Carpe diem
(Seize the day)
Oracle 6 … Even though he speaks good English sometimes …
Yep! You can bring it on home right to where Aboriginal Sovereignty had played like some big winner by being dead, in the era of viewing through the lens the most economically souped-up and politically right, left and centre, eye-fetching northern soils country. A wide-open vista full with new-age internationally sophisticated thought, packaged for fast-tracking exploitation from mineral wealth, exploding the bedrock, and scraping the surface of country within inches of gouging the eyes out of what living sacredness remained—the old wisdom men’s legal sovereign law that country knew protected the whole world, the priceless solid, left like rubble, to rumble when it toppled over into a miner’s pit of the multinational. Yep! Watch out for the ancestor games in these ancestral remains, the dust floating in the air, gathered in the haze cell, the sepulchral permanently resting over Praiseworthy. This was left of the sacred. Air laden with the betrayal. Thought Aboriginal Sovereignty had been breathing into his lungs for his entire life.
Stolen! What did this word mean for something so priceless that it could destroy the world, and the preciousness of Aboriginal Sovereignty? Who steals thought? And what was the thing that had gone completely wrong in Aboriginal Sovereignty’s life? Was it so simple, or great, that he had fallen in love? He got married. And that was wrong, even though Aboriginal Sovereignty Steel was seventeen years old, and knew he could be married in his law. It was not in white law, and so, he couldn’t marry her.
A twenty-odd strong police contingent had been sent to Praiseworthy to hunt Aboriginal Sovereignty, and they chased him down like he was their slave, until he was savaged by the search dogs the police had with them when he was captured. While isolated from his community in a closed-off interrogation room, he was read the rape charges against a minor, and no one mentioned other matters in their mind plaguing the mood, of how offensive he was in the sight of decent people after they had been informed of the facts about him from the national race for racist rage spreading like lightning across the country, where he had been singularly named like a chosen one, the first paedophile caught for creating a rampant scourge on the white purity of Australian conscience. The boy was not a mind reader. His mind was locked into other thoughts in those moments, like, was he being brave enough to be a man to fight these creeps, or else, on the other hand, was he already dead? He chose death, and merely said that he really loved the girl whom he had been promised by traditional law, from the day she had been born.
Hey! Shithead? You can’t do that type of thing here, not in this state, not in this country.
It was right way—we are married.
The first answer he received from the police presence behind him, was a volley of punches into his skinny back. Hey! Shithead! Rapist! Who do you think you are talking to? Aboriginal Sovereignty did not know. There were a lot of police crowding in the small room.
What’s an arranged marriage?
What country do you think you are living in?
There are laws against what you call an arranged marriage.
What law, man, I don’t know what you are talking about. This here, is one country—it’s call Australia?
Thump!
The thumping with a baton was hard. His mind spun, he was unable to keep counting the times he fell, felt the boots hitting, being hauled up, and happening all over again.
Don’t you answer us back, sonny—I will ask the questions, and you answer. Get it?
I am a man. These were the last words he was able to speak, but he went on speaking to the flow of country that took him on a long journey far into his ancestral world, and far away over the ocean covered with the whiteness of sky gulls and the storming of caper white butterflies journeying across the spray racing from the white caps.
Let me interpret for you on behalf of the Australian federal government that I represent as its law enforcer in Praiseworthy—what kind of man you are. You are a paedophile that’s what, and fortunately, we now have laws for dealing with that kind of dirty thing happening since the emergency intervention by the government to take over the control of your black lives. You heard of it? It’s called the National Emergency Response to intervene with what you blacks are doing. The Prime Minister himself made these laws with his own brain to change the slack black welfare attitudes of you people, to open up your so-called locked-up Aboriginal land, and to lock up men that prey on children. Came in law in 2007. Little Children Are Sacred! Remember those words? We now have laws to deal with all those allegations that were being made on the national ABC TV about rampant child sexual abuse, rivers of grog, and neglect in the Aboriginal community. You should have been watching the TV to see what kind of man you were likely to become, have become, are. The whole thing was on TV enough—even a moron wouldn’t have missed it. You want to know something—know what these laws mean? Look! You are not listening. Kick some life into him will you constable? I mean, what I am saying is the real power I now have as a policeman intervening into your life. Well! I can’t turn a blind eye anymore. The law is the law, and God damn it, I will enforce it.
Who knows why Aboriginal Sovereignty had to say, Oh! You won’t be hiding from us in your police station anymore. It was the wrong thing to say under the circumstances while being kicked around the floor.
What the law means is that I have as much power as I fucking like with you black bastards now. What that word means—paedophile—is that what you wanted to know? It means that Aboriginal men like you, who tamper with young girls, won’t get away with it. We can lock up scum of the earth like you forever, and throw away the key. Chuck the key into the sea. Just drive down there and do it. Just as good I suppose as bundling you into the police boat in the middle of the night and chucking shit like you in the ocean. It means you won’t be causing any more trouble to women and children and that is a good news story as far as I am concerned. And the result is, you will want to know this too: women and children will be able to sleep at night without men like you bothering them. That is what this all means.
Rise your fists? Come on. Rise your fists?
Aboriginal Sovereignty never heard the police speech about him. Their voices were only within themselves, and seemed far beyond his hearing—a fade off, that could not be heard above the auditorium of the ancestral movement through land, skies and seas, where even in the slightest movement of air covering him, he was being enfolded by his family, the spirits of country. This was how it happened on the day of his arrest, when he had become tied into the chosen shame of a continent stolen from his people by a pack of racists, who had turned the argument against the people whose land they had stolen, and whose intergenerational lives have never recovered from so great a loss.
Rise your fists. You niggers like to fight. Rise them.
The chosen voices of the nation-state continued to be relayed to the unconscious youth in a haunting of all places across the ancestral domain. You mean to tell us that a little Aboriginal girl was made to marry some dirty animal like you up there in Praiseworthy? The self-appointed high lord commentators of the righteous speaking on the television, writing in the newspapers, trolling on social media, rolled the claptrap on for months about dirty old Aboriginal men like this Aboriginal Sovereignty seducing young girls who had been forced to marry them. It was riotous news for sanctioned rioters, an in for all media shouting slogans to whip up the public sentiment to demand the wiping out of the entire cultural world of Aboriginal people from the face of the planet, where all that would be left of millennia of ancient wisdom—so urgently relevant today in the Earth ruined by the colonial exploiters and thieves of Aboriginal lands—would be the law of white Australia. There would be no room for Aboriginal law in one law for all Australians, and no more barbaric cultural practices, except, except, what? Well! Their art if they behaved nicely for the tourists, and acted professionally while on public view with their “lore stuff” in international festivities taking place on “home” soil.
I am telling you, rise your fists, have the first shot, you bastard.
You can tell them I was not ever there. He was now so far away from being held up, and singled out like a demon of Satan that surpassed an uncontrollable virus pandemic, and major catastrophic unprecedented global warming disasters, when even the prime minister of the day made sudden dashes to the national news studios to strangle the microphone while telling the country to look out for Aboriginal people who weren’t forgetting the grand theft of the total country. They needed to forget their culture. They needed to assimilate. What cool calmness came across to the nation from a voice romping with brutality, by being on show in this domestic crisis, showing how easy he controlled the black situation, which was sincerely educational too, training the populace that the only answer was for black to turn white. Everything else had failed, his voice was bleak, and God knows we had tried.
Look! The little black bastard has got those bony fists raised at last. Let him swing the first shot.
Aboriginal Sovereignty never heard the Prime Minister talking about the years of failed government policies which was blamed on Aboriginal people by quoting an anthropologist who seemed to have only developed hate and spite in his heart from his years of building his reputation and career from studying Aboriginal people, which had made him more an expert on their lives than they knew themselves. He was relevant, someone to articulate the moment and explain Aboriginal culture to the white populace. The rioting media lauded it, when he said, that they were racially wired back to front and hell-bent on being a failure. Well! No worries! The frenzy of dishing black fellows travelled fast, and travelled everywhere with the so-called right to be simply crazed about hating Aboriginals, which was nothing new, since what have you got? Invaders! Plus! A bad spirit that had grown fat on negativity. Equals what in whose law? Brokenness. Poverty broken. Broken generators. Broken homes. Broken emotions. Broken ties. Broken culture. Broken land. Broken people. Broken love? Broken joy? Race broken. A broken state of affairs. Broken band-aids. Broken children. Broken thoughts. Links to all times broken? Broken deranged and emotive sick brains? While there was so much publicity about the love matter of Aboriginal Sovereignty happening in plain view with nowhere to hide, the haze people were becoming so utterly depressed that it felt as though the air they were breathing had a negative current circulating through it, carrying the spicks and the specks of ancestral dust, the only love from the heart of the ancestral people of country left from the brokenness that had somehow ignited the illegal nation-state into believing that Aboriginal children were so sacred, that their love-lacking black parents could not possibly love them in the way of the more superior white love.
