Don’t let the stars get in your eyes,
don’t let the moon break your heart
—Winston L. Moore (Slim Willet), 1952
Oracle 2 … speak up.
Since he, sometimes called big time …
Aboriginal Sovereignty, named for young hope and all that emotion-laden charged asset language of the modern day—say e bin finished up one time good and proper from the Cause Man Steel family, just like he was some piece of rubbish dump sort of dead discarded thing for all times on the face of the earth. Gone now, from flat out disappearing into the mighty shark-infested ocean of the ancestors—and this same boy one time, causing his people to gulp in the throat, feel badness in the head for a long time, by what he gone done to himself by abbreviating his life span to a complete zero, millivolt, flashgun millisecond, micro scale thing full stop milliwatt, and by where forth, even his seventeen years ended up like some shit piece of holy smoke in the imagination by being snuffed out into nothing by suicide wishing himself to be as dead as a doormat somewhere under the old spirit fog dust covering the sea, and you know what this kind of thing only resulted in? Well! Fool people, it resulted in a proper dead fella the people henceforth say for the northern provincial town of Praiseworthy—right, and in the shock of the terribleness, there was no scrap of fuss.
Nothing made out of this masterpiece thinking. Well! That’s right …
Say! Dust lady must have took him though …
He was like precipitation, like virga. Like that: gone.
Cloud rain never hitting the ground.
Might be true! Might be too true! This was what the stories said.
What happened to the lungs of country then?
Was it the country’s law talking out of the windpipe of those whirlwinds?
So useless brains, what was the cultural comfort in losing Aboriginal Sovereignty?
Marginalised space people can you say something about this?
Go on, take your pick of any empty wide-open field in the brain you want to explore. See what? Empty tin cans. Heinz baked-bean tins. Something like that. Slap on the bottom. Smack! Smack! Search the dirt. Scrape soil aside with your foot.
Look! Did any useless brain cells fall out?
Why fuss? Huh!
No fuss.
This surly widespread dust in the atmosphere that had lain over the country for days on end, on these perfect youth suicidal nights of Praiseworthy, where wind comes in the afternoons, blows the dust out to sea, treading lightly through the water, another child of Praiseworthy was leaving the butterfly country—the land that looks like a big brown damaged-winged lepidoptera marooned in flight. He was going to the dream country like those other lost children disappearing over weeks and months, being led away by the hand.
So! What happened? You can ask that question in a thousand different ways. Why? Why? Why? Why was anything gone for all times? Nah! They don’t talk to me. Immemorial sacredness violated? Nope! Heaven, it collapsed? Didn’t see it myself personally. What ends, ends. You just don’t know? Was there a sharp dip in the astrosphere, the usual sine qua non human condition, in the modern era of the Anthropocene?
The answer? Blanket no. Couldn’t see it myself.
Of course not. Fools! Nothing was blessed! No promises fulfilled. There were no mass performances of trumpets blaring Te Deums, or drums rolling Handel’s royal fireworks with brass wind ensembles, nor anything else magnifying the magnificence of God’s will filling up the void.
The ancestral ground around this country moves in its own time.
And out of the normality, of just breathing everyday air and salt flying off the wings of a bird ploughing across the sea where the wind was buffeting this way and that, while the fish fly from the ocean in the tempest of cyclones colliding, or to where people were hiding in fright from unexpected storms, the ancestors turning up to check on their conscience while having a look around at what was going on inside their heads, and refusing to leave. They stay there, sitting around somewhere in the brain—hiding, and telling the same old stories of country—the stories reminding you about me and you, while the old granny lady wind takes the children away.
Someone like that might start telling you stories about what happened to Aboriginal Sovereignty too, of what they noticed about Praiseworthy where so many children were ending it all. What for? The why of those stories? Why the ode was such a mystery? Were those little children frightened of a white world—the only future they could see? Imagining a white people army taking control of their lives? Kids dream, think of being conscripted to fight white people’s wars? These were the new legends now. New sagas. What those ancestors asked, what happened to all those spirit children we gave you for country? Everyone in the whole country was asking that, not just those people of Praiseworthy. Where did those children go? Do you think the ancestors will destroy us before they leave too? Look at all these calamities breathing, breathing into the stories connecting country. Only country trembling, shivering like it was cold, you could feel that. Never stop. Whole country—like, what happened in Praiseworthy.
The ancestors might have to grow up those children themselves. They never let you forget that, those safe-breakers of your soul. Come in, help themselves. Look inside. Examine what you got, like looking in a fridge. This was where they lock memory to your soul. Telling you story after story about what was happening to that kid, country kid, country was like that when it speaks.
Sometimes, you would feel country roaring even on a still day, even in a concrete jungle you hear them telling stories, sometimes like thunder, sometimes just the tree swaying in the wind, sometimes through things you never heard of, or seen before. It was easy to hear them. You might even feel some slight moderating changes in the air as the breezes ripple and flow through your mind, when you could start wondering why the country was pulling all of these punches, coming with old sad stories into your thoughts like this. But don’t forget it was like war. A protracted campaign. All quests for decency were like this. Then, country can be kind too, and can make you feel really glad to be alive. But not now while the haze ancestors were talking low after Aboriginal Sovereignty never came back—their voices fading to almost nothing they want to say to you anymore.
Something small enough happened though when Aboriginal Sovereignty quit the scene in a blanket of falling dead white butterflies, by walking off completely in a flat sea under a wave of dust and cloud that hovers, never quite falls over the horizon, and covers the moonlight when final steps are taken in the middle of the night.
With this extreme event of a young man, the hope and all that, taking his life in what could have been the holiest of red dust storms that had lasted many decades, nobody could say if this was more of a catastrophe than any other catastrophe, and nobody could say what it was that happened to Aboriginal Sovereignty, or what it meant. If only the country could be read properly as you would see from those old people reading country like they were reading themselves, but country gone completely asleep, covered itself with a haze. The censer was wafting its hazy sacredness, and if you looked over there where the whirling red fog was travelling far out to sea, hitting the far side of the haze dome and returning, you would have seen how it looked around, looked over its shoulder to see if Aboriginal Sovereignty was following and there he was, walking deeper in that glassy flat sea.
About there, in this unusually noisy night where insect hordes screamed the news about Aboriginal Sovereignty from the spear-grass thickets that necked the coastline, if you looked from the reddened dark rouge skies to what caused the squawking flocks of seagulls, the thousands storming in the darkness, and listened to where all those mongrel community dogs were racing up and down through the fogginess of the haze and spreading the news about Aboriginal Sovereignty killing himself by barking uncontrollably at each other and making people, who not long ago had finally been rocked into deep sleep by hours of Christian hymn singers, rip-raw awake and yelling their heads off like a bunch of angry and not very peaceable people, and saying something like, What! What is all this? then, Stop! Stop! Your friggen barking useless pack of other worthless people’s mongrel dogs, and if you had seen that miracle, you might have noticed something else, what must have been the complete assembly of all the schools of trevally in the Northern Arafura Sea leaping from this spot, in and out of the sea, up to the skies as though trying to jump out of boiling water, and seen where these fish were looking over to the back beach in that corpuscle-reddened darkness, to that place in a patch of moonlight shining in that wild spirit mangrove country where those giant moths flutter in a lonely journey in their short life span, and if you followed this fella brown Atlas moth with a snake head at the tip of each brown patterned wing, you would have felt that the Attacus wardi had been awakened to the enormity of the all time sadness. This was at one a.m. which was the moth’s hour anyway, where they were fluttering about clumsily and slowly in all the breezy pockets, racing through the moonlit haze falling over parched dust-coated vines in the sleeping monsoonal jungle. If you noticed, you would have happened to know that there was only one other human being from this preoccupied hymn-singing turnout who was actually witnessing the suicidal departure of Aboriginal Sovereignty.
Way over in the night shadows of mangrove copses, the old grey forest tribe that grew all along the beaches outside of the township of Praiseworthy, just where the spirit of place might lie and be entrenched in the mind of those other fellas, them black, red and white-banded mangrove jezebels always fluttering the yellow spirit of their wings at dusk in their white flower to flower flights, if you had looked carefully enough around there earlier, say at six p.m. for instance before darkness fell, or thought about what was really hiding there with the swamp tiger butterflies off the paperbark country, which was long before the whole thing had happened with Aboriginal Sovereignty, you would have noticed the only witness was being exposed by a flurry of oleander butterflies that betrayed him, those ordinary black-and-white crows that were ascending higher than the mangrove forest hugging the coastline, and leaving earlier than usual, because they had been disturbed by movement in this lonely place before the ghosts turned up. There! That fat little ninja terminator kid who thought he was the assassinator, crawling around in the mud looking for his own demons like that Japanese god Shoki the demon-queller, as though he was trying to expel all the common thereabout head plagues hiding in plain sight that affected his happiness. Watch him! See how he hexes devils at the same time as sneaking around in the mud where the thickening haze was caught up in the arms of the mangroves, where he is half hidden by all those old exposed roots.
You had to look carefully with the deep history eyes to see what those old mangrove trees could tell through their stiff spathulate leaves, and of what else flowed around the aerial roots like spirit fish at high tide, along with the molluscs of periwinkles and mangrove worms burrowing in the saline mudflats, or the long bums and crustaceans, and the hungry mangrove goanna, or what was flushed through fish and the snakes in this place when the tide came in. This was how to read the local story about the terminator—what he came from, by looking through the power moving through this place. It was the kind of power that latches on and tugs like a leech, by drawing you right inside the stillness of the sea of unmoving leaves of the mangrove thicket in the flat breeze, that calls on human souls, calls on the fish, calls on everything in this place while singing those stories in a certain way. This was the way of seeing what was happening over there in the old skeletal city of bones left from pod after pod of whales that had come here throughout times remembered in the stories, to die on this sad graveyard beach amongst these forests of grey mangroves. A feast lasting ages, still celebrated by whistling kites from hundreds of generations ago. Now bones, where sprinkles of worried snow-white albatross butterflies fluttered among scores of mangrove jezebels—the red, yellow and black fellows—in the tropical dry season for butterflies, while ancient dancing feet were trampling to death all the pretty pink flowers of the morning glory vine called in Latin, the Ipomoea pes-caprae.
Of course! Those skeletons in the mangroves were holy whales too. Had to be, for they were from ancient law, and spirits returning every year, and again, suiciding in a swarm, just like the white butterflies flying towards their death, off in the sea. Legend law, the big story people told in story after story about how these whales were tossed across the waters of the world like peanuts, and thrown about on the top of mighty waves in the time of cyclones that crawled across the world, and thrown around in the skies by the powerful storming clouds ancestor of this place who then, thinking about giving a big gift story for country, whacked the whales on the sand to die amidst the congestion of stories in this part of the world.
In amongst a thick dark fog buzzing and swarming in the mangroves, sometimes when a cloud moved and the moon and stars shone through, you would just barely see the outline of the little fat boy trying to hide in the bones among the mosquitoes and sandflies. The ninja killer was slapping himself left, right and centre to stop the insects from attacking him and demanding that he get off the beach in the middle of the night. They were telling him as though they were his actual parents, instead of those two in the cemetery, to get home to bed.
So yes, this was Aboriginal Sovereignty (aka Ab.Sov) Steel’s younger brother. Tommyhawk! Same one Widespread had refused to call Duruki. Eight years old now. Fat kid. He was prowling around in a real sneaky way, like one of those feral cats you see on the highways sniffing around for roadkill. Those mangy starved things sitting in the dry yellow grass alongside those lonely multinational mining roads crisscrossing over the top of ancient law tracks throughout the interior of the continent. The broken-down pussycats, stilled, with no energy left to hunt their own tucker, and the only bit of movement coming out of them used to draw hot air into half-collapsed lungs while waiting for all of eternity for a middle-of-the-night miner with heavy earth crushing machinery rip roaring over asphalt to splat roadkill in their face.
Anyhow fat chance of seeing the little fat boy for even the seagulls hovering in the fifty-plus-degree Celsius heat of the night and looking like sky church statues cannot see him either. Tommyhawk had no need to give recognition of his proper name anymore. He was no longer to be called Duruki neither. Yo! Yo! Nor would he answer if you called him by his rightful name. You could yell it. Scream it! You could keep calling his legal name in his face forever, but this would be a waste of time, and as though you were talking to someone else, someone who never existed. This kid was too full of his own ignorance, so nobody knew what to call him anymore, if he did not want anyone in Praiseworthy apart from himself to know his new name, saying—as though he was talking to complete strangers—it was none of their business.
The ancestors would have known his new name, and so would the mangrove spirits that knew all the secrets people hid in the mud. The mistletoe and the mistletoe moths in the mangroves knew what to call him because this was where he was always hanging around, hiding and watching the misery of others, like a little academic who thought he knew it all. But who else was extra human or ghost enough in Praiseworthy to start guessing about some foreign secret code name he was now calling himself, like who would want to be called Ninja Assassin? The only trouble with this new name was that it really did describe this dangerous little schemer, or what his father called a fascist.
So forth and so on let’s imagine! Say it was true for there he was, loitering in the mangroves like some innocent kid who acted strangely, playing in the mud, supposed to be, hiding for hours in those whale skeletons among the swarming ghost butterflies always heading out to sea to die, and instead of being at school, he was watching his big brother Aboriginal Sovereignty taking forever to commit suicide, who was wanting to die like the butterflies, and wasting his time to get out of this world, and this almost bored Tommyhawk to death. The boy, remember, was totally modern. Fast. He fumed under his breath, Hey! Dude! Can’t you move quicker you dumb cunt?
If only he could march down into the sea and drown his brother himself. After some time, Ab.Sov eventually took another step, to follow the last one an eternity ago. A dead bullock could have moved quicker thought the assassin boy with eyes lolling in his head, impatiently tapping his hands on the side of his legs in a drum roll of wishing to get it over with, and beseeching go, go, behind clenched teeth, like it was an endless mantra screaming in his head, and as though his brain was processing how to project mental telepathy to get the message out there in the sea for Ab.Sov to move it, for not dying quick enough. The fat ninja was now feeling deranged, his head turned screwy, but he was still clever enough not to be seen lurking in the shadows spun by the evening’s rouge-coloured clouds crawling across the moonlight.
One hour, two, three, only time would tell if the spirit of once upon a time Tommyhawk Steel would still be standing in this same place, where he was counting an infinity of broken ghost butterflies floating in atmospheric rivers stretching through the universe, for right in this moment, this could only be what the count for freedom felt like for the assassin. He tried to project his total strength out to the sea, like he possessed the capacity to become a laser driller firing holes into that skinny rake black back of his older brother, to shake some life into the slow death march of drowning himself in the whispering screams of the slightest sea ripples on the flat ocean calling him to come.
Tommyhawk, although tiring of this business of his brother’s death, kept staring into the bony black back—placed a make-believe stethoscope to his soul, and could not take his eyes off Aboriginal Sovereignty’s agony. The day was still baking hot, standing hour after long tedious hour in the mangroves. This was the build-up. Humidity sky high. Sweat poured from every pore of his skin. This was not the reality of a long-held dream in Tommyhawk’s calendar, where things happened in supersonic rapid-fire, bang, bang, bang speed, fast, and faster—that sort of way. What he was looking at was an ordeal that was too slow. It had to end. It was a piss off, of having to wait for someone to die. At this point, fat boy felt his own brain was going to explode from the film rolling in his head, of viewing himself in a high-speed mad crazy dash though a frenzy of shark-infested waters where every crocodile in the sea was racing towards him, to tear him apart. As the film rolled on with a boiling sea atmosphere, he stalled, he did not race in the sea to be blood everywhere, even if he was the only survivor—barely alive in the rolling film. But in any case, he also knew if he had to march out there and drown his brother himself, Ab.Sov—being much stronger and older—might instead turn around and see that his own brother was trying to murder him, and just reach out with his bony arms and drown him.
He became so impatient from glaring into Aboriginal Sovereignty’s bony back that his brain only saw a dartboard drilled solid with laser-beamed holes created from his own powerful eyesight. Yet, while his sanity was roped to a pendulum swinging one way into dreams of being elsewhere, it would then swing back, returning to the whale bone city, where Tommyhawk zeroed in on Aboriginal Sovereignty’s red gauze Raiders cap that he wore back to front, and that seemed to be staring back to land, as though wanting to return to the beach. The swinging mood made the matter worse—of wanting to dream, but of not really knowing what Aboriginal Sovereignty was doing. Tommyhawk began to believe that Ab.Sov was changing his mind, and would not commit suicide after all, he was making up his mind to live while seeing all of those Belenois java white ghost butterflies that had flown out into the sea and were flying back, straight into Tommyhawk’s face mistaken for land, and were sitting on his face, his eyes, his mouth, on his hair, as though what was being said in the most delicate way, was that perhaps Aboriginal Sovereignty wanted to continue with his useless life. What then for Tommyhawk’s own escape plan? There was no plan B. Only a sea of dead butterflies.
Up to now it was all A-plus, with no minuses in sight for Tommyhawk, the Jedi of Praiseworthy, even if he believed it was not possible to stand around for another minute longer waiting for someone to die. He watched the sun creeping lower into the distant horizon of the sea, and one thing he knew for sure, he was not going to stand there in the mud all night inside the whale ghosts, and risk his own life. These whale bones would come alive in the darkness when the tide was in, this was what the old people always told in the culture stories which had a certain plot line about how bored people wandering around with nothing to do had disappeared during the night, and in the listing of all those stories, they talked about the bored people disappearing from the beach, because those whale spirits, they claimed true God, could kill sheer boredom in one minute flat by slapping you into the mud with those bones which were really weapons for pummelling you around like some piece of fish until you were stone-cold dead. This would be the ultimate death came the lesson, if any of the thousand and one ancestors saw you standing around being bored.
Tommyhawk squirmed to his left, then twisted to the right to stay conscious while trying to remember when was the last time he had remained so still since being cocooned in his mother’s womb. What about my brain, his truly only asset, now exploding from boredom, the only precious tool he owned, apart from the Australian government for Aborigines-gifted iPad, iPhone and top of the class tech, like the new MacBook Pro laptop, awarded to any prized closing-the-gap-with-mainstream Aboriginal student in the tropics by the Minister for governing Aboriginal Affairs. His brain was most ultimately worth saving, far more for sure than being wasted by the ultimate dream death of being pummelled by whale bones. His teachers had already told him thousands of times that only his brain would ensure a highly assessable future, to be able to run like a bat out of hell out of the Praiseworthy haze, to be released from its arms wrapped around him and strangling the life out of him with love. Yet, if he thought straight and a bit calmly about having to witness a slow sea death, keep the faith, everything was going to plan.
While the golden emperor moths stirred from countryside to countryside in the mangroves where the phenomenon of old culture was rising, Tommyhawk was beside himself with a paranoid fear of the growing darkness, and itching now to run down the beach, race out into the shallow sea, to really drown that Aboriginal Sovereignty himself. He knew enough about the slow tides in his total of eight years of life though, to know that if he did run into the water after his brother to try to drown him everything could backfire—he could become the target of maneaters, or his own brother would kill him. In a time when everything was ultimate, accessible, of either to be or not to be, he knew he would be deciding not to save himself, and he could ruin the only thing he had spent days waiting to see happen in order to keep being an alive person. No, this was not what a real ninja would do. He knew precisely what an assassin would do because he had studied ninjas on the internet, but he did not have a great comprehension of what it was like being caught like bait in a butterfly net, one that he had devised and woven for himself.
He just willed the dream to go as planned by repeating his me first mantra under his breath, For God’s sake hurry up you idiot, you know you don’t deserve to live, you paedophile, just get it over and done with. It was pretty easy really. I have seen little kids get it over and done with easier than you. Slap! Slap! Tommyhawk could feel the dampness of his sweaty body that was now becoming mixed with his own blood from the mosquitoes and sandfly hordes he had killed.
He was used to feeling the sticky blood on his hands even if he was too petrified with fear to leave the whale bone palace in the mangroves. Tommyhawk always saw the job through, just like he always did his homework on time. He was not like other kids, and this was why he thought he deserved to live more than others, because in the new order of the real world he was planning to join, only the fittest were going to survive, and this meant getting rich quick, and moving away from Praiseworthy. The haze was already opening its arms, and he sensed the pending freedom of being released from its grip. He had seen other kids commit suicide, and he always stayed and watched, and had never thought of leaving the scene until he was sure they were not coming back. This was how he knew that the quicker you got the job over and done with, the better it was for everyone. Grieve. Sorrow. Not ninja. He was Aboriginal ninja, not nothing, like government action. He liked neat solutions, of what was complete, bereft of emotion, where you cut the losses of war, or plague, or global warming disasters like the most powerful world leaders—the people without friends, and all for which you grieved not. The world he saw was either for the killing, or being a killer, and saved the untidiness of being hamstrung by the weak, of being only half-baked, of only getting things done half-heartedly.
When crunch came to crunch, solid stuff was what Tommyhawk was made of, even if he had to wait until this day was over, or until the end of the next century, or until the last day of life on Earth, when his body had petrified, turned into a stone that would still sit and wait. His mind was now unshakable about such thoughts as could be called up from the click of the fingers, where panicking fear could be nullified and transformed into unexplainable fearlessness. He stood still, in his tidy way of not moving a muscle, his tendency to be tidier than anyone else in the world, while witnessing the action of his set plan, the necessary execution of his brother.
All the mosquitoes in a coastline full of mangrove swamps were driven into whale bone city by the smell of fat boy’s blood, and their whining hurried through the muddy landscape to land on his skin. He was covered with thousands of stinging probosces punching his skin, making a feast of his blood, but this was nothing, only his stillness reigned now, because this was what a real assassin would be. A proper ninja. Someone who held the line.
There was no more room for thinking about giving up like a lesser human being, and believing failure was okay. No. The plan was the plan. Aboriginal Sovereignty would actually finish the job off himself as he was just about up to his neck out there in the sea. He was not coming back. Yet Tommyhawk did not turn his back and go home to bed before the job was completed, because he was now steadfast, transformed, had become rock. Aboriginal Sovereignty would die by the weight of this rock tying itself to his feet. Only a distant echo, repeatedly whingeing in the back of Tommyhawk’s head, kept going on about what if Ab.Sov did not die this time—Will you do all this again? Gee! That’s going to be difficult to have to do it again, and what would he do if his own life was over once and for all because you can’t get him to die. No one in their right mind could go through torture like that again. When you decide to kill your brother, then everything has to go according to the plan. There could only be one plan, not two, not three, or countless times to get a plan perfected, to get rid of a cunt. So, the plump little boy waited and felt that he was becoming the bones of whales in the mud of the mangrove forest where mosquitoes lived and feasted on a rock.
Bad history! Beware of such history! Everything had a bit of bad history making trouble, where the corduroy lines built by the ages of one’s humanity had not realigned, and stayed alienated, like when the old memory people come calling through trees grating in the wind, and when suddenly, the singularity of the cacophony ringing in the bush alive with the sounds of birds, crickets, frogs, suddenly froze, and the campana turns, and rings in another direction.
What are you, gossiping woman? Aboriginal Sovereignty had tried to ignore the ravings of Tommyhawk whispering in his ear about all the paedophiles living in Praiseworthy. No, bro, they are everywhere! All sexual depravers were out to get him. He wondered how a kid got perverted stuff like that in his head. Aboriginal Sovereignty had wanted him to stop. Stop now. He is a literal pest, Dad, who should be told straight, to shut the fuck up. But Tommyhawk was on fire. He raged while following Aboriginal Sovereignty around like a puppy dog. The little boy demanded to know the truth about whether his brother was one of those dirty men, or if their father was one, and if the whole community of old men were them paedophiles. Who? The ancients? The boy did not hear, but kept naming, and renaming those he suspected, the husbands, the big boys, the list growing longer by the day. Were they, were they? Ab.Sov thought Tommyhawk must have named every man in Praiseworthy a paedophile, and yet the boy persisted, he found more and more men to accuse of the most hideous crime against children. This is what the government is saying. Not me saying it. It was all in the newspapers. I even know the hotline. We got it at school. The number is stuck on the wall. They told us who to call if we are frighten of any man.
