Sitting in the Bones

if we fail to plan, we plan to fail

—Henry Puna, Prime Minister
of the Cook Islands, speaking at the
Nansen Initiative on Disaster-induced
Cross-border Displacement, 2013

1

Oracle 5 … Eh! Where that moth woman? Dance! The Moth … er?

Everywhere, the world was moving quicker into a crescendo of the confused, but up there in Praiseworthy, there were plenty of slower words being said sad on the beach by old ashen-skin spirit people walking up and down several kilometres of sand in an never-ending search through the haze, while hoping to find the absent ghost spirit of Aboriginal Sovereignty, and all awhile, jointly wailing, screaming really, saying things like, You had to ask yourself: what world did the moth-er think she lived in?

And, again, and again, through these ancient coastal laneways running through the sands, and into the sea far away of calm and storm, the old ghostly kinspeople moved steadily through seasons of bristling air thick with thistle and seed among butterflies, dust spores flying high and low in the haze, searching under every grain of sand where the caper white butterflies or Belenois aurota were ending another migration while straining to fly that last short distance into the sea, with practically destroyed wings now almost denuded of the dust scales that had once formed perfectly intricate art deco patterns of white drop feathers encased by thick black lines. Earlier, the migration had flown through an infestation of spinifex sand-skipper butterfly, the low flying Proeidosa polysema, which moved quickly with wings of silken dark brown infused with white patches, as their compound eyes watched in every direction in search for the flowers of stringybark, bloodwood, ironbark, the curly spinifex growing on land covered with the soft grassy spinifex Triodia pungens, amidst monsoon vines covering woodland trees of the savannah. There were many other local butterflies troubling Dance’s cabbage white butterflies, her precious Pieris rapae massing through the streets, and streaming down on the beach in silky strings, in search of anything rotting in its dying leaf heart carcass.

Those were the days, and the old people hummed in a dizzying talkfest about the songs of the ages being a marvellous balance of infinite existence that they described in one movement after another, even while they too were rummaging through the contemporary view of momentary existence devoured by the quickness of change happening through every second of life in this known world. And, these old ghosts well knew the gigantic ghost clocks of the all times covering the ancient land, and could see how this clockwork too was being transformed. Through having to search perpetually for something wavering off the radar, the spectrum of belonging to all existence, these old people had to find the essence of maintaining the learnt stability that had come through the all times—until now—to bring it back before it was too late, before it was lost forever, while being unable to stop dead time from progressing forward into new time, to be killed before it had a chance to live inside infinity. And so, they kept pushing back against these unknowns of time, to again be without any specific time, belonging only to the infinite existence of the world, and the finite possibility of being without change in the changing of every moment.

Help us find our Aboriginal Sovereignty. Some of the old ashen people, now walking among the scores of able-bodied voluntary searchers, were talking back to the ghost butterflies floating through the hazy breeze laden with lepidopteran dust, and out there, carpeting the sea. The searchers did not see anyone talking to the butterflies, and did not pay respect to the old people. They were far too busy being without shame, the empty container itself in the soul, while throwing around the dirt, all those bad feelings towards the mother. Yet, even though the ashen bodies of the spirits were walking about invisibly in the midday sun, the effervescence of the timeless aura was there, translucently reaching out on the beach, the thing itself finding and strangling the wrath, and eventually endowing the voluntary forward planning searchers with a slight soberness, where they surprised themselves with feeling a bit guilty, less hateful, and losing the vindictiveness pounding the drums in their minds. Still, you could not help feeling alone, even in a throng of foot-thong people, and that was how the voluntary searchers felt, doing the hard-yard work for nothing while being exposed to sixty thousand lightning-strike storms. The size of the voluntary search party, now comprising hundreds of people roped in for nothing by the super shire council mayoral outfit of Ice Queens ruling the roost, were ordered to continue to comb the entire over-trodden beach for the ten thousandth time, and search until they found a clue of what had happened to their missing Aboriginal Sovereignty. In the growing vengefulness of having to search for a needle in a haystack without payment, the searchers realised that they were being forcefully hypnotised, and were now even meditating like yoga people. They had been involuntarily zombified which made them feel all airy-fairy, to the point of feeling that they needed to be more careful about talking haphazardly, like fools—you fools, in front of the unseen, for they felt the presence of the old people breathing on their backs, as well as looking over their shoulders, staring into their faces, and standing on their toes unless they changed their tone of voice into something that sounded nice. We should be able to look around this beach and see her here with us voluntary searchers, they agreed. She should not be hiding from people with butterfly eyes. Well! You know what? Why didn’t she come straight down here on the beach where everyone else is doing the hard work for all the people of this country—out in the heat searching for her son, while also being attacked by injury donkeys, where everyone will be waking up and finding themselves either dead in a hospital bed after this, or immobilised? Didn’t she love her children like everyone else here?

There was nobody worrying about what that fascist kid Tommyhawk was doing, while he was skulking around like a mangy dog in the bareness of the caterpillar-stripped landscape, where a gravel airstrip had been cut through the middle of this vegetation chewed-up wasteland. The kid stood out like the eyesore he was, while trying not to be seen, but was seen clearly anyhow, by the hawk-eyed voluntary searchers staring up at this airstrip on the higher ground, from down where they were on the beach. They saw this weirdo, even though they did not wish to see him at all. His world, wherever that was, was neither immaculate, nor even the immediate business of ordinary voluntarily people searching for their lost sovereignty. What for? Well! They should have been applying their full-strength vision concentration to see what lay far off—like, for instance, the body of Aboriginal Sovereignty—by looking binocularly far away, at eye level. There was no need for wavering by swirling around 180 degrees to look at what was behind you, and also, upwards. You were not searching for angels, saints, fascists, spirits in the sky, or big-sky vision. This was not where you looked to find your suicidal Aboriginal Sovereignty. But, these straying sea-eye searchers, who had only ever felt compelled to look outwards to the sea, now seemed driven to look multifaceted upwards and backwards like a compound-eyed butterfly or plague fly, like they were God dreamers. It was simple glare, they said, that had latched their eyes on a stray sun gleam, and they saw plenty of the eyesore talking on his incredibly must-have sun-glistening iPhone, which was an envious thing for any poor people dazzling from afar, and provoking silent jealousy of what it would feel like, to have a piece of government-owned polished stainless steel glued to your ear. They could see how the fascist looked as though he was already elsewhere, and his addictive nervous pacing back and forth along the airstrip, and they too began to replicate his pacing, and being transported to some classy world of the fast lane where you robot-walked in moon boots for the rest of your life, and you were not just replicating a marooned fascist on a lonely airstrip running through the mulga in a pair of broken thongs. The voluntary searchers who had never before wished to be elsewhere in their lives except being on country now felt their time immemorial beings jeopardised, by knowing this kind of little fascist was not dreaming ancient homeland dreams, and this made them feel as though their sanity was being stolen, and that they too had been placed in some jeopardy departure lounge of a busy international terminal, the sub-normal monstrosity of unnaturalness that they had never before managed to imagine in their holy-place mind, and all this foreign mind-transporting stuff happened just by watching the way the kid was prancing around like a caged animal in their arid-zone airstrip cut through stripped land, where even they, who had never been to a city, were now impatiently pacing while channelling anyone for the sake of just saying hello, and checking for non-existent incoming and outgoing flights bundled in the blue sky, and expecting a call from somebody calling the scenario glistening in a sunray, and, Oh! My God, it was not even the Mother, moth-er, or the White Mother calling.

When Tommyhawk heard the spilt-guts laughter, and caught sight of the frenzied mimickers pacing off, like they were challenging each other in rows of line dance down on the beach, he felt caught in the burn, and drawn into this larger moment igniting into an uncontrollable wildfire as people yelled to each other, to him, to anyone, and his face winced in disgust. He spun on his heels, and took flight. He fled from the airstrip, ran for his life, and never stopped running until he had raced through the streets of Praiseworthy, pulled his mind back from the beach, re-packaged his scary-cat headspace into a suitcase that he dumped back into his re-ordered brain, fired up the telepathic power of his every thought to auto-kill the cheer of leery child abusers photocopying the impatient trademark pacing style of a chosen one legislated by the God government to act elite, and real nervy, until safely removed from the dangerous Aboriginal world. And, so, remembering he was already transformed into a rich white child inside a dark skin, who knew he was destined elsewhere, and even though he was waiting for the miracle to happen, know this, he was already living with the Whitest Mother of all Aboriginal children in Australia in the one and only spectacular $1.1 billion taxpayer-paid whitest shiny palace down in Canberra, instead of living in a government-designed tin shed erected as an endless emergency shelter for Aboriginal people to dwell in for the rest of their lives.

He crept through the mangroves where the voluntary search party was busy staring upwards through the gloaming of the twilight haze, searching to see the fascist on the barren airstrip. Silently, he moves into the ribcage of the whale bones where he instantly becomes as formless as the spinifex butterflies flittering through the skeleton, and amassed, asleep on the mud humming with mosquitoes. He becomes the whale ghost sitting in the bones where he would not be seen. The Golden Hair Mother had still not called her Aboriginal child. But, looking up into the sky above the sea, there she was swivelling in her office chair on the clouds, and seeing her busy working, he noticed her power cord was plugged into the power supply of heaven. This was a revelation in itself to Tommyhawk about powerfulness, and he knew for sure this was a complete step up from stealing pre-paid electricity meter vouchers to charge his iPhone. Well! Anyhow, he realised that her job in the Australian government was not easy, if she was to save all Aboriginal children from their parents. Why? He can imagine, and he imagines the difficulty of implementing so many inquiries to develop the necessary exhaustive formulas for determining which Aboriginal child of hundreds of thousands, was most in need, and which then, should be removed first to close the gaping hole of inequality, with the relative safety of white children. But, wasn’t he living in the most fear as a narrative fascist coming from a rampage happening right next to you? Wouldn’t that make you the most vulnerable? Didn’t this put you on top of the list? Why could she still not see that he must live in her beautiful parliament house?

While having to sit like he did not exist in the whale skeleton as the line dancers were exhausting their frenzy nearby, he thought if she was a real mother of all Aboriginal children, she should be able to see her children, and it was not right that he had to become invisible to save himself. He looked at the lady in the sky who was not offering assurance to anyone, and it was a complete quandary that when he tried to call, she kept staring into space, and neglected to answer his calls. He kept posing the question, of why he still had not heard from the big important white lady in Canberra who was sitting up there in front of him like a golden-hair angel in the sky. Where was her power? How did she look after all of the hundreds of thousands of Aboriginal children simultaneously, and instantly, if she was their true mother? But somehow, even that did not matter much if you had to depend on how well you could become invisible, even in the middle of a hostile line dance. He was already highly practised in safeguarding his invisibility and doing alright for a fascist. He had mastered how to keep the world at bay, but he really needed to be waiting at the airstrip for he expected there would be no advanced warning about when the army would actually turn up, flying in to remove this top-of-the-list Aboriginal child from immediate threatened danger. He slipped through the paces of how this eternity of waiting for help would turn out while scrolling the iPhone with his finger and checking for the text from the swivelling chair sky lady that a secretive almighty white government air force stealth B-2 Spirit bomber was on the way, and he had to be waiting by the airstrip if he wanted to be saved, because the stealth bomber would only make a quick landing to pick up the cargo—one threatened Aboriginal child, and rapidly take off—zoom, zoom—before the line-dancing locals rioted, and damaged the stealth with flying rocks, hunting sticks, strangeness and the like.

With nothing else left to do except maintain invisibility at all times, Tommyhawk tried to believe he was safe, while slipping into another bout of despondency, where he continued questioning the absence of anything at all being done about removing him from harm foreshadowed—once it dawned on the searchers that he had murdered Aboriginal Sovereignty. His father would kill him first, then throw what was left of his carcass to the extinction makers. But! Hadn’t he told the White Mother everything the government wanted to hear about child abuse and why he had to be taken away to live with her? She’ll call. She’ll call. He argues against his own doubts, and all his hopes rest on repeating his own mantra: I am her witness. She will save me.

What if there was nothing more left than a mantra to vanquish his foreshadowed foe as it turned out to be, and the foe was enormous, and encompassing the entire world and spilt out of the planet like rays of capillaries dangling in space? Tommyhawk Steel did the only thing possible for an Aboriginal child who thought a great deal about his particular circumstances. He rebuilt a stronger escape plan to get down to Canberra in a hurry. He pushed aside the dense fabric of doubt in his brain about the seemingly failed rescue mission, and he imagined a humungous piece of burnt-out flatland in his head that far exceeded the unlikely idea of the national flagship landing in the night, or a stealth jet. Neither could land on a broken-down Aboriginal community’s airstrip bulldozed through the scrub for an emergency landing by the Royal Flying Doctor Service. Instead, he blooms with a bouquet of larger empowerment in the middle of a rocket-fired flattened landscape. He felt calm while strapped inside a superpower’s designed rocket sneakily trucked into Praiseworthy by order of the White Mother. He knows that such an awesome lady, who owned hundreds of thousands of Aboriginal children, was powerful enough to arrange world peace if it was in her mind to do such a thing, but he also knows even as an eight-year-old child, that peace was not on the mind of any political manoeuvring bent on secrecy, and the spirit of stealth. He closed his eyes for the countdown, and he continued to feel calm in the overpowering exhilaration as the rocket fires up for the take-off, and he remained calm while feeling himself being launched straight out of the whale skeleton at about five miles a second, then being hurled through space, and arriving down in Canberra in a nanosecond as the latest saved Aboriginal child freed from savages, and the welcome symphony orchestra played the Stars and Stripes Forever, as he was being marched into the White Palace.

2

There are always two sides of a story. Say for instance, just for the sake of looking at the larger picture and fiddling around with the facts, let’s say, you were that blonde-haired White God Government Mother of a quarter of a million unloved Aboriginal children scattered across the country, when all these little jewels were put into your care. How were you going to save them? Who from? And how in the heck are you going to look after them? If you are the saviour, how are you going to remove all these children from their unloving parents and families by being everywhere at once in the entire land mass of 7.692 million square kilometres of the Australian continent? Was it even possible to be White God Government Mother simultaneously in every Aboriginal home like a picture of Chairman Mao, or Stalin, or of the Australian Constitution? How will you keep up with the Act? Remember! That Speedy Gonzales was only a comic, make-believe, not reality. Only the powerful people of country are able to be in all places simultaneously. It was a quandary to be the mother of the multitudes. It just cannot be done, even if you send the entire Australian army in to pick up all these children, and even with wasting billions of dollars in trying to reshape a world that was not yours to shape with long-term goals for closing the gap of inequities, it cannot be done.

You better believe that it was not just Tommyhawk Steel who felt special. Lots of Praiseworthy children had deep matters of concern festering in their minds. The compass is what it is. You don’t inherit the oldest surviving culture in the world for nothing, not without developing a bit of devotion to the interconnectedness of your world—even though you were being taught nothing but human specialism in the classroom. Yet surely, wasn’t this a totally urgent hour of need for a kid like Tommyhawk? Yes, there he was, roaming up and down the dust-laden airstrip while anxiously peering into the empty sky, and telling himself, Well fuck her—a million times. She could have at least texted back to one of his multitudinous SOS messages, especially while Tommyhawk was dealing with the frightening experience of being spooked by Aboriginal Sovereignty as a persistent memory. He could be seen flashing like a life-size ornament all over the airstrip. The object glowed with golden beams of stardust, and Tommyhawk thought the aura had been caught in the barbwire glare of the scorching sun belting on the airstrip, and it was not pretty to experience having a spook looking in your face, like a blowtorch. No Aboriginal ancestral hero staring at his murderer need to look like that.

There were too many revelations happening down on the search beach of Praiseworthy, and Tommyhawk eventually lost all sense of checking in with reality, for now he was blinded by the blowtorch aura, he could only see ghostly forms that might have been reality, or actually ghosts. He still had not been saved by the sunshine halo gleaming Blonde Hair White Mother swivelling on her office chair in the sky, but then he saw another ghost when he heard it yelping. It was his dog Pedro. The thing had returned one more time from the sea as a dog ghost. He saw its incandescent white fur looking spooky—shimmering in a mirage on the beach—but the dog ghost blazed with white-hot temper from the cosmic dimensions of its sufferings in the sea world where it had experienced hell while trying to prevent Aboriginal Sovereignty from drowning. The dog said it was only born to chase down rats, and never thought of itself as being a winner of the bigger battles in life it had endured to save the mightiest power of the all times, which was Aboriginal Sovereignty. Far from revealing if Aboriginal Sovereignty was dead or alive, this story of tragic experiences was not to be celebrated as a victory, or of winning the war, the dog ghost said, but it also said that it would never do a dog smile again. And, even while Tommyhawk stared down onto the abyss beach from where the airstrip abruptly ended on the edge of a cliff above the beach, he knew the dog had changed forever, as though its memory of happiness had been wiped clean out of its head.

He watched the little ghost dog spin around through its madness of trying to shake off whatever demon had wrestled with its fight to reach the beach, and as the dog flew around the sand and cut through flights of white butterflies, Tommyhawk could see it was dragging something it had brought in from the surf. This was when the jackhammer thought thumped in his heart, Why come back? The thought really annoyed Tommyhawk, even though he had severed all his emotional attachment to the dog after it had decided to run off into the sea in the first place, to follow Aboriginal Sovereignty’s walk towards suicide.

Anyhow, let the mind games run wild, and Tommyhawk ran the imaginary machine to flush out the pictures of the future, where he could not see himself with an old camp dog ghost following him around in Parliament House. And the future kept pumping the flow of possibilities on that lonely airstrip while he was waiting to be saved, and he stopped at the thought of whether Apple Inc would in time, invent an iDog for Aboriginal kids, to help them become assimilated into white culture more quickly, or else, leave holograms behind on the empty homelands of Aboriginal children playing with real dogs. Tommyhawk thought he would ask the White Mother for a designer dog although he had never actually seen one, but he thought as he watched Pedro’s demented ghost spinning in the sand, that a designer dog would have to be a better dog any day than some mongrel dog like this, that his own father had stolen, and given to him as a pet.

Then, after looking out to sea where a plane would take off, and wishing he could fly, Tommyhawk looked down from the pancake ridge at the end of the airstrip where he could see the ghost dog, and yep, it was still yelping around the voluntary searchers staring at it, and you know what, he saw the ghost dog actually dragging his brother’s old sun-bleached t-shirt, the one he recognised at once, with ABORIGINAL SOVEREIGNTY inscribed in big black lettering across the back that—hello, the thing in its mouth was ripped to threads.

When finally, many hours later, the dog had finished racing and spinning in circling yelps, it yelped its one last sad story which was about trying to bring home some of its sanity—yep! Yelping to prove something, that the old rag had brought old Pedro’s sanity back home. This unmoored the voluntary searchers who were bent on retrieving the first piece of evidence of their missing Aboriginal Sovereignty. There were searchers all over the beach screaming at Pedro, Bring it to me, until finally, after the endless chasing and manoeuvring around the flying grains of sand, the dance was done. The dog ghost sat staring at the sand-engrained wet mangled cloth with its bared teeth that looked like they had come out of a shark’s mouth.

Tommyhawk focused in on the insinuating rag on the sand until finally, he believed, felt certain, that when you really thought about it, you could say it looked as though the t-shirt had been ripped off Ab.Sov’s back by a crazy shark pack—honestly, he thought, even every man-eating crocodile jazzing up in a death crawl—truly. These thoughts were not good, were paralysing his mind, but he knew it was Ab.Sov’s own fault, he wanted to die, and that brother, was your idea, not mine. Let me hear you say I had nothing to do with it. Say, you were the weakest, always were. Blame yourself for what you did, not me—yep. He kicked the cloth out of his mind—one, two, three, and many more times—sent the thing flying, while the spinifex butterflies flew after it floating in the sea and brought it back, and dumped it in front of the ghost dog. A thousand times he called the dog to go away, but it did not move while sitting there looking at the rag on the sand.

