I bequeath nothingness to no one.
—Jorge Luis Borges
Oracle 4 … speak true.
Listen! Unravel the mystery death thing correctly. Look proper way. Carefully. See detail, if you want to see properly. Go back to the night Aboriginal Sovereignty walked into the sea … Wade through the blindness of no one noticing a fascist call centre operating in the mangroves, but never mind that. You need to find witnesses. The little trainee gangster kids less than three feet tall, all the toddlers in their wet Kimbies and Huggies nappies down there on the beach running free in the rapturous ancestral world, out in the night playing with the country spirits living in their minds with the kind-hearted wise old fellow elders walking forever on the sand with their packs of ghost puppy dogs and their pet baby kangaroos, and carrying around plenty of old ghost pussycats, with hundreds more spooky feral cats running around their feet, and on those really old bony people’s shoulders the pet white cockatoos danced, and those black ones with the red tail feathers talked with much ado about this country, and up above all this rapture of place going on, frenzied seagulls by the thousands massing over the moonlit inky sea when those mad parents had stomped down to the beach in the middle of the night after receiving an anonymous phone call.
Only minutes before, the caller, sounding like some ancient world kid disguising whoever he was by talking in a muffled voice, had called the lot—every mobile phone in Praiseworthy—and he was threatening to give the mobile numbers, Gmail addresses, and social media accounts of you paedophile parents, to the Parliament House chief whip cruelty police station cop up on the top of Capital Hill in Canberra, for nah gettin your mongrel kids ta bed early, like the Australian government said you were supposed ta. The muffled-voice kid was talking like he was some kind of trained parrot with a lot of nerve to be quoting vital confidential harassing sections for dealing with non-compliant Aboriginal parents in breach of the government’s legislation for any emergency, or non-emergency, or for any reason at all requiring a fistful of Intervention into their lives to stop whatever the government did not want Aboriginal people to do. With mobiles jammed hard against the ear, the parents kept listening to the freaky rage muffler who called them in the middle of the night, and were pissed off with being placed in a frightening fairytale nightmare about how a wicked white government stepmother would bake them all in a pie up there in Canberra, and on his voice flew, wafting about this section, and that section of some political on-trend Commonwealth of Australia Act about dealing with so-called abusive Aboriginal parents this, and this article or whatever, and that, about Aboriginal child injury-protection measures against really nutty murdering parents who happen to be Aboriginal. You could tell these parents could see the kid was a government-spruiker-muffler who was a genius in reciting the ins and outs of many racist legislations. He knew the lot, and the parents decided to run in fear to the seaside with their mobile still glued hard to the ear, for they had now realised that they were listening to a government-indoctrinated robotic type of kid fascist, and probably the only one of its kind in the entire country who could quote at this pacy rate, all those unfathomable miscellaneous articles, parts, and subsections of government law to do with downgrading the lives of Aboriginal people, and making their lives feel worse. Those parents knew exactly what the muffled kid was talking about, and wished they had a real kid like that in Praiseworthy, instead of those mongrel toddlers sneaking down to the beach when they should be in bed dreaming how to become smart. And they thought of themselves, while thinking who among them had not been born without an in-depth historical knowledge of government legislations about Aboriginal people fog-horned into their own brain at birth, and it ran like thick mud in the blood, and kept troubling their heartbeat. They would have been able to figure all this rot stuff out in their sleep, in an instant, about what the full extent of the ramifications of the fuzz meant in a piece of legislation for dealing with their matters: It’s always the parents who get the blame. Yes, of course they knew with an appropriate high level of fear for such an occasion like this, and had known what every inch of the historic paper trail was for any law connecting bad white government to their lives. Even if they were half-dead, they knew what to fear, but even so, these fathom experts for figuring out the nuances of government language, for being the infinite translators of completely useless government claptrap, definitely understood the gravity of the muffled child prodigy regaling his knowledge about the newly reinstalled old mission-day laws of the 1950s aimed at making these twenty-first century modern Aboriginal people less of a black disease for white people. Why couldn’t the prodigy kid be a famous piano player like Chopin, instead of being a prolific reciter of government crap? But! To tell you the truth, they knew you had to run faster than hell with fear written across your face when you were Aboriginal parents, just to prove you loved your children more than white people saying you did not love your children enough, like they loved their children.
The parents with a mobile pasted against their ears ran harder and faster in their mind, far quicker than their feet, as the muffled kid ramped up the prodigal pimp thing, by cutting loose that he was going to dob them all in to the government, all youse child sexual abusers—I know who you are, when suddenly, the mobile call went—tang! bang! Like! Like retaliation, like the battery went flat, like someone had hung up, and the house lights flicked on quick smart, and the noise of doors slamming could be heard several blocks away, which announced that things were being lashed out about who was to blame for their culturally independent-minded toddlers running amuck, going AWOL on the beach, this late at night. There were a number of outstanding matters being discussed between husband and wife that were on their minds for a moment like this, for suddenly being awakened by a fascist kid calling in the middle of the night, with stuff crashing against walls. Walls punched! Floors thumped! The town became a stampede of feet stomping up and down on the wooden floors of practically all the homes, tumbling in a domino slide while off in the distance you could hear another mobile phone ringing, and then another across town, and others too, the house next door, or another up the street, followed by switched-on house lights, doors slamming, and things banging, words that did not tremble while being fired full of force, as well as objects being lashed about in angry noise, spreading from house to house.
Next, almost at the exact same moment, the whole town was lit up and the town’s horizon was perfectly joined with the Milky Way. It was at three minutes past three o’clock in the morning when the angry parents had checked every room in their home to see which kid was in bed, and which was not, after receiving their own personal threatening phone call from the muffled-voice kid. Those who were quick enough, before the kid deemed a wasted prodigy had a chance to lay out his final fracking king hit in the ear by hanging up on them, had a nanosecond chance to double-threaten the kid in screams heard within the town boundary, and further on, spinning deep in the riparian water jungle bush where the ancestor mob and the snake crowd were trying to continue their deep sleep. Yep! Those quick-enough parents told that kid trying to blackmail bully them, that they would hunt him down: You better believe it. The whole place would be cleared out until every vicious little bastard with a mobile phone was caught. Those parents who were the quickest of all at four minutes past three in the morning, did not even need to speak into a phone. Their threats could be heard right across town as they breathed. Others did not need a mobile phone. They just yelled threats of murdering through an open window, and we don’t care if you are dead or alive after we finish with you … arsehole. There were other parents that had become further deranged on the spot, and had managed to think quicker on their feet by sending a verbal thought-volley quicker than social media, before the kid had a chance to hang up on them. All he would have to do was interpret the deeply snorted breathing that threatened, Don’t think you can hide from me. There is nowhere to hide twerps in this town. Then, almost simultaneously at precisely four and a half minutes past three in the morning, front doors were slamming bang, bang, bang, and the town’s parents moved off together into the shadows as they set out on a mission to find the kid causing them trouble, silently promising themselves that the first thing they would do once they caught this government fascist, would be to ban nuisance callers by smashing all mobile phones making calls to them in the middle of the night.
All along the lonely tracks, through the tufted grass plains country which belonged to the ancient creatures of the night, the parents jostled in a march to the beach in search of the kid with the mobile phone. All the little wannabe wallabies scrambled right out of the way of the crossfire moment, first in fright, then they fled as quick as they could hop far away through the corridors in the billowing tuft grasses, escaping from the bellowing voices berating toddler children hidden somewhere in the darkness, and on the voices that flew in the wind, heard the demented parents demanding to know which kid had the nerve to call anyone in the middle of the night.
A few dozen toddlers were quickly found and searched for a mobile phone by parents who had eyes like owls for seeing if any of their children had hidden anything in the grassy hidey-holes of this particular pitch-black paradise. The whole parade was soon frog-marching back home, but in the end, the crying babies too sleepy to walk had to be carried. In the morning, all of Praiseworthy took part in the interrogation of why culturally independent toddler kids in nappies were being allowed to act on their own free will in the middle of the night. The toddlers cried because they had only learnt to speak minimal English, and could not find the words to articulate how they felt about Australian laws, and were still unable to discuss at length what government legislation meant to them, even though these racist laws were an inheritance tainted intergenerationally in their blood. There were many questions thrown at the parents for acting like sovereign people who did not feel like providing answers about this crippling part of their sphere of existence, even under threats of their own survival. They just snapped disdainfully: You know what? We can’t live in this situation. The police were not interested in parents seeking answers about a mobile phone-calling muffled-voice kid prodigy calling them in the middle of the night because as far as they were concerned, Aboriginal people were not smart enough to produce a prodigy. This understanding would not go into any official police report meant for travelling up every tier of government, that had to be written and analysed in terms of the Emergency Act for Intervening more greatly into the lives of Aboriginal people.
Once the super cop had arrived on the scene to save the world, he too was a regime man who liked urgent meetings of what he described as the collective brain trust of neglectful hostile Aboriginal parents. To demonstrate this point, he threw a box of white and black rattles over the floor to see whether they landed in one nice heap together as though colourblind, or had remained colour-segregated. This began the ordeal that he said would take hours of total absorption in brutal self-analysis, where the super cop anthropologist kept insisting that every bad parent should bare their soul completely to him—tell him why they did not love their children like white people loved theirs. This, he pleaded, was the only way he could establish what type of parents they really were, and to be able to kick a few black rattles towards the white rattles. There was no choice about non-segregation, he said, while acknowledging the fact that the race of black rattles to the white world was a slow affair, but he continued by saying this was the wonderment of the beauty and craziness of non-compliance in the scattering of toy rattles. Whatever! It did not matter, for wherever the rattles landed, he was obliged to tell the government why the equity gap could not be closed in Praiseworthy, it was about their continued non-compliance, which was like the random spread of these rattles on the floor. He continued the analysis with a matter-of-fact face, by saying he had no choice but to tell the truth, for the government needed to know why its legislation for Aboriginal people was not working at the grassroots level. And why, he insisted, the closing-the-gap laws between black and white were always failing in Praiseworthy, and not only that, the gap was actually becoming wider, and becoming the bloody Grand Canyon of chasms, and what was more—like, the whole place was becoming an expanding sinkhole for crying out loud.
You are not the boss of here, clapped the united thunderclap of country.
Of course, big fellow government putting on fake compassion about the Aboriginal un-white moral crisis was just another meaningless quasi-winter type of intervention, and now even packaged with this super cop to implement by crawling lower than a snake to enforce something called legalese on the black crowd. The lot, bundled up as a done deal, and imposed upon the eager-for-change forward planning committee by the government insisting on perpetual training of homegrown specialists like these, was the hope for enacting the government’s law for every special emergency closing-the-gap situation known to mankind for saving Aboriginal toddlers in a Kimbies or Huggies nappy from unloving parents. The breadth of fakery knows no bounds, for all things needed to be changed in the view it seemed, and with the view being so multifariously rattled, you never knew where to begin, and this was how it was for the nation’s most righteous super cop as he continued on his beat to close down the gap forever, so there would only be one white Australia, that did not look like some humpy country that was all over the shop on the colour spectrum.
The meeting did not go well. You could not get the truth out of those street-type culturally independent kid toddlers who were preoccupied with trying to rip off their disposable nappy, or crying, or screaming, and not talking properly, and generally acting tough, as though they just wanted to be totally one with country by running amuck on the beach in the middle of the night.
Say you were sorry that you were not interested in closing the gap you naughty kids, and leave those disposable nappies on. Say that closing the gap was the net to catch all Aboriginal people so they can be saved. Say you wanted to become quick smart white and leave those nappies on, and stop wanting to go native.
The whole fiasco became a bedlam of loss in the brains trust, for those toddlers looked too radical for anyone to take on, and could not be disciplined since they preferred kind old spirit elders, to living parents. They cried non-stop, complained about headaches, and crawled all over the floor, deliberately scattering the assimilated rattles as though they wanted the white rattles to start becoming black, rather than the other way around.
You kids stop throwing those white rattles out the door right now!
Then those staunchest of women, all the young mothers, and the seriously powerful senior law women of country, the mothers of many children, grandmothers and the like, great-grandmothers who were sitting around looking hostile, after having had to bother themselves to come to another of the super cop’s meetings to explain themselves as being worthy of assimilation, now had the difficult task of trying to capture the rampaging toddlers to demonstrate the nurturing skills they had learnt from mandatory closing-the-gap classes, a special examination class which was now being held in this emergency in front of the super cop to anthropologically analyse their motherhood. It was an exercise in abysmal failure. The toddlers could not be captured or cajoled, and the babies simply chose to stay in their soiled nappies forever. This meant that the super cop could not decide what was learnt about how to change a baby’s nappy after these ladies had received lesson after lesson at great cost from an eighteen-year-old white sociology student called Betsy, who—in her not cheap role of saving black people—was living high on the power of what she called her white supremacy work experience stint in an Aboriginal community.
Then through the fifteen-foot-high cyclone fencing to keep out the unwilling, the riffraff, the agitators, the hard to train, the unassimilated morons etc., in marched the schoolchildren with their thongs flapping loudly and raising the dust on the floorboards of the modern purpose-built training complex for the emergency intervention into the sixty thousand year plus cultural history of Aboriginal survival to assimilate them into white people. Well! The war had been long and had taken a multi-purpose, multi-pronged and multi-layered heavy toll, and who could say how much longer it would all go on in a global emergency future where the poor people continued to suffer, but never mind, the spotlessly clean schoolchildren kicked aside the unassimilated rattles scattered over the floor, and sidestepped the mad smelly toddlers scooting in every direction with mothers in pursuit, and formed a neat parade to express their gratefulness in being excused from school where they might be learning how to win the war, to spend the day being interrogated by a cop. They were each able to speak personally into a megaphone, to say that they were not calling their parents paedophiles like the national media was saying they were anyhow. So, super cop said could each say after him, You had only been out playing football on the beach, and had not realised that it was the middle of the night? Each child refused to tell this lie, and was forced to stand with the megaphone until each word of what the cop wanted them to say could be dragged out of their mouths.
The air foul to breathe, quickly grew thicker with hostilities, while parents were forced to listen to these kids plying sympathy out of the theory cop anthropologist, who simultaneously was parting with his expert opinion about rehabilitating unloved children to the forward planning authority searching how to achieve rapid assimilation. The toddler babies said they were too scared to go back home on the dark tracks from the beach where devils were lurking to kidnap them. Who told you that? Our mummy and daddy, sir. And yet, strangely, the cry-babies would not stop talking when they were called little liars. More information flowed. Each toddler chucked a tantrum about how they kept seeing bad people in this ugly purpose-built asylum—What kind? What kind? The toddlers took turns at the megaphone and cried, child molesters, murderers of children, and plenty of paedophiles. The super cop anthropologist, also practically social worker, was almost overjoyed, and immediately jumped to conclusions from seeing a vast thicket of reasons lurking in front of him, where he saw the toddlers hiding from their parents on the beach, and started surmising that these babies were not only late going home from the beach in the middle of the night, they were not even intending to go home. Well! Wipe the hands of that, for one thing led to the other, and a little ringleader toddler stepped up to the megaphone, and said, Yep, that’s right. We were not going home.
All the parents called the little fellow a liar, lying through his baby teeth, and claimed that all these toddlers were naughty children who should be dealt with most severely by the super cop anthropologist, until they learnt to tell the truth, and the cop stood his ground, and said he was not going to punish babies.
The parents called this lunacy sideshow a load of rot run by toads, and said they were sick of things, like, you idiots acting like a pack of cringing dogs.
The forward planning thinkers formed a justice system right on the spot, and said they thought it was not bias when a mob of parents turned their focus on the cringing dogs, by accusing them of showing a little bit of empathy towards the toddlers, just—to prove their overwhelming love for the little children. The meeting totally lost it. The church leaders were called in to mediate in a holy way that took hours to bring up what was holy with a smoking censer. The forward planners asked why they had to suffer these false aspersions when after all, all they were trying to do was to work hard on an important job like closing the gap as volunteers, and further blamed these parents for neglecting their children.