Well! He took the first shot. It was amazing, mustering the strength to ask of his future, where was the girl he loved.
Afterwards, when Aboriginal Sovereignty had been accused countless times in the police station of being a hostile dirty old paedophile savage, he ceased to exist, he was no longer the sun, for he was being reimagined, his body parts cast into nothingness. He was dead to this world. Eye sockets bloodied, pushed into the back of his head. Don’t worry. He would not see you looking at him. And you do not really see a skinny kid crumpled on the floor for the blood, so much blood from skin and bones. What was left? Nothing except all this bloodiness? No. He was being personified by the imagination of the nation-state, the dull dirty lens of Australian folk law. Yep! He was the ethnological story. He fed the hunger. Fattened the mudslinger’s narrative of racial vilification. He was the paedophile savage. You know what happens when you throw enough mud? Hallelujah! Well! Song at last. Some dirty old black paedophile had been captured. Oh! Rest in peace. Success and vindication at last. The national narrative strengthened at the total cost of billions of dollars to hold back the tide of black justice through a simple illusion of fear, the dreaded uprising of the soul, the spirit of black savages attacking Australian domesticity. Nothingness achieved again, and again. Where was the light? Where was the flame to see the way?
The haze felt new, transformed into a darkened disquiet hanging over Praiseworthy. All within slowly slid away, each hid in its own withering mind, each dug themselves into a pit, the lid covered with armfuls of storm clouds, and inside the gloom set about erasing memory. You would not know what it was like to take a step into the day without it becoming a momentous ambition of confronting failure, to override indecisiveness, to never know which of the improbable routes heavily drawn from one’s hesitation could be transgressed, for it was a transgression too far, to be otherwise, to show face, while waiting there in the darkness, waiting for the next piece of news about the captured paedophile who was of them, equally them, equally family.
Look, but do not see who they are, who they felt themselves to be, becoming a bunch of paedophiles.
What sunk into the brain about being branded scum of the Earth, was how difficult it felt to claim what other people believed about who they were, which had made them hideously famous. Nothing much else was said after hearing the news of their paedophilia selves, for who cared about anything else happening in Praiseworthy anymore. Who cared about rampaging feral donkeys destroying their proof of being assimilable into the omnicidal bingeing Western world, just to maintain a trophy for a showcase tidy town of hate? They could grow fast-pace hate themselves. Give ground. Was this simply a retreating culture, having been moved back from the line in the ground many times already? A whispering hummed in the hemmed-in day talking to itself while trying to comprehend the news from afar. The Aboriginal Sovereignty people said they could not understand themselves, or who they were at all, in the new language of paedophiles. Some said: Liar! That boy didn’t have to be a paedophile. He had girls chasing him like anything. They were all after him. He was that handsome. Some said: He could have been anything. Anything at all. It doesn’t make sense. Some asked: Then why did he rape that girl for? His wife? Well! Then! It means we didn’t know him at all. Whose kid was he, anyway? He could have become the one. He could have. Others said: All these men here are supposed to be paedophiles, because of him. Where are those paedophile rings operating in Praiseworthy anyway, that these white people were talking about on the news? We don’t know. Who were those white people anyhow, never seen them before, they never spoke to us. Did they come here and speak to you because they never spoke to me, and how come I never seen any of them when I have lived here every day of my life? I am a churchgoer and no white people spoke to me. Some said: Men are all the same! You can’t trust any of them anymore. Some said: Yep! I always thought these were rotten men here, like white men. Nobody here treating their families properly. Some said: Who you talking about? You talking about my family? Might be your family, but you know nothing about mine, so shut your fat big mouth. Praise be to the Lord. Amen. All else, and so forth. Some said: Lay it on the table if you like, come on, show a bit of honesty, a bit of guts. Someone said: You know, my husband was always screaming at the kids—and he was a white man, so I divorced him over the matter. I could not trust him around our children. You couldn’t turn your back on him for a minute, and trust leaving the kids alone with that type. So, I said to him, get out. I thought to myself, be rid of that mongrel.
Anyone on Earth could feverishly dream about good things happening in their particular part of the world, and yearn for better days to come in their mind, but in the world of Praiseworthy imagination, they collectively longed to know what type of man Aboriginal Sovereignty would become, for he was already intimately known in a dreamlike state of mind as being of themselves, the you and me, the representation of truth in the ancestral creation of the collective family—before he had suddenly become the very opposite of the dreamt. And instead, what had now turned up, what came out of the haze of the era, was this vile old paedophile who had materialised the collective view of themselves. They too saw themselves transformed into the worst nightmare that was so frenzied and frightening that you would be too afraid to look and see what you had been told to see, what the white world of media and government saw—that a paedophile looked like Aboriginal people—and so you did not want to look from believing, that if you rose from the hole of eternal doubting you had dug yourself into, you would be destined only to see paedophilia in yourself, and in this old people’s ancestral sovereign world, it felt like some unnatural force had destroyed the eternal flame of hopefulness always seen in a sixty thousand lightning flash thunderstorm’s song.
Aboriginal Sovereignty Steel was now officially renamed paedophile by the nation-state—the only way to describe him under the circumstances, with the word popularised from top to bottom in the lexicon of the nation, the lex talionis spilling off the tip of the tongue, the buzz word for the war of the new millennium. This was the natural moment for the seeds of thought lurking in worldwide muck, the summer harvest, a paedophile dreamt into every Aboriginal man, woman and child.
Left alone in the detention room, Aboriginal Sovereignty was in another world. Where was life better? He could not grasp the thought of where life was better, and the more he failed to think where life was better, the more he freaked out, unable to breathe, unable to lodge the thought in his mind, the more panic-stricken he became as his throat tightened, constricted further, closed off the air, and he became overwhelmed.
In a delirious state of drowning in a world where there was no air, he might not have realised that he had already begun travelling somewhere that might have felt like hell in his descent into unconsciousness, a shifting into the fathomless, a fall to infinity, unreachable in unknown depths of shame, far from everything he had ever known. Then, on this journey of descending away from himself, Aboriginal Sovereignty might have realised he was dying, had forgotten the light of day, knew that he would never want to reach that place where he was falling, the place where life was better than anything he had ever known, or wished for, if he had wished it, for it meant nothing to him never to see it again.
Perhaps Aboriginal Sovereignty would never feel freedom in his senses, nor be reconciled to his deprivation of freedom, for he was never free, or freed.
Sometimes, in his moments of lucidity, he felt the touch of country pushing against his body, he could feel how the immeasurable hold of the world was catastrophically closing him in, he felt the shallows growing deeper from the incoming tide, while his head, hissing nothingness, was grabbing pockets of thought, realisations, knowledge that he could not be locked up, controlled, borrowed, not for a second, and he watched his future unfolding and ending, where repeatedly he could watch his suicide, and the smoothness of the tide travelling in, sliding past him, while walking deeper into the sea, to where far off on the horizon, he saw the infinite light burning from the ocean.
End of story, it ended just like that. Ask anyone you like who thought that they were well-accustomed to making speeches about the abundant twists of fate in everyday life, and of sucking it up big-time about what happened to Aboriginal Sovereignty. Myths were stacked to the proverbial rafters of the universe from the ice age to the white age, but, wait a minute, listen. The white law was just that, white law. There was a whole stack of laws in the world.
One of these laws said that you cannot have sex with a minor. He had raped an underage girl. Why did that girl want to get married to her promised one? She said it was the law, their law, the old true law. She said that other people had married same way, and all their families knew that too. She said stop being a pack of hypocrites, she insisted on being married, and went right out there, and claimed her man. There was no trouble about her doing that. Everyone knew. Said it was right. Those two loved each other since they were children. They said that they would spend the rest of their entire lives with each other. They were right for each other. This was law too. An old law, made before any white person ever set foot on the Aboriginal domain. Nobody would stop them. She saw how the older girls were already chasing after Aboriginal Sovereignty Steel, trying to take him away from her, threatening to get him married up, said that right to her face—marry him good and proper, whitefella way, so she married him anyway.
Far, far away, way out in the blue ocean where only the big fish lived with the old sea country ancestors, where in modern sea lanes the world’s cargo moved in traffic flowing back and forth with international container ships, and people traffickers rolled in the wake, and the seagulls spun in angel flight, flurrying around the deep-sea fishing boats that passed by with trawling nets flung wide under the ghost moon as the travelling swallows rested on the decks in the tens of thousands, this was where Aboriginal Sovereignty Steel was drifting, sinking, and being pulled back to the surface again and again by the old sea lady, where she hurled him, eyes stage fright, back on the old sea turtle, another of his close relations, carrying him further into the open sea, the broken spirit of a praise inherited through the ages.
