us mob all tru god
—Yanyuwa Gem, Diwurruwurru
(Poetry from the Gulf of Carpentaria)
Oracle 7 … Calling SOS at 1.57 a.m.
Tell you what … It was like this. Life was too short for some people to sit around crying their heart out about the era of loss, and this type of person, who already felt their feet were planted in the graveyard, decided to carry his grief privately. Cause Man Steel made the decision to move on with the Aboriginal Sovereignty idea. Wake up on the bright side each day, look forward to it, and have something to do. The rule-bending planet-fixer got on with being the heretic of Praiseworthy life.
Planet was on another of his long, arduous journeys attending to the needs of his fledgling donkey enterprise. He was travelling again in that 1980s red-dust-clogged Falcon that had long been battered into submission on as many bulldust bogged roads as he could find, the long dead tracks that stretched across the vast arid zone’s driest drought-bleached country of the ancestral world, where it took more than sheer guts and stamina for a man to survive.
But the trip was a total mess. Cause Steel was a broken man. A man whose life had dealt with enough loss. It would have taken a miracle to know if he knew why he even existed, let alone if he had any sense of direction left to reach the simplest of humanly possible destinations, and to find another, but better, marvellously more platinum-coloured donkey. Yet, he had to go. The grey mass of the almond-shaped amygdala that said he must experience the emotion of finding an ultimate miracle, had made up his mind for him. So, while bouncing his emotional collapse back and forth across both cerebral hemispheres, weeping and complaining like an overgrown sookie, and chucking off the cruellest bantering like he was born stupid, he went on his latest adventure, for this was the gist of it: Ya can’t have a decrepit old donkey being the mask-head of a platinum transport conglomerate. Well! Perhaps not! The quest in itself though, was more like a search for common sense in a world that had none, the stupid thing in his head telling him that nothing but the best would do. Even stupidity can be a relief, for Planet in any case, to finally realise that his world-class business would not go ahead in a total FedEx, Cosco, Allied Express, or Wridgways major transport aspirational fashion with any old donkey leading the way. You cannot have a quitter sitting up front as its mask-head. A big transport industry did not work like that. It barely mattered in any space of Widespread’s god brain to think that his special old silver-coated donkey was the only donkey he had ever seen over the years of his feral-donkey pilgrimages to find such a mythical creature. He barely noticed this only donkey among five million that his dream believed was capable of generating a dollars and cents industry in the magnitude of millions required for running the future world’s greatest sustainable, fossil-fuel-free transport conglomerate, nor did it matter that Planet had caught such a stubborn creature with his bare hands on a killer of a journey to hell on earth.
Who cared whether Cause Man Steel had emotional troubles for heaven’s sake? He didn’t. But men who steal other people’s cemetery are like that. Widespread was not into cemetery ownership, or touchy-feely sentimentality. How somebody felt was not how you run a world-class conglomerate. Yet, he tried. In his heart, he had tried to make compromises with the conniving part of his brain’s insistence for perfection, only to end up spitting through clenched teeth that his mind was already made up about the platinum donkey he had found to be the mask-head, and finally collapsing, defeated by the improbability of the whole exercise of staying true to his vision, by making whimsical excuses for the old silvery donkey to which he had become deeply attached. In the end, with the truth of failure not backing down an inch, he somehow found spare idle strength, spat the dummy, and agreed with himself, that the old platinum donkey in the back seat was wrong. No. You could not have a donkey on its last legs as a mask-head of an international transport conglomerate that needed to travel hundreds of thousands of kilometres crisscrossing the ancient epic highways and roads of the ancestral creation heroes of the entire sovereign country of the traditional owners. No. It did not matter if he had to continue arguing with his brain until he was blue in the face about nearly killing himself in his search to find an ugly old donkey in the first place, and having to cart the thing across the country, and all the way back to Praiseworthy on a long rough and dry journey of countless kilometres. He always knew it was going to take another journey even if it killed him, because he would not be able to start his dynamic business for the new era of global hardship with anything second-hand like a used donkey, and the old platinum donkey was exactly that, too old to be the mask-head of the conglomerate transport empire that stretched far, far beyond any dream now, for it was bigger than the dream itself, there was no doubt about that.
Cause left Praiseworthy like a done man of course, while he stewed on the loss of his Aboriginal Sovereignty, but on the other hand, he set out full of renewed determination, pleased to be on one more quest to find a younger donkey with an antique pewter coat of silver, more like the brilliantly platinum donkey he had once seen in what was an unreliable dream, since he could not truly see the colour grey he had seen in the long-ago dream. Yet what was a dream? What was the colour grey? He could make it up, or he could conjure the correct hue of platinum shown to him by an especially espial, acute, high-sensing night-time ghost claiming that whatever he was looking for, was exactly that, an oxymoron, and he did not believe the best-looking donkey in the world for creating a world-class transport conglomerate existed outside of a dream.
This poor old donkey, that had been gifted with the most exquisite coat of platinum in the world, lay prone across the back seat of the Falcon with fear shooting from its eyes, and far too petrified to move. Every primordial instinct in its being knew a couple of certainties: the lesser, that it was not good enough for the task as first donkey that it had never wanted in the first place; and the greater, that wild donkeys were survivalists. The animal barely eats, and at a guess, just lives on its enormous store of memories about the great herd left behind from its former life on the hard-plains country close to the ancestral world.
You do not get much out of kind regards and salutations while being a pet donkey to someone besotted in bridling your life with a dream for saving the world. Such thoughts had made the donkey feel like dying. A panic-prone creature in its inherited memories of man-made fantasy, the donkey had an acute sense that death stood nearby, in any close relationship with a man-made world crisis. The donkey played the game of being nonplussed for a while, while continuing to keep Widespread as the best company on his fantasy journey towards his unreachable horizon, and while being of no use for anything except itself, the donkey’s brown watery eyes scanned every moment of the passing bushland with only one idea on its mind, of choosing the precise moment when it would jump straight through the windshield of Widespread’s vehicle, which he was driving like a racing car on a wash-away desert road filled with bulldust. Deadly! Perhaps. Yet, you would not call this suicidal urge an act of fright, more the passing through one horizon, and into another.
While Widespread continued driving countless hours over the world’s roughest and mostly non-existent roads, to follow his dream to save his culture, his every breath weighed the value of the rare donkey in the back seat of the Falcon in the same way that some would examine a distant galaxy. What could you know for sure about anything? The question he kept asking himself was whether he could afford to release this poor old good-for-nothing donkey in the bush somewhere, without having any alternative idea of how to find its replacement, and while having no plan B for another platinum donkey mask-head to bring good fortune to his visionary conglomeration. Put in a nutshell, the scale heavily weighed against keeping this donkey which in Praiseworthy never really looked like the colour of platinum at all, nowhere near the dream colour that he needed in his industry. Against the glaring light of sun-stoked silver-coloured spinifex, most grey donkeys would appear to be the colour of platinum, but not this one, not even close. His eyesight had been tricked by country. He had never cared to accept this fact, nor that the donkey had done nothing practical to contribute towards proving itself as having any magnificence, such as producing platinum-coloured foals, or a foal at all for a future possibility of striking it lucky. This donkey was devoid of eminence. Why could that be? How could Planet have been so mistaken? It had obviously been a supreme leader of the vast desert herd where he had captured it. Surely it understood the magnificence of the country from where it came, where it was only possible to live close to the ground of ancestral power to become a pure survivalist, excelling by executing visionary ideas. He resented the fact that the donkey had never shown this capacity of dreaming big, nor even to repay for his gesture of kindness in capturing it, to be incorporated into the dream of a lifetime, or many lifetimes, to save humanity. Cause often glanced back at the resentful donkey, and thought that since he would be in the vicinity of the spinifex country where he had captured it, he would release it there—back in the wild.
Only spirit country knew what the old platinum donkey most likely feared from hearing the braying of five million feral donkeys that the scientists of these vast herds of feral animals and toxic plants thought were occupying northern Australia, that if there were any truth in this reality, then the top half of the continent ought to be crawling with donkeys.
