment, the grey-suited Aborigine troubled the government and Australia's white establishment, even though Jarra's discourse was with the British Lord. Suddenly, here was an articulate black who knew British and Australian law and debated their finer nuances; it was particularly worrying that he did this with journalists from the national media on the steps of their highest courts. This blackfella could reach millions of Australians any time he felt like calling a media conference which he had done twice already.

To many Australians, Jarra Mariba was a dangerous man.

Jarra's traditional mentor, Mutta Ranupingu, preferred to live away from his community, visiting only occasionally when he became lonely. He was married to Akuna who was forty-five, ten years younger than himself. Despite their middle age, Akuna and Mutta were tribal elders nearing the end of their lives. It made them angry when they had learned that life expectancy of Aboriginals was twenty-five years less than that of white Australians and they wondered if white Australian leaders started dying off at fifty if this might be taken seriously. Their five children, all boys, were married with many children of their own and they all lived in the community; so their visits were large family affairs.

That day they had made camp and built a shelter before eating. These were their ancestral lands: the three previous days they walked on a neighbouring tribe's land. They enjoyed meandering along the serpent-like course of the river and it took them away from their own territory.

There were stories about the deeply eroded river; of a snake in ancient times that was injured by an unwitting kookaburra, dropped from way above the hill tops; in its attempt to escape the area it carved this blemish in the earth. All animals were gigantic in that ancient time. Although this was not one of their clan's stories they both liked and respected it all the same - they were filled with the unique spirit of this area because of that.

There were water holes all around this region therefore the hunting was good. It was a pleasing place to spend time. The morning was silent, tranquil, warm and windless. Far off, against an azure sky, a moving greyish speck appeared. Mutta and Akuna sat on the rise above Blackfellow Creek and watched the speck approach. As it came closer they could see it was a wingless aircraft. The helicopter circled the valley in a wide arc, spiralling as it lost altitude. Then it landed, causing a red cloud to rise beside the creek below them.

They watched the tall, blonde white man step from the cockpit and Mutta nudged Akuna and signalled that they should go down to meet him. Mutta put his hands to his cheeks and called along the valley.

'Cooee!'

Aaron was startled. He looked up at the rocks, scanning them for any sign of movement, then he saw the man and woman slowly approaching. They were both naked. He decided to play coy and continued unstrapping the motorbike from the lower superstructure of the aircraft. After a while he called back.

'Hello up there!'

The aging Aboriginal couple looked graceful, balletic almost, as they scaled the rugged slope bringing them down to the river. Mutta stopped, his wife safely behind him, he looked Aaron up and down in a manner Europeans might consider rude, before he advanced.

'You by yourself?' Mutta asked as he got close, Akuna remained two paces behind.

'Yep... by myself,' Aaron said, smiling, cautiously diverting his eyes to the ground.

'You fly that machine all by yourself, eh?' Mutta asked as he looked at the helicopter.

'Yep.' Aaron slapped his sides nervously. 'It's not too hard to do.'

Mutta had seen helicopters before but never as close as this. He gingerly touched the windshield, ran the flat of his palm over it as he walked to be in front of it, then he put two palms flat on it and pushed to feel the weight in the beast. 'What are you up to, coming here?' Mutta asked as he did this.

'I'm interested in the stones and bushes around here,' Aaron said being careful not to give any cause for concern. 'I hope I didn't bother you with my loud engines. Are you camping near here?'

'This is our place.'

'I thought it might be your land.'

'Yes, this is our land. We camp everywhere, all over here,' he spoke with pride in his voice and waved his arms, gesturing widely. 'We are Djaru people. All this is ours.'

Aaron could see that Mutta was simply stating a fact, he wasn't angry at all. This land simply was his. Aaron knew the man had no legal title to it, but there was no doubting the fact.

'Yes I know,' he said slowly.