Of this ending, of a story almost complete in a wondrous ancestral sea country rolling and roaring in the eternal drift, nothing would be finished. His storm mouth, wide open but wordless, offering no defence, gurgling the turtle’s air bubbles while the spirit creature moved on through the deafening sound of the sea, as his life was disappearing through waterlogged skin so translucent it was releasing whatever thought remained clinging worthlessly in memory, of being cooped up in a small, airless room at the police station. Of all the thoughts he could have contemplated in this widest of wild oceans, lost in the expanse of the sea, all that he had taken with him, was fear of confinement. But, even the ocean could feel like entrapment for a jellyfish in the bloom, or a shark off-loading life. He imagined his thoughts were sparks flying off in a hundred different directions through waters that felt alive, encasing him, and now tamed, of watching himself flowing in images, sliding into the depths.
The boiling waters continued to encase fish, seaweed, marine life and the dumped waste of humanity in its folds, capturing all in the massive roll, dragging below and bringing it all back up to the surface, while he goes on catching glimpses of himself through the sun-lit sparkle moving through the ancestral spirit world that surrounds him in the surf. The old boss woman was always there, big as the ocean, pushed his other relatives aside, pulled him back to herself where she spun the waters, then, snatching him from a sea serpent cousin that whisked him away, or the big fish brother, shook him from its jaws, while it ran off with him. He was stolen by thoughts he finds above the water, as he was thrown back to the surface, dumped again on the turtle’s back as it swam for hours further out to sea to reach a star-laden night holding back distant storms, just like the night when he had disappeared from the beach at Praiseworthy and had barely thought of Tommyhawk standing in the whale skeleton, thinking he would not be seen, even though Aboriginal Sovereignty kept noticing the mobile phone lighting up, a mote of dull light in the dark night, seen from the corner of his eye. Stupid, he had thought at the time, as he turned his attention back to the sea from the chubby boy talking on his mobile to a message bank in Parliament House, while his thoughts flowed sharply with the acuity of seeing the closeness of the world to himself, how easily Tommyhawk believed that whale bones made him invisible.
While the world sang for lost sovereignty, the last thought that Aboriginal Sovereignty had on his mind as he drifted away in the vespertine glow of twilight falling over the currents flowing out to sea, was of her. She was the pain that clung to the terror inside his being, that was holding on, never letting him go, holding him back. Yet it was this vague scrap of thought left from the very first thing the sea had taken from his memory, that broke her grip, until she began fading from the epicentre of his thoughts, and he was forced to let her go. Their story manufactured no more fear, not when Aboriginal Sovereignty had always known fearfulness. He carried it like a dead weight, but now it felt lighter from being so far away, and driven by a malaise fiddling with his consciousness that overwhelmed him with a greater fearfulness that reached into his core, throttling all sense he had of being entrapped.
When another dawn arrived, that spoke of the beauty of the vast heaving blueness of the sea lady, he barely realised where he was. This dawn cried through the winds flowing off the waves that he should look around, but he was not able to open his eyes. There was no strength left in his arms or legs, and his sleep had settled into a sense of weightlessness. He could barely bring back the memory of being caged in the police station, and of where he had dreamt himself into an eternal closure, of becoming nothing, being in the better place of where he was now. In this state of passing through non-existence, he felt what closure was like. It felt like relief, of almost being able to reach into an incomprehensible distance, and sense faraway joy. He vaguely thought whether this was like waiting for a great moment, when he would again be lifted out of these spirit-loaded waters by a woman’s arms both gentle and forceful, his whole body reaching out to another reality, like having a ceremony sung for him, the praying of great ancestors waiting to relinquish, or withhold from him, the most sacred thing, his desire to keep his memory of her. He might have known, while making the final decision of walking away from life, that when he reached this point, he would have achieved the one everlasting moment he had longed to feel just one more time, and that he would go on forever simply feeling this one thing, of keeping her close. He drifts further, while the turtle floats away, and far underneath in the great depths, enormous schools of fish split apart like an oil slick, spin, and regroup.
Way out where this inky darkness roared, too far to return if it had ever occurred to a boy taking his own life, he grew calmer, as though it felt the most natural place to be on his journey, he was almost in reach of taking in his own hand, the ancestral chosen hand from another time. If he still had any inkling of his suicide, or of any decision that had led him to this moment, he knew that once upon a time he had grabbed a moment, and run to this ending, where he would slip into eternity with her, only her, in his soul.
Only miracle makers, and the spirits of the sea, and the shifters moving cultural memories from one side of the world to the other—this was where the sea men lived in the vast watery world of oceans divided into sea lanes, moving the endless traffic of cargo ships as waves clapped over the decks when storm clouds blown from the ancestral realm of sky laws ran loose—wreaking great havoc. Now, so far away in these seas, a tiny dull light glowed from a kerosene lantern rocking from side to side, barely detectable in the open ocean from where it swayed on the deck of an ageing fishing boat slung low in the sea.
This was the kind of vessel that hid by day, camouflaging itself behind the swells, indistinguishable in the sea by the worn sea-blue paintwork of long-ago fishing men in love with deep ocean blue, and the mystical tales of far-off pale-blue skies, or its bleeding sores, sea salt corroding rust, worm-eaten rotting hulls smelling of centuries of salty seas and fish, memories locked with years of handling fish guts, the murmurings, splashes, and generations of sea algae stuck to the sides of boats.
This was the world of another kind of master cargo shifter, a ghost man of the ocean who was welded to the sway moving beneath his feet. On this journey far off the northern coastline, one taken no differently from others made routinely over many years on board this ailing junk boat that was not his, he was the type of man who hauled human cargo around by asking no questions, and giving no answers.
He left the talking to other more convincing sounds of invincibility—from what claimed to be neither ghost, nor spirit, but the real thing, still alive, Offenbach’s operatic algae-tinctured parrot Vert Vert, the puke-green feathered oldest bird on Earth, and legal owner of the leaky boat. Let the fat reprobate parrot do the talking. Drum up the deal. Scam the scammers. Suss out dead weight. Be the liability dumper. Guarantee the profit margin. Sell a dud. In other words, organise the business end of their illegal trade in human flesh. Someone had to do it. And from beyond the swells, all you could hear all day long was the ancient parrot chucking about its shamble of psalms and pious hymn-singing like a medieval priest to its holy dove, while moaning and groaning, mostly in Latin, complaining about the growing cost of moving human cargo, that did nothing else but complain about the hardship of the trip. I mean, any moron could see this was not a cruise ship docked in Venice. The parrot was a creature of multiple personalities and did not act its age, nor did it bother to show a bit of respect for the political correctness of the era. It thought it was still back in the sixteenth century, where it was au fait to voice a shipwrecked sailor’s blasphemy of the Earth’s holiest verses, with its catalogue of what sea men composed on the job to save themselves in a wall of waves, words such as, I fucking hate you, you cunt of a sea. Let’s just say this pious hymn-singer was of questionable alternating multi-identities, quote foul-mouth people-mover unquote, or, if you spoke like a doomed sixteenth-century slave, the parrot was what you would call a slave trader.
The cargo shifter knew there were already millions of faces like his in the sea, people who had long ago abandoned the homeland face, the father’s face, the face of country, race, honour, love, or history. His was just another face of the worldliness coming hard on the heels of the era, a disposable humanity claimed only by oceans, and the sun above. His mind remembered not faces, not names, nor identity, but carried only the stories of untimely death written for someone else, to remember on the faces of those he pulls from the sea. And another thing. He remembers obedience. He runs to it, because he was told to run long ago, and he remembers to keep on running away from the living. You know what they say, best never to look back, the father’s last words: You live only for the family. Promise me this. Don’t ever return here.
Seas knew him, saw him living with people whose spirits he was moving, and while knowing they would never see land again, he simply watched as time went by, and as their weather-beaten faces darkened, then wearied into ghostly grey, were forged, lined, and shaped by the sea for the rest of their days.
In the vastness of where the seas and skies unified, his eyes squinted in the glare, but were totally adapted for staring into the sea for hours like birds hovering above the water, and while scanning the sea for days on end, he kept mingling eagle-like equalisations in his thoughts about what he had seen in the slightest disturbance of water, like a man who might have dragged into boats all sorts of creatures of the sea in his lifetime with the casual air of one who knew how to take care of whatever turned up from the ocean, and for reaching down into the depths, and dragging out without a thought what was caught in the net. It was what was in the net that had fed his mind in all these years of ocean-wandering around the world, just as there were many times when the old net had come in empty, or was full of great holes, and all he had to think about was starving, of eating only his thoughts in this hell. The swell was mild, and the current was running with the boat when he heard kites whistling, thousands caught up in an ancestor’s net flung above the ocean. The kites were swirling above the sea in one spot, and for a while, he had watched their desperate flights to break free, their spinning off in the distance, and like bombs, snatching at the waves.