Widespread had already driven thousands of kilometres, stolen enormous amounts of petrol siphoned from mines dotted all over this vein-rich mineral-loaded country, or from wherever else he could steal stuff when a back was turned, in order to keep following the coordinates planted in his memory by the mapmakers. The Falcon charged forth, travelled like a zombie on autopilot up and down imaginary grid lines stretching across countless hectares of the spirit-charged country. Dry land. Drought stricken. Land that was supposed to be plagued by feral donkeys. Plenty of bones were seen. Skeletons. The land was littered with donkey carcasses like one big long senseless massacre field. All shot. Bang! Bang! Widespread pointed his index and middle fingers like a gun at the carcasses scattered like shells on a beach, while silently mouthing the sound of a firing bullet.
There was nobody to blame except the mapmakers. Days passed, and the killing field was endless. It would never end. His mind fled from the massacres, but then he became paranoid, beyond reason, unable to turn away, yet still maintaining his course. He kept driving. Up and down. Staring ahead. Searching for donkeys over countless grids that looked the same as the last, and the ones before that. He believed that the mapmakers were conspiring against him. He claimed these people were using drones to follow him through the bush. You don’t believe me? What about those spy satellites he saw passing at night? What do you think they were doing? He complained to the old donkey that the New Age hippie scientists counting feral donkeys did not know what they were talking about. They lived in some donkey dream of their own, counting ghost donkeys in their sleep, misconstruing the facts, just to prevent Aboriginal people like himself from realising true self-determination. They too, like everyone else, were stopping him from building the world’s first massive donkey enterprise of the likes never seen before on this continent, and why not? They wanted people like me to remain pure, stuck back in the stone age, as though the future doesn’t exist for Aboriginal people. The future always existed. We only got here from the time immemorial because we knew about the economics of feeding ourselves. He told the donkey if it had been up to the job, it would have been like donkeys working in India. People making do. Or, like donkeys used by millions of the poorest people of the world for carrying, for transport, for self-reliance on their own terms like they had for centuries, and carrying their culture with them. These New Agers think only about having the right to live in a first-world country. Yea, get that, he laughs, while more or less saying to the less than perfect platinum patchy-fur donkey still pretending to be asleep in the back seat, that a bunch of land thieves had put fucked coordinates into his head, to prevent him from using donkeys to become a multi-millionaire in his own country, a billionaire if he wished it, but hey? What poor Aboriginal man like himself who wanted to be liked in a widespread, planetary way, would be mad enough to have inspirations of pure greed?
A day came when the wholesale esprit de corps of the magnificent-to-the-end-of-the-world souls of Praiseworthy heard something quite out of the ordinary pushing its weight through thin air. It was believed to be a dull pulse from the invisible ancestral colliding with its underneath-country lungs, and they thought that was very strange, and impossible for people like themselves who live the most ordinary lives where nothing great happened, to be caught up in such a sui generis moment. But, never mind they said, charging forth all the same, it was wonderful to hear the mighty ancestors awakened, and moving about in the air, and of course, this was to be expected in the unbraced era of planetary crisis created by humankind in the first place.
Life continued. Boom! Boom! Praiseworthy people said they country and did not mind at all if the ancestral was moving about doing their work, and they tried to sidestep, take a detour whenever detecting the presence of the mountainous huge, to stay out of the way of spirit work. You could live with anything they said, and they felt how nice it was to be listening to the repetitious slow pulse of country’s ancestral heart thumping from sun-up, to sun-down. The old people said it was better to hear the country’s heartbeat calming their nerves at last. The pulse gave them the right sense of being alive, rather than being overwrought traditional owners of land smothered by white colonisers. This was how the faraway droning played out, tolerated at first, from thinking that listening to a mighty ancestral heartbeat pulsing was something you put up with in life, like things that did not matter to the sovereign mind of traditional country, but after many months of hearing what became in the mind an amplified pulse—the greatest spiritual heart beating non-stop that now did not sound like a diamond dove cooing but had instead morphed in the most patient of minds into something else, like the continual sound of a motor car revving, and this was becoming very tiresome, to always be walking in an espial way over many miles to get around the ancestral invisible presence without bumping into it. Something nasty developed in the esprit de corps out of the inconvenience to all. Tolerance itself, once a terrific virtue to gloat about, jumped straight out of the soul and disappeared into thin air. Who knows where human tolerance went when it left? But wholesale tolerance leaving was another matter entirely, when a whole eternity of endurance went out the door, when the old people said they had no tolerance left in their brain anymore, it was all gone, and everyone should go out and look for where their tolerance might be hiding somewhere, maybe behind a stumpy saltbush plant out on the flat, for old people could not be expected to go around looking for tolerance in the haze.
There now seemed to be no sense in having to hear this monotonous monstrous heartbeat of country constantly going boom de the boom. It felt like being tortured with more dumbing down politics of the government, further enslaved, more than an eternal slave of racism, gaoled up by a pulse on their own land. Yet the distant pulse resembling non-stop cooing continued, and even though the young warriors went in search parties across the country and through the sea, tearing the whole thing apart to find where the eternal heartbeat was coming from, they could not find it, and the sound kept worsening until nothing seemed right anymore.
Things were intolerable enough for Praiseworthy people living under a perpetual dome of haze. It was the same as listening to pervasive racism and having no idea where to pin it down, or to find any sense of peace from listening to that malign sound eternally drumming in their ears. What could you do to stop it, except wish it would stop, or tell it to stop, but wishing something to stop, does not mean it would stop. You could feel your heartbeat quickening, beating faster and more rapidly, like a monkey’s heart rate after eating a bag of Queensland sugar. Some said, rather than being a monkey, their own heart rate was more like the ant ancestor constantly moving which, if you were amplifying this sound, would be quicker than a monkey’s, but the whole sense of hearing the increasingly rapid pace of the far-off droning had spawned a fear greater than racism, which was more like heart-attack fear, and the whole place crumbled in a sickness which was dialogised by many old wise people who had flown in from near and far in spiritual travelling, as well as in a jumbo jet. This community malaise they said, was a form of forlornness that came from a deep phobia related to hearing the country’s sick pulse rate, and which in turn created a pathological obsession with many people checking their own pulse rate like they were the flying doctor ordered by the government to go every day to Praiseworthy to check the pulse of every man, woman and child queuing along Church Street.
It was sad to see pretty butterflies fainting all over the plains grass. Grasshoppers grew disoriented and saw the world upside down, by being unable to orientate their reflexes to jump upwards, instead of downwards. You had to push comatose snakes out of the way with a stick while trying to walk miles around the mountainous-sized invisible ancestor. Enough was enough. It felt as though life was near the end. Dance fainted when a rapid-pace thrumming quickened to a frequency that even she, the most tolerant of women, could not tolerate, and she felt nauseous, as though experiencing out-of-control jazz. This had to stop when brains now spun like a wringer rotating in a washing machine. Stuff that, the old people with disoriented brains said. They were finished with being brainwashed, and they tried to escape the sound by grabbing whatever they could to steady themselves, while walking away, and feeling wobbly, then fainting. There were people fainting on the ground all over the place. Look at those poor pretty pussycats, dozens of them that could sleep belly-up through an earthquake, and had now turned into fancy pets, and could do tricks like jumping off the ground with all that thrumming going on in their head. They were crazed-brained cats anyhow, like the dogs, and the cemetery donkeys, all trying to stay airborne, jumping off the pulsing ground. The sun felt harsher. No rest would come at night while so much heat radiated off the ground, and while dreams were about plagues. Some were only gentle plagues like unseasonal screaming locusts worming through the darkness of heat, along with clouds of drowsy mosquitoes that clung to the skin sucking blood until they burst, but others were not.
There was no good time to come from standing somewhere dangerous and getting killed in this place. You had to think quick, to get out of the way when tons of sand lifted off the beach each time the big ancestor spat from motion sickness. Electrical storms brewed, and lingered like sick dogs with sixty thousand lightning strikes over country. The unsettling weather seemed incapable of moving its great weight off Praiseworthy. The whole thing squatted in the sky for months with lightning strikes hitting a church spiral there, there, there in a random chain reaction. You needed to jump out of the way real quick when trees were knocked to the ground wherever you moved, with sand flying like a massive serpent soaring through the sky, then diving around in the turbulences, coming back down, and flying low along the ground, before soaring again, when all of a sudden, the gigantic serpent roared in and out of the haze storm. The country’s old scientists said there was too much static electricity in the atmospheric pressure caused by the pulsing ancestral heartbeat that was driving everyone completely mad with its arrhythmic breathing bursting plenty of eardrums. The bird choirs sang off note while praying for all this stuff to stop.