I reckon you are one of those paedophiles. You are? Your girlfriend is underage? She still goes to school. The police will be coming for you, you know?
Where did he get shit in his head? Aboriginal Sovereignty thought that the distorted contents of Tommyhawk’s head were self-combusting over the vicinity of his own saneness. Dad! Dad! You got to get that stupid kid to the hospital. Get his head examined. The boy felt the rush of his own thoughts spinning on hot coals. Go on. Dad. Give it to him with both barrels. Go on. Show him who is needing to see a doctor. Tommyhawk’s blood boiled whenever he heard his older brother pimping on him to their father, with the sheer audacity of a paedophile brother thinking he needed a doctor. Man! It is you who is sick. Rah! Rah! Rah! When it got to talking about being sick in the head, Tommyhawk neither knew what was in line or out of line anymore, never knew when to stop, just to shut up his face. He kept on taunting, and grabbing half-baked one-liners about living with half live hot ash, the half firestorm dirty stick men were pelting through his brains. Filthy penises. Stick it anywhere. Into little girls. Sicko. Tommyhawk could rant on for hours when he was having a fit about the invisible world of paedophilia operating in Praiseworthy.
Aboriginal Sovereignty grew increasingly intolerant of his younger brother and told him to stop at once, said he knew what he was on about, end it now brother or I will shut you up for good, but Tommyhawk was gone in his mind, he was full bore, and however his brain worked, it never knew when enough was enough. You are a sinner person. He always tipped things over the edge. Ab.Sov warned Tommyhawk a thousand times about going into the no-go zone with him. Nothing would stop him though. You are sick. Chasing after little girls. Cradle snatcher. How old is she? Mum, how old is that Peter’s girl? You know. MARJORIE whatever?
Dance screamed, Shut up.
No, Tommyhawk yelled.
It is none of your business. Leave your brother alone.
Ab.Sov gripped his brother’s arm for a moment—that was all it took, then wham, Tommyhawk bit his brother’s arm, broke free and was straight out the front door and down the road as fast as those solid little legs would carry him. But all was not lost, Tommyhawk had found the crack to reach through, and he dragged out the map in his mind with the road out of Praiseworthy. He had nailed it. Knew how to get his brother big time. He ran down to his whale spirit in the mangroves, while convincing himself of what he had to do next, to report Aboriginal Sovereignty to the police. He was going to have him arrested and locked away. The power of knowing what he could do to fix his brother for good was almost busting his brain, and forcing him to stop for a minute, to take stock of the situation. I am going to bust up this family. He felt an overwhelming sense of relief, of having crossed a threshold of taboo by cancelling it out with another taboo, by actually articulating what needed to happen. He had found the solution to the main obstacles threatening him, which was in the way he saw it, his own life. The opening in this little boy’s mind was an enormous revelation.
Tommyhawk was right over the edge now. Right over. Yet, even this was not as far as he could go. The little squirt relished the fact that he was intruding into his brother’s privacy, making this space his own. His greatest thrill was to push the buttons in his brother’s mind that hard, that his life would become a battlefield for the doomed, because Tommyhawk was only after one thing, complete control. The battle escalated. It became an ongoing fight for superiority, although with Tommyhawk, it was a fight to the death, the winner takes all. He wanted nothing less than ownership over his brother’s life, where he would decide if his older brother lived, or died. Aboriginal Sovereignty threatened to bash him every time he mentioned white police, and Tommyhawk inhaled his brother’s fear, grew stronger on it, while he constantly used his time in the family home for blowing the hex words white police over his hand, and into the air, which was exactly like casting a spell over Aboriginal Sovereignty, who swore that he would kill Tommyhawk for saying that he was going to report him and his parents to the police.
The question of being bashed or not, did not march fright into Tommyhawk’s brain to say, you had better be scared out of your life. The kid had threats galore constantly shuffling up and down in his brain. Threats only produced some brand-new game-changer plan for this eight-year-old superhero feasting on fear. He was pumping on steroids, fuelling the head machinery and making another and another new idea stick on the wall of his brain. These were the kind of ideas he got off on for festering an unshakable mountain of paranoid fear in believing that his so-called parents were actually abusive kidnappers, and were controlling some kind of hydraulic influencing system that kidnappers build into a kid’s brain to brainwash them, to make them too stupid to remember anything. But the thing was, he did remember, he had broken adult power. He knew them for what they were, unloving, just how the white people were saying, that Aboriginal parents were not capable of loving their children. Tommyhawk felt the cold shivers running through his blood every time he thought of his despised, depraved, meaningless life that had no end because he was living with these strangers who kept on saying they were his parents, who were working for a gang of paedophiles from the city who did things like kidnap kids, hide them away, stash them somewhere in a storehouse, like this place where the police would not bother looking, where you could not see anything anyhow, hidden in the haze.
It was no wonder he felt like an alien. In a way, it was easy to figure out the scenario, since anyone could see that he bore no physical resemblance to these sinew and bone strangers who acted as though they were his actual parents. He looked like well-fed white Australians. So, he was dumped then. Kidnapped by a paedophile ring. He had to be saved from people claiming to be his parents who were drugging his meals so he could not think fast enough to save himself from being attacked. Tommyhawk looked at these people whoever they were, who had not even given him a proper home, and the educational stuff required to make a rich modern hero, or a future astronaut destined to explore space to find new super worlds when this one goes belly up, or for becoming any kind of educated president who was not a moron to care for the new world.
Actually, Tommyhawk had madly texted thanks of considerable gratefulness to the Australian government lady for giving him an iPad and his pile of other Apple things so he could protect himself, for giving him Apple technology—the best money could buy. Even a little boy like Tommyhawk, who lived on one of the poorest remote communities in the country, knew what stuff was worth. His feelings of fearfulness morphed into yearning, and before too long he absolutely believed that Aboriginal Sovereignty was more than a paedophile, and not because he had done time in gaol for being one. Tommyhawk had hotmailed the police about how Aboriginal Sovereignty was raping an underage girl. If the police had arrested him, then he must be one. All this, the newer reasons, the newer truths, about why Tommyhawk believed that he was better than Aboriginal Sovereignty, who was always telling him, It was not going to happen, bro. You will never be better than me.
Tommyhawk Steel kept the big secret locked in his X-ray brain, about how he was going to supersonically shoot himself faster than sound out of Praiseworthy. Nobody would stop him. He would be speeding away that fast, and at that much top speed, he would be like a shooting star inferno propelled twenty times faster than the speed of sound from all the paedophilia infestation he figured surrounded him. Yes, you better believe it, how he was going to be adopted by the number one mother star ship, the Commonwealth Government of Australia. This was the dream, the mission of removing himself from danger. Anyone could see it themselves, how his parents were dangerous, but he saw that the white schoolteachers were dangerous too for ignoring paedophile parents, and this made it hard to say which way a kid like Tommyhawk would aim his wafted brain when the enemy loomed everywhere, and any adult could easily harm him.
He had all the proof in the world that he was living in a dangerous environment if the government of the day was saying watch out you kids on Aboriginal communities, you is surrounded by infestations of paedophilia. He packed a bag, was ready to leave instantly, but it was taking ages of waiting for the army that was supposed to have been sent into Aboriginal communities by the government to examine children to see whether they were being abused. He had heard this on the news. The army was coming, and he was eagerly waiting for the war to begin when the trucks loaded with armed soldiers rolled into Praiseworthy to kill paedophiles—shoot them dead, imprison the parents, assassinate or fireball them out of their hiding places, but you know what happened, all the talk of government salvation failed to arrive, and he could see for himself that he was not being saved.
Tommyhawk tried to tell himself not to worry about being a sitting duck, even though the most powerful voice in Australia, the actual federal government, was telling him that he was supposed to be saved from being exposed to a dangerous world. You know, he reasoned, maybe he would survive all that.
Yet, there was too much doubt spinning in the war cabinet of his grey cells, and Tommyhawk knew that he had only been kidding himself, the government of the country knew better than some little kid whether he was safe or not. How existentially, the fog of danger could grow mountainous, even bigger than the bogeyman, and smarter than all baddies combined, but what Tommyhawk was dealing with was invisible, the Australian government did not tell you how to feel when the virus was everywhere and looked the same as everything else, and you could not tell what a paedophile looked like.
He was so desperate to save himself in the national outrage about infestations of paedophiles on Aboriginal communities, that he became obsessive about listening to the national ABC news by stopping whatever he was doing just to hear what was being said about how dangerous it was for Aboriginal children living with paedophiles. He became such a good reader of the news in order to save himself, that he flew to the top of his English class in the school. He craved more news items to read on the internet, just to stay tuned in to the multiple antennae of the information order chatting about Aboriginal children unloved by their parents, and he was jabbing like a ninja for a little bit of this info, and a little bit of that info about the major cartoon heroes on Earth, just to learn how to defend himself. Over many miserable months of wondering whether he was going to be killed by a ring of perverts, he listened to whatever news he could find on his iPad to broaden his thinking about what the brainy superior white people were saying all over the country about why Aboriginal parents did not know how to love their children, like a bedside nursery rhyme. It was like his fairytale horror story, where the word paedophilia laced this and that on the radio talkback shows that rolled on through the many hundreds of times he listened in bed late at night, when unable to sleep past one, two, three, four a.m., until the crack of dawn, because he was too frightened to sleep. But, somehow, in all the actual invisibleness of what was preying on his short life, he had to know what he was dealing with, and what he had to look out for. Instead of it being everything to be afraid of, he had to know precisely what could send him into an immediate panicattack from every pregnant pause, which could be the silence shouting from the sneaky movements through the house in the endless dead of night, or just rusted tin pausing as it cooled from the heat, or the roof creaking, or the endless rustling leaves travelling throughout the cemetery. Any of these indistinguishable sounds could send him off his head through the belief that someone was coming for him as he lay prone in his bed, too petrified to move, too frightened to open his eyes, but he could not tell anyone any of this, or explain what was going through his mind.
Tommyhawk was a wreck in the end. Where could you find the truth? He began to believe that the white people were hiding something from him. They were not even telling him how to identify the Aboriginal people they were talking about who were going to harm him. When. How. Identification. He required names like you see in any TV detective program, and yet, in real life, no one said who they were. How could he tell who to look out for? He felt totally alone, like the orphan he believed himself to be, who did not belong in the world of Aboriginal Sovereignty who was loved by everyone in Praiseworthy, and it was a fact, they only saw themselves in Aboriginal Sovereignty. His wrung-out mind, now suffering long-term sleep deprivation, rattled with his totally angst loathing of whatever genes of humanity he carried in his blood. How could he take it out of his blood? How to drain himself of inferiority? Even if he was not kidnapped and adopted to idiots, it did not leave him any less full of hatred for the many voices jammed in his brain loudspeakering pitch messages to the idiocy that he was nothing, never comprehended what schoolteachers taught, just as nothing would register in an idiot’s mind when the army spokespeople talked to his class about stranger danger. Then, a superhero came along—changed the power plug, and before flying off, said those voices he kept in the brain box were wrong. This was when the one neon light idea again lit up in his head: Get out of Praiseworthy for good in order to save yourself.
Now, the only thing he really had on his mind, was how not to die? So, he began a life of never being fully awake. In class, looking as though he was still dreaming, his teachers whispered to each other, and blamed his parents for not getting him to bed on time, so he could come to school fully awake. Yet, this near zero-functioning brain managed to excel at top of the class, even if he was just daydreaming about life’s riddles, of leaving his kind, of being elsewhere, but not by committing suicide like the kids who were killing themselves. He thought long and hard about what to do if someone made him want to kill himself, how he would defend himself, if he was ninja—game enough to kill an attacker—and if he could stop himself from killing once he got started, and while the imaginings lingered, of how he would kill himself like the other children, of what it felt like to be walking like a zombie through the air with your feet above the ground, until he found a way of committing suicide.
Tommyhawk felt that he did not really feel strong enough about killing himself and becoming another suicide statistic. He saw plenty of faces in his dreams, and had heard the whisperings and wondering about who would go next, and how they would go away. This was how the boy became obsessed with ways of committing suicide, doing all he could to worm his way into the lives of his schoolmates while quietly watching signs of their weaknesses, those he thought might commit suicide, go all the way, until he hit on what pushed them in the end—humiliation, the slightest mishap, a word out of place, a betrayal of their innermost shame. It was revelatory to Tommyhawk, and he had felt like a feather breaking a camel’s back, for now he knew exactly when some kid had been pushed too far and their hastiness to be off. To just do it, so very quickly, he followed in the shadows of the night to see how dying was actually done, to know the mechanics of suicide.
Now, while Tommyhawk was plotting how to fly the coup from Praiseworthy, he hatched many plans, each as bright as the previous idea of ascending like a lark, and flying amidst the vastness of possibility. This was the plan, he would tell himself some thousand times a day, and even while pure reason, rational thought, whispered this was not going to work, he would argue back with his stupid common sense, fight it off, expelling it, zap, zap from his brain, You don’t tell me what to do. You and you are not needed here.
Mostly, they were just thoughts, eventually petering out, the more he realised that nothing was going to work fast enough to get him out of the place, and that he would rather leave in a Qantas flight, like a TV advertisement, than run away into the bush like a feral cat. He had to have a better plan, and the plans grew large and became more extraordinary in how he imagined a way of covering a few thousand kilometres in five or ten minutes to reach the most heavenly palace for a child to live, and the more complex these plans became, the more desperate he felt urged to go.
You could say his mind had already left, and he only lived in daydreams, which is okay, but carrying your body around in the imagination was a true burden that always ended up with his being left behind like some want-a-be, and living in fear of becoming a copycat dirty paedophile like his brother, Aboriginal Sovereignty. Now, whenever he saw his brother, he thought this too could happen to him, as a trajectory which would need to be destroyed, by blowing up any road laden with paedophile poison like a bait in the path leading to his destiny of eventually becoming an all-Australian superhero, long gone from kryptonite paedophile places. He surrounded himself with another thought-bubble survival hex: I am better than you.
In the blue-sky imaginary of what the capital of Australia looked like in Tommyhawk’s mind, nothing was hazy at all. He had vividly conjured his own storybook where he was the main feature on every page, a child with a happy face living thousands of kilometres away in an outer-space world called Canberra. He saw only a golden goose in the arms of the outer-space child of this super planet that was entirely made of money. Nothing in this world grounded him in the reality of Praiseworthy, for in his future world, it was the exact opposite to any place where poor people lived. Parliament House had the best that money could buy.
Who said money does not grow on trees? Not Tommyhawk. In his storybook, he saw the palace of government surrounded by gardens that extended to every horizon, and he saw with his own eyes the millions of golden leaves falling off trees, so much gold it was just left lying on the ground. There were no camp dogs at Parliament House. No gonorrhoea-tail feral donkeys. No cemeteries, because he heard that Canberra politicians never died. There were no feral cats screaming all night long on a rusty tin roof and vomiting over your paradise. Or frogs. Or a toad wherever you walked. Lizards. Saltwater crocodiles coming up. Snakes. Sharks. Fish. In fact, in his storybook, there was no room for wildlife in paradise, only domestic pets that were not like real dogs, just a poodle here or there that ate money with the politician families, and it must taste good, like drinking liquid gold instead of a plastic bottle filled with creek water.
All this translucency radiating the brightest light on Tommyhawk’s perfected world, was like a comfort blanket perpetually skidding over the hazy reality of Praiseworthy. His life stopped, he was now paused, existing only through a mind fast losing control of the off switch to his laser-sharp imagination continually pumping spotlighting beams at warp speed across far too much reality.
Tommyhawk could not stop himself from ventriloquising a popular shock jock’s whingeing from his cripple mind on talkback radio, kept on repeat cycle on the boy’s iPad for company throughout the night. The little boy too had become a voice of discontent slapping life open or shut like a venetian blind. He was piecing the whole story together, proclaiming his life was a waste of time, and it was often enough for Tommyhawk to cry himself into a stupor after flying into a lonely tantrum over his desperation to immediately start living happily ever after in the capital of Australia. He cried in frustration about the forthcoming mothership of Parliament House that still had not arrived, not giving what he wished for, and then he wished harder that he would be found by the government, so he could become a super breezy rich kid who never had to think this much about reality again.
Sometimes in the mind of the whale skeleton that could wait forever, Tommyhawk reasoned that perhaps the big government people in Canberra were too busy trying to make more money from Aboriginal land to be bothered to come and save him from the paedophiles they kept saying plagued Aboriginal communities. Or, perhaps Parliament House was getting ready to fire at all the baddies with the best superheroes in the world, like ninja warriors ready to fight off anything, even UFOs from outer space. He calculated the cost of all these wars with the baddies, the cost of building the fancy Parliament House where they could plan how to fight the bad people, and the cost of guarding billions stacked to the ceiling from any bad people stealing it, perhaps trillions of dollars. Then, why would the government save him, how would they find him amongst all the Aboriginal children they wanted to save in Australia? But his real family was the Government of Australia, they had to single him out as its first son, and come and find him.
The red fog night searched around town again for the broken-hearted children, those like Aboriginal Sovereignty Steel who felt he could not live when he found out that his girl, the only one for him ever, actually his wife now, had been taken into institutional care by the government of Canberra, and sent away.
You will never see her again he had been told by the police.
Don’t you go causing trouble.
You caused enough shame already.
She is not for you.
You will be going away for gaol.
This is Australia law, man.
Everyone had told him that.
He thought life had finished for him.
He had already died.
The country’s old world reviewed Tommyhawk’s plagued young mind, his shifting from ancient to modern, his questioning of realities, the what-ifs and what was really true, his becoming more anxious about the what if of everything going wrong. This was plan A. There was no plan B. Cool heads reigned, but Tommyhawk was too busy thinking about what if his most important plan by far, a potentially pivotal life-changing moment of time for himself, turned AWOL.
What if Aboriginal Sovereignty changed his mind and did not commit suicide? Nothing was a cinch in a world where hardly anything went right. So! Worry! Fret! Worry some more! The little boy kept driving his feet harder into the sand, and consoling himself that they, the government, said he could have something better. They said all Aboriginal children deserve something better than this. Well! They owe me. And I will get them too if he comes back in.
Well! Poor little Tommyhawk had mountain ranges of disappointments traversing the geography of his brain, and he was right up there on the highest precipice, dangling from a thread over the jagged edges of the hard rock face with a thousand-metre drop to where Aboriginal Sovereignty was standing in the distance, chest-deep, and not moving. Look! He was just standing there looking out to sea. There was a red fog that seemed to be trying to lift him out of the water. This did not matter to Tommyhawk. He wanted to know what was stopping his brother, what was he thinking, hadn’t he decided to end it all. Why doesn’t he keep his word? You can’t even trust him.
It was not that Tommyhawk cared about what his brother thought about drowning himself because they, the government, continued spilling their tidal-wave thoughts through his brain, and he was riding these waves straight to the fairy world of Parliament House, and that was all that mattered. He would never be lonely again while living with smart government people, who he reckoned were right of the moment, and at this moment, he only wished the government’s space base would create a freak wave in the Arafura Sea that would whip right around to the coast of Praiseworthy, and wipe Aboriginal Sovereignty straight off his feet, throw him far out to sea, so he would not be able to come back. At this moment, he needed the government to feel sorry for making him wait this long, to conjure their powers of persuasion to order his brother to commit suicide, get it over and done with, so his little brother could have a better life. There was no end to the anxiety fiddling in the child’s mind, and palatial whiteness was slipping out of sight, becoming more difficult to locate among those colossal mountain ranges stuffed into his brain—all because of his brother. There was not much shaping his thinking, it was just gossamer, lighter than smoke, hardly weighing anything at all, hard to balance, even by the haze ancestor. Tommyhawk ended up believing in the worst, that the plan had failed, and instead of suicide, Aboriginal Sovereignty would live, and his own life would become impossible.
Ab.Sov, go on. You gotta commit suicide so I can get out of here.
But the golden lady was still not answering his text messages, about how he wanted to become a ward of the state so he could live with her forever, like a prince in Parliament House.
Whenever Tommyhawk stood in the last standing skeleton in the whale’s graveyard, the calmness of the skeleton resting in perpetuity among the mangrove ancestors would claim his mind. Tommyhawk knew how it felt to have been the whale, and he could feel its enormous strength, its warmth, and he brought it to life again through memories of its life in the ocean.
He would see its journeys in the world’s oceans of currents, long flowing rivers under the sea, and the times when the whale swam through mighty storms rolling across the waves. He felt the victory of the many whale wars the creature had fought across the oceans. He experiences riding the storm waves that reach far into the skies, and the journeys far back in time, the dangerous and perilous seas.
Tommyhawk thinks he is the killer whale’s ghost. He is the whale’s dreaming. A whale leader. An inheritor. Its thought. The boy thinks the law belongs to him. That he is dangerous. When he becomes the whale’s ghost, he believes that no one would recognise how the whale had become him, since all that people would see were its bones. Only the spirit ancestors living among the mangroves see, like the emperor moths, the Syntherata janetta from the Bombycoid family of Saturniidae encircling the whale. These moths seemed attracted to its bones, flying around the skeleton, thousands fluttering in the humidity, and crushing inwards as they find places to land. The old people still told stories about the Rainbow Serpent, and how the whale skeleton came from a pod of pilot whales tossed up by king waves in the era of colliding cyclones on the shores of Praiseworthy.
In the driest corners of Praiseworthy, the tight-lipped religious oracles sat on high and spoke of these important matters about the Earth. They were generally having a few conversations up there about prolonged droughts in the global era of greenhouse gas emissions, because being surrounded by so much tinderbox-dry bush did not feel like the old days of the last Ice Age when their ancestors lived in a rainforest right where Praiseworthy stood in this now parched environment.
In these continuing conversations lasting the lifetime of many generations of their people, there were the epics about the sea cooling the skin of whales, and the minds of the oracles turned once again, to throw new light on the old mystery of the beaching whales. A strainer shook the knowledge, found grains of new reason explaining why they had neglected the whale skeleton for so long, and yet, it was still sitting intact down in the mangroves like it was alive. Why had it not fallen apart and disintegrated? Someone said it looked as though it was waiting for something to happen.
The new light emerged through the leak that spread through the haze about why the skeleton had not broken apart. This came from one of those oracles who was heard talking in his sleep by his wife. A new story began travelling at lightning speed through every street, and went in and out of every home about why the whale was thrown up like vomit by the sea in a string of old tsunamis that had emptied the ocean’s stomach down on the beach with piles of sand, mountains of dead fish, crabs, coconuts and the coconut trees as well. There was whale blubber. Olden-time boats. All of mankind’s shitty rubbish, and even now, with the stench rising after storms became too much, the local council would take the big CAT, the Caterpillar D Dozer down onto the beach and doze the stench back into the sea. Yet, the whale graveyard survived desecration, and even though it was clearly seen by the up-and-coming assimilationists as a pure eyesore, no one had the heart to have it destroyed. Others said it never existed in their sight anyhow, so it continued to stand like a monument while the mangrove forest ancestors, growing rich from capturing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, were quickly expanding through, around and beyond it. The oracles claimed the erect whale skeleton was waiting, perhaps since the last Ice Age, waiting for a time in the twenty-first century to bury its huge spirit into a child’s mind.
There was only one person who claimed the miracle of realising why the whales had beached, and that was Dance Steel, the mother, when she had been heavily pregnant with Tommyhawk, her second child. The oracles of time had always spoken of the whales as a warning of the coming drought, but Dance said she remembered hearing the sounds of a roaring sea every night while she was carrying Tommyhawk, and she claimed that the whales were calling into the past, and talking to Tommyhawk even before he was born.
Although Dance claimed that she had no idea what the whales were talking about to Tommyhawk either before or after he was born, she said she felt the sea was on fire, and through her dreams, she saw fish throwing themselves out of the sea. Her dreams had been endless, like love letters to the soul of Praiseworthy, and not only that, she flatly refused to budge on what she believed had spoken to her in these dreams. She would keep seeing dead trevally lying in heaps up and down the beach. The oracles explained with much pride of heart that what she actually saw were the marvellous capacities of the powerful CAT bulldozing detritus which made the machinery worth the big-bucks acquisition that Ice Pick had insisted the council buy for this specific task. It was only the dozer working in the moonlight, heaping dead fish, and she was remembering a part of the story about what happened every year in the new era of super cyclones with king waves, and sixty thousand lightning-strike storms that brought the high tides too. Dance disagreed. She could not remember seeing a bulldozer in her dreams doing the job of hundreds of men, by scraping the beach clean of dead fish, and ploughing every single one back into the sea.