Once he had lived in an ancient low-lying fishing village beside the sea, and hell, what do you know, it too became a sacred relic under the sea. This new-era man, one of the last left standing, crept from the scene and would never again think of his people whose ancestry had been connected with ocean fish from forever in some small spot on Google Earth, now only a compass point in the ocean, with all else asunder. For all it was worth, he was the only living person who knew where the place was, since it was no longer registered on the rapidly changing map of the world. Initially, when they had walked bare-footed in tides running through their homes, they said you know what, let’s move higher, and higher again with the sea continuing to rise, flew their flag SAVE US, and waved their banners to the world about being climate change refugees. Then, you know what happened? Those people moved even higher, and higher again, while clinging to the tops of poles cemented in the sea floor where their homes once stood, making a stand, to continue protecting their cultural heritage in complex weather systems, and while they were at it, evolving as some kind of aerial trapeze artists, but being people who liked saying you got to keep having hope, they were reaching for the skies on stilts and hoping for the sea to recede. This did not happen. He became the remains, what was left, and he would always remain floating on the sea as cargo, a carpetbagger—a highly skilled anticipator of the unexpected, second-guessing the unexplainable intruding on his world of self, and right now, he kept a steady gaze through the sun burning down in the haze radiating off a patch of water, before continuing to scan the distances, line by invisible line, catching the vowels together for describing what he had envisioned, before turning around to stare in the opposite direction, while ploughing the contours of the same open sea.
So! What if he had the ability to read changes in the movement of the ocean’s terrain? What was remarkable about being able to read your surroundings as though your life depended on it? In the displacement era, when so many people of the sea were redefining themselves, the sea was full of people who had a planetary gaze seeded by the human spirit lost in the homeland. Did this make an exceptional human being? A triumph? Who knew what he felt? Did he even feel like a man? Or was he half fish? His was a steady gaze, more adapted to sea-mapping like fish, than looking at the structural geography of land, more accustomed to looking through the glare of the sun hitting the sea with narrowed eyes. He focused in to the dazzle of light shining on the water rippling and spreading in circles attracting the kites. He was wary, careful not to put the boat in more danger, for this man won his life by instinctively knowing the outcome of being led through many scenarios, prisms beyond his ability to control, from either fighting the force of nature, or the powerfulness of the spirit world, and as well as considering all the facts of scientific possibility in the changing world, he knew his limitations, and of his own capacity to contribute to man-made destruction. He had live cargo. They would survive only by his remembering that they had all come this far by believing in him, although he could not possibly say what amount of responsibility created success, for anything could slip into total disaster at the next possibility of tempting fate.
He knew, while searching through each of the imaginary grids of his endless surveillance of where to find easy fish, how many dead things wrapped around him. Stingrays. Octopus. Old whales. Cattle. Horses. Cats. Dogs. Pigs. Rats. A sea of dead fish once. The sea was a cemetery of seagulls. Men. Women. Children. Families. Many shrouds were wrapped around him, pulling the boat closer in this sea of death. He spoke just a few words, almost whispering to himself. Do not panic. No one felt there was a need to panic. A situation, whatever it was, would be dealt with. He would deal with it like he does, and anyway, his voice always low, felt calm to others close by who heard while wrapping themselves in his radiated strength, and felt the force of his determination on these high seas. But wasn’t his language foreign in these waters? His from another continent, from the other side of the world. He gestured to the other sea men on board to watch the kites, looked to someone at the wheel guarding the little fuel left to finish the journey, only enough to bring the boat to the coast now, and their eyes locked, moved together, to bring the boat closer to where he was pointing to the kites. There were people on board who were like himself, who spoke this language of silence, and who were now leaning over the side of the boat, also staring at the birds, but they said nothing about the wastage of fuel. They left this fate to their God. Hoping. Good fate. More prayers, hoping to land safely one day.
The old sea slug crept through the crepuscular gloominess of the advancing night, while the ailing motor’s chugging barely kept up the task of carrying its crowded human cargo, packed on the deck like sardines. All the desperate men on board looking towards the darkening horizon as it disappeared into the night. The parrot continued chanting holiness as the day’s news, the peace dove cooed, but the sea men were not seeking unification with a starry night moving towards some faraway homeland that no longer existed for them, nor how they were going to fit into the growing realities of millions of others who found themselves homeless, somewhere on the heating planet.
There were some with families on board, some who were alone, but who together kept slinking away with luggage consisting of old wounds, hunger, and thirst, while habitually gathering in the night’s darkness on a cramped deck, huddled in a sleepless mass of humanity’s landless, left only with the light of sovereignty from the planet to guide feelings plagued with a sense of abandonment, self-scorn, and doom. There was no other way to look at it. Pre-heat. Post-heat. Call it what you liked. Those people were just a handful of the countless descendants of the once cooler world, who had become landless. They were over the sea. Those who were threatening other people’s sovereign borders in the modern era. It was not safe to be in the same sea where incredible transformations were taking place down the decades as the sea gypsy world became a humanity never looking back over its shoulder to see land rights again, while simultaneously, never feeling that something significant had changed within themselves, even while totally absorbed, with an overwhelming desire to be returned to the long-forgotten world of their sovereignty, never noticing how they were effortlessly evolving into a humanity capable of inhuman transformation, where in an instant, a click of the fingers, they became nothing more than a camouflaged breathing element on a rust-ridden leaky boat, and as though they too had lived their entire life under heatwaves radiating from a sun that was so fierce, it had burnt a horror story into the paint of the sea, and of the sky on its hull.
He had allowed the boat to drift south to save fuel, and it had taken weeks where they starved, went thirsty, drifted off course in the huge storms, when lightning struck the sea around them thousands of times before giving up trying to kill them, and the boat almost capsized, heaving itself into a murky grey soup. These people knew that the boat could not carry on much more. Not much more at all, and each secretly knew that the thing that was needed most of all, was to lighten the load. But how? What? There would not have been one person who would have complained if someone else died, if there had been an accident, someone had fallen overboard. It could have been anyone, anyone might have welcomed the boat sinking, and be done with it, for they wished to let go, the final lesson, letting go.
Some might have drifted off into dreams in the midnight hours, catching a few moments of sleep, one would never know who had been too tense to sleep, no one said, nor would anyone say who sat on the deck looking at the blackness, occasionally catching another’s gaze in the dull glow of the lantern, the distant lightning, or the faraway light of a distant homeland abuzz in this moment of emptiness, and perhaps felt joy tinging throughout their senses for having captured in the ocean’s placidity one, two, maybe three images of a faded long-ago time, of imagining what life might still have been, had there been a different course, or somewhere ahead, fate was finding a way now the storms had passed.
The boat continued bobbing where the kites were mobbing the sea, where each bird seemed to be throwing itself headfirst from the sky with great force, diving at the sea, returning to the sky and back again, as though locked in an invisible net. There! There! Someone? The cargo shifter spoke only to himself, Must have fallen from one of the other boats. Others asked: Where? Then, they broke the habit of refusing to see freely, and peered into the pitch-black sea, trying to catch a glimpse of the body adrift, but saw nothing, and falling back exhausted, gave themselves up to the night.
There! There! The waves poured, then churned, concealing the bounty hidden under its surface. Go! Go! It only took the smallest detection for his eyes to read this sea, to see a body falling into eternity, and this man from the other side of the world flew over to the side of the water-impregnated boat, drove the length of his arm into the sea among the diving birds, and dragged Aboriginal Sovereignty out of the broil.
Perhaps only mighty things happen in the vespertine hours, when in a momentary parting of the clouds, the moon shone brightest on the breaking waves’ rhythm of nocturnal swellings signalling the sacred—a singular glowing on the disturbance of the ocean’s night-time dance, a tablature creating a long flowing movement of tacit calmness in the gleam, which was enough for the eagle-eyed sea man, the one who never slept at night while keeping vigil for the slightest changes of light on the back of the ocean from breaks in the clouds, or else a falling star, enough to reach into the water, to pluck Aboriginal Sovereignty out of the sea, snatch him single-handed from its grip, and haul him over the side of the rickety boat.
