The Fishman had decided to leave town about the same time Norm had taken to the sea. The convoy, with its noisy exhaust pipes spewing black fumes, drove like a long black snake through the storm-darkened town. More white crosses had been hand-wiped over the muddied cars. The Fishman told Angel he was leaving. He said he wanted to beat the clouds gathering, before the Wet had properly settled itself over the plains again. He drove around the outskirts of Desperance, signalling his convoy to set forth, with a bony arm swinging assuredly, as each car drove off. Then, using a finger sign and a face of total concentration, he instructed, ‘Head south.’
Fishman still tried to understand the foreboding that refused to leave his mind since he had arrived in Desperance, but the more he thought it over, the answer kept escaping him. ‘Time to move on,’ he told Angel again. ‘Before the devils catch up.’ He hated the illusionary world particularly in Desperance, which was tied to his childhood. He felt as frightened as anyone else of seeing spirits wherever he looked. Where others saw their shadow, Mozzie saw dark spirits following people around. They were inside every house, listening to conversations, remarking like gossips if they believed this or that was right. He watched them putting words into the mouths of the living. He knew out on the road, it was hard for spirits to keep up when vehicles travelled faster than a person could run, and in the convoy, there were too many people around talking among themselves, and drowning out the little voices of their consciences playing around with peoples lives. In any case, Mozzie preferred to dwell in the mystery of people, even if he got them wrong occasionally.
In the end, he drew strength from a narrow point of view, where, even if it were possible, there was nothing to be gained from penetrating the cloudy wall into his depressed state of mind to find hidden messages. There would be no time to catch up with old friends like Norm Phantom, Mozzie smiled as his mind captured the maker of silver fish, labouring over his work bench. ‘Oh! He is the real fisherman.’ He sat back in the car travelling down the south road, thinking of Norm travelling the seas of oceans.
Ah! The good life. Mozzie worried more for Will Phantom. He had fretted for Will. What was he up to? After he had disappeared at the lagoon, he had not seen him again in Desperance. He thought Will must have heard about the mine men, the ones from the big powerful mining company, Gurfurritt International. Everyone knew they were out searching the area for the body his convoy had seen on their way up to Desperance. Angel said that Will would be around. She heard from the girls, that they had to keep Truthful from finding Elias’s body in the fishroom.
This was all becoming too close, Fishman thought, and he told Angel this. He knew if he stayed the feeling pricking his heart so deeply would not leave until something went wrong. He remembered how on the road, he had begged Will to stay away. Knowing that it would be at least two years before the convoy’s return was why Mozzie had taken him away in the first place. At the time, Will was lucky to get out of the place.
The whole world had turned upside down two years ago when Will Phantom had blocked Gurfurritt’s pipeline in a dozen different places along the 150-kilometre stretch, when it was being built to carry the ore from the mine to the coastline. Rest on your head Desperance! There were insinuators. It had taken some investigation on the state of the art pipeline to establish the method of sabotage. At first it appeared that the pipe was self-exploding across the plains of spinifex. It seemed the pressure of ore travelling down the pipe to the coast needed to be adjusted, then readjusted.
Sweating engineers cursed each other’s incompetence each time the thing burst, and they were sent out in the hostile midsummer heatwaves, to do the backbreaking work to fix the darn thing. It was a nightmare to suspect that a thirty million dollar pipeline had been constructed of the wrong material. What went wrong with the grando plano? It was a good question with no answer. Oh! Yes! The Fishman convoy had been lucky to get Will Phantom out of town alive. Security was running mad. No one had seen the likes of it before. Every exit point had been heavily guarded.
When the big miner threatened to withdraw, halting further building of the mine, the town watched as its population increased by one hundred per cent. The State Premier ordered a squadron of police to be flown in from the state’s capital down South to help search for Will Phantom. There were dozens of pot-bellied police stationed in plastic chairs at all of the river crossings. When the religious convoy had reached the crossing of the wide, tide-surging Normal river on the edge of town, Mozzie Fishman saw what they would have to confront to cross the bridge.
He studied the rifles first, and behind the rifles, the set faces of dozens of police officers, uniformed and plain-dressed, lined up on the other side of the bridge. Further back, police cars were swung across the road as a roadblock, ready and waiting. When the convoy started to cross the bridge, for it was already too late to turn around, the uniformed police came forward with the German shepherds. Mozzie saw the dogs panting for a drink of water, and very quietly, sent word back through the cars: ‘It is nothing. Be brave. The dogs are just a threat. Everything will be searched. Pretend it’s nothing.’
It did not pay to protest when the police made the occupants of the unregistered cars push their vehicles over the side into the flooding river. The ones who did, if they had been observant, would have just been fast enough to see the slight tug of the handler’s lead, a signal, before the dog lunged. Then, knocked to the ground and savaged, they crawled on their stomachs to slip over the side of the bridge. Well! When they clung onto the wooden planks – as thick as railway sleepers, simply hanging there, suspended over the swollen body of the brown snake ripping along at a tremendous speed below on its way to the sea, they might have heard laughter, and for brief moments felt the sensation of shock at the incongruous misplacement of mirth with fear. Then, with the sounds of savage snarling dogs ringing through their heads, the dogs thrashing about above, ripping at their ears and the backs of their clinging knuckles, their bloodied hands were slippery like black eels. If there were moments to spare, they retained their last hold by dragging their hands through the long splinters of that old bridge which became impaled in the palms of their hands. Finally, they would let go. They fell through the brown depths of the raging waters, surfacing metres down river, looking back to the sea of blank faces on the bridge, watching them disappear to kingdom only come.
But with all of that, it was some kind of comic relief when the convoy got through, and the police missed Will. Still, Mozzie thought, Will was never going to be the picture of anyone’s stereotypical black rebel, guerilla, activist, stirrer. He was too familiar, like an invisible man, who walked through his whole life in a town without anyone batting an eyelid to notice what he looked like. The chief detective thought the whole town was brain dead when every person with civic responsibilities responded likewise – ‘Ah! They all look the same to me.’ ‘Can’t tell them apart, never could.’
Call it providence! Call it neglect! Call it what you will. There was not a single picture in town of Will Phantom. Both factions gave contradictory descriptions. They used whatever wardrobe full of memories they possessed. Anyone who sprang to mind they gave as their honest opinion of the description of Will. They were more interested in rhetoric. There was more to say about warring factions and community disputes, than the likes of Will Phantom, and his cohorts in crime against others. The senior detective had to say very loudly at least a hundred times in his best attempt at broken English, that he was not into theorising or analysing their brawls. He did not want to think about it. He was a very hard man.
The police hurried away to ring up the regional newspapers, but somehow, even they did not have a picture of Will Phantom. Not a single snapshot in all of their records. Unbelievable! Even though he had excelled in all school sports and was once the student of the year. The police went down to the Council office to look at the historical records. Yes, they were sure there was a photo somewhere – Man of the Match on Picnic Day sometime. An Aboriginal boy with a big grin. Caught the biggest fish during the Easter fishing competition. You heard about the fishing comp? It’s very popular? No. No picture must have been taken that year. Sorry!
The police had already been through the school. Where were the class photos? I can’t believe you have no class photos of Will Phantom? The senior detective hissed how he was sick of being in the mongrel town, while he looked incredulously at the unkempt piles of crumpled photos spread over the green pingpong table. There were dozens of photos, but nothing that showed this person had once spent eight years of his life in the building. Didn’t he go to school? they asked out of interest.
Yes! Yes! He sang ‘Sweet Caroline’ and ‘Come Lately’ when he walked home from school. The police learned Will was a charming boy with a melodic voice who sang Neil Diamond songs. The whole town loved listening to him. Often the whole town would be singing the same song in his wake, as he walked past.
The police went straight down to the Phantom’s house. At least twelve good men using a fine-tooth comb searched every inch, two times, maybe three, and came up with nothing. Nobody could beat Angel Day’s daughters for fastidiousness. Norm had ordered them to destroy anything that would remind them of Will, the day he left home. Norm Phantom did not help the senior detective either, since he insisted that someone called Will Phantom was no relative of theirs, never was, and never would be.
The Phantom family were paraded in a line at the police station in front of all of the out-of-town police. The senior detective spoke to his men: ‘This is to help you men to get a bit of a gander at what you are looking for.’ He walked up and down in front of the silent family, and in return they glared back, with spite in their eyes. There was no strong family resemblance running through them, anyone could see that, but the senior detective saw smidgens of familiarity, and must be credited for his exceptional detective skills. The four eldest, Inso and Donny, Janice and Patsy, were on the heavy side although each had completely different facial features. The old people called it a testimonial to the strong differences in both their parents. Girlie and Kevin were worlds apart from their older siblings. Both were skinny as rakes, but again, perhaps, looking more like their father.
Angel Day did not help either. Treating what was happening to her like a terrible illusion, La Goddess of Mozzie Fishman was very annoyed to be rudely rejoined to the family she had quit having anything to do with a long time ago. She had a new life, she told the senior detective. Even minding her own business did not seem to be enough these days. ‘What a family,’ she had scoffed with her words flowing like butterflies. ‘Police barging into your home, and even though we have done nothing, I am forced to come down to the police station and parade around like I was nothing but a bullock in the cattle yard.’