Dance hardly believed a word anyone else said in those days, and instead, went rushing down to the beach screaming in her mighty voice capable of echoing far away that she had just seen the end of the world. It was hard to tell whether Dance needed to be restrained from having any close contact with the children of Praiseworthy at that time, or even with the child she was carrying, but then, when you thought more about what she was nutting on about, she had talked about hearing the bones of those whales creaking whenever she passed the whale cemetery as though they were coming back to life again. She said they were coming alive, and had imagined how they would thrash about one day while shifting sand with slow movements of their bodies, and while storms of butterflies flew up from the mangroves to land on the whale bones, helping to push the sand-buried creatures back to sea.
Death finishes up, turned to the past, of what was, that could never be restored. This was what had happened over time when the whales and the people of Praiseworthy never spoke to one another anymore. Nothing existed between people and whales again, and for Dance, lost alone in her dreams of swimming with whales that no longer recognised the voice of a human calling to them, it had triggered a long and terrifying labour through her belief that the whales had come for her baby, and this fuelled her fear that the baby had become a whale, and the birth would kill her.
Dance collapsed, and she became almost demented with the baby kicking and struggling inside her, but refusing to be born. She believed that the baby would die too, after three days had passed before Tommyhawk was born. The baby that Dance believed had been taken from her she said could be traced to man-made global warming, of not knowing how to talk and walk with the planet, but she gets things wrong. Misjudges. Misconstrues. Happened all the time. This was the reason why there were legal restraining orders to stop her entering Praiseworthy these days, keeping her down at the cemetery. So instead of getting it right, she was half right. Right now, it was Aboriginal Sovereignty who was taking a walk through the sea, and as casually, Tommyhawk had thought, as though he was catching a bus out of the place.
There were dense clouds of mosquitoes swollen with the blood of the people of Praiseworthy rising up from that long lonely mangrove coastland. The swarms hovered for a moment above the whale bones before joining en masse at whistlestop speed to fly to sea, to where Aboriginal Sovereignty was floating away. You could hear the colossal swarm cloud charging through town to gorge on human blood, before returning momentarily to hover over the whale cemetery, as though seeking an explanation about what was going on, then returning to the ocean in a futile attempt to save Aboriginal Sovereignty. This cycle would be repeated many times in the night of the ancestral world bringing Aboriginal Sovereignty inside the realm of its knowledge.
The incoming tide laps around Tommyhawk’s knees. His soul cries for the unreachable distances from deep inside himself: It should have been me. But, his brain craves only exciting things, of far more exciting times ahead for himself, all of which lay elsewhere. But where was this dream? Was it disappearing, becoming too hard to grasp, was Tommyhawk losing sight of the dream? How many more times would he have to keep reminding himself that his future was elsewhere, and he was that close to it? That really, I am the one who should be leaving first. Tommyhawk felt like screaming out to Aboriginal Sovereignty who was so far away now, to stop impinging on his well-thought-out dream of the fate of two brothers, where one dies and one lives. He was stealing the show of the person who had dreamt about escaping from Praiseworthy first. It wasn’t fair. It was really unfair. I wanted to go first.
But, each time, just as he wanted to run down the beach after his brother and maybe try and save him, Tommyhawk mentally kicked his silly little soul for thinking that the sea had more treasure in it than the government in Canberra, and he again inscribed in the biography he was writing about himself in his head, that Aboriginal Sovereignty was just killing himself, he was not really leaving. He’s just the gutless one that’s all. Tommyhawk tried to keep this point firm in his mind. He had to remember that he was the one who always wanted to get out of Praiseworthy—it was his total dream, not his brother’s. So why ruin his own chances by intervening with someone else’s pre-determined fate? If he saved his brother then he may never get a chance to leave. It was the only thing that Tommyhawk could not understand, why his brother never hated his useless parents enough to leave them, like he did. Why he loved fools? This would remain a mystery to him. Ab.Sov had just never seen it. He never wanted to go anywhere. Never thought of it. Never thought of upsetting the status quo.
Brainless Sov. Why should he be leaving first—just like that, and not even asking Tommyhawk whether he minded or not? So little Tommyhawk punched himself in the face, to punish himself for having such thoughts. Let him go. He was only killing himself. Who was a younger brother anyhow? He was not his brother’s keeper—was he? It was not up to him to intervene, and make himself look stupid to be out there in the sea swimming like a half-drowned rat. A killer whale would not be calling out to someone to get out of the water while it was making a kill. A killer whale would put himself in the top position. Be an alpha killer. He even thought that he heard Aboriginal Sovereignty telling him—like usual, to stop thinking like a little boy. All you ever do is think. That’s the main problem with you. Always. Your brains will burst eventually. Go home. Get some sleep. Yes. Ab.Sov would want that. Cheat his death. Wouldn’t he?
Jellyfish swirl by, and run in circles. Long blades of seagrass float on top of the water. The sandflies of the early hours land on Tommyhawk’s skin and nip his back, but he does not feel pain when he is taking the part of the killer whale with its mouth open wide.
What’s young Tommyhawk doing over there in the mourning sea? A gathering of seagulls fly in from the sea, and hover over the whale cemetery. One by one, the birds begin to flit, glide across the ghostly presence of the mighty ancestors, and dive low enough to catch a glimpse of the boy with the serious face caught by moonlight. He is watching what they were also watching, then the squadron fly back and forth challenging the boy with fierce eyes, and fly back, circling the big brother moving away, out in the shallow sea.
Look! Look! He had got the suiciding brother believing he was only watching someone fishing over the waves, further out in the ocean while the sky grew louder with bird cries. It was bedlam in the skies with birds calling over one another, their cabal of thousands piercing the howl of the wind buffeting their bird feathers, but such spectacles were ignored by Aboriginal Sovereignty in the sea below. His red-and-white cap sits low on his head, almost covering his eyes, covering his thoughts, covering where he is looking, or what he is looking at. A seagull flies closer. It sees that the boy believes he is in perfect incognito, hidden below the cap’s centrepiece of a finely embroidered head of a massive shark, and he is not moving a muscle because he thinks that no one will think he was trying to kill himself. The only movement radiating oddly in the stiff breeze that the bird feels, is the speed of his ticking heart and blood pumping around his body.
That kid Tommyhawk was acting like a piece of stone, his bones rigid, glued to the spot. Not even a brain cell moved with a piece of his thought. His conscience was a void, just an empty space. Nothing in the grey matter was saying, go save your brother, or what was totally wrong about watching your brother taking his life. Absolutely! No fricken worries. Tommyhawk just looked as though he was watching some casual act of providence happening in the surf. There was no need to prevent his older brother from further disappearing from sight and never coming back. All he believed was that both he and Aboriginal Sovereignty were doing the right thing about their lives, which meant saying to himself that if anyone wanted to go and kill himself, then let that person go ahead and do it. What his older brother did with his life was none of his business. Aboriginal Sovereignty could look after himself.
There was no denying the fact that sometimes, Tommyhawk felt obliged to un-suppress some of the weaker arguments that barged through his betwixt and between conscience when it showed up in his brain. He was not inhuman. He just knew how to keep a lid on berserk emotion playing tennis with his soul, bashing the ball at some rare spontaneity of guilt frog-leaping out of its house, to force him to feel obligated, to consider the meaning of family relationships, releasing a fusillade of more and more guilt asking—But isn’t he—I mean—isn’t Aboriginal Sovereignty your brother? Shouldn’t you care about what happens to him? Whack! Whack! Tommyhawk knew that you had to whack that idea out of your brain if you wanted to rule the cruel world. Tommyhawk was good. One hundred per cent. He knew how to respond to any beckoning guilt screwballing him with its love of failure with a big flat no. He had always been quicker to quip off the mark than any procrastinating conscience: Couldn’t Aboriginal Sovereignty take care of himself? No! It didn’t look like it.
You cannot lie about a death wish. Tommyhawk just did not feel as though he should be the one to have to intervene when he saw other kids taking their lives by doing the right thing. Enough! He knew that he was not the son of God. Far from it. He was doing the right thing by looking after himself. He could think of plenty of reasons why he did not want to run home to tell on Aboriginal Sovereignty, and who would he be doing the telling to in any case? He just did not feel like it. This was not his fault. On the contrary, Tommyhawk felt vindicated: he just had to keep on reminding himself it was for the best. Both their lives were on a knife edge, and his depended on not taking his eyes off the scene unfolding on the beach where his brother was now so far away nothing could be done, and all good so far, because he had not returned.
The incoming tide had submerged the whale cemetery, and fish swam through the mangroves, the blood-bloated mosquito horde still flew and attacked, but Tommyhawk was on the cusp of success, his wildest dreams were coming true, so he kept his statue-like pose, while continuing his vacant staring over the water.
Yes, yes, the ordeal of Aboriginal Sovereignty dying was almost over. Aboriginal Sovereignty was finishing up after it had taken an eternity for him to find his way out of Praiseworthy for good.
Tommyhawk found himself caught half-submerged in the incoming tide, but he kept calm by reminding himself to keep standing very still now—it would not take much longer for the golden hour, the tide would turn, don’t spoil the moment just in case of a dead person coming back to life again. You could not depend on fate which was a slippery beast that could change its mind very quickly, even when a different outcome would seem completely impossible.
Let’s say that Aboriginal Sovereignty might have a change of heart. He might panic on his drowning breath and swim back. He was a good swimmer, the best, he could do that. And what if he turned back, and actually saw that his brother was just standing around like the shifty little creep he was, watching him drown himself? Well! Tommyhawk knew exactly what would happen to him. He would be dead meat if his brother discovered him spying on his botched suicide, and feeling peeved by his weak as piss effort to kill himself. This began a whole new scenario unlocking in Tommyhawk’s meltdown brain of dreading how all hell was breaking loose, and he could feel his mind racing off and telling his body to run away, or be the dead one instead of his brother.
But what could be worse than getting yourself killed? Tommyhawk already felt fish-dead, dead enough, completely dead from his full-time exhausted effort of keeping himself alive. These were his multiple-choice answers to questions that pinged back and forth over the brain waves in racist Twitter rant about was it worth it, if you is black and all that, if it had to be so hard, if you is black, was it worth it to keep on being alive in a world owned by whites? Yet even ranting racism could not penetrate Tommyhawk’s head, because he knew that he would rather die if he had to wait one more time. He could not even begin to imagine what it would be like to have to stand around being as bored to death again, with having to witness another of Aboriginal Sovereignty’s suicide attempts. What if, after all this and half-drowning himself with the flooding inward tide and all the other tides that had drowned his brain, what if he changes his mind again, if he had to say again, Your useless life was not worth living. Be dead. You must be dead. I am so over you, you—paedophile.
And yet, this eight-year-old kid now eating a bag of chips he was holding above the salty water, was a seasoned witness to a string of kid deaths. You could say he was an expert unbiased observer of this kind of tragedy, kind of like the aspiring first world viewing the third world committing suicide at its expense. The first time he saw a kid die he just felt that somehow this did not happen. It affected him less each time he saw it happen. He could not help it, and he had become fascinated with the idea of some of his friends committing suicide. He wanted to see it happen. Said he would be there. Orchestrated the alibis. Don’t worry bro, I will be there. I will keep you company. I won’t tell anybody.
Perhaps little Tommyhawk truly understood the guiltlessness of obsessive power, and the helplessness of becoming obsessed, or how it feels to be completely driven towards making sure something happened that would make you feel everything that was wrong was actually more or less worthwhile. Tommyhawk’s desperation was so freaky, it was at risk of overwhelming him, and he heard nothing trying to temper his lost in action conscience with the many contrary stories he was imagining about how this would be the last time he would get involved in making someone die, or how he would not get involved in something like this again, or that he would never again waste his time standing around in the quicksand of an incoming tide of crocodile-infested mangroves being a suicide witness. He was always shift-changing to deal with the practical, figuring out how to speed up the process of achieving his target to get the death kid over quicker to help build the safe corridor to his own survival. This was a different kind of obsession to how you would feel about taking somebody else’s chocolate. In Tommyhawk’s mind of seeing himself in the future, it was more like clawing your way towards having the latest next-generation, fastest-on-Earth iPhone/iPad/iPod/MacBook Air no matter the cost. So once committed to this level of obsession, almost any well-oiled brain system could be trained to reach unparalleled levels of patience to feed the addiction. But his brother’s long-winded many suicidal attempts had reached the zenith of an unparalleled virulent force mutating the meaning of loathing and hatred.
Still though, Tommyhawk lied by telling the imagined saltwater crocodiles hunting for murderers while swimming in the mangrove roots of the incoming tide, that he had never actually seen anyone take their own life before, even though he had witnessed quite a number of youth suicides, and you could say he had been implicated, although he only watched, which could have been anyone else watching something bad happening in the world but doing nothing about it. But he did not want to revisit any of those could have times right now. He blocked any truth, hid it in the darkness, peering hard at the incoming waves and the wash, where only occasionally in the reflected light of the moon on the water, he caught sight of something in the darkness that he thought was his older brother floating away, and he could not tell if it was Aboriginal Sovereignty or not. All he wished was that Aboriginal Sovereignty would really disappear so that his reality could never be found in any ocean of the world.
Go on! Do it! Do it now! You idiot! he dared himself to think with audacity, but he would not scream at Aboriginal Sovereignty in case he heard himself defiling his own character with the voice of a murderer. Paedophile! He kills this too. Words that jump from the brain now suffocate in his mouth. Crushed words, he crinkled them up, and shanghaied the crumpled lumps down in his throat, swallowed down to the garrison languishing in the pit of his stomach. This was where unclaimed words acidified with potato-chip pastings, and nullified screams. No. This child had no time for screaming while he thought about the delicate matter unfolding in the sea’s voices of reverence and echoing in the fathoms down to the sea floor. A boy’s silence in front of a mighty sea was very important, to remain quiet like an animal hiding, who watched from a distance, and to be wary as he felt the watery ghost arms reaching around mangroves, searching like police hunting murderers.
Occasionally, or time and time again, that little brown boy tosses his head of sun-bleached curly hair that generates enough air turbulence to momentarily separate the mosquitoes swarming around him. His impatience takes on new forms of viciousness now because he feels that Aboriginal Sovereignty is still alive even though it is impossible to see where he is in the darkened sea. It had become so late, and he was still forced to wait even though he needed to be in bed at this time of the night. He knew what time it was without checking to see where the stars had moved across the sea, because he knew it was more than half past two in the morning and he does not need stars to tell the time, or have an instinct about what time it was, because he checks his mobile every few minutes, and it tells him the precise time, that it is 2.30 a.m.
If this kid respects anything, it is exactness, quickness, and precision, and the need to have the exact time in his head all the time, even if he was so exhausted from having to watch some arsehole taking all night to commit suicide, because he thought suiciding was boring and this suicide was killing him, and this was not just random boredom because Tommyhawk could have died many times from the sheer boredom of being cooped up in his life, or from continually having to orchestrate each new failed way to escape his life, and the only way he would manage to keep on breathing the one two threes until eternity was by continuously checking what time it was on his mobile, just to keep himself high five awake, to force himself to take the next breath, to save himself from dying from not having the will to breathe, and by reminding himself to take the next breath and the next, through every second all the way through his mundane life, until, well until one day, when his life would suddenly feel like hot burning lights, feel like a bedazzling life which was bigger elsewhere, or bigger than everything under this sky.
His eyelids drooped over those young brown eyes now straining to see the moment that he had been visualising for months, and which should have taken only a few minutes. But he needed to see the end just in spite, to know the ordeal of standing around watching all day had finally ended, even if it only felt like an anticlimax because he could not even think straight in the middle of the night, now that he was fighting himself. But the dreams keep trying to take over his thoughts, and he could see the crocodile police ghosts swimming under the water like scuba divers searching around the mangrove forests for murderers. They are making him feel like a murderer, and he felt those police fingers touching him under the water instead of the incoming tide tossing a million sticks and mangrove pods through the salty waters where he stood, or the crabs and shellfish that have come out of their flooded mud holes, or the incoming schools of fish from the sea dancing with the jellyfish mob, while singing their love song from Handel’s love of a tree to the submerged mangrove forest, per voi resplenda il fato. Tuoni, lampi, e procelle non v’oltraggino mai la cara pace … No. A boy like Tommyhawk feels truth is very close to him in the early hours of the morning, and he knows that dead police crocodile ghosts still keep their power, keep their guns and batons, and still hunt for Aboriginal boys like him even when they are dead, and he knows that they will use their ghost fingers to drag him under the water where they will lock him up in their ghost gaol deep under the mudflats, drowning him in darkness, to make it look like suicide. You got to watch out for things like the invisible, of what you do not see, of being exposed to ghost police worlds of crocodiles which were far more dangerous to an eight-year-old Aboriginal child than being bailed up by a gang of real live killer saltwater crocodiles crawling over the muddy high tide sea floor in the mangrove forest where you happen to be standing in the middle of the night.
The sea water in this world was very dangerous, and every sense of Tommyhawk’s being told him this, that he had to fly out of the place, and he knows this, because all he ever plans is how to get out, but he cannot just fly, not without an expensive ticket on a Qantas flight—and who was going to pay for that to happen?—and the only way to get his ticket was to endure whatever it takes, to stay half-submerged in the tide, until the ultimate decision is made of whether he or Aboriginal Sovereignty had survived. He knows that there can only be one genuine hero. This had to be the ultimate game of exhausting endurance, like a wager or bet made between him and his brother to beat each other to the end, so he must stay awake, stay on guard, survive everything, even ghost police disguised as enormous saltwater crocodiles brushing by his submerged legs in a mangrove forest at high tide. The thrill, its continual warding off, and the resurrecting of its intensity, was all he owned, until Aboriginal Sovereignty’s actual final disappearance from the face of the Earth happened, to accept the thrill of a hero no matter what the odds, by being there to see the death wish happen. All this boy could do, was to continue mining for strength from the tremendous storehouse of faith he had in himself, to defeat the total boredom of being a sentry.
Why are you taking so long? Finish it! Finish it! If I ever see your stupid smile again, or have to pretend to love you like a brother …
Across the surging sea, the seagulls squalled triumphantly, screaming as they flew around in circles while heading back and forth, as though they were saying to Tommyhawk, He is still alive. This is another one of your failed attempts. Idiot! You can’t kill Aboriginal Sovereignty, anyone would have told you that, and you are going to have to plan your escape all over again. The dawn was not far away, and began to lighten the water and this made Tommyhawk almost cry because he knew that he had no endurance for another failed attempt, that this had to be it, or never.
I will kill him myself if he walks back in. I will walk out there and drown him …
But it was finally happening. The months of planning for a new life for himself was on the cusp. The randomness of opportunity, when it finally happened, was unbelievable, even if it felt like an eternity in the happening, where fantastical dreams of living in new worlds could be crushed at every moment. Whales die slow you know, when they suicide by throwing themselves out of the water. Yep! Tommyhawk had seen plenty of suicides and normally, he could never believe how fast something like this could happen, how it does not take long, and where one minute, you could be right next to someone and talking to them, and the next thing, they were all action and it was over and done with in a flash.
In a way, Tommyhawk envisaged suiciding as being simple, you decide, you do it, and then it is finished, and a body becomes limp and floats away, facedown in the water. But still, he knew the tricks his brother could play about wanting to kill himself, and then returning like Lazarus from another broached attempt and pretending it was his natural forte, by saying the love of his life was always pulling him back. Hello! She wasn’t even there.
Yes, Tommyhawk knew that Aboriginal Sovereignty was a trickster who had succeeded in making him stand around in disease-infected mangroves for nothing in the middle of the night. He was probably now ridden with malaria, or Ross River fever, or Murray Valley encephalitis, and standing in mud full of septicaemia melioidosis germs.
Tommyhawk began visualising his body wasting away, becoming diseased, rendering him paralysed. He froze, was unable to move, neither his arms or legs moved, they were now heavy blocks of steel. He panicked, racing questions ran through his head, that he was now practically dead? Aboriginal Sovereignty had killed him. He was the one who had been set up. His own brother was a murderer. He was somewhere out at sea watching, and laughing at him for spying on people.
Tommyhawk said, Sure, and managed to believe that being paralysed with fear did not really bother him. You just make yourself pretend dead. That was what ultimate winners would do.
Most of all, Tommyhawk wanted to be the first person to give the news of his brother’s death to his True Idol Mother—the patron saint of all Aboriginal children. She was that greatest white lady on Earth with the golden hair who was the boss of Aboriginal people. He had heard that her omnibenevolence radiated like holy-statue rays of sunshine from her head, and that those lightning beams were capable of locating any residual joyful sense left in the world, a rare thing that had remained closeted away in this child’s mind, and would allow light to shine upon him. He had colossal pictures of her covering every interior wall of his brain, just so he could always see her secretly in whichever way he looked inside his head. This way, he made sure that her face illuminated his every thought, every sight, so that he would never forget what she looked like. This all-of-brain image of her shone brightly, like a golden angel guardian who watched over him at all times from where she sat on a brain throne while he fought for his life in high-tide mangroves infestations full of ghost police disguised as saltwater crocodiles, knowing that this woman, composed of priceless gold nuggets mined from his own traditional lands, really loved him more than his parents, who were the neglectful and abusive types of people incapable of loving their children that the whole white country were telling him directly in every publicised forum that they could blab on, because they wanted to save him from his own people, just like their leader, the golden white woman who lived at Parliament House in the capital of Australia.
Tommyhawk squirmed to unstiffen his water-clogged body, but he felt confident enough to pre-empt his success, and could not wait to get a message through to the Golden Mother whose presence was exploding in his mind, so he twisted his finger on speed dial to make anonymous calls on his iPhone to Parliament House. He could see her sitting right in front of him in heaven on her swivelling office chair, and handing him even more shiny new iPads, iPods, iPhones: all the latest models. He was being lured into heaven, he had already transcended Praiseworthy reality. He felt that he had reached the centre of world power. She had become his Mother. This was the power of the Australian government. This was what big powerful people could do.
These were such extraordinary feelings that ran through his mind and flowed into his body, where he felt adopted by the government lady, and he felt shivery and so excited, that his arms and legs loosened from the tight grip of the mangrove swamp. His fists pumped the mosquito clouds over the whale bones and knocked them flat in the mud. He looked up into the sky and knew he had shown his imagined gold angel that he was a worthy boy. Tommyhawk saw actual transcendence, where the colossal giant of a white lady was bringing her mighty power—the Australian army, and boom, boom, boom, fighting off all the paedophiles waiting around every corner with schemes to injure him. You only had to call her. He could even see the God Government sending her down from wi-fi heaven to save him, and this was why Tommyhawk could firmly believe that his life in Praiseworthy was just about coming to an end, and he wondered what it would be like to live in such a delusional wonderland, and if she would allow him to sit on her swivelling throne … sometimes.
She’s going to be very pleased with me now, Tommyhawk knew this, how he had kept himself rigid like a monument throughout the night of drama, while his whole body was eaten by an infestation of disease-ridden mosquitoes and muddy-water viruses now crawling through his blood. He hoped she would not think he was full of disease, and he kept his fingers crossed on his treasured iPhone that she—the gold angel, had—well! sort of—already given him a present. Now her presence was everywhere, and she smelt like the air itself. She was wherever he looked up in the sky, even looming higher than the ancestors, and he tried to anticipate the moment when she would eventually take his call, when he had to call her the Right Honourable, like you were supposed to call a cabinet minister of the Parliament of Australia who says they were governing the traditional owner of country.
He had once asked his teacher: How do I write to the Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, Miss? She said to the class that you would start with—Madam, your Right Honourable. He had practised this many times. He scrolled over his text messages. He had texted your Right Honourable hundreds of times to ask her to adopt him, for example, as follows:
ADOPT ME. RIGHT HONOURABLE.