The boat woke when sea spray shot upwards, stalled mid-air, and the weight of salty moisture clung in the air on this blackest of nights, as the body hit the deck, and the ocean shook as though being pulled apart by a volcanic eruption far below the surface. The boat owner, Vert Vert, woke startled by the shockwave trembling the vessel, from where it was twitching and scratching fleas in its century-old dreams with its head tucked under its salt-laden feathered wing while it slept standing upright in the corner of a pile of deck junk next to a strayed peace dove. The cocky jumped first up, then down, and carried on in a mad screaming tirade about killing the sea. A flash of distant lightning flowed along the deck, and picked up in a flash the wave of fear jerking through the mind-shifting nightmares jumping in the open air from bundle to bundle of sleeping people, reacting to the ocean water splashing onto their skin, which sent them skittling further down into the soul world where the terrible fearfulness of oceans had come to play tricks in their minds. The entire deck became a wave of people shifting out of the way of the touch of salty water that could be seen in patches of moonlight running in a torrent towards where they were lying in flits of sleep while waiting for the soft hour about two or three in the morning when the heat radiating off the flat sea dies and squashes from the mind all thoughts of the long days without relief from the relentless sun and windless days, when finally, it was possible until dawn, to drift off into deep sleep. Who noticed the rescue attempt? Bodies come. Bodies go. These people lived in a palace of death, not of divine faith, and they wondered why the man sailor with the eyes of a sea eagle was always searching for more people to rescue. Even, look now, rescuing the dead ones. It was not like they were living on an international cargo ship, or on one of the tens of thousands of dry-bulk cargo barges streaming up and down the Huangpu River.
You either breathed, or you stopped breathing, that was it really. There was only so much space no matter which way you looked at it, and to the people on that hot night’s deck, spooked as they were by the world turning on its head when the body hit the deck, made room, moved accordingly as the boat rocked, to avoid being touched by the mystery in the water flowing from the body. You could call that a deficit. Something that added extra liability to the sum total of the scheme of things, when you realised that you were still breathing among the living, and perhaps, that you still cared about something, even though you could hide yourself in the darkness of nights like this, and had thought you were already dead. Then out of the blue, you were caught out by this dead person, he had shown you that you were still breathing. Who needed to ask questions? So many were asked already about whether saving anything was necessary. It was not about the money. Or being in another life. All this heady business to be weighed up. What a life was worth. The burning question of the era? All of humanity asking which life was worth saving, or how to risk death in any situation, like it was being asked right at this moment by that wet greyness, a ghost clinging to a body, that seemed to be asking these worldwide catastrophe-exhausted people on the overcrowded boat to decide if this dead person among all the dying, was worth sharing their space with, on this dangerous sea voyage, right now. This was the dilemma of dying in the ocean, when the spirit would not let go of a body not returned to the sacred homeland.
Ever since the lonely sea man in charge of this turnout was a child, helping his father pull dead people away from the arms of the sea, he knew by staring in the heaving surface water, how to read the message that the sea was asking of him. He knew how ocean waters behaved, how its ghosts carried a corpse of the Anthropocene in a roll, kept it floating on the surface while waiting to be found and taken from the sea. He had grown up with a deep sense of these old sea laws about bringing back the bodies to their families, the sacred people of country who had died in shock after being tossed into the sea like the waste of humanity. These people he had pulled limp from the sea always frightened him. He might have questioned once or twice, about whether he was out of date, that he had too much ancient thinking entrenched in his head, or whether he was out of touch with the modern reality of giving up what weighs too much, of travelling light without responsibilities for anyone else, for the era was too unprecedented, and unable to weigh up what it was that was expendable, or question what was worth saving. The trouble, and he knew it too, was that there were too many people to save, and you know what? There were not many people left doing the saving. Maybe humanity had become lost with having too much to save, and was now left saving for what remained of itself, more than worrying about the dying. Yet he knew that these people had died knowing that whatever was found in their watery remains, a god, ancestor, fish, or human eyes, or a guard bird in flight over the ocean, all would feel the story of horror written on the dead person’s face, the last moment of being alive, their final act of writing a lasting testament. This was their legacy, the ending of a human law written in perpetuity, that would never be erased, nor forgotten, by eternal sacred laws of the Earth.
The chants of the sea will continue for all times, and sometimes, when you hear a rhapsody travelling in the winds across the water and far away in the flatlands, you will know it is the world rejoicing, and sometimes, it is the slow music of changing fate, like the way it was abruptly changing course in the time immemorial, for the here and now, sacred orders, renunciation, by intervening into a boy’s suicide in those midnight hours. Sea spraying. The wind picking up the body in the spray, and pleading with the air to breathe life into his lungs, while guiding the boy towards an ailing people’s boat in this seemingly ad hoc rendezvous through changing ocean currents so late on a weekday night.
You are my brother. The lonely sea man who rarely spoke two civil words to anyone, the same man who asked nothing of the ocean, who makes no lists of demands, or hopes for anything on Earth, such as any land giving him an identity, a temporary visa, or one inch of soil he could say belonged to him, was now oddly muttering over the unconscious broken body on the deck of the crowded boat. Brother? Ever heard anyone talking this broken kind of English before, I, it was me, I found him alive, and calling him his brother, yep, the very same man who had for years worked in the hospitality business of people smuggling, and barely acknowledged who was on board in this people-laden boat business that he kept afloat. He always faced the open sea—preferred it that way, with his view turned away from the sight of a damp, salt-encrusted huddled humanity hoping to be saved, and leaving parrot talk to the parrot. Let the bird handle the on-board entertainment, since it enjoyed the chitchat of its long cyclic chanting of avian sagas about the life and death of birds, the stories with many horrible bilingual mixed-up episodes which he stretched into decades before reaching the end. Who could say if the parrot’s little dictatorial world found its equivalent in the world’s major dictators of billions, or but a few scraps of life, but the parrot really liked indoctrinating its captured audience in this confined space like a detention camp with no escape, by screwing the brains of these boat people about the importance of brotherhood in times like these with the birds, trees, the flowers and the hills and on and on in its preaching through the complete catalogue of life on Earth, to teach the homeless seafaring what to say in an emergency on the high seas. We are brothers. Brothers! Brothers! Etc.! Et cetera?
Like always though, the world of this little boat-smuggling operation changed suddenly from time to time, and whenever change came, it was left to the sea man who preferred to be surrounded by silence, to answer the brute officialism of the next round of voices of border control people now headlighting the boat, demanding identification in some ungodly hour before dawn, and so he said something he had initially heard blurred through the static of life, sounding something like this, Eh! Brothers.
Only minutes earlier, when the military men had arrived suddenly, hovering in helicopters that roared above the ocean, and looking down through the beams of spotlights shining onto the heaving boat, they had abstractly noted the terrified faces staring up at them. The manoeuvre was quick. Before the boat people could raise themselves off the floor of the deck, the uniformed men were being lowered on board the stricken boat from the helicopter.
The custom patrol boats arrived soon after. Name? Name? A score of uniformed men demanded names of everyone through the fully uniformed interpreter who busily stumbled through a string of probable languages of these current boat people inside their sovereign border, the intergenerational sea-dwelling people whose mixed origins, it seemed, could be anywhere from the north or the south of the equator, including Middle East to Asia. Finally, with more orders barked into his ears to get the job done quicker, the interpreter started pointing to the unconscious man lying at his feet. The people-mover pointed to the deck, and thumped his chest: He’s my brother. Name? Name? The other men on board nodded at the unconscious man lying on the deck. The people-mover thumped his chest, pointed to the deck: Brother. They thought Aboriginal Sovereignty had fallen from one of the other boats in the dispersed small fleet of moving homeless people, that were also in the act of being caught in this sweep of the Australian net of closed borders, and if you were boat people you would never set foot in the country.
Whatever followed the flashing strobe light circling the night ocean and back onto the deck in the questioning continuing forever, the life fantastic simply flew over the head of the sea man, who continued staring out into the night. He was more interested in expressing his idea of brotherhood, hissed by the wind now in the sea spray, Brothers! Without looking back, he casually gestured to the truth behind him—brothers, pointing to each bundle on the deck, where every man, woman and child on his boat was his actual brother, now caught in the passing strobe light. He shrugged his shoulders time and again while the border control interrogators, ignoring the parrot and the peace dove, were trying to get him to identify his boat people properly, to tell them the story of where these people really came from.
Who cares? He would not know. How could he know who any of these people were, when he had long forgotten what it meant to be identified as a person from somewhere. The border control officers reckoned that he was lying, because he was acting like a French man, the way he stalked through his human cargo without managing to stumble over anyone. They did not know that he had executed this stalk walk many times before through the crowded deck, for he knew how to stalk his way into oblivion. The sea man scoffed, and thought who cares if he becomes theatrical moody in a non-verbal kind of way by fully dramatising his indignation like a European, as though it had become utterly inconceivable to him to continue being forced to speak Australian in a cat bailing up a mouse kind of situation, when he was wasting his bilingual tongue on speaking ignorance, to match a version of the dismal English language plaguing the Earth.