The little children began screaming for some café food—a fizzy drink, and a falafel salad—in exactly the same way that they had seen white children chucking a tantrum for food on TV advertisements, only these toddlers cried more fiercely that they needed a doctor because they were starving with nothing to eat in this purpose-built asylum. The little jerks became paralysed from totally losing it when offered turtle eggs to eat, and cooked freshly caught fish served on a plate. They ended up lying on the floor as stiff as a board, unable to move either leg to walk, or to lift up an arm. They could still use their tongues, so they began whingeing and blaming the angry parents for turning them into stone statues. This was amazing enough, but then, a strange breeze full of dust suddenly came up the street from out of nowhere on this breezeless day in the haze, and the dusty current flew into the meeting, and slammed the door behind it. The breeze continued flowing over the children pinned to the floor by their own tantrum paralysis, and then, it picked up speed. The parents felt as though they were being slapped by grit as the flooding air grew stronger and out of control. The cyclonic wind, still confined inside the purpose-built training centre for assimilation, now picked up the rattles, threw the white rattles back into the box marked white rattles, and the black rattles back into the box marked for the black ones. As though this tempest wind had miracle hands, it closed the boxes, taped them with sticky tape, and then this monstrous 250-km-per-hour bedlam wind picked up the cardboard boxes like a rugby player, knocked down the door on the way out, and roughly flung the boxes onto the dirt outside where an old man was sitting on the ground. He did not need to look up about any of this power, but continued to scratch the dirt with a stick, and the dust blew away, and faded into the bush.
The wild little toddlers were fessing up to nothing, and were unable to move their tongues even though they wanted to rat on each other for the crime of not being in bed asleep at the allotted time of closing the gap which was five p.m., to be fresh in the morning, to be able to jump this way and that through the atmospheric hoop of lies, to gain a few smidgens of truth. Now, the little toddler spies, seeing the old man outside thinking about them, were too petrified to lie on the floor like statues, and jumped into the lap of their parents, because a bogeyman might come and cast a spell on them. Hours passed, and they still would not move away from their mother’s apron strings, so now with nothing else to say that could set them free, the toddlers started claiming to have seen things that they should not have seen. What was that child, asked the super cop. The most articulate toddlers had seen the sea woman turning into a cloud of seagulls and swimming with hammerhead sharks, then flying around on top of the water and kicking saltwater crocodiles in the guts.
Their parents thinking which way, half believed the stories because there was a powerful sea woman who had been living in the sea around these parts for thousands of years, and she was more real and alive than the glut of paedophiles that the Australian government and the national media were saying they were seeing in the Aboriginal world because they believed all black men were predators and abusers.
Things were being weighed in the dust particles that the old man threw from the ground, and now, the Praiseworthy parents were just relieved that their toddlers in either Kimbies or Huggies nappies were safe from the sea lady’s power which was far more real, than believing what the land thieves were saying about them.
The smart little toddlers were saying that they were not stupid, and were telling the truth so the old man would stop making them feel like they had been turned into stone statues. They now claimed to know what suicide was—we seen it happening all the time here. We know what was going on, when we see someone walking off into the sea in the middle of the night and not coming back—you call that suicide.
You want to stop your lying, you kids.
We big now. We’ve seen it happening plenty of times.
Enough of that talk. You kids are only babies and should stop lying.
The toddlers said that they were even thinking about suiciding themselves to get out of this purpose-built hell for assimilation.
We will do it if you stop us playing with our old people down on the beach at night, and the toddlers added anyhow, Aboriginal Sovereignty was not coming back to you mob.
The parents of several of these youngsters wanted questions to be answered there and then: Tell us you did not have anything to do with that? You tell us right now! Tell us you never pushed him in the ocean, did you? We don’t want any murderers in our families.
We good children. Tommyhawk—he there. Saw him. He shouldn’t have told …
The big ears super cop instantly became another kind when he thought he had heard criminal evidence for the first time since he had arrived in Praiseworthy. He turned whiter, as though in shock. He looked like a white monster experiencing full wrath against Aboriginal people while moving slow-motion towards the toddlers. Then, just as suddenly, as though reacting to the rampaging of a white monster, the confined space of the purpose-built training centre became another thing altogether. The atmosphere inside the building turned into a bulletproof viper’s nest of poison when the public good that was happening nice and polite up to this point, turned into full-throttled ugliness of the type you would not want to encounter. All those sour faces converged angrily, accensi ira concitant se in hostem, and like an illusion, the phenomenon hurled together into a totally tangled but unified crazed ancestral being lunging in every direction at a simple enemy, the shocked super cop.
Full rage followed.
The government’s trainee parents shielded the toddlers behind their bodies, and the women closed the open spaces with roared hoarse-voiced rhythms pumping for battle, and thumped their chests, and the volleying primordial whistling blew the top off the building while they were screaming that these children were just trying to bring attention to themselves. Get away, cop. You stop right there you loose cannon of the government! Don’t listen to these cry-babies. Blood shook. The entire radius of country gathered its belongings into a monstrous powerhouse that was at once almighty, real and final, and pulsing hammerlike, it was like the sky had fallen down on the relevance of the frightened cop and pushed him out of sight. As the haze of dust rose in the building, the people of country continued volleying, Can’t you see, these little babies are just squirming their way out of trouble. Well! Sure! All was indignant. The toddlers cried like innocent babies while hiding behind their parents and tugging and biting their legs, which forced the parents to cry with raw emotion from seeing themselves being forced into a deadly seriousness, now of wanting to kill anyone who came near their babies. It was a real mayhem situation in a long day of quivering the spears, without saying anything about the bigger story curdling in niggled thoughts travelling through the stick the old man was using to draw all the facts on the ground.
Way, way out in the sacred world of rolling waves where the ghost spirits of the ocean sometimes sung like Perry Como to the galaxies, don’t let the stars get in your eyes, you could listen to the sea singing back, don’t let the moon break your heart, and the moon taking its turn, and singing, there are too many splendid moons, and in the splendour of stars you could hear the whole ancestor country chorusing, there are too many stars so remember you are mine.
Then one day, after a thousand nights of ordinariness where nothing sang, the sea lady from the beginning of time was somehow changing the movements of ocean streams. She had turned from swimming deep in the sea in her dance with hammerhead sharks and scaring away sacred crocodiles, and come to the surface to glare at the stains in the timelessness of what had been ordinary. This happened when the old lady had been listening to a dumped boyfriend wafting into her ears the same country-and-western song about the stars that he was playing on sky radio. She focused her gaze elsewhere, towards other incongruities happening around her body which she saw in the moonlight hitting the watery surface, and lighting up the silver rippling from the wake of the grief-stricken Aboriginal Sovereignty Steel.
This was when she saw the boy’s waterlogged body floating alone out there in the sea. Just occasionally, the old sea lady could still manage to hear him fretting as he was dying, almost dead, and moaning about something that he had left behind. The old sea ancestor wondered about the trail of glittering light, and she softly asked, What was that? What could it be? The sea quickly became disturbed over too many miles, across too many stars, from too many nights of the moon, and from too many days of being alone. The sea woman rose up in the wailing winds, to search for what it could be, that the boy had left behind.
In the ordinary ebb and flow now grown into howling winds and roaring seas stretching from ocean to ocean, the old sea lady asked the fishes and the ghost of fishes in all the magic of the tides, and while searching through the sea river currents, to find what it could be that was worrying young Aboriginal Sovereignty Steel: What thing had he left behind that was stopping him from dying. Finally, though, in a world where all times seemed like nothing at all, it had probably only taken a half an hour for an answer to be found. The busyness sea itself rose, spilling Aboriginal Sovereignty over the waves, and heard him whispering: You know what? It was the bloody Basics Card. You know, the silly white man government’s tool of the twenty-first century for cruel means to suppress any real sense of sovereignty out of Aboriginal people. Yep! The oppression tool, all rolled up with land thief in a bloody Basics Card. Are you sure about that, sure that was what you will need for an eternity, in the infinity of your all times? the busyness sea asked. Why was this boy of sovereignty thinking about racism when he could have been imagining the joy of death, or another joy, the hopefulness of his sovereignty in country?
But! Hey no. Aboriginal Sovereignty was more worried about what would happen to his independence, about his bit of welfare entitlement, his social benefit under Australian law, even when he was dead. How was he going to feed himself if he lost his Basics Card. Worrying! Was this all he could inherit in the twenty-first century? Worrying about not having any money because he had forgotten to bring his Basics Card on his suicide, after he had been floating out there in the sea for days. The government was not worrying about eternity. It only worried about getting rolled in the next election after a four-year trip of further disempowering the sovereign peoples. Luckily, the sea lady chased away the hammerhead sharks all day long, kicked the man-eating crocodiles in the guts every five minutes, blew away another ten thousand Portuguese man-of-war in a sea plagued by these creatures this time of the year, and gathered up the deadly sea snakes and threw them to the other side of the world to think about how to behave while swimming back home, while the Aboriginal Sovereignty kid was worrying about not being able to buy a packet of chip potatoes at wherever he thought he was going, if he did not have his stupid white government’s Basics Card.
In the faraway sea under a clear blue-sky day, while the boy was being kept afloat by the old sea lady throwing her weight around with whatever was deadly confronting in the busyness sea, and also busily calming whatever while she was deciding on what to do with him fretting in an ocean now heaving with his heartbrokenness way out there, all consciousness slid through schools of trevally, more than any fisherman had ever seen. What might have seemed calming to the fish one moment, had become a fretting place, of worrying about how to get past a bigger weather system developing underneath, in the deeper waters of this world. Now it seemed that the whole sea was fretting about how Aboriginal Sovereignty could use a bit of money tied up in a piece of plastic on the things he wanted but could not buy in the sea, and which was not on the government’s prescribed list of what he was allowed to purchase with his money. And somehow, he never saw himself dying in the middle of the ocean, or panicking from knowing he was lost from the land, but just sliding from one thing to another. Where was little creep Tommyhawk anyhow?
Aboriginal Sovereignty grew weaker. He struggled to focus on anything at all in the watery world that had taken hold of his life, and once this had happened, his wish for a piece of government plastic to spend in the sea lost its grip, fell from his head, and was quickly fading away. The currents took him too far away to the deeper sea world where there could be no fighting to take flight but it did not matter, he did not feel he had a struggle against the waters of his homeland. And yes, although assuming he felt sorry about his predicament of being too far away from his parents’ home in the cemetery to ever be able to return, let’s say he used what was left of his capacity to think about one of the great mysteries in his life, of how to create a pipe dream like his father’s grandiose donkey transport conglomerate in the emergency of global warming, and perhaps with his last thought, he felt sorry that he had not made a will for his Basics Card that would buy a few stars for the dream.
The sea lady was not interested in Basics Cards. What use was another piece of plastic to her? The ocean was trashed with plastic. Untold billions of plastic bottles, and the rest of the many trillion bits and bobs floated into the centuries to come by winds, currents and waves, and journeying towards one of the many rubbish dumps, creating their own thousand-kilometre circling mass, gyres like giant weeping sores festering the ancestral planet in the centre of the ocean basins.
The local fishing people of Praiseworthy were returning home at the end of the day after another endless search to find Aboriginal Sovereignty. Each day, they would leave at dawn, and come back at dusk to pull the aluminium motorboats up on the sand, while the hunting dogs that had gone on these journeys would refuse to leave the boats and would sit there and howl for having failed again, and had to be forced away from the sea as they tried to swim off to continue with the hunt. Then, as the fishing men gathered together to talk about the fruitless day on the sea and walk home, they ignored dozens of large blue-and-white government signs that had sprung up and down the Praiseworthy beach that were an Australian Government Initiative Warning for proscribed areas where no liquor, or pornography, or paedophiles were allowed, and described in large lettering what the penalties were, such as the max being $74,800 or gaol, or $22,000 max or gaol, and to call 1800 333 995 (24 hours/7 days) for information (and hopefully, to make complaints).
The searchers of the sea who preferred not to see signs polluting the pristine beach of considerable ancestral consequential powers, were now bone-weary from searching for the body of Aboriginal Sovereignty in a heaving sea that had refused to help any human being today, yesterday, or the day before that. These were mostly old fishing people who had been roped in as a search party to find bodies in the ocean, who said they only knew where to find any fish whatsoever in ancestral waters, not bodies, and refused to work for any Australian government symbolism. Now, to prove a point, they avoided seeing English-language signs as they walked with their heads staring down on the ground.
These were ocean-hardened people of country, not forensic scientists, or the police. They were always at sea, and had never bothered to learn how to read English, and often claimed there was no need to understand English to belong to their world. They walked along the beach of the ancient homeland in thongs making a squishy sound on the watery beach, or quietly barefooted, while trying to draw in deep breaths of the saltiness of the sea that would tell them every single time that this was the peace of mind they needed to know about, the important punchline in their lives, not government signage. Yes, even the sound of the sea could not corrupt the thoughts being aired by the fishing people on reckoning to each other about how they were not going to waste a second of their eyesight on rubbish stuff like proclaimed area signs from the government, and how they would rather have their tongue cut out of their head with blunt scissors than speak in that weak Australian language of signs. You could see, so it was said about the days of searching for Aboriginal Sovereignty, that these fishing people never spoke a word that was not for this place, that sounded like death walking around in their mouth. All that was fine about not speaking this or that, but they had to admit that they were being poisoned in English. These old coughing men would punch their own chest to listen to the wheezing echoing in the lungs, to announce, Here! This is where all that stuff goes. Any fool knew the sea air was not the same sea air it used to be. This sea air would make anyone feel sick, and these real scientists believed that there was only one thing causing their bodies to rot: they were being infested with microparticles of racism, which were just like any other microparticles encountered in the plastic hazes the size of a thousand kilometres circling in the sea, and floating in the dusty haze dome over Praiseworthy. The diagnosis: all racism.
So there was talk of starting another war in the language of the sea country gently moving out beyond the horizon, and it too never saw the proscribed area warning signs where the fishing men walked while feeling unhindered by the ring of steel signs cemented metres deep, and mere metres apart along the beach, and, continuing on around the circumference of Praiseworthy like numbers on a giant clock, until joining back at the beach again. The old men and women eternally searching for the return of Aboriginal Sovereignty were bequeathed to nothingness, other than to a consciousness of interconnectedness where relatives were all life, and further related to ancestral creators, and further related back into deep time, and across all country places of land, sea, and skies.
It was in this time of government signs that the old fishing people who had been trying to find Aboriginal Sovereignty started believing that there was a funny thing happening, for even though they never looked at government signage, they claimed that they had never seen a dust particle from the haze settling on any of these government signs, and they proclaimed, this meant something was very strange about all these signs being dumped in sacred country. They noticed the smallest things about country anyway, and now saw how the storming seagulls following them home from the sea—as seagulls had done since time immemorial just to catch fish heads or fish guts thrown back into the sea—were also behaving strangely. Seagulls normally liked to sit anywhere, but had never once landed on any of these signs to fan their wings while facing the sea breeze, nor had a single lizard, ant, or any other animal like a snake bothered twisting itself around a government signpost, or sought shelter in the shade of a sign.
She can’t read English either, some countrymen reasoned, referring to the sea lady now becalmed, who had not bothered explaining why any Australian government sign was important either, not to any part of this country place of Praiseworthy. She had simply moved her magnificence away from the becalmed sea, and the fishing men walking home from the sea, and on the tides turning, and flown inland, low across the ground through threads of ancient cobwebs lying across the powerful boundaries of the ancestral creators.
The sea woman exercised law differently, sometimes quietly, and it felt as though the old mermaid never had, and no longer existed. A pack of ghost dogs ran up and down the beach looking for the ancestors. The grey spectres barked and barked at the puppetry of the signs erected for one act alone, capturing the souls of the free fishing men, the now proscribed people who no longer went fishing at all, after being turned into corpse hunters, who walked home without the fish haul, attacked by the growing numbers of hungry storming seagulls flying madly about overhead. The atmosphere grew congested with questions created from the open wound in the soul of the corpse hunters, who were now openly, and annoyingly criticising the missing parents. Why weren’t these parents going out in the dangerous sea journeys? Shouldn’t they be searching for their boy along with everyone else? Did they think they were better than the people who needed to catch fish to feed their families? Did anyone have the right to be different to themselves? Every day, while the corpse hunters were losing the rhythm of fishing people, they thought it was the parents who needed to be searching for their son, instead of not lifting a finger to help the people who should be fishing for a job. Why couldn’t the actual parents be out scanning the sea like everyone else working side by side on the occasion of this sad time? The walk home from the sea grew heavier with the weight of failure. No one could eat the fish from the deep sea. The corpse hunters cried that they were carrying the weight of the sea woman hitching a ride on their shoulders. She was sitting there with her full weight. Her long trailing ghost net embedded with cockle shells, jellyfish, crabs and sea stuff crushed the cobweb world covering the ground, and altered the many intricacies of gossamer shaping the ancestral map. The talking increased. What about the horrible nightmares the corpse searchers were having about what was lying out in the sea for them to find one day when they were just simple people trying to catch fish. The atmosphere grew darker out where the storming seagulls flew after the fishing folk, who knew how to see where a fish might be in the swell, but could not find their Aboriginal Sovereignty. There was a shift in the mood, and the fishing men turned corpse hunters now talked about how they wanted to punish these parents, make them pay for this nightmare of having to trudge home without success every day, and having no time to fish. They wanted these parents to feel what it was like to fail, by taking away their identity like their identity as fishing people had been taken from them. They were now only referred to as being corpse people. So why shouldn’t those parents lose everything they stood for too. The walk home from the sea with the heavy sea lady hitching a ride on their shoulders crippled the souls of these old fishing men and they thought that locking away those parents for good would be too good for such useless people.