Akuna watched with interest from a distance; she was shy. Her nakedness disarmed Aaron but he was compelled to continue to look at her. He liked looking at her. He liked the way her form, the black female form fitted these surroundings. It was nature; she was natural. But he recognised in himself that the experience was sexual, not a lust-filled sexuality, a subtle, sensual sexualism; this even though Akuna was an older woman and her body not as firm as it had once been.

Mutta circled the helicopter, prodding and shoving.

Aaron grasped for conversation and followed the old man.

'Right, well... I'm only going to be here for a short while, I hope you don't mind.'

Mutta was thoughtful.

'It's alright, you can camp anywhere around here for a while,' he said graciously. 'Got any bacca?'

'No, I'm sorry I don't smoke.'

Mutta looked past Aaron into the cockpit.

'What you got in that thing?'

'Equipment mostly... things I need to do my work.'

'What work?'

'I get rocks, dirt and plants and mix things with them, to see what they're made of.'

Mutta motioned for his wife to come and join them.

'We know what they's made of.'

'Yes, I'm sure you do.'

Aaron moved to the cockpit and opened the door.

'Just a moment, maybe you can help me with something,' he said.

Mutta followed him, wanting a look inside this giant mosquito, Akuna too moved beside them both. Aaron pulled some paper from beneath a pile of clutter and unfolded an aerial map of the region.

'Can you read maps?... or understand maps?'

'I don't see too many... maps. What is it?'

'This is a map, a drawing of this area.'

Aaron placed the map on the ground and they all sat close to read it. Mutta's face became firm and serious as he scanned the document. He turned the paper so a corner was at the top, then he fell back, startled by what he saw in the white man's artwork.

'What ..! ' he said to the map as if the document were speaking to him. He was visibly shaken. Tilting his head at an angle, he stared into the white man's eyes.

'Who are you?' he gasped.

Mutta had become fearful. He couldn't tell Aaron that his high-tech map matched the sacred sand paintings his people had been making of this region for centuries. And that these ritualised sand paintings included the coded whereabouts of the sacred Wandjina sites, or that these locations matched Aaron's white dots exactly.

Aaron was silenced by the intensity of the old man's gaze.

'Just... who are you?' the old man repeated his question.

'I'm Aaron Shoemaker.'

'That... that's just a name. Who's sent you? Where are you from?'

Aaron looked into the old man's eyes and recognised fear.

'Is there something wrong with my map?'

Mutta looked away. 'I can't tell you,' he said.

'I was hoping that you... '

'No!'

'... could tell me what these white dots are?'

Aaron's voice trailed off as he pointed to small, white squares, dots he had drawn on the map. These were the squares he found while examining satellite photos with a magnifying lupe glass while half asleep a few weeks back. He looked to the old woman and back to her man.

'Do you know what these are?' Aaron asked again.

'No!' Mutta was firm.

'Right ..., I guess I'll have to go and see for myself.'

Mutta called to Akuna in their native language and they stood.

'We're going now,' he said abruptly.

'Okay... (ahem), are you camped around here some place?'

'No.'

'Right...' Aaron said. 'Okay, well, good-bye then.'

Akuna was walking behind Mutta and looked back to Aaron; she pointed to the hills to the south from the direction he had just come and shook her head, signalling an emphatic no. Mutta did not look back at all.

Discreetly, Aaron waved to her in a friendly way, nodding and smiling.

An hour later, the high pitched roar of Aaron's bike echoed off the red rocks of the river valley in the world's most ancient landscape, sounding like a prehistoric predator.

Aaron had a fairly accurate notion about where the white square was; he had seen it from the air, it was more pronounced than he had ever imagined, so he headed in that direction. He wanted to ask the Aborigines if they knew of it and could tell him anything about it. Their reactions told him they did.

Aaron recalled that the massive uranium strike in the Rum Jungle in Australia fifty years earlier had been discovered due to local aborigines warning prospectors never to go near a certain spot: the 'sickness place' they called it. For countless generations it was proven that anyone who went there got sick; if you drank the water there, ate animals or plants from there you got sick, horribly sick, and died. The blacks didn't know that the victims had ingested massive doses of radiation from the uranium in that region; they simply witnessed prolonged suffering and numerous deaths. For thousands of years the entire region had been declared taboo.