Femme fatale almost flew out of her house after she finished complaining about the invasion of privacy. But she absolutely refused to get into the police car when she saw her ex sitting there. ‘I am not going to sit next to that bastard,’ she had told them flat, but how were the police expected to know she had been avoiding him like the plague for years? She stood her ground out there on the footpath, holding the police cars up in the heat, until another car was sent around to pick her up.
Once inside the police station, Angel Day demanded that Norm tell her what he was looking at. Norm was surprised himself that he had been glaring at the way she was dressed. Too tight, too short. Wanting to correct her behaviour – arms flapping everywhere, eyeing all the men off, showing her legs like a spring chicken. He wanted to pull her together, stop her making a fool of herself in front of the children, but no, he remembered, she was not his property. Then, if that was not enough, she refused to stand in a line with her ex-husband. Norm went up to the desk where the senior detective was leaning and quietly let him know how insulted he was: ‘How dare you parade that harlot next to my family.’
She spat at the foot of the senior detective and when he looked down, he saw that it had landed on one of his polished brown shoes. He looked straight back at her and she winked at him, giving him the eye, as she had given many others before. He thought he was going to hit her. Instead, he instructed his officers to make her stand in line, at the other end, as far away from Norm as possible. She said she was quite capable of standing by herself, and with her head facing off to the furthest wall, she did not have to look at anyone. The senior detective looked at the lot of them – six children, two parents – and asked the assembled police, to note the remarkable family resemblance. ‘Believe me! this Will Phantom is going to have a similar look about him.’ A hick town crook was not going to beat a smart man like him. Satisfied, he clapped his hands. ‘So let’s go boys, we got a job to do.’
When the mud dried…
Claypans breathed like skin, and you could feel it, right inside the marrow of your bones. The old people said it was the world stirring itself, right down to the sea. Sometimes, in Desperance, everyone heard the drying mud crack in the vast claypans. You could hear the ground groaning, splitting its epidermis into channels of deep cuts all across the ground. It looked like a fisherman’s net, except it was red brown, and it trapped whatever was down below from breaking through to the surface. It made you think that whatever it was living down underneath your feet, was much bigger than you, and that gave them old clan folk real power. They said it was a good reason to keep on living right where they were. Keep it right. Everyone had to keep fighting those old spirit wars, on either side of that, Got nothing, going nowhere neither, Uptown.
‘This is the only safe place left,’ old man Joseph Midnight kept repeating to himself, as he wandered in and out of his old bit of a lean-to home. The structure of tin and plastic, in an ongoing state of disarray, stood behind the brand-new house the government had given him free – lock, stock and barrel – for cooperating with the mine, but which he said, ‘Was too good to use.’ His relatives, resigned to the fact that the old man was beginning to lose his marbles, took no notice. Midnight was an example of what would happen to themselves one day. It was what they would also do for staying alive so long – the last flicker of life was like this.
Old Joseph had stopped walking over to the town. It had been his daily habit for decades and an inspiration to his clan. He refused to look after himself. He had no food. He just left it up to whatever relatives were around to make sure he got something to eat. They scolded, plonking a sandwich or a plate of stew on his lap. ‘Well! What’s the point of being alive if you are not prepared to look after yourself properly.’ Grumbling and moaning about everything, and no thank you, mind you, they finished up saying, ‘You are nothing but humbug, old man.’ One square meal a day was not worth being spat on he told them, and they hurried away, bloated with complaints, ‘Who cares about being loaded down with the old bugger anyway.’ He was like lead, that empty seashell, called relative. Yet, they were so morally obligated, conscience could not be unlinked and unravelled from family matters even on Eastside.
Old man Joseph Midnight, heard speaking to his dead relatives as though he too was already dead, said his kinfolk were not worth two bob. ‘Look at us – we are just invisible people around here.’ Watching him talking to the wind blowing through town back to the sea, the kinfolk said he had lost his soul.
Nobody chewed the fat over there, and no one used a smidgen of brain, to fathom old Midnight’s mind. The poison flowed on like contamination into the river. Nothing stopped the talk of poison outside the fish and chip shop either. Such as Fishman’s people saying Elias was dead. Found dead in his boat, they said, on top of a dried-up lagoon. What kind of talk was that?
‘Man should be horsewhipped until he lay dead,’ he growled, waving a hand of dismissal through the air at the imaginary listener following him in and out of his pathetic hovel. He spat towards the new house whenever it caught his eye. He was suffering the unrelenting pain of a wrong decision. For days, he had been unforgiving of himself, for it had been his own snap decision, made without thinking. He never gave himself time to think. ‘Why should an old man have been left to make a decision like that. Why couldn’t somebody else have made it? Why send his whole world away?’ He was speaking about his grand-daughter Hope and her child Bala whom he had sent away to sea with Elias Smith, hiding them during the night in Elias’s boat, under a tarpaulin. No one but Elias knew they were there, when Elias had walked away from Desperance at dawn, pulling his boat behind him to sea.
Old man Joseph Midnight had waited, bent low down on the beach, on the night before Norm had set to sea with Elias’s body. He looked out for the robot, Gordie, who was still alive then. He was alert for anything moving in the shadows – terns, hermit crabs, and sea snakes all moved along the beach. Occasionally, he would give an affectionate rub of pride over the side of his old, tin boat, only newly painted mangrove green.
Old man Joseph Midnight had one hope. He knew once Will heard about Hope and Bala, he would go looking for them, because if there was still some good in the world, and heavens knows it was rare, it was the love between Will and Hope, and their little boy Bala. Will Phantom had arrived, soundlessly, in a borrowed car. Slipping along the foreshore through the darkness, checking which boat he would take, Joseph caught him by surprise. Speaking in a gruff tone, he was a heavy smoker after all, Joseph’s voice came from somewhere close by, ‘I knew you’d be wanting a boat, and I owns the only one going to last the distance you be tracking, so just so you didn’t go about helping yourself to what’s not yours, I told meself – I’d better sit it out here for a while, and wait for when you decide to come down. You make sure you look after this boat properly.’ Will nodded, throwing his gear on board, as he began preparing old Joseph’s boat in readiness for the sea. ‘It’s the only decent thing I’ve got left, you sabie me?’
Old Joseph told Will how he had been listening through the grapevine, people talking – after he had disappeared from the Fishman’s convoy at the lagoon. ‘Knew you was coming home. That was good enough news for me when I heard it. Made an old man’s heart feel good again knowing you might be coming home soon.’ He had waited at night down by the green boat for several hours after darkness had fallen and when Will never arrived, the cloud of doom had resurfaced and he growled at the wind, which was his way of talking to his useless kin, who in all other matters, he preferred to have nothing to do with.
‘Stupid buggers – lot of them. No use to a person at all – never have been. Thought they were too good to learn anything from me – Righto then. Not one of them knows one single thing about the sea to go looking for their sister or the little boy. Idiots.’
From a borrowed car, Will unloaded into the boat the gear he needed to take to sea. It was simple fare, several water containers, fishing gear, some canned food, spare clothing. The old man gave him the directions to the safe place in his far-off country – a blow-by-blow description sung in song, unravelling a map to a Dreaming place he had never seen. ‘I grew up in the hard times – not that any bugger cares.’
Will knew. The stories of the old people churned in his guts. He responded in the best way he could to show his affinity, ‘Inhumane treatment, I know, Pop.’ Yet, old man Midnight remembered a ceremony he had never performed in his life before, and now, to his utter astonishment, he passed it on to Will. He went on and on, fully believing he was singing in the right sequence hundreds of places in a journey to a place at least a thousand kilometres away. ‘Sing this time. Only that place called such and such. This way, remember. Don’t mix it up. Then next place, sing, such and such. Listen to me sing it now and only when the moon is above, like there, bit lower, go on, practice. Remember, don’t make mistakes…’ The song was so long and complicated and had to be remembered in the right sequence where the sea was alive, waves were alive, currents alive, even the clouds.
‘Will, remember, you will only travel where the sea country will let you through.’
It was only then, while old man Joseph Midnight was watching for Gordie, he whispered the story of what happened to Hope after Will had left town, on the run with the Fishman.
It was clear both had the hunter’s instinct, a stillness, and compelling eyes that saw through darkness. Both kept an ear listening for any sound, as unconsciously alert as the hunted animal or fish needed to be, while listening for sounds from up to one kilometre away – past the Fisherman’s Hotel, past the rubbish tip, past the last moored boat, past the hovering seagull ghosts simmering in the light of the moon. Tonight, they heard the sound of sea water lapping at their feet on the edge of the beach, while in the distance, timber creaked as moored boats rubbed against one another, and there was the constant ringing of a small bell on board of one as it bobbed in the ebbing flow of the tide. Further out, they could hear the engines of the barges travelling to the ships waiting in the deeper waters for the ore from the mine.
Occasionally, they heard the sound of heavy machinery creaking before sailors yelled, then the droning of ore loaded into the bulk holds. Out there in the bay, it was a noisy night with ballast waters ejecting into the still waters. Nature too, splashed from fish jumping out of the shallows. Constantly, dogs barked at the moon. Close by, a barn owl hooted its stanza. The channel-bill cuckoos disturbed one another, up in the skies, shouting in a frenzy of old man’s crackle.