Then, one day in this story of the unsuccessful quest to find the son, the sun faded from the sky when the old sea lady began breathing spectacularly like a gale force wind, and her ghostly high atmospheric pressure breath filled the region, and while she flew, her perspiration fell like a fine sea spray that rolled off the waves. She picked up speed. A quick succession of darkened storm clouds rolled into a low trough, bringing the birds—brolgas, ducks, bush turkeys, and seagulls—flying alongside her for company. The spectre of darkening storm clouds roamed far in the land and far away in the sea. Seagulls dwarfed in the skies, and the heavy clouds crawled almost on their belly as they passed over the proscribed people walking home on the beach, inking the waters where schools of hammerhead sharks shook with a glimmer of fright before scattering and diving deeper to slink off on the sea floor covered with meadows of rolling seagrass where they hid. Further away, white masses of sea birds swooped upon the sea snakes hissing along the top of the waves and in the surf. The old woman had a hint of a smile on her face as she roared down from the clouds, and in her speed she kicked the crocodiles swimming too near Aboriginal Sovereignty and sent them flying to the mangroves down the coast where she had seen them a month before.
Through the clouds, the moon shone on the body being carried far away in a glistening stream on the backs of ocean fish, the enormous school of silvery trevally that had lived in these waters since who knows when, and were ancient carriers of human souls taken away by the sea.
The whispering fish know about meshing, crisscrossing and the entanglement of storylines carrying all things into a home that was as expansively universal, as the world. Their fins were pumping and propelling a flying silvery creature composed from the sheer vastness of their numbers through the water beneath, and that carried the boy above the water. In this spirit world, a full silver moon reflected its light on the flurries of air he drew into his lungs, that keeps him breathing, while being barely alive.
All these images were real, and could have been captured on the latest space technology imitating a god’s eye for peering into these eruptive waters spreading across the top of the continent. Or, could have been easily picked up on a radar, and watched by the checkers of countries in the region of Asia, and by those powerful people on earth who were using satellite images in their surveillance of fishes and the nautical activities of boat peoples, border intrusions, and so forth.
These spies, watchers of the sea, may have seen the blurred shadow of Aboriginal Sovereignty floating in a rippling sea off what they thought were the un-sovereign borders of traditional land, and may have thought nothing of seeing what they believed to be a traumatised boat person. Easy to watch, while infra-red lungs breathed in the froth and bubble of what happens. Drownings. Ghosts. Remains. Things you see on the radar, the human business end of political bargaining over the harmlessness of the forsaken, were not the colossal ramifications reshaping the ancient story in country. You could not see that so easily on the radar.
Death was not cut and dry, nor do these out-of-the-blue things only happen to Aboriginal peoples—a wheel spinning repetitively—nothing to be done about it, nothing to stop it happening no matter what you threw at it—and so, salutare, in glory they will go … En their medh riki fara …
This was a midnight voice calling out for honesty, a stranger peeling back the layers of truth to examine what held a place like Praiseworthy together. So! Even though there were many people out searching in the sea, when walking along the beach these people of sobriety stood in front of the government’s Proscribed Area signs along the beach, and felt like they were the accused of murdering their own culture. They besought the sea in its own language, to give Aboriginal Sovereignty back to them, and even after all this time of searching futilely, kept wishing with all of their hearts, that this would not be another suicide. The waves rolled, and would continue to roll, while they waited. The fishing people calculated the tides, while silently surmising about what really happened amongst the heavy harvest of their theories, possibilities, probabilities, and waited, for the body to roll in, and although nothing was said openly right away, none could stop wondering about the missing parents—these anti-Praiseworthy people. Yep! This Cause Steel, who thought he was the main traditional owner, who could not prove his Native Title at all, not like they could. Well! It was a show. A radiating fever like ultraviolet waves on the beach. They saw it themselves: You see those rays coming off those government signs? It's poisoning our brain cells. Who knew, and perhaps they were over-preaching the solemnity of the reason they were feeling no good, but they thought all eyes should be scanning the sea to way yonder, and back, not just their own eyes.
The people were curious, and sometimes asked between themselves, what kind of father was Cause Man Steel really? Why wasn’t he on the policy radar, doing his bit to close the gap thing between Aboriginal people, and the rest of Australia? He should have been the first one, not they, who needed to be out here on the beach standing in front of those signs emanating poisonous radiation, and also proving, like they were, that he was not like other Aboriginal men the government and the media were accusing of not loving their children. Well! He should be there, if he claimed to be like everyone else, standing side by side like a real man, and involved in the search. Many of the corpse hunters texted each other when they saw he was not on the beach again like they were, preparing to be like a real man ready for the war of fighting the entire ocean to bring Aboriginal Sovereignty home. They wanted to know from whoever was in charge of this war thing, to find out when the father would be coming down to the beach like everyone else? Find out what was wrong with that murderer? It might be all right for someone to be antisocial if they liked, but they should be helping the main people like themselves facing a killer sea wanting to keep Aboriginal Sovereignty for itself. He should be helping to fight this great war of the all times, here and now.
The intermittent screeching of the collective town crier, the alarmist of country trying to find a corpse, went on and on from the sea to the beaches, from the bush to the home, into mobiles, along Church Street, and into the ears of all things, We have lost our Aboriginal Sovereignty. The search grew into an overwhelming deep grief that sent twangs of shivers shingling up and down the back, and the mourning ceremonies were activated in clouds of smoke on the beaches, but the oldest spirit world was continually interrupted by the simple human conscience of the time: Which side are you on? A Christian force beaming from Church Street ascended onto its throne perched in the psyche to decree that everyone was a church leader, yes, yes, while trying to mitigate its songs to the old songs of country. A choir of gospel songs began rising magnificently into the rolling clouds. Then, thunder roared, while forks of lightning went bang, bang, bang and hit every single one of the signs around the periphery of Praiseworthy, like a circle of firecrackers lit up on a cake. This was strangely miraculous for sure, since what took place was shocking, so instantaneously powerful, in reducing those metal signs into little blobs of molten scrap metal on the ground. Well! The corpse hunters and the fanning beach ladies said so, and felt fortunate enough that they were not hurt in the unspeakable holy fracture of country raising its awesome irk. They considered it a joy to have not been struck by the enormousness of the lightning ancestral being, so the loudest town crier shouted, So two more times please. The clouds grew heavier, and the fishing people began singing like they were channelling Pete Seeger, singing We shall overcome someday, and about giving peace a chance, then got on with the old ceremonies.
Thank you. Thank you. Deep heart, someday we shall overcome, and live in peace, and it was to be expected, to have grief as enormous as the ancestral lightning screeching amongst the crowd on the beach. The stricken had become more stricken since there had been a string of suicides by the young people, but somehow, again and again, calmness was regained, and once again, hand in hand like a bunch of black flower people, their dry eyes stared out to sea to find the son of all. They needed to have at least sighted the corpse once to make hope keep breathing in his body returned to them from the ancestral spirits.
The trouble of hearing donkey noise was not the number one choice for anyone wishing only for a bit of respect, like wanting some peace and quiet in their lives while they were trying to hear the tinkling of water falling from Aboriginal Sovereignty, the moment he walked out of the sea on an incoming tide.
You know … these sad old ladies said with mad voices while furiously waving the pandanus fronds, These are not holy donkeys.
Not Corpus Christi donkeys.
Not Palm Sunday donkeys neither.
They are the wrong colour donkeys anyway.
These are Jaguar colour for carrying rich people around.
Not like real holy grey carrying Christ.
The old women were completely pissed off that they were being tricked by the colour of donkeys that were supposed to be actual machinery, and did not look like, nor sound like expensive machinery to them, for instance, the sound of a naval frigate or aircraft carrier cruising around out in the ocean, or an air force fighter jet landing on the deck, were they themselves in such a reality, were they earning the salary of a fighter pilot. These people who had already suffered majorly and substantially said they were exhausted from hearing the constant braying of freaky coloured donkeys they did not like. They did not care how fucking valuable this fake machine was, or if it was the machinery for the prized new world transport conglomeration of the heart’s desire, it just looked like donkey all-sorts to them—the ones that were nearly the colour of platinum, or the not-so-prized ones, or the plain wrong ones, or even the most special and rarest ones. Whatever! They were all fakes, delusional versions of a single platinum magical millionaire-making donkey that did not exist, and did not even look like machinery to them. So. What? They hardly cared less, even if all these wrong donkeys had personally taken Planet years of crawling around in every bit of spirit-charged spinifex-ridden bush containing the most sacred songlines running through the arid middle lands of the continent. Any donkey was a donkey of this stupid man’s illusion of the type of machine he had in his mind, pursuing whatever relentlessly, bloodied and possessed through landscapes covered with the sharpest spinifex known to mankind, that tore most of the skin off his entire body.
In the hunt for an elusive creature of someone else’s beautiful imagination, to find the most silver ghost donkey that ever existed, everyone in Praiseworthy knew it did not exist. It was neither real, nor spirit. Widespread was actually looking for a creature of myth, one capable of creating magic, of fulfilling every wish, and never gave up hoping to turn his donkey business into gold.
Now Widespread was still nowhere in sight of the mourning dust haze of Praiseworthy. He had either slipped in and gone, or had disappeared from sight, not hearing the beseeching of the town criers searching for him to help in the search for his son, nor did he hear the women with fans on the beach, or the fishing people consigned as corpse hunters roped into a sea search as volunteers who hated searching for corpses of other people’s children. It was rumoured by the dream travellers that he was still at least a thousand kilometres away, and was heading home with the mask-head, actually a very old platinum donkey. It was a slow journey in a vehicle, a broken-down piece of machinery worth nothing that only crawled, stalled, and clapped out under the weight of carrying his heavy nightmarish premonitions, while trying to contain a struggling donkey that had messed up its platinum quality fur coat, and was still pining to be taken back to his home. This did not feel like gold, nor like a world of millionaires, and there was no gold being made yet in any of this high almighty business venture of sustainable magnificence in the fast-approaching new era of global warming.
All was not well either, down in the cemetery of Widespread’s dwindling Native Title estate. He had been away so long, many thought he had died after bringing all these donkeys into the place, and they said, you don’t mourn people like that. Don’t worry about him. He had gone and died, and left them to find his son’s body.
There was a whole lot of neglect going on down at the cemetery. No one bothered to close the gate anymore—the boys were gone, and Dance only cared about searching for lepidoptera dancing over the bushland, and she literally could not see the fast-breeding thousands of feral donkeys standing all around her. Well! The donkeys escaped, and were migrating to the beaches of Praiseworthy as though it was a luxury tourist resort with free food, and soon enough, there were hundreds of hungry, gangly and distressed-looking donkeys galloping towards the searchers who were looking to find the real one, but who only saw instead various shades of grey donkeys, or some white ones, brown, brindle, black, yellow ones charging towards them, blind with hunger from the scent of food, melting ice creams, corn beef sandwiches, minty lollies, cough drops, Coca-Cola, and other fizzy drinks, not to mention gallons of tea sweetened with condensed milk and sugar, cooked chickens, hot dogs in a bit of bread, sausages from the community barbecues and truckloads of food for all the involuntary search parties, paid with money siphoned from the council’s essential services budget from the government’s closing-the-gap vision of assimilation, but which the mob thought was for creating equity in building roads, like the ones in white towns, and providing services like education, sewerage etc. that were on par with the rest of the country’s towns and cities. Nah! Really! The old fanning ladies who were being run down by stampeding donkeys thought it really did not matter what colour these animals were, since they all looked the same to people who hated donkeys. Same wise, in a time of flux, the hordes of wild donkeys did not care who was on the beach. The hordes stormed, knocking people over like sticks. They went crazy. There were packs of donkeys all over the place rearing up on hind legs like they were dreaming of being high-ho silver, or they were kicking out their back legs, and rolling in the sand in the middle of the involuntary lady searchers fanning themselves while trying to stare out into the hazy sea at sunset, annoyed with being lumbered with two jobs. Wasn’t it enough that they were trying to measure the density of the thickening haze of global warming which was what they were supposed to do in their real job as elders, but now they also had to scan the ocean twice, not only to measure the density of the haze, but also to search for a cripple-head God boy dripping water as he rose from the sea. The donkeys attacked the fishing people who were totally pissed off with being involuntary corpse hunters forced to travel in ever-widening grids further out in the ocean to find Aboriginal Sovereignty, and who were now just trying to walk home and have a sleep before returning again to the sea, but had to fight their way through thousands of donkeys trying to mangle their bones. There was no end to the troubles, for the donkeys were attacking the gangs of toddlers in nappies trying to kill these animals indiscriminately with sticks, and as the hordes of donkeys and dogs fought one another, the oblivious children playing rounders on the beach and having a good old time were also attacked. The all-out attack continued for hours with no side giving an inch of ground while everything that got in each other’s way was destroyed by donkeys, people, children and dogs flying all over the place.
There was not one among the big old ladies fanning themselves, the corpse hunters, the old people sitting on the white plastic chairs, others on the fold-up chairs outside the cemetery because they were too afraid of donkeys to go inside the cemetery yard, and the church people building more churches on Church Street, who were not carrying an injury caused by a donkey which was either physical or psychological, or both, and who thought it was a beat-all disgusting act of Widespread’s, to abandon his feral donkeys in Praiseworthy. They claimed over and over that he had no business dumping his donkeys on the people who truly belonged to Praiseworthy to have to worry about in their time of much life hassle, and how they cried with injuries and worrying, that as far as the eye could see, vast herds were now invading the tribal Native Title land, the holiest of law places of the all times. Everywhere you looked, you could see these dirty creatures wandering freely over the pristine ancestral beach. There was no end to the trouble and the worrying, since there was no one either official or stupid, like the Major Mayoral thing Ice Pick who was too worried about whether his golden Christmas beetle would bother turning up this year, nor were the lackeys like the forward planners bothering to iron their mustering gear like civilised people, and saddle up on a real horse to round up these savage donkeys by whatever means, and export the buggers to some place on Earth that wanted to purchase packs of untrainable, savage donkeys that broke your arm or bit you on the leg or rolled all over you, just for the hell of it. There were some people who said they clearly remembered a time when Planet said he was going to let these donkeys go loose like this, to let them roam free-range, to let them rip up the countryside, the country that was not his in the first place, just like the cemetery on the edge of the town where he was squatting by saying it was his Native Title right. Now, it appeared, he had probably died in his own country which was elsewhere, and had left his mad donkeys on this country that was not his.
Now look at this. Shit everywhere, and it had gone on for too long. These were really mad types of donkeys, and the whole town thought they remembered Widespread saying that they were not feral donkeys. They could not tell what he had been collecting, for if all these thousands of donkeys were pet donkeys, why were they destroying the town like a pack of wild animals? These feral donkeys had no respect for Native Title land, or anything sacred. These were bad donkeys. We want to win here. No one should be bringing feral animals to Praiseworthy. How many times had they told him this, that Praiseworthy was a tidy town, that people in this place win major prizes for tidiness by picking up more rubbish than anyone else in Australia, and had raked up every single leaf that fell on the ground—things like that. People here do not want a place that looked dirty. This was the cleanest place of all. Now there was donkey shit everywhere in a place that had no history with donkeys in any time of the human experience. This Widespread, they added, must have been from somewhere else, some foreign country for instance, for he was not like themselves in any respect, so he must have come from somewhere else, where the local people have donkeys living with them. They wondered if he might actually be Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Indonesian, Chinese, Filipino, Arab, other people with donkey traditions, people with donkeys from countries they had seen countless fleeting times on TV, and actually, that was why he could not be a Native Title holder over the cemetery.