Nothing stopped, the old wisdom people, the scientists of ancient knowledge, had to go out in the bush themselves with their racing hearts while having to hold on to whatever they could so they were not blown away, to search for the whereabouts of the beat affecting their heartbeat. The funny thing though, no one else around the country who was not a traditional owner of the land, cared if the country was falling apart, so the ancient people had to walk around all day long in the long grass, thrashing it to smithereens with their hunting sticks for all these lazy people too. The grasshoppers had to drag themselves out of the weird summer haziness to swarm into the sky around the thrashers while trying to escape being hit with a stick. The old people’s dogs that had been told to stay on their feet if they knew what was good for them, started disappearing into the bush in search of the thumping sound, but came running back to their owners with their tails between their hind legs, and then refused to stop being the worst thing of all, a clingy belly-up dog. Then, some cats managed to set out in search of the sound which they had mistakenly identified as being the giant lickety-split rats attacking their imagination from the rooftops, or up in the church steeples, or where the rodents had taken over the abandoned sentry posts of the government minding other people’s business. Other cats, the idiot tame ones, were maddened by the sound of rats scampering, pitapat, low-like, and very faintly heard, while being chased by mind-altered feral cats listening to irregular heartbeats in the internal speaker system in their brains. The whole pulse scenario grew worse, and felt more like techno music in the mind. Steel wire strands brushing flick-flack across a kettledrum! But the mysterious thumping did not stop, and there were terrible earaches that made listening no good in the hectic pace of the global emergency, where Praiseworthy had to keep abreast of the political climate for twenty-first millennium people left out in the cold in the rat-race to survive.
Some mothers of the time immemorial who claimed to be more expert in pacifying irritable sounds than anyone else, said the pulsing did not sound either ancestral or human to them at all. It was not a baby crying for instance, for they claimed to have the ability to hear any kind of baby crying in a thousand-kilometre radius, or even three thousand kilometres, and in fact, their hearing was so acute, they heard babies crying anywhere from coast to coast in a circumference of nearly twenty-six thousand kilometres of coastline stretching right around the whole country. These women had the capacity to order children to stop crying, so some of the special mothers who could hear where a big baby was crying, drove their minds right around Australia like racing drivers, and came back in a matter of days defeated. They were unable to find the sound, and said what the old people were already saying, it was coming from the country itself.
Thinking less magical, and more factual, it was easier to slip back into remembering one’s obligations as brethren of any of the umpteen churches in Praiseworthy, where inside these holy places, while the drumming was interrupting the normality of sermons and choirs, Praiseworthy people began to believe the faraway thrumming was revelatory, that it came from heaven, and just perhaps, they were listening to God breathing, and now, no one spoke of the divine country, preferring instead to take an oath of silence about heaven stuff, to better hear the sound of the mysterious breathing holy one, when in total silence, listening to the God breathing in the atmosphere, they could decide if this was a miracle.
In this time of a heavy-breathing atmosphere, another remarkable thing occurred in a string of unnatural events. It was as though the world was throwing everything at the unprecedented stories it wanted to tell, to say it was changing, that a new story was being formed. There was a continuous hatching of ghost moths down in the cemetery. The spirit moths were everywhere. They crawled out of the sandy soil, from under the yellowing hummock grass, and from behind the peeling bark of drought-stricken gum trees. The world of Dance Steel became bedazzled. She clung tighter to her fascinated sense of the marvellous, seeing the haze land covered with fluttering ghosts, the smoke-filled sky becoming a glossy sea of whiteness. The sight overwhelmed her. What was the world saying? The moth-er fainted again and again with the sheer joy of the thing, of being in this space of wonderment, with the pulse continuing to create miracles in episode upon episode of fainting and then of revelation, awakened by the vibrating hum of the night moth’s wings. As soon as something like this happened again, seeing herself even more alive, that she had not after all died, she would pull herself together, and eventually overcame the feeling of dying. She began believing that it was possible to be reborn from the mysterious power of the ancestral moths breathing in the atmosphere. Now she only dreamt of escaping death, and how the power of the moths breathing into the atmosphere that had once caused her to faint on the spot—sometimes on the top of a fallen concrete angel, at other times wrapped in a tangle of solar-power fairy lights—was the strangeness of country itself, that helped her to understand the true glory of her life.
With the realisation that she was on this planet for one thing, to be alive, and that she would endlessly be returned to life, no matter how many times she dropped dead like a moth that had fallen out of the sky, curled in its wings, and died. No. Death would not lie inside a person with a mission, and what was hers? She would never die. At least, not before making sure that only her sons inherited true Native Title over Praiseworthy, and not anyone else. White man’s law electrified her mind. She was alive. Queen of the quest. She might need to be alive for a very long time. She might even be invincible, always alive, always dying and returning to life, heartbeat aligned with the urgency of the atmospheric breath even if it was oblivious to her. Her fainting episodes jumped out of her skin. The routine business of listening to air going in and out of her lungs, just to keep on living though the world’s longest marathon court case to prove her Native Title over Praiseworthy was thrilling enough, though of a known war that was endless to her. She pulled the moth-sweetened pulsing air into her lungs, and like the world’s greatest unconquerable, she was there, alive, just to continue proving her endurance for the impossible feat of proving that each of her forefathers from time immemorial had maintained unbroken occupancy to Praiseworthy through another racist piece of flawed white man’s legislation. A paper structure aimed at non-recognition. A modern-day white man’s law mess that did not recognise its own complicity in genocidal acts to steal a complete country.
While a faint sound seemed to be coming from a long way off, the actual location of the ever-present pulse could not be pinpointed in an instant, not in weeks, or months, or unless a miracle happened, or it would never be found in years to come. The irritating throb never stopped. The mysterious pulse continued beating with what was identifiable as being Buddy Holly’s missing heartbeat, which you would hear in the rhythm—thum thum … a thrum thrum, and this musical sound of heart thumping missing a beat continued from the time you got up and put your thongs on in the morning, until you chucked them off again when you went back to the same bed at night. But even dreams change, and the sound of an eternity of a missing-beat pulse that never stopped, could become a monster so enlarged in the brain that the benign turned toxic, and the toxicity of the missing pulse would keep coming at you while you lay a long time in your bed like a semi-comatose cane toad that had been run over, and in this disturbed state, incapable of untying your tangled-up brain from the knot it made of itself from listening to this axe murderer chopping wood—chump-chumping, and missing a beat for the hell of it. Was this a living hell? Was this ancestral? The ancestral breathing heavier, choking in this polluted mess?
The pulsing sound with its missing beat grew into an even greater mystery, and sometimes, among other scenarios, the pulse felt as though your own heartbeat was out of sync, beating arrhythmically, that there was something wrong with your heart, as if you did not have enough heart. Or else, you felt that you were listening to the vibrating lungs of a fat bronzewing pigeon—Phaps chalcoptera you call it, with its non-stop oom-ing, a mantra in swells and thrums hummed to its disinterested mate while hanging around Praiseworthy, through another long summer of haze. The maddening sound never stopped, not for any tick of the clock. In the sermons under the multi-denominational church steeples, the church leaders shouted down to the sinners from the pulpit, that this cooing was exactly the type of interrogating sound that torturers used to drag up guilty feelings from the pit of the stomach in the middle of the night while they kept torturing, drilling for guilt, and until you were left wretched with the kind of emptiness felt in the middle of the day, and then? Then, you turned to your own true church without going down the street like a traitor, and joining your enemy church by switching the beat into reverse-action guilt, where the whole cycle of being guilty would only swing back to the starting point of existence: your innocence. Bite-sound. The soul tossed like salad.