I HATE MY PARENTS.
THEY ARE BOTH REALLY PAEDOPHILES.
I ONLY LOVE YOU.
Just a few words. Short messages were the total gist of the majority of his texts. Always addressed to your Madam, your Right Honourable-ness. He should remember to address her correctly even when she appeared in his dreams, to be like polite white people with good behaviour, not like his parents, or anyone in Praiseworthy who called people they hated whatever they liked. The Golden Mother would not call him a liar, unlike someone like Aboriginal Sovereignty who had always been accusing him of telling lies.
Tommyhawk sighed, wiped the perspiration from his skin. It had been a hot night, humid in the mangroves, but seeing up high, how her buoyancy caught the light of the moon and glittered through her golden hair as she swivelled in her office chair in the sky while watching over him, he thought that maybe he could text her again right now—even though it was late in Canberra, but he could see her watching him, teleporting herself anytime she liked and seeing everything. It struck him that she was miraculous when he realised that the Golden Mother had real godlike vision to be watching a quarter of a million Aboriginal children all at the same time, and yet there she was, hovering just above the mangrove swamp, while capable of hovering over the entire country. How would he begin, what would he say, how would he make her believe that he was definitely at risk of being abused by Aboriginal parents who did not love their children? An avalanche of words tumbled back and forth, driving him out of his mind. How would he make the important white woman believe him, that he was at risk of being abused by BLACK PEOPLE, the kind of parents the Australian government was saying did not love their children. Then he wrote: SAVE ME! He continued with the text message while busting to pour the entire contents of his head straight to her, and felt he could write to her all night. He wrote her long text messages, telling her stories, making up fairytales, though he had never sent those texts. This was more serious news, like an SOS message. HELP! He only needed to say a few words. HE’S DEAD. How could he just tell her important eminence that Aboriginal Sovereignty had gone, disappeared in the sea, taken his life, it was all over for him? She would not be hearing from that troublemaker anymore. Simply leave it at that? Or, perhaps he could write that her worst enemy—which was what Aboriginal Sovereignty represented—would not be giving her government any more trouble with talk of his buggered-up rights. I KILLED HIM. No, he would not exactly be saying that.
Tommyhawk wanted her to assume, rightly, that he had taken care of the problem, but not that he had actually murdered his brother. This was a white lady guardian angel of children like him. She protected children from killers, from all sorts of people. That was her message right across the country. She was really saying he could trust her. He would have to think carefully about how to frame this text message to her if he wanted her to evacuate him from hell.
This time, he knew for sure, she would arrive personally in an air force jet to take him away from Praiseworthy. Well! It would be dawn soon and the horizon across the sea would look the same as it always looked, and you would not see Aboriginal Sovereignty in any of it. But! Tommyhawk knew what could not be helped, that the only flaw in all this waiting around would be not having the body as evidence. Please make it urgent, he would text her. He would text her again, saying that he wanted to go to Canberra to live with her in the big flash white Parliament House forever. He would text again, saying he wanted her to adopt him. She would agree. She had to. She was his White Mother.
In these early morning hours before daylight, it felt like there was a miracle happening with a white holiness rising from the sea. Tommyhawk continued texting to the vision over the water in the fog, where he could see her swivelling around on her office chair in the brilliantly lit sky palace of Parliament House. She was giving orders on her mobile for the doors to be thrown open for everyone to see her new son, that black kid from Praiseworthy she had rescued from the whale-bone skeletons, where he was standing up to his waist in the sea among the mangroves. The trouble with this vision was that you could never see properly through its blinding brightness. You needed to squint your eyes, peer through the slits of your eyelids to see what was going on in the vision while an imaginary rising sun was striking her worshipped self and radiating off her clouded palace with multiple rays of golden light, so intense in its brightness that the startling light shining from the golden threads of her hair was too strong for Tommyhawk’s eyes, or even for the fish to see in total darkness. This was the pity. He was always too far away from visionary distances constructed by his desire. But I am the special one, the only child she could possibly see while swinging around on her office chair as she watched over every Aboriginal child in the country.
Honestly, visions these days do not last long, and this vision was shattering for Tommyhawk Steel, who could not believe it when he looked way out to the sea covering the mudflats, and caught a glimpse of the small white thing. Actually, it looked like somebody’s stupid dog. His dara. His mungkuji. Bajangu. Kujukuju. What was it doing out there? Bobbing around in the sea like an idiot. Pedro. I could kill that dog. But, then, he knows that the dog was already dead. It had died long ago. The whole world of remembering the loss suddenly crashed down again in Tommyhawk’s head. His brain flipped right out this time, and he could not help himself from air-freighting his yelling soul message to wherever Aboriginal Sovereignty was drowning, Save the ghost dog. He felt robbed, but he had no choice, the finely curated orchestration had shattered through his brain, he felt ad hoc, exposed, shamed. Should he actually scream for the dog to come back? You are so full of shit. Call the whole thing off? Bullshit! Could he scream to Ab.Sov to go and save his dog. Arsehole! Why was Pedro following the suicide person anyway? The dog was already dead. Why was it out in the surf following the non-person? It always liked Ab.Sov more.
Pedro! Pedro! He tried to will the friggen dog to come out of the sea. If you are my shit dog, then you come back now. But the more he raged, the more poor Pedro was pulled beneath the surf to drown, although it was dead already and was reappearing from times before like film re-loading, re-playing the re-drowning multiple times and electrifying Tommyhawk’s head with too much fury because he felt as though the dog was trying to replace the swivel chair Golden Goddess from her central place in his thinking, turfing the throne and all out of his brain. He weighed it up on the spot, and in an instant, decided that the fake dog ghost was an actual traitor, and poor Tommyhawk’s equilibrium was blown up into parts scattered all over the universe like a broken spaceship floating like a pile of junk and sinking away into the loneliest places of his spirit. But, you know, could a fascist let a ghost dog die? He continued to see the distressed dog swimming and sinking under the waves, and bobbing up again somewhere behind the invisible Aboriginal Sovereignty. No, Tommyhawk could not do nothing, his voice failed him, a voice so completely lost it could have been among the space wreckage floating millions of miles above Earth. Who knows why Pedro had to spoil everything? Well! Bugger you, Pedro. Go then. Tommyhawk was now the whale. The whale that would attack Pedro. The dog had made its choice.
Pedro, his old dog, that small cute white, must have been an expensive Maltese terrier mixed with some other breed of a thing, what you call a designer dog that his father had stolen from a white family in the city when they were sipping café latte, now following Aboriginal Sovereignty’s footprints rather than his own—as though it knew what the end game would be, and had decided, instead of being abandoned by the little traitor, it would rather save Aboriginal Sovereignty from drowning. It had ignored Tommyhawk down on the beach where he was hiding in the whale skeleton, and scampered into the breaking waves instead, preferring to lose its life in a treacherous darkened sea, rather than dog-paddling the high tide in the mangroves.
Tommyhawk stopped feeling like a superhero, but then suddenly, the swivel lady appeared above the whale bones, swinging on her chair, and gazing at his self-pity with indifferent eyes, and he thought what would she think of him now? What would she think, seeing failure? Would she have said that he should have tied up his stupid ghost dog so it could not go wandering around when the deal was being made? He decided to deny everything. He would not say anything about the dog in the ocean looking for Aboriginal Sovereignty and trying to save him. Did he need to tell her that? Would she know already? He usually told her everything. Never lied to the Golden Mother. She knew everything about his life. But she did not need to know this. That was the answer. She did not need to know he had killed the dog. Even though the thought of holding something back from her made him feel as though he had deceived her, he knew she could never know about this. He was not going to text his Golden Mother about losing his dog. It was not even worth it. He would not tell her that his own pretend dog preferred to die with Aboriginal Sovereignty. These thoughts made him feel really angry because he did not need a traitorous scum of a city dog to make him look like some sneaky person you could not trust, even though the dog might have been the only thing in Praiseworthy he cared about, even though he had accidentally killed it, and it was decidedly clear the dog did not love him.
Well! So! It went, disappeared. Stuff you then, Pedro. Go to hell. I will be all right, Tommyhawk thought in a laconic voice like his father’s, I wasn’t taking you to the new life in Canberra anyhow. You are only one of the half greats. He remembered this was what Aboriginal Sovereignty had once called him. That’s all you will be. If only he had something to throw at the dog. Now the swivel-throned Golden Hair Mother was appearing in the dust haze above the sea right in front of the mangrove forest, and she was dressed in a business suit that seemed to be made of the bits and pieces of pink-dyed plastic shopping bags that the wind had torn to threads and had ended up being caught somewhere on the thousands of kilometres of fences of the vast cattle properties that closed off the traditional owners’ land. Even her golden hair spraying out of her head in thickets of plastic sheen seemed to have the hues of a luscious pretty pinkness.
The whale-bone skeletons always lost their dull whiteness of the day when shone upon by the moonlight, and their luminous sheen stood out as a spectacle of remembrance, as though the bones were returning to life, invigorated through dreams of the night long ago in those heaving seas, before they lost life in the strangling air where they had beached. All of them. Those giant bodies watching each other’s passing, pacifying each other to the end with talk, filling the air with memories of whale stories.
Tommyhawk had now waited through many sun-baked hours, and through the last sunlight shining through cobwebs laced over trees and across the mud, and the millions of mosquitoes gliding in the air, and then darkness, and all the while, still believing that only the mangrove mosquitoes knew where he was hiding. Yet country sees everything, and the moon shone brighter on Aboriginal Sovereignty standing so far away now in the shallows of the tidal zone.
Out there in the sea, the shiny skin of his back shone brightly like a lantern, and the glow had drawn the long storyline of arriving, the coming of the large Syntherata melvilla and Syntherata janetta. These were the emperor gum moths that had been gathering for hours like ghosts, and had flown towards the thrumming of bronzewing pigeons through the coastal dust haze after deserting the coastlines of mangroves, the bilkwood Flindersia and the billy goat plum Planchonia careya. The air grew congested with woven layers in streaks of gold as the serpentine moth trails swarmed far out on the sea towards the shining light of eternity, as though the bat-like moths and the lepidoptera of all kinds were forever bound to protect the life of Aboriginal Sovereignty.
All the dusty gold wings fluttering, and bumping against one another, crafted an illumination of woolly golden scales that glistened on the sea, but Tommyhawk did not see the wondrous golden thundercloud surrounding his brother like he was a saint, and the halo of moonlight shining on him through the cracks of clouds.
The fat boy was busy enough keeping awake. It was difficult to balance standing on one leg, and then switching to the other in the squishing mud with the tide coming into the whale bones. His self-imposed rules of stillness were broken a thousand times already, while his mind wandered off into dream-wishing that he should go home. But he realised that he could not go anywhere before the real deal kicked in and his mind came running right back to where he was standing in ankle-deep mud. His mind should not be tricked into dreaming about being otherwise, or straying from his predestined plan for his new becoming, and this was a reminder for Tommyhawk that Aboriginal Sovereignty would never win this argument.
Why can’t you do anything right? Tommyhawk grew more bitter, a bit more pissed off with this long death march out to sea. This ordeal of Aboriginal Sovereignty’s suiciding had taken some of the slowest hours on the planet, and the little fat fellow was totally exhausted. He reckoned that Aboriginal Sovereignty was doing this on purpose. Tommyhawk’s mind was edging on a full-scale eight-year-old tantrum like he would have had at home when he could not get what he wanted. Yo! And, whatever else his mind raced through in the memory bank storing all the bad times you could stuff in an eight-year-old’s brain, sought, found, and delivered in a thud of lead on the floor of his brain one after the other in a God audit of the blows to life where distrust constantly hung, stored in the place of not having desires realised. Desire! He was full of desire, his total existence only felt pure desire, a fully directed desire towards his own survival, his complete desire to live, and not just simply to be, but to become far more. What the boy wanted was not a new realisation in the history of humanity, or to be the main tool of human survival for the millennia of Aboriginal existence—for if there was anything that Tommyhawk desired, it was to create a lifelong, rest-of-life exclusion zone from his brother. The question he posed to himself was this: Did you want to, or not want to be involved with a burden for the rest of your life, and Tommyhawk could not see himself as a carrier of his brother now, or when he was his brother’s age, or even as an old man.
Though Tommyhawk’s mind preyed on the need for swift action to seize his own splendid future, it had now taken more than half a day to achieve the death of his old life. Nothing more could happen without his brother committing suicide, and what if Aboriginal Sovereignty did not have any genuine intention at all of going through with his suicide of drowning himself? Perhaps he had no idea about what he really wanted to do? Why was he immune to saltwater crocodiles, sharks, and box jellyfishes tangling their poisonous tentacles around him? This ocean is supposed to be infested with man-eaters. You won’t do it, will you? There was even another small voice going on about nothing, and saying, Save him? Tommyhawk’s lips remained sealed. He knew that it would be just like Aboriginal Sovereignty to ruin his plans for a better life if he started calling the police on his mobile to rescue him from the sea and his murdering brother over there in the whale bones, and started aborting the suicide—leaving it for another time, even though he wanted to be dead. Can’t make up your mind. Well! That there was no truer word, thought Tommyhawk, You stuffed up your life, don’t stuff up mine.
The boy fiddled, twisted from one muddy mosquito-bitten leg to the other, and was so hopping mad, and still forcing himself to stand there until the bitter end. It seemed like an end of the rope situation, for he could never be sure if Aboriginal Sovereignty already knew he was hiding in the whale bones, and was just mucking around with his mind in this mesmerising circus act of his, enticing him into the sea so he could murder him. If the scales fall anywhere, right now it weighed in Tommyhawk’s advantage, for he could never be tricked. He had been tricked this way before with Aboriginal Sovereignty changing his mind, but this time, it had to be it, of continuing to will his brother to end his life so that his own life could start speeding up on the calendar that he had already mapped out for himself, the big secret locked in his head and pushing him forward every waking minute of the day. A desire to get as far away from Praiseworthy now driven by an urgency so relentless and focused, he thought of nothing else, even forgetting to eat sometimes, or to sleep. This was the thing he wanted more than life, what he called his afterlife, and that was to live with his true Mother, the white blonde-hair lady.
In order for this new life to proceed with the big important white lady, he had to be perfectly sure that his big brother killed himself more properly this time, not just going on about how he wanted to kill himself, when he only meant half breathing—which was not dead, just like the last time was not dead, and the times before that, when Aboriginal Sovereignty bailed out, had some last-minute change of heart, perhaps remembering some last-minute thing he had to do, and stood in the ocean, showing his true weakness like a gutless wonder that had no ability to make the big decisions, except to keep the choice alive—the either-or of his total lack of resolve. Was this going to be the same scenario? You could see it all happening. Aboriginal Sovereignty would come striding back through the sea with a big smile on his face while acting as though nothing had happened. Not even an apology, just talking stupid, saying he was just out visiting his sea relatives, talking to fish. He was not going to kill himself over his lost girlfriend. He was not that heartbroken after all. She was not worth it. Or, on the other hand, because she is worth it. Tommyhawk would have to start all the agonising and insipid whispering all over again, while mimicking an apologetic Australian politician in opposition to the government hell-bent on pushing yes-men to support some of its outlandishly stupid policy decisions. All this was depressing enough, and sapped the boy’s enthusiasm to work at achieving his own grand plan aimed at his eventual adoption by the angelic white lady who could not leave him to live with his harmful Aboriginal family. Go on do it and get it over with. Do it, will you?
There were times when you could see the sickness of conquering floating in the air as a general thing, spreading over a couple of centuries more than any new worldwide virus pandemic. Tommyhawk had told his father about Aboriginal Sovereignty trying to kill himself, as he had always been trying to talk to him about kids committing suicide, and he remembered his father acting as though he had not spoken, as though he had not even heard him speak. The man seemed to be acting as though nothing like that could ever happen to constant sunshine. Cause told the boy to stop telling lies before he killed the little liar in an instant. It felt like a wild wind separating him from his father and forcing Tommyhawk to step back, to get out of the way of an actual murder taking place by this man who he already assumed was capable of murdering him. He watched the back of the tall thin bush man with a mop of greying hair tangled with odd bits of leaves and twigs walking away, and mumbling something into his chin as though he was speaking to his own shadow, he will get over it.
The boy back-answered quick smart. He always had to have the last say: You are not a proper father. You are just an intermediate father. Well! Cause snapped at that, What in the bloody hell’s name is an intermediary father? Tommyhawk bit his tongue, didn’t say intermediary moron, and from blurting out that as far as he was concerned, Cause was always acting like he was overwhelmed by having too many children, whereas in actual truth, he only had these two—and he could not handle two sons whom he hardly had anything to do with.
The question right now in Cause’s thoughts was about survival of a black man that came from deep history, and it was about flexibility. Flexibility with reality, and whose flexibility mattered. But what would a little boy like Tommyhawk know about life? Look and learn boy. How many times have I got to show you how to do something? The man was wringing his hands. Kid with the mad talk. Follow me. Tommyhawk thought that he was learning enough already about what flexibility meant by watching his older brother’s uncertainties. Will I, or won’t I? Will I get married, or won’t I? Which way? Am I still in love with this one, or that one over there, or neither? Perhaps all ways were better. Or no way. Who could keep up? Aboriginal Sovereignty’s life was like a supermarket of choices.
From the time Tommyhawk could put two and two together, he always knew that he was the complete opposite to his drippy brother. The glue was different. He was superglued set to the idea of being a decider, to make, take and defend like his life depended upon how fast decision-maker quick he clicked his fingers. He was wired to the unbendable, on constant repeat cycle about what it meant to decide, and probably, would rather die than bend from his decision. This was how he thought you needed to be hard-nosed, like the government, and what being in power was all about. There was no way he would become like his brother who would always be living in the opposition, who could not make up his mind about anything.
The boy was already a plain little outsider fascist watching Praiseworthy people praising, fawning and admiring the very personification of Ab.Sov’s flexibility, and never seeing him for what he was, as an abbreviation of future failure. In fact, Tommyhawk was calling his brother future failure as he stomped around in the mud in the whale bone palace at frigging three in the morning, while demanding to know why an idiot like his brother had ever been named Aboriginal Sovereignty and not himself. It was a complete joke. Ab.Sov was not able to hold his concentration long enough to get a simple job done—like look at the time, and he was still trying to kill himself. The boy was near to tearing his own hair out, those brown curls plastered by perspiration to his scalp, for it was extremely difficult for him to understand why anyone could not just follow through with their own decisions. His thoughts ran through the other kids he had watched on this very same stretch of beach, who had tried to chicken out at the last minute. Who couldn’t keep a concrete plan in their head until the end. He blamed the flexibility his father spoke about as being like the wind, and he hated the wind gusts that came and moved in any direction, and he hated everyone in Praiseworthy for lacking in concentration, always being airy-fairy, the prime weakness he would be escaping from, once Aboriginal Sovereignty carked it.
Tommyhawk knew at three o’clock in the morning that even though he could not see Aboriginal Sovereignty anymore, his brother was still alive. His brother was messaging him on his mobile. Aboriginal Sovereignty had to be out there in the sea somewhere with his mobile in his hand, which felt absolutely paralogical unreal to Tommyhawk, that his dying brother would be calling people. He checked the messages. Saw hundreds of missed calls. The iPhone froze, un-froze, then froze once more while umpteen messages flashed in. Where could he be, whispering into his mobile while killing himself in the ocean. Why was he texting people? Quickly he looked behind. A slight breeze, the warm breath whistled into his mobile ear. Oh! It was only the hot mobile he felt, but his brother’s presence seemed to be close, he knows his brother’s presence anywhere, and it was as though they were standing side by side, both watching the death scene. Was Aboriginal Sovereignty standing there, really had he come back? Tommyhawk was petrified, but swung around, looked through the complete circumference of blackness. He could not see the spirit ancestors of Praiseworthy busily moving through one another, going back and forth, fetching up deaths in this night like no other. Left! Right! Front! Back! Pitched black mangroves wrapped up the light and Tommyhawk could hear a lonely repetitiveness in the whispering sneaking up behind him, edging closer, reinventing the sound of country with steady breathing reduced to the minimalism of a last gasping, help me. Then, his brother’s voice felt as though it was coming from inside his bloodstream, and Tommyhawk did not know how to dislodge the whispered plea coming through his own blood racing to his head.
Nothing escapes the sea’s embrace once it has swallowed all life from one’s body in distant waters. Its power paralyses, overtakes the movement of limbs or body, you are unable to move freely either towards the sea’s infinity to a life beyond death, nor move back, returning from breathlessness. The boy refused to hear repeat-mode brother pleading, playing his song too late, a riff sung blue.
Shut up you. Shut up. Tommyhawk knew about forever, and at least he was truthful about this, he never trusted Aboriginal Sovereignty. You won’t trick me. Get away from me. You. You. Disease. I know you are trying to lure me into the sea. Tommyhawk sniggered at the sea of heartbreak, a local rallying song, one he championed in his own mind. His brother was always trying to get him to experience country, get used to it, it’s in the blood like, go out into deeper waters. Have fun bro.
The truth was this: Tommyhawk Steel had never truly experienced what the death world was like from outside of a computer around three in the morning. He did not care that there was such a place outside his window where many story worlds interacted more deeply than any one person could ever know. His knowing is of not seeing where he is among the mangroves encasing a city of looming skeletal whale bones that belies an otherworldly legendary, because in the blackness, only a night heron screams its ancient song to another, and it to another along the endless kilometres of mangrove coastline, until the herons all take flight, fly in and out of the eddies cascading through the quivering dance of ghost moths flickering pianissimo in their eternal droning song.
At this point of the night, the boy who thought he was a ninja was drifting into a deep sleep where he met the devil that took over—ordering kicks, a head punch, calling him weak, forcing his eyelids open with its bare hands, to witness the end of time of Aboriginal Sovereignty. All around, the local spirits in the mangrove darkness were massing in flight over the sea dreams of times immemorial, and whenever the moonlight broke through the clouds, Tommyhawk could only glimpse his brother dilly-dallying his death so far away. It hurt him to have to keep this vigil. He became delusional, deciding that he had died and Aboriginal Sovereignty had set him up, and was out in the sea on a vigil, witnessing his death in the mangroves. Tommyhawk started to believe that his brother was making him wait long enough so that he would run into the sea, where he would easily become disoriented in the darkness, as easily as being caught in a ghost net hidden below, and pulled by the currents further out in the sea. His brother’s power was overtaking his mind, and Tommyhawk felt that he was collapsing dead in the mud now that every bit of blood in his body had been drained by mosquitoes—yep, all of that. Yet, the small ninja, even on his last blood-drained leg, was able to drag from somewhere in his legacy of crash-hot powerful ancestors who knew how to survive super droughts and ice ages, one last drip of desire to survive, and he was able to hear the rat-a-tat timpani marching his eyes elsewhere, towards the ultimate visualisation of his luxurious mansion home, the safe white parliament palace in Canberra, and he knew this was where he was headed—not in a ghost net like an octopus. He was going to live after this one last ordeal, and he smirked at where he thought Aboriginal Sovereignty was standing in the sea, and he whispered, knowing that his brother heard, I’m telling you there would be no mucking about if it was me.
The truth was that no good comes out of government propaganda, indoctrinating the mind of a black kid visiting his nightmares in the mangroves in the deadly night. He was just rolling with the bad times like the devil incarnate, and making spooky stories for the ancestors. A modern power ninja like himself knew the reasons why Aboriginal Sovereignty was not made of the same ancestral stuff that was in the ground all around Praiseworthy, in the food you ate, the water you drank, what you smelt in the air, the same thing that the whole region was famous for, iron ore. Wasn’t that why just about everyone in Praiseworthy was solid, and called themselves metal names? But the baby was crying out there, probably hoping a crocodile wouldn’t eat him. Or snakes. Or rats. Where were the sharks anyhow?