Of course, while being restrained and forced to listen to this night raid invasion of sovereign border personnel questioning the authority of a master of vast oceanic voyages, you could imagine this sea man may well have felt rightfully loathe to respond, but how could a piece of the sea respond when its thoughts were habitually being used to communicate with his vessel about its problems of keeping afloat to move elsewhere on this oceanic planet, to speak back to the sea for its ways of persecuting him? What was the point of hearing the sound of any human language being spoken, when it was spoken without hope, as though the rising sun was unwelcome. This silent philosophising did not seem to be of interest to the parrot. The sea man often felt totally lost on understanding why the parrot was entranced with the sounds of its speech, as though it could never believe in the miracle of hearing itself speak like a man, but the parrot with ruffled feathered greenness did soak up every single word in sight, regardless of how worthless, or its stupidity. The bird shovelled the lot into its skull, the word churning hot as a burning coal-fired furnace firing up its foul-mouth shrills, or squeezing another word, phrase, please, any rendition in its fat brain to join the lulling hymns in its library of sagas thrumming to the captured audience. But now, the parrot was silent, and did not bother to say that it, actually a parrot, owned the people-smuggling operation.
While the sea man continued to act belligerent by not bothering to explain to another human being about carrying human cargo, or what lay behind the blankness of a human gaze closed and bordered up forever, he was no fool. He knew catastrophe, that there was no mind in the world that would be able to carry the full weight of lives silenced, nor feel the infinite weight of the betrayal that hung in the boat. It was all held there, locked by speechlessness, drowned in the sounds of the sea, and the sea birds wallowing in the twists and turns of the air braiding all knowledge inside out while following secret journeys across the world, all held by the weight of nothingness forever returning to the mountainous wishing, but failing, unable to wish in the private country of a sovereign world occupied only by the ghosts of an erased humanity, ghosts of country belonging to the vague long ago, which was nobody else’s business except their own.
The easiest thing in the world would be to drown himself by jumping into the fathomless depths of their stories, but he felt it was not necessary to waste his breath where there was no respect for the sacredness of such knowledge. Why would he? He knew no language existed that was powerful enough to explain the world of one single person on the boat, nor was he sure if a comprehending language of man-made atrocities would ever be developed that discovered how to empathise with the depth of loss in the sum total of human endurance so far, nor the strength and survival of each of these people standing behind him, even though God knows a new form of language would be needed for a future world of exponential chaos, when someone of far greater compassion, will need to tell these stories of the broken world that even on this small boat he could not look at, and had turned his back on what these people saw, had known, and he was ashamed of being unable to reach the level of understanding required of him. It is a routine drill, he knows it, so he says next to nothing to the curt questioning of border control interrogation before again being sent on their way on the high seas of whatever ocean, and this will last, while air continued to pump in and out of their lungs.
Perhaps the continual flow of breath was just a question of looking at his situation in a certain way, by settling with short-term fate, rather than always searching for the longer view, but whatever was true, people felt foreign to the sea man. The world he views like the peace dove sleeping through the interrogation, perfectly simple. The only countries that existed, whether on land or sea, were occupied by blood brothers. You were either a blood brother, or you were not. All the same! Well! We are the same. Everyone on the boat was a blood brother. When asked what country they came from, he says—if he bothers to say anything—Here, this boat. This country. He flings his arm around in a gesture to protect the brothers behind him, and while indicating that the overloaded grossly submerged boat was the country of his blood brothers, snarls, What was the difference? Humph! You are the invaders here. You think you own me. Think we are all the same. It was simple to say they were brothers, while others on board say nothing.
The border control interpreter struggled to keep himself standing upright on the swaying refugee boat. He stood among the Australian Sovereign Border military men in mottled green and grey uniform, the colours of the ocean’s floor, gloved, capped and navy-vested, light goggles hiding their eyes. Vert Vert’s waterlogged cargo vessel, now swaying lopsidedly, tilting further sideways, was clearly unable to endure the extra weight. The hull drew in more water from the turbulence created by the helicopters, and was leaning dangerously, on the verge of sinking.
My brother! He needs medical attention, the sea man spoke in a style of voice that had been dragged through gravel, while he now crouched on the deck to cradle Aboriginal Sovereignty’s head, to stop him swallowing more water spilling over the sides of the hull as it continued to pitch and roll. But in the speed of the operation to evacuate the boat and to destroy it, the people-carrier was pushed aside with a weapon, immediately ordered to stand with the others who were bumping into each other while they were being counted, as the panicky interpreter continued his futile attempts to question them randomly about their origins, where language had died long ago from wrecked weather systems, or had been killed by invaders. Quick! Where are you from? Where are you from? Which country? Quick! The boat was searched while Aboriginal Sovereignty rolled in the muck on the floor of the swaying boat, and somewhere in his unconsciousness, dreamt that he was touching eternal peace with his fingertips. The boat people were ordered to remove their clothes and identity, throw everything on the deck before leaving the pitching boat, and then roughly pulled on board the patrol boat, or dropped, pushed, or thrown into the sea, to be hauled up by ropes from a lifebuoy thrown at them.
Only one man among plenty spoke the wretched language of unwantedness, of what had been long lost in old sea burials. The sea man unfurled the world’s broken and reassembled languages while gesturing pointlessness, throwing his arms above his head, and letting loose his mixed-up array of language while pretending he was fishing, and struggling to bring in the biggest fish in the world with a big smile on his face, which probably meant to the border patrol people that these people were lying about being only a bunch of poor fishermen. The language keeper assembled some more words of his unidentifiable language to the unidentifiable human beings camouflaged in army grey combat fatigues. Supposedly, he meant to say that they were not into the business of invading other people’s countries, or wishing to be destroyers of traditional lands with global-warming consequences. They were not colonising destroyers. They were not the ecocidal people. Not army. No need to be frightened. They were not the ones murdering the planet of the broken homelands. He tried to indicate that they had run off course. They were out of fuel. They were intergenerational landless people, not invaders, not armed.
The vessel was searched for drugs, or anything else that could be seized in the illegal import trade. Rest assured, there was nothing worth money on this boat. No gold. No exotic parrots. No drugs. Ice. No rare monkeys. Smuggled orangutans. Endangered lizards. There was just an ageing millionaire parrot that was into the importing-exporting industry, the unstoppable verbaliser of bird saga, but now, strangely, silent. The green parrot was placed in a wooden box. The peace dove had probably flown off to continue its endless search throughout the world for peace. Then lastly, just moments before the fishing boat was doused with diesel and set alight, Aboriginal Sovereignty, now strapped onto a stretcher, was hauled up from the deck by one of those army helicopters while flames soared around him, and in his unconscious state he was only vaguely aware of floating through plumes of smoke he saw through slits in his heavily hooded eyes, and what he saw felt to him as though he was passing through the fog of forever. The boat people watching below thought the miraculous fish man, dragged dead from the ocean by the watcher of the sea, now appeared transcendently aurea, which was the word they used to describe a holy spectacle of deep memory, that felt like being in the greatness of a vast spirit-charged homeland, and they continued to stare upwards in awe at the corpse being lowered on board the ocean shield, the protector of sovereign borders from all forms of invasion, its Indigenous inhabitants, viruses, diseases, and other peoples in the rapidly increasing ocean population of the landless.
What was the gift of Aboriginal Sovereignty? Guts? A dazzling star-quality agility now handicapped, pinned down, like it was left shackled in the ocean, anchored to a reef? Someone would have to go out there, and find his spirit. This boy does not soar like an eagle anymore, or float above, like a thundercloud. Never mind! Just look at him instead! Leave his spirit out there, where over the sea the spirit healers flew, and back again to the mainland jundurr world of Praiseworthy. This dust fellow was not ordinary anymore. He could not remember how to recapture time everlasting in a heartbeat each and every time he breathes. He never knows how to cast an eye over the circus acts, fight them from tipping the life fantastic out of the blood stream, out of the force of his life. The less he sees somehow blinds the world too, through this business of diminishing the ordinary from everything. He was only capable of catching tiny glimpses, a snatch of what was going on around him through eyes that never fully recovered. The sea took it all.
The truth was, in the world where he was now living with his brother, the sea man, life was neatly folded and pushed away into the background. He does not mind becoming something else, of nothing that was vaguely recognisable to him. He would not know how to find what happened to the rest of his life, which his sea brother said was filtering time immemorial through the opaque depths of lonely oceans. He was no old dreamer, where he could have seen that the greatest spiritual ancestral beings were visiting him, because he no longer knows who they are, or how to feel their presence, he does not know to whose ancient worlds they belonged, nor that they were in his being. The old people came and walked along beside him, hobbling along, and finding it hard to keep up with this young spring-step fellow always walking too quickly, but look out, he was going nowhere except to catch up with the thoughts that kept running away from him.