Praiseworthy people felt tortured about being true believers of one faith. Why not swing around? It was the type of thing that made you feel mad from not knowing where this endless heart pulse skipping a beat was coming from, but that kept amplifying in the brain, which felt like a steel factory with the heavy machinery of your denominational boring drill holes in your head as though it were an underground mine with dumpsters pumping endless loads of raw sewerage into the river, into the country’s heartbeat—and it had to be that, because what else would overtake the pure and glorious chants of the municipal mass choirs, the hallmark sound generally heard over all else in Praiseworthy?
But! The thumping heart had been thrumming from a place that was unimaginably far, far away. This was a place well known to the ancestral world in the windiest corner of one of the loneliest places of all in the Dreaming country—a power place that was dangerous and unloved, abandoned to pollution and decay, where worn grey soil lifted, and permanently floated thinly and useless in the sky, like spirit angels of enormous magnitude blowing their breath in puffs of wind that covered the atmosphere of flat-running ancestral fields with summer-dry thistles mixed with snapped off bits of dry grass, twigs mostly, pollen, fluff, dead spiders and flies, moth wings, pigeon feathers, and not much more. And there, among the soupiness of spirit scorn, the scrawny swallows danced in flight after flies, and minor sparrow birds bopped among grasshoppers, micro-organisms, frayed bits of plastic bags and other waste stuff of the continent’s rubbish swimming amidst the thoughts of the old people back in Praiseworthy, and where strands of fur floated in the atmosphere from all sorts of semi-domesticated and undomesticated animals that were savages all the same, and the grey dirt smelt of donkey piss from a sea of donkeys running cheap and grown more feral in numbers. A changeling prospered in this place. A little boy was sleuthing himself away from his befuddlement from coming to terms with being dropped off by his father in this wreckage of an environment.
You could call this the result of blind political will enacted over several generations against the original inhabitants, accompanying the bewildering act of feral and gross neglect about the way that these first children of the land were being treated even by their own fathers, but in his seriously impacted child’s mind, an enormous furnace hissed and spat fumes like a volcano amidst a high magnitude earthquake where savage camp dogs chasing one another—more than any person could conjure in a string of random thoughts over any lifetime—bowled each other over in dog fights. And above all of this, floated the Minister of Aboriginal Affairs, the middle-aged blonde lady sitting on her office chair swivelling in the sky loaded with dust particles struck by the sun, who the child kept imagining was a golden angel, who in her gleaming yellow wattle suit and golden jewellery, could easily have unleashed through her outstretched hands missiles firing multi-tongues of fire that shot “far out” across the land while singeing feral cats as they wandered the country in plague proportions. The boy went searching through his mind to find his parents who he seriously wanted to kill, and yelling his name was Tommyhawk Steel.
Well! That then, was actually that, thought L’uomo di ferro, the old donkey herder on the other side of the country, as he slipped away in the darkness while thinking about grassfires. His own hair of whiteness, perm-frizzled by hot winds and smoke, bounced this way and that, while he hobbled side-on as he went, and if you watched him departing through the simmering mirage of the heated earth, you would see him moving as though he had been permanently thrown off balance by the inextricable force of a twenty-first century world spinning askew on its axis.
The dumped boy Tommyhawk Steel stands alone in these chopped-up fields, that in their flatness stretch far away against every horizon meeting the sky. Behind him, the only dwelling that rose slightly higher than a donkey, was the herder’s hut. A bare structure that had grown from limbs of ghost gum, and over time, was heaped with damp and rotting sheep skins and goat and donkey skins into a Tower of Babel in praise of living like a wild man. Ahead, the mirage shimmers deceptively over vast distances of flatlands that in the blink of an eye, becomes a shallow lake of great ancestral sacredness, a dangerous watery world stretching across hundreds of kilometres. The boy belts an old rusty forty-four-gallon drum with a stick, flogging the thing senseless on the head of an old flatland ancestral spirit sleeping beneath these lonely plains since the creation era, that preferred to be swayed by thousands of years of silence that was broken only by long-lasting droning ceremonies, the occasional low spurts and dreamlike chirruping of birdsong—the plague of feral pigeons cooing, the squealing of starlings, or the flocks of little diamond doves—or even, to be soothed by braying donkeys pasturing on the grey stubble grasses. But what is that? A land of silence does not care for someone banging monotonously on the side of a rusty drum dumped on its head like a crown, and missing every second beat.
This is how much I hate you. Tommyhawk’s long-lived rage grew wilder. He never got over it, how he had been dumped, and he never stopped thinking about how his father had driven off and left him—months ago, after having actually kidnapped him from where he had been hanging out on the gravelly Praiseworthy airstrip waiting to be rescued by the Australian government from his parents. And then, without saying a single word to the fascist son throughout the long journey across the continent, had abandoned him thousands of miles away, in a place that looked like Mars. He stared at the dry lake’s windswept moonscape, an empty mirage that had remained consistently the same from one monotonous day, to the next. He was ready to kill his father right there with the gidgee stick in his hand—if Cause Man Steel ever came back. The boy’s skin was clammy and hot, even with the coolness of the early morning mist rising from the dry lake. Tommyhawk’s blood boiled. He ripped his filthy t-shirt off, and bare-chested, and with a mind loaded with anger, he continued bashing the empty oil drum, sending secret messages in code to the White Mother with all the strength his bony left arm could muster.
With its eternal rest disturbed, from being rudely interrupted again and again by Tommyhawk’s continuation of his racket, the mighty all times creation spirit whose being was all over this place, moved its enormity from deep inside the sacred country. The land shook, abandoned old beer cans rolled ting, ting, rattling against one another in the dirt rising into dust and heaps of marsupials—Macropodidae and whatnot feral cats and myxomatosis rabbits—jumped out of their holey abodes, and from under any bit of shade where they were resting on the lake bed, while sparrows and swallows leaped from the earth and shot to the skies. The donkey land scattered while leaping off the ground to escape the vibrations of an earthquake that was felt across the continent. The Dreamtime rumbled to life beneath the feet of the boy, and stretched its entire body across the land. But, just as suddenly, the lungs of the mighty ancestral paused, as Tommyhawk missed a beat, then continued rumbling as soon as the kid gathered more rage, and continued belting the drum with the stick.
Tommyhawk was not belting a rusty forty-four-gallon drum for nothing. He knew sound travelled a long way from this important place, and taking stock of what being rattled by an earthquake felt like, and utilising his knowledge about science, the boy thought he was being shaken by a 2.0 disturbance on the Richter scale. He gulped as the sequence of rumblings accumulated into another tremendous shake of the land, and this made him pause while he thought that the land might split open and swallow him before he got a chance to kill his father. Instead of running off in fear of his life, he knew there was nowhere to go. There was no escape, so he immediately started bashing the drum even harder than before.
Inside the land, the old ancestral spirit returned to its silence, perhaps to think, while trying to figure out what was wrong with this boy standing on its being. Perhaps it was calculating the weightlessness of a clan child’s spirit against a fluffy breast feather of an owlet that had just dropped on the ground. This was not—Fin! Fang! Foom! The country’s spirit spoke in its own language in the ancient sounds of the earth, but you knew what country meant when you heard it. The sound was enough. You jumped up immediately, rang the earthquake alarm, and jumped right out of the way for cover. Now, there was something right off skew around this place with the ground continuously rumbling, as though it was keeping up with Tommyhawk’s heart beating as hard as he was beating the drum, and drumming now, with even greater strength. He wanted someone, anyone, to hear him. He wanted to be saved. He wanted his brother Aboriginal Sovereignty to come back from the sea, and save him. The ancestor groaned, feeling the kid’s fear. Knew the real age of this heart. Where it had originally come from. Yep! Traced it. Identified the lot in an instant, just like the old wisdom people of country. So easy for an ancestral being! Pinned that kid Tommyhawk down. Had him pegged. Carrying too much weight on his mind. Some piece of work. A child slewed off course even before the moment he had fallen out of his mother’s womb, and instead of breathing fresh air that contained the fullness of everything of country in which to nurture possibility, he had inhaled weight—the bushfire smoke generating off great summer heat, polluted soot, ash, radioactive waste particles and micro-organisms destroying life in the lands and seas, and the dust haze of extended drought micro-waving through the atmosphere that gave him no time instead of it all.