‘But what happened!’ Will whispered, with urgency in his voice. He needed to hear the story once more, pushing old Midnight further, quicker, while knowing in the end he would have to run with the boat for there was little time left to take the tide out. He needed to capture their life, Hope’s and Bala’s, to see everything he had missed. There had been no outside communications with either the East or Westside camps while he was away. No telephone to pick up. No one to take messages. No way of getting back. Will knew Hope could not have left on her own accord and found him. The separation had been complete. ‘Pack it in ice,’ Fishman told his crew was the best way to handle the heart. He said his heart was the perfect model they could mould themselves on if they wanted, if they had problems handling separation. Will tried to imagine how Hope managed alone. And old man Joseph Midnight talked, gently telling the story again, but quicker, as though he thought he might be sprung upon any moment by the elusive Gordie, slithering through the grass line behind.
‘Well! I got word, that’s all. That the police were going to arrest Hope after those fires. They couldn’t find you. They found all of those who fell off the bridge when the Fishman’s convoy left town. All the others, they were frisked and searched at the crossing. They kept thinking you were still hiding around the place so they started saying that she was involved with you, even that it was your hand involved in burning down the Shire Council, after the big problem with the pipeline.
‘And Elias, he was supposed to be guarding, looking after the place, so they said he must have stood by and did nothing when he saw you doing it. They had conducted their own investigation. I heard all about that bloody kangaroo court they had down at the pub. In the end, they told him to get out of town. After, they were still looking for blood, anyone’s. That was the reason why they were coming for Hope.
‘They had already started to torment her with questions and threats if she never told them where you were. The police never believed you went away. They was always thinking you was close by. The town was all revved up and harping on, “Nobody knows the trouble we got because of that Will Phantom”. Jeez! Here in town, down at the mine; I reckoned they invented half of it. Everyone reckoned it. I reckoned it too. I heard them saying things like, “Oh! Look! Fancy that, broken glass bottle left on the road. Bet Will Phantom did that”. Anything.
‘Some woman said it was Sunday instead of Monday and that was your fault too. Yo! Who in charge of changing time then? Bet Will Phantom behind it, that’s what. They even believed it when you said once that you could hide behind thin air around here. Well? Now you could have been behind every dust storm so they went searching through it, round it. “Where could he be?” Who’s going to find you first? So they come after Hope, just so they could flush you out.’
‘Well! Somebody killed Elias,’ said Will, running his hand through his hair, still unbelieving, but knowing he should have predicted all of this would happen. Life had no meaning in this new war on their country. This was a war that could not be fought on Norm Phantom’s and old Joseph Midnight’s terms: where your enemy did not go away and live on the other side of town, and knew the rules of how to fight. This war with the mine had no rules. Nothing was sacred. It was a war for money.
‘I know he is dead. Finished poor bugger. Fishman mob told me that,’ old Joseph’s timbre was breaking and becoming barely audible. Will could see how the old man had been worrying himself sick ever since he heard the news about Elias. Joseph went on, saying he did not know what he wanted to believe anymore. ‘You can’t go around burning things down Will, you should know that. A bloody waste of money that’s what that is.’
‘Hope was not involved in anything, Jesus Christ. None of us had anything to do with the fires in town,’ Will explained, as old Joseph watched him. ‘It was that fucking mine did that, and it’s their own money they wasted, so don’t feel sorry for them. They never worried about us when they were riding roughshod over our rights.’ Will kept his more worrying thoughts to himself. He decided not to talk to the old man about how much danger he thought Hope and Bala were in, if they were still alive. He did not say that he believed the mine had murdered Elias and set him up in the lagoon to trap him.
‘Would the mine want to kill Elias? He could of just died out there. Maybe.’ Old man Joseph Midnight stopped, as though unable to bear the thought of the consequences of Elias not completing his journey, if all three had lost their lives at sea. He turned to the new revelations from Will. ‘The mine people don’t want to burn down the Shire Council office and start all those other fires? They got nothing to do with the town. They must of had a good reason for doing those kind of things.’ His voice tailed off again. He did not want to understand if it all meant that in the end the hope for a better world had perished in the sea.
‘You mob,’ old Midnight said, following Will in his readiness to cast off, ‘talk all the time about some kind of new, contemporary world. New world – Blah! to that. What contemporary world? It’s the same world as I live in, and before that, and before that. No such thing as a contemporary world.’ Why should someone old like himself comprehend Uptown having reason enough for killing and burning amongst their own jellyfish white people? ‘I understand our mob having a go at each other,’ he said, referring to the old wars. ‘We got to fight each other until one day we might git sick and tired of it.’ What he really meant, Will knew, was that one side must give up and go away. It was the ultimate solution that neither side could resolve. Which would be the loser? It was the only way the fighting of the last four hundred years would finish.
‘The way I see it, white people treat each other nice way. That’s right what I am saying, init? Uptown got something – a good neighbour thing with the mine. No trouble. No need for trouble.’
‘It’s called a good neighbour policy, old man, and it means nothing. This town is being used, you know that? Used, and they are too stupid to see it.’ Will was annoyed and he wanted to set off.
‘Well! That’s not true. The way I see it, the mine has got no problem with the town and vice versa. I watch them all mingling, talking like they can’t get enough of each other. The mine put money into the town too – all the time by the looks of it. So there is no reason and you wrong at this this time, Will.’
‘Of course they got a reason…’ Will was about to explain how the good neighbour policy worked to kill opposition, but Midnight cut him off.
‘You know I sent the boy down to your father with a note one time,’ he said.
‘What happened?’ Will was surprised. The two senior men of the opposite clans never spoke, or acknowledged the other existed. Their language had no word for compromise. Was this a signal of defeat? He looked closely at the old man to see where the trickery lay in the creased features of his face. No, in the lie of the land, nothing good could have been packaged in this gesture. Norm had never forgiven Will for having a relationship with Hope. And Will knew that Bala was old man Joseph Midnight’s treasure, so it was a strange thing for him to say he wanted Norm to look after the little boy after the police came looking for Hope.
‘Suppose he never wanted a bar of it. That little fella walked down that road over there and all of them frogs over on Westside just stopped croaking on the sides of the road, just to watch what was going to happen. Well! From what we heard, they saw what was going to happen. That old bastard did not have enough guts to recognise his own blood. So I had no choice. Now, I blame him because all of this would not have happened if he could have helped his own flesh and blood.
‘You know what the mean old bastard did to his own grandchild? No? Nobody would have told you. Well! He just looked around on the ground, can you believe that? And the next minute, he picked up a stone and threw it, picked up another – threw it, and another. Threw it all at the little fella like he was someone’s dog to get rid of. So, good little fella, he just turned around and come on home. All of them frogs on our side were that glad. All along the road! Well! They never even stopped croaking for one split millisecond when he come past. They were that happy to see him they made themselves dizzy with excitement cheering him on.
‘Oh! I wish my little baby was here now and all of these things never happened. I am left with the worse life now. I tell you Will, if I wasn’t old and decrepit like I am, I’d be coming with you. And I blame Norm Phantom, nobody else, and soon as I am well enough again I will be going over to confront that dog straight to his face. Square up. Everyone will be asking then, “What happened to that big hero Norm Phantom?” And I’ll just be saying, “He’s gone away. You won’t be seeing him anymore”.’
Will listened to Joseph’s wishful rumbling – so on and so forth. He wished he could offer credence to Midnight’s story, even when he could imagine it as being the truth. True, when Bala was born, there had been silence. Not one sound from Westside – no shouting out, no rejoicing, no herald singers singing ‘a child is born’. No one said, let bygones be bygones. No one measured the possibility of the child, who could be the adhesive needed to create peace between the two groups. So, instead of joy, Will thought, stones were thrown of the literal kind. This was where the ambiguity lay in Midnight’s story. There were no stones to be found on the claypans over Westside. Only sick in the gut people complained about stones. Whitefellas dreamt of stones. And children thought stones were magical.
Will Phantom was soon far away. Alone, on the ocean, he had become a one-man search party to find his wife and child. He sailed impatiently for several days, after having had no difficulty in finding the currents old Midnight had told him to ride, and finally, he had the low, flat isles in sight. The previous night he had felt the changes of movement in the water – the slower flow, the rise of the water, which pleased him. Now, he sighted land ahead. The number of sea birds increased until he felt that every bird in the world was heading towards the same destination. Their piercing calls became louder and deafening until the familiar sound of the ocean had been drowned to a murmur.
Occasionally, Will felt he was becoming disoriented. It was difficult not to be overcome with curiosity, and unconsciously, his eyes would be drawn to look skyward at the low-flying feathered clouds that swarmed noisily through the skies. His stomach lurched and he felt his mind slipping into a state of dizziness from which he could only escape by concentrating on the sea. The low string of islands were just as old Midnight had told him. ‘Bit like mangrove forests – same colour as me boat – good place too,’ Midnight had explained. By this he meant, there would be good hunting and good camouflage.
The dense grey-green mangrove forests lining the beaches, stuck out of the water, all the way back towards a sandhill. In between the mangroves rose clusters of cycad palms – Cycas angulata, like spirit camps, like sentries with their windswept heads staring out to sea. In the shallow waters, the colour became greyer. Will could not remember seeing sea water like this before, but he kept on steering the boat towards the islands. Later, he realised that the islands were composed of clay, and this caused the discolouration of the water similar to how the Gulf waters around Desperance used to be. Before mining. Very soon the blue of the ocean was left far behind him, with his thoughts of what Midnight had foretold. The imminent expectations of land Will had carried across the ocean now became an invasion of optimism, similar to his experience in the desert, burning his body with thirst, hunger and love.