3

We never seen her. While the time immemorial geniuses mathematically absorbed more of the greatness of ancestral infinity, they calculated in precisely half a second flat, that nobody had seen Dance, moth-er Mother, in non-specific ages they described as, ever. This inability to see her, added more layers to the haze legend about people becoming miraculously lost in the fleetingness of human existence. It was just part of the wondrous supernatural phenomenon of forever, if only it were true, for the fact of the matter was that she, and her entire family, were somehow disappearing into the faraway. Nothing to regale about that, or to distract oneself from any of the multifarious realities of wasting time on self-absorption by constructing your own major construction site of bugger-all consequence in the mind—when the old minds had already been there long ago, constructing the road to the all times. Leave it to them. They erect the barriers, the invisible steel around the minds of their people that was capable of shutting out the dark clouds of the twenty-first century as though it was just another breath in time. Leave it to them to break from the pestilences of the past in reshaping new eternities in existence.

On the other hand, whilst being personally rearranged by the here-and-now government to take yet another detour into their policy world of mayhem, which was all you could say of a sad and sorry time for the whole of Praiseworthy while pining for the return of their Aboriginal Sovereignty, a fool had found in the toolbox of oppression a cruel tool to use upon themselves. There was always a fool, and Praiseworthy people said yes, yes, yes, park that on us. We’ll have some of that kind of crazy assimilatory measures if you think us poor people are helping the government to make up their mind to chuck us a few dollars. They let the fool in their head pin on every door their own locally designed restraining order against themselves—like those prohibition signs being used by the police across the beach, and so the nailing went on. The designer notice—bang, bang, bang—was nailed on every gate of the locality, flown from flagpoles, or tossed on the dirt for a downcast eye to see on the spot, and from stopping the word thing from being blown away in the trade winds, by chucking one of those old mission days white painted rocks on top, an artefact, a left reminder of even greater oppression, to hold strong words down. A government interpreter who was not cheap went around each house to translate what the flapping notice proclaimed into standard English—from rampaged white supremacy diction, into something all-encompassing, like this: Nobody knock here. This saved a lot of trouble of saying the notice applied to multifarious peddlers of government hype, typed in fat print to include pissheads, pornos, paedophiles, perverts, dopeheads and drug lords with laundry bags. But the thing about the designer signs was the tendency for flexibility, interchangeableness, like graffitied legislation continually being amended. The plural persons was scratched out, until a singular person remained on the censored signs. A local who was powerful enough to write something epical in a single word—lead-handed, and grave heart—wrote DANCE with mega-sized texta in a snake-track scrawl like a single Chinese shan shui brushstroke painting reminiscent of an ominous mountain range where fireflies lit up the darkness with their dance.

But! This was not an ordinary dull piece of paper after it had been written on by the power of country, the wisdom of the ages, the Pope et cetera and so forth of the north. The message was everlasting, indelible, a change-shifter, a heightener of emotion for creating such an exalté atmosphere of everlasting Aboriginal Sovereignty in the brain it would be stuck there forever. This was what happened far away from all else not worth knowing where the world was full wondrous, and all the more reason to celebrate with solid prayers to get up, stand up and show up, roared exaltedly by the faithful of the tabernacle down in Church Street. This was the news of country. Paper signs combusted, caught fire and exploded. Little fires sprung up from these bits of elder-altered paper where the notices were nailed bang, bang on doors, gates, fences, or had been whooshed, chucked under a mission rock painted holy white. Moths rose, and poured into the flames. The paper messages manifested into an unstoppable petrolhead pyromaniac and no one could pull themselves back from the fire head’s irresistible powers for smelling like exploding petrol driving along like a racing car through the streets of Praiseworthy while shovelling the petulance hiding in the dust into its souped-up fiery spirit that continued flying off in x, y, and z directions of multiple ancestral pathways that led farther away, and into the sky. Oh! jubilant ember-lit atmosphere, the congregations grew far too excited while linking together in arm-intertwining connectedness to sing Shall we gather at the river where the bright angel feet have trod, and so forth. The prayers continued far into the future, and this sign-burning devotion was like a hex that kept Dance from knocking on other people’s front doors. She kept her distance, almost, as though being unable to penetrate the ferocity of the petrolhead’s power to fire up a piece of paper.

Wide and far, this real sovereign owner mob got smarter, and were emphatically certain that Praiseworthy did not need a police presence which was invisible to them, not if a policeman was actually doing his job by being embodied in a piece of paper, and could actually, without being anywhere in sight, and sitting over three thousand clicks away down in Canberra, while disguising himself as a piece of paper, construct invisible twenty foot walls around their highfaluting residences that were capable of stopping the cemetery woman from coming around and making an utter nuisance of herself. They said it was good that her heavy arguments of all and sundry had been silenced. They took great pleasure in knowing that her mad mixed-up voice could not penetrate the invisible barrier of inextinguishable gasoline fieriness that now oozed from those notices nailed to the front door, gatepost, fence, and under the mission rock boundary. This was the beauty of living in a furnace while feeling the overpowering heat of radiating fangs jumping to the other side of the road where she was forced to stand out of the way of becoming inflamed like an Olympic torch, while she remained shouting her loose-tongue abuse about suffering Native Title cruelty at the hands of common people. The hiding policeman in the exploding paper was too strong for her. Nobody could hear her vile voice anymore. Instead, they were happy sitting around on upturned kerosene tins watching TV in the lounge room in the poverty-stricken sovereign owner of the continent’s supposed to be rightful legal home, each an overcrowded boxed oven built on the cheap side from a government loan that even twenty generations of their families would be paying off forever, and long after the house itself had collapsed to the ground. You only had to hear the crackle of a bushfire running over the sacred lands from a long way off, and you would have to ask yourself, What was that big magnas hissing taipan Dance saying now?

But you do not knock a miracle, not in this most awesome of outcomes, where you would never have dared to believe that one day you would not have to hear her treasonous voice belting on again about rightful legal people, and robbers of Native Title. Their voices stayed on the main holler line—We are sick of her. Of course they were, and would tell you themselves she could get stuffed for jeopardising their Native Title claim, that falsifier of legitimate claims, asking the big stealer Australian government to recognise her above all others as the Native Title owner of the cemetery land. Liar! Anyway, those who were silenced, were history. They were the vanquished.

The volunteer search party of fan-waving ladies, fishermen forced to give up fishing to search the entire sea for bodies, the throngs of people on the beach who desired to become godlike searchers, all had one thing in common, they wanted Dance to stay right off the beach, and mind her own business. They would rather be dead than have her helping them, even though they liked to go on about how she was nowhere in sight in the search for their Aboriginal Sovereignty. There was always a second story, the one underneath the mask when chewing the fat in the greater story, taking form through zigzagging across memory in the cliques, gatherings, campfire discussions, and kitchen caucuses critiquing legitimate problems of how neither she, nor Cause, those other kinds, were even from Praiseworthy. You know what? She was from China. In the echoing of what was contaminating the strain of the bloodlines, you could hear the seashell wail of the sea reminiscing how she should take her family, and go back to China where she belonged.

What do you do with questionable questions, the ones newly written in the bloodstream? Let the belongings spill across the floor? Create a win-win spin for assimilationists on the march one way or the other towards treason to the ancestors—not even hers, betraying their traditional country—not hers? For who was she anyhow? In any case … She was not even one of their types, and for some strange reason, it was determined by someone whose word spread like truth, or fun, or ancestry, ancestry hidden, ancestry all or nothing, or for some strange reason, she had come from some other species, the inferior subspecies that had escaped from a bottomless well of evolution. Who was right about throwbacks? Who had come first, who had come later, and who were not really the time immemorial people who were descended from the ancestral creations?

On the red hazed beach of the futile search, down there among the white butterflies killing themselves in the act of mass suicide which might have been over the sadness of losing Aboriginal Sovereignty, all of this did not matter to the locals of Praiseworthy continuing the extensive search to find their infinity more as an obligation, rather than from the desire of recovering human remains amongst dead butterflies. They just felt glad with what they had written about Dance Steel’s treachery on the census form to the Australian government, which was in short, about her attempt to overthrow the natural order of things. They had all copied the same message written in simple white-people language which seemed to be a perfect solution to find a quick way of destroying Dance, instead of unpacking the interconnected intricacies of the time immemorial language of high culture. Such an undertaking would be like turning the life of your mind into a quarry, and jackhammering your soul into a million little pieces. You would have to sort out into which pile of incomprehension you would categorise your infinity, before you could pick a single box out of time immemorial to be translated into common English.

But believing white government required your art form was meaningless. The trick was, how to get meaning into the heads of these people. Ah! What for? So, Praiseworthy people just wrote: Dance Steel had lost her way. Fine! Who was Dance Steel? She was caught up with the butterflies. This final statement confused the distinct mind-field of the policemen who were asked to go figure that big black woman of wasted fury up there in Praiseworthy tangled up in butterflies. The message was police code language for drug-smuggling activity by this Dance Steel’s relatives in Asia, who were butterflies.

4

Over in the distant grasslands where Dance was searching for Planet’s disappearing donkeys, she had not known whether she belonged to a dream or not, while walking through a swarming carpet of small yellow grass butterflies preforming their story for this place inches above the ground and bringing it to life. In the distance, and far as the eye could see, the country shimmered in a vast single yellowness of rhythmic waves of dance. The sameness of the breathing land grew more dizzying the longer you looked at the lemony country leaping to life, and Dance continued walking slowly through the narrow path the butterflies cleared as they flew apart in front of her, and closed again, back into the vast singular movement, as she walked on ground that was no longer solid. The land was alive, and breathing as a spiritual organism, disconcerting to walk on, and in this sparse yellow spectacle consuming all horizons, all direction was removed. What remained was the bleak beauty of a great ancestor joined only by the intensity of blue sky. Without knowing where to turn and to stop falling apart, Dance kept her eyes downcast, and tried to distract herself from the power of country in ritual, while humming Eurema smilax, slowly rolling the scientific Latin name of the tiny yellow butterflies of country in her mouth. She had never seen these common butterflies massing on this scale before. In these grasslands, it was thought, these butterflies came back to the ancestors, and they were multiplying in tens of millions while reliving an eternal memory in a lemon-dancing haze becoming the ancestral serpent’s gigantic body, stretching over the land and passing through her, crossing into faraway horizons.

This mesmerising yellow sea continued radiating outwards in waves, spilling over the ground and drawing Dance further into its enchantment, hypnotising her in its story-making ceremonies of enrapturing country, and she sleepwalked further into its strangeness, where now, all low landmark tracks and footprints were blanketed by the vastness of this oceanic serpentine yellow. In following this ancient map of a single ancestral being, there was no freshly spun silken spider thread powerful enough to draw her back into the tracks of contemporaneity, and the more her transfixed eyes stared into its eternity, the more she became disoriented in the vast scale of the grassland country’s stories, and the more frightening this power place felt to her. With no lifeline to stop the catastrophic sense of fear that falls like quicksilver down her throat and churns through her stomach, as though the fear itself was being chased by ghosts, before racing back up to her throat, she tries to force this overwhelming fear to subside, not to reach into her mind and spin out, and she would collapse under the pressure of the passing ancestral serpent. Who would find her body dissolved in the dirt? What would happen to her as she became soil passing through the atmosphere of the haze? She felt a weakness in herself, of failing to place herself back in the world, as her mind spun with half-formed thoughts of becoming lost forever, of being absorbed in the overwhelming stillness of the sky, of being inseparable from any other particle of dust on the ground, of never being found, for she had become nothing.

A place lost? Earth? Dance continued, cautiously trying to find her way through the yellow fog of butterflies, and without having any true idea of where she was heading, except for being vaguely aware of one familiar sound in each heavy step as it hits the ground, that made sense to take the next step. The yellow ground ripples with waves while alternating through new and deeply unfathomable changes, through all the known spatial realities that lull her ahead, onwards, taking her further inside the ancestral map. But while trying to break free of the yellow flood, she knew nothing would ever be the same again in her life, even as she tried to recapture and to hold together the broken shards of scattered images from her memory’s fleetingly integrated random moments, which in themselves were not enough to capture the wholeness of a single momentary truth from what was ever real on this grassland, or to lay out the way back into her knowledge of homeland.

Dance continued moving through the flow of the country’s awakening and fought to resist it, with her own sense of her willpower over the overwhelming aliveness of the ancestral world, by swerving her mind away from the direction in which the mighty yellow ancestral being moved. Each time she resisted the onward flow of the shape-shifting land, only to be smothered by the single movement of countless millions of yellow butterflies, she would be forced back into an unreliable focus—no matter how incomplete and vaguely comprehensible. She pulled the dry monsoon forest butterflies and moths into the single delicate caterpillar thread in the flood of life that had always drawn her home. She gathered up those spirits, a flood of wind-broken winged butterflies which were held in place for the moment into a rainstorm dillybag, before being erased in the moving life of the woken ancestor.

In her attempt to evade the grip of the ancestral serpent’s body spread across the land, she stirred and reanimated the monochrome yellow flow through thoughts which ran with a gathering of much-loved butterflies, an assemblage of fleeting colours spilt in dizzy flights against the blinding blueness of the sky. Then the single pearly whiteness of the common butterfly called Elodina captured in memory splashed over the yellow flowing through the blue sky, before soon adding the snowiness of the rarely seen migrant white albatross—Appias. Latin names spilt through the ancestral awakening, and her mind’s eye travelled the firm and rapid flight of the black pencil-lined wings of the white Belenois java butterfly, the evening brown Melanitis leda, and the large yellow grass Eurema hecabe. These were only some of the butterflies living within the geographical range caught by the vast shadow vibrating like an earthquake rippling across the homelands.

Dance throws more imaginings of country into the ancestral flood. She recreates and jumbles the diversity of the homeland. She casts the luminous riparian vine thickets laden with numerous species of storm-broken-wing butterflies and moths, the ghosts that fall over the vast landscape. Her mind races quickly through the catalogue of lightning, the sixty thousand lightning strike storms that gel together, stories of flight that ended with turmoiled wings. She throws faith from the mandala of her imaginings that, seen from the distance, fall like handfuls of ash. These were the black and white spotted common crow butterflies the Latin expert knew as the Euploea corinna species. All these butterflies floated and spun into a silent screeching of hot air in this atmospheric flooding, with more country butterflies thrown into the reimagining, the amalgamation of returning vision to the faithfulness of homeland. The sky is stirred by the orange lesser wanderer—Danaus petilia—and the swamp mangrove tiger-coloured Danaus affinis. The spinifex grasslands re-emerge with the travelling of the white-eye ghost butterfly, an old spirit that shows itself in the world with snowy-fringed heavily scaled wings, that flies its ancient routes, reminiscent of Hitofude-ryuu style flight lines, along delicate parasitic vines meandering their serpentine pathways over the spinifex. This old ghost is commonly called the spotted dusky-blue, and somehow someone came along with a Latin name in this ancient world and called it Candalides delospila. She found other butterflies perched on the memory lines of country, where each had momentarily formed its place in a scatter map before slipping back off into nothingness. Yet they had lived long enough to be defined in the country of hot dry winds blowing in from the coast that had sucked their dust scales into the hazy darkened sky, before settling down on the grasslands by the morning, and on the waxy opened pores of the tiny tough leaves of the hot country’s mangroves.

In this bedazzlement of ceremony, the dust gathers higher into the atmosphere and blocks out the overall sense of single movements across the ground. The sun penetrates the haze like a torchlight, flashing over the large brown emperor gum moth Syntherata melvilla flying across low distant stars to another caterpillar-leaf-eaten eucalypt, and the light passes by, catches the velvety brown hues of the clumsy flying multicoloured Atlas moth with a serpent’s head and body drawn on the tip of each wing that catches the glow of moonlight. She watches the single mouthless Attacus wardi, the largest moth she had found floundering in flight around the cemetery at night, flying from grave to grave every night in its short life of a few weeks, before it died on the same old lady’s grave where the others had fallen. Her mind turns elsewhere, always falling onto a plain unadorned recollection of what contained love, hope, joy, sustenance, gutted joylessness, broken-heartedness. It was something, all she had recently left behind sitting on the empty kitchen table in the empty cemetery house, the food that would be waiting for Aboriginal Sovereignty when he returned. Or? Now unsure who she had left in her inheritance, she saw the fading image of abandonment left for Tommyhawk, or for Widespread, in a place where someone would need to return to one day.

Only the starkness of a white whale skeleton rising up from its nest among the yellow dust-covered mangroves on the beach was seen by the sea’s ancestral eyes in this place, though the old whale would never be visible to those other spirits living in the Milky Way universe of the celestial equator, where the serpent bearer serpentrius gripped in both hands the death of deaths.

Where was she? What do we say? What do we want?

We want the moth-er Mother?

We want the Mother.

What she doing that idle woman?

The great throng, gathering in a spellbinding politically charged upset protest movement from the capital cities of the 1970s, were travelling from near and far by the busload to become voluntary searchers on the beaches of Praiseworthy. All had only one aim in mind, and that was to find their Aboriginal Sovereignty. You can imagine that it was an ordeal, continual struggle to regain Aboriginal Sovereignty from becoming an all-round total disappointment for the world-weary thousands of Indigenous rights voluntary searchers who could not see the mother of Aboriginal Sovereignty being staunch like themselves. They chanted, where is the mother of Aboriginal Sovereignty? Why was she hiding among the yellow-winged mangrove jezebels flying from the monsoon vine thickets and storming into the mangroves? Meanwhile, the shadow of the yellow haze carrying its treasure of broken-winged butterflies higher in the atmosphere darkened the beaches when it picked up the collective thoughts of Praiseworthy. These worries! They were slung straight up into space, and what was now orbiting in the galaxy was about Dance, the moth-er Mother, what was she doing? Shouldn’t she be helping to raise good Australian children that stayed alive, and not dead ones for other people to come to the end of the world to find floating around in the sea? I mean, do you know how big this sea is? It was no wonder giant death adders were being thrown at Praiseworthy from the serpent bearer up in the celestial equator when the whole universe was being earbashed about how their Aboriginal Sovereignty had gone off the rails, with so much talking up big by the mother about being traditional, while at the same time, the father with the mass of donkeys was banging on about how you needed to be the era’s most ruthless entrepreneurial money-grabber.

She was making evil, effigy devils. Who were those devils anyway? All this, and more, was happening inside the illegal house of modern Praiseworthy’s Native Title cemetery. Oh! The world had changed when these thousands of volunteer beach searchers said that they had seen some eerie things in their dreams—spirit mob, disguised as something else, appearing like giant puppetry, but equally, looking like her—Dance—the woman they had never seen, a Chinese spy person moving around that hearsay full-of-moths house, sending her weirdo signals in their dreams. It was purely the vision bro, in every house you saw them images—hundreds of moths clinging to the ceiling, crawling up the walls—kulibibi fellows everywhere, like dikili. Saw there also! Giant-sized ghost gum moths, flying, twisting, hula-hooping like nobody’s business in the whirly wind cemetery of that big junba—ceremony mob. Kabarrbarrijbi. All types of mumu now, dancing and twisting about, jiving it up while even singing like Sam Cooke down in his Harlem heaven—Bring him on home … Repeating that phrase over and over, singing it like a thousand times—like they was saying it to us—who you? Get out of the way for they would bring Aboriginal Sovereignty home themselves, and even like we were the strangers here in our own country. That’s right. Mumu wild party, looking like they hated us. Yep! What was being said was the truth! There in the middle of a real dark night, there were things you shouldn’t be able to see in pitch blackness rocking and rolling, but they just looked like plain mongrels shining like fluoro, or phosphorescence. Some even looked like cringing crap dogs sneaking around where they shouldn’t be, singing you know, singing dog language—Hello! Hello!—actually saying hello to us, instead of barking woof woof and tearing our guts out, but we just plain cut-snaked it out of those dreams after that. We refuse to have dreams in Praiseworthy.

These searcher people who were sneaking around the cemetery in the night needed to be cross-examined by the pious churchy crowd who were asking if it was not copies of Dance dancing, that had made the horde of searchers star-crossed lovers of hers in their repeat-mode mind, and all that you were seeing was just some other kind of illusion like these donkeys here pissing on us?

No! No! The horde searcher people said how amazing it was to see rhythm ghost ceremonials, for you had to see it to believe how it felt like a hot breeze had hit your skin each time those ghosts swung past you, but we were too frightened, and so we ran away in those dreams. But before we took off in our ideal dream car, we heard things too. There was wild talk blasting from the radio—real ghosts talking in the proper sense.

Chinese, but nobody else living was in that radio, we swear true God.