Sure, there was true country talking in the din that little Tommyhawk Steel was bent on making—continuing his rat-a-tat through the night, the clickitty, clankitty-clank clank all through the next day, like the day before that, and then night again in the land of spirits. He had better watch out with this noise. The creation ancestor of the barren lake shook the big law governors of the creaking ground. It was unbelievable, seeing moonlit cracks widening in the old dry mud lake, while in the flurry, the hovering bosses skirted around the lake, and screamed at one another through the skies. It was hard to decipher what they were saying as the winds swung around and chewed up the dead stubble grass and sent it skywards. Seeing this made it easy to understand that even vapour, spirit ghosts, had more power than a piss-ant government in Canberra debating how to fix dirt-poor Aboriginal people, to keep them poor on their stolen resource rich lands. Old ghosts take it in turns to front up and loom in the skies directly above the boy, to look point blank into his motionless face, and then with worried expressions move aside for there were others behind. There were so many ghosts gathering, they formed low clouds, and mobbed the flatness of this country’s heaven. Their breath fogged up the atmosphere. Mist falls, and settles over the dry, mud-cracked ground, and the shortened stock-chewed grass, animal droppings, a million rabbit holes, and the wetness lay over the backs of about a thousand multicoloured and grey-pelted donkeys stretching yonder to kingdom come over the dry lake.
Where does this bonny kid get so much energy? This was the question, the mysteries added to the low atmosphere rolling with thunder touching the earth, where the ground rumbles with the turmoil of worrying why he doesn’t eat? Why he doesn’t stop belting that drum to eat anything. Why doesn’t he sleep? Maybe this boy is already dead? Huddling ghosts, the total ancestry about this place, have gathered on the land, the closest surround the child, looking at him, trying to figure him out, watching him bashing the drum, shocked to see their faces twisted, perplexed, traumatised, dark with anger, mirrored in his. They blow small gusts of wind in his face, hoping to cool his temper, but the wind gusts are tossed back from his nostrils, and fly off through the stillness to search for answers here, there and everywhere in this place where even strangers have been killed for lingering too long on the dangerous power of country.
A long way away, on a rainy night in Praiseworthy, the moth woman, the moth-er, studies the artistry of the mapmaking in the wing structure of a moth already a ghost paralysed against the glass of a lamp on the kitchen table, as though this creature had been trapped there, tricked by a positive phototaxis into believing in something else—reaching its zenith, already on the moon—and wasted its migration, taken off course from the ancestral map with only one day of life to reach the summit of its existence. Amen. Long thin strands of her grey hair, electrified by the dry storm hanging in the atmosphere of the haze, stand on end. This shimmering silvery mess, easily mistaken for wind in the grass, attracts disoriented moths left, right and centre that flutter around her head to scatter eggs. She sings in a preachy voice, Amazing Grace, taken from the Praiseworthy gospel’s hymn sheet. She is no Aretha Franklin. The moth-er, though, is accustomed to studying her insects, either in the silence of an empty house like this, or to the sound of her own hymn songs, serenading moths in praise of their kingdom to come, but she still heard it, that sound of water leaking somewhere in the cemetery. Either a tap, or there was rust in the water-tank stand. Perhaps donkeys were pissing all night. She hears it drip more loudly on quiet nights like this, but now, she finds it almost impossible to concentrate on moth wings clinging to the glass globe of the lantern while there is a tap dripping arrhythmically into her ear. She cannot tolerate disorder, and wants to correct the rhythm of the drip, to go into the graveyard of deceased people in the middle of the night and fix the thing herself, but she knows that she cannot do this even if the constant out-of-rhythm dripping is taking over her mind. She is the prisoner of the ghosts and trapped inside her house. She would never leave the house at night.
Who cares where the blasted drip was coming from? She tried to concentrate on the lines of moths swimming haphazardly past her eyes, that then fall one by one plop, plop onto her dinner plate, their wings caught in the grease, and she sees others crash over teacups stacked in the sink and float in the dishwater. The more she listens to the perpetual unevenness of the drips falling from somewhere in the cemetery, the more she feels that the kitchen is growing quieter while the moths continue on their flight to the moon, and the only other sounds are the captured moths beating their frantic wings in an attempt to save themselves from drowning in the sink. The sound of the wings belting to stay afloat overtakes the sound of the disjunctive beating of drips hitting the ground from outside the house, and the more the moths fight to save themselves for the few hours left of their lives, the pounding in her ears grows louder, and there is nothing she can do to save a living soul, even from the kitchen sink, when she looks down and sees that the beat is coming from her own heart. She hurries to the sink and tries to stop this toneless rhapsody of wing beating from the drowning moths, that sounds like someone who does not know how to have a proper heartbeat, or know how to belt a drum, but nothing works, neither saving the beating wings of moths, or their silent screams growing louder in her mind.
Tommyhawk does not fit easily with living in this lonely faraway windswept landscape on the other side of the continent, nor does he tire easily for a child that was supposed to be malnourished because he refused to eat, and acts like what was officially described as a deranged Aboriginal child from a dysfunctional homeland community despised by the colonial weight of the country after these lesser black people had the nerve to win their rights back over their traditional land after years of hard graft and decades fighting racism through every court of Australia. He was at the pointy end of staring down the Aboriginal world by casting the spotlight on poorly kids according to the general thinking of the biggest outfit for casting blame in the burgeoning Aboriginal industry, speculating on how all Aboriginal children were sacred, and unloved by their own parents, and wondering how you weigh Aboriginal parents not loving their children like white people loved their children? Deep in the pollution loomed the scales sitting out there in the bare earth-eroded paddock of the lonely brain where self-appointed judges weighed who loved children more than “the other.” A chorus of old people filled everywhere with spirit laughter about this kind of stupidity, which normal people would never hear from the racket of that drum-belting Tommyhawk. The mad troll kid will continue belting that thing out there in the climate, while growing hot as hell, sweaty body, and never hearing his own noise. How was he going to survive?
The old spirit people keep gathering in greater numbers to watch that infernal waste-dumped diesel drum being belted, and tried to distract themselves from the noise echoing across the land. They have examined every single ant now, watching them dart along their ancestral spirit tracks in the dirt, and admired the manoeuvres taken across the hot earth from one clump of grass to the next. They stand directly in front of Tommyhawk, and stare into his eyes, but he looks straight past them. He stares into space, as though his brain had been permanently set on autopilot. They know he was starving himself, but his energy grows stronger, for he beats the drum even more loudly, and they notice that the hordes of donkeys have retreated to the back corner of the lake and with their long ears pinned back on their heads, acting as though they were trapped and cannot escape, they stamped the ground, and kicked up dust, trying to eradicate the noise.
You get back here, you hear me. Tommyhawk screams to the north, across the watery mirage of the lake reaching faraway into a distant flat horizon. He curses this cunt of a father. Hate can cast a long shadow, for it is now travelling across the ground and radiating over vast distances to where the ancestral pushed it back to Praiseworthy, and continues beyond even there on the other side of the continent, where the pulse travels and travels, until it reaches the hidden detention camp where captured boat people were languishing—where Aboriginal Sovereignty dances to the sound of his heartbeat along grids in the exercise yard that map his imagined journeys to Praiseworthy, where no one can pinpoint where this frightening pulse of the land’s heart was beating from. And hate moves further on …
Into this vast sea of grey stubble-grass sameness, the boy frequently scans the landscape to see if his father is returning—that dumb bastard of a father Cause Man Steel—while the drum continues echoing SOS in code. Tommyhawk believes that the sound pounding in his head travels in another direction, to the east, travels interstate, all the way to the nation’s capital—over a thousand kilometres away, all the way to his White Mother in the palace called Parliament House. He could see her walking around her vast mansion—staring at better butterflies than those in Praiseworthy—and he thought that if she had any sense at all—not that she had ever proven to him that she had no sense—she would be able to tell just by hearing him drum, that his SOS would give her world-class spy government the coordinates of where to find him. Occasionally, in tiny gaps of silence when Tommyhawk stops, pauses, brushes the sweat with all the dust picked up by the wind and blown into his face, and his dirt-engrained mop of brown hair falls back across his eyes, he flicks it with the back of his arm, listens, and the more intently he listens to the silence reigning over the landscape towards the lake’s far distant horizons, the more he does not hear a vehicle coming, and the more certain he feels that his father will never return.