Pulling the bike to a stop Aaron still had fifty metres to reach the ridge, he donned his backpack and walked. The air was dry and the sun beat down on his head. He thought he must wear a hat in future.

When he reached the rocks he grabbed at the jagged outcrop and began traversing beneath a long, overhanging shelf. Unexpectedly the ledge opened out into a wide enclosure surrounded by more rocks where the overhanging shelf thrust outward, here Aaron came face to face with massive cave paintings - twenty or more.

Wind gusted along the crevice. He trembled. Instantly he knew he had stumbled into a sacred shrine. This was an extremely sensitive, secret place where Wandjina left His image on the rocks for men to see forever (then He went back to the sky); it was a place for religious teaching; a place where elders brought male adolescents of their tribe as part of their rite of passage to wisdom; a place of significance for the rocks themselves were imbued with spiritual properties.

Aaron was taken in reverence at the sight of the sacred rock art. He knew he was probably the first European ever to visit this place - one of humankind's most ancient temples. Trembling involuntarily, he stumbled as he moved nearer. Cautiously, he touched the faces of the figures and the pigment came away and stayed on his fingertips. Looking closely he rubbed the whiteness between his fingers then he looked back at the figures.

There were four heads painted brown and black on a white background, on the right hand side was the outline of a kangaroo. But it was the human-like figures that bewildered Aaron: they appeared to him to be wearing a head dress or helmet, with black eyes, they had no mouths and on each figure over the heart area there was painted a black hole. The paintings didn't continue down past the waist, the rendering at that point blending into the reddish colour of the cave interior. To Aaron there was no doubt that the figures resembled men wearing space suits and helmets. In addition, the rock art was directly below the painted white square which he believed was meant to be viewed from flying craft.

Suddenly, the quiet gave way to a coarse roaring sound like one might expect from a shrieking alien. Aaron blocked his ears instinctively to muffle the ear piercing howls and ran to see what would make such a sound. The rocks reflected the sounds every which way, so it was difficult to know from which direction it had come.

A hundred metres away Mutta stood with his legs wide apart, at the top of an elevated rock swinging a long wooden slat on a length of twine - a bull-roarer. Using a taut, straight arm he swept the bull-roarer angrily through the air, high above his head. His tribe used the roaring sound to ward off unwanted people and bad spirits. He swung and pulled on that string until his arm was weak and he could no longer do so, then dripping with perspiration, he fell to his knees exhausted.

Akuna peered cautiously at the white man from behind a rock, she could see he had climbed to the top of the rock ledge and was standing, hands on hips on the sacred white square. She felt a sadness for her husband: he was the custodian of the Wandjina, a responsibility that had passed through a thousand generations of hands to his. He desperately wanted the man to go away, he strongly willed it as he lay gasping from his effort.

Soon after, Aaron steered his motorbike among the smooth gibbers of the river bank following the stream back to where he had left the helicopter. He was extremely excited when he dismounted beside the helicopter, using long strides he paced the area and became lost in his own thoughts.

'Jesus!' he shouted at the surrounding rocks, his voice echoing along the empty, ancient valley.

When he had collected enough rock and plant specimens from the surrounding area, Aaron looked at the map once more and calculated that a second white square was only seventy-five kilometres north. After strapping the bike onto the aircraft he took off causing a cloud of spiralling, red dust to follow him off the ground. He had to see for himself if this second white dot marked another rock shrine.

Below, Mutta and Akuna took credit for the inquisitive stranger's swift exit as they watched the aircraft wind itself up into the sky. And they marvelled at the miracle of flight as they saw it speed towards the horizon.

For some time Aaron manoeuvred the helicopter at low altitude, just above the treetops. He had to gather his thoughts, he was intoxicated, elated. Coming out of a daze he looked about and thundered upward past a thousand feet; the blades chopped at the air creating popping sounds as the aircraft climbed.