This chorus up and down the streets rifting night and day said Widespread was a bad man, and it was a genuine prophesy of theirs to say the writing was on the wall for these donkeys in the not-too-distant future while Planet was behaving like some excessive remote-areas Belshazzar opera person around Praiseworthy. The various search parties could not wait for him to come back dead or alive, and in fact, they were hoping he had not died somewhere in the desert, so he could come back and see what his vermin donkeys had destroyed on Praiseworthy territory, land that was not his law country, and even if it was, he had no right to destroy what he was supposed to look after. They could not wait for him to return, so they could tell him to get out, to go away and leave them alone. Let’s just say that Cause Man Steel, the un-emanator of the assimilatory times, was under the pump because he was an irritant of the pristine being raked and scrubbed for white trophy tidiness, and he was therefore a habitual nuisance like his noxious un-Australian donkeys. He was not anyone’s choice of what was real, for not manning up to reality in the world of practical existence by perpetual compromise.
The nuisance bugger donkeys of the fabled transport conglomerate continued to create hindrances for the searchers while the owner remained nowhere in sight. Either dead or alive, he was not putting in the hard yards as they were, to find the dead son. Everyone now realised that these donkeys were really wild animals. They attacked everyone. They were untameable. Anyone in their right mind could see that they were not domestic animals that you would use for a proper haulage conglomeration placed in the pointy end of the business and financial world. These were wild animals. That smelt. None smelt like money.
In the world of Praiseworthy with glory walls practically in every home resembling a sacred temple covered with intergenerational prize ribbons, trophies, worn-out ringer boots, akubra hats celebrating the world’s greatest cattle musterers, bull-riders, fastest lassoing champions in the hemisphere, and several silver mines worth of belt buckles engraved with renowned buck jumping horses of the dry country impersonating Godzilla on the rampage, the home representing more prizes for major feats of excellence per population than anywhere else in the world, there was not one person who chucked a saddle on any of those so-called pet donkeys, to get it to go somewhere you wanted it to go. They figured that riding a donkey was absolutely incomprehensible. Who wanted to ride a wild donkey fouling the pristine beach to the extent that you could no longer walk on it, would you call that a class act?
While it was being left to everyone in Praiseworthy, the people who already had the job of being a volunteer wisdom person, watchtower or beach sentry, or corpse finder in the open sea, they also had to stare down the barrel of pollution on pristine beaches, to look at the vast foulness like an environmentalist, and do the actual sums of what they called donkey arithmetic, to work out the cost of cleaning and scrubbing each grain of sand, to restore the place to something that looked a bit nice. Well! Everyone ended up arguing the toss about scrappy scrub donkeys that had never carried a real thing in their lives, and could not see it themselves, how donkeys were going to replace container ships in the congested shipping lanes in the Kowloon Peninsula off the South China Sea with about twenty-five thousand tons on board. Or, how a donkey could become the fuel economy’s next-gen 770-horsepower refrigerated semitrailer hitting melted tar while overloaded with more than seventy tons of vegetables or anything else. You needed to see something real like steel in a conglomerate transport business bounding through the globalised world. Real business. Not gammon stuff. Anyone, even an idiot, would be able to see that Widespread’s filthy donkeys would not know how to help the Australian economy, and would not even be interested in a looming global warming situation for us hereabout original peoples. No way! Anyone could see these donkeys were not going to make any kind of impression on Wall Street, not even in a hundred per cent hundred-year prospect of peak global warming happening everywhere. So! This is what happened. The official searchers here, there, and everywhere still surviving somehow on some new-fangled version of a government perpetual training scheme designed to magically teach them the non-existent value of white social responsibility, were all together, staring at the dung beetles getting rich on donkey droppings that covered the beach more than the sand did, and they tried really hard to mentally improve upon the reality of the arithmetic, to work out how they could make a few dollars out of transporting a box of tomatoes from A to B on one of these ugly creatures polluting the paradise of the pristine ancestral beach frontage, and how they might turn a meagre return from the box of overheated rotting tomatoes into a fortune, or at least a going concern, before Widespread took the opportunity, if he ever returned to Praiseworthy and started to claim back any of these straying donkeys. Who, they claimed, even on this beach, wanted to be a squanderer of opportunity when it was supposed to come knocking, or to ever let a chance go by?
These people had enough powerful notions thrown at them about how they could get rich fast, if only they took the opportunity. Yet, the idea of becoming rich when you were dirt poor could grow into a mountain of wishing in the mind, that would in the end be all you could think about, and why you would begin believing in fallacies. Now the way popped in the brain like osmosis, and the searchers thought that perhaps they really did know more about donkeys than Widespread, since, well, you only had to look at their knowledge of livestock which was practically in the blood, and it felt as though they were the greatest in the world in knowing how to work livestock while communing with the pride-of-place intergenerational devotional wall of fame, the trophy paraphernalia and so forth and you know, So what if Planet says he’s a donkey whisperer, he’s a bloody donkey whisperer my foot! What was really going on with this donkey conglomerate anyhow, when anyone could see that these scungy animals had come straight out of the desert where they had been living for more than a century. Just because they could survive out there in the wild and in the baking heat which had mutated and improved the genes, and looked like Rastafarians with dreadlocks, did not mean Planet knew more than they did about donkeys. The searchers reached for the real, and they believed that these donkeys had recreated themselves in country that had already reached the peak of the climate emergency forecast. Widespread had plagued the place with freak donkeys with fur that looked all weird and silvery like platinum and weak from global warming, and were what you might call—half albino.
But: Who were they to say anything? They were only people who had been forcibly recruited to be corpse searchers on an enforced volunteering government training scheme to help them to become socially responsible. Yet, this feel-good stuff was not sustaining their inner soul, and they thought further about the numerous instances of hindrance from these donkeys interfering with their need to have a totally clear access and view of the sea, and talked further between themselves about how Cause Man Steel was only obsessed with donkeys, and would not have any idea about how to start a transport conglomerate. What was really bothering their minds, was how they needed to see mythical supernatural donkeys gifted to them from the God of the multiple denominational churches, and so they prayed for real donkeys, something with more oomph, looking like they had the power of the ancestral creators of country, and death to ferals. How would you expect Widespread to develop a powerful wall against fear, like wildfire? Fire that produces its own tornadoes of lightning and thunder, and fire clouds raining live embers in howling winds all over the country? These were in the old stories raiding the nightmares. How was he going to develop a world-standard conglomerate transport system to drive right through all those mega-fires in the Pyrocene age of global warming? You needed superhero donkeys belting through the era for something like that.
The donkeys did not get it: why the involuntary volunteer searchers were always screaming at them, Shoo! Get out of the way. The pack became indignant, stood in the way of the search parties moving in a line along the beach while prodding the sand with sticks in search of foul play, any evidence at all that could be linked to the disappearance of their Aboriginal Sovereignty. All the old volunteer ladies fanning themselves on the beach kept yelling to the God cop anthropologist that there were too many donkeys obstructing their view of the sea, but he pretended that he could not hear them by writing notes in his notepad with a sharpened 2B lead pencil.
With no one believing that feral donkeys had the right to exist in this space, there was a stand-off between a fuming and hot-tempered people with no time for intruders, and this large pack of hungry donkeys that had grown to like sea breezes and wanted the space to continue moving around on the beach. The anthropologist cop soon became bored with the eye-balling because he did not know what was going on about belonging, and he soon left the heat of the sun to go and do another report to the government about how a bunch of agitators were protesting on the beach over the loss of their Aboriginal Sovereignty. These were not like the “real” Aboriginal people he used to know, he wrote with a flourish in the stylised, dot-point report, not like the ones he knew years ago, who never complained about the government, like these modernised whingers about human rights.
This was when one of the searchers was fuming about the state of the world to the point that blood literally bled in his eyes and sped in an agitated whirlpool of anger throughout his body. He cast away the devotional belief of all the churches believing in one God and said he did not want to sing any more hymns to make things feel better in his head for a few fleeting moments. He was very pumped up. His body shook. He pranced over the beach like he wanted war, and wanted the thing with the donkeys to be finished with once and for all. He walked up to the donkeys packed in a huddle a couple of hundred metres down the beach, yelling bitter words about how he felt about life, and waving around the long hunting stick he held in his hands. In this full threatening gesture of anticipated battle, he aimed to cast the first blow. He swung the stick with full force haphazardly in front of these animals that refused to move, or acknowledge he existed, before a sharp crack echoed back along the beach when a donkey was struck on the head.
This war man chased the stunned donkey, nearly killed it—the almost perfect platinum pole star of the proposed transport conglomerate. He was bent on attacking it, storming after the striking ice greyness through the stampeding pack, and the more the stunned creature ran frantically in circles of fear, the angrier became the attacker, because he could not understand why in hell it would not just run back to wherever it came from, like for instance, back to friggen Widespread’s place. The attack turned into some kind of sport running red-hot with targeting and hitting the injured donkey, while he lashed out on any other donkey that got between the one that he was now determined to kill.
This bleeding donkey, in shock, punctured skin all over its body, with fear in its eyes, began attacking and biting the person with the stick, and this escalated into a fight in the sand flying sky-high between the stick-yielding man at one end, and the donkey that had grabbed the stick and was holding it firmly between its teeth. The great tug-a-war turned into a marathon that was watched by both humans and donkeys to see which would win possession of the stick, but neither would relent in a storm of kicking, punching and biting while sand flew with skin, fur and blood.
The mass of startled, open-mouth donkeys braying loudly and locked in nervous twitching panic bolted in a heaven-like stampede—not of angels, but of donkeys, dogs and people. The old women yelled and shook their fans. In the mayhem, the toddlers and children cursed and attacked both donkeys and people with their pocketknives as they weaved in and out through the searchers. The children were kicked by the frightened animals lashing out in this war, and they retaliated by yelling and swearing about being hurt. Parents threw sticks, stones and buckets of sand at the fattest donkeys—dozens of pregnant jennies—trying to hit them in the eye. Many were bitten on the neck or arm, or kicked, as the donkeys reared up to fight back while being prodded with sticks, shovels or walking sticks, or pounded with stones by people trying to move everything off the beach.
The major transport conglomeration, its so-forth beautiful vision of resilience in a hot as hell new world, and as a monumental cause in the hope of saving his people for the new era which had driven Cause Man Steel to the edge of insanity, was already heading for ruin. This new God-hero Widespread, who had been suddenly driven by a premonition that he had to race back to Praiseworthy, did not realise that he was being locked out of this reality of the show on the beach. He was still far away, further west, and south in latitude, caught in another ancestral country—thousands of kilometres away, while fixing his broken-down Falcon in the bush lands, and trying to convince the perfect platinum donkey to forget its sulkiness about being captured, and instead, be more cooperative about becoming a world-famous mask-head, almost one of the senior angels, a seraph for driving a sustainable, high-edge unpolluting business venture of purity into the new future. What could be more worthy than heading the world’s first sustainable transport conglomerate? You were doing nothing out here. He pattered on about his worthy vision of the life fantastic—of how to do it when they were all living in hell, while he was still figuring out how to reassemble the contents of a useless motor engine scattered on the ground all over the bush, and he further challenged the feral creature by asking it, What else were you planning to do in this heat? Both man and donkey looked around at the scorching heat somewhere near fifty degrees in the middle of the day, canvassed the mirages up the road, drew into their soul the wilting hard leather-like leaves of the flora, and Widespread challenged the donkey to step up to the fact of global warming. Well, it’s going to be like this, you need to be a bloody good warrior when it becomes hotter than this in the future. So, my friend, you may as well be doing something useful with your life and your future generations. You will either be just baking like everything else around here while it gets even hotter than this, or you start doing something about it. Which hellhole do you want? Even king donkeys like you have got to step up, just like everything else, if you are going to have a snowflake’s chance of surviving on a burning planet.
But remember, and there was paramount remembrance about what was happening in the fight for the beach, that it was a total bedlam of misunderstanding from day one about what these donkeys were doing in Praiseworthy in a fight of one man with everyone else.
Now, it was plainly obvious that this donkey enterprise would have to end.
Many of the beach people were knocked over in the fracas. Sandstorms flew up from the dry beach. All the donkeys that were almost the colour of platinum were gone, and some were among the hundreds of donkeys struggling far out in the sea. Tempers were raw. Injured people were screaming. Others were yelling for people to save the donkeys. Others were yelling for more blood.
Those who noticed the struggle of at least a hundred light-colour donkeys half-drifting, half-swimming far out in the massive blueness of the sea where it meets the sky, perhaps thought that these animals were doomed. It may have crossed their minds that these donkeys drifting further away, were either losing the will to live, or were lost or disoriented from never before experiencing an escape from horror in a blind run through the sea, or were just too terrified to swim back to the beach. And then, as the people on the beach were preoccupied with censuring themselves with the perpetual immediacy of danger approaching their lives, they turned their backs while juggling a lifetime of mixed emotions, and perhaps in the seesaw, were pleased one minute to see this view in the sea, while feeling mortified the next.
They may have imagined the animals coming back, floating on the incoming tide either dead or alive, while holding Widespread to account in their chastising minds for being the owner of these donkeys who had not yet witnessed the end of their ordeal. Perhaps, in a truly long sigh of resignation for preserving their integrity to fight another day in the long struggle of life, each had showered themselves with a winnable diamond-cut finality fetched up from the surface of their souls, this small thought resembling a kernel of generosity from experience, a well-crafted inherent knowledge that all good things must come to an end.
We will wrap one of these rotting stinking carcasses around his neck when he gets back.
The super people saw new times with a contemporary, flexible agenda, which Ice Pick said was how to manage the moment of perpetual change for the better, which meant accepting the fact that when you are in mean times you got to conserve your energies to do one or two things, those most concerning your own needs: You don’t have to see everything with a tear in your eye. A dying donkey was just a conservation of energy, another evil preventing rapid progress in the theory of We shall overcome, in a newly acquired conservatism on the road to freedom.
What if Planet valued these donkeys, they would make him pay for this bloodbath on the beach. The old ladies called the faraway police of Parliament House on their mobile phones to fly up to this Praiseworthy beach right now, and shoot all these donkeys suffering in the sea, and along their beach frontage, blocking the view of their search for Aboriginal Sovereignty.
Far, far away, and far from where the solid core thinking of Praiseworthy was heading with vendettas and so forth, Cause Man Steel was assembling hundreds of engine parts for the broken-down Falcon, walking around with his rubber-thong feet in the prickles. And, perhaps through enough bad feelings, and curses, and his premonitions about nasty stuff reaching him from thousands of miles away, he felt the need for individualising his weird obsession about achieving Aboriginal self-sufficiency, to recoup like a last will and testament to himself, where his type of economic independency was heading, of reassuring himself in his righteous getting crazy rich vision through his totally unbendable singular focus, that he was dead right. He was right to believe in a dream by spending decades to acquire a unique millionaire-producing donkey the colour of platinum which was worth more than gold, even if he had only once seen it in a dream. You had to trust luck. Really trust a particular type of magic he knew existed in his ancestral orbit, that was as far removed as you could get from hexed lingering-death government schemes for covering the inequity gap with whiteness as far as the eye could see—and so on and so forth, because he knew what real luck was, and he said it now, You got to fuck that lingering death into nothingness.
How would the government know anything about the Aboriginal predicament?
At this stage of luckless journeying, his fat head was only capable of spinning its own golden threads of vision that were, at best, better than all the rest. Just follow me, he cried aloud like a prophet from the peak of a desert sand dune to the faraway people, and by assuming that the whole of Praiseworthy was hanging out to hear what he had to say, like a magic man with great powers whose words floated far away with the ancestors over country of the song lines, he telepathically chucked them the goods, by giving them a thought or two about having faith in a better fate, which was what he was thinking about while reconstructing the empty cavity of the Falcon’s wrecked engine, and he said more matter-a-factually, far more than any time he had spoken about anything in the past, I will show you a way where you will not have to speak to white people again. The thought struck gold big time with such a fantastical idea in a place where there was no spanner in the works of his brain, and he felt great for being on the way about this, about being nearly at the boundary gate, where you just had to figure out how to open the padlock, to be on track with achieving his simple, blue-sky vision. So, wanting to be clear, he went on explaining the flight from oppression, his rags to riches deal: You got to control the carting and transport industry of Australia. If you can cart what you need, and you can transport yourself for nothing, then you will be a free man, he claimed. You owned your destiny because, he said while teleporting into the fray, whatever else you need in life will follow you, if you can carry your own load. This was how our people lived in the past and survived. This is how we will do it again. Fossil fuel is not going to last forever. Mate! We are blessed that some of those old pioneer buggers of colonisation left us the gift of these five million feral donkeys. Well! At least it is something, after they took just about everything else, let’s show the buggers that we will rule this place again from their waste.