When the sun begins to set again in the west, the boy knows that if he keeps staring dead straight ahead into the haze over the flat barrenness, he is going to be fine. North, he must not become disorientated from seeing northwards, yet his eyes travel, and he stares at the back of his father’s neck as he imagines him driving home without him. He willed the vehicle to roll on a straight stretch of lonely road. If he wishes his father to be killed in the rolling Falcon in a place where the out-of-control spinning vehicle will land, far off the road behind three-metre-high spinifex plains where he will never be found, he must keep looking north, to find his father heading home on the lonely road, because his own life depended on it. Will he give his father one last chance to turn around and come back to pick him up? He had not taken his eyes off this empty space for weeks now, then it will be months of seeing further, far beyond the donkey herds permanently stationed in the corner of the north fields to stay away from him. The north he sees does not include the sight of donkeys which have made tracks running off one another and over the lake bed in every direction. It is a total maze that becomes thicker each time his eyes blink, or whenever he brushes sweat off his face and squints to see further than the mirages shimmering in the stark sunlight. All that he knows is that he must navigate his sight through the maze of donkey tracks, and concentrate even harder on a single imaginary line which he now only thinks is the tracks of where his father was heading the day he left, but now, in this timeless forever, he returns to the maze of donkey tracks that appear to be covering the ground more thickly in a tangle of sun-glistened cobweb lines, and while Tommyhawk’s mind becomes less focused, and absorbed into the tangle laid out before him, he becomes convinced that his father is the one lost, and he is not sure if he is looking at the right track in his imagination anymore.
All the lines know that Tommyhawk will never look to the south for refuge.
If you come from the north, look north, or you might become lost to the spirit winds singing through the she-oak forests where the ghost moths live.
When Tommyhawk’s mongrel father had left him with the local Aboriginal donkey herder who called himself L’uomo di ferro, he had not hung around long. Widespread had driven day and night to get across the continent as quickly as he could to palm off Tommyhawk forever, and then he stood in the dust just long enough to get his business over and done with about dumping his fascist kid with the hermit, while mumbling about how the government was training Aboriginal children to kill their culture, and all the while looking elsewhere, fleetingly casting an eye over thousands of donkeys nuzzling dust to get their tongue around some tangled-up desiccated spirit grass root, tasting as sour as this over-pastoralised worn-out country itself. That’s all I’ve got for sale, the herder growled. He did not speak much while looking at the kid. He would argue about the liability later on with his shadow. Cause said he did not want any donkeys anyway, although he never said that there was not one in these thousands of donkeys worth a second glace, since none had the right colour for a transport conglomeration, and then he left. Drove off. Hit the dust hard straight across the centre of the dry lake. Left bulldust rising off the ground at the rate of a hundred miles an hour, and forming grey clouds drifting high in the sky. All that took less than ten minutes. Arrived, did his business, and just drove off as he would whenever he left Praiseworthy, without bothering to think if anyone else was coming, or staying, or saying goodbye. Dumped the kid, and left. You could see the Falcon become a dot in the distance, and disappearing altogether.
The old hermit, his shadow’s talker, often walked past the fascist kid while adoring the beauty of his donkeys, and he thought to himself—fair enough, the coloured kid could bash drums forever if he liked. He had probably bashed a few drums himself in his life for whatever worth it was, about nothing in the end. Ya skin gets tough, he might have mumbled. Could make a drum out of it myself. You learn this.
L’uomo di ferro casually looked in the direction of where the little fascist was staring across country, and saw neither rainbows, nor clouds, nor a chance of rain. All he saw was that Tommyhawk followed with his eyes, the increasing distance, the greater miles of travelling his father was putting between them. Real sad stuff. Tough on the kid though. At least he was not left with some little cry-baby. The old man sees what he knows, that the donkey tracks crisscross through miles of dense thorny brambles as tall as a man—that it grows thicker in the imagination each time you take a really hard look at the impracticality of cutting through it, to take a short-cut across this type of country. He knows this himself, knows how your mind can play many tricks on you when you try to follow any of these tracks through the escalating growth that looks deceptive, looks like dry stubble grass until you try to go through it. He knows what it feels like to be caught in the tow of its undergrowth which strangely, exponentially expands and covers all roads identically, until there is no road, no more maze of donkey tracks and you can neither go forward, nor backward, for in the scheme of this geography, his place easily becomes non-existent, his life is blotted out. He knows how you could drown in the endlessness of thinking about being lost, of suffocating underneath the groaning of this network of giant brambles changing its shape, deceptive, calling you to take the crossing across stubble grass, and it would be too late when you realised that this country was something more supernatural, like a wild spirit twisting you into tighter knots, for it does not want you on this country, strangling itself together to keep you out of its reach. He knew this was where the kid watched, this was what he saw, even willing his father’s car to be squashed to a pulp and perhaps it had been, as he continues to drive blindly though its endless thorny thickets without sensing the danger that lurked so close to him, until it was too late, and the hermit wondered if the father would die without a thought for the son he had abandoned.
The thrill-maker in Tommyhawk’s imagination was growing more murderous in one bang after another booming through the entire ancestral lines of the continent. All this went on one day after another, while he beats the drum harder through a pandemonium he sees in the oblivion of noise and blood spurting from the car in all directions, like it was shooting from a public fountain in a city such as Florence, where blood replaces water dripping from the thorns, and although the whole nasty spectacle makes him feel disorientated, and he feels dizzy from the sight of so much blood, still he refuses to stop looking ahead no matter what he imagines, refuses to stop beating the drum, and will not look at the emptiness behind him, because he has decided that he will not have anything to do with ghosts of the south. And, because he did not know what a ghost from the south looked like, who was he to believe that L’uomo di ferro was not a southern ghost, or what those donkeys were that were covered in grey dust, or what kind of spirit place he was in. All this, he instinctively knew, was a ghost land.
This could not go on. One day, Tommyhawk removed his wandering mind from its imagining, and he did this by continually reassuring himself that if he could only concentrate on what he really needed to see, if he kept looking north to save himself, then he would be okay, and by this he meant that he would keep faith alive by convincing himself that he will catch up with his father to kill him. But still this is hard work, since his mind cannot stop imagining the Falcon rolling over and squashing his father alive. He slams the drum with renewed strength—I hope you rot in hell—even while he hopes his father will come back as soon as possible and take him home so he can escape to his White Goddess Mother and live in the white palace of Parliament House in Canberra.
Even though there was nothing to see—neither spirits of animals changing pastures, nor a killing land—the sight of it created a stockpile of exploding imaginary mounds here, there and everywhere that could be flora or fauna seen as a mysterious landscape of storms in the mind of Tommyhawk Steel. The White Mother does not swivel on her office chair in this sky. He never sees her anymore. What he sees, mostly, are his own hard questions wrapping around his imagination for flight, that only tighten, render immobile, a stiffness that feels so suffocating while he belts the oil drum, he scarcely breathes. What could you do with any total disaster? The boy still wants to escape when his mind wanders off sometimes, but he is scarcely able to find a way to his former dreams, those old stunted mounds that have refused to grow higher, that explode as soon as they are touched. Sometimes he feels as though he is just in a bad dream, but soon enough, all the exploding bits of reality shatter in free air, then reassemble, and he realises over and over that the fantasy is real, and this was nowhere where he should be on his life’s journey to happiness. He can no longer think of how any of this shit happened to him, or how he had been ripped off like this by his father, before his mind finds another banger to explode in his anger. Listen! This one is a double banger that sounds like it had exploded in a drum of gun powder, and all that was left in its wake of skyrockets shooting with long tails of crackling light was the dream smoke rising in the air that smelled of crackers and the singed fur of donkeys.