He rode the boat over the breakwater towards one of the dull grey-green islands. With the boat steering quickly towards the shoreline, he started to notice in the shallower waters breaking onto the beach, an unusual amount of rubbish. Glistening in the sun amidst flocks of seagulls, there were dozens of white plastic cordial containers bobbing along the coastline. Will recognised these as an ominous message from the guardian spirits of the place. It was not a sign he had expected. Midnight had not warned him of any of the dangers associated with his old ancestor’s land.
Now at the end of his voyage, he felt as though he was holding his breath in melancholy anticipation. The solitude at sea had been a time of reflection, where he had thought about his life, and a future that could be with, or without Hope and Bala. Heading towards land, he thought optimism had evaded their past, and it had eluded his vision of the future. No good had come of any of their lives. It was these thoughts that were abruptly broken when a final wave threw him onto the chaotically crowded beach. The island had been overtaken by nesting pelicans, watching him with angry-looking eyes, and wherever he tried to cut a path through their nests, their necks lunged out and he saw wobbling up to their mouths, little lumps of sound, travelling and stalling, until breaking out of their beaks into a long, deafening screech. Thousands of the white ghostly birds hovered over the islands, moving like noisy clouds as they filled the next part of the air space while abandoning the last. Later in the darkness, he would see the moonbeams illuminating the birds like white lights, and when the breeze shimmered against their wings, the night droned away as though the whole planet was alive with the sound of Indian tabula and clay drums.
Everything he sensed about the place said that he should leave immediately, so he went back to the beach and thought about what he should do. Nobody could inhabit the islands, which were very small, but he had to be sure. He towed the boat further along the beach until he found a thick grove of mangrove trees by the side of a small creek. He secured the boat under the trees and prepared to wait until darkness fell. He caught some mud crabs and cooked them over a small fire.
In mid afternoon a storm moved onto the coastline, with the same sense of impatience as Will, and within seconds, the clouds burst and the rain fell. Relieved, Will quickly took the opportunity to walk, in the rain, through the nesting birds, which were now too drenched to be bothered with him passing by. As he had thought, the island showed no signs of fire, nowhere Hope might have stayed, nothing that showed anyone had ever lived on it.
He went back for the boat and moved to the next island and then the next, collecting nothing but gashes on his legs from the strikes of angry birds. After two days of searching, he rowed across to a larger island. It was still raining heavily through clouds that touched the water as he came in to the beach. The island was the last in the group of five. He secured the boat just before dawn.
There were fewer nesting birds to bother him as he walked through the rain, and the poor wretched birds that remained glued to their nests had their heads buried under their wings trying to keep dry. He saw a lot more of the puzzling plastic bottles bobbing along the shoreline. He thought they might have come off a ship, a loose container from Asia perhaps, fallen into the sea. Once opened, the container had released thousands of bottles which floated to the surface and drifted, until they had been driven onto the islands. It could have happened a long time ago, or it could have been only a few months. It could be that simple, the bottles were caught in the waters running around the islands between the foreshore and the breakwater over the reefs.
Will stopped dead in his tracks when he heard the tenor. A voice, lush, rich, Italian, had suddenly broken into a full operatic song, just a few metres from him. Blast! the bottles, he thought. Someone’s trick – Midnight’s? Rain, snappy gum foliage and high grass separated the slow, melodic singer, from where Will stood, dripping wet. He was astounded by his own carelessness. Elias, Norm, Midnight, Fishman – all sprung into his mind. Taught by experts. What would they say? How could anyone be so stupid? He had not been paying enough attention. He had been too sure of there being no one else around.
He glanced down, and saw his heart pulsating through the skin of his bare chest. Then, from the corner of his eye, he saw the singer, standing almost beside him, with a face full of expression, expectation, passionately glorifying the perfect day – Ma per fortuna è una notte di luna, e qui la luna l’abbiamo vicina. The big Italian was standing alone in the rain, arms open wide like one of his ancestral Gods. Rain dripped over his golden face. Pearl drops of rain rolled down his black beard. He was lost in his song: fortunately, his eyes were concentrating on his fingers directing the accompanying chorus – a family of singing magpies. The black and white pied birds were perched high in the branches of nearby gum trees.
Mine worker! Will recognised the blue uniform. Shit! Where were the others? He moved back behind the singer, and further back until he was safely out of sight, then he circled around to see why the mining company had people working out on the island.
The man was still singing, obviously alone except for the plastic bottles strewn everywhere, on the ground, in the grass, enmeshed in bushes and undergrowth like large, alien fruit. Will watched the bottles moving by, spirited along in the strong, gusty winds of the morning. The wind, cutting across the island, picked up the song and the plastic and carried them tumbling through the bush, finally rolling them down onto the beach and into the sea’s arms. Will was amused by his mistaken earlier scenario of a freak accident, where the bottles had bobbed up to the surface from a fallen container.
Whatever happened to vigilance? Will asked himself. The first and only rule he had learnt about the mine was that nothing happened by accident. The importance of being forever vigilant should have applied even way out in the middle of the Gulf, in a sea desert, in the middle of nowhere. Once, when he was a child fishing with Norm and Elias, they had seen roaming armadas of the world’s jetsam in flotillas that were like moving islands that you could walk on. As they had passed by, Will had seen thousands of screeching sea birds fishing off these sea-made apparitions which creaked and rattled as they moved along the circling currents of the Gulf. Norm and Elias ended the fishing and headed home to tell of what they had seen.
The mysterious flotillas washed around in the Gulf for months. Stories that knew no boundaries grew into epics of speculation. This really was news. A wise man’s moratorium was prescribed. Everyone was prohibited to go on sea journeys until the flotillas disappeared. The old people went around spooking everyone to stay away from them. They claimed they were made by mad seas. And when the sea was mad, dead men’s spirits got caught up in these phantom places. ‘Don’t look at what the sea has done.’ No one did, unless they wished to be haunted for the rest of their lives. Looking at the Italian tenor singing the country in a foreign language, making the land and sea sacred to himself, Will knew he was stupid to have thought in the old way, like a normal person of his own background. Mining changed the way people had to think about looking after themselves. If a man was to survive, he had to first think of what the mine was capable of doing to him.
So much for old man Joseph Midnight thinking the island was a safe place. Yet Will realised there was no point blaming an old man whose vision of the place was ancient. He knew his country in its stories, its histories, its sacred places better than the stranger now singing a love song to it. His time stretched over the millennia. How would Midnight know the speed in which everything had been changed at the hands of the mining company? It was far beyond anyone’s realisation. Will started to calculate the danger Hope and Bala faced, if they had made it this far, before Elias was murdered and ended up inland in the lagoon with his boat.
Nearer, as he moved through the bush, wet from the mist, he saw the tenor was serenading several rows of steel drums, half buried in the sand, covered with a net made of heavy rope and tangled with vegetation from the surrounding bush. Further back, he saw a canvas tent set up in the bushes next to the drums, and several fishing rods and tackle. He thought that perhaps the island had become a weekend fishing haunt for some of the mine workers. He needed to get closer to the drums. Water drums innocently registered in his mind. A storage site for fishermen.
The mine worker had his satellite phone attached to his belt. A guard, Will reasoned, who fishes. He started to scrutinise the site more carefully. It was small but open, grass flattened, intended to look like a weekend fishing place. The airborne coastal surveillance team flying past would not be interested – if they even had it marked on their flight paths. Wilderness fishing retreats on islands, which were not much more than wrecked reefs covered by sand and light vegetation, were popular with remote miners. You would have to bring water in. How? Boat! Helicopter! Will scanned for flattened vegetation, and looked to the skies. Everything was clear, only patchy clouds and sea birds hovered, but these did not flatten vegetation.
He moved on. The world he viewed shone dimly. Although his mind was racing through the possibilities, his body felt too heavy to move. It had already decided it did not want to see what lay ahead, to be told that there was a lot of ground to be covered, to establish whether Hope and Bala had come this far, and what had happened to them. He pushed himself. Go on. Leave the drums. He smiled sarcastically as he mulled over the most obvious scenario of the fishing camp. A riproaring black market trade spinning off the mines in the Gulf. Who was involved? Who knows? Who cares? What was the environmental hazard to his traditional country? Some little operation like this could be very lucrative for any of the miners wanting to make their retirement package. Nothing short of an olive plantation back in the home country for the Italian. Palaces in Europe or Asia for the management.
Will scorned the thought of transport ships now frequently moving up and down the northern coastline. The whole oceanic world seemed to be occupied in the Gulf. It was a grey painter’s palette of tankers exchanging mining equipment for mined ore that came to the coast, after the flesh of the earth had been shunted there by pipelines, tying up the country with new Dreaming tracks cutting through the old. Big ships, small ships pulled in from all over the world bringing tinkers, tailors, beggarmen, thieves. Anchored off Desperance, the ships waited for the barges to bring the ore out through the dredge tracks cut in the grey shallow waters where there were once lush green flowing seagrass meadows. How easy it would be for a ship to stop by some remote reef to pick up a bit of unofficial cargo. Uranium? Gold in lead? Will was knowledge galore, navigating his own nirvana.
The Italian continued singing to the birds and Will was moving through the bush out of view. Or was he? Yes, he remembered, he was certain, but why had he fallen asleep? His head screamed with pain. The helicopter roared in flight. He tried to remember backwards. What had happened from the moment he started edging himself away from the miner’s camp to now? All he could see was an unfathomable darkness. He lay face down on the floor of the moving sound. His legs felt as though they had been stuck together. His arms were pinned to his side. The tape he imagined, was the iridescent yellow the company used to seal the boxes and eskies carrying chemicals. The sound was deafening. Only pain hammered inside his skull. He struggled to keep together a few simple thoughts. He was on a helicopter. The spinning rotor blades and the engine exploding through his head killed any thoughts of trying to understand what had happened.