Another thing that kept bewildering the ninja boy was why Aboriginal Sovereignty was the local hero. What did he ever do? Why was he beloved? He was just a criminal. A paedophile. He did not have ninja resilience. Or sovereignty intransigence. Hard to weigh it all up, all of those pivotal questions written on the devil scales. Hey! How come you were treated like a bag of nothing, while your brother was Aboriginal Sovereignty? What makes one better than the other? The question was as inflexible as his not being able to stop the world from falling apart in the middle of the night. It was all about escaping, and focus, and Tommyhawk had the main ingredient, and you know what that was? The resilience for being a survivor, this was the only thing he ever had, mostly learnt from his absent father. But unlike his father, he was saving himself, with a mind that was running like the rings of Saturn slamming all the broken pieces of old moons, comets and asteroids that got in the way.
Even Tommyhawk, or especially Tommyhawk Steel, knew that you needed the resilience of Godzilla to escape paedophile heaven. He knew this while whizzing through eight years of life like a rocket on fire from asking the question, Dude, who am I? Unlike, for instance, the mainstream child, he perfectly understood what it meant to be the victim of injustice in the country’s historical theft situation. Sweet! He looked at himself, and decided, Dude, you are the national narrative. Perhaps he knew this was his time. The glory moment that said to him, They are talking about you. He heard the message coming directly to him in endless political diatribes describing his situation on the radio, TV, or on the internet, where all these people were actually talking about him in the singular, and drumming it into his thick head how much he was at risk living in an Aboriginal community. They are talking about me. He lived in an Aboriginal community, didn’t he? Well! Watch out kid because you are living where all the paedophiles roam. He was not saying anything like that originally, but then, the white people were saying it—like they were speaking directly to him, and saying that he was living in a totally dysfunctional world crawling with paedophiles. Why? Because the Australian government—also, for the Aborigines—had said so. From that moment, when Tommyhawk learnt how to string a few thoughts together about paedophiles attacking Aboriginal children from his addiction to listening to the ABC news, instead of watching the cartoons if he had been normal and had not been born a fascist like his father always claimed he was, he would not stop talking about paedophiles. I’m a paedophile. You’re a paedophile. He had the radio blasting here, blasting there: Well! That was the news. This kid is mad, Aboriginal Sovereignty told his parents. You got to make him stop saying that. Yet the whole world was agape on the TV and saying it, and gossiping in an official political government way about plagues of paedophiles rampant in places like Praiseworthy.
Will I get attacked by the paedophiles? Tommyhawk felt he was living in hell. Paedophiles were after Aboriginal children, and so naturally, he believed, They must be coming for me. I know it. The radios kept pumping the news that paedophiles were rampant, and all over every square inch of the Aboriginal world. It was as though his brain was being eaten alive by a thought virus, a pandemic, where every Aboriginal child was at risk. He spent every moment of the day trying to escape from the imagined virus snaring him into its grips and finally killing him. He could not get the thought out of his mind that he was an at-risk child. Anyone could see that but who was doing anything about it. He lived in a state of emergency, of total vigilance, of trying to second-guess the invisible paedophiles out to get him. Nowhere felt safe. Hey! What monsters lurked, that created a child’s hell ex nihilo? Was it done intentionally? What felt definite in Tommyhawk’s mind was not infinite time, not far-distant time, but an eight-year-old’s heightened imagination for anticipating a very dangerous situation—albeit, one created by the highest authority governing the country—where he felt it was immanently moments before he would be attacked. The only great news came at daybreak when Tommyhawk could not believe he had survived another day, but this only deepened the next item of his apprehension, of having another night to deal with. Another sleepless night, of how to stop suspecting the worst. He was like a rat cornered by cats. How was he going to escape? You tell me …
Well! You had to be a superhero writing your own magnum opus about fear. You had to overcook the brain until it fried, until it exploded like an attack weapon, and on this feat alone Tommyhawk spent just about every second, thinking about how to be a human magnum six-shooter, how to keep strengthening the war cabinet living in his brain, to make sure that all the world’s paedophiles actually living in Praiseworthy would not get him. But how was he going to know what a paedophile looked like? You got to know what enemies looked like, but how could you tell when the contagion looked like a virus that was invisible to the eye? Suspenseful thinking was killing him, reeking his head with suspicion, and yet it was impossible to tell, so he ended up with the only available solution, that all adults were paedophiles.
And why not? He knew the most important people in the country—the government of Australia supposed to be governing for Aboriginal people as well—were saying his community was crawling with paedophiles so it must be true, so why should he say it was not true, why should he think the government of Australia was wrong? Then it occurred to Tommyhawk that it was not very nice to be looking out for himself all the time, that he had to fight the war himself. If he was living in a war zone, shouldn’t a child expect a bit of help? How was a child to protect himself from the world of adults out to harm him?
Right—now! Tommyhawk hit the jackpot. He was planning to get the hell out of any situation where he was the known prey. What he desired most had been ingrained in his world through millennia, and this was his desire to survive. Wasn’t he genetically and spiritually wired to fight calamity, ice ages, global warming, any kind of anthropocentric climate change, as well as contagions, viruses or diseases, or anything relating to the above—ditto paedophiles? He was the sum total of twenty-first century thinking, but he also said what the assimilationists wanted from young Indigenous minds. Yep! Exactly that. He was getting right away out of Praiseworthy. Was he dangerous? Anyone would be mad to try stopping him.
What was wrong with that kid? Dance Steel, the moth-er Mother, could not get anywhere near the fire and brimstone mouth of the youngest son. You keep your distance from me, he ordered, when he had figured out what a paedophile was. He waved his iPhone at her. I am going to call the police and tell them all about how you are trying to molest me. He told her to watch as he measured out an appropriate distance in giant footsteps: two metres from the virus. Don’t come any closer than that, or I will report you to the police.
His father said that he wanted to flog him for talking to his mother like a fascist, but he was holding his hand because he was a decent man, and because he knew that Tommyhawk was just looking for any excuse to report to white people about his own family. Cause knew what everyone else in the world was saying about paedophilia being rampant in Aboriginal communities. He remembered thinking, gee that was a sophisticated word when he first heard about it on the seven o’clock news on the ABC. He thought it had something to do with petrol. They are talking about petrol-sniffing he told Dance while watching the TV from the couch. He had even told Tommyhawk on the spot that he would kill him quick smart if he started sniffing petrol because he was not going to muck around caring for him when doctors tell him he would have to give that new paedophile medicine to him for the rest of his life when he became a vegetable from sniffing petrol. Don’t you go around shaming me, you idiot, Cause had yelled, and Tommyhawk yelled right back what a paedophile was, you faggot, it had nothing to do with petrol. Then, like a gross type of infection had broken out in the world, it was all about paedophile this now, and paedophile that in Cause’s argumentative conversations with Tommyhawk, after the boy became obsessed about who was a paedophile, and started accusing his own father of being one too. The shame of it. Who was touching children then? Where? Where! Who? Who? How could the whole community be paedophiles, if I am not a paedophile, you little know-all?
Tommyhawk told Aboriginal Sovereignty to social distance himself from him too. He taunted relentlessly, unable to stop obsessing to the family about his paedophile brother. You sleep with little girls. So, you are nothing but a big paedophile. Aboriginal Sovereignty thought the kid had gone insane. He was more than an idiot. He had developed a phobia about adults, or everyone in Praiseworthy bigger them himself.
Man, take a look, the little idiot is mad. You should get a doctor to look at him. Time and again, Aboriginal Sovereignty told his father to do something about Tommyhawk, or he swore to God that he would put his hands around the little punk’s neck and strangle the living daylight out of the little cunt face himself. Cause walked away. His mind was fully occupied already on how he could make his family’s life different, how it did not need to be all this arguing, and how he would show the way to their future by setting an example of himself. He would not explode into a lot of hot air just for the sake of his family and deal with the uncontrollable brat for what? A bit of peace and quiet that consisted of being accused of being some scum thing, violent-violator father, unmanly sort of thing that could not control himself—like he was exactly what white people would have him be, and were begging him to act like an ape, or a primitive caveman from the stone age, like he was an animal. No. Widespread was not having any of what he termed the shambolic race-hate stuff based on white people’s perception. This was not how Cause the empire man saw himself. You had to think about yourself as having successful dreams, of having too much money to splash around, of being a big-time provider, to get away from these moments of racialised induced family dramatisation. Vapourise the hate off the radar.
Cause flicked off the well-honed switch involving himself with the run-of-the-mill mindlessness family drama wasting his energy. When he switched off like this, he was like the man in the Bible, a focused man with a plan for saviour-ing a lot of Christian donkeys needing to be fed, handled and whatnot for building the conglomerate model that created x, x, x black millionaires. Well! Put it this way, it would be impossible to count the scoresheets of rich Aboriginal people and it was majestically more special to own this level of accomplished absenteeism, which just meant having the ability to look dismissively at Tommyhawk’s latest round of antics, or tantrums, or whatever else the fascist kid’s annoying behaviour consisted of, by remarking into his chin, with the coldest, flattest, hardest voice, some general mantra about the hardiness of the local universalism, which was that, He will get over it in the end.
Everybody got to die. That was a matter of fact. You don’t need brains to work that one out. Who was too frightened to die? Nobody in this place. Everyone in the world knew that they were going to die sometime and have their troubles finished with, but Aboriginal Sovereignty was only becoming a young man. New time coming with old time. Why he gone and die for?
The word of all words spread quickly, and it felt as though a secret inquiry was happening about something very serious that had gone wrong in Praiseworthy. Those hundreds of noisy myna birds guarding the place from the rooftops, began hyper-shrilling well before dawn. It felt as though an eternity of fledglings had been lost! The racket never stopped for one moment, while in the darkness the birds jumped about on the ground and through the trees, signalling back and forth the ultimate call in the language for danger that shot across family grounds spreading thousands of kilometres over ancestral country. Oh! Nobody had ever felt such grief of the myna bird’s deafening wailing blanket covering the land with echoes in all faraway directions. Then of all things, the haze collapsed in a sigh under its own sorry weight, and nearly suffocated half the town as it squeezed its heavy humidified air through every nostril in Praiseworthy. All the alarm sirens buzzed through its heart as the lungs of the town began to collapse, before the haze managed to drag its haloed dome back up in the atmosphere, and the darkened omnipresence cloud just sat there, as though looking for something while touching into the death sense of all things.
Everyone knew the world had changed by breakfast time. All the sad news was rocketing around town, and pumping that much blood through all those old broken hearts now beating quick time sticks about the insolubility of the mystery. Aboriginal Sovereignty’s odd suicide coincided with a dead gum moth’s winged eyes staring from the ground in the front of every door, and every place. Then they noticed, when looking out to see whether the favourite view of country was still there, which was generally a relaxing thing to do first thing in the morning before the passion of the day eroded with troubles, the absence in the view signalled that the trouble had already begun. In the omnipresence haziness, it looked like there was an even greater halo sitting over the top of the haze dome squatting over Praiseworthy. There seemed no longer to be a straight view of their world. Haste came next. With no time to waste, everyone who had an iPhone got busy expanding some exposé or other about the density of the haze to any bureaucrat on the Australian Capital Hill etc., about those things, I ought to tell you, of what I think you ought to know about those donkeys of Cause Steel causing things like this to happen, in a fervent chat, chat, chat about the inexplicable, of what nobody knew, about yet another mystery to deal with in these times of hardship, when nothing one wished for ever came true.
When phone calls as usual generally failed to change the world order with acts of decency and justice, it left all these local Praiseworthy people running around in circles, and crazy crying. The wrecked world became undone. The debilitating spirit-killing humidity that had been long tolerated, now seemed far too severe to endure. These people became nothing in their minds. They appeared to be like ghosts in the eyes of the myna birds. The long-sustained cooing of the bronzewing pigeon watching from the distance while searching for seed in the stubble grass, only saw the human spirit in a sheen of transparency that it did not like. The bird watched these ashen grey ghost people with bare feet moving through the russet-red-hazed covered landscape. All the mourners were dressed in ash-covered t-shirts and shorts, wearing sunglasses, straw or cloth hats, or their old land rights caps, and had dollops of white sunblock cream smeared over the nose like ceremonial paint, and some of the ladies were carrying fat babies on the hip, while others were kicking the shinbones of the people in front of these processions, and the grasshopper plague jumping out of the way, some to the left, others to the right. And if you looked behind, these people were followed by legends of bare-chested ghost kids in shorts with bare feet scattering in all directions over the countryside, who were yelling o-ware, we are going to tell on you. The half-wild ash-covered ghost dogs chased everything in sight. Dead butterflies. Ants. Cause Steel’s donkeys hit by cars roaming around looking for donkeys to kill. Along the periphery, colossal numbers of spirit pussycats with kittens went stampeding through the summer dry grass along with the melee, and soon the whole stubble grass plain fell over, and was flattened to the ground.
Run, run on, moving quicker through the steamy haze resting heavy over the spinifex grass, while the ghostly grey people flashed by with odd glimpses of red or ice pink among sprinklings of silver stars, blue unicorns in the snow, and striped PJs. It looked like a stampede of colour hued by ash that was spreading in all directions through the grass and among the riparian jungle of smoggy Praiseworthy. The glue of humanity was becoming unstuck here, breaking loose from a moment of thought that rolled and flew into another level of spirituality from hearing the sound of ancestors crying. All memories were being weighed together in the land of eternal life, then wait a moment, listen?
This was no good neither, when the racket of grey ghosts’ panic through the grass woke the spirit country. The lever was pulled. Every resting ancestor that had ever existed on this place was awoken from eternal sleep, rising up from their resting places in country, and assembling their powers in a deep trough forming an atmospheric weather phenomenon in the enormity of its build-up. The denser the air became, the more the country grew hostile, until finally, all the grey ghosts felt this was the end of the world coming in the grass, and they scattered. The place went really haywire after that. The brindle grey pussycats ran for their life from the fright of having their fur coats singed and smoked by the electrified air, and they all but disappeared from the face of the Earth with every dog, brindle, spotted, or one variety of colour, running with shivers down their backs.
Once those spirit storms created out of this freak weather were on the hunt, it was not easy to put them back into their resting places. Their stories were countless, too epical to be recalled right there and then by an inconsequential human mind. The charge in the air was too powerful, and as the almighty creature of electrical storms moved through country a weather system was developing with it, gigantic dark clouds spinning with lightning and thunder like a colossal war taking place through the sky. From every point of the atmosphere, from horizon to horizon, continuous lightning bolts charged across the sky, or struck the ground. A million lightning strikes, mularrijbi, full cheeky—kijibaji—that ploughed in and out of country, struck tree, rock, anywhere, same place bang-bang once, twice, and three times, each lightning bolt ripping a tree trunk straight out of the ground. Trees for kilometres around were ripped apart. The thunder roared like a freight train through every human soul in search of Aboriginal Sovereignty. Soon enough, all the emotion was bolted, superglued together into one big hell of a problem for Praiseworthy. In all of this havoc, it was a dry storm, and not one drop of rain fell from the sky.
Voices, come one at a time—a bit sneaky at first, then becoming more and more brave by the score—and claimed that no blame for Aboriginal Sovereignty leaving their traditional lands could be laid at their feet. Praiseworthy feet were not the feet of community-minded people anymore. They were the pure feet of individuals who were separating themselves from country saturated with cooing bronzewing pigeons repetitively droning ceremonies going on all day throughout the territory. They wanted to break from all of this guttural grief. Life, it was felt, was for moving on. Everyone needed to break free. Break the link to legacy after that freak electrical storm tried to murder everyone in the whole place. Yes, they all needed to assimilate faster now—accelerate the thing to be done with it, by seeing themselves as becoming the more individually oriented people of the current era forced upon them by the mainstream living on the oldest continent in the world of Aboriginal Sovereignty, by resurrecting and dragging the era of the colonialist which should have been long dead, back into the future. Got all that? the Major Mayor Ice Pick said. He was now being heard as the one true voice of the higher ground, berating that he had been telling them to assimilate for years, and saying to the ash-covered people he would be teaching them to save themselves by speaking better English in the future like white city people. And Praiseworthy people began noticing the way that they spoke English, and felt self-conscious because they could not hear the white piousness of superiority in their own voices which they felt were inferior, and how they did not sound like a Church bishop asking the brethren, Why were young people committing suicide here? They then hardly spoke what they called their backward English anymore, nor would they speak their own language so it would die out forever.
In the best English then, Why here, and why us, and why not somewhere else where they do not have the same troubles as us? Every day, these were the inexplicable questions in English that droned on like the pigeon’s song everybody wanted to escape from hearing all day. But every person on every street up and down Praiseworthy found that it was not easy to assimilate into white Australia no matter how much you wanted to be reborn white. They simply remained speaking in the same old monotone of the pigeon droning, which was like listening to their own continuous grief.
There was nobody in the world who would be able to deny the fact that Praiseworthy children were disappearing like flies in the eyes of their numb-minded families, and to the point where there was no longer enough despair to go around. There was never any time to recover emotionally from the death of one child, before something else happened, because another, and then another child was gone forever, taken from the midst of a grief yet to be diminished, that would never be extinguished.
What more? More kids dying? While heads were hurting to find more reasons than you could poke a stick at about why Aboriginal Sovereignty committed suicide like all the other children, nothing was resolved. You would hear talk about suicidal thoughts in every house as you walked through every street—about what was the use of anyone living anymore—trilling so loudly over the top of a plague of cicadas shrilling through thousands of kilometres of bushlands in late summer, that you felt as though you were going deaf. It was there, even by the end of the day, when everyone had clearly exhausted themselves from hearing their own echoing voices destroying what it meant to be alive, it remained a mystery about how Aboriginal Sovereignty had disappeared from the face of the earth. Perhaps if you were the kind of person who thought of hope, perhaps then he was only nearly finished, half-finished, and was floating somewhere in the sea, or perhaps, he was an already finished kind of hope, and on the floor of the ocean rolling in the currents. This hope thing was the almost conspiratorial tone of voice in which people began claiming that nothing was a fact yet. Nobody had seen his body dragged out of the sea. Had they? Or, washed up on the beach. True. All that could be said about what was factual or not, was that suicide was a real killer of young people with wrong ideas sitting in their bodies.
Then this big mob of grief-stricken dust-anointed people gazing upwards into the skies with the tears salting around their eyes, these dynasties called out to the greatest non-ecumenical ancestral beings of all in this country to tell them why Aboriginal Sovereignty had gone away, and why no one had seen that shamefaced Aboriginal Sovereignty dead or alive for weeks. They said he better not be dead wherever he had gone. They also said that someone had better find that boy even if he was feeling no good because this was the place where everybody felt no good, so their Aboriginal Sovereignty had better come back.
Praiseworthy wanted the boy to come home, even if white laws thought that paedophilia was rampant in their community, and Australia thought they were all paedophiles. We turned secret people now, they sang to their ancestral creation beings governing the country, even though they said nothing was changed in the all times law, and they only saw themselves as just the ordinary people from each family, camp, or house. They said to the ancestors, We are asking you because you are more powerful than the boss God of Australian people who wanted to take away Aboriginal Sovereignty, want to kill him dead, break his heart, just because he was a boy believing he was in love.
In the paedophilia era of belief running through the mind of national Australia, the story was that everywhere you looked in an Aboriginal community you would find a paedophile. Aboriginal people went skyrocketing crazy about this lie, because everyone was starting to believe that they were either a paedophile, or had been a paedophile sometime in their lives. Police came into their homes looking for paedophiles, and the whole town went through each other’s homes searching for the paedophiles and could not find any, and being people who could see what was not there, found it very challenging that they could not find a black paedophile. The army came looking for abused children in every house, and the old aunties cried: Why are you asking me about that? Don’t ask me. Shame. Stay right away from this place.
The whole place burned with heat, and it felt as though there was an invisible fire raging in the haze, while everyone ended up running themselves ragged round the clock to try to sort something out, to help them find Aboriginal Sovereignty. Everyone felt as though they had been changed for the worse and could not understand what was happening to them anymore. Who were they? They did not know, nobody knew. That was except for a few of the upper echelons, the sceptic types, the powerhouse, strung to Ice Pick. He was cool as a cucumber and continued on as usual, making plans about how the brethren should live, drinking an espresso coffee while sitting around in a darkened, freezing air-conditioned clean-air filtered office down at the Praiseworthy shire council. First, he thought, Every man, woman and child should want Aboriginal Sovereignty to die. Second: The take-away line was—why should Aboriginal Sovereignty live on forever? He thought it was becoming a summer of hell. The heat grew stronger and lasted longer and his gold Christmas beetle looked like it was not coming again this year. The sun poured down every day for months. The hologram of himself had not deterred the dust dome that continued to squat over Praiseworthy. And the record-breaking humidity grounded everything with a mud-coated lethargy that crippled all clear-headed thinking in either an overcrowded house, or in a shack. No one ever imagined it would be like this. What’s that? Where we got to run about solving mysteries while we were already being driven mad in the mystery of this heat? Well! The whole of Praiseworthy rang one bell of agreement about this. What do you think we are to be able to fix this? The Major Mayor said he was not superman—you know. On the other hand, the deadened in the brain people said that nobody could think straight about how Aboriginal Sovereignty became lost somewhere out in the sea at a time when so many other children were committing suicide by drowning in the sea, and nobody knew why. Why they had become adrift! Lost their footing, whatever did that mean?
Prayers were on fire, and the ashes fall far and wide across the lands of Aboriginal Sovereignty. The whole place had become giddy in its devotion to off-grid religions, and there were now not many feet planted squarely on the ground that were not willing to hear some kind of angelic message lecturing them about letting bygones be bygones and other stuff about generosity towards the villain, because the every person had almost overnight been called upon by the holy, accompanied by harps, organs and violins in either this way, or that foreign belief to create a stampede, in a complete, full on in toto race towards accomplishing one’s own self-style assimilation—by practising like a rabid trainee in how to become a chosen one. It was profoundly incredulous, and difficult to understand the all-knowing, and the all-grabbing apparatus that came along for the ride, and which generously included visions, such as the plentiful and bountiful appearances of angels flying about the place of the ancestral spirits. Was there a traffic jam in the skies of the spirit war zone? Perhaps, or perhaps everyone just wanted to become a fast-paced prophet—a reincarnation of gabble, the TV preacher, and perhaps temporarily, thought of abandoning the old laws of country. Never mind! These new-style, all-swinging rah-rah churches of Praiseworthy, were very fashionable for the times, and pleasing for any eye to see, the choice of multitude holy places enriching their fabric and even camouflaging the old laws. And then, no one knew for sure how such a terrible thing of losing their Aboriginal Sovereignty in the sea could have happened in the first place, since they had forgotten how something like this had already been happening frequently with the other little children who went into the sea and never returned alive, never came home in time for dinner ever again. They were too caught up in wondering about other things now, like the dazzle of spirit force generated in the multifariousness of so many churches erected around themselves, where every second house had become a place of worship, a temple or shrine to one or another worldwide religious belief.
In the world of the new spellbound, many were hooked on the choral Gloria in Excelsis Deo storming the surrounds of this part of the planet, and it was hard to notice the commonplace skies clapping and thundering and lightning as usual in spirit talk about something else. It was exciting to believe that it was only a matter of time before this new communal prayer would be tweaked to perfection, then there would be real miracles happening about the place. The wish was for something small at first—a nightmare-free sleep—and then eventually, if the small wishes came true, the prayer would be built up in a more substantial way, for more focused miracles, such as the miraculous lifting of the haze blocking a clear view of what lay ahead, and to cool their part of the planet substantially, not that they were expecting blizzards, but perhaps less crippling fires, prolonged droughts killing everything, inferno bushfires all over the place, and widespread flooding that does not turn cattle into fish. This would be the end of being barraged with unwanted miracles that smelt like the rot of long-dead fish or feral donkeys infesting the beach. Yes, it was difficult to decide what would be a real miracle when so many miracles were needed. But people had to decide what was most needed in their new religious belief in miracles, where hoping for a wish to come true out of the blue might be granted, from the mere goodness of oneself as a new type of God person.