Donkeys, the gloater cried to all and sundry in a voice capable of travelling several hours and days, through heat-shimmering mirages, dust storms, electrical tempests, into the swamps, bushfires, floods over the plains country, through earthquakes, and other global catastrophes, before reaching over the old rooftops, crawling around multiple rickety church steeples, and seeping into the broken temples of the mind with a word or a sentence either deleted or lost by the weather editor, until finally, all that was left to hear was a clear half sentence checked into one’s thoughts, and they did not know what this incomplete sentence meant, what was the new economic order? What was the new economic order? The half thought was a complete puzzle for the searchers down on the beach while pondering the shire council bulldozer’s flattened sand monument dedicated to their massacre of donkeys. All they remembered Cause saying from his soapbox days, was something about how it would take a hundred years to complete a blue-sky vision, a hundred years to build perhaps, but you know what, you are the ones who will scoop the future trifecta, because not only you, but your heirs will be in the hot seat. They will inherit the future of mankind. He had wired that news too, via an old megaphone hanging off the side window of his vehicle as he drove up and down Church Street spruiking his views like a politician. Widespread knew the sums, and it was all plus, plus, plus without any hesitation, or subtraction of hope while he was saying, You know what idiots? I am going to unshackle the Aboriginal person. You want to know how? Brainwave, pure and simple brainpower, doesn’t cost a dollar, and you know what, you will get it for free from me.
Where was the spirit of all things, was it lost? Did it exist at all? Or was it, too, searching for Aboriginal Sovereignty? Time was passing quickly for a man building a dream far away in the desert country while the body searchers keep searching the sea for a corpse, and the old ladies on the beach keep looking sideways out to the sea, and becoming far more occupied with collecting incriminating evidence. All day long they tackled the hate barnacles attacking their mind while trying to keep an eye on the sea, and taking selfies of themselves beside marauding diseased donkeys running up and down and past them on the beach in plague proportions right in front of their eyes. Or else, they pressed their mobile phone hard against the ear to beg the capital of Australia’s police to drive about three thousand kilometres to the haze dome, to make donkeys disappear with a bullet.
The search parties wanted to take the matrices out of finding Aboriginal Sovereignty, to lessen the complexities of being an involuntary searcher under their intergenerational circumstances, to be without thought, or to concentrate all thought on the search. They no longer wanted to be forced to live with the painful views in life, either from feral animals proliferating in the world, or hearing the views of a bad person far away fixing his broken-down vehicle on some unused bush highway. They wanted action against this proliferator for living illegally down in the cemetery, squatting on land that was not his to squat on with hundreds of donkeys slumming around in umpteen humpy pens thrown together with rubbish and tied up with rusty wire. All this got in the way of a clear mind, that should be thinking with respect about where dead people should be buried. The action corpse hunters who were out searching for bodies in the sea, should not have to be searching for a final resting place when they already had a cemetery. It was their right to be entitled to a peaceful eternity of independence that was not in existence when alive, to finally turn the lights off, and lose themselves in the quicksand of eternal peace, and not to have to worry about a dead feral donkey being buried in the hole where you should be buried.
Ode to glory in the haze, the citadel of the high ground knowing no bounds, where the steeple people, right down to the old granny lifesavers on the beach, knew the cost of their freedom was too much. They knew the kind of freedom that Widespread was talking about. The thought of too much freedom could make you go mad when the proliferator went over the place in your head, and made you act like a dingo. His slung-shot freedom messages using his ancient telegraphy powers were deleted from the brain. He was not going to control this mob, like other people who sent emails to your brain even though they were miles away.
The whole world of Praiseworthy knew he was tampering with their minds with his messages, and trying to make a pack of whingers out of good involuntary lifesavers battling saltwater crocodiles, sharks, box jellyfish, snakes and whatnot to find their Aboriginal Sovereignty, and forcing them to be reskilled again as failed volunteer search parties whose only task was to recover the bodies of children floating in the sea when these kids learnt the future in a few weeks at school. The warp thing about Widespread’s travelling messages, was that he pushed the local brain trust in an instant too far, into pure hatred towards whatever he was visioning—like this last-straw donkey business, that had left them fighting for their culture down on the beach that used to look like a million dollars and could have been a popular tourist venture, but you know what? It was pristine-less, and no longer spotless by any stretch of the imagination.
There was just never any respect, none of this in the mind of an involuntary corpse searcher, for his mind was an on-the-ropes respect-free zone, because he was too livid gone, and sour he could not be himself, a true fishing man throwing nets in the estuaries for mangrove jack, free to dream about as much fish as he liked, like an ancient fishing man far out at sea in a place of his choice, and bringing home proudly a haul that could break your back, or dreaming about fish like a proper God man, or seriously like the Greek god of dreams, Morpheus—the swan-winged one of the thousand sons of sleep—Somnus. The suicide retrieval business was not for them. They were not into being involuntary volunteers upsetting the great serpent frightener of men, or whatever else huge was out there squatting in the sea, or worrying about who was squatting illegally in the question mark Native Title quest cemetery, or why the parents were sitting around at home eating another packet of gingernut biscuits with a cup of tea, and not searching for their own lost children with funeral eyes like they were themselves. Ordinary fishing men should not be asked to do this kind of no-statement work for nothing. This was really a police job, but, where were the gutless police? The devoted got down on their knees, and it was a total all-out frenzy of praying along Church Street in forty-six degrees Celsius out in the midday sun, or at least fifty-four degrees in any tin shed holy place of the denominational churches—if there was room to squeeze in another of the devotees, for there were always too many holy people trying to squeeze inside an oven that was called a church, and needing to yell over one another their own unique story about bad donkeys to the burning-ear God. And they repeated what the number one holy smoke God fellow had proclaimed in a pamphlet showered into the dreams of Praiseworthy: Let us pray. Pray for the decent thing. Let us pray that we will be able to destroy all these dangerous donkeys as quickly as possible before they kill everyone every now and again. Let us pray that proper police will come here soon and knock sense into Cause Man Steel and drag him down to the beach at gunpoint to collect his poisonous cut-snake donkeys, then let’s hope the police make him clean up this guts-all-over-the-place mess of the pristine ancestral beach frontage, make him real sorry for himself, make him shake like a rattlesnake with fear, and bulldoze his eye-ore house into the ground, pour a forty-four-gallon drum of petrol on it and burn this rot, then make him go away. Let us pray this will be done, and that only we true people, will get a Native Title determination from the Australian government telling us we own our ancestral land, and not him, or a donkey, not that these were proper God-carrying donkeys anyway glory be, Amen.
So that was what it was all about. No one would be helping Cause Man Steel after his slaughterhouse-mayhem donkeys transformed the pristine beach by turning it into a major crime zone. And the searchers grumbled, this is how he pays us back for helping him. Looking for his kid. We had told him straight a long time ago, that we did not want an international transport conglomerate set up here in Praiseworthy, not his type of bodgie bogan type of peasant people turnout with donkeys.
As the seasons shifted from summer to winter and back again, the jamming of electromagnetic frequencies also increased through the extraordinarily high number of simultaneous mobile calls being made from the terrible-looking beach to the nation’s capital police by the involuntary search parties suffering flashbacks of the major crime. They screamed into their mobiles: Morons! Look at the satellite images from before the crime, and now, where we look like aliens living on Mars. What are we going to do with the shocked sky, flat and drained of life? The brokenness of the ancient rhythm of the sand—all scattered over the broken beach. The universe of sand-dwelling tiny micro-creatures and the crab spirits strewn on the surface and desiccated by the sun. And in the swish-swash, clusters of unconscious sardines tossing in the surf. How would you feel about that? We cannot even feel the ancient pristineness in this killing field anymore. The collective voice of the little people of Praiseworthy orbited across the biosphere, and demanded to know from the faraway police, the enforcers of law from thousands of miles away, what their human rights were worth from roughly zero, to one hundred per cent. Why did we have to lie on the beach wounded for days like we were the donkeys in this war zone while requiring medical help to arrive to wrap bandages around the wounded? What was that worth? Zero, or one hundred per cent, you get what we are talking about? They demanded to know what they were actually worth, whether they were worth nothing, or eighteen per cent, or forty-seven per cent, or one hundred per cent, such as a Commonwealth of Australia politician that makes these laws for crushing Aboriginal people.
The fear of more violence spreading on the beach escalated in the minds of the battle-weary, and soon began skyrocketing right out of proportion against what the rest of the poor world knew as the gentle beast of burden, the donkey that carried Mary through the streets of Bethlehem. The expensive government medical staff barricaded themselves inside their locked gated compound in Praiseworthy and issued a proclamation saying that they were not going to treat diseased donkeys, or people fighting on the beach. They stayed in their cyclone-proof fenced compound, behind a three-and-a-half-metre-tall cement wall around the hospital grounds annexed by state laws from traditional Aboriginal lands, and handed medicine out to the sick people through a hole in the wall, otherwise kept locked by a tiny window hatch. Ditto, the local police officers who hid in their compound on land long ago excised by state laws too, and would not come out to enforce the law, because they feared for their life. SOS rocks were thrown on the roofs of the hospital, nurses’ quarters, the police station, but it was evident that neither nurses nor police were taking any requests to attend the crime scene of an escalating calamity created by the perpetual troublemaker Cause Man Steel.
The terrified donkeys not only continued attacking people on the beach, but were now up and down Church Street tearing apart the multi-denominational holy places. The church people became blinded by fear and rage, and were fighting one another, while with untreated injuries or not, the involuntary searchers continued fighting the predators. Donkeys were kicked, pulled to the ground, tackled, and half-strangled until luckily, by sheer brute force generated from the fear of being killed, they managed to escape, regroup, and gallop in a headstrong way, back down the beach, to again charge at the corpse searchers trying to inch their way towards the safety of the sea. All through this scene of sand flying and screaming donkeys attacking the yelling wild crowds armed with pandanus fronds, shovels, hunting sticks and crowbars, you could hear people cursing donkey devils, donkey shit, but from time to time, there was a pause, the almost tranquil calm of a flat sea singing as it gurgled across the sand, while the people of Praiseworthy waited in vain for the police to come with guns, and the medical people to bring bandages and a needle and thread to stitch up their open wounds.
Well! Nothing. No police came. No field hospital. The senior police in Canberra said, Good, go pull the other leg in a text message that was sent back down the barrel of nuisance calls about donkeys mucking up the pristine sand while fighting with human beings. The local police behind the barricades claimed that they were laying charges against the people who had burgled Cause Man Steel’s home and let those donkeys loose in the first place. The police claimed that they knew who the trespassers were, because they had received very interesting anonymous phone calls, which were all from the same muffled voice broken up by the sound of waves crushing on the beach. This was the tip-off. We have names, the police texted the villainy people to desist from texting, Or! Else! What? You can expect heavy fines for trespassing by text on police property.
The involuntary people texted the police back: Idiots! There was a lot of verbal damage in the exchange about who was who on someone else’s property, and the police texted back. Theft of property. Stealing donkeys.
Hey! Brain trust!
Why would anybody want to steal feral donkeys from the bush full with millions of them?
Have a look at this.
Blood! See f-n blood pouring from my arm.
The thing must be broken.
See my fingers. This one is dangling. They are all dangling. All of my fingers are f-n broken.
F-n donkey kicked me in the face.
Some old lady over there, she is unconscious. She’s been well and truly kicked in the head.
All of my ribs are gone.
That bloody donkey tried to chew my leg off before I killed it.
The old pandanus-frond-fanning ladies were photographing selfies of themselves with injuries, and they too texted the police who still were not flying in from Canberra with a shipping container full of dynamite to blow up every donkey on the beach. The next text they sent screamed: Who is going to pay for all of this damage to our pristineness we are looking at? We are going to sue you cops for compensation. They themselves, as old women, did not have that kind of money to spend on repatriating beach pollution. Their money was locked up in a government Basics Card, which meant that every cent was controlled by the government. The real people were screaming around on the beach about how debts for repatriating a war zone could last forever, and they really hated Cause for not setting up a proper worldwide money-spinning transport conglomerate, the biggest shipping container company in the world. They blamed him that there were no rich Praiseworthy Aboriginal people as he promised there would be, and how they would be the captains of the transport industry controlling what was to come—things like worldwide pollution, now hitting home with colossal unprecedented weather events—and looking at this destroyed ancestral beach that could have been a luxury beach resort, they now felt certain, that even the great sacred ancestral being had well and truly risen, flown off, and look, probably would not return any day in this millennium. This did not make the real people happy. They just wanted to be rich enough to deal with the future by buying some justice, or silence, on their own cultural terms.
Now, the way things happened, it was these involuntary searchers who were losing the battle for the beach. They were too used to dealing with killers, colonisers, land thieves, human rights abusers, or poisonous snakes, global viruses, spiders, mosquitoes, flies, and unprecedented catastrophes of global warming. They had never had to fight a donkey human killer. The old ladies said they would not be waving a palm frond for any of these savage donkeys next Palm Sunday mass. They would not be cutting any fronds from the foreign palm tree. The involuntary corpse searchers as well as the pandanus-fanning old lady coast watchers of the ocean thought it was impossible for good cultural people like themselves to fathom what was holy about a donkey that wanted to kill them, or how you could put these murdering feral donkeys to good use in a global transport industry.
The thing was, the beach had its own thoughts of manufacturing reality, where the more the searchers raced over the sand and struggled to grip the edge of the sea by their fingernails to save themselves from being mauled by mad donkeys, the more it felt as though there were other donkeys on the overhead flight path of a Qantas Airbus 380, jumping into the sky from the height of thirty-five thousand feet, and falling with their full weight on top of what was left of the shattered beach. The fatigued corpse searchers wanted it on notice that they had been forced to do this terrible job, and were now placed in jeopardy, seeing for themselves what it felt like to be rained on by donkeys falling from the sky, since the old fan-waving law women had gone home to cook fish soup. Where was the God anthropologist cop—well, he was useless. He was gone without recording a scrap of evidence of this theft of the ancestral land by a pack of donkeys. But, as the cop said, he couldn’t handle the job. It was too violent. He was so disgusted with seeing the violence of human beings fighting donkeys, that he had gone back to his university down south, to write a sizeable book about everything he knew about anti-violence, whatever he could think about, and to prove it was a higher virtue that was only possible for white people’s minds, to conquer the sensitivities of being civilised. For he would say, Aboriginal people’s minds were too ancient, and incapable of reaching the hefty heights of a sophisticated modern civilisation, since they were basically inferior to the white race’s own superior inferiority and greater abstract cruelty for destroying the entire world.
The remaining searchers who were still capable of standing and fighting on for their lives, deeply felt the pain of abandonment, but nevertheless, they felt as though they were involved in some magical mighty curse battle that had suddenly befallen on their cultural domain because they had lost their Aboriginal Sovereignty. Even when beaten, they took heart, and the involuntary searchers picked themselves up time and again from the sand littered with injured and broken body parts, to challenge the jinx of this nightmarish reality, to be there in the last almighty stand, ahead of being driven into the sea by donkeys.
And what about that Tommyhawk? The other kind. It felt as though Planet could catch elsewhere in a single breath, and bring the boy’s spirit to this place where he was stuck with the broken-down Falcon he had crashed, and his magical whingeing donkey. The boy’s rapid breathing felt so close, close enough to catch, while standing so far away, and Planet paused, felt his lungs constrict, and a sudden pain ripped through his heart. He instantly knew the boy was frightened, probably up to no good again, and he had to take a deep breath while thinking about this mischievous younger son, the born fascist, who was useless to him.
The moment passed, and he looked around the spinifex plains deep in a dangerous spirit world where he was ensnared until the Falcon would be ready to go, when magic had taken place through his bare hands, and that load of rust would shoot like a bat out of hell, and he would be gone from the never-ending spirit songs whispering around him, that he felt were flowing across the atmosphere, when he was labouring with this crapped-out engine of the Falcon disassembled into dozens of oily parts, which were still a mystery even to the spirit world staring at the tremendous puzzle of damage spread over the ground. While growing more unsure of knowing where he was, as though this country was trying to disorient him, pulling him in the undertow of its power, Widespread of all people seemed to have lost the plot, because he began to believe he had been in this place for a very long time, longer than he had imagined, and now, though becoming further disoriented by the very thought of his fascist son, suddenly no longer knew where he was, and he felt the urge to run, to escape, it was like pure rage whistling in his head. Widespread had always sped through this country, never stopped even for a piss, but now, he had no idea where he was in the vastness of wind singing through waves of spinifex that reached far away in every horizon. His total being, sunk in an aloneness that he had never before experienced, lost in flashes of imagining, aching to destroy this mystery dragging him into a sink well of himself, suddenly feeling as though he was already back in Praiseworthy, and while staring out to sea, and wondering why Aboriginal Sovereignty was not coming home, realising he wasn’t at home at all. His mind had only flipped out, blanked before he realised the heavy reality of where he was. Disoriented, shocked, he spun around and found himself on the plains of spinifex, and saw the parts of the vehicle all over the ground. He had forgotten what he was doing. It was as though a door had slammed shut on the powerful vision of a future that had always held him, even if it remained so far removed from the reality of where he happened to be.