Instinctively, he moved, struggled to free himself, before realising he was better off pretending to be unconscious, but it was too late. He felt his head dragged back by his hair. At the same time, a boot was pushed into his back. The tape was ripped off his eyes. His head was jerked around to face the light. First he saw white-edged blue. Then the sun at nine o’clock, and he realised it was mid-afternoon. Down below was the ocean. He tried to turn his head to see the person who gripped his hair, but the boot sunk deeper and his head was jerked back again.
The door slammed open and a cold wind smashed against his face. He knew the feel of her body passing and now that feeling crossed over him, and Hope fell. He sees, sees her face calm, her dress blue, she liked the colour blue like the ocean and sky, and he struggled to free himself. He used every muscle in his body to slither out – to fall with her. In those moments, he slides, pushed and shoved against the force of the wind screaming, but Hope falls with her silent dress blue into everything blue, and he is recaptured by those hands gripping his hair more tightly from behind and the boot, square into his back, planting him down on the floor. The only possible moment had passed, and the door was relocked. He listened, but he never heard the ocean, or Hope, only the flying murderers screaming to each other, then he vomits. The mask has been ripped off his mouth so he does not choke. This time, when darkness descends, he feels the blow striking the back of his head.
All moments in time are the mysterious and powerful companions of fate…
The realisation is especially true for those final moments that end life. The ghostly liberators hastily pass by the living to knock your breath away. No time at all before the soul has sped from the body onto a breeze where a moth was flickering by on a day darkened by low passing, kidney-coloured clouds. Time goes on, and one thinks, What of the living? You do not want to believe in death. You do not want to feel the strangeness so peculiar when death has occurred suddenly. There is a terrible shock when what was ends.
Eventually, as time trickled by, Will began asking himself if he had really seen her, watched her fall, unable to prevent it from happening. It was so easy, preferable even, to begin doubting yourself. He kept asking himself – was it really Hope? Could this thing of nightmares have happened to her? How could he have been so utterly powerless? In all of his visions of the future, which he believed were in his grasp, there was no place where dreams were snapped off at the base to prevent growth. He wished he had only dreamt what he had seen. But this was not his dream.
The helicopter blades droned on through his head as he lay semi-conscious on the floor of the moving aircraft. He breathed fire from the stench of aviation fuel. He fought against his inconsolable sadness. He wiped away confusion and nausea by imagining it had to have been someone else’s limp body he had imagined going through the door a hundred times. But every time, it was Hope who came back, coming back into the open door of the helicopter smiling, then falling out again, over and over. He could not remember the look on her face as she fell, but nothing could take away the fact that it was her.
The very first time he had seen her, she was walking in the rain, and from where he was sitting on the ground, the first thing he noticed was how her bare feet slushed through the mud. Wet yellow grass blew on both sides and he had watched her from a distance, coming his way, with a dirty, sodden, royal blue doona wrapped around her. She looked like a big child amidst the smaller children who walked with her. He knew they had come from the Eastside camps to join the people he was sitting with next to the river. Everyone had been talking for hours about the mining company Gurfurritt. Will was listening, sizing up the mixed reactions to the mine.
Sabotage playfully plagued his mind. He listened to someone saying people were dying while they were talking. ‘We are burying people and all we do is talk.’ It was true. Even this meeting had been adjourned for a funeral. Will had come hoping to recruit helpers with his fight for land rights. The fires were getting out of hand. Half of the plains were burning. He had to be careful whom he trusted. Allegiances were changing constantly and he knew the reason why. Over many months, he had watched Gurfurritt play the game of innocence with bumbling front men who broke and won the hearts and minds of more and more of his own relatives and members of their communities, both sides of Desperance. Will did not underestimate those innocent friendly meetings where the mining representatives claimed not to know what was required from Native title claims. He believed the company knew government legislation and procedures related to Indigenous rights like the back of its hand. His mildest to wildest dreams were swamped with top silks who provided piece by piece legal advice to the supposedly ignorant Joe Blow, the local mining negotiator, from as far away as New York.
Some people were talking about the jobs they would be getting. You very, very wrong. They were arguing against the pro-land-rights brigade. Whoever heard of it around here before? Land rights kind of talk. Not going to happen here I tell you that right now. Huuump! Some were called Uptown niggers to their face. Others were saying they wanted the mining company to give the country back. Others were opposed to having any mines on their sacred country. Full stop. Some people said how they would kill anybody going against country. We can make it look like an accident. Get em when they been drinking. Manslaughter kind of fighting. They claimed murders of somebodies could be arranged to look like accidents. Yah! Yah talkin air. A nervous vein ran through the meeting whenever the strength of lawlessness was observed in their community.
Talk was always cheap. Cost nothing. And talking like Che Guevara made the huffy people’s hair on the top of their heads stand straight up on end. A chill ran right down their backs. So! Without saying a word, because the meek do not speak, they went heave-ho, in favour of chucking out wildness. Everyone who was not talking animal madness like they were hearing, was quiet. Instead, they said, without saying a single word, if it was going to be like that – okay then. No one would bother speaking anymore. Then the moment was broken by the sound of young laughter floating through the air, from this little group from along the track, breaking through the smoke of smouldering fires.
Will knew almost instinctively where the helicopter was descending, flying south, down towards a landing depot, at the mine. The helicopter pad was an isolated plateau where the wind rattled through large warehouses and hangars that had been built by the mine next to the petrol pumps. Light aircraft and survey helicopters were housed in these buildings. The complex was large enough for all repairs and maintenance to be undertaken by the mine’s well-supplied workrooms. The precinct was a self-contained entity, enclosed by cyclone fencing. Everyone on earth would agree that it had cost a bomb.
The door to the helicopter opened before the engine had wound down, and Will was thrown out onto the ground. When he landed on his side and felt the dust flying up his nostrils, he rolled over face down into the earth. Through the spiralling red dust, two sets of feet ran out of the way of the moving waves of dust. Each man demonstrated a sharp alertness which meant, Will knew, if they were involved in this kind of activity for the mine, they were most likely in peak physical fitness. He estimated both were about the same age as himself. After the helicopter lifted, he was covered red by the falling dust.
‘Are you sure?’ The Fishman sought clarity. ‘Of course we seen it, we’re sure alright.’ This was the story of the two thieves, who saw the whole thing happen as they carried out surveillance activities around the hangars, checking on what they called ‘that bloody mining operation.’ Fishman’s men, who had returned empty-handed, waved aside further communications. ‘Wait a minute.’ Both were bent forward, with hands on the top of their knees, waiting to catch their breath. Not fit men, they had run, stumbling through fifteen kilometres of spinifex. Their legs were covered with bloody cuts. Incredulously they reported the whole darn incident to the Fishman.
‘Cut the tape on his legs,’ one of the mining men at the helicopter pad ordered the other after the dust had settled. Immediately, Will felt a knife rip between his legs. The two men reached down and dragged him to his feet. When he felt something hard pushed in his back, he had no doubt it was a gun. ‘Okay, black arsehole – get walkin.’ Fingernails cut roughly cut across his face as the tape was dragged off his eyes and left hanging in his hair. Will looked ahead. No need to capitulate to his captors, not yet. The ground picture was what he needed to know first: deal with the murderers later. He already knew they were dressed in the mine workers’ blue. Sight of the landscape confirmed what he had already guessed. He knew this country without sight, even when airborne. Once, when he was much younger and very crude in his methods, he had visited the hangar as silently as an owl one night. He had not believed how easy it was when he had poured industrial detergent into the fuel tanks, and because it was too easy, he created other havoc for the mine, then left unnoticed.
‘Get him inside – over the left hangar – first one,’ the man with long yellow hair, not the Italian, told the stiff red-haired one. He was obviously in charge. He lagged behind, dialling the mobile phone he had detached from his belt. In the grass, families of soft-rasping finches – white-spotted and blue, red, grey wrens, flew out of the grass, settled down ahead, then flew off again. They were quickly joined by hundreds of noisy, virginal white, feathered cockatoos with their plume of golden yellow standing straight up from their heads. Their wild screeching continued to gather momentum as they lifted straight towards the sun.
This was kingfisher country. A lone, deep-sea blue kingfisher dashed across the sky in fright. Will watched its path across to the hills. Its flight was a part of the larger ancestral map which he read fluently. He does not have to speak to ask the spirits to keep the birds away from the mine. See! Mine waste everywhere. The grounds were covered in contaminated rubble. Make them go back to the river. Will had always been puzzled why the birds flocked to the mine.
Whenever he saw so many birds around the mine, it raised a lot of questions for him. When would they realise the hazards of going there? How many evolutions would it take before the natural environment included mines in its inventory of fear? He and Old Joseph had sat in the hills and watched the water birds flock to the chemical-ridden tailings dams, where the water was highly concentrated with lead. Afterwards, when the birds flew back to the spring-fed river, where the water was so clear it was like looking through crystal, in amongst the water lilies and reeds, and natural waterfalls dropped between ancient towering palms and fig trees: they bred a mutation. The old prophet Joseph predicted mutated birds would drop out of the sky. No one knew what would happen to the migratory flocks anymore. Will surveyed the distant barbed-wire-crowned cyclone fencing. An impenetrable wall three and a half metres high, surrounding the mine complex to at least six kilometres in diameter. And the birds danced over it while wild animals clawed their way underneath.