Sometimes in this possessed state of mind of wanting to kill everything, when he staggers through the heat of the day, or when he is unable to pull himself away from his addictive drumming through each night, Tommyhawk would ask himself the same question from every possible angle, about how he could have once been clever enough to read the sick circumstances of his life as plain as day, to plan his murderous trail into a dream life, yet then be tricked into giving it all up. What went wrong? He knows what any child knows, that it is the clever people who are not destined to end up in hell. They plan their lives by knowing how to latch onto all the good people, who were the most powerful people, like the people who ruled the country. He tried to retrace his thinking from ages ago when his child’s mind was younger, to when he could jump straight into the moment where he had let his naïve guard down, the needy ice cream moment, a stupid desire that was not even worth it, but had ended up killing his vision of heaven on Earth, knowing that if he could go back in time he would and he would remain there to keep murdering that moment forever.
They left Praiseworthy together in the Falcon with that old donkey in the back seat. Perhaps the boy already knew the deal. The deal or no deal. If he had thought about it, he would have known that he would have to be exchanged for a donkey on the other side of the continent, otherwise, why would his father have bothered taking him on one of his journeys? Then, who would have known that when they had arrived in this backwater, his father said the old herder’s donkeys were too scrappy, and left him for nothing, gave his own son away for free. Just drove off. How could you allow something like that to happen to you? Tommyhawk had felt like punching himself in the head a thousand times for being so stupid, of not trusting the White Mother to save him. He could have waited just a little bit longer because the White Lady Mother of all Aboriginal children would have turned up in the end, and saved him from the police tracking for murderers. Any smart police would have said they could see his guilty look all over his face and known how he had tricked Aboriginal Sovereignty to commit suicide. Tricked all the other kids too, didn’t you? They would trick him into saying all their names. He tried not to think about how she might have sent her own personal Parliament House plane up to Praiseworthy to save him, and found he never existed, that she had wasted the government’s super jet fuel on nothing. Had she thought he was not interested in her adopting him anymore? But surely, no one need think of what could have been, of what it would have felt like if you were not adopted by the White Mother that represented what was right in Australia, and so he did not think of what could have been, if he had stayed at the airstrip for say, another five minutes, waited just a little bit longer, but a child does not really understand the workings of luck, who gets lucky for instance, or lucky enough to know when a federal government number one air force plane would arrive to rescue an Aboriginal child, to whisk him off his feet, and fly him to the White Palace in the capital of Australia, where he could now be living as the Golden Hair Lady’s adopted son. The dream was lost, unreachable, for luck was just like catching a butterfly, or being rocketed to heaven—in fact, Tommyhawk wondered which part of the universe was heaven, and how you would find enough money for the flight if you were not a millionaire? All these dreams, so many thoughts about possibility, were only good enough for what? Mostly his mind was far too busy to be thinking about paradise lost. He had no time for wishful thinking about being a cute Aboriginal child of the White Mother of all Aboriginal children living in the White House in Canberra. Being in his reality, you could see he was not keeping up with the piles of lethal thoughts he had jumping all over the place in his head, escaping from the hidden box marked fireworks, next to broken imaginings, next to fumes, or the one marked ash-coated donkeys, or what was for murdering, and other such boxes stored in the back of his head. No matter, he would keep the main box, the biggest burgeoning colossal mountainous treasure trunk locked there forever if he had to, and drag it out when he saw his father again.
Look! Who cared where that kid Tommyhawk was in the world’s problematic meltdown times, when all anyone could see was smoke rising tempo di menuetto in the atmosphere, and eventually after circumnavigating the world many times, evaporating in outer space? The whole land had become a very dangerous place in which to live, and you could not just pick up sticks whenever you felt like it, light a little fire, and let it go up in flames anywhere you liked as though you owned the place, as if you were some kind of sovereign-class citizen for the lot. When it got down to being on your own like Tommyhawk, either you thought about how the wicked father felt freaked, or he didn’t, when he just shot off like fast freight with his dumb old platinum donkey, and had not cared less about dumping his kid with a stranger in a hellhole.
Tommyhawk senses only danger in this brittle grey country’s hours of quietness, when a day wears itself out, and there is only the slightest change in the weather. Sometimes, he is surprised when an infrequent breeze gently sneaks up behind him and touches his skin with its finger. His immediate reaction is to think that someone is there, and initially, he feels that it is his father standing behind him, but he never turns around to see who it is, never reacts in haste, because he knows he must carefully plan the killing of his father.
Whenever the land feels offended in all points of its compass, its mood is altered, changed to no good. Perhaps when this happened, it had felt offended by man-made interferences with the atmosphere, or any sort of thing that wrecked its home like rubbish being left everywhere and other depredatory human activities, or perhaps, the country does not like hearing a perpetual arrhythmic heartbeat, something that feels unnatural. Gusts of wind travel swiftly over the grass from faraway places of who knows where and of which country’s powers will strike Tommyhawk, but he will never look away from his thoughts. He never loses sight of the north even when clouds roll like monstrous ancestral spirits, and sooner or later, he would again be soaked with the muddy mist which covers the land. But the sun soon dries the dampness and returns the dust haze that becomes airborne through the slightest movement of a breeze, or the trampling of donkeys over the ground. Sometimes country crawls along the ground in places like this, and reaches up and grabs strangers to shake their brains loose, but the boy has hate-fists. Fists curled tight. He is in the groove with the strength of this place, with fists that stay clenched while he beats the oil drum. He pulled the filthy sweat-sodden t-shirt over his head. Threw it to the ground. His father’s face frozen solid under his darkened sunburnt face, and he thrashes the drum, and screams. I will fight you. The drum rolls. I can’t wait to kill you off. He was now covered in dirt. Sweaty hands. There was no difference between him and the ground. His blood boils. He looked like the old man that he might one day become.
The visibility of vast flat places disorients, and has the capacity to create a natural prison. The sun sinks quickly over these plains to entomb it in the darkness of heavy rolling clouds that frequently cross the night ground of the barren lake. Sometimes there is no moonlight at all, and not much visibility in the haze even during daylight, when the land becomes covered with hard fog. Wild winds come at other times to stir up blinding dust storms and Tommyhawk feels that another world has risen up from the dust and come alive, to bring back the stories of long-ago old people he sees over the lake covered in ash, and who are leading thousands of ash-coated spirit donkeys through an unseen landscape. He feels their slow movement of crossing the featureless lake, as he can see the endless parades that part to go around him, but the enormity of their presence touched him, and he felt as though the wind was trying to take his mind away, and was pulling him into these crossings of the spirits. He does not know where these winds go, but he feared his destination, of being inside the unknown, of becoming lost forever. Nobody should stand on sanctified ground where they do not belong, but this was just country to a fascist boy of Parliament House dreaming, even though he does believe in one thing, that he does not belong to the profound grief he feels in this place. If it was grief that this country wanted from him, there was no sorrow in his soul for this ghost country.
Tommyhawk beats the drum harder until the wind disappears into the darkness with the plethora of ash-coated ghost donkeys, tails dancing a cachucha while running off, and disappearing from sight on the surface of the dry lake covering these old lands governed by powerful atmospheric ancestral spirits. But he knew that even though he was trapped in this land prison, and confined inside of spirit country while waiting for the dumb dumper to return, that the sound of the beating drum would travel exponentially through space, through ghosts coloured grey, and into the consciousness of the guilty White Mother patron saint of Aboriginal children who had not answered any of the mobile calls that he had made to her. If Tommyhawk was anything, he was a law-and-order man. Had it all figured. While he beat the drum, he listened to the sound waves belting its arrhythmical pulse—travelling through open space that bewilders and bamboozles the spirits of country from knowing what was going on—spits the revolting sound off into the breeze, into the gale force winds, cyclonic storms, sixty thousand lightning strikes and thunderstorms, through unprecedented El Niño bushfires, global-warming droughts, then ten La Niña floods of inland sea proportions, all bouncing from the thrashing drumbeats, from off satellites, to his father—wherever you are—as the sound continues along highways, bitumen, and bulldust-clogged and washaway roads, hatching fish eggs that had fallen from the skies on moth wings, grasshoppers, sheep’s backs, rats, spiders, the drumming charging his mobile phone, iPad and MacBook with flat batteries, and through the sky on the wings of migratory birds, or supersonic jets beyond the reach of the sound—doesn’t matter—and travelling to its final destination from either the A1, or A20, B72, and B23, or B32, or the A25, to waft into Parliament House like swallows, or dark matter, delivered by a Swan Lake ballerina into the ears of the blonde-hair lady sitting in her office chair that swivels in the blue-sky dreaming of Canberra where all saints hover. Could he make enough noise for the whole world to hear his message? Listen! Clear as bells: I tell her what you are really like, you are nothing but a dog—wait and see—the police will get you, they always get people like you. I will tell them how you abuse your children. I hate you. You should be locked up, you arsehole. He wants to make his stupid father come back. Then I am going to get you.