Those thoughts were where the ancestral spirits of country, the ghostly serpents, were winding the rivers, and where the dingo dogs were sleeping in the mountain range in the distance, sitting with their huge backs to him, and with the mangrove forest along the coastline that looked like tribespeople dancing ceremonies in the storm winds singing the stories, rhythms that continued to stay in his mind for days, or months, and sometimes, with the fog women spread across flat country for kilometre after kilometre, lying there like something extraordinary in the red haze.
He continued to circle the thoughts of his traditional country, as though following the ancestors of changing seasons, but if you looked to see where he was looking, you would see his view kept shooting from this to that reality, hit by the glaring sunlight that blocked him from seeing anything clearly in the blurring mirage. The view was sweet, and became sweeter, as it moved through the years of his continual circling over the same piece of ground in the barren exercise yard of the detention centre while all the other prisoners watched, and thought he was really somewhere else, that perhaps his mind was safely away from imprisonment, and he was in the world for seafarers protected by the powerful gods that bring the tides, thunder, lightning, wind and the sea waves. He was protected by the goddess Mazu who protects sea travellers, sailors and fishermen. He was protected in the Irish sea world of Lir. He was watched over by Zhu Rong dwelling in the dragon’s lair of the South China Sea, and other sea gods such as Long Wang the Dragon King, and in the Shinto Sea, by the sea god Watatsumi. So powerful became his influence of casting spells over others watching his travelling ceremony, shuffling over the same piece of ground creating country through the symbolism of circles, that even though the inmates of the detention centre, who had originated from all over the world, did not know where he was travelling in the ceremonial ground he was creating, they gifted him with the dreams of their destinations, their gods, and they willed him onwards, championed their proxy to be inside their desire to be elsewhere. Aboriginal Sovereignty generated peace of mind as the inmates who had illegally been incarcerated would calculate the distances he travelled through endlessly pacing the exercise yard in their inescapable barbwire-fenced detention camp, and they wanted to believe that he had reached the extraordinary distances of freedom, and had succeeded in passing through all obstacles, to reach the desired destinations that were otherwise impossible to reach, so that through him, they too could become closer to their gods in endless time. While they saw what they wanted to see of elsewhere in this impenetrable prison, only he could see the haze women roar down from the red sandstorm sky and dance across the arid baking flatlands while carrying their pandanus-palm fans, and see how they shimmered in their dancing mirage while weaving in and out of his brothers. And where you would find him pacing through one after another of his odyssean journeys, he was circling the haze lands, and watching the old wise people storming up from its sea of dust like silver fish chasing after swarms of those wandering white butterflies that colourblind his vision with cascades of whiteness, shielding him from forming real thoughts about any of his reality by changing the postcard scenery of freedom, and stopping his mind from leaving his sense of belonging elsewhere rather than falling into the entrapment of being locked inside a razor-wire prison surrounded by the sea, where he was marooned, and left to rot with his world of brothers speaking their disjointed languages.
What else was there to do? When he spoke in the language of the oldest ancestors, nobody understood a word of what he was saying. Nobody knew what his origins were, where he came from, and he could not tell them because he never left the dream place in his mind, and whatever homeland language he was speaking failed to succumb to the foreign interpretation of invasion.
The souls of the brotherhood sung from the same hymn sheet about the spirit boy shuffling up the shelly dust in a rhythm dance, rocking back and forth while continuing to pace in the compound. They were full of wonder about the sacredness of the boy coming into their stories, which they said were dreams falling from the stars at night. Their stories grew wilder in a garden blooming with dreams about how an actual spirit had fallen like a star from the sky, its glowing light plunging deep into the ocean like a gannet diving after a fish, and how the surrounding sea exploded into a silvery aura beside this falling star that became a sea wizard, leaning over the side of his country that he had shape-shifted by weaving and plaiting planks of timber to resemble a boat, and while leaning into the sea, had fished the sacred boy from the water. These people said it was as though another life had been created for them in their capsule of brotherhood. Where else would a true brother come from, one that puts his own life on the line for others? The way they saw it, it was as though they were heading towards the new world of an unmoored star, continuing these long journeys in redefining what freedom meant while reaching a haven built only in the mind. They said that when you were blessed like a shooting star travelling unmoored to anything, the language too needed to be redefined. And you know what? They felt you would not speak the languages of mankind while in the business of surviving, not when you finally understood, that a lodestar spoke another kind of language altogether.
What Aboriginal Sovereignty spoke was spirit language, the feel of dancing feet, pacing, shuffling through the pearly shells, dust rising, while travelling the ground in the compound. You could see in the trails of dust blowing from his footsteps, a divine presence speaking a language of its own coming up from the soil. Or perhaps, it was something else altogether, and he danced a language of forgetting, of not wanting to remember, not articulating anything, or knowing through a single word.
You might call them seasons, the wet or the dry that came and went as quickly as it had arrived, while rows upon rows of brothers gathered under the baking sun in bare feet on the edge of the oven-hot crushed-shell exercise ground to watch the ceremonial boy doing the sacred stuff. The weather was invariable, and did not change greatly from scorching heat when that mad typhoon fellow on steroids blew up the sand and shells into a storm, while the brothers held onto life in driving horizontal rain by clinging to the sand under their feet in flooding king tides, watching Aboriginal Sovereignty dancing, shuffling through the fish, circling the compound. These interned beseechers for life, the wide-eyed fishermen or the landless, cheered and spoke on and on about not being able to see the holy thing written in the broken shells through sandy blight eyes from weeks of sandstorms when hot winds blew howls from the earth. They howled too, but still, they wanted to watch that fallen holy boy shuffling the fragments of shells, and were giddied from his endless circling, as he rotated the backwards and forwards flow of his movements through the sand in a ceremonial on this small piece of earth, writing of journeys through the consciousness of all times. They could not read the stories being written in the pearly shell ground, but it felt as though something of life was being created, and you know something? It was not unusual to find some of these anguished brothers of the world rushing up to the boy too sacred to touch, acting as though they were unable to stop themselves from kneeling on the ground, or trembling like a leaf in front of the divine, and begging him never to stop making them see the reality of the betrayal of their time as fishermen, or as boat people left to die on this flooding atoll, this land forsaken, claimed by the rising sea, even though he seemed incapable of comprehending their presence.
Aboriginal Sovereignty remained unalive to the world around him. He barely noticed where he was living, or how he was joined to a league of brothers in a family that was so vast, their numbers formed a single place constituting neither land nor sea. They were a single soul of humanity trying to figure out what happens next, what was coming … their existence, clearly identifiable and interconnected through the map of human fate, enduring great circumstances of loss, eternally roaming oceans in the crisis of a ruined planet. Caught people. Stalked. Trapped. Silenced. Censored. Rejected. Captives of powerful planetary investors hiding from the plain view of world crisis in private gated sanctuaries throughout the world.
His life seemed to be caught in the quickness of a short breath of time, but this denied the agelessness of eternity bound together through his interconnection with the coming of the breeze, the clouds, the rain, the next storm, and continual growth. When he breathed, it was not to take the air from the atmosphere, but to inhale ancestry, the mighty creation spirits journeying through him, coursing their way in a regular pattern, slowly travelling to his lungs and returning through the moist air released back into the atmosphere. He wasted no breath on the plainsong of the brothers because he wished nothing from sacredness. He asked nothing of the sea that surrounded him. He made no list of demands to be saved, or hopes for survival, salvation, identity, new life, just as he asked no land to be his, for he was of country, and country was in him. It was as though his existence was enough while walking to his destination, the point of his endless navigation circling the compound like the hand of an implanted compass of ancestry that was always positioning homeland, always channelling the place of his belonging from any other place in the world.
Aboriginal Sovereignty might end up living this way forever, like some form of eternal life with his sea wizard brother, the restrained imprisoned lodestar, and beside the countless others, the hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of people entombed alive, secretly hidden in the new lands being formed by the rattling of body parts all over the world, and by a frothing sea that vomited monstrous mudflats jutting from the ocean, which became covered by fine white sand from wave after wave crushing the pearly seashells in the surf. These places grew wilder in a world apart, where the planet unfolds merciless winds in an exorcism of wild arms, swiping at the sand it pushes back into the sea, and leaving no trace of hope for permanency in the bareness of the eroding mudflats, the peneplain it leaves behind in this cycle of waves delivering sand, and the winds blowing it away.