‘You, on the fucking chair,’ ordered the big-boned man with the fat face and yellow hair, the mobile phone still to his ear. Will sat on it and waited. He had time.
‘Hello? Yeah! We’re back. And we got the fucking mother load. We got him. Yeah! Thought you’d be pleased. Told you it was just a matter of time. We’ve got the bastard.’ The man with the yellow hair, eyes covered with expensive sunglasses, looked into Will’s face. He casually inhaled from a cigarette in his other hand.
‘What does he look like? What do you mean? Don’t they all look alike? I don’t know. Tall, skinny bugger. Got the kind of mug on him you won’t want to see down an alley way in the middle of the night. Remember the cop we had in charge of the crossing that time? ’98 or ’99? Yeah! Well! He was right. The mongrel looks like the rest of his so-called family…Yeah! It’s him alright…What? No, she panicked when we took off. Wasn’t any point bringing the bitch back was there? No! Oh! Too late anyway. Alright. We found her camping by herself. Yeah! On the island next to the store. Where we picked up that weirdo that time…Yeah! Elias Smith whatever. So, you were right. It was a good job we gone back and checked…Kid? Wasn’t any kid there. Probably didn’t make the journey in the dinghy with them in the first place...We found him sniffing around the store. Yeah! The Conte’s fine. Singing away to the birds when we last saw him…Alright! We’ll wait down here with the bastard.’
Will watched yellow hair put his mobile phone back onto his belt. He walked over to the door, looked out for a few moments, then came back and saw Will was staring at him, straight into his eyes.
‘Hey! Shit-head. What are you staring at?’ The question was asked with a fist planted straight into his face. ‘You wanta have a go, do you? You wanta have a go? Well! Go on.’ The cigarette butt burned into Will’s lips.
He remained motionless, only his eyes alive. Then he heard the footsteps coming closer from behind him, returning from the kitchenette at the far end of the hangar and with the footsteps came the wafting smells of hot coffee and fried steak. The fried-steak-smelling man with the red hair started winding plastic tape around Will and the chair. ‘Just in case you got some fucking funny ideas,’ the man snarled, with his stiff red hair standing out on tufted ends.
‘Come and eat,’ he said, handing the other man his coffee and heading back to the kitchen to deal with his cooking.
‘You can see the mongrel’s eyes. He can’t wait to get his hands on us,’ the yellow-haired one replied, drinking the coffee down in a single gulp. He wiped what remained in the cup across the air, in front of Will, and was not hurrying off for food. Whatever was misplaced in his mind was not hungry for food. He found it necessary to torment Will a bit more. He needed some kind of reaction to his achievements for the day. It was as though he could not find enough ways to fill the job description. Inches away from Will’s face, he taunted him with his responsibility for the deaths of Elias and Hope, screaming as though the whole world needed to know, not just Will Phantom. Will stared past the man’s ravings to observe the blue kingfisher. It surprised him that the bird he had minutes earlier seen flying away with its shrill whistling echoing behind it, had flown into the hangar and was sitting on a rafter, as though it had been sent back to keep him company. You don’t kill sea spirits pure of soul, Will instinctively knew in his own mind – like Hope, like Elias. They come amongst the living for a short time, perhaps little Bala was such a spirit too, because he was their child.
The man’s voice disappeared. The sickness in his soul swelled inside his body until it burst, looking for company and faded away. His shadow joined in its owner’s personal triumph. Both took off their expensive sunglasses. Both mouths pulsating, describing a crusade of killing; describing how it would not be long now, they would be christening the new pipeline.
‘It will be a journey an a half you betya! Only fitting boy – after all of the expense the mine had to go to having to build a brand-new pipeline just because of people like you. I tell you what – you got the money to pay what it costs and we’ll let you go. No you haven’t? Nevermind, once we get you through the mill you’ll come out the other end, nothing but a big pile of slurry for the fish to eat. How do fish eat blackfellas like you? Slurp! Slurp!’ The yellow-haired man laughed at his own joke until his teeth bared like a wounded dog. Seemingly content, he put his sunglasses back on, and went to get his meal.
Will had not heard the threats. He was thinking about the eyes of the murderer, and how he had looked into those eyes and seen his own reflected back at him. Perfectly matching eyes of despair – a mirror image of the murderer’s. The kingfisher was sitting in the rafters preening its turquoise feathers, and as Will watched it, it too returned a steady gaze until, as though hypnotised, it closed its eyes and fell asleep. Will remembered he had not eaten for two days as a sick hunger tugged in his stomach from the smell of meat cooking. Whispering a refrain to himself – Got to keep the wolves from the door, keeping free of the wolf pack, kill the wolves, keeping the wolves away – he soon lost interest in food. Searching around the building from where he sat, he began calculating distances and speed in his mind. How long it would take to reach the lagoon, laying out the track through spinifex, until finally, he too fell into an exhausted sleep.
The radio in the kitchenette woke Will to the sound of familiar voices from the ABC, broadcasting across the airwaves, travelling through realms of ancestral spirits over great expanses, to reach into the loneliness of people throughout the Gulf of Carpentaria, the Channel country, and along the Diamantina. Stray rays of sun found their way into openings on the western wall of the hangar. The white beams of light crossed Will to spotlight the dirt and grease on the opposite wall. The radio broadcast only reached this far north about six o’clock in the afternoon. This was after the heat waves had fallen from the sky, and their enormous energies vaporised into a lightness, clinging to the ground. Will listened vaguely to the news bulletin and the weather report. He had to figure out what the two men were doing behind him, but there were no other sounds coming from the kitchenette.
Could they have gone outside? He glanced towards the door. Perhaps their boss had already turned up from the mine, although he thought it was unlikely. He would have been woken up. Inconsiderate! Will cursed the bloke he remembered seeing on TV. After the pipeline was destroyed. Of course that mongrel would keep him waiting, want him to sweat, dreaming up how he was going to carry out his dream to finish off the little punk.
Will had watched the bloated red face of someone called Graham Spilling staring from the television screen as though it expected to see someone wanting to destroy his mine jump back at him. Then after an outburst on how the mine was now threatened because the company would fail to meet the timetable of some overseas refinery already threatened with closure, which meant the loss of hundreds of Australian jobs, the face had paused, as if its voice had been crushed, as though a terrible idea had occurred to him, that his own job was on the line. Then, after a few moments, he just as remarkably found the strength to continue: ‘I swear, hundreds of jobs, and because we fully support the sunshine State of Queensland, and we want to help the people in this state get ahead and want to see good things happen here like this development, the biggest mine of its type in the world, I am offering a $10,000 reward, no questions asked, for any information leading to the capture of…’ He continued, his voice breaking, trying not to be personal about his tormenter, but Will recognised what he was trying to say. For the younger Will Phantom, from the era of destabilising the mine, the sight of the face twisted into mock hyperdrama was a memorable moment, but hardly the result he expected at the time from sabotaging the mine. It had been the day of the terrible hitting back, hit and run, bang! bang! bang! Straight along the pipeline with gelignite.
Will had always half expected that if he had been captured, the mining company bosses would queue up to have a look at the kind of person who would destroy a mine. The very same newsreader had called this kind of person the most feared of the North. But the red-faced Graham Spilling he had once seen on the television was not the kind of man who would be coming posthaste to the hangar in the light of day. The irony was, men like Spilling did not kill other men. Only the person, perhaps inebriated enough to turn into another kind of human being, like Frankenstein, could temporarily find courage to instruct the cold bloodedness of killing. Wasn’t it in the dead of night when good people go about their dark deeds?
One becomes more confident when one’s not alone, and somehow, this was how Will felt. An odd sensation that made no sense, yet it would not leave him alone. There was no rationale in the stupidity of thinking others – what others? – would come to help him. Even though he had not heard any movement, he was convinced the Fishman and enough men were outside, waiting for his signal. Now he saw a different perspective on his arrival at the hangar when he was thrown from the helicopter. The Fishman’s two thieves were lying flat in the grass next to the shed when the helicopter had taken off. Through the dust he had seen them raise their heads from the grass. Hands signalled, questioning what had happened. Then when his eyes followed the flight of the kingfisher, now retracing its movement, taking notice of the whole panorama of spinifex to the foothills, he saw the subtle movement of other men from the convoy stationed in the distant hills on the other side of the fence. They were back-up for the thieves scouting the hangars for an overnight operation. Will knew if they were still around, then the rest of the convoy would be down at the lagoon. What was new? They were short of fuel.
Will looked for the kingfisher but it was now nowhere in sight. He kept an ear on the radio in the background, listened as the weatherman read the weather report. A cyclonic build-up in the Arafura Sea. Will grew interested, remembering an earlier report of a cyclone sitting off the opposite coastline, east of Cape York Peninsula. He could hear the words – low-pressure system building into a depression heading in a south-easterly direction along the Arafura Sea. This surprised him. What had happened to the cyclone off the Cape? Nothing. The weather report ended. It must have been in his dreams.