So even if Tommyhawk remained imprisoned for an eternity, he would be king of a once-in-a-lifetime great escape that only a handful of the most exceptional people in the whole of humanity could ever dream of achieving, which would be almost like a time when whales walked on dry land and slept in your bed—imaginary things like that which you would call a bad miracle, or good miracles through one way or another of believing above all adversity created from the beliefs of others, that this little Aboriginal child from the bush, would or would not become a multi-millionaire dropkick like powerful white people.
That autopilot kid should have been called cancelled at birth.
The donkey herder wants the dumped kid off the place.
All! Clickitty! Clankitty! Day and night. Clankitty—clank! SOS-ing his coordinates, so he says, like he knows where he is, and yelling his name was Tommyhawk Steel. Good luck with that! I suppose I could have told him—look at this place. Do you really think anyone can hear anything coming from here? Echoing long distance that’s what he reckons. What echoes? I don’t hear any echoes I tell the genius. You could bomb the place and nobody would know. It doesn’t exit. I tell him to his face that he is a prize fool just like his father. He had plenty of donkeys to look at here instead of wasting my time. I saw him standing there. Glaring, getting an eyeful. All full of disgust like he never smelt stench before. What do you expect with hundreds of donkeys hee-hawing at the fence, begging to be picked? Take me! Take me! Even that kid had about zero interest in looking at donkeys, and his father going on in his head: I don’t know which one? Maybe that one. No, I think I better take that one. I don’t know. Calls himself a donkey man—he doesn’t know the arse end of a donkey. I gave that idiot at least a thousand donkeys here to choose from that all looked the bloody same to me, and I take it, of course it was a hard decision—not about leaving his idiot son behind—can see why nobody would want a rattlesnake like that. I am the prize fool for agreeing to keep him here. Haven’t slept a wink since with an axe murderer running about the place, but of course it is hard to choose a good donkey. Like that big grey-pelage jenny over there. She’s full of class, can’t get better with the right kind of white gaze above its nostrils, long eyelashes around its dark eyes below that tatty Rastafarian fringe—can’t help that. It’s an infestation of prickles here. Knots in its ears! People get too spoiled for choice. Too specialised. What’s a particular colour, going on about this colour, or that colour like he’s colourblind, and can’t see straight. But anyhow, how was he going to cart a donkey back in the type of vehicle he has with him? Where the boy sat probably. It did not even occur to that dumb kid that there would be no room in the car for him on the return journey.
The donkey herder decided that he felt out of place in his own home, and had to leave. He left, on foot, in the dead of night. He skirts in a wide radius around the belted drum, moving in a north-westerly direction, to avoid the boy staring north, whom he believed was too spaced out, and would not have noticed him leaving anyhow. The herder was, he believed, the only human being alive who knew the ancient knowledge for navigating across the now flooded muddy lake in the wintertime. This was a treacherous journey of spirits working on the surface of dangerous undertows, whirlpools and hidden crevices that exist beneath these grey waters, and could drown him if he was not careful. The old man relished hard country travels that were loaded with traps that threatened to imprison him, until the waters dry off in summer to expose his skeleton with what would look like his mouth gasping for its last breath. In this enclosed world of deadly threats devoid of a saviour, he slowly navigates by memory through kilometres of waist-high waters, for he wished only to be where the name of Tommyhawk Steel was neither recognised, nor wanted. Yet the pulse reaches everywhere, and the waters have grown choppy in the wind gusts, and the storms come with horizontal rain that creates sprays from the flapping grey waves that heap together into a tsunami of roaring tidal-like waves that, all together, drown the ringing sound resounding everywhere in this ancestral holy space.
Days before he left, the herder had given the boy a chance to go mustering for donkeys with him, mentioned the idea, but he had refused. He had too much SOS texting to do.
Might be gone a week, or two, don’t know. The old man realised that he had never really thought about his sudden urge to count roaming feral donkeys on the ancestral lake at high-water mark in the middle of winter. Except? Well! It was just a niggling thought he had that he could not shake off, of not being sure whether Widespread had stolen his prized jenny, since he had not seen it around lately. It was a vast lake which stretched for hundreds of kilometres of isolation in every direction you looked, and the beauty of it was that you saw nothing except the spectacularly amazing changes of its hues, the multiple shades of greyness that remained the same through season after season, where in the sameness of the windswept stumpy grey vegetation, the same colour as marsupial mice, rabbits, and lizards, it would not matter too much if he stayed for days on end mustering thousands of his feral donkeys through the watery lake to find the missing jenny, but he told the boy if he died out there, nobody who tried walking off around this place by himself would find his body, not in a dozen winters, or summers.
Maybe it will take the police or somebody like that six or seven months to find a little fellow like you. Ya will be just a bit of grey skin, parched from the sun like a kangaroo hide.
Then he chucked the boy some bullets. The rifle fell in the dirt.
Fend for yourself. Kill something, if you want to eat.
Synemon wulwulam. You would find all nature of Latin names for the continent’s endemic moths and butterflies while flicking through the shelves of the national libraries, encyclopedias, dictionaries, ABC news, social media, text messages, and whatever else was stored and archived in neat rows of boxes in Tommyhawk’s head. In his urgency to find clues for navigating a safe route across the freaky lake before the crumbling platform of his mind altered irreversibly and fell apart, he began in an odd place, searching through the complete catalogue of the country’s diurnal and nocturnal moths, and all was going well, until his mind was struck with another setback, and his tongue became twisted and got struck dumb on a chord, for no way in the world could he get his tongue around the musical sound of Synemon wulwulam, and the name of this moth remained locked in his head, stuck in a groove, paralysing his mind, as though the moth itself had terminated the moth count by conquering Tommyhawk’s mind, and like a conqueror, was insisting its Latin name be repeated. Say it! Say it! Synemon wulwulam, while forsaking its own sovereign name which was unknown in Tommyhawk’s assimilated head for Latin names. Tommyhawk searched high and low to find where the Latin name had stubbornly attached itself inside his head, and how it had boarded up all the pathways in his brain world of home knowledge. He could not find the moth’s real name to dislodge it from his head, and the creature’s scaly shale-like greyness blurred his vision of how things should be, for he could not see the wished-for neon-lit A1 highway escape route through the monotonised greyness across this endless expanse of country, not while the colouring of Synemon wulwulam preferred not to be elsewhere, making a job of itself trying to cut a path for the mad boy through fifty-three point one degrees Celsius sitting across the vast surface of the lake, while caught in the updraughts of the air currents racing in the opposite direction.
Night moths wrote maps of journeying in the air as they flew through the canopies of stilled landscape. Sometimes, their stories were the waltz of mysteries that reached far away in the sea, gathered along the seawater lapping on the beach, or in flights further along the beach to the whale bone palace, broken wings falling through the flowering mangroves, down the streets of Praiseworthy, to the cemetery. Dance, the lepidoptera woman, was gone. Disappeared. Almost as though she had flown away with the moths one night, and left only the sweet smell of moths and butterflies that had feasted on gum-blossom lingering through the house.
In a world that does not change, the stories of all times continued to be told, and were serenading though the winds, and in the stillness across country, their fulness in truthfulness, never forgotten.
And also, in the airways these days, many static stories.
Put me through to the Minister. She knows me. She is my real mother.
What? The Minister for Aboriginal Affairs? Where did you get this number from?
The army gave a cup to us. It’s got the hotline number on it. If Aboriginal children are being abused—then call this number. Well! I am an abused child, I’m Aboriginal, so come and get me. I want to live in Parliament House you dog.