Seeing nothing but everything existing across the plains of spinifex reaching further away in either direction, he felt the wildness of this strange country of wind ancestors blowing their travelling waves onward, towards many homelands, and he wondered why he was in this strange country, someone else’s country. He could feel the pulse of the wind flowing across the waves of yellow, knew it was pushing his soul, quickening his heart, and this movement of country unnerved him, and he kept asking himself, when he realised the situation he was in: What the fuck’s name am I doing here?
The sound of his own heart beating with the whooshing of rolling waves of spinifex was unnerving him, and he kept spinning around, certain of a presence in the wind that stood directly behind him, and he called to the fascist, Is that you Tommyhawk? And as he would often step back, move away from the crashed Falcon, he felt the flow of the country’s breath moving over the back of his neck. And then, nothing, all movement stopped, and old Planet would growl at the ghosts, Get the fuck lost. As the sun rose higher in the sky, and the remains of the previous night’s dew dried, spinifex butterflies flew everywhere. Flies rose, and settled. Ants travelled over the ground, over the disassembled parts of the sedan, and crawled up along the slender spinifex stems flowing in waves to where the gossamer was flying in the air, laden with travelling spiders. Then the stillness arrived, and nothing else moved except sweat, and the tremendous thumping of earthly quietness. Widespread felt laden with the weight of not understanding why he wasn’t already at home. What was he doing in this place with a donkey of an unusually grey colouring that would not stop staring at him, and was crying out to its own destiny?
In his battle with spirit country tangling him in the stillness of its ancient world, and paralysing him with bewildering thoughts that held him in its grip and prevented him from leaving, he became more imprisoned in this world where nothing moved except for the wind ancestor bringing a feed of the atmosphere to the spinifex, and where only ants tilled the ground while forever moving through the yellowness in the clockwork rhythm of winds dying down. While he searched the landscape to find its potency, a thought convinced him that this country would kill him, and it left him intoxicated with a heightened awareness of pending doom. He sensed he was being dragged into the dangerous infinity of summertime wind, calling up a dry-storm lightning strike that would race through the spinifex in firestorms, sending ash particulates higher into the atmosphere, while leaving behind a totally blackened landscape transformed into ash.
Only a big god of country would know Cause Man Steel had no idea what he was thinking about anymore while he raged with a spinifex fire exploding sky-high through his head, every time he thought about Tommyhawk. You see the way the fascist was behaving? Well! Have you? He spoke forcefully into Dance’s face, even though he could see that she was too busy with chasing moths around the house, or whatever else she liked to do. He was standing right in front of her, but she ignored him, and he could not believe she could not see him. But, she could not see, she was in a snowstorm of moths, so he answered himself, You just go on, but I bet you anything you like, he never learnt whatever he kept in his head from me. I never taught the little freak not to respect his father, and one day I will promise you this, I am going to teach that fascist kid a lesson he will never forget about lying to people. Dance could not see Planet through the storming moths even if she had felt his presence. Her eyes were elsewhere, mesmerised, moving with the flurrying moths and capturing all the rapture of the moment she could squeeze into her head while pushing him back to the crashed site of the Falcon, and telling him to leave the kid alone.
Planet’s sulking mind tramped back into that distant spinifex country, to stay with the platinum donkey, to make sure it would not leave him, but all he saw out there was Tommyhawk in his imagination—squealing about being hurt, and threatening to tell the police. Planet was quick, stitched the defence, already rehearsing what he would say, I never touched him. Hell! Was that all? Give a man a break: Nobody could even look at that kid. He had to keep reminding himself that he was not in Praiseworthy at this moment, So! How could I be bashing a bloody cheeky fascist? I told you, he was muttering as though speaking to phantom police as he kept on walking through the plateau of endless spinifex to find the donkey that had taken off, while knowing he should not have taken his thoughts away from the sneaky thing, but he could not help feeling the police were already touching him, and his speech was in the flow of such a moment of claiming innocence to power that was not on his side, I never touched him, and you could never be sure if this was just a thought, or a defence mechanism for just another endless conversation he was having with no one.
Well! What if the kid was totally assimilated as far as a man like Widespread was concerned, and he had told Dance this many times—who cares hey? She had no idea what he was talking about. Her mind had departed the vicinity long ago, and was dwelling in another country entirely, where the likes of Widespread hardly featured at all. In her mind, he was a foreigner lost in thoughts of being elsewhere, an anchorite in his cocoon of rusted spare parts, like a solitary bag moth that travels in its silken home spun with piles of sticks it drags along behind itself, lobbing like a stranger in and out of an imaginary sometimes world. If he knew this, he also knew it was like flinging oneself down into a well of dreams, to drown there, if you wanted to wait around forever while trying to capture enough interest from others about your dreams to save a complicated world, an ascetic life, which to her mind meant that nobody would ever want to know what you were on about.
In the end, Cause chose wife avoidance, and while disappearing off her radar, and without a thought about coming back again to check on his married life, he was able to solve the jigsaw of the crashed Falcon. He began reassembling the motor parts back into the vehicle, and knew he would continue with the job, even if it took forever to get back on this loneliest of roads again. He kicked-started the engine a thousand times, until he heard its sick rumbling, which felt as though the entire vision of the transport conglomeration had shot through his veins and back into his brain, and the thing, mighty in itself, was breathing more vision, it was becoming greater, and not only that, its life would grow. The vision grew more splendiferous by the minute, and it did not matter to him if he knew the reality of where he was heading once the Falcon was back on the road, once he recaptured the reluctant mask-head platinum donkey again, and they would drive off in a storm of hope to build the unforgettable dream. Sure! He was no match for the government policies for Aboriginal people which were the stagnant swamplands in his brain. Sons? He already knew Tommyhawk was no use to any good vision where trust was required since the day he was born, but no matter! Aboriginal Sovereignty would lead culture to eternity. There would be no problem about re-signing himself up again to the worst of what could happen to him, for he knew, being behind the eight ball was not going to destroy what he had in his mind, the abundance of hope in what kept him alive. No one would have to fling themselves down into a cavernous pit at the bottom of the stairs to understand his language of economic independence, translatable to anyone on Earth: a thing that covered the whole vast vista of all that has been, and all that will come to be.
The compression in the cylinder head of the vehicle kicked in because it knew it had its part to play in the big vision even if it was only machinery, motivated by Cause’s brain turbocharging and belting around the bush in his head to check with the big checker running the universe into overdrive, about how the eventualities of the future era might pan out. He could not help himself. Widespread had to go tramping around in his brain every second of his life like a rabbit poacher, to find out where all the traps were set to ensnarl his vision and make mincemeat out of it. Vision like this was a precious commodity, and a man of vision had to be ready to go out and conquer the threats, throw explosives down rabbit warrens, blast the lot, ply traps open, until he just about killed himself with making sure that no threat had been left on the gold-clad road of clear vision, for this was what having a vision was like, dealing with freaks getting to the vision traps before you, and turning dreams into a quagmire. But the trouble with having an army of thoughts out searching for traps, you start to remember too many things that will convince you that you have yet another trap to eliminate, and this was what was happening even though he was thousands of miles away from Praiseworthy, because he had always known that Tommyhawk was a threat to the new era of the culture’s survival. What to do? The troubles playing on Widespread’s mind were endlessly unfathomable, as he worked methodically on the engine of the Falcon, and tried to ignore those faraway words in the back of the mind whistling in the wind through endless waves of spinifex. You touch me, and I will tell the government all about you. Tommyhawk pointed to his bloody government iPhone, and all his other iWhatnot information gadgetry that he reckoned the government gave him to protect himself against family violence, and you abusive fathers, and Widespread could hear the God anthropologist policeman saying that Aboriginal men were inherently violent—they were natural killers. Who knows who else the kid was talking to, or texting right this minute, or what he was reading, for who knew where his mind was, or what he was up to.
Planet smiled. The pistons were not choking from the herculean strength and endurance it had taken to hear the motor running normally again. If this spinifex country thought he was less a man from seeing his son as worthless, with the jubilant Falcon purring to go, he felt pleased in remembering the look on Tommyhawk’s face when he had the electricity cut off to the house. See who you can iPhone now? Go on texter, text someone then. What? You got no power. Did the government forget to give you free electricity with your computer and mobile phone? Well! See who pays for the power. Text them to pay for it. Remember who puts the food into your mouth? It’s not government. He would teach the little fascist a lesson if he ever heard Tommyhawk call his brother disgusting names, and call him a paedophile. He had asked Dance, what kind of talk was that? Where did he learn talk like that? He had told the woman who bred a fascist that the kid would be the death of him, and he could see him now, running off into the bush across from the cemetery, leaving him to stand around with the crucifixes by himself, while she, the mother, yelled from inside the house, you leave him alone, or I will call the government myself to take you away.
A get-rich-quick scheme was the simpler answer to the woes. Money was the answer to all this, as he had said time and again, even if his soapbox spruiking was as slippery as an eel, or his imaginary supersonic weaponry for destroying enemies of the vision was non-existent, or his goals were grey-coloured like the old donkey he now pushed back into the Falcon. It was deal or no deal, and a lucky thing that the magical creature of long-known self-preserving adaptabilities to preserve its species, hardly minded at all about getting itself out of the spinifex and going for a drive, for as quick as a flash, the donkey seemed to have reduced the size of its body to mould itself back into the confined space of the rear seat of the Falcon, and its face looked as though its vision of itself as a platinum donkey mask-head for the transport conglomeration of the petroleum-dead era, instead of a jaguar, or a pit bull on a Mack Truck, was simply meant to be.
The sedan was now heading in the general direction of Praiseworthy which was possibly some thousands of miles away, but Widespread suddenly felt uncomfortable with his imaginary angel wings folded flat behind his back against the driver’s seat. There was something wrong about the senior angel wings he needed to implement a grand vision with the force of a god. He had not noticed that he had been dragging these oily grease-stained feathers around for days in the spinifex and wind while fixing the engine. He looked back at the silvery-grey coat of the donkey sleeping in the rear seat, and noticed that the sublimity of having wings now tattered and knotted with twigs, grass, and sharp thorns, was totally impractical for these desert environments. Widespread had gifted his prized companion a set of glorious wings as well for its new role as the spearhead of the grandest transport conglomeration ever known to mankind. Now he frowned at the rumpled, tangled feathers wrapped around the old donkey’s body. The donkey had slept anywhere on the prickle-covered ground, having lost its patience with standing alert permanently like it was meant to be a pristine dreaming angel of this continent. This was not what the donkey thought was meant to be. It needed its hooves to break desert rocks, and to tear the ground apart in search of a herb, but the spearhead that Widespread had in mind was a glistening angel-winged creature of blinding titanium that was ten times faster than speed as it flashed brilliantly across the atmosphere. What he was expecting the old donkey to do, was to fly jaguar-like on a platinum hypersonic missile straight into the future. This was the type of donkey he thought he had found.
All the stars looked down at the car lights of the vehicle driving through spirit country at an incredible speed on an almost invisible, overgrown back-country spinifex track while following a storm of migratory caper butterflies in the moonlight. Widespread wiled away the time on this spirit journey of returning home, by reminding himself and the ageing platinum donkey that they both were on a winner here, even though the old donkey was still querulous and ungrateful about being captured, and doubted whether it was up to spearheading a long haul road train like a Mack Truck for the rest of its life because it would destroy him, and while the idea of being hypersonic was out of the question, it wondered whether Widespread could find some alternative natural resources to destroy and leave it alone, so it could retain what was left of its donkey powers for a retirement with the rest of its Equidae family.
Widespread said don’t be stupid. He told the sour-face donkey that he had studied everything anyone needed to know about transportation, and he knew all about the donkey business by watching forty-four million donkeys work as beasts of burden in all the poor countries in the world on the Discovery Channel. The donkey said he was mad, but Widespread said he was not just making up a vision for saving his people in the new era without checking the facts. He said it was not just the make-up of the animal that had nailed it for him, but the donkey’s sturdiness, its strength and ability to endure harsh conditions like a local native animal, but the difference of course, which was better, was that you could not convince a native animal to carry your stuff for you. So quit complaining, donkey. Think about it. Widespread did not accept the donkey’s reasoning about not having supersonic missile power. He told it to have some belief in itself, that it should not think in fractions, but in the vision headed by a platinum donkey which was so magical, they both had a fine pair of invisible God wings with enough power to fly barge after container barge down the Huangpu river in Shanghai, or anywhere else in the world, in a fraction of the time it was taking now in the global challenges of climate change, viruses and wars. Just say, he challenged the donkey continuing to tell him he was madder than a cut snake, that we could manage to beat humanity at its own game? You got to think like a game changer, that was the way to do it.
The Falcon’s reconditioned miracle engine rumbled, and it crawled over the gibber rock terrain in a wild blizzard of butterfly whiteness, and Planet kept on explaining the business to the platinum donkey in so many hours of words which, in summary, were about the suitability of donkeys from the point of view of overall global convenience. He prophesised the new world in the sucked-dry fossil-fuel-depleted world, where all the eyes of the world will be looking at you donkeys. They will be looking at your sustainability rather than having to search the entire world for some rusty spare parts for heavy transporters, cargo ships, road trains and things like that. Anyone with half a brain would see that you mob of dry country donkeys will flourish like sacred animals in time to come because you will only require the most minimalist of care, so what do you say about that?
You could storm a religious heaven and beat the door down for holy answers, but this sacred continent was created by the greatest ancestral beings of time immemorial, and as remembered through religious laws, had left a labyrinth of crisscrossing tracks over the entire land. Planet knew the powerfulness of this law, but he could barely comprehend how he was being entwined in the awakening of an ancestral realm while in a long storming cloud of ghost butterflies, captured in its thrilling serpentine snake road meandering across arid country through swathes of spinifex grasslands, the acacia, mulga, turpentine, to the black soil plains, the claypans and onwards to the coastal savannah through a riparian vine country of insects, to travel over the beaches, before finally, heading to sea. He was being steered on the path of this ancient journeying of story that would eventually end in the sea, after it reached far across the land. His eyes concentrated on the whiteness that had marked his course for he was not able to deviate from the travelling cloud of butterflies, nor stop the Falcon from continuing with the spirit journey, and nervously, he kept the conversation moving while talking shit about changing the world order of the underdog. He asked the donkey if it minded being a minimalist creature, and tried to reassure his surly business partner that donkeys were supposed to be smart, and easy to get on with. Don’t know what happened to you. Even I know how a donkey is supposed to act. But, hey! Why should I talk? I suppose you just don’t know how to act properly if you can’t watch how your homeland donkeys act on the Discovery Channel. Anyhow, just try to get with the picture about surviving for the new world. Act brave and unnerved like donkeys do in wartime while walking through the massacres and the bombed-out craters and carting the injured to field hospitals, since this is how you are going to have to act in the many wars created by mankind with their escalating global problems, and look, you’ve got to admit it, you donkeys would be excellent in these hot wars that will last centuries.
Anyway, Planet warned the sour-face donkey, we will have to be ready for war—just in case, to be ferrying supplies, and bringing road-train hospitals to carry the injured over rough terrain etc. And the only animal he knew of that would be uncomplaining as they moved amongst the dead or dying in a battlefield while bombs were falling all around them in the sometime future, would be, you—donkeys. Well! Even donkeys, like men, have to make hard decisions in life, and so, having a broken-down Falcon sedan in the middle of the desert was okay if you were making your own future for free. What could be better than scouring the spirit country for free in the good days, but keeping an eye on the abyss ahead? You needed to be able to view the world through your own eyes as a feral donkey captured in the chasm of a big dream, as being an offset to a near distant, totally altered world. He wanted the donkey to try to make the quantum leap, to place itself into a global future, and Planet kept explaining the facts of life until he was blue in the face to the ancient platinum donkey over the slow journey of following the ghost butterflies across country. But, of course, Widespread did not mind refining the countless equations running around in his head, which were totally about how a dirt-poor man like himself could in his lifetime, a lifetime that coincided with the clamorous death of the known world, make himself a very rich man. This would be a time he explained, when donkeys were the name of the game. Where anyone could make a quid. It only required a bit of imagination to see how you could roll with the doom. In fact, he would be helping all other living beings to survive. The conglomerate would be owned by the feral donkeys, even more than he would own the business. All the feral donkeys had to do, was agree to work with human beings—to pull the load so to speak, as much as he had to work to establish sustainability for both species in a heating world. And on Planet went, trumpeting the dream about how the feral donkey species would be helping to create a new economy for millions of poor people across the world, which collectively meant donkeys were already worth billions of dollars, it was just that nobody realised the potential of the new era—yet.