You can tell …

They—searcher people from all over the place—said exactly the same thing to each of the elder congregations of the hundred churches, that she—Dance—had stuffed her illegal house with effigies, and you should have seen it, more-than-life-sized puppets disguised as beautiful Asian spy butterflies instead of our spies, which was treason of their traditional law. These butterfly-lover souls were not their homeland ancestral spirits of lepidoptera. They were hudie in Chinese, or, ho diep, pattampoochi, ya-a, nabi, titili, chocho, or kupukupu. Those moth puppets were in the yard too, with real moths, and it was eerie to look at this new ceremony for who knows what it meant for country seeing this stuff?

The horde searcher gang marched in protest to the cemetery that night to find out why Cause and Dance were not helping on the beach with their search for their Aboriginal rights, but nobody was home in that illegal house full with those heebie-jeebies. Nah! We could not get out of there fast enough.

What Dance saw was something that nobody else could, and this continued to flummox the broader collectivism of the haze gaze. The woman was watching butterflies and moths swarming over the cemetery, over Praiseworthy—feasting on mangoes rotting on the trees, and flitting unnoticed over the searchers down on the beach. She never heard the searchers calling all over the cemetery, and then yelling, Anyone at home. She was listening to the world of hundreds of species of butterflies and moths, the butterfly country that existed in all of its fullness, if only in her mind. The world she looked at, or only wanted to see these days, was butterflies, and this was where she lived, even as she continued to live through an obligatory dialogue either with, or about, her children, and in any case, all of which could singularly be interpreted into something or other, like this: Tommyhawk, you get yourself down to that school in Praiseworthy and show those white teachers who's got the better brains. Or, saying to Aboriginal Sovereignty, You stay right away from those white government crawlers for your own good, good boy, listen to what I am telling you—you should be listening to me and listening to your father. Why don’t you listen to us? Widespread contributed nothing to the talking on how to make normal human beings from sprog. It was left up to Dance to unpack the whinge, the commentary, the dialogue, the undisciplined conscience of landscape rattling away with itself, while otherwise preoccupied, until the family left the house totally confused, left to pursue the different routes of their own making—Widespread to his great vision of building a world-class donkey transport conglomerate, Aboriginal Sovereignty in search of never-ending love, Tommyhawk in his wish to leave the vicinity of the homeland for good, and she being left to pursue her vision of searching for butterflies.

This Dance was so far away in thoughts about how her family would ever survive the realities of their time, that she never saw or heard those who had been sent to fetch her to search for Aboriginal Sovereignty. You could not hear people screaming if your world was locked by thoughts that told who she was: My name is Dance Steel. I have nothing to do with these people. My name is Dance Steel, and this is my traditional land and fuck these people who have told me to keep out of their town. My name is Dance Steel, and I never walk where I see these despicable people on the land of my children, and I do not walk on their land that should be somewhere else. It was easy for Dance never to recognise other people, because she walked where others could not walk on the Dreaming track of moths and butterflies. She only thought of their resting places, which were her responsibility because no one else was looking after their spirit country.

Who looked more Chinese here? She was the first to scoff about who was who, with a toss of her white hair matching the colour of the mass migration of white butterflies landing in the sea, twinkling with light, faded to gum-moth bronze at sunset, before finally reverting to a red silvery tinge like a mangrove jack. She gave as good as she got while chucking around a few of her own ideas about what she called the Praiseworthy look, which she scaled in whiteness, Chinese or Aboriginal. The blend of common colonialism, even though nobody admitted ever having heard of her relatives, all her aunties and uncles, and old grandfathers, but never mind any of that, because she could easily claim the lands of Praiseworthy just as good as anyone else under the circumstances of white law-making compromised rights. So she challenged back that everyone else belonged elsewhere—were not of the same blood as her butterfly song line, and even if they were Aboriginal, she could not recognise any of them as being Aboriginal people of Praiseworthy.

It was difficult to lure a mangrove jack, and even more impossible to drag the world of the ancestral out of its country by acts of hostility, insult and criticism. Look again! Even the resolute husband—Cause—was told time and again that he was illegally squatting on other people’s cemetery and decimating traditional country, knowledge, law, culture, and society. But he was deaf too. He did not speak the same English language as other people. You were excluded man. People told him to his face, and letters from the Native Title bureau presented him with the judgement itself, which if you took all the fine print away, just said: You were not blessed. Haze people wanted him to stop lying about being the most important traditional landowner of Praiseworthy, and that he too, should move back to his own country, wherever such a place existed, because they did not know any foreign countries themselves. Take all those donkeys and your mad wife. But Cause just replied, You know what? I am the Dreaming. I am the air around here. My Aboriginal Sovereignty is the lungs of this place. Get out of my way. I got a fucking business to run.

What you talking about? Yap! Yo! We talking too—about getting rid of donkeys even if they got a cross of Jesus on the back. That’s foreign business. Not for this place. We are modern twenty-first century Australian people here moving up in the world. We are not into the exporting and importing business like salespeople. We are only into becoming the Global North, and not importing anything that’s going to make us look like even poorer cousins of the Global South than we are already. Exporting means minerals, pastoralism—cattle, sheep, barramundi. We are not importing anything, and especially not any donkeys that are going to make us look like the majority of the world—like millions of poor foreign peoples from Asia, or those poor buggers, the vast majority in Europe walking around with donkeys to help them carry their load and whatnot, or South America, Africa, or the Mediterranean, or the Middle East.

5

You can tell …

The old country wrapped kinfolk like Dance Steel in its living being. Yo! Yo! You could reckon that it would be a miracle on Earth all right, to be able to see who she truly was inside the stories of country stretching into infinity, and you would never know whether she really lived in the stillness shrouding the land, or see her there, on the summer leaf that barely moves for decades, or if she was in the monstrous display of the sixty thousand lightning strikes fury of a top country storm lighting up the night. No, without imagining, you would not see her at all, just as you would not find the moth cooling itself under the brittle bark of those solemn white gum trees lining the ancient kinspeople’s river. To be able to see the country in her properly, you would need the eyes of the ancestors, the ghosts, and the spirits of this place. Those that have appeared right in front of your eyes and you did not see them, and they saw nothing of you, not in their reasoning reaching far beyond the capacity of human vision, which sees only itself in memory, but never the reality, never the unconquerable breadth of ancestral knowledge.

Nobody had seen this woman beyond the grey questions of government-contrived politics, although you might have briefly seen her through imagining yourself as being elsewhere, up on a higher plane than Qantas, and have dared to feel what it would be like to look far down from up in the stars of the heavenly dome, and just for a while concentrated on the idea of migrating elsewhere, like the fallen from their homeland taking a chance on the rough seas you see heaving below, and then know how she might have felt like a butterfly taking the left turn of life, the orange and black patterned wing wanderer, or the white and black winged caper white, migrating through the hazards of faraway majestical spirit tracks to end up dying in this sea, or else, the migrant butterfly that comes and goes across the rolling ocean of the northern sea while travelling in the wind above this living ancestor, flowing on its endless journey. Who knew how a spirit mapped the migrations of fate, while Dance secretly broadcast the absolute certainty of her migration to all and sundry, of how she could not wait for the day to come when she won back legal title for her ancestral land after more than a century of hardships, of how this day could not come more quickly, and the very first thing she would do when she clutched the title of her land in her hand, would be to demand the removal of all those illegal carcasses of people she did not know, who should not have been buried on her land. This was how time stood still in the endless struggle of getting nowhere, in the lifetime wasted in all that drive and effort to keep up the bravura while the struggle goes on and on in the war without end, until all that was left of the lonely spirit, which was almost nothing at all, was an ability to see there a tiny road running off to the left. How had she missed it before, you would not have seen it at all if it was not for the reminiscences of faintly amplified voices popping up from memory to point the way—to take that road over there, and get out as quick as you can while you have the chance. This Dance, well, the dance of the times was called calamity, of never knowing whether she would ever feel safe on her land, but there was this road to another heritage.

Turning away from the floating spider-web district spun over the ceiling, Dance began searching thousands of social media networks. Where were the people smugglers on the dark web who, while dropping off boat people in Australia, might be interested in taking her family to China? She set up a Twitter account called @CheapAsPossible. Illegal people smuggler wanted for some poor Aboriginal boat people, she messaged. Pick up Praiseworthy beach ideally. Destination China. Boat smuggler people with leaky boat need not apply. Small modern-day people ark was essential for four Aboriginal people leaving country. Never to return. Don’t need US C-17 Globemaster military transporter. Only genuine people smugglers need respond with non-government references, e.g. positive emojis e.g.: .

There are always plans far too grand for all manner of people, and far too long the distance to accomplish, but not for Dance. She had dispensed with the unfortunate stockpile of her life, and now thought of nothing else except how to achieve her ultimate dream, which in a nutshell, was to remove any further interference to whatever fortunate moments of good luck she had left in her life. Dance offered a favourable description about the type of people smuggler she was seeking to take her sacred family to the new world of the greatest power on Earth. She racked her brain over how to construct the plan on the cheap, before providing the type of blurb for scouring the globe in her search of a creepy shyster. She searched to find an apt description of a low-life from the back cover of a huge book by a great poet. She then wrote on her Twitter account a message, addressed to @CheapIllegalPeopleSmuggler etc., the following statement: Wanted people smuggler whose presence on Earth reasserted itself at a deeper level to boat people who were surprised to find themselves more chastened, more astonished, more humble, although retrospectively, and still and nevertheless, she seriously thought that even this description might not necessarily include all of the qualities of the good human being she was truly searching for in a modern-day, hardcore people smuggler.

The living serpent of country crossed many, many tracks while following maps of its creations, and had somehow felt the urge to create the world anew while listening to Dance harp on in country, of her desire to be gone henceforth, and to travel as far away as she could get from this Praiseworthy world. You know what, she had the audacity to preach to country instead of praising its eternal gloriness—in spite of the troubles, the place is dispensable. Whatever! The creator of country too could move, and it began moving across the broader world in search for that ideal people smuggler that was going to take it for a ride. The melodies of travelling thoughts that Dance heard coming from the ancestral serpent’s wide journeying broadened her perspective of what it meant to be in eternal movement, of travelling henceforth and so on, and she felt the infinite flow of this ancestry transforming beyond the cemetery, she felt the enormity of the long serpentine movement rushing headfirst through the ocean, the weight of country itself striking upwards, taking to the skies like a flash of lightning that crosses and re-circles the globe in repeat-mode of returning and departing, like a big hoon doing a U-ey, or a burnout of the world out on the flat.

The circumnavigational spirit quickly became a globetrotter hyped on its own kind of steroid ancestral powers, and Dance grew accustomed to the giddiness of the ancestor’s spin-out view of the world happening in a flash, yet she was unable to stop the ride, to slow down and gain any reasonable perspective on her direction. She just grew increasingly more determined to keep on with the search to find the faraway visionary homeland—the China of a historical ancestor. She was becoming the China that was. Her imaginings, now unleashed upon the world, grew greater and the whole thing in her mind became inexhaustible in its demands, and in particular, that she, just a poverty woman who had never travelled from her homeland, had to reach further into the unknowable, be off the radar of the planet, all elsewhere, and sundries. She became sleep-depraved. She could no longer describe where she was in the all place, or where she was going in a monochrome world. Having lost her sense of direction, she could no longer describe how to get to the end of the road let alone to China. How would her family ever reach the new life? But, anyway, and nevertheless, all her unrequited dreams were of being elsewhere in the monochrome, which was still further than could be imaged, and she abandoned her struggles in Praiseworthy. Why worry about winning back her Native Title when she could explore the total planet on the internet? This was the superglue place to be, expanding her brain until it burst with chasing an illusion, and a ridgy-didge boat smuggler.

A sharp turn of events stuffed the lot, and threw the superglue up into the air when the nothingness in her soul became lost in its own void. Nevertheless, she hit the alarm clock and checked in with reality, where she conceded that a seeker of old culture needed to know much more about how to find the fieriest people smuggler to trust the precious cargo of her family. She required a true ferryman who treated people decently while transporting them to the brave new world of the heavenly kingdom. But the grandest of ancestral creators that normally lived in Praiseworthy, had not paused once in its mad tempest of rupture, havoc, and upheaval in its journeys around the planet to find the truest shepherd to take the family of Aboriginal Sovereignty into a new world. And then, guess what, it saw the internet! The ancestral being drew breath, paused, and you could tell it was loving the technology of the slack road. It saw beauty in this type of journeying without physical effort of continual effrontery to create vast new story lines for extending its law over all the broken planetary domain, and it would not stop pushing Dance forward in its quest to claim all ancestries, and link them all to the country’s ancestral domain through virtual technology.

While the mighty live ancestor of country held Dance in an endless quest of creating tracks for the new era with modern modes of transport through flights of technology, she was in a complete frazzle from being mentally used by country to link the world together with Praiseworthy, when she really wanted to be uprooted, and plunked elsewhere in the unknown world. She wrapped her head around China, and became far too engrossed with surfing the internet to find an illegal people smuggler who wasn’t a thief or an idiot, and who had never heard of the great horde of voluntary searchers down on the beach of Praiseworthy combing every grain of sand to find a trace of their Aboriginal Sovereignty. Neither she nor any people smuggler heard the noisy search people frantically calling at her door, Anyone home? She did not notice the salty-air-encrusted beachcombers walking through the house among the scary lungkaji policeman moth puppets that they had mistakenly thought to be Chinese spies. Strangely, she did not feel the persecution of what she called a living hell pressing against her skin, while she was too busy complaining about the cost of people smugglers these days, who thought poor Aboriginal people were millionaires by demanding thousands of US dollars paid up front, just to bring their leaky boat off the coast of Praiseworthy.

A humid eeriness saturated the internal world of the house that was enough to make your blood curdle, and this was a feeling, the searchers said, that they were being caged inside of Dance’s mind. They had panicked. Cried. Screeched that loudly, they had frightened each other, and in this bedlam of screeching in each other’s ears, had felt what it was like to be trapped forever in the slut woman’s mind. The cold shivers were racing down their backs when they realised there was a very huge presence in the house that felt like the greatest power of country. The thing was suffocating them, they could not breathe, and its sheer bulk was blocking them from getting out of the door. And so, they said, they never had a chance to see if anyone was home other than evil, because the whole thing did not matter anymore to them. They would rather forget about feeling weird, and do all the searching for Aboriginal Sovereignty themselves, rather than being captured inside the slut’s house.

Yet, in her solitude of escapism dreams, nothing was going to plan for Dance. No illegal people smuggler stepped forward. It seemed that China was not on their agenda, not the drop-off point for the world’s rejected peoples. She had lost count of the number of times that she had applied for her family to be repatriated to the Republic of China, by filling in what she believed were online repatriation or asylum-seeker forms without understanding a word of Chinese, and probably not even contemplating whether she had confused the Chinese immigration officials with all the wrong answers. The cost of muddling anybody’s brain cells was not her responsibility. She never received a reply. But the hopeful asylee Dance was made of much stronger ideals than nationalistic idealism and what Chinese characteristics were required to be a resident of China. Such stuff was out of the question for one of the traditional homeland who was versed in not giving up anything easily right to the struggle of the last breath. She decided to write back to the silent Chinese officials a ream of reasons why her family should be accepted as genuine Aboriginal refugees from Australia.

If you want the truth, I will tell you the truth for this was how it went …

She wrote about fearing for her family’s safety by living in a ransacked homeland where they were racially persecuted by all and sundry, either consciously or non-consciously for being part Chinese. On the other side of her genetic make-up argument, she described how she was the small grey moth that flew through the sandstorm of donkeys and searchers attacking each other on the beach, and far out to sea where it hovered when it saw Aboriginal Sovereignty at war in a watery, aqua-blue sea. He was in an epic struggle with the mighty ancestral sea woman, now caught in her massive swirls, and she was pulling him further down into the depths of the sandstorm on the turgent ocean floor. She, the moth-er moth, had watched the struggle down in the depths, until suddenly Aboriginal Sovereignty released himself from the water’s embrace. And in one rapid movement, he shot to the surface, then skyward up from the sea while water drops billowed behind him like a sunshower, and he met the moth eye to eye, and she saw his grinning face as he reached with an outstretched arm to grab the moth in his hand, before diving back into the water like a silvery-scaled fish.

The moth returned again and again to the dance of the water dragging Aboriginal Sovereignty to the bottom of the sea with the fish, crabs, and the seaweed caught in the tumbling whorl pool, and again, the moth dragged him back to the surface. She was the respite until his downward fall, diving again, and again, the struggle back from the bottom of the ocean. This was the dance: a grey twist of clouds opening the rays of sunlight that caught the rainbow colours of the ancestral serpent’s breath as it sprayed through the storyline of the time never-ending laws. This too, was her dance, the dance of the moth.

6

You can’t actually hear ghosts talking on the radio. Bulwa! Kadajala! But bogey radio men were speaking in Chinese on the beach. Everyone was talking about these radio ghosts. Ghosts of the blood. In local blood. The ghosts of all sorts were in the head and there, sitting around and speaking through the radio, getting in the back of real smart minds, talking nothing but trash. All that type of bullshit talk going on. Wakada-wakada. Mungkuji then. The ghosts created plenty of heated arguments, and the voluntary searchers—the inside people, and outside people—were arguing among themselves about who should be the top boss of the search party. Should it be the modern-thinking people to say which way to look, or homeland people who let ghosts tell them what to do on country? Nobody could say how some Chinese ghosts showing up might talk politics on Australian radio, and then they argued about whether anyone in Praiseworthy would know if their ghosts were also talking in Chinese, even if they did not even know a single word of Chinese themselves?

Jidimbi what I am telling you is true, and if you don’t believe me well bugger off the lot of you.

Choke on it.

Well! A modern-era person asked, What time did you hear the Chinese ghost?

Doesn’t matter.

Let’s make a note about this, build a thesis palace, so we can think about the significance of who was telling these lies later on in the middle of the next century.

One of the startled searchers who had fled the slack evil bulk blocking the cemetery, remembered hearing water splashing around in that house like a huge fish trapped in an aquarium. Or in a bowl of water. It might have been Dance taking a bath, but it sounded like evil splashing that was nothing like the sound of her, for she was worse than evil. She hides by making herself look inconspicuous like grey moths blending into the environment, such as those gum moths sitting on a piece of bark over there in the eucalyptus trees where the river flows, that cannot be seen easily, that seemed to be invisible to the eye. A mother should be the first person to be seen down on the beach helping to find Aboriginal Sovereignty. She needs to be totally visible, seen clearly as the most bereaved, and leading the grieving throngs to some kind of salvatory hope. Why doesn’t anyone keep to the script? If she could sling a donkey halfway down the flat, or smash it against the walls of Parliament House in Canberra, if she chose to do something about feral donkeys, then she should be there on the beach with the rest of the modern-day ark humanity of Praiseworthy. Was she inhuman? Gone white? Why couldn’t anyone save on scoring the counterpoint? All the truth and justice about their missing Aboriginal Sovereignty will be dealt with soon enough in a courthouse, but let’s not act classless like a cultureless throng down on the open beach. This was not Surfers Paradise. The great influx of Aboriginal Sovereignty protest searchers were justified in feeling fatigued and annoyed from looking at the same fruitless flat sea, but like the homeland people of Praiseworthy—the voluntary search parties of fanning ladies and fishing men—they felt it was important to keep on being hopeful by watching out for a good time whenever that might be, or to keep a hopeful thought in mind for seeing a particular type of frothiness on the beach the elders were talking about, and that may or may not have anything to do with finding Aboriginal Sovereignty. Or else, another divine ray of light would spill across the sea from the setting sun and like a miracle, light up the glowing body of the miraculous of the all times, and in spite of enduring the atrocious absence of parents, all these contrapuntal contra mundum voluntary searchers knew deeply in their heart, that their demand to have Aboriginal Sovereignty returned to them would go on forever—if necessary.

7

But these mementos of the great throng of voluntary searchers were hung out to dry with everything else—dust falling off birds’ feathers, fish remains, insects, the windswept leaf and the animal that shook its fur, relations, and ghosts. Nothing easily put aside while speaking about what one knew when the weight of knowing the era was too much. A number of children had committed suicide right where the searchers now stood. Their little ghosts were everywhere, and it was unsettling the haunted beach. Even fish stayed away from the sorry place. It felt like a massacre was still happening right here, and when you thought about it, it was.