The sound of multiple bells ringing in the dust-hazed air could be heard through the streets, under the streetlights, and down by the seaside, and so too were the holy men’s blessed ghetto-blasters mixing the jive in ministering goings-on through long marathons of preaching. The quick smart became ultra-competitive while rattling their fusible pedagogues with the contemptuous cacology of devotional language. Each tongue bore its rattling on about how their own particular faith church’s glory light was blazing more divinely from the will of the Almighty, or the Holy Ghost, in a more holy and legit way than any other fake God person’s gammon churchy thing that did not belong in Praiseworthy. These mighty sermons were either praised or damned by a floating congregation spreading itself around like dust and leaf litter in the haze, or by one drop of rain, for that was all you will get from the greatest ancestral creators summoning up a thousand-year drought, and people ran from one church to another while calling for more miracles! It was a full focus of vision heavenly storming while whispering devotedly in a bonanza of madness for divine faith to ward off evil from the old fog dust hell in which they all lived, and begging for the return of Aboriginal Sovereignty from the sea.
More and more houses were emptied of their occupants to placate the insatiable demand for churches to administer mass to the masses in their growing desire to be versed in every religion on Earth, and it was not unusual to see these little churches groaning with congregations of a particular devotional deity or belief. And while it remained very popular to create a glut of churches to saturate Praiseworthy with holiness, still more would be erected from bits of scrap timber and any piece of whatnot lying around the place that could be used to build some kind of structure that you could call a church. Oh! Silent night was a thing of the past. Any joy a child had of listening to the sea from a seashell covering the ear was now a thing of the past too, for while the days never ended in hearing the holy toil of bogie clerics sweating it out in the worse-than-drought heat with hammers bashing nails in warlike efforts to out-construct the enemy churches, every other church’s fancy makeshift cathedrals housing pulpits were reaching further skyward, and surpassing gravity at twenty or thirty feet high, or even higher just to be closer to heaven, by reaching outside of the haze dome to be surrounded by ethereal clouds, which would be far higher than the high-rise central business district of Hong Kong, but would bring the devotional closer to the source of the holiness of these adopted religions—some that created unimaginable amounts of money from the local black man’s land—but if you reached for heaven, you needed to capture this pile of money that should have been yours, so why complain? This flight for building higher than the clouds for church men to find the spirit level was possibly at the altitude of a Qantas Boeing 737 flying at break-speed at about forty-one thousand feet, or whatever it takes to stay that high.
Well! It was not an unremarkable desire—of wanting to reach for heaven where the air was pleasant, with an acuity acquired from having right faith—if you wanted to avoid toppling over, say, on ground baked by the morning sun. This was the reason why, very quickly, everyone thought that they would like to have ultra-extra wishes granted, for them to quickly reach the great heights and leave behind the mess of the overheated world. The question was though, which faith was the best, and where could a church man go to pray higher than the average human ego? How could a person of human weakness be removed from the other weak throng, so to speak, to become ethereal, which was anyone’s guess about what was the optimum height of preaching and saving yourself though a heavenly life, one that was far more extraordinary than sweating it out without money to pay for electricity to run the air-conditioner in the orb-like heating facility of global warming over Praiseworthy.
So, it felt wise to be elsewhere, somewhere nice in a temperature-controlled environment granted with extra value, for this heaven had extra dials on the switchboard to suit every wish, including to exile all racist context in this new world. Then being right up there at the height of holy work, you could be clearly seen in the atmosphere like a ghostly angel casting a Mount Sinai type of cool shadow over the haziness from any angle across the flat landscape of Praiseworthy. And you know what, church duty mattered whether of orthodox or unorthodox gods, and Ice Pick, the big God man Major Mayor of Praiseworthy, checked the sound levels regularly for he needed to hear the medley of screaming devoutness at perfect pitch. Fervour up, he insisted on his rounds to the Pope-like people of religious all-sorts, Get that deaf haze to hear the word of Praiseworthy. There must have been a hundred preachers at this stage, and with more wannabes coming behind to join the megaphoning of daily preaching with battery-charged PA systems connected together through umpteen metres of sun-frayed and half-buggered grey or yellow plastic extension cords plugged into an extravaganza of power boards connected to the mains of a coin-operated—pay as you go—meter box that was hooked up to the mega-rich state’s power grid—long resourced from the minerals that came off Aboriginal land for a song, and that guzzled up the pension money hand over fist of poor people @ $20 here, $5 there for an electric bulb to shower a single light for intergenerational families of thirty or more to share, until the money ran out.
Preachiness now claimed the region of the top notch, and with earplugs on, and microphones blasting, dream sermons reached the ad finem right on the stroke of 45C plus—going on to 55C at noon, and a sea of index fingers pointed to the sun as though it was God, while a chain of drawn-out echoes sailed the air mail to the man above to remove the haze making us vomit, and return Aboriginal Sovereignty to us.
The will of God was not accepted, and the brethren were not getting over the loss of their own son. Amidst a plethora of preachers, the angry faith seekers eventually lost sight of the promise of paradise, and began arguing among themselves about how to be holy. Thunder roared, and the ten million lightning strikes that filled the skies and struck trees and electricity poles fused all the wiring, and everyone was without any type of power. The church podiums went up in flames while moths and butterflies whizzed wildly through the fiery grass chasing each other in an obstacle course through the masses of churches flying away through the wind, and the arraying splashes of holiness quenched nothing across the vast flatlands, for not one single drop of rain fell on the ground. The haze remained solid in drought, and it did not pay to hear the heated arguments up and down the streets, or along the footpaths, and in the tumbling-down remains of the all-visible makeshift churches that had sprung up like weeds in the front yards. Rocks were thrown about while analysing what had happened to Aboriginal Sovereignty, and where was Cause Steel anyway, Shouldn’t he be here to look for his son, not leaving it all up to people here to do what he should be doing himself instead of chasing donkeys around the countryside?
The lost sea brethren swayed together teary-choked, and cha-cha’d between all the creeds and dominations—souls were up for grabs, and they went to seances to send another load of messages to Aboriginal Sovereignty, to tell him to return from the dead, for this killer blow was a blow too far. The befuddled asked, Why would Aboriginal Sovereignty suddenly decide that life was not worth the living, and immediately want to kill himself? And why disappear without trace, not to be given a proper community burial where everyone could have grieved together over something? His body had to be found, and this was what the brethren wanted the church men to pray for, and for once, to at least try to make people’s wishes come true.
You want church people burying Aboriginal Sovereignty? You got to be kidding me. Ice Pick, being the Major Mayor with key responsibilities about running the show and orchestrating everybody else’s business in the likelihoods from the humane to the economical, thought hard and fast about what to do. No. 1, he pondered about what a normal person wanted when they died. But no. 2, he was not sure whether Aboriginal Sovereignty would want a church burial. Or, even! Even! If he was really dead, since you know he was in trouble with the police people, and perhaps he was just hiding, lying low somewhere out in the sea for instance. He might even return to Praiseworthy waterlogged, or come back looking like a ghost, or perhaps he went to live with all those ghost people dwelling about the place and one of them might come back like a human pretending to be someone else, or he might come back in the form of his totem, which of course, Ice explained, would exclude his own totem, the missing golden Christmas beetle.
Now there were vicious rumours floating though Praiseworthy, even though telling fake stories was against the Major Mayoral editio princeps, a book hefty in edicts of legal jargon that had been dragged by the wheelbarrow through the slimmest adit, pumping out his laws into the atmosphere from the gold mine of imaginings from a diehard living in Ice Pick’s personal mind, and so, once fired into the open air, contaminated it in perpetuity. Gold! Gold! Gold! This! was gold. That was gold. Well! It was all gold, which Ice claimed originated through a chain of osmosis made of gold connecting the great men of the most powerful countries on the modern Earth, on how to run a place.
Then someone who had an original thought that was unguided, un-coerced, or un-polluted by Ice Pick said, what if someone had actually found the body in the ocean, and had snuck away with it in the middle of the night? That person was shouted down, You are a stranger to us. There were too many of these what-ifs in a time of perpetual overpowering grief, and the only way to deal with the ordeal of losing Aboriginal Sovereignty was to build more churches, until there were just too many ramshackle and humpy churches built on stilts where the multi-denominational oracles could look out over the top of the masses, and far over the mudflat horizon, to pluck the angels from the sky that were carrying holy messages of preachiness for the masses, but not for nothing. This was the space. The ocean. This was where the oracles were imaginatively frog-paddling around in the waves to come up with some answers by foreseeing otherworldly things happening, like people stealing bodies. Story emanated everywhere from the countless denominations with pulpits now reaching further up into the sky, and this was where church men sat like lifesavers who saw everywhere, whether seeing or not, the obstacles preventing the recovery of the body. They demanded Ice Pick, as the Major Mayor thing, to launch a full-scale investigation into the reasons why they were being prevented from showering full magnificence in the burying of Aboriginal Sovereignty once and for all. The oracles bemoaned that Ice Pick should be combing the whole sea, sieving and draining the ocean until the body was found, and then Aboriginal Sovereignty should be buried full-stop in the local cemetery in a proper grave, dug six feet deep, and the name never mentioned again.
In the end though, a full-house, mass-oracle-styled consensus was reached. This was achieved only after the haziness of Praiseworthy began to spin uncontrollably in a phenomenal tear-jerker. The high-pitched and totally marvellous operatic performance was beautifully curated and edited, squeezed into a hyperventilating hour, preventing the solemnity of anyone having to be tied up in songs for months. The church men and women said we were modern now, and the urgency of the monumental situation required everything to be assembled in haste, you needed to think like a government trying to cover up the severity of a pandemic being a killer of millions when they said, You just have to learn to live with it. And in any case, the leading church men and women were guided by Ice Pick’s thought processes, and this was important, otherwise the whole thing would have been strangled to an inch of its life very quickly.
The haste in the haze opera consisted of at least fifty finger-pointing choirs. Not one chorister was able to sing a note of foreign hymns in tune, but they were conscripted nevertheless as volunteers to each of the churches, the ones with plenty of congregation, and the others that were not that popular because of their weirdo beliefs going too far off the scale of normality, and were a bit of a one-horse turnout anyway, and could not be equally represented in a truly democratic manner. So! The choirs sang churchy prayers without any musical finesse and that was fine enough. It was enough that their voices filled the air with a repetitive guttural moaning of great bewilderment and wonder, while accompanying a serious number of ghetto-blasters blasting in sync Vienna Philharmonic orchestral music of a Strauss waltz on the ABC. The epical song prayer could only be translated by the old people as being about beseeching the foreign Lord—not the true creator of their world—to give mercy while they were screaming at the bored-to-the-eyebrows children to behave like normal people, and while elbowing other enthusiasts undeserving of one of the holy seats in the front rows where the elders should sit, to get out of the way from the contaminated singers. You should have heard those plague cicadas humming in the bush for miles around and poisoning the decibel of the foreign music. The tenors went wild. The lyricist who was on a hotline to Ice Pick who stayed at home cross-communicating with the spirit of the golden beetle, was given permission to compose more glorious lines on the spot to be ruined by the untalented throng. Yet the crowd was ecstatic. People flocked to the stage like fans at a rock concert. Everyone wanted to become a tenor with adoring fans, and even Johann Strauss the second may have seen the whole shebang a bit differently too, if he had to compose a waltz for the hell haze created by the Enlightenment, instead of dreaming about how to create a stylistic music inspired by slow-running Blue Danube river-tinkling water type of music.
Then in the stifling heat, the Praiseworthy fiery sopranos, the Ice Queens, frocked in brightly coloured cotton kaftans purchased from free trade shops in Darwin, ran across the stage singing Hell-a-lu-yah here, and Hell-a-lu-yah there. The women sent the whole rowdy spectacle crazy, and the bush world became pyromaniacal. A strange thing happened from the allurement of their pitched crying, and their waving around of dried-up branches or spinifex grass balls of fire in the breeze with live embers flying everywhere. The haze blew apart. Dragon serpents sprouted in the clouds. They flew across the skies with fire-tailed meteor showers trailing behind them. The natural world thought that it was buggered. All the birds and bush animals, insects, dogs, cats, rats and lizards fled for their lives, because sooner than anyone could scream fire, there were wildfires burning uncontrollably all over the place. And! Golly, you know what? A spectacle of fire the like of never seen before was created from pure haze, in this operatic performance of begging somebody or something to return Aboriginal Sovereignty to Praiseworthy.
A kind of shell-shocked awesomeness descended upon the throng. It was the first time they had ever seen fireballs of such velocity and intensity, and they said it felt like the fire era had been fast-tracked on steroids, and had been piled up all together right above them of all people, while they could do nothing but stare upwards in wonder at the haze on fire. Everyone felt the enormousness was too much, and that this total strangler of an opera was far beyond any comprehension, and they were relieved that it finished, and not a moment too soon, for the spirit of the thing was enough to make you jump quick smart out of the way when you saw smoke rising from the ground, and airlessness that made you gasp. Yes, all this. But it was this true type of hype that made the whole town go bananas, of feeling alive and crazy with rhythm, with what felt like having your brain blown apart which was fabulous, for the rapturous thing about being engaged in this new-fangled holy opera business in these local churches, was pure gold, it was a watershed.
It was a blockbuster that sucked the oxygen straight out of the air and starved the brain. This pollution crusher was later talked about for years and remembered to the death by the multitudes who were there, who said it was memorable, but in a belly-up kind of way, and claimed that Cause Man Steel had stolen the show in his asthenia. He was blamed for stealing the body that could not be found. And, they wanted to know how he did that, the trickery, and when would anyone know when they would see Widespread facing the music that they all had to endure. Somehow, it was still a mystery for the righteous people standing on the higher ground where you could reach to the sky and engage the angels to do the specialised investigative work, for fact was fact, candles were lit, lanterns shone, and every piece of artificial illumination was dragged onto the streets of the churches to light up the ash-filled skies spinning with angels for the finale of the reality opera.
Yep! The light shone on the dodgy shark with his get-rich schemes. Who else, it was assumed, would be stupid enough to go wading around a dark stormy sea of sixty thousand lightning strikes in the middle of the night among the man-killer sharks? The spotlight was shining straight on someone thinking he could make some money out of selling the remains of their Aboriginal Sovereignty to a foreign museum, to be displayed in a case with a sign: Aboriginal Sovereignty: The last of his world. Did he think he could actually set up his transport conglomerate with that type of money? The people’s cash? Nobody thought Cause Man Steel should be spiriting Aboriginal Sovereignty away from others in his community. They did not say he could do that, stealing what was rightfully their right, and robbing the lament from Praiseworthy. You would have thought that a museum would have paid him a lot of money for something so precious and irreplaceable as their Aboriginal Sovereignty. The whole horrible atrocity became the scenario of what went down out there in the sea. The men went back to the sea to bring in the big fish, and there were people that had remembered saying at the time, that when they were under those cyclone clouds and the dry-storming ancestor began howling, it felt like a voice from heaven was saying to them: All this grief. So much outpourings about the theft of the body of Aboriginal Sovereignty. The fishermen went into their bundle of churches focused more on the sea, and while watching the swinging of the smoking thurible that was altering their age-old beliefs, wondered whether the fish they caught with their own labour would be enough for men to eat in this day and age. Was it worth it, I mean, the money he got paid for it?
The heartbroken haze crying for Aboriginal Sovereignty disturbed the hot season butterflies. The jaded wings of the pretty kulibibi were flicking open and shut, fanning in a whiling stillness to cool themselves while clinging to the holy statues in the cemetery. Time passed by slowly like an everlasting raga played to sweeten the prolonged drought sulking in the haze. There, across the cemetery, the butterflies slept on the stiffened leaves of hill-sized oleander hedges, while others hung limply on the ropey vines cultivated along corrugated iron walls, creeping in and out of the windows, and onto the roof of Cause Steel’s illegal house, while other small ground butterflies—the grass yellows—were resting in muddy puddles beside the graves.
In a strange awakening of ancestors bristling by, a slight breeze touched this stillness in the country, and touched one by one the hatching of black-and-white winged common crow butterflies on the oleanders, and they began spreading their unstuck wings, and then after a while, were lifting themselves from the silver chrysalis, and took flight. Up into the air, they began dancing their long butterfly ceremony that they had brought with them from ancient times. The air became electrified with the slight approaching sounds of a grasshopper, or the black-dotted and snow-coloured winged white butterfly, and the white-eye ghost butterflies that had left their ant friends caring for their larvae in the spinifex where journeying leaves travelled over the ground in a breeze, and the dry inland lizard’s weight snapped a twig, or a sudden whorl of wind lifted the dust from the riparian jungle vines covering the bush country of the coastal pandanus and mangroves. The rustle sent the gathering of migrating caper whites to take flight from the moving leaf litter, and they went fluttering high in the sky where the clouds joined countless other butterflies—the awls, swifts, darters—a mixture of black, white, yellow and tiny brown grass butterflies. More slips of colour were carried away in the flowing dust above the graveyard and joined a sky-borne butterfly kaleidoscope of swirling, dizzy spiralling wings flitting higher into the thermals to join the search of the vast flock of screeching white cockatoos and other birds—myna birds, eagles, ducks, and the bush animals—marsupial mouse, water rat, flying fox, python, gecko, frog and wallaroo, and over there, the fish in the sea, in the search for the lost soul of Aboriginal Sovereignty taken from country.
In their endless chasing after the lost soul of Aboriginal Sovereignty around the souring heatwave inside the haze dome, the butterflies found Dance Steel instead. The ghost moth-er was wearing the drab mothy regalia of blanket grey that she habitually flung around herself. While the butterflies danced in zigzagged rings around her, she stood motionless, where she had remained like a statue in the backyard of her home since the loss of her family, staring at the rusty tin place that Widespread had built smack-bang in the middle of the cemetery that he had claimed was his traditional spirit country, and where he had whacked a Native Title claim over it, and had made sure he excluded the rest of his kindred buried under their feet. Everyone knew that it was sad times. A lot of the old people said they could not wait to die soon enough because of this Native Title stuff-up. Bring it on, they said with a general finale humph signalling no more should be said after their last word on this matter. Their wish was only for one thing to happen after they died, to become a wracked soul buried in the contested graveyard to settle the matter of who belonged where, and to enmesh themselves further in one hell of a long death struggle dispute with this cheat fellow trespassing on their spirit home, to make sure there would never be any resolution to the matter for all of eternity for the misery it had caused them in life. Let thy will be done, and make sure they said, that their body was buried in a neat hole, not some slack-arse two-foot hole, but a proper deep six-foot hole in the ground, and they did not care how hard it was to dig a hole like this, because they knew the difficulties of a long war that would last forever, and they ordered, put me somewhere in the disputed cemetery, where they would remain forever in close vicinity to the fake Native Title claimant, to be able to jump quicker out of the grave at night without having to walk too far to his humpy thing, without the aid of a walking stick that living people used, so that they would not waste any of the solar energy firing up their haunting the shit out of the stealer of their land, electrocuting him good and proper while he was in his sleep every night for the rest of his life, and, then, when he finally died, the final part of their death wish was that the Native Title thief would be put into a really shallow hole next to mine, where they would be able to jump right into his grave next to theirs on a nightly basis, to kill him straight out properly over and over and over with all of the weaponry in their stash of cut-throat sharpened axes, spears, fighting sticks and other such-like killer weapons taken to their grave with them, to ensure one thing as a lesson to all hijackers of Native Title, black or white, that this final blow for justice for all, would be done.
The last breath beseeching that their remains be buried lock, stock and barrel, which only accounted for their body as a sovereign citizen right, was catchy, and many who wanted to fast-track the way to the spirit world, could not wait to develop the business interests—shares if you like—against Widespread’s sacrilegious donkey transport conglomerate business venture that this global player had established in the graveyard. We will make it all wreck and ruin for him was an honourable pledge to be taken to the grave—far cheaper than a bullet, and to face a white court with a murder charge, because in the end it was seriously about jeopardising Widespread’s success forever by giving him some justice for his feral animals contaminating a sacred place. We will be like a gang of ghosts he can’t see. We will kill all the grass, the weeds, the lot. Nothing will grow for Widespread. We will turn that place into ground zero. A proper spectacle. Poison the lot. The donkeys were eating all the artificial flowers that were supposed to be for the deceased people. Donkeys had destroyed all the twinkling solar fairy lights that made night look beautiful for country. Donkeys kept knocking down the crosses that kept the devil away, and were trampling the ornaments in their hee-hawing fights, and what was more, all the trampling around at night in close proximity to personal graves, was disturbing the dead people’s right to have eternal peace.
It was strange how great worlds of retribution and revenge were taking place in the everyday world and were never really noticed for what they were, as though they could never be undone, and as though it was an invisible monstrous cruel thing that would be breathed into the lungs of living people. And still, the butterflies’ flight continued, though marred and re-synced in the electrified haze around where the statue-stilled Dance Steel stood while waiting for the return of her family, and while the frizz of her greying hair sent shockwaves through the weather system. It was always a splendid thing to be like this, relatively free in the papery thin reaches of thoughts about beauty she might have seen sandwiched in the humid heaviness of problems plaguing the realities of her life. There was a lightness so waferish in her thoughts, that managed to float brilliantly above the mire that abounded in the land of the graveyard, as she kept watching the many-splendoured butterfly ceremonies of jade-edged wings buffeting on the hot thermals. Butterflies always leave, she thought. They flit, dip, rise, while entering and exploring worlds only open to their eyes. She saw the plateauing and rupturing in the dance, where following the movement of air, the whiffs of colour chased away in clouds. They were spell-casters, rapidly disappearing from sight untrained to follow butterflies on these endless flights to who knows where, to the end of a wet, muddy pond, to the mangrove flower close by, or a migration a thousand miles away in a journey so perilous in drought, the great firestorms, or the sudden floodwaters creating a vast inland sea, and she wondered if any would return to the spirit home.
If Dance let her mind spring back to reality, it was in knowing Widespread was never around. He was nowhere in sight on the Steel family’s ramshackle headquarters, so why were people blaming him for stealing Aboriginal Sovereignty’s body from the face of the Earth? He was not an ocean man. How would he even know where to find somebody in the sea?
So, once her ability to capture small sightings of beauty drifted away, the second important thing imprinted like a daily rallying cry in her brain belted out the question of, Why me. It was a simple question. Most other people personally asked why they had been singled out for bad luck sometime in their life, but why was she condemned to be loaded with these two words forever, superglued across her brain? Her eyes followed donkeys everywhere she looked, for it could not be otherwise when she was surrounded by donkeys, hemmed in by them every moment of the day, and while her eyes scanned across the cemetery, she might have wondered how on Earth she had ever got caught up with looking after somebody else’s mess in a perpetual battle of flogging a dead horse. The scale of the operation was enormous and out of control, way beyond her understanding and capacity to take on any responsibility for it, and this obvious lack of being superhuman made her feel in jeopardy of being able to handle her life, and unable to comprehend the year in and year out deal of having to defend every square inch of this earth full of graves of people she never knew, and plots for people who would go into their grave carrying their full hatred of her, and wondering why she continued to keep an eye for stealers of her husband’s multitude of penned and unpenned roaming donkeys on this tiny bit of land that was not even hers. And she may have thought why she was doing this for donkeys that seemed to loathe her, that instinctively moved away, kept a determined distance from her. Nothing in this life made sense to her. There was no obvious reason why she had to be the protector for his rights to own donkeys on land that was not legally theirs, just because she was there, while he was not.
It was very difficult to defend land that took energy to keep pumping blood through every heartbeat, just to keep mounting a superhuman drive to ward off all challengers whether dead or alive that were bent on evicting her family from the cemetery. If you could do nothing, perhaps it was better to hope for stillness, and in her statue-like pose, she resisted her obsession of counting heartbeats, every donkey heartbeat, years of heartbeats she had wasted on Widespread’s follies and promises of colossal wealth while her hands remained empty, and she had never seen even a few coins pass through them.
In the statue-pose, it was an all-out soul-balancing act on a tightrope over the multiple life-destroying precipices into which you could fall in a single day event, and where the total focus of balance became vital and life-saving, just to keep yourself from spinning off the skids. The war against falling was so mighty in her mind, she knew it would only take a momentary lapse of her full attention and concentration to make the difference between saving their old ancient Native Title land from becoming the intended Major Mayor Ice Pick’s spy base for a foreign superpower country like the USA, India, or China, or whatever else new scheme of endless possibilities that Widespread had drummed into her mind about what the weaselling scum Ice intended to do with our land, to prise it from under their feet. Yes, believe it, great love existed on earth, and a mighty love allowed Cause to indoctrinate Dance into believing that the cemetery was all that existed of their children’s homeland and it would remain special, for there was nowhere else on Earth like this place of the dead, and can’t you see, that all places of paradise no matter how large or small, must be defended with the full-smarts to the end of time. And it really had to be so, for no other place in the world existed when you only had eyes for the homeland.