So, was Planet any better off than any other poor bugger on the face of the planet right now? He did not think so. Imagine the scenarios when the world’s financial markets are collapsing, and it was not that he had much to do with global monetary funds, but anyone would know what happens in a world crisis. The Arabs stop selling oil—then, there is no more oil anywhere on the planet, and very soon he told the donkey, You have to be ready for when millions of people could not afford to run a car anymore, or fly around the world on Qantas jets because it would be more expensive than in a pandemic to fly anywhere, and the rich people will want to become like most blackfellas and try to steal our ideas for surviving, but if you play your cards right and close to your chest about what you are doing, and you are able to adapt, you are going to be one hell of a rich donkey so don’t go ringing up anyone about your plans. Keep it tight. Tell no one, and I should not even be telling you this but I am bored just sitting here. Look! It will be like this: you won’t have to walk around in the desert looking for a blade of grass anymore. People will be shoving a mountain of straw at you every time you open your gob. Cause said he was waiting for this time, anticipating almost every breathing moment for when this new hard-up world would emerge. Believe me, he continued, I have been listening to the business reports on the ABC radio for years, and on ABC TV, and he had been doing this long before he had the electricity cut off to teach the fascist Tommyhawk a lesson in budgeting, and fiscal control. But! Who cares? Having no power, excluding the use of electricity in the house was not a problem, not for an entrammelled man like himself, who had to break free of the shackling, and teach himself how to become the acute business man that I am today.
The donkey was lulled into a deep sleep from listening to the groaning vehicle singing its song while Widespread harped on about the precarious state of the planet. Then it began twitching through its cantankerous dreams of the finances involved in running an international transport conglomeration in the new times, and wondering how many donkeys the operation would entail, and did it actually want to be involved with so much drama so late in its life. The journey was long and slow, with the serpentine butterfly cloud only moving about eight kilometres an hour, and occasionally, when Widespread thought that the donkey might be in a rare good mood for hearing more about its role in the International Monetary Fund, he would speak either at length about the state of the world’s dwindling finances as a result of global warming calamities, or how Dance would refuse to acknowledge the world’s deepening financial crisis, because she thought it was not money they were actually going to miss when she did not even have twenty dollars to buy food, and he would have to tell her to just stop thinking about herself for a minute, and start thinking about everyone else. In these tales of how are we going to survive, when he had spent decades in analysing the collapse of the world’s banks, he could not believe she did not seem to care in the slightest that he was putting himself up to be the man in the era, to save everything. And he told the donkey a personal observation that he had not told anyone else, that she was just not interested in planning for the collapse of the world, at least, not for a world with him in it. She could not see his donkey franchise spreading across the country, nor that their lives would probably become international, equating to rock stardom.
He told the business partner another thing as well. He was figuring out how to stake a Native Title property right claim over the ownership of the country’s five million donkeys, which kind of made sense to him, and he thought that should have been enough to inspire the donkey’s brain about dollars and cents; but he could not inspire financial world imagination in its mind. Perhaps it was because Cause was the type of man who was not a cowboy—that was what we did when we were young fellas, he told people who said Praiseworthy was horse country. We don’t want feral animals here.
There was no money in horses, he remembered slinging back in the deep gravelly voice he said he would preserve for a town full of idiots. There was no money in cattle neither, he sniped at the ancient ringer tribesmen who were still trying to re-ignite their youth as slaves to white cattle men thieving their traditional lands. He had said the idea was simple for anyone thinking about becoming a property developer. All they had to do was think of feral donkeys as property development. They would be in the box seat, reap the benefits. What could be simpler than that? He told the business manager they would not be asking the Australian government for money so they would not be getting hand-outs, nor would he be going to the bank for a loan either, because he would be remaining a free man, and, you my Equus asinus, would remain a free burro—an ass, so to speak. It was all about investing in the future, and he spoke of being in a time of total independence as though twenty golden trumpets were blaring behind him, and he kept challenging the donkey to do the same, to build this ring of fire business up from the ground around itself, to cover itself in the glorious flames of burning money, or else, he would do it alone if he had to. He did not know what the donkey wanted for its part in the vision, but he claimed that the only thing he wanted in return was that his people backed him with flames in their own hearts that matched his own, for he had found the perfect donkey to make the fire wild, to send the flames higher so that heaven could see that the black man of this continent was a free man and not only that, the best man, but sadly, he said, he could not walk away when the only acknowledgement he got for having kept this prolonged vision alive, was a garden-hose dousing of this almost-built heaven in his heart, his proud dreams, his pride.
And the old business partner donkey dreamt on, as Widespread described how Dance was not listening to him anyhow because she knew what he was talking about was not going to be like Jetstar, Virgin, or, or dare to say it, a national carrier, like Qantas. You know my friend, I told her, You just had to use your imagination about this. Aboriginal people were not going to survive the twenty-first century when the world’s economy and all the rest of it collapses with an airline company. Man! I mean donkey, I told her once and told her again, stop thinking piecemeal, incremental change, the language of government’s closing-the-gap policies between Aboriginal people—the have-nots on their own land, and the non-Aboriginal people.
I told her to at least try to imagine people with donkey carts, you see them all the time on the Discovery Channel, remember, I told her, stacked with hay? I had pointed to the bloody TV screen, and said, See how much those donkeys could carry? Carts loaded with produce. Carts loaded with bricks. Carrying anything. Poor people all over the world use donkeys and we have got five million of the buggers here.
The donkey dreamt of Dance’s voice whaling through the long winding snake dance of the butterfly song line travelling across country, and it could hear her telling Widespread that there was no hay in Praiseworthy. We have got no hay to feed donkeys. You noticed that? The vista remained spinifex, and she said, the only dream was for a new car to drive from square a, to square b. Then, while long gone from being in his sphere of influence, and having her own crise de nerfs moment about their personal financial situation which was far worse than what the World Bank had to worry about, you could feel that she was having a complete nervous breakdown. You can forget about the world financial disasters. Forget about donkeys. Begin with something simple, like a reliable car, she said that was what she wanted most of all. Let’s be like other people getting ahead around here, who are not interested in the world economy. We will still be poor no matter what happens in the world and you can’t get more poorer than that, and that she claimed was her personal, long-range vision.
She did not say that her sights were unable to lift off China, an imagined other ancestral land, where clouds were made of butterflies gathering precipitation from the humid fabric of the day, and where she saw jewel-coloured wings flitting in bamboo forests, and over the sun-glistening watery terraces snaking across the hillsides woven through emerald-green grasslands, rice paddies, and green-leafed vegetables, all of which felt far away, the distances inconceivable from Praiseworthy. Was she being called to another homeland, this world unknown to her, and what for? The question ranged deep in her psyche. Where was the origin of the strength of her wonderings? Was it from being pushed to China, by her own people telling her to stop claiming other people’s Native Title land? You take your family away from here, you are really Chinese, not Aboriginal. Go somewhere else, back to where you come from, go back to China. And the strength grew from wondering how to understand the infinite stories, the collected and integrated texts that made up the battle for precedence in a soul.
What will they eat? These donkeys? She asks too many questions of a spectre travelling with the lightness of dust. Her eyes rolling all the while, staring beyond the presence of Widespread standing right there in front of her. Whether ghost, magic transporter man, or alive, he remained dead to her. She pushes past the levitating spectre, to breathe in the cemetery, its sparse landscape of billowing yellow grasses, the many giant lopsided plank crucifixes, wind-strewn plastic flowers, all of which were beginning to annoy her. She tries not to notice the grey mass of the levitator, another piece of madness that interrupts her China plans, but she continues asking the same question to the absent husband who keeps sending his spirit back from wherever he was, only to remind her to look after his donkeys.
There seems to be a lot more diseased and half-crazed donkeys living on the grounds of the cemetery since yesterday, and she screams there is no room for more animals. Haven’t you got enough? Where was the we in this folly, and how was she going to feed all these donkeys on this dry, bleached-out country stretching as far as the eye could see. What was the use of putting donkeys on any of it? She flung her arm across the open view a bit too triumphantly, to where patchy dead grass chewed and scratched level with exposed roots would not even feed a few cattle. She picked up the dirt like an old seasoned pastoralist of the cattle industry, and invited the levitating self-transporter to look at this rubbish, although she called it shit anyway. See this? This is parched. That’s parched. She walked around while kicking at the dust with her red-thong foot, and claimed you have ruined the ancestry, these donkeys eat everything, even this shit.
In those wild carried-away dreams of emigration, Dance had already moved the true Native Title family to the other homeland—the unknown China—and out of racist Australia. She said they were leaving the time immemorial. Moving into a new sunrise. Getting away from the down the road, downward spiral of government largesse aimed at keeping a beggar a beggar, and she told the levitator to pack his bag for China: We’re moving. This whole racist thing is costing us mob too much. When the going to China rumour spread, the weight of community sentiment agreed with her. Yep! Pack your bag and go to China. We don’t want any Aboriginal Chinamen-looking people here, and you look a bit Chinese to me. So of course one day, a brilliant idea jumped right into her head when she heard of China becoming the greatest country on Earth where phenomenal levels of poverty had been crushed, and she had thought, Why not? We’ll go. Take me. Perhaps they should go and live in China. She thought it might even be a bit of a change. See what the soul thought. And suddenly, her soul said it actually felt lighter, and yes, why not emigrate, and forget the historic racial profiling of her family that was killing their soul. What would it be like—you know, not to be like a dog feeling the hatred of racial differences for the rest of your life? What would it feel like, not to feel like a cringing dog, and being re-educated like a human being who was valued enough to be submerged in Chinese characteristics that had already been defined for your mind, without having to do a stuff-up job of having to define yourself among other stuffed-up people, and she thought it would be a blessing to be profiled for constant surveillance which might give you a sense of security instead of living with intergenerational insecurities as a dispossessed person, and to let the government decide what you should think so you would not have to bother wondering about what the wonderment of being was, and not be bothered to be eternally imagining your exceptionalism to all else, but a single conjoined human organism of billions. She wanted to know what such a lightness of being like this would feel like over an eternity, where you did not have to think too hard again, and she began to ache for such an invisibility, where you would not be insulted to your face because you did not exist. Which was worse, she did not know. You really look Chinese. You must be Chinese. She imagined being lost among a billion people of similar appearance, and wondered what that would feel like? She would save her family from a Sino-Aboriginal heritage that was considered to be a far worse crime in Praiseworthy, albeit a sentiment copied from the majority of the population, and a far greater crime than an Anglo-Aboriginal heritage in quests of Native Title over the cemetery.
The trouble with the China dream was that Dance had no idea about how to unlock the secrets of history. The obscure Chinese ancestor of long ago left no trace in Australia of his ancestral homeland in China. This lack of foresight was a real hindrance for any of his descendants to the end of time to work through to find his ancient family home. She created hypothesis after hypothesis of wondering what this ancestor’s intentional sneakiness was all about. Why was he blending in with the native flora and fauna like he was hiding in the land of the Rainbow Serpent, and in the end, not leaving a trace of himself in this country, except his genes. These were matters that really hindered her arrangements for migrating to her imagined butterfly-jewelled paradisal elsewhere, where she could see the tepid sky growing heavy with butterfly clouds that eventually became an atmospheric river sitting above the land for months, in the season of typhoons. She received no reply to her daily pestering, the haranguing applications to the Chinese government pleading for asylum—for her family to be saved from racist propaganda that was killing her culture, and pleading for refugee status in the land of the long-ago ancestor whose name she did not know. Well! Not to worry! She was totally ignored by China, even though she generously included plenty of complimentary flourishes in her applications, where she also remembered to mention a wish to live like those landless ancestors in overcrowded stilt-house cities perched above the sea water, or on a city of old decrepit boats stacked side by side along the Pearl River Delta, so that she could experience what it was like to live among the largest number of species of butterflies anywhere in the world. No one in Beijing knew what the foreigner was talking about by romanticising over a world that no longer existed in the genius of modern China. But, somehow, it never occurred to Dance to dampen her enthusiasm about migrating to the other homeland, even though the Chinese government had yet to answer a single email enquiry, along with the applications for permanent residency as a returning national.
Listen to me? she pleaded to the Chinese Embassy in Canberra. Do you know where such and such place was in China? Another Chinese place name smashed, crumpled, destroyed by the mispronouncer, another name pronounced like nothing else heard on Earth, and spelt in the dialect of the worst Aboriginal pidgin English from the Praiseworthy region. She flipped off that many emails to China with hypothetical villages with unpronounceable names that were so way out there, they were totally bewildering to the homeland bureau in Beijing. The secret surveillance facility for the study of foreign languages and behaviours that might threaten past, present or future China, did not have a clue what this foreign woman was on about. They wanted her to stop stalking China. Stop invading their national idiom. The emails ended up in a large dossier marked serial stalker, and were passed on to a string of security hypothesisers to find these mystery villages that were hiding in plain sight among more than six hundred thousand villages across the national register.
No one in the echelons of apparatchiks wanted to go looking for some old culture village while constructing modern China in record time, and they wondered if such a stupid distraction would end up taking an entire army to keep up with the serial stalker’s surmising in her emails about wondrous hypothetical villages secretly ensconcing some of her blood relatives in China. The mysterious Chinese ancestor of well over one hundred years ago was officially hypothesised to have been some kind of spy of the time with a long-range vision, who had created an opportunist world of espionage against China through his future descendants hidden in a secretly formed village that kept falling off the radar. Why was this ignorant foreign woman opening up her can of worms by poring through a vast list of Chinese ancestral villages on the internet in incalculable hours—the generations of thousands of years just to re-tie a family knot created in the Australian gold rush? No one in China could say why she was uselessly leaving no stone unturned to drag up what had long ago been given the final flick.
Any of the names she had found on the internet and mispronounced matter-of-factly to Cause to instil a piece of Chinese information in his brain, proved that their family had a more than casual connection to China. But Cause had a dead brain for anything to do with Chinese ancestral homes. All he wanted to know about was Chinese donkeys. What do tha use em for? They only got about six million left from killing them and selling the skins. He added up the figures of about forty-two million donkeys already working in developing countries across the world, and he wondered if there was an international donkey transport conglomeration being forecast for China’s Belt and Road Initiative that would outcompete his own initiative, and how he would harness more from Australia’s five million feral donkeys. And, while he ate another cold pie, while espousing about the numbers of donkeys in the world, she said that the consumer price index would be naming a fridge after his big mouth one day.
Most of all, he wondered why nobody else had thought about the economics of donkeys in the heating planet, and had said he was searching for a platinum donkey to lead his transport conglomeration. Do you know how much platinum is worth on the market today? It’s worth more than gold. He told Dance that what was happening in his dreams, was that he could see how magnificently the extensive signage for the donkey business would blot any other Praiseworthy reality. In fact, the signage would bulldoze what was real today into oblivion, and the power of the signage would grow his super herd of platinum-coloured donkeys bigger and stronger, more than anything else ever seen on the planet in the transport industry. The signage itself, singed by hot-iron branding, would be perfectly read on the rump of five million feral donkeys, THE REAL PLATINUM DONKEY TRANSPORT CONGLOMERATION. All major stuff, that would be truly seen and highlighted like a gold texta from outer space, and you know what? This gigantic placard branded on each donkey would look like it was printed by an enormous angel, and to complete the picture of how to be successful the whole operation would even be read by aliens flaring strategically across the world in hyper-solar-charged night brightness like the stars, and still be possible to be seen by a fool, even if the planet was totally covered by blizzards. Why planetary success would be so good, he told Dance, was because his signs for the future could be read in four easy words: transport, independence, rich, freedom. It was all in a dream, he explained while expanding on whatever the original dream had been, in a place of middle of the night madness where he saw how all his people could be free people, more free than they were already, with a plus-plus added bonus—of being richer but good rich which was possible if you worked with feral donkeys, and in any case, everything would be platinum rich, and have the benefit of a whole vision, like this—although he was only revealing a slice of the dream cake, for the whole thing could never be really and truly shared with anyone else in Praiseworthy, because the depth of it would blow your mind away. He was very sorry, but said the real details of the major operation would always be locked up in his head like a secret. Nobody could be given the true secret of economic self-reliance, which he said would be the platinum number one rule for maintaining Aboriginal sovereignty in the new age.