All the sad thoughts of children rose up from the sand, grabbed you by the ankles, climbed up and jumped into the brain and talked to your mind about those four teenage girls who had committed suicide together, and saying, You should not be down here on the beach talking about this. You saw girls running around on the beach when there was a waning moon. You felt for them closely. Off to a party, they sang. Migrating like swallows. Drown themselves. Hard to forget that! Then that little boy. Nice kid. He was always on the beach fishing and fishing, loved that fishing. Twelve. Another boy. Eleven. One fish totem. Another family lost a girl. All copycats, all same way. Then there was another girl. She was at a good boarding school down south. Prestigious. How lucky was that? Able to go to an expensive college, all expenses paid by the government’s closing-the-gap scheme? She should have been happy? Then another kid the other day. Children going down like flies. All the boarding school children had to be brought home to keep them safe with their own parents. And still, more children. Nothing stopping them. It was like a pied piper thing, somebody’s spirit coming up from the sea at night and talking rubbish to those children. Everyone saying this was another stolen generation, and no one knew the real cause of it, but Cause Steel did not make a lot of friends either when he kept saying it was Praiseworthy’s own fault for being a bunch of Australian government lackeys, paid to keep their mouths shut, and not standing up for their rights.

There was a suicide pact of ten schoolchildren but someone saved them that time. No one remembered if it was Cause Man Steel who had actually stopped the kids in time. He was out at night, down on this same beach where he had set up his own one-man night patrol with a high-beam light spinning from the top of his sedan, watching what the kids were doing in the middle of the night. This was the first time he had been accused by the shire council of being a prowler, a peeping tom. Forgot all about that time. Forget it happened. It was funny how the negative part of the mind started jumping ahead of itself in the twenty-first century, and spoke out of turn. But no one wanted to forget that old Gerry and the Pacemakers song You’ll Never Walk Alone, playing at those funerals for children. Those thoughts were as pungent as the saltiness in the humidity, at the end of a storm … walk on in the sunset-lit sand, eyes scanning the sky where the gilded sprays rolled and sparkled off the top of waves. It was as though the children had no idea why they were deciding to leave Praiseworthy once and for all, and had left as simply as walking into the sea, and as though they were off to a party, some community incentive disco turnout to attract youth. Perhaps what becomes of memory was stilted, not the whole of reality, and what was more disturbing, the sensitivity of childhood was lost to the tighter government controls over the freedom of the Aboriginal world to define its own future. Put very simply, those children had felt the pointlessness of the new era, that there was no future. Whatever the reason, there had been no new reality dawning as far as they were concerned.

And all those mothers of the ghost children were not like Dance. They were not hiding. They were visible in their grief. And they were not like a bird that had never insulted this community. A starling singing sweetly. As the hours passed, the shadows grew longer and the whispering came closer to cover Dance in malice, speculating that maybe Dance had migrated, like a moth, and this was the reason why she was not part of the search. Or that maybe she had died, or something else had happened that prevented her from walking down to the beach like other people to volunteer her services to find Aboriginal Sovereignty.

And where was Tommyhawk? Why hadn’t anybody seen the younger brother who had the misfortune to be born into a dysfunctional family? Everyone began asking if anyone had seen Tommyhawk around. Nobody had seen him, although they did not expect a fascist would commit suicide.

8

Who’s this Tommyhawk? The Minister for Aboriginal Affairs was beginning to feel a bit nervy about all those weird tweets on her gold-class mobile being sent, she said, from this Tommyhawk. Look here, this someone named Tommyhawk. His umpteen bucketloads of texts continually appearing on her golden image. What were all these numerous text messages about? Click delete. Chuck another, click delete. She was sick of deleting messages from this same person. She should not be receiving so many unsolicited text messages. Who gave the stalker her personal mobile number anyhow? I don’t owe somebody called Tommyhawk. Why was she being harassed? Pestered? Did anyone know how many Aboriginal people loved their minister across the country? And why did this person Tommyhawk seem to know her every movement? Could you believe this? He wanted her to adopt him. I can tell you now that is not going to happen. I don’t want to be loaded with a black child with problems. But! Wait! He kept calling her White Mother. If she could just feel … something? There was something special about this type of adoration that buoyed her, took her up into another level of the stratosphere, and reinforced in her mind the concreteness of her government’s racist policies being a real blast for Aboriginal children. She was after all, the federal government’s White Mother for Aboriginal children. Then bingo, she thought more about a win-win situation, like a what—exploiter, or a reaper? Why not make something of the crop? Perhaps, she could adopt this Tommyhawk, send the RAAF bomber up north to pick him up, have her staff check him out first? See if he was the real deal. Not just a set-up. Not an activist. Healthy! Was not going to lumber her with a crippled mind? Questions kept coming thick and fast at Parliament House. She somewhat explained how to go about the new situation, See if the kid was not too fucked up. Don’t consult anyone with legit standing in the community who claimed any authority while accusing us of nigger farming. Just get the gossip. Consult the idiots. She was already visualising her future self, parading her Aboriginal child, the last of his tribe, across all factions of parliament, just to demonstrate how far she was prepared to go to facilitate the success of her government’s emergency interventionist policies into the lives of Aboriginal people living on wretched communities across northern Australia. One success at a time. Clink! Clink! Costs a billion dollars.

9

A dust storm continued blowing in varying degrees of velocity each day as it normally did to stir up the haze dome and rattle the forty cents donation tin hanging on a gate. It was time for the windswept swallows to return home with tattered and vane-broken wing feathers from another long migratory flight. Through the storm, the swallows managed to sing a few terrific tunes while gliding in the dust that followed the traffic roaring through the streets of Praiseworthy as though there was nothing much else to do in this world.

There were still no Canberra-like stirrings to Verdi’s beckoning of Go, thought, on the wings of gold, Va, pensiero, sull’ali dorate. Aren’t no government jet plane being fuelled up and firing to go at the capital city’s airport, to be seen at whatever angle the Golden Hair White Mother was going to acquire her policy-showcase black child to the public cries that it (the fascist) be inserted centre-stage in the Coat of Arms—equally between the kangaroo and the emu, hammered and screwed above the door of the Commonwealth of Australia’s white palatial Parliament House. But she was on the job, even if losing the battle on behalf of Aboriginal people. She was demanding Cabinet, or what she called Cactus, release no less than an RAAF fighter jet for the greatest rescue mission on Earth, to save an Aboriginal child from cultural extinction in his northern homeland. What she was planning was beyond the pale. A step too far. She would educate the child in his culture. The Cabinet solidly argued that it was ludicrous to think the Aboriginal Affairs Ministry could use an RAAF fighter jet for the use of an Aboriginal, and that, when viewed with the greatest of margins on the other hand of politics, she was creating another stolen generation. Her colleagues were just not into a rescue operation on enemy territory like this inside domestic borders. They were not into kidnapping an Aboriginal child or greater acts of domestic terrorism, and then—think about this—collectively raising such an Aboriginal child in Parliament House was like ceding sovereignty of their own home and country, for what, or what next? The Cabinet demanded that the current Minister for Aboriginal Affairs’ acts of sedition cease immediately, and she renege from the dangerous path of reckless dreamy idealism, one that was bent on destroying the total fabric of the country.

On the other hand, Aboriginal Sovereignty Steel’s suicide way up there in the woop-woop haze dome country of the other kind—where the black fellows lived—was recorded for posterity in the overall figure in a category in the census—the way the bleak spirit maintained its distances, and could if required, fetch up the anomaly to slightly brush against, for a moment, the lonely complacency of the illegal nation-state’s soul.

10

While Aboriginal Sovereignty Steel’s body rolled in a pelagic swirl of currents, normality was resuming in Praiseworthy with every man, woman and child required by the Major Mayoral thing, the albino Ice Pick, to throw themselves back into the forward plan. There was no time to waste with what was done. Not here. Not in this place busy with putting everything right in an eternity of bad things that had happened to the people. What was still fresh on the mind of Ice Pick’s mayor business of another view of the world, was how he had spent considerable time putting the whole town—young and old, babies and all—through a five-year agreement with the government by wheeling and dealing, and selling their soul and so forth, by forcing through their collective mind a totally compromised reimagining of themselves through a new retina, the one that turned a blind eye. So! Let’s rejoice, and do it. It was out with the old, and in with the new, for there was real metamorphism whiffing in the air to change the butterfly continent’s “free country” personality into something else, in becoming a little master of their own region with locked doors to outsiders, and without a care in the world for those who fall by the wayside, like the old and the weak, ensuring self-preservation in the era of building crisis, and from the calamity of having idiots in charge of a global wreckage company that was rifting along like a bunch of idiots while in charge of the world’s demolition from a deadly pandemic, and climate change. There was, of course, always another view of the world as a fanatical continuing paradise.

Heaven forbid, Ice Pick warned, if anyone had niggling thoughts creeping around the left-hand corner of the wall in the back of their mind every now and again. What more was there to say, if you ended up having a shitload of a bomb explode in the thought-nigglers for continuing to talk about their Aboriginal Sovereignty? Who cared what rubbish truck exposé of a colossal mess of bad thoughts they were dumping in front of the forward plan for closing all gaps in that old pipe dream of living in a fully assimilated world? You could not have ordinary people letting their stray thoughts from left field stuffing up the instrument to move into the assimilated future where you neither saw black nor white but only greyness, which was the forward plan. Nor could you let thought-nigglers do the questioning about what was normal for normal people going about their business in a world full of chasms too wide to jump, or asking themselves questions about what they thought was happening to the body of Aboriginal Sovereignty, who had been floating around at sea for a good amount of time now. Well then, no, you couldn’t have these things stuffing up the future of the twenty-first century. So, listen! Ice drove around to his Ice Queens to explain this was what was going to happen—better thinking, which was a stupid thought since great thoughts were not even going to rise to the surface. But he knew if anyone else was given a chance to have a thought, the forward plan would be a total ruin. Tinged! Shanghaied to hell! Pinged straight into a sick gut swilling up to the eyeballs with semi-digested grease-laden dinners, a packet of crisps, a can of Coca-Cola, a packet of Minties, a Freddo frog, coalesced with a packet of smokes.

Ice knew that it was only in his dreams where the other people’s bad dreams of dumping on the forward plan needed to be resolved. He knew that it was somewhere in his dreams of the middle of a night, where he needed to sit on guard on a fold-up camp chair, and wait for traitors to show up. You would catch them sneaking around, dragging their free minds behind them, stirring up their stray thoughts, pondering about whether they chose life or death, or muttering about the fate of the dead boy’s body. Was he swimming with a school of silvery trevally fish? Was he living with the hammerhead sharks? Was his spirit alarmed at the touch of a fish’s mouth nibbling his skin, or a shark gnawing on his rib cage where the great flocks of sea birds were splashing in and out of the sea? These were the self-glorifying thoughts he always had to push away, and those simple thoughts that a fish spirit swimming in the sky at night might point them to the final discovery of their Aboriginal Sovereignty, and let all hell loose on the forward plan, if they waited around long enough on the beach to see what would happen, instead of safely dreaming about nothing in their beds as soon as night fell over the soul of Praiseworthy.

These were times long ago, and new times for the nature of grieving. Everything was changing, and Ice Pick knew this. What pleased him was how the forward plan had been set in concrete. Nothing should crack it, for it covered all of the main contingencies, such as how much scope should anyone have to behave like an idiot when there was a future to plan? And this was why the thing foreshadowed how much more you should grieve over a broken heart than the next person, how to strike the right balance about grief? Or, how much of eternity could a people spend crying about themselves? What could you do with so much grief anyway? What else was in the engine room? Well! Do not worry. It was all in the forward plan, which was like a war plan, the hated plan. The thing with Ice was, he could not stop wondering how anyone these days could find the time for pondering loss, or for idly staring at the old sea to see if they could find the floating bodies of children when they had nothing left in the tank for any more sorrow? Not that this was the time for minding other people’s business, when they were thinking about becoming non-aligned individuals, champion separatists without a cashed-up plan to pay for the revolution against a Commonwealth government-imposed nonsense plan of closing the gap to waste your life fighting about the frig all thing of it. This forward plan was the work of a far bigger champion than ordinary people. You needed a fool for the grieving business, like Cause Man Steel. He liked wasting his time by being different to everyone else. Or, his wife Dance, lost on moths. Or, the lost child, sitting in the dark place wherever Tommyhawk the fascist hid. The forward plan only had one purpose, to move the entire Aboriginal world of grief into white prosperity.

11

Ice Pick said he was sick of all this beachcombing stuff, and put a stop to the grief scene by permanently closing the beach. He sucked up some air, and shot down to the beach himself, acting all huffy and puffy, to announce the lock-out—everyone to get off the beach. Hammered the banned signs, sweated, ate some peanuts, drank a bottle of soft drink to clear his lungs, and then held up the forward plan to the illiterate beach squatters and said, Read this, and stop grieving will you. The voluntary searchers shed thousands of tears of protest, would not stop crying, swearing true God that they saw enraged smoke palls shooting out of his pink nostrils, and that his pink eyes had grown pinker, and it got to the point where it looked as though his eyeballs were about to explode in the sun, even though it was only sunrise at five minutes past six in the morning. They thought about this, and realised that it must have been his body radiating such enormous amounts of static electricity, even his natural white hair looked like it was being frazzled in a microwave set to cook a roast.

See this? Ice screamed to be heard over the sound of the lolling sea slurping onto the beach. He needed everyone to hear him speak clearly like an accountant about the piece of flapping paper he was holding up in the sea breeze. See this piece of paper? That’s me, you lot, what you are looking at. No not this piece of crap. You are looking at the bodily incarnate of this piece of paper. I am the Commonwealth Government of Australia’s forward plan for Praiseworthy. This is what gives us our power. Figures. Multiplication. Not division. Not subtraction. Economics. Mathematics. Equations. Me! I am your multiplicator. I am this paper. No. I am not paper. I am this piece of paper. The proper power paper! Not grief. Grief isn’t power. So! Go home you people and get back to working with reality.

He had some lackeys use a bit of speed anger, like a whip cracking, to hand out copies of himself in the form of the forward plan. Hurry up. Give ’em all a copy. Everything that breathes. He ploughed his newest expensive four-wheel-drive work vehicle through the sand behind the beachcombers trying to leave the beach with his hand flat on the horn to stir up a bit of energy in the place, to get everyone moving quicker off the banned beach, instead of dilly-dallying and moaning about having a heavy heart. My heart is heavier than yours, he challenged with pink eyes rolling in disgust. What do you think having power to bring the forward plan into reality is all about—nothing, like its weight is worthless, it means nothing? He felt as though he was choking on all the words racing to be said of what he thought all his people should know about, what the weight of this power felt like when it came with the ultimate responsibility to carry out the power of the Australian government, which felt so powerful indeed that it was like being bulldozed into the ground. No one believed him at all, for the weight they carried, even if it was made from fish and chips, felt heavier than the weight of the albino, but Ice’s sermon about what the heavy weight of everyone else felt like while being carried on one’s own bent back continued. The weight left the beach. There was no one left but still, Ice’s words about carrying all the weight could never stop. Even the empty beach should know the weight he felt about having to question the old law business of country while all this sorry stuff was taking up so much time and making the weight heavier to carry since all the work of the era had been left entirely to him to complete. Why me? The heaviest heart of all in the place had not asked to be the saviour.

What Ice Pick wanted to be placed in his head, was a simple answer to his questions. He wanted somebody to tell him how come he had been relegated to be the solo think tank for everyone else? Why did he have to be the one with the hard story to tell about how he was being left high and dry to carry the load, while everybody else had decided to be a beachcomber? Why was it left to him to ask how come you people can’t help yourselves by getting hysterical and mindless about keeping your “old world thinking” of being here forever and never giving up a thing? Put yourself in my shoes. Think real fucking hard about my responsibilities as your Major Mayor working my guts out to shape your acceptance by white Australia so we can at last all become one people under one Australian law. It was a more major pity that he had foot-in-mouth disease, and was prone to dropping the clanger. You know what? Assimilation will be good for you. It was such a terrible disease, an awful contaminating virus of a thing that just would not go away. So, anyway, he created another simile as a tool of explanation to the constituency. He explained it simply, like this: You know, when you see this piece of paper looking at you, can you say your law is the best, when all you will really be seeing is me looking at you, not just a piece of paper looking at you, because believe me, I made this paper into the very likeness of myself, but also remember too, I am not just a piece of paper, and a piece of paper is not me neither. Get that into your brain cells?

This was how the old people were always saying that country gets lonely without its people. The sea, while looking from afar, saw the banned beach of this solemn and lonely place where even the mud crabs were gone to try their luck elsewhere, leaving behind all their ancestral ghosts of countless millennia to be born over and over in the wrong time. The sea sighed, turned its back and continued to withdraw further away from the expansion of mudflats. And you would swear the flattened sea looked like plains of glass. Then the sea swell spilt another way to the other side of the world, so this place could forever haunt itself in loneliness. And without even knowing why this was happening, unhappy ghosts flew through the gaping hole misery had made in the sky. Now, it was left to the ghost crabs to spring up from their bone-dry holes to cradle hot sand with their claws, to sprint off, back down another hole, disappearing from the glare by clawing into the soft wetness far beneath the surface, where they waited in hope, for an incoming tide. Only these spirits of country—flies, darting blue butterflies, seagulls hovering above the death-scene beach, their eyes searching for scraps of food—were the witnesses left of the death of the human soul. It had been the end of the slow death show when the people of the sea had turned away, slowly walked back to their homes, and returned to work on the forward plan. From this point on, they would strive to meet the expectation of having their lives prescribed by a set of statistics so that middle-class Canberra bureaucrats advising progress to the government for closing the statistical gap in equity, could prove that equality could be achieved through assimilating black into white culture.

At each end of town, the old country men and women returned to achieving paper goals that were and that weren’t turning them into white octopuses. They knew this was not right. They also knew there should not be any margin for error in modern thinking for becoming white people, and they should not be striving to become a living treasure like an octopus of the ocean with a truly remarkable mind for understanding the fathoms. But, here they were, balancing the pretence, acting like a bunch of pseudo-modern thinkers, trending in tangents, bending the mind until it became half-baked, having a boogie-woogie whale of a time with their life tied up in a million knots to untie while carrying on, staying afloat, sometimes even having a fun win in the future decades of being in the war of the everlasting and doomed forward plan.

Now, while the dust floated more thickly in the haze dome, who had time anymore to understand eternal love, how it was created in the all times of this place? How could such a love be measured against those whose longest memory was inconsequentially shallow in comparison, and unable to recall the depth of a single dream, let alone infinity, of love created since time immemorial?

12

In the picture-book world being hotly imagined upstairs by the God government for Praiseworthy, where there were many bewildering holy pictures hanging on the wall to bewitch the soul, it was the beguiled local economists of the all times who were bothering about adding up and subtracting the nuances of eternity, albeit the forward plan. While ducking and weaving around the political sensitivities, and doing a bit of the basic cha-cha grovelling with the talk, they were just asking the simple question: You know something Ice, what was going to happen on the scale of our ancient ceteris paribus, and all other things being considered equal in our all times, if you put too much into the light of the white right, what do you think it is actually going to cost us mob to get a coin-operated bit of electricity from the white heaven?

Finally, they asked: If Aboriginal Sovereignty was dead in this place, what was his death all about? Wasn’t it a privilege to be alive in the all times? They were remembering when they were custodians to the waves thundering onto the beach. Seagulls screeching in the white spray. Winds howling. And when the custodians screamed over the roar of the sea to be heard, and were demanding a Native Title court case to settle the matter, that paradise on Earth was theirs. But wasn’t heaven better? they were asked. Or, would they be better off being a pack of sinners? Why should they follow the forward plan? they had asked the judge. They wanted to fight the stormy seas instead of packing their life in somebody else’s plan, and demanded Aboriginal Sovereignty be given back to them. There were old people sitting around on the white plastic chairs again instead of searching the beach, who were that wild in the head, they said that if anyone came near them with another forward plan to turn them into a bunch of white octopi, they would fight it with anything, bomb it, poison it, knife it with broken glass bottles, but they weren’t going to love it. No. They were not going to love anything they hated. Nor would they sleep again, or eat neither, until they reinstalled the economies of their own sovereign future by bringing the forebears of Aboriginal Sovereignty back on watch for this place.