The day he had left old Midnight and taken his boat to sea he had heard the report of a cyclone hanging south-south-east of Cape York, somewhere in the Coral Sea. What happened to that? The weatherman ended with a short statement about a tidal surge due to the cyclone activity in the region. Will closed his eyes and saw the tremendous fury of the winds gathering up the seas, and clouds carrying the enormous bodies of spiritual beings belonging to other worlds. Country people, old people, said it was the sound of the great spiritual ancestors roaring out of the dusty, polluted sea all of the time nowadays. Will believed this. Everyone clearly saw what the spirits saw. The country looked dirty from mining, shipping, barges spilling ore and waste. Something had to run a rake across the lot. ‘You really got to watch your step now,’ old man Joseph Midnight warned when Will had taken the boat out. His voice had crawled over the water to Will. ‘Last couple of years, there was one every few weeks, another cyclone jumping around. Whoever heard of that before?’
Jesus Christ! There was water piling up in the skies. Then nothing. The weather report was over. Stuck in a empty hangar a couple of hundred kilometres from the sea, Will imagined all the satellite activity hovering over the Gulf. Spies of the world zoomed in onto a pimple on your nose, or knew what you were saying in the privacy of your own home. Was anyone looking at Gurfurritt? If someone spied on the weather, why not provide more information about what was going on? Rich men paid for foreign cargo ships from the four corners of the globe to anchor in the Gulf to transport ore.
It was high tide. Will knew how the tides worked simply by looking at the movement of a tree, or where the moon crossed the sky, the light of day, or the appearance of the sea. He carried the tide in his body. Even way out in the desert, when he was on the Fishman’s convoy, a thousand miles away from the sea, he felt its rhythms.
This feeling for the sea had been inherited from Norm, and Will began to think of his father on his journey with Elias. I hope you make it to the old world. But of course he would make it. Will scowled at his weak sentimentality over his father who never bore his children’s burden. A saltwater man who insisted he belonged to the sea like fish. I’ll weather the storm. So said the veteran of the mother of all storms, invading the hangar out of the blue, to this wasted luxury of his son, reminiscing what was once upon a time: If the natural forces get me in the end, it will be on the flippen land. Never the sea. I bet my life on it.
Puzzled, irritated, by the commonsense madness of his father’s hick town philosophy, Will twisted about on the chair, muttering to himself: ‘If you’re dead, you’re dead, no need to bet on that.’ But the memories of his father were not done with Will’s thoughts, even in this moment of crisis. Norm Phantom was keen to show his son whom he had not spoken to in years, something else from the past. The little list. The list boy! Did you remember to bring the list? How a man could come back to collect his winnings, if he did not keep his little list of fools in his back pocket: who owed him money, so forth.
‘What’s the matter with him?’ The Fishman’s men had been trying to attract Will’s attention.
‘Dunno. Throw a stone and see.’
Someone hit Will on the leg with a small stone to bring some sense into his head. Now he saw two men from the convoy standing by the door smiling at him. Then the mobile phone rang.
‘Chuck,’ the yellow-haired man spat his name into the mobile. He had come out of the kitchenette and was standing somewhere to the back of Will in the hangar.
‘What? A fire. You got to be joking…Alright, I’m on my way.’
‘What’s up?’
‘Graham said there’s a fire over this way. Stay here, watch him Cookie. I’ll look around.’
The next moment Chuck returned, running to grab the fire extinguisher, and ordering his mate to get the other fire extinguisher on the wall next to the doorway. Ignoring Will, both quickly disappeared. The Fishman’s men had come prepared. Knives were produced to cut Will free from the chair. Within seconds they were outside the shed again, and looking back, sensed that Will was of two minds about going with them. ‘You mad, Will?’ They had only moments to get out of the place, and Will was holding them up.
‘Give me a knife,’ Will ordered, but no one listened to him. ‘Fuck you! Give me a knife or I’ll kill you. They killed Hope and my boy. I am going nowhere I swear to God, until I kill them. So give me the fucken knife.’
Moving around the benches, Will saw a tyre lever, grabbed it, and headed out the door. The two lads felt blood draining from their faces: this was supposed to be easy. They looked at the fire down at the last hangar. The flames were arching out like waves and black smoke billowed into the atmosphere.
‘Look man, I know how you feel! But those arseholes are dead already. They’re gone man, I swear it, because as true as God I am standing here, this whole place is going to blow, as soon as the fire reaches the pits. Come on, we got to take you with us, fuck you, or we are going to die in this mongrel place. Look up there and see the friggen fire for yourself man. Come on, man, or we will kill you ourselves.’
The two young men, no more than eighteen apiece, dressed in grey shorts, baseball caps, with Bob Marley staring from their Rasta-coloured T-shirts, worked simply to the letter of the Fishman’s orders. They were still wearing workingmen boots supplied by the mine. A lot of the young men in the Fishman’s convoy had done their stint in the mine, looked around, seen how it all worked, then walked off with their mining helmets and boots as souvenirs. Both still had their cigarettes hanging from the sides of their mouths, while they used the iron-fisted grit of their fathers to persuade Will to get the hell out of there.
The fire spread quickly across the grasslands, throwing long red tongues down to the south. Will looked at the black smoke billowing into the sky. He tried to see through the wall of smoke to locate the two mine men with their fire extinguishers, but could not penetrate the curtain of blackness. The only thing that was clear, were flames reaching up into the sky at the far hangars. It looked like a giant candle, a millennium flame. A wind of intense heat forced Will and the two Bob Marley faces to flee.
‘Come on, Will, get a fucking move on,’ one of the lads said, maintaining a firm grip on Will’s arm. The second lad did the same on the other side and they ran dragging Will along with them. They kept looking back over their shoulders as they ran, stumbling along through the spinifex and grass and gravel, seeing if anyone was coming from the mine, or if they were seen. Looking ahead at the distance to reach the fence line, each knew, until they were over the fence and into the scrub land and hills, they would be in full view of the mine men when they turned up in their vehicles.
‘Let’s hope the bloody lot goes up in their bloody faces,’ one lad said to the other as they ran, knowing it might be their only chance, if the bloody lot went up. But when they looked back again, the yellow-haired one and his mate were running after them.
‘Split up,’ Will said. ‘Take the left and right, and I will take the centre, go low.’
‘Do you know where the opening is Will? Head to the left, one hundred metres. Remember that.’
‘Get going. I know where it is, get going.’
The three peeled off in their different directions. The two young lads were looking around. Where was the backup? The whole operation had begun with several dozen men who had slipped in earlier, spreading themselves all over the mine site, to do ‘a good job’. It was to have been a pilfering exercise on a grand scale, pure and simple. Then they got word: Fishman had changed his mind. The teams had come in the previous night. They moved on the fuel tanks, syphoning petrol into jerry cans which had to be carried over to the fence line and into the bush on the other side towards a waiting vehicle. They had spread around. ‘Have yourself a shopping spree, tools and equipment – for the road.’ Freezer raid, the Fishman had ordered. Usual thing. Raid everything.
‘Man! Where in the fuck are they?’ one lad screamed across to his mate. ‘Where’s the bloody backup, mannn? Jesus!’
Guns were being fired. The two lads heard the strange sound for the first time in their lives as the bullets whistled by, inches past their ear, and both yelled, ‘Duck man, they are shooting at us.’ Both ran faster, bolting for their lives like jack rabbits, and Will, where was he? They had seen him disappear into the ground like he was made out of thin air. And they did duck, unbelievingly, as they ran, seeking cover behind every clump of spinifex, as though dead spinifex could shield anyone against bullets. But that was what they did, and kept doing, with no backup at all, not even looking back to see that glorious fire tonguing down to the underground storage tanks, nor knowing there were only moments to go, and they would be all feeling what it was like to be blown sky-high, if they did not make it out over the fence and into the hills.
Fate and precious moments are tied up together, and as the saying goes, What goes around comes around: the yellow-haired man tripped. Instantly, his head was split open at the temple by a rock that had, up to that moment, lain on the ground, embedded in soil that was thousands of seasons old, untouched by humankind since the ancestor had placed it in this spot, as if it had planned to do this incredible thing.
Rock and roll, it was unbelievable to have seen what happened. Will had been so close, waiting to take what rightfully he claimed, and the man was running straight for him, and only Will saw what was about to happen, saw the rock was ready, waiting for this moment. Instantaneously, it was as natural a reaction as you would expect, but he felt cheated you know. He had even thrown himself towards the man to try to break his fall. It was too late, a snap, how quickly a driven man could be defeated. Will had no idea a rock could rob him of his revenge. He stood, arched over the dead man in a moment of foreboding, watching the blood pouring out of the man’s head all over the ground, the glorious yellow hair now tainted red and covered with dust, wishing he had the power to bring the dead man back to life. Where was the justice in this? The murderer struck dead, died instantly without pain, and went on to eternity with the look of peace on his broken face. And there was the stone, still there, unmoved.
‘Will! What the fuck are you doing. Keep running,’ one of the young blokes yelled back over his shoulder. ‘Jesus Christ!’ he yelled, ‘I never seen so much craziness in you man.’ Seeing Will standing there looking at the ground, the young man was certain he would end up going back for him, just to appease the Fishman, and shouted: ‘You are going to get us all killed, fuck you.’
Will heard and ran. Out in the open he looked back for the red-haired Cookie, but he was nowhere in sight. Will had missed the moment that the backup men with rifles in the hills had witnessed. In full flight, lifted in midair, Cookie kept running after his prey before he heard the piece of lead explode in his chest. His eyes jumped to the left, then to right, as though undecided which way to go to hell first, before he sunk down into the spinifex.
