One afternoon, as I made my way down the familiar track, I saw that Mr Dawes had visitors, a group of native women and their children, with one or two men, sitting around a fire outside the hut, Mr Dawes among them. I hesitated, but one of the children saw me and called over to the adults, so all faces turned to me and I had no choice but to continue down the hill. Mr Dawes got up and came to meet me.
– Allow me to introduce my friends of the Sydney people, he said.
He went around the circle like any gentleman in a drawing room.
– Werong. Milbah. Patyegarang. Baringaroo. Daringa.
Each name was a burry blur of sound to me but he saw my difficulty, repeating each name and making me say it after him until I had it. Once you made the little effort to hear them properly, the names were as straightforward as James or Mary Ann.
Then he said a sentence I did not understand, but I caught my own name in the middle of it: Mrs Macarthur. Through the ears of the people listening, I heard it as if for the first time, a set of sounds considerably more complicated than Werong or Daringa.
The men, strong, upright, enclosed, acknowledged me by a look somewhere to the side of me. They were not unfriendly, but they were not especially welcoming either. They cared nothing for chat, for social smiles, for cheerful prattle. They were not concerned to take an interest or put anyone at their ease. There was a weighty power about them, an authority that seemed to come not from the weapons that lay beside them, but from some assured world of knowledge they lived within. They reminded me of no one more than my grandfather, that man heavy with his faith, who lived always under the shadow of eternity.
The women did not exactly look at me, either, but there was a sense that I was greeted. They had found my attempts to say their names hugely amusing, that was obvious, while my own came easily to them. They spoke to each other and laughed, very clearly about me, but there was a subtle shifting of bodies that felt like an invitation to sit beside them on the clean dust. I was pleased to accept, but was unused to it and awkward, my legs and skirt tangling so that becoming a part of the group was something of a business.
Beyond their names and mine, exchanged between us as a token of all we might have liked to say, we fell back on the language of the body. I found myself paying attention to Mr Dawes’ visitors in a new way, as if my skin, rather than my ears, was listening to them.
Daringa showed me her baby, wrapped in that soft powdery bark that looked so much like paper. Admiration of a baby is one of those things for which no language is needed. I peeped at the child’s face in among its strange but effective blanket, stroked a cheek, said the praises that are usual to please a mother.
Daringa laid the child gently down on the ground and unwrapped her so I could further admire. The babe lay solemnly staring, her fists gesturing, her thighs strong, the woman already in the making. Daringa’s long shiny fingers smoothed the baby’s body as if the feel of that soft skin was an irresistible pleasure. She was a queen to this princess, her hands firm and sure, authority and love together.
No one ever talked about our sable sisters. And yet Daringa, a mother like myself, alive with love for her child, dandling her babe as I had dandled mine, the babe chuckling up at her just as Edward, for all his sickliness, had chuckled up at me—Daringa was surely as much a sister to me as any woman I had known.
But this was the woman whose people, I had been solemnly assured, ate their babes. The conviction passed from mouth to mouth, and no one ever asked, How do you know? A few guesses could become an entire story that, once in place, was as watertight as a barrel. Falsehood could travel around the world in a barrel like that, and down into the future, without ever springing a leak.
When the women talked to each other and to Mr Dawes, their speech was a rounded liquid flow of words with none of the jerkiness of English, and with a different cadence, the words starting firm and easing away as if not to insist. It was hard to imagine a scolding in such a tongue. Mr Dawes’ questions were slow and laborious. Still, the women understood and replied. He had a little blue notebook and a pencil, and made jottings as they spoke, but although he was clearly trying to learn the language, what was happening remained a conversation.
When the baby had been sufficiently admired and wrapped again in her shawl of bark, and Mr Dawes had written down enough words, the women got up, called to the children, and slowly made their way around the slope of the headland towards the next cove. The men were already gone, so quietly I had not seen them walk away. From my own society I guessed that they believed men had business with each other, and women were not part of that.
– As you saw, my friends here are good enough to be sharing some of their language with me, Mr Dawes said. Most remarkably, the language is inflected! Exactly as Greek is!
Inflected, I thought. What in heaven’s name is inflected? And why might it be so remarkable?
– You think you will remember the words as you hear them, Mr Dawes said. But you will forget. Or you will think you heard something easier, something that seems familiar.
He riffled through the pages of the notebook, so eager for me to see everything at once that I saw nothing.
– Slow, Mr Dawes, I said. Let me look!
Some pages were headed with a letter of the alphabet and ruled up in two columns containing pairs of words: Karingal—Hard, difficult to break. Karamanye—the stomach ache. Korrokoitbe—to swallow. On other pages there was a verb, and below was the mostly empty shell of its parts. To see—Naa. I see—Ngia Ni. Thou see’st. He sees. We see. Ye see. They see.
– I thought it would be no more difficult a matter than filling the blanks, he said. Such was my presumption. Now my method, if you can call it that, is different. You see here, an exchange between myself and the child Patyegarang. Transcribed as I heard it. What I said, what she said. So that I might take in the living body of the language rather than a fingernail or earlobe, and hope for understanding to come in its own time.
Patyegarang had been part of the circle of women, a child on the threshold of womanhood. He told me that, in spite of every obvious difference, she reminded him of his younger sister.
– Patyegarang has my sister’s quickness of mind, he said. And her bright humour, her curiosity. I feel almost as if I have Anne’s company here, when I speak with Patyegarang.
He pressed his lips together in a grimace of regret.
– My sister would make a good astronomer, he said. But she will have to marry.
I had nothing to console him with. I knew the scant possibilities of happiness for a woman who would make a good astronomer, but whose acquaintance with the stars would never go beyond walking out into her yard and looking up only until the husband and children in the house needed her.