The battering ram work of taking on all comers that threatened Widespread’s past, present, and future land of the great transport conglomeration needed to be left, right and centre of her mind even if it were a distant dream that she did not share. He had forewarned that their marriage was not a job of finesse, or for the faint-hearted, but more primed for a highly argumentative woman, to be willing and able to compete with every other angry soul when it came to the crunch, of having a husband like Widespread and defending his Native Title land. This was the kind of wife who would normally harp on for hours in favour of their defence to own what was rightfully theirs, and if that failed, further expressing herself with physical action, by throwing around her flighty arms to force home her beliefs.
Sometimes though, the theory of a dream became more about the desire of what one ought to be, rather than facing the reality of how anyone could be the wife of a man who was preparing for the collapse of the world through global warming with every inch of his being. Even the butterflies, mesmerised with her attempts to fly from her thoughts, knew where she was headed in the long run. The sun was beating down, and the butterflies copied Dance by sitting majestically like tiny statues on stems of dead grass, and became too paralysed to move. They were enthralled with being dead-like, copying the vibrating sound of her thoughts in their bodies, and returning a thousand renditions of the same continuous ancestor story sung over eternal time down the line to where they now sat in the dead grass, or in the mud, and drunk on their own willowing sounds of songs combining with all song for country.
The breeze turned, and Dance again heard the grieving operas that came from the platforms in the sky where the sermons were held for Aboriginal Sovereignty, and she stood like a ghost with her arms pinned down on her sides, like wings broken out of their chrysalis and still unable to become unstuck, and was unable to say a single word.
Only her thoughts continued to scatter with the bits and pieces of the opera, and were hitting against each other, but nothing made sense, and she thought that she had become mad, and the more she tried to move, the more frightened she became of thoughts clashing and accelerating with the opera, and it was impossible to speak. She felt immovable, like she had become a rock, and could bring no tears to roll from her eyes for Aboriginal Sovereignty. The families of the deceased continued to sit on their collapsible chairs outside the fence of the cemetery, to mourn from a distance because the place was a big pigsty overrun with dangerous feral donkeys, and when these folk saw her staring straight through them and into an unspecified location, they also stared back at her, and yelled from a distance that they were sorry for her loss.
Nobody sitting on the fold-up chairs knew, or understood if she had wanted to say something, and thought that perhaps she wanted to say nothing, because speechlessness was the only raw reality anyone could be expected to endure in the tragedy about losing Aboriginal Sovereignty. There was nothing that could ever be said about the pain of so great a loss. So, no one bothered to ask her where Aboriginal Sovereignty was buried, and even though they only came to the cemetery to see their relatives, they could not help it if the question was right on the tip of their tongues. They could see she was staring through the bush as though she was watching somewhere else but was unable to reach her moths and butterflies that were being pulled apart by the swirling dust, so they bit their tongues about asking her the question.
Up and down the streets the Praiseworthy holy assemblies argued the toss about which preachers were the best in the world, but they did not notice the kaleidoscopic spectacle of broken-winged lepidoptera filling the sky, flying higher into the troposphere. Both phenomena of the spirit were more to do with the strange mourning of Aboriginal Sovereignty’s unassimilable mother Dance Steel, than religiousness. Who was she anyhow, to be staring through people and out into space down at the people’s cemetery like she was putting herself above others? Never before, or even once, had she tried to act like a team player in this business of Aboriginal Sovereignty like a good Aboriginal citizen who was depending on everyone cheering together for each invented policy initiative by the Australian government for Aboriginal people. She did not know the name of the game. Compromise! Compromiser! You heard a lot of glibber spiel in Praiseworthy. It was good manners to believe what your illegal government for the Aboriginal people thought about Aboriginal people.
They asked only one thing: Why couldn’t she be like us? Well! One would try to figure the reason why Dance Steel, a woman who had nothing to speak about of herself, would not just accept facts, the home truths like everyone else obsessed by the world of government? They thought if the government of the day was obsessed with saying that Aboriginal people were flawed, then you needed to re-fashion yourself along with each and every government policy to create whatever model of Aboriginal people that Australians would be proud of by their degree of becoming white. But what was wrong with Dance Steel? Why would she not become a team player? She was not cricket. She had no idea what cricket was. This was the reason why she remained a nobody who did not know how to love Aboriginal Sovereignty in the way the government was teaching Praiseworthy to love their children. Now their Aboriginal Sovereignty was gone and it was her fault. She was just an awful woman—a mean cunt of a woman, so they blamed her. And now, nobody knew why the boy suicided because his mummy was just standing around like a statue, looking at the sky. This place retained its drought dryness. The dust haze hung everywhere like it was depressed. Dust stuck on everything. The air smelt of dust, then it was the time of the woeful racket over the death of Aboriginal Sovereignty in drought-stricken bush blooming with cicadas thrilling louder in this time of year.
Sovereignty! Come back my Sovereignty! In so much private grief, the droning mantra involving all of Praiseworthy was sung from sun-up to sun-down, conjuring up memory upon memory through a modern unending song cycle of having lived with Aboriginal Sovereignty, of a time when life was better than this. Around the clock everyone worked hard, and dozens of churches with mini-vans were rostered in a ceaseless concatenation of devotion that was so solid with holiness, you would have thought it was Rome, and the holy drivers were instructed to only pick up members of their specific denomination and drive them down to the cemetery to pray at the fence line, in the hope that their dead relatives might say something to them about how to find Aboriginal Sovereignty again.
So, congrats! Some congregants had made excuses to go and see their dead relatives in the cemetery, without even believing that the dead were going to say something to them. They were happy to test the power of their faith. The cross-infection by religious entryists attempting to infiltrate each other’s private new-style churches to destroy the holy inclusivism required by the collectivism of living inside a haze dome, needed to be weeded out. There could not be people coming along and trying to create their own individual entr’acte performances of what it means to be holy in the crisis of coming to terms with the loss of the most loved of all. That required one total holy communion to respond to all catastrophes, which could only be done by the church leaders for the good of all.
You could not have individuals going around saying they were sovereign individuals who were making up their own rules by breaking away from the established churches in a mini-van and acting selfish, by hoping to spot freshly dug earth themselves, or to act secretly, and so were sitting on the fold-up chairs outside of the cemetery, only to pry on that so-called mother, to see if she was still standing around looking like a horrible statue of herself. For of course she was, and that was the reason why you could not have congregants acting suspiciously and concerned with their own self-interest of being there for one thing alone, to pick up clues of where the body of Aboriginal Sovereignty was buried. They all wanted to be the first one to find the body, to return Aboriginal Sovereignty to Praiseworthy. The traitors continued to define the recovery of the body as the terms of their holiness, and the popularity of springboarding individualistic imaginings about Aboriginal Sovereignty’s death spread stories quicker over the land than the uncontrollable bushfires down south, up to the north, spreading all over the country by the sixty thousand flashes of lightning dry storm infestations from one summer to the next in this moment of time, when the speedily man-made warming planet went psycho.
The feat was beyond compare. Al di là del confronto. Incomparabilis! Aboriginal Sovereignty, who was barely noticed in life, now became praised more than anything else in Praiseworthy, and meant the world to all the arid-zone people of the haze dome. They did not even mind living in a slack shack of government failure if they could recognise Aboriginal Sovereignty as being all things, if only Aboriginal Sovereignty could be returned to them. All they said was that they were through with training to become strong fellas for better futures in the super shire town thing being built shit anyway. It was just a fanfare walk through the haziness of being a common man. They would rather be sovereign people of their own infinite culture. You should have heard the private talk. It was mad.
Copy! Properly sabi sabi way quick smart for these were top-shelf people. Copy! Open up thine eyes. No more listening to gammon talk about which way that dead boy was, whose name belong Aboriginal Sovereignty. Along this place, Praiseworthy, that boy Aboriginal Sovereignty was really related to all mother country, he was all the country. The number one stories for all the time—from immemorial times of true ancestral creators of country until now. Even the ghost heron’s cry was calling him country like country mob been doing that type of good remembering for many millenniums—forty, fifty, sixty thousand years, or five hundred thousand years, one million, nobody could count that many years, but maybe not too much years to count in this millennium though.
All copy, and the running-about people copying, what he up to that Aboriginal Sovereignty Steel to make him want to die? True fella way. Strong sea storm fella way. Big rain excellent fella way. Miracle man way. All way. More capable, more beautiful, far more dazzling smarter, like real smart and, oh! what was funny too—you should have heard him carrying on bang, bang, bang with the joking and making you laugh so hard, and making everyone think more positivity about what makes such a fabulous character that grows more scrumptious on hindsight in Praiseworthy.
Since he been dead though, he heaps more greater praise like a god, much more now than a dog full of ticks, and much more than all those parched-face, bony feral pussycat things running around on the highway that you would not give two frigs about. Those bony things with scabby lice fur thick with mange you see out there in the homelands of what the greenies call the wilderness. See them everywhere running along that bone-dry bitumen, and on the side of all those corrugated roads, which were that hot it got those cats’ hard paddy-paws more scorched, and limping along panting fast now, their tongues hanging out and eyes lolling around in their heads while they must have been dreaming about existential roadkill. He was more praised than that, or that dead boy’s little millennium brother Tommyhawk, who was the only Praiseworthy baby born in the drought of 2000 that brought all the bad luck to the place. The devil snuck up from hell with that one in his hand, and chucked the bugger clean straight into Praiseworthy, smack into the haze, because no other ghost in hell could stand the sight of him. What’s his name, that evil little bugger—Tommyhawk Steel? Cause Steel’s youngest son? Son of that Dance moth-er thing who looks like a moth—full troublemaker, and you can underline that with a big black pen marker for emphasis.
They were all a piece of work that Widespread Steel mob—with the exception of Aboriginal Sovereignty because he belonged to country, the others did not. What could anyone do about a stupid little kid like Tommyhawk anyhow. He did not look like country. He looked like he did not have a shred of empathy in his whole body for country. The people of Praiseworthy do not lie. Not about something like that—like who does or does not look like country—and they do not lie about the lies that little liar could tell in the holy Praiseworthy dust bowl. Rip up to the top of the scales for curse. Tommyhawk! Him government boy! You mob better believe everything you been told, and now you will find out why.
See in those clouds! Those were the real thing. Holy mob coming all the time now. Indoctrinators. They have some really good singers. All of them, like some big dust storm fellas flying around country while roaring their heads off in prayer. You can see them everywhere in the sky these days—on aeroplanes flying above the swirling bushfire smoke on the move, one over there in the distance, another coming up behind. Oh! Fucking look harder, further off down the coast. More fire-making mob over there coming up from over the sea. You get some who were like country, but were not. They were just people who did not belong to country who were acting like a pack of God’s ghost angels in heaven with their singing about white government values.
You want to know how you can tell that? Books! Big white law books! Look at what they got holding in their hands. The Australian Constitution. Bibles. Government policies. Legislations. The things that do not belong to the real ancestors. The ancestral creators did not carry around a book. The Rainbow Serpent—Boodjamalla Law spilt into everything, and stayed there. Let the white angels read religious monologues mucking around in your brain like a broken record, and convince you to get indoctrinated into assimilation. You can do it. You can use it. Singalong way all day, always you can do it, was no wonder Praiseworthy felt like being in a prison run by heaven.
The real indoctrinator, you never seen him. He does not even have to appear in person in Praiseworthy, because he got his appointed angels doing the job for him, and making a big din by singing a bit of this and that over the top of each other—in all these pissy little church mobs’ choirs screaming about something or other at the top of their voices—in their gossip songs about how Aboriginal Sovereignty spoiled everything for them.
You know what they say, that only the good die young.
Well! Praiseworthy liked to thank God for taking the good for himself in front of their own eyes, and leaving them rubbish people to deal with—the combustibles with catastrophic vision, like global warming.
Boom! Boom! Boom!
The good get taken.
Shit stays.
While Praiseworthy was growing obsessive in whispering private talk about losing Aboriginal Sovereignty, a full-grown man like Cause Man Steel was crying like a baby when he drove back to town with the old platinum donkey in the back seat of the sedan. He had not stopped crying his heart out since that day when, so far away while hunting for a perfect donkey, he had woken up in a cold sweat while exposed in the full heat, and had felt in his bones that Aboriginal Sovereignty had passed away from shame and a broken heart. He had driven home like a bat out of hell, and he would not stop screaming that Aboriginal Sovereignty was just becoming a man. Widespread wept and cried for months. His tears covered the floor, and had to be mopped up and carted away in a bucket, and his tears fell all over town like never-ending rainfall and created flooding gullies and creeks with fish swimming around in the salty waters, and he kept on weeping for his loss.
Then you know what? One day something strange happened in Praiseworthy. It became a place that was so hard-hearted, that you could actually feel the heartbeats clanking like steel because Widespread’s continual weeping around the place had made people feel short-tempered. He was not considering their loss too. But on he wept, and he kept reminding everyone in town that he wanted his Aboriginal Sovereignty to come back. You can’t, people told him, because he’s dead. It was that plain and simple, and then much later, when everyone in Praiseworthy could not bear the sound of Widespread’s wishful, guilt-ridden crying anymore, they knew that Cause Steel’s heart was softer than a pussycat, and in the fury of boiling blood pumping through their otherwise more molten steel refinery hearts, in hissy-like nastiness which was fashionable, they told him to get over it like everyone else who had to deal with great loss, even greater loss than his because when you combined it all, he was just one person: Everyone else had lost Aboriginal Sovereignty for good.
Praiseworthy people were rather pleased with discovering their new strength of dealing with the profound sense that all had been lost. They were becoming sceptics, and said there was great satisfaction to be found in being nasty to Widespread in the great philosophical thinking going on about how this greatest of loss was really about the building blocks for creating better fate. A signal more or less, to send Cause wherever—to get him to leave their Native Title cemetery while sitting on the other side of the fence on fold-up chairs outside the graveyard, and stewing about how they should be inside the fence tending their ancestors’ graves—weeding, and bringing pretty flowers, bunches of gum leaves, and picking off the asbestos flakes that had been floating around in the atmosphere from old crap housing and landing on their family graves, but that was nothing. What really made them fume inside and tremble from head to toe, was to hear Widespread still mouthing off while crying like a sissy. This made you feel sick, because Cause would not stop thinking about wanting Aboriginal Sovereignty to come back, and it looked like he was going to go on about him not being dead forever. Where was the body? And the more this grieving father continued to act badly about the grief of his oldest son suddenly committing suicide after going against Australian law, and seeing how he was building a mountain out of his pain, the more he was shut out and shunned by Praiseworthy with its own mountain of retaliation to sort out against Widespread.
You know what the silo was like? Everything about Cause Steel became an even greater ex nihilo claim about how he was fake. Then, they said to hell with him pretending to be a super leader bent on mad schemes to overthrow local humanity. The ex post facto claims poured in abundance like his tears, where everything became a screaming match about his so called exclusive Native Title claim over the cemetery. The local humanity people were becoming extremists in their vicious lolling-about of ideas of making him feel even more totally ex gratia than ever before. They felt that purposefully shunning his grief was to be executed with gusto, without even a thought. It was just the way it was. The man could scream his lungs out for all they cared. He was like a dead man to them. He was like a dandelion seed floating away in the breeze that no one cared about because he was just one of millions of dandelion seeds floating in the air that no one cared about. He was just another loner who happened to be surrounded by a whole town of gleeful people who always hated his guts in any case, and would never forget how he excluded them in his Native Title fiasco about their cemetery, and somehow or other, ended up having everyone else prove they were the true Native Title owners of the cemetery, all bar of course, Cause Steel.
The word spread about how nobody knew who this Cause Man Steel was anymore. He was history blanked. Cancelled. Nobody knew where he came from. He was a mumu to every house and soul like demons that could not be talked about. Like a true devil. You would not even look at him, never see his spooky white hair, nor catch a glimpse in the corner of your eye of his haunted face unless you wanted your heart broken, and all you could say was, this was a devil who was somewhere he was not supposed to be. He was not in their culture. Not in the long tradition. He was nothing.
Widespread continued speaking the same language as everyone else in Praiseworthy, but they claimed that he had always spoken a different language to the local traditional country of the cemetery. They said he would not be able to communicate with this traditional country. He could not speak it, and how would the spirits even know what he was talking about with talking about Native Title. This was not their language, the spirits of his country were elsewhere, or they had come before time immemorial, or had come after the language of all times for their place. Anyhow. He was just a scam merchant creating his scam scenario like his major transport conglomerate, and if the truth be known, his family had never been anywhere near the cemetery in one hundred thousand years. Where was the proof? He had no family buried in the graveyard. The realisation of what this type of argument meant as a killer of a Native Title claim was rhapsody in motion. Once this great thinking was flowering, the fold-up chair mourners rose with full belief in having never seen any of his family’s spirits walking around in Praiseworthy, and this was what they would tell that Native Title judge to prove their counterclaim, the next time they saw the fellow. It was fun to be cruel, to feel full with life, where liveliness had dwindled to almost nothing over two centuries, and to become bloated in the guts with something to think about which was so much better than what anyone else had to say about the matter of being alive. The folded-up chairs people thought you never knew what came tumbling out of the barrel in the mind when you tipped it over. Other than water, other things spilt over the ground too, but who was interested in the spilt water when snakes were slithering around your feet.
Now the thing was, there was nothing much that could be built out of what comes out of an empty barrel, at least nothing that ended up being glorious. So! In short: What do you do with a squatting snake? Wrap it around your brain? This was what happened. With the spreading belief that Widespread’s traditional country was elsewhere, and so elsewhere that it was far away and may as well have been in China, this was where the story ended up, not that anyone in Praiseworthy knew a thing about China, or even that Asia was a big country containing several other traditional countries and nationalities, and ruled the sky and the moon too, because this was too hard to conceive when world thought began and ended in Praiseworthy. Now all of a sudden, everyone else with Han blood in their Aboriginal veins thought that, unlike themselves, Widespread was actually Chinese, and not Aboriginal at all. It did not matter that there was total blindness to the considerable mixed-heritage in the racist creepy colonial history of the region. All thought this was okay and were sequaciously pleased, in being prepared to say that Cause Man Steel actually looked like a Chinese person, because an intergenerational string of whitefellas had pointed this out, so it must be. Now even Dance, if not her sons, one assumed being dead, the other being alive somewhere, was not praiseworthy enough for Praiseworthy Native Title holder fact and she belonged in China too, even though not much was known about the world outside of Praiseworthy geography that only included faraway Australia, and American television. Ice Pick came along to talk to the folded-up chair people, the white-plastic chair people, the many denominational churches, and said he was advised by his totem golden beetle, which spoke another language entirely that he would never understand, that the cemetery was his. The oracles of the multiple churches continued to say so much more about who dug the grave holes, and they finally agreed that there would be a grave hole that Ice Pick could have for himself when he died, just like everyone else would be given one, but this was a community thing, and he would have to share the space, with everyone else. Nobody was better than anyone else, and he could not put a Native Title claim over his own hole in the ground even if it was the final resting place for his bones. But why kill the dream of where this story was heading on the likes of Ice Pick? Who cares where he wanted to be buried? Where was Aboriginal Sovereignty buried? So much was being tied up with how the oracles of the churches debated about all the spurious Native Title claims being made over the cemetery, and why the squatters Widespread Steel and his family should return to China, instead of claiming Native Title on country that really belonged to the blood of other people, they were at risk of losing forever any possibility of ever finding the body of Aboriginal Sovereignty—dead or alive.
Widespread knew real hate sounded like real estate, and he lived off it. This was his temple where hate sprung up from everywhere in the realm, it rained hate, and you could feel the vibrations of contempt gyrating like snakes radiating around a snake’s temple of worship. The popularity he once enjoyed as a loved leader glimmered somewhere in his dreams like a dying star, dimming to less than a speck of dirt on the country’s collective conscience.
Cause had become more than an exile, by being shut out in such a way that not even he had been capable of realising what it would be like to come home and feel that his own soul had never existed in this place. All he could remember was that on the day that Aboriginal Sovereignty disappeared in the sea, all the wind in the land had changed direction and flew to the north while picking up dust, dead leaves, sticks and gravel, and all the flying insects. Everything began running to the north, even the feral cats, dingoes, and birds. All instancy was absorbed into the land’s mourning, and blown with the wind coming from the south and heading up north to the sea, dust rolling through the roads where Widespread had been sleeping in his car on his mission of capturing a feral donkey more perfectly silver than real platinum. The wildness in the wind was the thing that had ripped Widespread’s soul out of his body, and drowned it in the atmosphere of the dust travelling north.
This was the moment when Widespread finally realised that he was no longer related in a place where everything was related. His soul was gone from this land, and he knew that something very strange had happened way back in his journey. He felt lonely in this landscape of quietness that had always felt like his own being. He saw himself back in Praiseworthy living again in his world of donkeys, and this mirror image confused his mind because it was hard to tell which was real, or how he was occupying a memory of where he should be. He knew this was wrong. He could no longer understand why he was away from his home, or why he was in his car, and could not orientate himself. It was as though he had been placed in a nightmare in the middle of the night. He had to go. He repeated the words over and over, as he tried to find a sense of direction, deciding to follow the wind, hoping it would take him home, and stashed in the back seat of the Falcon, an old grey donkey that he had no idea how it got there in the first place, but in this nightmarish state of amnesia, seemed to be like a perfect donkey.
The winds on the way to the north stalled at times, and in the stillness where nothing moved in the landscape, Widespread would begin to remember his life at the cutting edge of the saviour world for pushing his people first over the line in the race to survive the predicament of the crisis, the end-of-world era. Only the bravest of humankind, the people who had nothing to lose and everything to gain, would be able to look at the vastness of the drying land and see the possibility of this eternity, and what he saw was the entire country crisscrossed with short cuts like kangaroo tracks or cattle trails, the quick lines forging the way for his colossal new-age transport empire thriving in a fossil-fuel-deprived world. The whole conglomeration was spectacular. It would not last forever, but it would do for the interim while the real crisis was taking shape. This was what he saw—the medium-term deal, and the sheer energy of seeing himself auto high-tech, the solar pilot orchestrating the country’s new transport system, with a widespread donkey-carrying system constantly moving over multifarious routes which were like strands of interlacing ribbons cutting across the burning continent, or like the heavily used international cargo lanes of the global fleet currently turning billions of dollars over throughout the oceans of the world. And he thought about the country he was driving through becoming more desiccated over longer and hotter summers in the bush in the prolonged drought when little could survive—other than donkeys—and he wondered if the heatwaves would ever end, and he realised the pointlessness of hoping for the climate to change. This realisation drove home his need to settle his so-called legitimate claim against Praiseworthy’s long-suffering multitudes of conflicting Native Title claims, to prove that he alone had unbroken access to his traditional lands in spite of over two centuries of colonial annihilation, and where the theft of Aboriginal land on a colossal scale from there to kingdom come had left bugger-all of his Native Title land to claim back for all that it was. A ring of steel around his own cemetery was where he must build the high-fangled techno transport conglomeration with pack donkeys to save the fate of his people, or even perhaps, the whole country from that total crisis stage of them having nothing left, not a litre of gas to save themselves.