Then it was strange, a fluttering ribbon of thought blew itself into a gale-force wind as it went through the gate in the brain which started everyone off with accusing Sovereignty Steel’s father, Cause Man Steel, of murder. The man killed his son. Ice Pick choked on the madness happening while he watched Praiseworthy throwing the baby out with the bathwater so to speak, and he lamented how the forward plan was destroyed by Widespread. But, and nevertheless, someone had to be the killer, and the people who had gone totally warrakujbu crazy said quite logically, that there was no one else in Praiseworthy who was a killer. They had never seen any killers before. So! Who did it? Cause Steel killed his son. The black father killer, the John Howard image imprinted on the brain of the Australian citizenry. So why not see the phenomenon of the black killer father right under your own nose, the maddest village fool said, right in Praiseworthy?

Mayday! Mayday! Will anyone think in terms of millennia? Ripped out the lot. This scene was terrible. There were no good pictures left in the picture book. Well! You could not leave thousands of years of violent fathers there to look at. The picture must be changed. The Praiseworthy council’s Ice Queens seized the day and sticky-taped the forward plan back together quicker than you could wink, because there was a killer in their midst. A plethora of Aboriginal men’s conferences were being funded by the Commonwealth left, right and centre for the haze dome to be free of terror, so that all the local Aboriginal men from four years old to ninety-four, could face up to themselves, to understand why they were so vile and violent. Everything called social welfare was being thrown at the problem of tribalism, and amply reflected upon, even though in the end, as it was in the beginning, everyone knew there could only be one killer father who killed Aboriginal Sovereignty, and it was not them. A pack of old white professional anthropologists, social workers, criminal lawyers, store managers, nurses, priests, teachers, police, doctors, judges, journalists, motor mechanics, builders, road builders, casual labourers and office workers who had been studying every breath of Praiseworthy people for years and missing the light shining on their egos, were called back to town by the Major Mayor, so Ice Pick could ask them what it meant to be a violent Aboriginal man, which he was sure he was not, so he would not know what it was like to be violent, but he wanted them to tell him about other Aboriginal men, the ones they thought they knew better than themselves. Look! He did not know which ones. Do you think a Major Mayor has eyes at the back of his head? How could he see who was hiding under the radar, like Planet? There was a white-out as one by one, each of the professionals stepped up to the podium on Church Street to speak their take on the new trend dialogue about violence as recorded through their eyes while taking care of their Aboriginal people, to help prove that Cause Man Steel was the most violent man on the planet.

The defeated from imaginary kingdoms who rushed back to Praiseworthy to share their accumulated pain of wanting was impressive, mighty, and endless. The gravy train, more lucrative than pots of gold, looked broken. It was a circus. These people were a total mess. All of them, irredeemably broken. They carried mountainous internal gripes. Gaping wounds more open and salted than the Dead Sea. They were the beaten. But play on. And it was game on, for this gathering wanted to get to the root cause of this father violence theory rampant in Aboriginal culture. Let’s root out evil. Destroy that violence. Let’s attack the devil. Get this Widespread murderer who killed our Aboriginal Sovereignty. Say, he had just lost it, or say he was just an ape-man who killed everything in sight. But, hold on. Hush now. Listen! You could not move for the decrepit old professionals with plenty to say rushing into the shire council building, and wanting to get to the stage first, to be the first to get everything off their chest, to spew as much misery as possible. It was like a rugby scrum with a lot of pushing and shoving to take charge of the podium, to grasp the microphone and enthusiastically screech at fever pitch their bulging bags of woes, and to take the most time to offload their life of suffering carried silently for decades, before leaving on the charter flights at the end of the day to get out of the place as quickly as humanly possible. But what can you say about truth telling? It had to be done? Firstly, there was the pain of years, the burnout from the broken wing nation, the years of suffering silently, now returned to the village square like flowing lava, to rant to their favourite black people compelled to sit through hours, excruciating hours, of long-winded analysis about themselves, explained through treasures of thought patterns gained from the sacred anthropological shrines from Stanner to Lévi-Strauss. You could cut the air with a knife, for who at the source of so much anxiety wanted to hear how they were not the type of people that the professional helper had hoped their black people would become? Nobody felt happy about the fact that they had not somehow overcome crippling poverty, that they had not shone like a beacon of hope in total despair, or were not the joy of the professional helper while still living as oppressed and robbed people. Nobody felt thrilled about this truth finding at all, while wanting to kill somebody there and then, enthusiastically, and at fever pitch.

After the exodus of white suffering from black hands, what remained in Praiseworthy were not only the general nightmares, but a more terrible feral-themed nightmare. Everyone was having them. These nightmares were mixed with the most tragic loss of a joyful soul, and being left with murderers. The bed where one slept became a feared place, a dungeon, it was hell on Earth. Sleep was the most unpleasant time of all for you could grow very tired of journeying to frightening places of the soul. You knew this would be the place you visited if you succumbed, after falling exhausted into the dreaded world of sleep. You knew where that went. So! There you were with your last thought of being carried into the recurring dream of separation from your homeland. How many different dreams can you have of becoming lost? Countless it seemed for Praiseworthy. These were the dreams floating in the night air. Was it the ancestors calling you to find your way back to the spirit land? It was no pleasure being lost in those unknown alien worlds and to encounter unparalleled terror. You were no warrior equipped to fight nightmares of the spirit. Nor a way-finder to joyfulness. Praiseworthy became this dreamscape. The place where the soul-dead always became lost, and were forever alone. Well! Nobody on Earth wanted to be lost in such a nightmare. Or, to be lying sleepless in the dead of night, waiting to find another way to become lost. Who would even care for a wink of that type of sleep, to lie in wait until the time came again, when you confronted what it felt like to be totally lost, and then, while stuck in the groove, only to hear some murderer type go plap, plap, plapping with his thongs hitting the gravel sideways in a cloud-covered starless night, where the other thing you would hear in the haze spirit dancing was yourself whispering stress stuff, like: Shh! Listen! That’s the murderer.

This was exactly the type of idiot sound that Cause Man Steel made wherever he walked. He always walked as though he did not know how to wear thongs properly. This was when everybody realised that this was the sound made by a murderer, exactly the same sound that Widespread made while he was chasing his feral animals around the place late at night. So, of course, it did not take long to figure this out. They were the world’s wisest people who knew how to put two and two together, and realised he was the devil murderer walking stupid in contemporary thongs.

Yep! There were many types of devils that knew their way to Praiseworthy, and all this questionable nocturnal behaviour of the thong man, was raising many questions and answers. There were dozens of people rushing and dodging devils in the middle of the night to get to the Major Mayor Ice Pick’s major palatial house, the only house with fancy this and that, a good door, and a swimming pool. Instead of staying in their beds like proper citizens who were almost taking the road to assimilation into the white mainstream, they had felt the urge to ask Ice at two o’clock in the morning, how to go on living like this while a murderer was running loose in their lost soul? And, in the glow of moonlight in the hazy gloom, Ice’s snowiness sheened back at the sleepwalkers like a vanilla ice cream ghost when he appeared on his porch to confront these constituents who claimed to be lost in a nightmare.

Ice ordered the night walkers to go home—to leave his property immediately—but they never left. They continued to sleep where they stood at the mayoral palatial front door, even though their eyes were wide open and looked frightened while the froth dribbled from their pretty wide-awake-looking mouths, vengefully spilling out the total content of what it was like to have a crippled soul—if they were really asleep, for there should be the sounds of some snoring at least from their apparently sleeping mouths, not one hundred per cent wide-open and invigorated with a terribleness that felt like thousands of spears striking Ice in that lump of clear ice pumping in his chest. This whole shattering effect of ice being split was now escalating the nightmare to fever point, where it could reach into the uncalled-for effrontery that immobilised Ice Pick on the spot. He felt as though he had been impaled on what was supposed to be his own private front door. He struggled to free himself from being hooked in space, so he could stand up straight on the ground like a real man dealing with people pretending to be walking in their sleep, so that they could dump him with a tidal wave of demented words, as though he was the public rubbish bin where you threw sticky ice cream wrappers, empty packets of chips and things like that. How many times in a day did he have to think how he could be the best mayor in the world when there were people trying to destroy him in their sleep, and all because they had failed to dream properly. Ice took his only chance at surviving other people’s nightmares, by grabbing what he could from reality. He ordered his ears to only listen for hooting owls but these were silent, or seagulls squawking but none were making a sound, and he listened for barking dogs somewhere down in Church Street and other places where the nightmares were so thick that nobody heard the dogs barking outside. In this, he was victorious, and how victoriously good victory felt, to be able to ignore the sleepwalkers’ complaints as he grabbed his own mind from trying to fly off with the fairies. His head rang his mantra bell, which was, We never used to have any murderers here. And Ice did not mind the fact, that he would have to spend the remainder of many nights listening to bizarre stories of how the haze dome was making murderers on an epical scale. He liked the main game of this developing narrative being continuously repeated and redefined, while travelling through every sequence of DNA in generations to come, and he travelled with the catastrophism that the Anthropocene haze feasted upon, and blamed it all on the murdering Widespread’s donkeys.

Fancy that!

The Christmas beetle lifted its wing out of its gold case, and flew away to get some decent sleep elsewhere than at the dimly lit door.

By day the world would be seen differently, when the whole infrastructure of Church Street once again became mobilised in wide-awake prayers of the Glory be, to fight against bare-faced murderers of individuals, murderers of Aboriginal Sovereignty, and world murderers. They too, decided to storm the Major Mayor Ice Pick’s house so their complaints could be heard in broad daylight, that there was no future, no new era, because there were not enough Aboriginal men’s sheds in Praiseworthy for all the violent men in the world to hammer some wood together to make something look nice, instead of being hands-on violent criminal kinds, and not enough steel gaols in Praiseworthy to lock up murderers, and not enough healing courses to let bygones be bygones, and not enough anthropologists to wrap up the Native Title arguments before they were murdered by their enemies.

Even Ice knew what it was like to run through—what he called—his superior mind, a few thoughts about how easy it would be to take another position, as some of the people of Praiseworthy had in the past, in the days when they had never thought of themselves as being used as a sideshow expo of violence for a desperate big government’s stab at politics. But those times were a faraway memory when you knew there was another option to suit the times, like pointing the dead-easy finger at your nearest and dearest. Well! Why not? Someone had to be the scapegoat in the unsettled colonial crime involving an entire population of millions of people. And all you had to do was give it up to the donkey trapper wherever he was, the felon last seen roaming around some overgrown landscape infested with millions of fireflies where he was slowly retracing his way home with that old platinum donkey that he had spent years trying to capture. A creature so worm-riddled and life-worn that had anyhow fulfilled the impossible dream of being the prerequisite mainstay of the overall visionary transport conglomeration for the new era, simply by looking like a gleaming stainless-steel kitchen sink scrubbed cleaned with Jif.

Ice knew the scene and what happened when you thought enough about the scale of cataclysm that sat in the gut, like those in the tide of building full-bodied accusations about their favourite subject, the guilty murderer. These people of the old times were experts in finding a murderer of anything in the world, and if you truly thought about it like Ice did, anyone could see that Widespread personified everything that was manifestly out of control, right up to the level of the planet being murdered by his type of humanity. This was the type of guilt you carefully poked at the end of a long stick. The only way to catch the killer of their Aboriginal Sovereignty since the police were not locking up that real murderer.

13

Ah! The soft and dreamy moths flying far away, followed the moon running through the gleaming stars above the eternal haze of Praiseworthy. The moth-er Mother sat at home late, balancing the heart-stir see-sawing between the very best of Ben E. King, and the latest claptrap about Aboriginal people on the radio. The moths on the walls soaked up the art, the stuff she had pasted throughout the house in multiple layering consisting not of red roses I beg your pardon, but entirely of newspaper clippings Widespread had collected ad nauseam about the Australian government’s racist intervention policies to control the lives of Aboriginal people. Perhaps moths kept up with the news of their countrymen too, by flying into the house to study the archive of hell.

We will make sure these atrocities will be remembered for a thousand years, Cause told his family whenever he shone his Eveready torch over the complete walls of remembrance throughout their Native Title cemetery home. He waved the torch around like it was a wandering moth, and said that he wanted to be constantly reminded about what the national cheer squads in the media were saying about his people. Remember to have recriminations, he warned his young sons about their future before they even knew what a future was, and while running his fingers over the juiciest pieces of outright racist slander, he whispered in a low murmur, reminding them about their responsibilities in the future world. Here listen. Pay attention, and remember you will be living in a time when all the food you will have left to eat every day, if you are lucky, will be a few grasshoppers starving in the dust, that’s if you can catch them, while you are living up to your eyeballs in a goanna carcass global warming famine catastrophe like you can’t even imagine, just like the countless other millions, and I mean millions, of other poor people in the world with no fauna and flora, like the people in Madagascar are already doing, who did bugger-all to create global warming. Remember you are no different to any of the poor people on Earth and this is the reason why you have to be extra careful, always vigilant, never lose track of the bigger picture or the long view of where you are going if you want to survive.

Don’t waste your time sweating on the small things for nothing, but don’t forget about the recriminations, and justice for the poor.

The speech would become quite emotional, and Planet just thinking about the future planet, would be enough to activate the power within, and it was the kind of power that would make a dam burst from an unprecedented mega-flooding, or an electrical storm massive bushfire event, when he became an overexcited colossal, a giant of a man made from a skinny ageing man who frightened the sons who still had not learnt how to talk properly when he jumped up from his chair at the kitchen table, and went searching the wallpaper with the torch again, hopping from one article to another, to find a few words that especially made his heart burn volcanically, spewing a river of lava from his mouth that made him look like a devil to his wee sons learning how to keep stoking the fire, until it grew into something resembling hellfire and brimstone while he continued on, vaguely remembering what was stored in the enormous vault containing his collected thoughts on the subtle differences in the world of racism against all Indigenous peoples, but then deciding it made no difference, a racist was a racist, and all racists were equally bad, and none were to be forgiven for destroying the planet.

He was proud that there was a black question mark hanging above their house, and pleased that he was against the stereotypical age-old dogma of lest we forget. There would be no forgetting in his house, he whispered to the sons now transfixed, almost hypnotised by the wavering torchlight beaming over the walls glued together by news clippings on one particular subject, racism on a grand scale. The man thought he was the world expert on the language of war, and was not interested in growing red roses, cabbages, or food for his donkeys, while telling the startled Dance that he was free-range, like a chook.

All was good and proper in the household that hated racism, and each time Dance caught another incessant broadcast of her favourite topic to fire up the anger for a good fight with the radio broadcaster some several thousands of miles away, she would eventually switch off her own internal nervous breakdown antennae that were looking pretty buggered up these days, and blocking out her imaginative world where all the racists lived, she would calmly continue counting the moths which had arrived like a storm to read the walls dedicated to memorialising racism. The whole house blazed with golden orange-wing moths flying straight to the flickering electric light bulb, the Syntherata janetta, and Opodiphthera eucalypti, pretty moths swarming in from the mangroves. The house was stirred by the pronounced eyes on the wings that seemed to be seeing what was really inside the feast of thoughts brewing on the walls in fine print. Dance moved carefully through the mass gathering of moths while trying not to injure any of the fluttering creatures pasting themselves to the newspaper walls with the thousands of pulsing wings that made the air swim in a dance.

Dance looked at the wall of moths, and just thought all this reality was happening elsewhere. This was not her news. But being left alone in the house, Dance repeatedly turned the radio on and off beside her, then turned it on again, exactly on the hour, to see if there was any news about her missing son. She sat still in the 1960s blue lounge chair that swallowed up her small frame, while not noticing how the house was swarming with moths. The daddy-long-leg spiders crawled out from under the cracks, to create vast webs over the newspaper walls to capture the moths. She continued listening to the hourly news throughout the night, while hoping she had not missed an important snippet of news about Aboriginal Sovereignty in another racist diatribe about an up-crippled-creek Aboriginal world, just so that she would remember exactly how Aboriginal Sovereignty always came home. She knew this news going around Praiseworthy about his death would make him laugh, but then, when the newsreader finished, she rose from the nest of blue vinyl, and switched the radio off. In her quest to ensure complete accuracy with what her memory was telling her, she repeated the newsreader’s text word for word in her mind, and this was what she was doing in the silent kitchen—a place of worn, subdued brown dust-stained dullness where dull-coloured moths were clinging to the walls until, sensing the first hazy glow of sunrise, and following one another, they flew en masse from the house, leaving it empty at dawn.

She did not know why her eldest son had fallen in love with that girl who was his promise wife. She is only fifteen, I told him, and he being two years older—you should have known better. Why did they have to fall madly in love with each other now, and not wait until they were older? Aboriginal Sovereignty was oblivious to the lectures Cause gave the family at mealtimes about what was written on the wallpaper about Aboriginal paedophiles. He just would not see it. He was not a paedophile. Could not believe it. Have you learnt nothing about what you needed to do to be assimilated into the mainstream world of Australia?

No! Aboriginal Sovereignty just did not want to hear anything different to what he thought about who he was. Stop preaching to us, Dad, that was what he said. Let’s eat some food in peace for a change. The boy was full of his own magic. Dance thought he flew, he moved too quickly, all you had to do was turn your back for a moment, and whoosh, gone. She smelt him now, the smell of him always lingered.

Why? Inseparable? Aboriginal Sovereignty and the girl could not be parted, so the old people agreed to leave them alone, because you know what? The schoolgirl did not want the older girls to take him. She saw them flirting with him all the time. They were doing things that schoolgirls were not supposed to know about. She went after him. Shadowed him. Would not let him out of her sight. She was his responsibility. He gave in. They were already married, and look that was it then, and even then, you could see that one day they were going to be the future of Praiseworthy. They would make things work. Leave them alone and they will be alright. Everyone said that. The old people sitting on the white plastic chairs nodded their heads in agreement. The multi-denominational wholeheartedly agreed in sermon upon sermon, They were meant for one another those two, and whenever anyone else happened to see those two kids together, well that was what they said too, and that was that. Dance remembered what people had said before her boy was accused by the police who came to their door with government orders about stopping anyone from interfering with underage children. Where was Cause? He should have been home. Why was he never there to deal with the racists?

14

What the hell! And it was a matter of hell, when the truth struck home the moment Widespread rushed through the door of the family home while screaming that he was the only man left standing on the planet who was the true law boss for this place. Now, he claimed, he arrives home and sees what is happening, there was a new law calling itself the big Silence Dreaming, and he wanted to know why this story was sitting on top of his ancestral estate.

Even though this might have been some crazy news for all, Dance wanted to know what he was doing by bursting in on the widow woman of the world’s worst family who had no husband, no children, and if this was a hoax, just to cover up his guilty conscience for never being where he ought to have been in the hour of life or death of Aboriginal Sovereignty. He was dead to her. She was a widow now. Let the weight of the world fall on his back, instead of hers for a change. She had already slipped into her widow clothes of vile veiled grey to greet him at the door, when she had heard he was back. Well! It was not difficult to hear of his return. She heard the whole town screaming in the distance. They were yelling news about losing Aboriginal Sovereignty, all the voluntary workers who were now redundant and spitting about being banned from the beach, were banging iron bars across the broken-down Ford driving through Praiseworthy with a startled and frightened kitchen-sink-colour donkey stampeding in the passenger seat, staring with fearful watery eyes at the humanity eyeballing it with wild eyes and trying to pull it out of the vehicle, while Widespread was freaking out and driving like a maniac when he saw the ghosts of people he knew—all his old family mob, waving to him from the deserted beach.

It means, I am the father of Aboriginal Sovereignty, Planet roared in hoarse-throated, guttural grief when he brushed past Dance in a stampede through the house. She stood back, and watched him behave like he was an animal destined never to rise from its rage of raw screaming that poured into the home. Dance walked away in disgust. She couldn’t decide whether to be shocked by the rawness, hearing him trying to strangle his lungs to the point when finally all that was left of his grief was a belated pall of silence that now seemed out of place, a shock to witness, since the season of grief had already long passed in the spiritual law of responsibility and observances. And here among the dead, she had to continue to be responsible for life, not just of her own, but of others around her.