Anyway, while he could read the lay of the land, Dance was caught in a whorl of encumbrances of her own making, when in fact she should be listening to him explaining over and over until he was blue in the face, how to achieve the self-reliance of economic independence. He told her once, and he told her again, their world must remain surrounded by donkeys to visually demonstrate the world of economic progress, and this was the reason why he wanted her to build more enclosures while he was away, to contain his growing herd which would never be too much. Enclosures! That too, would demonstrate real economic progress, that the things don’t run around freely, gates left open and donkeys roaming all over the place. This was not the way true discipline worked. She told him he was stupid. Can’t you see fouling up the place feral donkeys are the reason why the police force are always looking for you with intervention orders to stop you talking about this nonsense to decent people. You’ll get locked up soon. They don’t like people like us talking about money. Makes them frighten like they might have to fight us fair and square about who owns this country. See! You want to stop talking about Aboriginal economic independence. Your so-called people are not interested in how feral donkeys are worth millions of dollars when anyone can see they are worth nothing. So stop making wars with your own people. Talk this poison talk stuff somewhere else. Take it up to the Mars men and see if they can be bothered reading signs from humanity, a species not worth knowing about.
But if others lacked vision for the cause this never stopped Planet in his tracks for a second, and he made up for his people’s combined total lack of vision for a transport conglomerate by spending every single minute in the day tackling wild donkeys to the ground to prove his point—which was this, that nothing would stop him from keeping his eye on the prize while calculating how much money a wrestled to the ground donkey could make, adding up the figures while lying spread-eagled over the top of a panting donkey pinned to the dirt, which mind you, was the closest you would get to seeing the dollars and cents falling from the ceiling in his mind, which was far more than he actually had in his pocket. He believed that if anyone else had the mind to be a genius, then they too would see real money in the bush, by having a casual look around, and being prepared to have a shot and build a global transport conglomeration from scratch, just by wrestling as many feral donkeys as you could find with your bare hands. But, sometimes, it took more than genius to wrestle a donkey. It also took panache to do something greatly, to do it beyond one’s own meagre capacity, and doing it before somebody else jumped in and stole the thought, and became ridiculously rich by using your original idea. This was the thing about vision, it never hides in the scrub, never hides from view, for it sits like a piece of sunshine for anyone to grab and be ahead of the game, to get yourself into the main frame before the oil reserves dried up and most of the Earth became an unbearable zone of hot wars. Nevertheless, Widespread also believed that fretting was pure hindrance for the visionary, because when you were having a flamboyant fight with a bad-tempered feral donkey, the scale of the thing meant you had to be in the moment, to be in the spirit of place, and to believe you had the ability to pace around in the vastness forever to find what you were looking for, and to believe you had won the battle, before it had even begun.
This was how to do it. You sourced where to find feral donkeys, and you got out there alone—somewhere in the bush of the spirit world—and up for a fight with your bare hands. But! Where were the takers? Who wanted to queue up to beat around the bush, and acquire some rough experience in empire building? Nobody could see the vision Cause, Dance explained the clear reality of what seemed less than perfect to her, and she plainly made it clear about how she was struggling with every idea of having any vision, when all she saw around the yard were a pack of recalcitrant untrainable donkeys trying to escape from her, running off ten, twenty, thirty kilometres away in the bush, where she had to footwalk like a cattle dog, to chase them back to the cemetery again. She did not have time to be his roped-in visionary who was left to chase donkeys around the flat, to cart mountains of grass and tree branches around on her back daily, just to feed his increasing herd of livestock, while he was away catching even more donkeys, driving around in his vehicle like some black kind of pastoralist.
Even thousands of miles away from Praiseworthy, he still heard her voice whistling in, questioning and trembling like a tempest, everywhere ethereal, wrapped in the sky—all possible in the unexpected power of country, and there in a single tiny flower miraculously growing in the sparseness of an inferno-cleared ground, and there soaring—a single bird flying overhead, and there, her presence mist, moisture, wind, as expected as the morning stars that hung over his shoulder.
There would be many donkeys to bury when Planet reached Praiseworthy. He had been away for weeks, months—existing on next to nothing, while travelling the hundreds of kilometres at no greater than butterfly speed, after searching for the mythical platinum donkey he had finally found, the old one in the back seat. While he travelled the distances and years to this point, he had always believed such a donkey actually existed, and although he barely remembered the original dream creature, he was certain it looked a lot differently in reality, a lot younger, stronger, better looking, and like a real pride mask-head of such silvery-grey blinding brilliance that possibly did not belong to this world, which of course would have adorned it with otherworldliness powers of the kind that would make it capable of leading a global transport conglomeration comprising of countless thousands of donkeys. Widespread had to accept this version of reality, since he had practically used up his eyesight on seemingly endless journeys throughout the entire song lines of the country in search of this unique creature. And Widespread himself would agree with this logic of what really happened, since plenty of his epic journeys had turned sour, and were now the legendary focus of a thousand and one tales of his being thwarted by his own visionary search for the true colour of platinum. And apart for those numerous false true donkeys he had hunted down in bush journeys that turned sour, he had to bargain with idiots—more feral types than you could imagine—to acquire many extra donkeys at about a dollar a head by refusing to pay a cent more than his bargain basement profit margin, and while always imagining in a good way, that one’s haggling, bargaining, paying less, and sometimes getting an animal for free, or in foal, would all lead to the prospect of a truer platinum hue to increase the much-desired ancestral type power required for his growing donkey empire.
Widespread’s premonition of unprecedented loss felt more powerful than he could control. His mind moved minus, minus, minus in the ghostly plains of spinifex that had existed in this place since time began, and he ended up losing all sense of where he was, or where he was heading while the Falcon drove on, journeying in the cocoon cloud of the spirit butterflies travelling north. Was this homesickness? Was it something in the mind he had never before experienced, of feeling totally lost in the ghost country of the homelands? Yet, in the absence of knowing, the feeling of having lost something dear would often create a state of panic in his mind. He would be overcome with an ever-deepening sense of sadness and foreboding, that in this crippling state of his mind, could only be explained as having lost the only thing of value to his vision, and that was the platinum donkey. He could not explain it in any other way had he felt the old donkey would die before he reached his destination, and it felt as though he was dying in himself from thoughts about what he would do if it died, what it would mean to the dream, for where on Earth would he ever find another platinum donkey like this one. And he thought more in terms of subtraction, of another minus, for what if it was already dead, and he had only found a ghost donkey, for the reality of the question was, why was he looking for a platinum donkey which was the colour of ghosts in the first place, when this might be the colour of any old donkey whose fur was greying with age? Each moment like this felt closer to his own death, and of feeling as though the ground was opening up, and swallowing the only donkey on Earth he needed, of burying him forever too, for he may as well be dead. He began weeping over its death even as he would pathetically keep checking and feeling the air it drew in and out of its nostrils on the back of his neck, and he could see that the rare, money-making lucky donkey had not taken its eyes off his back, and had not robbed him of the future, as the maker of progeny, of the rarest herd of platinum donkeys.
When you looked closer, you would see that it was only his grease-engrained hat that looked like giving a sense of sanity to cling to while passing in this dangerous country. He continuously shook the grease-and-dirt-engrained hat while flies buzzed in the slow-moving vehicle, brushing back his own oil-laden greying hair, as his mind wavered off into some mesmerising dream of appeasing itself with thoughts of failure in the swarming whiteness spread across the endlessness of spinifex country. He lost track of time, and sometimes wondered whether he had been driving in circles, and the circles became endless and felt as though, he had always driven in circles. He saw Dance in the distance walking through the spinifex, and he knew at once that this meant she was not feeding his donkeys, and he watched her—knew what she was like, totally ignoring the starving herd, and blissed out in this snake country, while she moved with the butterfly haze leading her astray. She continued walking through the spinifex covering the red earth, as he became locked in a fear that there were snakes coiled under each passing clump of these yellowing balls of needle plants nearly as tall as Dance, and yet, she continued to stay ahead of him in snake country dreaming, a cabaret of snakes, where she did not seem to notice any of the power he felt while watching her from far away, moving more swiftly then he was, and finally, she simply faded away.
The Ford Falcon passes over a rise, and another rise through sand dunes, while the fabled donkey of his fortune in the back seat does not take its eyes off his back. Planet knows a thing or two about donkeys, and fully comprehends how it was trying to unnerve him to spook him into letting it go free. But Widespread just thinks that the donkey does not really know him. He will never let it go free, and so he tries to call Tommyhawk on his flat mobile just to see what was going on, if everything was alright at home, but of course, the kid never answers because the little fascist was spoilt to the core by his mother. He lays the thought aside from the catastrophe of life, and he still could not work out the reason why the bloody government would want to give Tommyhawk an iPhone, or a computer, or an iPad, even though he heard the echoing of the child’s voice in his mind, These are going to be my weapons against thugs like you, ya old paedophile.
Huh! Well! Cause has never worried before about snakes, but right now, while in the wonderment of thinking about the government dishing out free computer stuff to his son to disrespect the parent, he also began to dwell on poisonous snakes. There were snakes all over the place, that leapt into the vehicle from the dense spinifex plains forest, and while he pumped the accelerator to the floor it made no difference to the five kilometres, or butterfly speed, that the Falcon travelled on its own volition, the snakes lunged into the open windows and attacked the donkey. The shock of the situation trapped in his imaginings of possible scenarios that would destroy the only platinum dream donkey by transforming it into a huddle of snakes in his elusive wavering from reality had now gone completely overboard, but he felt nothing except his grip on the steering wheel, and he knew it was now or never if he was to be the saviour of the situation dragging him beyond his control, and he did not loosen his grip until he reached the edge where this country would release him from the longue durée of its infinity, and let him continue through the lines of the law to reach his homeland.
One wonders why people say things about someone else, whether the person is there or not.
Cause! Yep! Away again. Always out of town. He likes being elsewhere. In the bush somewhere big-noting himself, but nowhere near Praiseworthy of course. Good then. Let him stay there forever. Let him rot in hell. Let him never come back. We all hate that person anyhow. Held up our Native Title settlement for years with that fake claim about his old Daddies and Mummies, and making meeting after meeting with the government tribunal. We never want to see him again.
Call me shit. Why not?
Couldn’t give a shit what you call me, understand?
Widespread never cared whether he lived or died in Praiseworthy, and when he had eventually returned to find his life upended, transformed into a major crime scene, had wished he was already dead and had never returned, for at the end of the day, he may as well be dead, and he wondered why he was still alive. Why should he live instead of Aboriginal Sovereignty? Why live in this endless mess of life that seemed unconquerable, knowing his world would never recover? He of course knew the reason for being alive was to despise himself, and no one would do this better than the man himself. No other person could use every breath of air being drawn into their lungs to better curse the shallowness left in the faint echo of himself that kept on reminding him that he had a business to build. What a laugh? A fool’s vision! Who was he, trying to do the work of a god? He sometimes thought about his former self, who had once or twice said he had thought of dying somewhere out in a sacred place where only the local spirit creation beings were living, and that, even if he was a man who felt as though he had died with some desperate idea of conquering life with death in his mind, he always remembered one thing in the end, that he had work to do, and that was enough, and what kept him going, kept him alive. At every stage of disassembling and rebuilding the vehicle destroyed from the crash in the place where only spinifex grew, he felt the spirits of that country were forcing him to live on and on like he would never die, and even more than this, the spirits of that place were conquering the sabotaging platinum donkey mask-head for his transport conglomeration from escaping back into the bush. They were encased in this world for a long time, but, he knew finally that he was unable to conquer death with the life of his child while he had been thousands of miles away from any other human being and even though he had chosen to take death, while the spirit ghosts kept giving him life to overcome his own fragility, to bring him back to face death all over again.
Move! Will you? What could you do with a man devoid of the will to live, who had a business to build to get his people through the next thousand years, so that they could continue their time immemorial journey to infinity? You could leave him to waste all that oxygen pumping into his lungs for nothing, or someone could start making sure the bloody country would always be there for the spirit of Aboriginal Sovereignty to continue living in this place. Widespread knew that some God making money was not going to do it. God knows there were enough praying for sackloads of money in Praiseworthy, but you know what he saw in the infinite haze parking itself across the traditional homeland? He saw that there was no God on Earth setting up a Reserve Bank in Praiseworthy, not while the most powerful ancestral beings that had made the country in the first place were not into making money for any predestined fate of these times. It was imported gods that made money for Australia to think about making a mess of the future, but well, Aboriginal people needed to think about how to make a bypass through the mess, to reach their own future.
And so, this flat man wrung dry of tears, the bloke who wanted to be dead by pumping his grief, and stuffing it into his lungs, fuelled himself on the fact that when you have no money as a black man living in an Australian democracy, then living on country felt only ethereal, like the stuff of unfulfilled dreams, and the only dream coming for Widespread while feeling like he had no life, and letting these dead thoughts roll over and over in his mind, was that he had forgotten about the script, and the script of the country was about the infinite timelessness of the ancestral will to survive into eternity. The script was written in country, and in the skies by endless thunder read in the light of sixty thousand lightning strikes, which was enough to make you forget any of your vague useless dreams that were less than a flick of time, and you would remember where you belonged in the moment of time immemorial, the care and responsibility for good country being greater than creating a world of infinite grieving, and this was how to control the future when you cared about the great powerful beings warning you deep down in your soul to keep on script, and that you better learn how to let those big creators rest easy in the places of their creation. Don’t let them start wandering around and feeling lonely, to wake up and come looking for the people who neglected the world, and in their powerfulness to create, use the very same power to destroy all things.
But what could a man do about that young brat of his, Tommyhawk? A real creepy fascist kid! This boy who thought his father was a piece of rubbish? How would this dead meat father, the man ripped of emotion from head to toe, feel about the loss of Aboriginal Sovereignty, and being left with a sneaky kid like that? Did some relic of love swathe across his shattered mind, smother the smelting ashes in his memory of the repressive younger son, the fault-finder, the one educated by the government to evolve into a new organism, an arch-conservative white man in a black skin? Where was the thrilling in the heart the greatest, or where hardest to digest, or else, what was the point of dealing with uncomfortable pictures? Who cared if the man would never fathom to this day the story about how Dance had sung naming in his head when the top son was born, forever harping on, What about Peter, Paul, etc., nice names? Why couldn’t you have called him something properly normal, and fitting in with our colonisation, our subjugation, you can still be powerful by just fitting in with the status quo by being called a name like, racist, or why not a worthless name like haulage cart, cartage, carrier? Or, why not flip to the other side with something saintly, a bit biblical. Aloysius was good. Solomon. Something like Bartholomew. Like Moses. Forecaster. Truest Formula. Or even Babylon. Nice Praiseworthy names from a church. Bible names. Or, just plain Donny Cat? Fuck! A prophecy name so he would live forever, Tithonus? Better than an I wish you were dead name, because that’s what people in this country will be saying about a name like what you are saying, you know.
Widespread had said he wanted to remain being a proud man, by saying the words of his own choice, whenever he felt like it. He did not have to become a heretic, like some black man addicted to the Australian way of life if he did not want to, and anyhow, he asked, where was the insult in saying the only words that he loved to say and mattered most to him, to feel how smoothly these words rolled over his tongue. He was talking about the only two words relevant to his existence, Aboriginal Sovereignty. He remembered saying something significant to Dance about how his firstborn would fully capture true ownership of country, and this would be a source of pride in his every thought until the day he died. Then you know what happened, he told Dance, the ancestors had actually rung me up while I was at the supermarket down the street, and buying a packet of cigarettes—look at this mobile phone here—you can see their number, and what they told me all rapturously and blessed, was this, Call him Aboriginal Sovereignty. And you know what, I rung them back while I was having the smoke, and you know what I said—why not? And Dance, she only asked one question about the ancestor’s mobile, which was about what the ring tone sounded like? She just could not get her head around the idea of what a deep-time ring tone would sound like. And, it was a funny thing, he said, while explaining the phenomenon of receiving a phone call from beyond belief, how these big conversations with the ancestors of thousands of years ago could actually be understood by a language-contaminated human being of today, even though mind you, those old ancestors spoke pure deep-time lingo from this place which had come a long way before modern pidgin English, like how these white people spoke in Australia while thinking their speech was the height of world sophistication, and had insisted on teaching the real people, but still, you could feel those old people fixing your brain with thoughts too big to decipher properly, because what they had to say, had to come through eternity to get here, imagine that, and weep, because you needed to have a mighty big brain to deal with a challenging message from the ancestral telling you to go and pick up your firstborn, and take him outside into the starry and holy night, and hold him up for his old kinspeople to see from the Milky Way, and say, Here is your Aboriginal Sovereignty.