But nothing is ever easy, is it? And Widespread knew a thing or two about negative charge fallout. The man encountered huge-scale shit everywhere he looked. You know the story about the harder they come, the harder they fall? Questions fermented hex-style out of the bloody ground. The environment turned sour with doomsayers supering up the hype swilling in their brains and spreading rumours, more than you could poke a stick at. There would be no quick run to success in his world, not when achieving was about being weighed on the scale made by the coloniser for weighing the size of failure, and being much more tant pis than a real black fellow’s vision, and more about the tantalising negative consequences being implanted over the combined brain trust of humanity. You have to expect bombs from any type of fool exploding all over the place. Boom! Boom! Hey! Was Widespread ripping his own poverty-stricken people off? Bring out the froth gatherers, like the floodwaters storming down a dry riverbed spilling over the side bank, or where it sits around until the inconsolable people freak out the place by crying all night about being without hope, for the haze had grown heavier, and it was becoming too much to bear under the oppressive humidity, creating so much anxiety about who had which, any, or no money, or who was the poorest of them all. Or, which people were most ruined by the times? Or, how much was a poor person worth anyhow? Or, who had more money than others? Or, who on Earth created the most wars? And who among them all was the worst person alive today? In the mix of doom, it was difficult to see why Widespread was wanting to take every person’s cent to use on his pyramid scheme. What was a pyramid scheme anyway, and why was he calling it his vision, and on a day where so many saw the long-term vision of themselves as sitting on the bottom of a triangle where they were starving, why was Widespread being allowed to sit on top of their combined weight, while throwing their money around for his pet donkeys to eat?
The local world said that the Praiseworthy palace of dreams was being created by one man and was a selfish plan that was never theirs. It was lessening Ice Pick’s rocket-fuelled propulsion to march quicker towards assimilation in the mainstream life of Australia. Most of all, it was thought Widespread was wired with transmitters that were not receiving the correct message, as though he was delusional, and trapped in the bedazzled trance life of an idealist who was bent on one trajectory, to get them lost in a confused trans-everywhere dash for the future with his diarrhoea-tail donkeys. Was that it? The long run? The idealist survival plan? Cleaning the donkey goona? Now, let it be said once and for all, nobody wants to kill the dream, but the whole conglomeration business was stacking them up into living in a total nightmare. This was what the world of Praiseworthy thought, while dreaming of living in a perfect world. It felt as though life was too much with Widespread asking them to give up their dreams. It was almost like asking for their first-born child, asking them to sign up for the pyramid scheme with a few dollars each week from their precious pension money that barely kept them from starving to death. This was asking far more than the cemetery when you thought about it. He was actually stealing their regular heartbeats with debt. Where would they find money to continually feed donkeys? The whole nightmare was making people dream about money all the time, of not having enough, of trying to help an idiot turn zilch into millions, all because he had a hairbrain scheme that he sneaked up to people who never had enough money even to turn the electricity on to look around in the dark.
Now, since he came back pretending to be heartbroken and stuff about losing Aboriginal Sovereignty, who wanted to go down to the cemetery anymore just to sit outside the ring of barbwire fence on a fold-up chair in the sun, getting preached to by Widespread about building their economic independence in the new era? They already had that kind of talk from the Australian government for the Aboriginal people—saying they had to become self-sufficient. They said, the only way you could become self-sufficient would be when you were dead. You did not need another loose cannon talking stupid like the government that had never accomplished anything in the lives of Praiseworthy people. And another thing, wasn’t Widespread under investigation by the police about the disappearance of Aboriginal Sovereignty, or something like that?
Tommyhawk hated his father even more than he did before Aboriginal Sovereignty left. His father had blamed him for his brother leaving home. He heard Widespread telling the police that he could not even remember seeing Aboriginal Sovereignty thinking about suicide, or going out to sea to drown himself, or hanging from the tree. Why would he? Tommyhawk thought his father was lying through the teeth to save himself, when he should be killing himself because everyone hated him. His father was like a fool, and Tommyhawk could have told his father that Aboriginal Sovereignty was living out at sea, just out of reach, just out of vision, and told the story of how he could see his brother living on the back of an old sea turtle.
But this truth-telling would never happen since Tommyhawk Steel was not speaking to his father anymore, even though he could have told his father how he saw the huge turtle bobbing in the ocean, and even knew where it was. Liar! He had no idea where it was, but he knew powerful men in the world lied, told fake news, and got away with massacres, butchering, blowing the world apart, destroying everything. He could have said what type of turtle it was: Chelonia mydas—a real giant with eyes that could see the clarity of oceans that its kind had mapped over its brain for eternity. He could have put his father at ease, lessened the heartbrokenness, by saying he knew that Aboriginal Sovereignty would always find the biggest and the best in the country, in the skies, in the sea, like he was already inside all of these worlds. He could have said true God he was out in the ocean fishing with that turtle—all was fine, and that was a straight story. Not liar. But let the police think what they liked about men like his father—let him figure it out. Tommyhawk knew his father did not know what had happened. He was not there. He was not in the alien place of Tommyhawk’s mind. Why would the boy say anything about Aboriginal Sovereignty? Why would he bother? He was long past saying anything to his father about living in a cemetery full of dead people feeling shit about having their peaceful resting place overtaken by thousands of illegal feral donkeys living on top of them. What if these dead people from the time immemorial come for him next? What if they were already making his life hell? What would he know about the retaliation business circling in his mind?
You could say Tommyhawk had packed up his childhood innocence in a backpack along with his dreams of leaving home, and like uneaten fruit, it had rotted in the bag. Innocence had become something perishable, while dreams could be controlled and manipulated. In the dream of living in Parliament House, once he had established how to get there, it was just a matter of fact, and Tommyhawk thought he was right on the knocker about ensuring his safety, to survive childhood.
Once people talk, you get it. There was always a chain of constancy, but sometimes the flow bolts off and never returns, and what you are left with is a kink in the chain creating a humanoid, a freak waft replica of human behaviour, such as that sly little Tommyhawk acting incognito, like a cruel trick of nature, believing that he would not be seen by the everywhere eyes of community already jumping on to the fact of how good they were in recognising befuddlement when they saw it, and were already zeroing in on this runt kid with one big mouth attached to his troublesome mind, more than any other kid about the place.
In this time of no more Aboriginal Sovereignty, Cause felt as though the house suffered from a beehive hysteria that perpetually flared up over any little thing, and he could only look down on it from his lofty height close to where the spiders were running, across the cobwebbed highways floating from the ceiling of the house. While he had always chosen to hear the flat rhythms of the world, he now chose to hear whatever was going on in the family, to hear what motormouth had to say, the runt who always had to have the last word, even after being told to shut the fuck up a thousand times. Yet, what could you say? Whatever was heard from being up there in the ceiling, no one would be spared from what spewed out of Tommyhawk’s mouth about the world in which he was living like a misfit. The kid was a complete knockout. Cause thought he had become some kind of moron banging on about technology all the time, about his brand-new iPhone, iPad, iPod, iWatch, the complete Apple combo the boy claimed he had won from the government for being top of his school’s curriculum, which he said was super easy if you aligned to the government’s point of view about Aboriginals to gain a bit of empathy for yourself. That was pretty simple for any idiot in the world to do what he did. If you were an empathy freak all you had to do was add up the masses: the most people likely to give you empathy. Check the figures—black or white. You just needed to know how the government for Aboriginal people thought about Aboriginals, and the most important thing, know that everything led to the government’s power to intervene into Aboriginal lives for the good of Australia. Tommyhawk said this worked like electricity. You stop the power of rogue circuits. Yep! Tommyhawk thought he was invincible, like a ninja, winning everything hands down—Mathematics—tick, English—tick, Human Society and Personal Development—tick, tick whatever, you name it, won it just by expressing his raw opinions with a few oddball equations about living in a world of shit.
Now Widespread was not thinking with envy in his mind about how smart and superior his child’s fascist brain was, compared to his own. He only thought plain and simple, that the kid was humiliating him. What? Again? Tommyhawk was really on his soapbox, continuing his usual diatribe about how he must have been an orphan. Outside the dogs were barking. Donkeys were carrying on with the hee-haws. The pussycats screeched. Cause weighed in with his version of the orphan story which he wanted to believe had happened. Yes. That’s right. Your mother found you under a frog so that is why you have such a big mouth. That was what your big brother said, remember. Cause smiled, although he could not believe some of the stupid things that came out of the boy’s mouth about how he thought all men living in Praiseworthy were the government’s paedophiles and no children should be living there. Where do you get ideas like that?
I knew the moment it happened, Cause said to his wife Dance while trying to catch her attention—another of his life’s ambitions, to get her attention long enough to speak while she was continuously in flight. He had become the watcher of a wife who was already a whorl wind even in the most restricted of spaces—in the pokey kitchen, or anywhere else in the cemetery house—and he wondered whether she might become catastrophic like a storm he once saw that spun into a cyclonic mad woman that left a trail of destruction from the sea to where it had become a thousand-kilometre sandstorm he remembered long afterwards as being just like Dance. Stay still! He was totally distracted with sinister thoughts jumping about in his head while watching her running around, and trying to catch her attention so he could talk about the evil and sinister thoughts going through his head. But if you were to hear someone speaking from his head somewhere up in the ceiling, he would have to be quick enough to articulate the goods from his brain, so why did she have to run around endlessly looking for things that they did not need on the table when all he wanted to speak about were the evil and sinister things that were bothering him? What’s the hurry? We are only having dinner. This business of where to find what was evil and sinister lurking in his head could take five minutes, or five hours, or he could grow old from having dinner for all he cared. She said, You look as though you are being chased around by some wild devil dog. Now his stomach was swirling into a tighter knot for he did not know what to say, so he said that he was finished with dinner. He no longer felt hungry. Forget it. Anyone would think we were trying to eat dinner on a footpath in the middle of a city.
Dance picked up the pace in her speed to be gone elsewhere, and she had blocked out particular words from her hearing, anything that sounded like, Will you stop for a moment while I am talking to you? She did not say that she was too preoccupied to hear a man speak. The skinny rake of a woman just continued moving, spinning from one moment to the next, almost fleeing from too much thought, and while running left, right and centre around the table of the very small kitchen and serving the dinner, it seemed like a miracle more or less that equal proportions were dolloped on each of their two plates. Then, barely sitting down herself to eat, moments later she was up and out of her chair like a rocket shot into space, and the table was quickly cleared because she felt Cause had finished eating anyway, whether he thought that he had or not. Then she was gone, and had simply disappeared.
Only her physical movements could be heard leaving the house. She was somewhere in the cemetery where the birds had fallen silent and closed their eyes to avoid being disturbed by whatever she was doing, sweeping the leaves, the invisibility of tidying up nothing, washing, hanging up, picking up, throwing out, bringing in, carting this or lifting that, watering donkeys, putting stuff away.
There were soundless insects spinning themselves into oblivion from being caught in her turbulence. Cause had tried to keep up, to keep following her no matter what she did while talking, yak, yak, yak in free thought to explain the vagaries of life happening from her not teaching Tommyhawk how to hold his tongue. She told Cause there was no explanation needed—that she was not interested in his evil and sinister thoughts, because she already knew where the boy had picked up his loose tongue. But what the heck? Why spoil Cause’s dream about who was responsible for what their life had become? She had made her bed long ago, and it would stay that way.
Whatever the problem was that struck her mind about how to be a devoted wife, Dance allowed Widespread to continue with his case: this was a free world. Everything was a matter of your degree of tolerance. He had always claimed that people had a right to speak about the ills of the world in this cemetery. Well! Go ahead, she thought, open wide those locked rooms of imagining where the overgrown gardens were dust-laden, and make of it whatever you like. This did not mean she was not listening, or had not heard his exposé on matters affecting his dignity and human rights, his Aboriginal rights, his actual ability to be a man which, as she saw it, was his business. She continued moving hornet-like, without interfering with a single word, or waiting for his voice to hit any of the right frequencies for a woman who was more tuned to listening to the language spoken by moths. His theories flew helter-skelter around the cemetery for insects on the buzz to snipe at and catch as he followed her, and the same theories were heard by the wind that brought the clouds back for the bewildered Praiseworthy to see that it was raining again on the cemetery while everywhere else had remained dry, and again were heard as dry reverb by rain-soaked donkeys with big heads about becoming the prime carriers in a conglomerate transport business for the new world.
While Dance was attending to the chores of running whatever it was she said was life after all, she never listened for the spirits of the ancients challenging Widespread with their knowledge of time immemorial, and who were helping him he said to squash each of the new forms of being denigrated and denied, and which he had explained many times to Dance, were about systematically losing his rights. He said, I am talking about Praiseworthy. Where else, she thought, since he had never lived anywhere else. Words like Emergency. Army. Protecting kids like Tommyhawk from his own parents. She heard that. I am being accused of child molesting and being a paedophile. The government is accusing Aboriginal men of all sorts of decrepit evil and sinister things. She wondered who he was talking about, who was this someone who was so poisoned he had become totally paranoid. What felt strange to her in all this evil and sinister talk, was how ugly Cause had looked when he kept talking about how the government was out to get him. The more she tried to figure out what he was saying about what was making him go silly in the mind, the more reasonable life seemed to her. Had they not both led the same life? Why say these stupid things, taboo things, how could the Australian government for Aboriginal people be in his head all the time, particularly when she had not seen any government in her life. What government? she asked with a couple of clothes pegs in her mouth, and a bundle of clothes in her arms. Their life was nowhere near the government. She had not seen any Australian government in the moths and butterflies all around the mangroves and estuaries, or in the monsoon forests, or in the rift valleys and deltas, or around the sand on the beach that slipped in and out of the sea.
There was no need to spell it out, but Widespread gave his usual pledge, from the all life from the ancestral to the modern epicleses of the multitudes of Praiseworthy churches, and from the ancestral beings that do not sell out to the Australian government for Aboriginal people. Oh! Do not worry. The ancestral creation beings knew all about the Australian government, for country never abandoned its people in the long stretch of time from and to infinity. He beckoned to the blue-sky dreaming that he wanted to make it clear that he was not saying how his donkey business was going to be a raving success even if it was a great idea. He just knew what to do—that was all, and all it was about was saving his own kind by giving them more economic independence than they could ever dream of having in their lives. More even than what was actually needed. Yes, cheers. There was no doubt that his plan would make his people rich, or richer in any possible future scenario of a clapped-out world. And you know what? The failed government would be dead. Well! That was what he said in the kilometres of foot traffic following Dance around the cemetery, and she was wondering what these rich people would look like in the super-heated waves of an even hotter world.
We will be staying put right here in this cemetery of our Native Title land with those donkeys worth a lot of money, Cause said while feeling pretty good about himself, and he would be building an effective argument to put before the courts, which was the normal scheme of chopping wood for practice that a black man had to do against the government wanting to bring Aboriginal men down, now labelling us criminal paedophiles to justify taking our land rights. Same story, he said confidently, but we will never leave.
This was the high horse.
Even while we cannot achieve our dreams, or our vision yet, we will. Or, even if we are not doing enough for our children, or we are not loving them enough or something like that in the eyes of what the Australian government for Aboriginal people wanted to keep saying about us, we will never leave. We will be on this land forever, because this is their conspiracy theory—to make us leave here. They do this just to get us off our people’s coffin-choked land.
Can you tell me why government wants to own this place? Dance spoke in what she thought was her charming self-talk, and as if trying to conceal her deceitfulness about the place being a joke, and while taking stock of the view. A precision view of a tired-looking house they had both constructed out of sheer determination to claim what was rightfully theirs. The dream of so long ago built with all shapes and sizes of other people’s abandoned old chipboard walls nailed together with corrugated iron that had seen better days over a century of its life, and asbestos fibro sheets that had been lying around on the ground for years. The whole lot covered with the bits of ageing plastic shower curtains fluttering in the breeze like a carnival of faded colours. Then, she inhaled the stench of one thousand donkeys soaked with five minutes of rain and jammed into the cemetery, and she said nothing.
Cause too, glanced back over his shoulder towards the house, and stood there staring into an undefinable distance where he expected to see Tommyhawk the assimilationist fascist, and finally he said in a low grunt, This child of ours has become a total running motormouth on the subject of sexual abuse of all Praiseworthy children, of paedophilia, and all sorts of mumbo-jumbo innuendo. Dance. Listen. Haven’t you heard all the foul stuff that comes out of his mouth? I am telling you, he has froth in his mouth while he is saying what he says. Well! He did not learn anything like that here. Not in my house. You should know where he is learning things like that? He would have preferred her to reply, to show some solidarity as a parent of her mongrel child, that what he was saying was correct, and was the truest thing he knew, that their child was learning white shit at school.
That was it. Cause had pleasingly named the cause of the problem plaguing their lives. He nailed it. So! He returned to an old story, wound it up, hit play, and started the spruik all over again. Didn’t I warn you? Didn’t I tell you on several occasions you got to watch out for the fascist? I know what these assimilationists smell like: it comes from all the dirt and shit they claw through to get in with the Australian government, by thinking they are going to get something by turning asbestos white. You can smell an assimilationist a hundred miles away. I told you right there and then on the day he was born, as soon as I saw him, I said watch out for this one. He was going to turn up with a tribe of white pussycats. Ghost cats that looked like abstract art painted by that foreign artist fellow Picasso. White cats hiding under stuff around here and watching over the fascist.
You are freaking mad. That was what Dance said. How can a baby be an assimilationist fascist? She did not say anything about never seeing the ghost white cat tribe, just in case it really existed, and she did not want to appear to be lacking spirituality by not seeing invisibility.
Only for my eyes, lady. Only my eyes. I don’t even remember how many times I have had to keep telling your deaf ears, it feels like I am in a time warp. How many years has it been? All these years I have been talking myself hoarse, and you know what you got to realise, he is not even grown up yet. Eight years of age still. Well! They own his brain now.
What! The ghost cats?
Don’t be bloody stupid. I warned you there was going to be a problem with this boy getting himself indoctrinated by the Australian government. Well! They got him already. He’s assimilated. Wasn’t immune enough. Couldn’t resist it. He couldn’t even hold out until he was a man or something before running off to be white. He ran to them willingly while he was still a little kid.
Widespread told Dance he was just speaking plain. One tells a wife and hopes she hears the thing she is being told to hear. What can you expect if the kid is forced to have the education of an assimilationist? See the result? He laps anything up that white people tell him. Now he hates his parents. He only loves the government.
Dance asked Widespread how that could be true. How would you know? She had frequently asked him to explain some idiotic corpus delicti stuff that he was telling her with his superior tone of voice, and speaking as though every word was general world knowledge that only she failed to understand. Yet she would be curious enough to continue exploring his mad mind when she thought his thinking had become so outrageous that even she agreed with the rest of the town saying that he should be locked up. Well! The cemetery was a small world, and Dance wanted to see what she was missing in life from not worrying all the time like he was about every single thing that was happening in their world.
Sometime, whenever she felt in the right frame of mind, she thought it might be interesting to see how he would explain the crime of the century to her yet again, of just how he thought Tommyhawk was capable of not loving his parents completely and wholeheartedly like any other child of Praiseworthy. Other people might say whatever, but much ground was covered in journeys taken by Dance into the wilderness of her life, sometimes to view the fountain of grief, or the quiet open plains-like rationale of doubting whatever crawled out from the dense, fast-growing thickets of mad ideas that came out of her husband’s brain. You are an idiot, she flatly rebuked him. How could any kid be so simple-minded and prone to assimilatory ideals, that he only wanted to love the Australian government and not his own parents?
What? Cause asked. The news hurts your ears? Anti-government ideas are not your preferred viewing platform. Widespread just grinned. He loved the self-righteous. There was nothing like boosting one’s social role in life by convincing others to get on the same page. Now he saw himself as being on a winning streak, because Dance kept insisting that only an idiot would think he could stop a child from having an education that was approved by the government for all Australian children. She gave Widespread one of her steely glares, called him mad because he was acting like some tragic person again, like someone who thought he was better than the government. As a matter of fact, she claimed, her son must go to school. Its compulsory. You can’t stop it. It is the law. You can’t break the law. It is illegal to stop kids from going to school.
One thing Cause hated, was to be called mad. This was where he drew the line in the sand. Dance stopped her own deranged state of chasing whatever she was doing, stood still for one moment, then she crossed the line, and said flatly, Tommyhawk loves school. He was top of his class. He is a very bright boy. You should be proud of him.
Dance moved onwards, moving so light and with her regular rhythm of footsteps falling onto the ground in the same tracks where she had walked so many times, it looked as though she was flying like her effigy puppets of the most hated, that danced in the flames of her bonfires. She was in the world of her own silences while emptying, flinging around, and filling dozens of buckets with water for the donkeys from a hose connected to the water tank on the back of a truck. Ordinarily, she would have flung the effigies out of sight, but now, with donkeys crawling all over the cemetery, she had lost the battle of being some sort of domestic queen whitewashing herself with the fascinating minutiae of home life. Her narrative was different, as she toiled with the seeking, and the feeding, the watering, and the cleaning, the gates open, gates closed management for interconnected, interlocked families of the all-visible, and all-invisible, array of the multitudes.
The battle for keeping domesticity vastness in order was her world, since the sense of regulated bliss lived elsewhere. Her home improvement consisted of the numerous gigantic hate effigies that secretly turned up around their domestic space, and whenever Cause noticed these ugly puppets—a replica of the people Dance hated—he thought there were little devils in the bush dumping this unhuman ugliness at his door. He could barely stand the sight of these puppet sculptures and chose to look away, to not see what he did not wish to see anymore. Who wanted to see the closed-winged dead things like enormous bats painted moth-grey with stitched lips, with no ears, and having the same haunting peregrine eyes that stared straight through one’s soul and into the vast distances beyond? The donkeys feared the ugliness, and steered off into the furthest space in the cemetery. The number of effigies increased as Dance would decorate her world with them. She hung them on nails all over the walls of the house, and she hooked the ugly people puppets to the water tank, or draped them over tombstone crosses, while others were left on the sharp ends of dead branches of trees, waiting for their fate, the general bonfire. Widespread, struggling to keep up with the pace of his wife, continued trying to communicate from the growing distances between what each chose to see, to convince her of his unrequited love song of saving their culture, by saying to her, You must be blind. Well! That did not convince her at all. Dance just dropped the high-pressure hose that danced all over the ground with water pelting in every direction like the fandango, and slowly walked towards Widespread. She stopped exactly five centimetres from his face where she whispered so low he had to strain to hear her say, He will grow out of it. And he did not realise, that they were still talking about Tommyhawk, and not his general overall vision of saving the future.
Stolen him, he muttered into his chin, remembering the thread of the earlier conversation, but only the mosquitoes cared about what he said while sinking their probosces into his arm and drawing blood from the saviour into their bellies, and wondering why he was telling them to listen to the radio. You want to listen to the ABC news on the radio. It’s in the national news, you know. Dance’s mind was now somewhere else entirely, and so far down the road heading away from the cemetery, speeding away through the swarming mosquitoes and the old fraying wing feathers of migrating swallows diving through the air above the graves, and even the murmuring of her thoughts were gone, departed, far off and could only be seen as a magnificent storm aura spreading through the atmosphere in its twisting and bending speed, puncturing the air with enough force that its vibrations reach back to the cemetery, trips mosquitoes, disorients the swallows’ flight over the graves, and sends them crashing to the ground. While she does not notice the vibration destroying the swallows, she searches for the rare mangrove moths flying unnoticed above her head, and dizzy with her smell, sweeter than mangrove blossoms, they cling to her back.
In the stilled mangroves, she talked to the forest of moths too deaf to hear her talking whispery-like, like a moth, and only hearing blasting from the cemetery Widespread’s radio world that he had refused to switch off, since they lost Aboriginal Sovereignty. Even the insects had grown accustomed to the sound of the chattering classes on repeat, booming across the graves and down to the mangrove forests, speed-talking about all the paedophiles rampant in Aboriginal communities, where those Aboriginal parents did not love their children, and all Aboriginal men were violent. And the chorus—wait for it—why should they have special rights?
But while the insects paid no attention to the news of the nation, Dance spoke in whispers: I told him that dead people do not want to hear that kind of news.
And the insect world droned on and on right across the landscape as though they were not interested in the news of the national broadcaster.
Yep! Widespread, why were you spreading the news of the world like anyone was interested. Hey! She yelled back to the cemetery up the road, Why do you have to be the spreader of the fucking news?
He yelled back from the cemetery, down to the mangroves: A poster boy. That’s what he is.
A prize-catch for the government, wouldn’t you say?
He is their mantra now.
We are all preachers here by the way … And yep! Fuck your stupid domestic bliss stuff too, for all I care.