What had he witnessed here? Should she feel anger? Seeing him like this, intruding upon the greater silence that had fallen, and now governed the house since Aboriginal Sovereignty went missing. It was this sound of nothingness that slapped her in the face while she watched the rush of soundless words pouring from a mouth still imbued with memories of the summer angels in themselves, the everlasting glue which lay at the very core of the emotional tug that kept her spellbound. Yet she had known what it felt like to be scourged by the heat of frenzied ancestors, those ensnarled in her conscience ever since the suicide of Aboriginal Sovereignty. He’s gone. Gone, I am telling you. Something happened to Aboriginal Sovereignty. He disappeared. People are saying it was the old fellow. The sea. She glanced sideways at the ground. He rose up—just like that, and took him. I had to identify his clothes. It was his, his, I said, but the police kept me there all day long, asking the same question. Was this his? His? His t-shirt? I guess so. I think it was his. How would I know? They asked me that over and over. I thought I knew, and I said yes. Then I wasn’t sure, and I said no. Then I ended up with no idea whose bloody t-shirt it was. It could have been anyone’s. I don’t know what clothes he wore. I never looked at what he was wearing like I was a snake looking at him. I am a man, he would tell me. They did not believe a thing I said.

Well! Where is he? Who? Your son. You know who? Then these stupid people wanted to know what I did with the body. They interrogated me. The police. A million questions. All like that. Like, I had done it. Can you believe it? They thought I had killed my own son. You killed him, they said that because someone told them I must have, so it must be true then, and I said who told them lies about us, why would I want to kill my son, what for? They made me feel like a piece of rubbish. Less than rubbish. How did I do it? Look at me! Am I rubbish? Do you think I am rubbish? Something just dragged out of the rubbish dump? Maybe you were talking to the police. You are always talking to people. Can’t keep your mouth shut. Now we have really lost him this time.

Again, he thought, what had he witnessed here of what Dance did not say in the hours that followed his return home? He was doing what he normally did to continue destiny, to continue living until the end, when he was dead. He takes care of the practical realities of life. He must care for this life, the one from which Dance had already departed. He did know where she was in the scheme of things. He spends most of the night housing the platinum donkey amidst the destruction of his vision, and wonders what else he could have said, when there was nothing to be said. What becomes of the future? How could he describe a visionless future? She had not said that she didn’t have the ability to hear humanity anymore, could no longer listen to any of its joys, laughter, sorrow, sadness, the hopelessness of those trapped like prisoners in a long war of invisibility in their realities.

A soul simply disappeared. A soul refused to hear what another person said for the rest of eternity. Was this a loss? Would it seem insane even, if the world could no longer hear a sound falling within the range of a human voice, losing whatever this voice had to say in its fading away from country, mountains, rivers, the trees, plants, animals living in holes, sea, bush, the plains country, or in other words, from where human speech was becoming too low to be heard, inaudible to anything else existing on the planet. Neither Dance nor Widespread could say if this was the case for the other. Any soul could lose its ability to hear the drama of human life in another, and it felt to Dance as though she had lost her soul on that day of the police interrogation. What she did not say, what was left of herself, the lonely shield, guarding emptiness, nothingness.

She did not say, and it was not important for her to say what could be heard of joy, since joyfulness was hardly the remembered realm in the greater marriage, and what weighed and balanced, she knew, was only her personal opinion. It was not important enough for her to say what joy was found elsewhere, the faraway higher range of sound frequencies heard by moths. Nor would she say what else she knew of the marriage, since if butterflies wished to communicate it in their flight, or in the trail of life’s minutiae, it was already spoken through the ancient spiritual law of country since the beginning of time. And she did not say that moths lived in far more heavily populated and experienced worlds, even if at a gentler moving pace in the hectic road of survival.

Shh! Why listen to Dance speak in this day and age? She could not say, but felt it would be far more important to be tuned elsewhere, listening to the higher frequencies of a moth communicating at say 300 kilohertz, instead of the human range of fifteen kilohertz. She could say what a moth sang, while listening to their ghost ceremonies of journeying from the time plants began flowering millions of years ago. What she was listening to, was the changing eras of old ceremonies of flight dancing, where the prophesies were continually guiding their survival into the future changes of country.

When darkness fell, she slipped away through the donkey yards, and almost flew, away she went on another of her solitary journeys, to a faraway vine forest to find the gathering of millions of moths in flight, flying together, or separately, from one vine-entangled ancient eucalyptus, rivergum or paperbark, to the next. This was where the large brown-winged emperor gum tree moth was nestling under the bark, not far from where it had broken out of the cocoon it had lived in for a decade, lovingly cradled in the breath of old gum trees, and perhaps sensing something else, the travelling song humming across the country, of newly hatched ghost moths that had left behind vast fields of thousands of empty pupae shells protruding from the ground before flying across the starry sky canopy in a single ceremony. There, once back on the ground while resting their wings, whispering about being Noctuidae, of the smorgasbord of colour and patterns on each other’s wings, and reading the story board of evolution in the orange, yellow, mauve in the old lady moths’ night-raiding, nibbling on overripe fruit, for the granny’s cloak moths could be seen flying in circles against the counter-clockwise flight of the four o’clock moths, and so many others that looked like flying leaf-litter landing in the dusty, ancient tangling of drooping vines, where vibrating wings were whispering through the moonlight hours.

15

A raid on the house.

Sirens rang in the sky.

Those local ancestral angels singing weee-wooo.

Where would Widespread find Aboriginal Sovereignty?

Who was to say?

The moth-er had left behind a total house rage. Cause could not break enough stuff. He would force Dance to feel what he felt, because he never saw what she felt. Yes, perhaps he thought about making her feel more pain, a greater raging than his, far more then he felt possible of unequalled, unsurpassable grief. So, he went on breaking stuff and smashing whatever was in sight, upturned the furniture and guess what? Nope, Aboriginal Sovereignty was not there. He bashed the walls down, the shrine of racism, and again, found nothing, because nothing as huge as worldwide racism hid in the cracks of timber, or under sheets of iron. He broke every piece of furniture in the search of his home, smashed it to bits, not just to find their lost lives, or memories, or just to bring back another time, but for something else, the brokenness circling in the crush of what was already broken, crippled, and undefendable, himself.

And then, suddenly he stopped the wrecking, as though he stood in the open space, and remembered something. If it was a reprieve for the wrecked house, a disaster zone, the sight of it caused him not to groan in pain, or laugh with relief, but only to fall silent. He noticed Dance. She was still standing in the same place, where a wall had stood for years and had always looked the same until minutes ago, and still, he had not realised that she no longer needed a wall to protect her, if she fell, if she became caught in his war with the world to find his son. What else was missing, because Cause did remember something, perhaps what he had really been searching for, and then he grabbed it in his fist, the passing thought of what had happened earlier while he was walking home, after the police had finished interrogating him about where he had been all these months, and if he had done something to Aboriginal Sovereignty.

He remembered warning Dance about what he had heard on the way home, of how it seemed as though someone was actually trying to give him a message from the dead world, almost like a God man was wanting to give him the answer, giving him a gut feeling blackfella way, by pointing him in the right direction so to speak. You know who that was? It was Elvis Presley himself, a god from our times. You want to know what he was singing? He was singing, “Devil in Disguise.” You want to know what I thought when I heard that? Tommyhawk? Where is the fascist? I am not saying anything, but I think I will kill him when I see him, I will not be able to help myself. Should have done it the day he was born. You should have done it. Keep him away from me from now on Dance, or I think I will murder him because I will only be seeing the devil there in front of me. He’s all yours now.

Whoosh! More wind blew, or, it was like that, felt from the flutter of a moth. How sweet it would be, if one could read a story written on the wings of that moth stirring the breeze while flying in the moonlight. Dance said nothing about the lost home while reading the unfathomable or innumerable messages held in the billions of microscopic scales stacked like sets of roof tiles on the wings of the moth. She watched this flight of the immeasurable, of a holy epistle, a moth’s map of time, reading the text through the light waves hitting and bouncing off the ridges, ditches, the rivers and crossings contained in each scale. Country always tells its people that there are endless ways of reading its world, depending on whether you are a moth, a butterfly, a dragonfly, a mountain chain, the sea, a river, moon, or stars, or the atmosphere itself. The story was always about sanctity, the sacredness of country.

Dance sat prone-like in the rubble, a statue on her throne, the old blue vinyl lounge chair, where she could still clearly see the sanctuary of her world, as she had surveyed her home countless times. She saw through the house, dwarfed by the scheme of how her life was being played out, and continued her gaze across the open space outside the missing windows, taking away all that was familiar of the world of her husband’s grand schemes. It was way past that now. The space collapsed, blurring time into nothingness. She looked further into the stillness in the evening glow of the cemetery’s flat lands, glimmering with large crucifixes, statues of broken-winged angels, the Virgin Mary, mounds of freshly dug graves, plastic flowers, tinsel and Christmas decorations lit by scores of flickering solar-powered white lights. While in this flicker of hauling up from the depth a life’s baggage to the surface, the stuff of what had already passed by, she saw in a metaphorical sense, that the crumbling roof had long ago collapsed and killed both Cause and herself. She reviewed the scene repeating itself, and in that instance, saw how they were already dead, dead to each other, dead to themselves. They were already dust swirling in the haze tower, the dome growing denser and higher into the atmosphere. Beyond this, she saw oblivion, no obstacles in the path to the horizon, and this was where she caught a movement that violated the sacredness of this quiet moment of contemplation. It was just a flash, something moved, but still enough to know who it was running helter-skelter in the hazy gleaming far away captured by the full moon. The other son. The younger brother. Tommyhawk Steel running for his eight-year-old life right across the empty space.

What are we going to do with him gone? She knew this was what Cause meant to say, when he suddenly came into the room that no longer existed, and stood voiceless before her. Her view of Tommyhawk was now blocked, and she sunk further into the sea-coloured vinyl lounge while his brokenness burst from utter silence into a sixty thousand lightning-strike storm of thunderclaps spoken by the ancestors, and she watched him planting his accumulated grief in the raw tilling of the outpouring, sees him drag from his gut each fat seed, drop it with a bang, and cover it with his foot, to let it grow in the muddy open trench. Bang: It should have been me. Bang: How can I go on now? Bang, bang: Nothing to live for. Et cetera: I can’t cope without our Aboriginal Sovereignty. I want to go back up there and kill all those bastard cops. I want to kill everybody. You watch me. He finally stopped, turned, left the house, went into the cemetery, and desecrated graves, hauled up the holy paraphernalia of statues and crucifixes, the plastic flowers and fairy lights, the bones too if he could have dug deep enough while busy hurling the lot across the dry earth, and he kept on hurling until all of his grief left his body, when it jumped to the other side of the fence.

The puzzled donkey stock—the hundreds of what had been similar-looking silvery-grey donkeys, all that were left and mostly injured by fighting with the people of Praiseworthy on the beach, now looking like the colour of old stained kitchen sinks—ran around the cemetery in a braying racket. This song went on for hours in some kind of ceremony from God knows where, while Dance captured them and locked them away in their pens. The old platinum donkey lay flat on the ground fast asleep with a smile on its lips.

After his regard was shown in the wielding of a crowbar, Widespread retreated into his silent dreaming, the faraway place in his brain where he created the hard yards. And it was hard hearing the silence of the Australian bushland in the summer time broken by a crowbar, when nothing much created sounds except the piercing cry of a bird, or the call of an animal, or the sound of a snapping twig, and it was much the same around Praiseworthy, where people only spoke in whispering now that their Aboriginal Sovereignty was gone, while saying, Great news, the murderer is back.

This was how great news spread, while people in Praiseworthy went about their business of discussing among themselves about what had to be done to finalise the death now that Cause Man Steel, the killer father, had returned. It felt as though the news itself had created days of suffocation by heavy humidity, when the whole town said it could not breathe, all the oxygen had been sucked right out of the air from the precise moment of the return of the killer in the midst of all the better people, when Praiseworthy felt obliged to pronounce that Aboriginal Sovereignty Steel was officially dead.

It was hard to catch your breath in the stultifying haze dome. Wherever you turned, you would see people gasping for the same bit of oxygen. Children collapsed in the classroom, out on the streets, down on the beaches, dazed and lost in the airless bush, panicking parents slouching around on foot breathless, or driving up and down looking for kids to apply mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to. That was the trouble with global warming already striking one of the world’s all-time people’s hottest places. There was big-time panic. There was mayhem, and all the conjuring to bring back the dead could not be conquered by the obsessed in either liturgy, or lethargy. In this catastrophe-collapsing world, even the birds struggled to stay in the air. You had to watch out for the bigger birds, lungs saturated with dust like vacuum bags, dropping out of the sky like bombs. Breathless, the little birds began to fly lower until they could only make it to a few centimetres above the ground, disturbing the dust with their wing beats. This was serious business for the world of the creators of country, when you saw rats gnawing the hard earth trying to draw air, and the old bush animals slinking belly to the ground, breathing the dust, futilely searching for a hole in which to bury themselves.

When it got to this, there was barely a soul in Praiseworthy who could breathe properly for the prescribed minute of official silence in remembrance of Aboriginal Sovereignty. Everyone choked instead, in a day of particularly heavy dust clouding the atmosphere in the haze dome. The ancient people looked at the dust being pumped out of the guts of country, and said this was happening because the haze was crying, and this was the most unnerving thing of all for them to see in their old age, not good at all to see the spirit of country shedding tears of dust. This type of grieving for Aboriginal Sovereignty was becoming worse, with tons of dust generated on a daily basis from the skin of the ancestral settling on the skin of the living. But this trifle was not going to stop the obsession with the mourning business firing on and on in a vapoury plume signifying the enormous, unprecedented nature of the greatest loss, the loss of morality, the words left after the loss of futility.

Everyone was going to die—right, sometime, and Planet, after turning his back to all else, told the platinum donkey, At least you are not dead. He ordered the donkey to get up from the ground and stop acting depressed, and to start acting like the mask-head of a transport conglomerate. He needed it to stand up straight, with alacrity, and act like a leader that knew how to trudge onwards and forever more, through the era of the burning planet.

But, first of all, Widespread said, I am going to help you to steal back your conscience, just as he claimed to have stolen his black conscience back from being the property of the Commonwealth Government. He told the donkey it had better get ready for plenty of action with its new status of belonging to his Native Title country. Widespread said he was going to dream it into his traditional country. You are going to be inside Aboriginal law. I am putting you there. Same thing, for all you donkeys. You are going to be sitting beside my story. My law. Yep! I am changing all your foreign ceremony, the lot, since anyhow, the universal story will end up where it began, with Aboriginal law. I am doing it. Putting an end to the past couple of centuries of you mob of donkeys being treated like an outsider, or a pest, and being treated as though you are nothing more than some unwanted feral creature that don’t belong on this land. Who’s to say, Widespread claimed, while the seriousness on his face deepened its sun lines into a network of north country rivers as he reflected on his power to reorder the all times, Yep! Who is to say that you are the invader, when the real invaders brought you mob here in the first place like slaves, and against your will?

The sun kept shining more brightly and all the land grew hotter without any human abatement to lessen the overheating world, and in the sun’s constant attempts to penetrate the dust haze with even greater heatwaves laced with lightning and thunder, the platinum donkey eventually rose from the inferno of baking ground. It raised itself, stood upright and straight, and demonstrated with a strut and a fast gallop around the cemetery, that it was full of enthusiasm for Widespread’s plan of incorporating all feral donkeys into his laws for the transport conglomerate. After hours of shaking off the dust, the donkey was full of a silvery sheen, a picture of Hollywood glory that demonstrated the kind of herculean confidence required for saving the world of Widespread’s vision from going under, for it was ready to hit the road running. Its inquisitiveness had gotten the better of its own inherent incapacity for success. What you were looking at now was a donkey of the type of resilience that could match anything an overheated world threw at it, without any human intervention, because it knew in its total being that it was capable of surviving by itself thank you very much in the roughest conditions—extreme heat, bugger-all food, and barely a drop of water. Done that! It had already built itself to be ready for global warming as though it had predicted this would happen, and because it knew what man was, a useless denying destroyer of all that was good in the world. Who knows why it would actually want to know more about the bravery of black consciousness by agreeing to become a mask-head beast of burden for a transport conglomeration run by a nut-case human like Widespread?

But the clapped-out old donkey was rejuvenated, and you could say it had been reborn, for it looked as though the ancestors had come along and groomed it into absolute rocket-ship metallic condition. It shone like newly minted silver. You could have fired it to Mars, or any of the planets. It looked out of place in the decrepit donkey stables in the cemetery and should have been stabled on a rocket launch pad at Cape Canaveral if you looked at the way it stood fit and ready to prance at the world with flaring nostrils in readiness to fight the climate war, and too eager in its stance of biting at the bit to be ahead of everything else in its path of flight. Perhaps it had hung around with Planet too long on those isolated dirt roads of the back and beyond, and the way this donkey fellow was acting was all show, this king for wars had lost its natural wisdom, but these were the times of climate emergency, of facing up to being in the era of uncertainty, for the donkey kind to take over the fightback operations of the vision to survive, since it was still smart enough to know that it could trust someone like Widespread only so far. Yet the donkey’s curiosity knew no bounds, and it wanted Widespread to speak more about breaking shackles with the false narratives of either the real gods or the fake gods. Detail. Detail. Planet complained that the donkey was up itself. How could you tell which was which if some gods looked like black people, and some were white, or brown-skinned, or some were complete animals, and others had almost zero appearance in those multiple gyrating hula-hooping waves of hallucination.

The platinum donkey grew more shiny silver, and now it took on the colour of a faraway star, and all it wanted to see was the faceless imitation gods that infested the Commonwealth Government that Widespread himself had said thought they were the only gods on Earth. So! What else was fake, and where was real? Its inquisitive energy grew further away from the fakery, and into an inquisition about what was actually holy on Earth. Which of these multiple gods had made the donkey a beast of burden for its saviour? How would you ask something of a god? Demur! A flower is a god? A sick baby animal is a messiah? A huge storm cell, swirling crazily in the upper atmospheric of heaven, was a god too. Air is a god. Dust. Haze. All gods. The silver donkey now behaved like it was more than a native research animal, but a messiah among messiahs of ancient law and story, and of being country—a messiah of its own domain. Naturally, it wanted Widespread to show it some of those Commonwealth Government plans for eradicating feral donkeys with bullets shot from high-powered rifles from helicopters flying over the inland, or by more powerful means of eradication by sterilisation. This messiah did not like the plan of pretend gods with those false narratives to squash other stronger or lesser narratives, and it said so. It wanted its job of being mask-head to the transport conglomerate to be bigger than a Commonwealth government—that was only an elusive thing—and would be aiming to reinstall an Earth Government for the caretakers of the great creators of country, that was the real narrative the donkey hawked like a proper countryman, the story of Aboriginal Sovereignty.

The donkey, built like a thousand battleships, asked if pretend gods would be exposed by the real gods of the Earth Government, which was the Earth itself? Would those ancestral creation spirits of country change the planetary era from one thing to another? Or was it already happening when living spiritual beings flung themselves with purpose and intent across a forest of giant mountain trees and broke them apart like match sticks? Or, when seas roar? Or, rain stopped? Or, floods destroyed entire countries? What happens when ancestors re-create? How do you become trained to imagine the powerfulness of other living beings, and to read the many depths of history in the ancestral stories? These were the many questions that the platinum donkey had to ask Planet, before dignifying its glossy platinum-ness as the ultimate mask-head of a global warming era conglomerate transport industry.

16

But …

While hearts were pounding to say, please, please say that Aboriginal Sovereignty is not dead, tell me it is not true, the drumbeat was not answered, the conch shell call went unheard, the travelling ancestors returned empty-handed.

A waning moon still hangs overtime in the middle of the day.

Scores of stars fall from the sky each night.

Take it away, take this grief of the people away.

Nobody wanted to touch that limp t-shirt dragged in from the sea.

Aboriginal Sovereignty’s poor limp body, all seventeen years in the making, a man in the eyes of his law frankly speaking, could easily have been pulled out of the faraway ocean directly north of Praiseworthy, and flicked onto a cargo ship travelling on a busy international shipping lane.

Did the sky ancestors wait while hovering in the heavy clouds far at sea, and see the many failed attempts of the fishing men throwing themselves into heaving waves with recklessness and shocked minds to retrieve the body before it disappeared altogether?

These old ghostly-looking fishing men who belonged to the sea country, were following a glimpse, which they spoke about endlessly to remind each other of what was seen in a momentary glance hours before. They had been doing this for hours, busily casting nets in the shallows, searching where nothing greater than an unexpected translucence had last been seen floating beyond the breakwaters. They were looking for another glimpse of waterlogged skin, knew it was human skin, and trained their eyes to catch the translucence the colour of mother of pearl, thinking that perhaps they were longing the wrong way to find a glimpse of life that wanted to belong in the wondrous sea country of silver fish, making itself impossible to distinguish in the dazzling multitudinous iridescence of rolling waves heaving with tiny pearly shells.