Makeshift shifting worlds were a total laissez-faire feature of modernity in the era of this burning planet, where the modern home was a weathered, stripped and mud-stained plastic sheet thrown over a couple of sticks. The collective broken from ancestral homelands existed in shelters resembling thousands of giant praying mantises dragged up onto the beach by frequent storms. If Aboriginal Sovereignty dreamt at all here, it was a beckoning dream of the dawn bringing glimmers of light over the sea, an awakening eternally revisiting the break of day. If this reality had any relationship to Praiseworthy, it was in the portrayal of the subliminal forces of colonisation, where he ate or drank what belonged to others, and he held his hand out without thinking, took what he was given as if by instinct, subconsciously begging for his life, knowing that his physical sustenance depended on one thing alone, which was called foreign aid. Aid workers. Aid workers’ uniforms. Aid drops. Aid for world peace. Of being absorbed by a temporary landscape that will eventually be reclaimed by panicky waves throwing sand back into the sea.
Life flows through aid, aid that was only brief, selective, moves forward, and leaves him behind, circling the compound on that tiny spit disintegrating into the ocean. You know something though, there were millions of hands shooting up every day from inconsequential spits dotted across the world that were saying, pick me from this rubble. His hand automatically copied the arms of desperation—the brotherhood begging to be saved. Like their arms, his arm stayed upright in the air for hours while he continued shuffling the pearly shells in his dance. Gesturing! Look at his arm. See his empty plastic water bottle. That blue one. The one jiggling, bobbing so you will notice him in the throng. There were millions of people leaping, springing into the air in the ceremony to be saved, to be chosen, recognised as human beings among the damned. Look at this empty water bottle, it was waving far above all the others. See this hunger first. See this number one poverty situation. Take me. Take me to the flowing river water. Take me to the pure ancestral lake water. Let me eat the food of the disappeared homeland. Olives. Belacan. Coconut milk. Grapes. Wine. Chocolate. Eggs. Meat. Cheese. Rice. World food memory entwined in the sinew of the outstretched arm.
The sequestered sea brothers, the unwilling, imprisoned on this spit in the ocean will never have any idea where Aboriginal Sovereignty originally came from. How would they know that of the countryman? Main one? But, alas, and most unfortunately, what did anyone know about Aboriginal Sovereignty in a stressed out globally warming world?
Yo! Refugee man. You look here, and look yonder, while searching endlessly for the perfect dream world where streets are paved with gold, and diamonds and pearls grow quicker than flowers, and where nothing is cultivated other than for the consumption of a slovenly cravenness, nourished from the first to the last breath firing in every human heartbeat, thump, thumping in the midnight hours throughout the land. You want dream worlds that do not look like licks of mud vomited up by the sea? The paradise people who exist for the colour of ocean blue, the rising tide, were riding a wave.
Dreams were worth having for sure, and Aboriginal Sovereignty’s dreams were big time. In these dreams, he frequently speaks in his traditional language, which could be heard from anywhere across the world by the ancestors. Dead people. Not the living mob carrying on all busyness in those Praiseworthy churches. Only a handful of living people of the ancestor country spoke this power wavelength, and you did not have to tell the mass brotherhood that it was a futile business to take words from the treasure chest in your heart where you kept dead homeland languages saved for the future. You could hear the iambic pentameter of refugee lingua franca constantly cultivated, overturned and reformed by the rhythmics of the sea—winds, storming waves, thunder rolls, fish too, screeching birds, the splashing, the sounds of nothingness, and the eternal creaking of rotting wooden boats while the old homelands accents either faded away, or were intermingled again, with the local spirits of the oceans.
When he dances with his feet shuffling quick through the crushed seashell sand, Aboriginal Sovereignty holds up his empty plastic water bottle amongst a sea of brown hands, hoping the aid workers that come and go will always see him, and when that happens, you know what, he really believed he was in paradise.
There were powerful governments right around the world who knew about the inmate whose strange behaviour stuck out like a sore amongst a million of the landless sequestered on some unnamed dot of mud in the middle of the ocean. Aboriginal Sovereignty had become a person of interest to the keepers of the big money of the world. Aerial surveillance from multiple locations in various parts of the safe bubbled world swung onto the target walking in circles on some rubbish-covered institution on one of the new uncharted mud formations which was a good place for dumping unwanted people. Although normally it would be pretty unusual for any big government to feel afraid of a beggar they had imprisoned on the other side of the world, it was the satellite analysis that was suffocating common sense by creating a disease, where the world had gone freak mad with horror shows running through the social media streets that pumped the blood faster through the mind. So, what was initially downplayed in online chat across the planet as being warm and fuzzy, friendly, perhaps a bit unusual, but harmless all the same to watch an idiot, soon turned virulent and nasty.
Like faith, it was not easy to break out of sudden full-scale addiction, and this was how it felt for all the government spies watching monitors aimed at the shelly atoll, and without realising what was happening, the spy world had become depressingly possessed with scrutinising the tiny existence of a prisoner causing troubles by walking around in a circle. They could not help themselves, these spy people sat all day in front of room-sized computer screens in their spying facilities across the world, while watching, drinking more and more coffee, eating stuff, and waiting for something to happen in that lonely exercise compound on an unnamed and unofficial pile of mud not listed on any map, and as time passed in the slow pace of watching nothing happening that was of interest but might become interesting, they could feel like they were actually right there on the scene, standing on razed mud covered with dusty pearly shells and a windstorm while blending in like a sore thumb among the forsaken standing around the compound in this razor-wired institution situation, and this was where their thoughts remained, even while flicking from one speck in the sea people storage facility world to the next anywhere else on the planet, and having to zoom back in on what felt kind of vaguely interesting or potentially dangerous, to see what happens when you keep watching nothing interesting, because obviously something was orienting the spy’s mind to another bounty-hunter type of spying mind, to force them to stay in the hunt by becoming increasingly mesmerised to that point of madness, where you feel you must point out the indifferences of the haves and have nots because you need to prove you have a higher realm of imagination and more sophisticated thoughts, and this was just how it felt to be lured into watching this unidentified x male landless beggar constantly shuffling grids of slow clockwise circles for hours on end, to find out if it means nothing, or everything that you need to condemn, and put an end to this business wasting their time.
What swings in his head? Hell? Was he hostile to aid or something? Of being helped? Of being unappreciative of the well-oiled carousel of handouts being thrown into the air from the privileged to the beggar? Was he threatening their existence with some magic emanating from his shuffling feet? Spitting where he should not be spitting? Putting the privileged people protected from the viral load of worldwide pandemics at risk of being spat at while going about their normal lives? It was as though a fantasy was happening on the big worldwide surveillance screens, and becoming a nature documentary of human wildlife just by watching him shuffling grids slowly clockwise on an atoll not marked on a map. Yet, Aboriginal Sovereignty kept drawing in the crowd. He mesmerised the gallery of spy networks watching from the wealth-driven world. It was impossible for these powerful people with the satellite technology, to realise that they were being trapped by a beggar. They were already caught in a dream-web spun through the galaxies ignited by the dreamlike stamping of the ground with his feet, and in the end, they were being broken, unable to pull back, their resistance nothing more than twigs, a floating feather, against the rhythms of Aboriginal Sovereignty’s feet waking the earth. The spies were incapable of grabbing a lifeline by closing down the computers that had woken a suicidal streak running in their brains. Instead, turned into binge-watchers, they were unable to stop staring at the computer screen where the rapid shuffling on the sun-struck shelly ground began quickening the heartbeat running hostile with their imaginings of what it would feel like to be removed from the rest of the world to a place where life shrank into nothingness, and where anything left in your soul was found in the single act of breathing that kept you realising you were where you would never be found.
Nothing broke the steel-like grip forcing the transfixed to keep watching a traumatised life abandoned forever, a life so far removed it meant nothing to them even if they felt a pang of conscience festering in the mind from watching the intimacy of despair. Nothing could break the glare of the spy world, eating bags of chips while having eyes glued to HOYTS-size cinema monitors relaying vision from orbiting spy satellites, until finally, Aboriginal Sovereignty released his hold. He let them go. It was hard to believe what you were seeing when the ceremonial boy began shape-shifting into gale-force winds from the sea that screamed through the air while bringing what looked like hordes of praying mantises changing into the shape of plastic sheeting thrown over sticks blowing in a cascade through the shells whipped from the ground, and flying away in a slithering serpentine haze that took with it the storied law Aboriginal Sovereignty had told through his feet writing grids comprising tens of thousands of ceremonial tracks. It was like watching a human galaxy cut through the magnificent sameness of creating a new time, place, or being, but spectacular storms creating havoc all looked the same when viewed from outer space.