Only the t-shirt, a relic too sacred for normal mortals to touch, remained on the beach where it was guarded by the ancestors. The proof of death, the white sodden rag, lay forever in a clump on the sand. It was washed over by the incoming tide that brought more sand, shells, and seaweed to burrow in its folds, while on the outgoing tide, the sand crabs came by to pluck off the colonising microscopic life, and set to work reorganising the structural fabric of the little temple the sea had built in the sand.

The humidifying stillness in the air would only be broken with the unrestrained screaming and yelling all along the prohibited beach that poured from cars driving away at breakneck from the changing spooky scene of the crab-altered t-shirt relic seen from a distance, through binoculars, to see what was happening to this most precious sacred site. A pitying grief also came from deep within the lungs of the nostalgic people longing to go to the prohibited beach, who happened to be walking by to see what had changed to the t-shirt clumped with sand, and when they saw that it had moved closer, towards Praiseworthy, they ran off, hobbling with their pile of grief, or they ran down the footpath screaming—get away from me—and brought this never-ending grief news back to every home in the community.

These tender memories of Aboriginal Sovereignty’s new life as a t-shirt spread like fast wind throughout the super shire of Praiseworthy, and nobody knew what to make of a sacred site moving closer towards them, and what would happen if the wet season came again, what would spring out of the ground in the sun shining through the haze.

Then, those fishing men who had thrown themselves at the waves with their lines of nets in the open water, said that they saw tears as he slipped away from their arms, reaching to grab his body in the boiling water.

It was claimed he had been crying, because they could still feel the moisture of Sovereignty’s tears on their skin, long after their bodies had dried.

17

What did it matter who thought what? The people of Praiseworthy were generally straight-talking people, who spoke to one another at the rat-a-tat-tat breakneck speed of the local vocal music. It was all the way with one hundred per cent honesty, and for good measure, heart-raising thumping with five thousand per cent emotion. While others may have thought silence spoke louder than words, there were many in this world who could go on about something bothering their mind for days, and then, when they created a human earthquake, shake the life out of the culture, and not shut up about having to bury the t-shirt without a body.

These memorials grew into a symphony of raw grief endlessly poured into dozens of microphones electrified with kilometres of power cords tangled like snakes throughout Church Street, and amplified to the max through tinny triple-bass loudspeakers. This song ceremony went on for days and the pervasiveness of the loud humming sound with the drumming of pigeons engulfed the environment, and penetrated the soul of everything, where even the ants, birds, fish, beetles, butterflies, lizards, a stray dog, a pussycat, a passing cloud, and even a single breeze, lay down on the spot as though paralysed by the loss that could not be overcome in the crying land.

These Aboriginal Sovereignty people refused to talk about anything else, and throughout the accusing dramatisations, and name-calling about those murdering parents living illegally down at the cemetery, they spared no English syllable in the one-dimensional positioning of blame a long way from themselves. No spanner in the works here. Nothing was going to shift the direction of their precious thoughts, even though, everyone knew Aboriginal Sovereignty had died of a broken heart—that’s what happened.

That was what had killed him.

Yo! If you looked around the big-ticket underbelly of shrilly-dilly blame-calling, nothing seemed to be how it looked, and only a foolish person would believe that Praiseworthy was a place for making jokes that you did not take seriously. For one thing, look at the renewal. The results already in. A forward plan doing its job. This town was practically brand new, a model, a reconciliation wonder, built into a modern-thinking people’s ark for carrying the all times over the proverbial waves, the tsunamis, through the mud of a receding sea, a desert, or rising seas travelling a thousand kilometres inland. The ark would do its job, and carry you into the era. It was the glory of the vision. The thing that equals paradise. This was what Ice said. He had always claimed the dream was an ark, a floating dream—freed of tragedies, sailing over the top, cannon-balling bad things until they were dead meat, like what you do if you bring a cat, feral donkey, or feral anything like thought into the place because what you do, you kill it so you don’t have any problems. Ice stacked this louder word with a superior communication system well-strung and multiplied through Praiseworthy for mantra-ing: You need to score. Forget all this major grieving. Grab life like it was your one last chance for escaping over the rippling waters infinitely catching the oratories in their eddies, get on this ark, start paddling the rapids gathering thoughts in the flow, navigate yourself through the sovereign brain estuaries flooding the mind of country. Forget the endless memorial, the nexus in the head, this never-to-be-settled-ever-in-many-lifetimes type of disagreement, stop saying we are never forgetting this century, or the last, or the one before that.

Ice Pick was just like any other dictator in the world who liked to control people. But Praiseworthy people said he might be of use if his heat was freaky red. Phenomenal. Madder than white heat. A Fahrenheit furnace-blower. Even the engine of his latest four-wheel-drive vehicle disrespected him, and overheated whenever his burning body of white anger sat in it, when he took the memory of the golden beetle, as he often did, while driving around, to watch the minutiae of the now daily processions carrying the faithful heading north, making their way to the banned beach in cars or on foot, and with them, carrying mail-order bunches of brightly coloured plastic lilies, lilacs, sweet peas, roses, religious statues, solar lights and solar-powered candles for the imaginary grave of Aboriginal Sovereignty’s t-shirt, the stuff that had arrived in big cardboard boxes on the freight plane or a barge, then lay around for days at the post office like wasted lazy dollars, waiting to be picked up from the floor, and in the meanwhile, had ended up clogging the corridor of the nerve centre of the ark, the mighty flash and not cheap administration offices, where people like Ice kept tripping over the stuff parked in the hallway, in what should have been a nice salubrious walk to get into his flatly controlled fifteen degrees Celsius cost-a-fortune air-conditioned Major Mayoral council office.

You can’t knock any of these eventualities that could siphon off a bit of luck, but this Ice Pick was a magnanimous mayor of officially recognised major capacities. The pink man did not worry much about tripping over a pile of cardboard boxes containing a few plastic flowers. He had bigger worries on his mind in the role of his life, of being the major influencer of the place. This was how he preferred to see himself. Like? Someone who did not complain about tripping over anything, like a clumsy idiot who did not know where he was going.

All Ice Pick hoped for, was that he could keep the sharks out of reach of the tidal wave place in his mind where the secrets of his success rolled, stacked, and fell in the surf, and were taken back to sea. The last thing he wanted in a place full of probers, the ten-seconds boners of fish slapping the fillets onto the scales to see how much juice they had actually scored, or the unofficial world record holders of butchering cattle quicker than any other people on Earth, these people now, to start shining the light too closely into where he was coming from, to start thinking about his rock-solid background in acts of total self-compassion from walking in the shallows of his head, and shit, for it was all shallow, and there, only discovering his total immunity to morality, where his immorality weighed less than the slightest degree of fidelity to their one hundred per cent total world of Aboriginal Sovereignty. He had done what he had to do, while riding any government gift horse to get where he was in life. Who in hell cared if he maintained his own line in the sand on which side of his heart he kept his personal rights? He rode his own crazy horse. The horse was only a humble brand-new Toyota four-wheel drive, that could have been a Range Rover which was his preferred choice, or even a dream Mercedes-Benz G-Class which was also not cheap, but, by deliberately scraping the gloss off himself, just to show he was really one of the mob, he had chosen slightly less. This was his own genuine veracity of pretence, choosing a cheap tin bucket in the manufacturing of progress, to demonstrate his total humility to the common vision of his people in a challenging moment, rather than driving around in an expensive set of wheels, and by doing so, proving that he scarcely thought much of himself at all.

Headspace was everything, where it was at, and Ice Pick was not only obsessing about the funeral processions marching down to the cemetery on a daily basis for nothing. He was interested in seeing who was not supporting the local economy by not spending in Praiseworthy. Who was ordering elaborate flower wreaths and other fancy whatnot—holy statues, solar-light fripperies—in the recent online shopping blitz in the time of a global pandemic.

Most of all, Ice wanted his people to stop crying about losing things all the time, developing into a pack of emotional people. He thought, while looking at more truckloads of artificial flowers going to the cemetery, that his people were totally lost. They were only thinking of themselves, and not looking at the bigger picture of becoming normal, like colonised people. Join the rat-race. Get into mining and non-renewable resource extraction. Go and bugger the planet up like everyone else. Why were his people not thinking about how they were clogging up the important cargo ships in Shanghai, stalled bumper to bumper in the mouth of the Yangtze River? Didn’t his people know anything about prioritising international cargo during a dive in the world economy from the pandemic? That international cargo needed to be prioritised. Carry more important stuff to keep the world tick-tocking along in a streamlined way, rather than this junk, all the plastic flowers in the world being piled up in thousands of shipping containers, held up on world wharves, instead of having stevedores cart important medicine and technology to get rid of the virus. He mandated his people to sit still for a half an hour and listen to the seven o’clock evening news to educate themselves in worldly matters. He did not care if they grumbled about being poverty people who could not afford batteries or electricity to run a TV or a radio, to hear about the backlog of containers on the world’s busiest wharfs, where even Australian iron ore was sitting on the docks of God knows where, languishing when it should be feeding the world economy? He thought, you know, that every bit of worldly education counts in the world crisis, and that it was entirely up to the individual to stop the pressure on the liveability of the era, by not ordering online plastic flowers to be shipped thousands of miles across the sea to Praiseworthy. Yes, Ice was the main man who thought it was only admirable for his people still suffering multiple intergenerational effects of oppression, to help ease the pressure of the worldwide pandemic by not ordering more plastic flowers from overseas and crashing the global economy forever. What more does he want then? What about everybody living like Praiseworthy mob, what would the world be then? Ice formulated a lot of questions for everyone about their behaviour. Let them be busy with their conscience, about what was going on in the sub-conscience, and to leave his alone. How else was he to keep the model ark, a model?

There was only one trouble with his idea of excellence in accountancy, which did not match other people’s excellent view of themselves on this matter. They thought his kind of accountability pedagogy made them feel sick in the stomach, and he should apply the same personal high standard of being accountable to the world, in the strictest pedagogy of who he was himself, which was much less than what they felt of themselves. This cheeky feedback found in the suggestion box made him hell-bent gung-ho mad, and drove him into becoming his own personal private detective on the lot—whatever it took, by setting stricter standards than a Canberra bureaucrat on auditing, accountancy, fact-finding, his own even higher standard of laws of thought, logic, probabilities, and possibilities for his people. There would be nothing fuzzy about who Ice Pick could become in a flash. He too could be the world champion fish-boner or butcher, fleshing out more crime in Praiseworthy than could be ticked off in all the episodes on ABC TV of Midsomer Murders. By now, while sick of the sight of plastic flowers in his hallway, he was using his own unique methods for suspecting who would commit a crime long before the actual crime was identifiable and committed, and he personally would be the decider, of who to chuck in gaol as murderers, child molesters, terrorists, drunks, radicals, liars, or in other words, all these violent types of crimes which he would sort out simply by intuition, by just having a feeling, a hunch, that he was right on the knocker about righteousness, to maintain the gold-standard credibility of self, the unmeasurable right to dwell in the model ark of Praiseworthy.

Whatever was happening about a burial on the prohibited beach where the plastic flowers and solar lights and statues were mounting up like the Himalayas, where you could hear the ghosts wailing in the gales roaring through imaginary chasms and mountainous valleys, while the mourners cried even more emotionally, carrying more plastic flowers to the grave of the t-shirt, you could say Ice had better things burdening his mind that he would rather deal with than all this fakery. His radar, in rocket-launch mode, pointed directly to what Widespread was doing about the feral donkey plague. Nothing! He would rather think about how this local plague was the worst thing on Earth staring him in the face at the moment, than about the criminal nature of his people ordering plastic flowers online in a time of crisis, and which all in all could have been easily imagined in his bed while fast asleep and dreaming about nothing. What joy could a political man like Ice get from doing what he liked, when he was able to read every single thought in Praiseworthy like a book he had owned forever? He had incorporated the lesser fortune of their world on the outskirts of his greater fortune real close, in a library of biographies written in shape-shifting lines and contours on the palm of his hand which resembled a live-wire act of balancing boredom, or falling into the chasm of his death.

Where was the surprise in life, if this beach was just a beach? If you asked Ice, he would tell you himself that it was hard to live in a world where there were no surprises. And he pursued potential surprises like there was no tomorrow. He already knew the composition of the daily procession of grievers heading to the beach. The mayoral business knew those who would be there on any given day, like the chief grievers of the multiple churches who thought they were better than the mayor of the place, who was not turning up to pay homage to the grave that was not a grave. He could tell you who would turn up with the showiest wreaths of roses by the truckload, or lilies, tulips, bird of paradise flowers whatever, or who was lugging more gifts chucked out of heaven—plastic giant-sized holy statues of guardian angels piling up to the rafters with everything else that had been stacked on top of the flowers over the imaginary grave. Ice hung around the beach while gawking at the thousands of golden Christmas beetles crawling over the mountain of plastic flowers now sanctified as a holy shrine. Then, because he was overwhelmed by the feast of colours, he mentally calculated, without requiring the use of adding up machines or computers, what conditions would be like for whatever had been buried underneath. Say? How long it would take for a body buried six foot under the sand, which was not the case anyway—but what if it was say—how long would it take for its spirit to escape from an eternity of entrapment under this pile of plastic that had been built over the grave and called a shrine? Did a spirit need a straight line to travel in a hundred-metre sprint, or would it become hopelessly lost while trying to work its way through a fathomless entangled maze of dumped plastic petals? Who could tell? But, all in all, Ice understood the logic of a spirit as enormous as Aboriginal Sovereignty having difficulty getting back to his clan land anytime in the near future under these circumstances of being enshrined in plastic, and so he thought, less havoc for himself, for this surely, was a good thing. Ice tried even harder to reconcile in his mind the prospect of the greatest spirit of all being lost in toxic waste for a very long time, by remembering some particular TV documentary among thousands he had watched in his lifetime in the hope of gaining a complete understanding of the world with a head full of vague snippets about all things foreign to Praiseworthy. But, the memory bank being what it was, now an overused and overwhelmed organ stuffed with a jumble of information ranging from purely useless idiocy to right pearlers of world wisdom, it took a moment for Ice to land upon what he had learnt about how long it took plastic to decompose, which was freaky but he had to know that it was going to take something like five hundred years for full decomposition, and possibly less in the era of increased global warming heating the haze dome quicker than anywhere else on the planet. Yep! With knowledge like this, you could not beat Ice. He nailed the logic flat in the face, for Ice knew immediately what destiny lay ahead for a spirit as huge as Aboriginal Sovereignty being buried in the sand as a t-shirt, instead of a body. He reckoned that it would take at least five hundred years to break out of the imaginary sand grave underneath shipping container loads of plastic flowers before the spirit of Aboriginal Sovereignty could travel back to its proper ancestral home and create some havoc. Like what? He thought of the transformation of the spirit of Aboriginal Sovereignty becoming something nice after stewing for five centuries. Again, he stared at the plastic mountain where the golden beetles were searching for its relevance to country, and in his mind’s eye he saw plenty in its eventuality over time, of even becoming a priceless antique swan-like creature of pure sun-bleached white, limping back home over the seas—that was how it looked in his head.

What interested Ice Pick more in these circumstances of what he considered to be a dubious suicidal act in the sea, was how he was going to pin a murder charge on Widespread. He could always do the head work, using his brain in a densely insignificant way by calculating the cost of plastic flowers, but who cared if one plus one equals two, and why waste time chopping wood for practice? What was real here? How could you justify chasing small fry around the bush all of your life? If your whole point in life was being in the business end of proportioning blame upon others by continually wasting energy lifting your hand up in some totally bored way, just to point your finger of whiteness at the guilty for a crime of which you say you knew what the outcome was going to be in a total no-brainer nanosecond, knew simply by intuition, as a no-brainer, then like Ice, you would eventually have to think about what else could be of benefit for humanity? This was the reason that Ice knew you had to go for it, and bugger the consequences of the surrounding fallout.

Anyhow, mind job was the work description for a real man focused on being a Major Mayor of the world of Praiseworthy, and Ice now felt totally overloaded with sneaky eye-strain from continually watching what hundreds of feral donkeys were doing while shitting up the place by forever roaming here, there, and all over in a general donkey zigzag way instead of being locked up in proper pens and confined to walking up and down narrow grids, like an industry person would do in animal husbandry for a pack of useless feral animals. The man was going cross-eyed from watching packs of donkeys freely moving in the shire’s no-go zone for feral animals that had been using the healthy Australian bushland to grow into the size of elephants, but he wasted no thought about other feral animals, such as pigs, and pigeons, which were holy, intra-family, connected spiritual relatives, and where Ice was told if he made a mistake and killed a feral pigeon instead of a donkey, he, himself, would be killed on the spot with a bullet. Ice ranged around every inch of Praiseworthy in his fuelled-up vent for vengeance, and he felt as though he had been caught up in the work of a full-time surveillance officer for removing illegal donkeys that would not leave, and he was not imagining it, their numbers were increasing the more he tried to drive them out of Praiseworthy. The whole surveillance thing was at risk of defeating Ice, for it was too much from a simple job description for a Major Mayor to expect him to endlessly have to conquer Widespread’s spreading-diseases donkeys from overcoming the cemetery and taking over the homes of Praiseworthy. He could not legitimately spend his entire time herding feral donkeys with his four-wheel drive by cutting through rough scrub-like jungles from point A to point B all over Praiseworthy as if he had become some backwater proverbial shepherd. All Ice wanted was to work on the high ground, to find proof beyond reasonable doubt that the donkey herder was the real murderer of this so-called suicide of the t-shirt buried in the sand, and possibly, was also the head of the Canberra government’s spies’ rumoured paedophile ring operating in Praiseworthy, which had somehow in all truth led to the heinous murder.

Ice was confident that the criminal would sooner or later reveal a slither of incriminating evidence somewhere with Widespread following hundreds of feral donkeys by continuously retracing his steps in circles over the ground. Somewhere in all of those footsteps, evidence of what had really happened would appear. The evidence could be a piece of hair in plains of stumpy yellow grasses where even the animals that lived there were hard pushed to find some clump of dry roots that they called home. Or else a button. A bloodstain. A mysterious witness who still had not come forward to be interrogated to an inch of their life. He was not interested in the compromised t-shirt mumbo jumbo sand monument guarded by crabs on the beach. Ice wanted to be able to call the police office with real evidence like a hair strand, or a button, like you saw heroes catching villains in those crime series on television, and he wanted to say bluntly like a real endless suffering man of his world, that Cause Man Steel, @Widespread, @Planet, or @whatever, had murdered the suicide son. Ice did not know how he was going to prove it, but this did not seem to matter anyhow, because he knew beyond doubt that Widespread was the killer, and that was all one needed to know.

You would have laid a bucket of money on the table to prove he was right about this, and this idea appeared in Ice’s everyday conversations of spreading the word, by naming Widespread whenever he spoke with one of the hashtag names as being the child murderer, and possibly as one of those child molesters from the rivers of grog that Canberra politicians were always talking about. For example, he would casually ask, what was the child murderer Widespread doing with those donkeys? Simple innuendos being placed in the thoughts of his general public on the road to make the ark pure again.

What turned up unexpectedly for Ice, and blew his mind right out of his head, was how the community kept rising up to grieve the death of Aboriginal Sovereignty, in the throes of an unusual amalgamation where the churches of steeples and observatory towers had combined in strength after lengthy discussion and compromise, and had decided to bury the false t-shirt. No one was buying the murder argument being floated by the Major Mayor. This constant denial of the facts created difficult moments for Ice, and the empty pit in his headspace felt catastrophically loaded with the nil and void devouring him from inside out.

Who knew why, but Ice always had to dig a hole for himself. This was the type of person who could not visualise perpetual pristine wilderness without seeing a hole dug in it. The man was a human pink underground mole, worm, snake, a wombat digging its way underneath the soil, only happy when looking at a big hole in the earth. He was another kind from the local ancestor, since becoming modern, he loved the sight of a man-made hole creating money and jobs for Australia, even if you never saw any of the treasure yourself. The iron-ore-silver-gold-lead-zinc-copper. The list of the holy country being endless. He was straight for the literal bolt hole. Yeah, he said you did not have to die in a ditch for the pristine land of your ancient beliefs just because a hole was being dug in it. Holes were normal. Everyone had to dig a hole. This was what humans do, he claimed. You had to think about the aesthetics of digging up stuff. You either dug, or you got dug into a hole. This was the modern world he had in mind for surviving the thing, where everyone faced up to being an excavator of dirt. Don’t be frightened to dig a hole, he said. Open-cut holes, or deep holes created by blasting the surface to smithereens. This was the digging required to solve the mysteries of life, for whatever art was for, it was never about nothing, it was always about digging into the mind, boring into the heart, shovelling into the soul. He believed the art of excavation was the broken conscience, and the greater the hole to be dug, the greater the translucence. And equally grand in his mind, he saw the slagheap of a conscience unearthed as a beautiful thing to comb through for hidden treasure. Ice had dug that many grandiosely operatic holes in which to bury himself for the sake of the art of digging, he had created an underground ark from the depths, and it was this monstrosity he had brought to the surface to make a lot of money.

Ice, being this ark man and all, said the ark sprung from the depths was not all it was cracked up to be while hindered by the grief thing slung across the surface like a wet blanket. It burnt him out. One person could not carry all the ore for brightening the era. He needed some help from being overwhelmed by mad people’s theories about stitching up holes from adversities. His life had become so terrible that he had not even noticed his golden beetle was prone, legs up on the dashboard of the brand-new mayor jeep, and was now totally silent, looked like it was dead. This did not matter. Ice was more into the tangibles, desperate to catch any murderer who owned feral donkeys, to bring closure to his trumped-up murder charge against Widespread as quickly as possible in the Australian courts, up to the High Court by throwing everything he had at digging holes to find evidence. He brought out the heavy equipment. The council’s bobcat. Called up the road works. Bring in the bulldozers. Called the mining companies. Get the explosives. Rip the guts out. Dig the lot. Let’s see some dirt flying around here rather than crawling around on the ground with a magnifying glass to see some grain of paydirt. A foul murderer still at large. Well! Holy smoke! Ice grew redder as he became madder. He was regularly seen by the total population hiding from the heat in their hidey-holes, watching him driving on the deserted streets, jump-starting in short fast spurts from one place and grinding to a halt in the next, to check for evidence about killers while leaving the not cheap latest mayoral buggy’s siren ringing non-stop whistle and bells, and with the mayor sign brightly glowing in metallic gold with a string of red fluorescent show lights dancing in flickers around the roof of the cab. Ice looked everywhere for a slice of life to interrogate killers on the loose about, but all around was ghost-town dead. There was nothing happening. Only solemn ancestors spoke. They said they did not know who he was. There was a complete disappearing act, and Ice had been trying all day to find a handful of what he called his important “pet black” people—the signatories to his various hole-digging ventures in thought, law or order, or in other words, in bringing convenient truths to the surface for personal gain.

Where everyone else was so immobilised with sorrow that only negativity flooded with fire and hatefulness, Ice’s spirit remained full of movement, and he was way beyond any soul making a sound barrier of grief around him. He took the king hit, ignored the shit flying in the ether of his puff of smoke, and kept asking the bulldozer questions in the hole of denial about killers in Praiseworthy owning feral donkeys. He did not care how much it cost. If he had to, he would use up all the fuel left on Earth to find a bit of dirt. The signature people were nowhere to be found. It was a total disappearance act, and the eerie silence left behind, felt as though these people no longer existed.

Finally, Ice realised that he would not be able to finish off this business of catching a murderer without signatories to complete his statement of outing, by outlining the reasons he believed that Widespread was who they were looking for, and possibly, head of the government-created paedophile ring. But all was not lost. The hole was being dug deeper. It was simply not the end. Bedrock was still to be reached. So! Ice just forged the signatures. Not even really a forge. He had no idea how they signed their names. He just dashed something on the page like a cross, and wondered why he had not done this before, instead of wasting time and the cost of several tanks of petrol driving over and over on the same streets since after all Praiseworthy was not that huge. Ice took a screenshot of the document on his mobile, and sent the thing south, to the Affairs of Aboriginals Department.

A few minutes later, when he thought enough time had passed on Earth for heaven’s sake, for his document to be delivered to the Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, he called her office in the Australian parliament situated some four thousand kilometres south from Praiseworthy, and again, asked to speak to her about how he had cracked the government’s paedophile ring run by loose murderers. When he was told to hold on, the minister was in parliament, he ordered the bureaucrat to get her out straight away to speak to him. He argued the toss with what he called you belligerent bureaucrat, but got nowhere, except the raw deal. Listen! Cow, he argued, I am not asking you to personally tackle this emergency. He further yelled into the mobile about the lack of common courtesy in the Government of Australia these days, and finally snapped he did not have all day so, You tell her to call me. Wham! He ended the call, while knowing she would get the message, knew that powerful Major Mayors like to be in the thick of the job in rich mineral provinces in the north, knew the traditional owner did not like to be kept waiting too long. Moving on now … fast. His list of urgent calls was long. Morally important. Media dogs, opposition politicians, local loudmouths, numerous hacks positioning and jockeying for whatever power was for sale, whoever else you see. Totally. Right up the guts of people like him to keep the country moving regardless, when times were tough.

18

Of course, Praiseworthy would be waiting another forever to get much help from Canberra. Some were feeling murderous about this too. The white government cried poor. It did not have enough money in the budget for sending riot police to some little Aboriginal place called Praiseworthy, just to arrest the most dangerous murderer in the world—the killer of Aboriginal Sovereignty—who was still right out of control. Sad thing to see. People running around who should be locked up. The havoc makers among all these peaceful people. The Major Mayor Ice Pick continued calling the nation’s capital every day, just as he had done in his entire career of being the saviour of sometime in the future. Many forefathers had, and many future descendants would, sacrifice their entire lives on this thankless task of trying to preserve their sovereignty while it was being further eroded, and ripped from under their feet.

But this was the forever world enduring the greatest grief happening in their time. Goodness it was hot. Hotter than hell! The dogs were locked up. They did not bark. The birds had finished fleeing—all the skulking herons dressed in drab grey feathers, the angel gulls, the sea eagle watched no more, the snowy white pigeon, and those rails that hid in the mangroves—and, might never come back. Ants fell fast asleep in the ants' nest, the massive red mounds stacked all over country where soundless wind scurries slid like snakes over the soil, and destroyed all the wayfinding pilgrimage trails forever. The cicada could no longer drone, the morning breeze dropped, and no fragrance rose from the mangrove flowers to intoxicate the lizards, butterflies and bees. Nothing moved in this heat, not even a dust-covered leaf that used to be covered in lerp. The ancient serpent curled up, watching all this silence from its home under a clump of dry yellow dust-covered grass.

And from there, all remaining quiet, except for the swish-swash of fans waving across the faces of the respectable old ladies shimmering in the mirage, like the schools of mourning fish of silvery colours swimming the flows in the sea. The vigil ladies walked under the moon to the ocean, making their way through the grassy path to commence another day in their never-ending vigil of silence on the prohibited beach frontage. The place where they stood was where the ancestors’ songs droned, and where the beating dukuduka clap sticks pulsed in heart beats reverberating across time, country, sea, sky, fire and wind. The fan-carrying ladies wore their church dresses—the worn long ago hand-me-downs from city ladies—now aged into the fading colours of the drab scaled moths of the local bush.

In the glare they saw a piece of the wrong vision coming towards them. The blur of the hazy mirage hit them in eyes, and they thought it was Jesus coming—Oh! Glory Be—but in the end, they saw only another human saviour, the main prowler after murderers—Ice Pick, heading towards them. He was acting scary like a stray dog, all hungry-looking, rabid-acting, jumping up and down in time with his mind, doing a bit of a brain twist and shout, while a person of his position ought to be guarding their proper oldest humanity in the world, should show off his ancient culture, by acting normal and sane at all times. They loved the popular interconnectivity more in powerful people who knew how to behave on country, rather than wasting precious eyesight on seeing mongrel dog behaviour in their old age.

This Ice was trying to jump out of his skin by screaming his white-type rage language into the dizziness of the mirage. The old women heard him angrily shouting about having something, was he saying he had gun power? You could hear him screaming his abusive violence all over the place—countlessly using his white language, ripping up the sacredness with his sacrilege heart. Then, as he drew closer, the old fanning ladies saw that the sinner man was trying to pull off the mobile phone superglued to his face. Again! More sacrilege happening. It did not occur to them to wonder who he was talking to while he was going off his head and creating so much sacrilegious offence as to call the spirit country up with his anger. Suddenly, those old ladies began to feel the great ancestor stirring in the ground, and because they were having heart attacks quick smart one, two, three on the spot from the panic of the earth quaking violently underfoot, it was difficult for those old ladies to firmly stand upright. They swayed back and forth in the rumbling, and with their mind full of anticipating, they knew that any moment now, the enormous ancestor would burst right out of country, and rise into the atmosphere to breathe in all of the oxygen in the world—for that was how these relatives breathed—and then, it would exhale a single enormous fiery breath of poisonous fumes, and everything would be destroyed in this one overpowering volcanic breath. This was not the first time that these old ladies had thought about the ancestral forward plan, and to be frank, they had always said that one day this would happen, knowing that such an eventuality was becoming clearer to them with people like Ice screaming on the hotline in the holiest law country, since how would it know about mobile phones?

Look! The whole earth shook. The stories of the ancestral world unfolded, of what happened long ago, of being remade. Everything moved. Was shocked. Shook. Country spoke its own language. Your soul heard every word. Where’s your Aboriginal Sovereignty for this place? The old women gulped fear. They felt as though they were losing their mind, then when the mayhem passed as suddenly as it had appeared, as if they had returned from a dream, and thought that perhaps, Ice did not realise the terrible thing that had just happened, he did not realise that when they had lost their Aboriginal Sovereignty, their entire world had turned to silence, where even the dogs knew it was better not to bark, and even slugs had the sense to be silent and motionless, and birds were not singing anymore when there was now so much silent crying in the heart of life.

The grievers stood rock-solid on the side of the road while watching the mayoral jeep continuing on its way, driving a short distance, jerking to a stop. Ice jumping out to yell at yet another empty house where everyone had already taken off out the back door in an earnest walk to get away from him, while pretending not to hear a thing, which was the correct thing to do, since nobody should expect to hear a thing while all this grieving was going on.

ERRRRK! GET HERE! YOU! Finally, Ice decided that he could hear the old ladies gesturing to him in sign language. He expected to be hit for another ten-dollar loan. He stopped yelling into the mobile about not being able to contact anyone in the entire government of Australia ABOUT A MURDERER IN A REMOTE ABORIGINAL COMMUNITY, because they were either swanning about AT LUNCH AT A SWANKY CAFÉ DOWN IN CANBERRA, or crapping on about nothing in PARLIAMENT. He caught his breath, and told the old women that he was in a hurry with no time to talk to anyone—GET THE DRIFT! Catch me next time.

These old women could not waste their life in being fobbed off either. They were ageing faster by the minute while waiting in a posse for him either here or there, and exhausting themselves by puffing up and down the street, or else, having to nearly break their necks by jumping out from around corners in front of the mayoral jeep while trying to catch up to him as quickly as possible, before he jump-started the motor, beeped the horn, and they were left listening to the engine roaring a couple of metres down the street to the house next door before they had a chance to catch up, to have a simple chance to whisper something into his ear like, SHUT THE FUCK UP, why did he have to keep thinking about the murderer business—this really bad thing that had never happened, when right at this moment, the spirit ground was baba, moving through the air, because country was looking for Aboriginal Sovereignty. You can’t hide anything from country. They knew the long labour of life to achieve wisdom bore little fruit sometimes, but those elderly ladies were more or less satisfied that he had got their message by simply using the commonest language, of having chased him around with hearts thumping like teenage girls while they were ageing more prematurely with spider-web hair to catch up to the jeep to tell him to stop yelling ignorantly all over the sacred beach about the lack of the Australian parliament being in their presence. They did not want white government in their presence. These old women felt as though they were ghosts kidding themselves into believing that they saw actual comprehension when they had looked square into the blankness of Ice’s pink eyeballs.

Gosh! Why do they do it? Anyone would feel disgusted for old mothy-dressed ladies acting like teenage girls mooning over some moron bringing them down, even while they knew the facts, that Ice Pick had not heard a single word of where they were coming from. After that, what else would they have left of dignity? They wondered what they had to do to make the idiot listen more, before all time ended in this place. You could tell just by feeling the air moving in circles that the lot could blow, everything destroyed in a single moment, and they were imagining themselves ripped off the ground, and involuntarily thrown through the air along with everything else: dogs, seagulls, butterflies, bees, snakes and lizards, the sacred mangrove trees, nothing spared from being thrown into the frenzied-ing vortex with the mad circling winds whipped up by the haze with all the dust coming off the ground, and spinning with the bushfires, embers pelting everywhere with lightning jumping, and thunder clapping, everything heading in a jet force fireball flight up into outer space. Then, while the haze was smashing their world and the entire universe was falling apart, the ladies claimed that whatever would be left of themselves, would be just a few ashes floating down into a crack in the earth which they called the gate to hell. Ice wondered why these ancient women were telling him these mad things. He had done enough. Hadn’t he? And where was that fat-arse Minister for Aboriginal Affairs anyhow? He screamed her name again, and again, into the vibrating mobile phone—You want to come and save us, or what?

I have got something to tell you my boy. Listen! Ice Pick hated this side of Praiseworthy, where elderly women rushed him the split second anything went wrong. I am not your old-woman magnet. He thought about his magnetism to old women because it was happening a lot lately—this flirty haranguing confused his image of being the person holding the ultimate authority for the welfare of his people. That was how it works. One boss. He delegated power, not the old women delegating work for him to do.

Take youth suicide for instance. He thought this reoccurring problem should be a community issue that had nothing to do with him. People should be in charge of their own business. But he could hear these old grave women now, calling him from way down the street somewhere, shouting his name while heaving and puffing, running out of breath, having a heart attack from trying to run after him, the ladies he called the big units. Ice already knew the same negative story told from every possible angle of not coming back. In his mind, he could not recall when he was not endlessly tossing this question in his brain, DO I REALLY HAVE TO KEEP KNOWING THIS? He does not want to hear another word about suicide, and his blank eyes twitch uncontrollably. How would he know the answer to everything that happened in Praiseworthy? He felt quite uncomfortable to be put in this eternal predicament of having old ladies chasing him, which forced him to muster up some kind of extra inner energy to reassemble what was going on in his head about imprisoning the murderer of children forever, and to reflect on how this would transform him into a reasonably acceptable person to mainstream Australia. That was the goal. Get rid of the spookiness of being a snowy white other who gets abused by older women making up fairytales, while waving their fans tantalisingly in his face.

Such goings-on. Nobody helped. Ice had to tug every contorted feature of his face back into place, reset the nice man act while forcing himself to conduct his business with these women. He knew that a very smart part of his brain understood reputation even if he was not fussed what anyone thought of him, and there were eyes everywhere watching how he handled himself. What was the point in expecting remorse? It was hard to put yourself on top of people who saw themselves as being the true sovereigns of their own world. He hoped that these women felt satisfied for wasting his time. This was when he heard a thin squeaky voice continuously calling from the back of his head, trying to break through the other brain racket going on about Canberra. Someone was answering his calls about the murderer. When he listened more closely, Ice thought the weasel voice was trying to warn him that this was probably not the time to do some flirting business with these infatuated old women worshipping the ground on which he walked. But Ice could not believe that this mousy voice from the wasteland of his brain, the place where dead things lived, could just turn up when nobody asked it, and dare try and tell him what to do. In casting his eye over the dead fields of this vast wasteland, a junk field of the trivia which he rarely ever visited, he tried to pinpoint where this remnant idiot lived, where in all his past failures was its address, then, when he shoved the thing back where it belonged, he would return to the task in hand, which was catching real murderers. A task now to be undertaken single-handedly, it seemed to Ice, since the entire workforce of Praiseworthy employed by the municipal super shire had taken upon itself to endlessly grieve the funeral of a t-shirt.

The news sprung on him by some idiot in his brain crying of young people committing suicide, began to fog Ice Pick’s wider vision of assimilating into the wide-angle white view of economic progress for Aboriginal people. As far as he was concerned, this was the only deal on the table, and now it felt tarnished by the brain idiot highlighting life-and-death matters that had nothing to do with the main narrative obsessing the rest of his brain of pursuing the forward plan of ultimate assimilation for achieving equity in the Australian world. When the Minister for Aboriginal Affairs finally called the ark man to find out why no one was working to close the gap in Praiseworthy, and sending in their daily progress reports in being trained in becoming white people, he mentioned to her that it was a very sensitive time culturally for Aboriginal Sovereignty. She told him that this never-ending argument about Aboriginal Sovereignty was annoying, but he told her, he would not be committing treason by challenging the sovereignty of the Crown’s ownership of Australia. Nope! He sighed—why was it always about saying he was loyal to the Crown—and so he continued on answering her greater suspicions which were what her call was all about, that Praiseworthy was full of Aboriginal people trying to betray her government to China.

What makes you think Praiseworthy was promoting the Asia century? He could conduct an orchestra on paranoia as good as it gets. So! He did. The silences fell at will, the talk dance enjoying the civil argument of the western world, conducting a considered conversation as you would, while speaking with the majestical White Lady Mother of all Aboriginal people, particularly their children.

The thing was, Ice continued, after a suitably long pause to demonstrate that he was capable of carefully structuring his thoughts, We are just trying to get rid of welfare dependency here, and never having to rely on the Australian government for any more hand-outs in the future (pause), and he was only saying this, he said, instead of saying what the accused murderer Widespread would spruik to the world, of never having to rely on people buggering themselves up completely in an overheated world, and he was not saying like the old people were saying, of increasingly noticing more twelve-year-old insurrectionaries roaming about the streets looking for trouble at half past two in the morning.

You never want to lose a government minister on the phone call when you are still articulating your breathless point of view, so Ice quickly revved up the conversation into flooding word-rapids about the murderer. Remember, I was telling you about that fake Native Title claimant Widespread, Cause Man Steel, the murderer at large? He shot for goal. Bang! Bang! He told her flatly what she was after, what she could shoot up her pipeline in government, how to nail a black insurrectionist. It was a present. Thank you. No problem. Ice raced on, gave her, the Right Honourable, his personal best viper’s score in his dash to beat the parliament of Australia’s scarcity of time to speak to the lower-class, Aboriginal dignitaries from the regions, even those like himself from a super shire in the mineral-rich province of Praiseworthy. He spread lashings of syrup sweetly for there were no worries about that, and continued rocking, fear for fear. Keep remembering Widespread as your biggest threat, Ice slurped, almost licking the mobile, Think of him as the only person up here in the north capable of spin-drying a pile of yuan like Rumpelstiltskin’s gold. He told her to forget all about suicide rumours buzzing in her ear from the troublemakers, complainers, poseurs, do not fall for the wizardry of the shit-stirrers, fakery, scammers. He picked up verbal speed, his racing tongue lying exponentially with a speeding heartbeat to reach the end of everything he had to say, with a bit of praise, like, Your policy initiatives to prevent youth suicide are great. Hmm! Hmm! Really great! Believe me. All Ice wanted now, before she hung up in his ear and cut him off mid-sentence, was to convince her that when the world went belly up with bugger-all fossil fuel left in the bucket—although he did not actually say this to her because he did not want to sound like an idiot, like Planet, but what he did say in a pushy way to get the last word was that—in Praiseworthy, it would be the likes of Cause Man Steel, the real live murderer on the loose, who was planning on becoming a Chinese yuan tycoon from shipping donkey loads of the collective Native Title iron ore reserves to China in a two to three degree increase in global warming reality post-2030, an irreversible situation which would not be long away now. It seemed like a good note on which to end the conversation, rather than being the other way around, with the Minister hanging up on him, like he was a tyrant. He felt on top of the world, far better of course than lying flat under the weight of a minister of government banging on about nothing. Ice came to the end. Said all he wanted to say about pushing the government in the right direction. He had kept control of the debate. Let her stew on that. With a moment to spare, he babbled on about how the murderer Planet was already training tens of thousands of feral donkeys to cart all the remaining iron ore out of the country to China. With his fresh-air conspiracy theory firmly established in the mind of the Australian government, Ice hung up on the unarticulated gasp cut short at the other end of the line.