A dozen convoy men scrambling out of the hills, leaping down rocks, hands cut by spinifex, raced to the fence line to open a hole in the wire. The fence was rolled back for Will and the two lads to run towards. It seemed as though the whole world cheered them, yelling: ‘Come on, come on, hurry, you can do it.’ Then, the cheering turned into a synchronised ballet of men risking their lives without thought for themselves. They ran out towards the lads, and finally, had the three snatched up by a sea of hands. Their lungs burnt with exhaustion. A human chain passed each of the three along up to the hills, until finally, they were thrown down for shelter behind the boulders, in the fold of the ancestral spirit who governed the land.
The fire burned like hell over there at the hangars and even in the hills, the air was that hot, it burnt your skin. It felt like being in a furnace. Dust-dry hair turned into rust, stuck up straight and waved in the air, charged up to the hilt with electricity. Well! The moment came then, just how the Fishman said it had to be. And it would not have paid anyone to look back if they did not want to have their head blown off in ‘the process’. They were the Fishman’s favourite two words in those days.
The day, all action-packed like it was, was now all said and done. The men of Mozzie Fishman’s dedicated convoy to one major Dreaming track stretching right across their stolen continent, were sitting up there on the side of the hill – like rock wallabies, looking down at what was left of Gurfurritt mine. Just looking, and turning the sunset crimson with their thoughts.
A day at the mine had turned into a modern legend about travelling with the Fishman, and civil morality…
What a turnout. Gee whiz! We were in really serious stuff now. We were burning the white man’s very important places and wasting all his money. We must have forgotten our heads. We were really stupid people to just plumb forget like – because the white man was a very important person who was very precious about money. Well! He was the boss. We are not boss. He says he likes to be boss. He says he’s got all the money. Well! We haven’t got the money neither. And now, all it took was a simple flick. A flick, flick, here and there with a dirt-cheap cigarette lighter, and we could have left the rich white people who owned Gurfurritt mine, destitute and dispossessed of all they owned.
Straight out we should have been asking ourselves – Why are you not hanging your head in shame to the white man? We were supposed to say, Oh! No! You can’t do things like that to the, umm, beg your pardon, please and thankyou, to the arrr, em, WHITE MAN.
Somehow though, everyone got carried along the humpteen tide of events, like, we must have swallowed one too many sour pills that morning for breakfast. Now, we were looking at the world like it was something fresh and inviting to jump into and do what you jolly well liked. That was how our dormant emotions sitting down inside our poor old hearts got stirred up by the Fishman when we listened to him talking in that fetching, guru type voice of his, saying we gotta change the world order. Change the world order? Mozzie Fishman! He is sure enough a crazy man. Oh! We said that. But he goes on in his satirical slinging voice about what happened ever since that mine came scraping around our land and our Native title! ‘Well!’ he says. Us? He wanted us to tell him what that turned out to be! We were a bit cross with Mozzie standing up there, Lord Almighty like on top of that rust bucket of a Falcon station wagon of his. It and all its white crucifixes wiped all over the car through the stains of red mud.
‘You know who we all hear about all the time now?’ he asked us. ‘International mining company. Look how we got to suit international mining people. Rich people. How we going to do that?’ Now, even we, any old uneducated buggers, are talking globally. We got to help United Kingdom money. Netherlands lead air problems. Asia shipping. United States of America industry, and we don’t even know German people. ‘I says,’ he says like he is singing, ‘we mobs got to start acting locally. Show whose got the Dreaming. The Laaaw.’ He liked to empathise ‘The Laaaaw’ whenever he was heating up around the ears on the subject of globalisation.
We whispered among ourselves. Ignore him. Clap your hands over your ears to put an end to his blasphemy. Don’t listen to him. Still he was not finished with us. He goes on ignoring our pleas, and in the end demanded, soft as silk, he knew who he was playing with. All satiny voice, he said it was time now to end our cowtailing after the white people. It was finale time. Hands up. Who we got to follow? The white man, or the Fishman? This was the ultimatum. Well! He made us that wild. Of course, we got no choice – we got to go with culture every time. We should have known he was leading up to all of this destruction. But we? We were like following dogs, and we were happy to do it, not think, because we were acting solely and simply on pure rage.
The soundwaves coming off the explosion in the aeroplane hangars at the biggest mine of its type in the world, Gurfurritt, were just about as tremendous a sound you could ever expect to hear on this earth. Like guyfork night. Booom! Booom! Over and over. But one hundred times more louder than that. Ripped the lot. We were thinking, those of us lying on the ground up in the hills smelling ash – what if our ears exploded? What would deafness sound like? We should have thought of that first.
Sometime during our precious time on earth we could have asked a deaf person what it was like to not hear the sounds anymore, before we go around deliberately destroying our own good hearing on wildness. Oh! But there was no going back because no one was going to reverse where the rotten hand of fate was heading. So, even though we were shaking in our old work boots, thinking we got busted eardrums, we watched the fire rage like a monster cut loose from another world. It might even have come from hell. Even the devil himself would have least expected us weak people to have opened the gates of hell. But we watched full of fascination at the fire’s life, roaring like a fiery serpent, looking over to us with wild eyes, pausing, looking around, as if deciding what to do next. Then, we could hear it snarl in an ugly voice you would never want to hear again. Alright, watch while I spread right through those hangars like they were nothing, hungry! hungry! Get out of my way. It did that roaring along, exploding through walls and rooftops which looked like toadstools bursting open, then once those flames shot outside, going a million miles an hour up into the sky, sparks just landing wherever, like a rain shower, out in the grass somewhere around the back.
The fire spread out the back of the hangars in the dry grass, and then it came burning around to the front again, fanned by a gusting south-easterly wind. Then, the monster smelt the spilt fuel on the ground. It raced through that, quickly spreading itself over the ground weeds, until it found the fuel bowsers, then it paused, maybe the fire had thoughts of its own and could not believe its luck. The fire just sitting there was as awesome a moment you could experience for our men waiting in the hills, sneaking a glance from over the boulders they were hiding behind, peering through the black smoke, thinking maybe their luck had run out and what next.
It looked as though the fire was going to peter out. The fire was just sitting, smouldering, not knowing where to go next because the wind was not blowing strong enough to fan it in the right direction. Our men looking from the hills continued staring at the little flame flickering there, fizzing out. What could they do? It looked like defeat was imminent. And, that same old defeated look, two centuries full of it, began creeping back onto their faces. But, it was too late now, they had a taste of winning, so they projected their own sheer willpower right across that spinifex plain, calling out with no shame, Come on, come on, willing the little flame not to fizz, believing magic can happen even to poor buggers like themselves.
Somehow, someone started yelling, ‘Look, look, it is starting to move.’ The unbelievable miracle came flying by. A whirly wind, mind you nobody had seen one for days, just as a matter of fact sprung up from the hills themselves. It swirled straight through from behind those men, picking up their wish and plucking the baseball caps which came flying off their heads, together with all the loose balls of spinifex flying with the dust and the baseball caps, the whole lot moving towards the fire. When it passed over the open rubbish tipsters the mine had lined up along the side of the hangars, it picked up all the trash. All the cardboard boxes, newspapers lying about and oily rags, spirited the whole lot across the flat towards the line of hangars on fire.
It happened so fast when the fiery whirlwind shot into the bowsers and momentarily, lit them up like candles. Well! It might even have been the old Pizza Hut box someone had left on top of one of those bowsers that added that little bit of extra fuel, you never know, for the extra spark, or it would have happened anyway, but the wick was truly lit.
The finale was majestical. Dearo, dearie, the explosion was holy in its glory. All of it was gone. The whole mine, pride of the banana state, ended up looking like a big panorama of burnt chop suey. On a grand scale of course because our country is a very big story. Wonderment, was the ear on the ground listening to the great murmuring ancestor, and the earth shook the bodies of those ones lying flat on the ground in the hills. Then, it was dark with smoke and dust and everything turned silent for a long time.
‘You think they heard it in Desperance?’ some young lad whispered carefully through the settling dust, because he did not want to frighten anyone by making the first sound of this new beginning. It was so incomprehendingly silent he needed to speak to hear himself talk because he was thinking of his family and the noise of his memories of them was the only sound he could hear.
The sound of this young voice being the first sound was a relief for the others who had been thinking they were listening to the sound of their own deafness. However relieved and pacified they were to hear speech, everyone kept listening, listening for what else remained missing – Ah! It was the noise of the bush breathing, the wind whispering through the trees and flowing through rustling grasses. We needed to hear the birds chirping, the eaglehawk crying out something from the thermals high above, but the eery silence lingered on. The birds were nowhere to be seen or heard, not even a singing willy-wagtail lightly flittering from rock to rock wherever anyone walked, or a mynah bird haggling at your feet. We looked into the dust and smoke-darkened skies and saw no twisting green cloud of budgerigars dancing away in thin air. The wind had dropped. Silent clouds passing overhead cast gloomy shadows over the peaceful trees, while grasses and spinifex stood stock-still as though the world had become something false, almost reminiscent of a theatre setting. We men floated somewhere between the surreal stillness, and the reality of the ants, lizards and beetles and other insects moving through the rocky ground as though nothing had happened. No one spoke or answered the boy, because we guessed the explosion must have been heard on the other side of the world, let alone in Desperance.
One will never know what really happened that day. Fishman, never stopped smiling about it. He said his recipe was top secret. He was regarded with awe whenever he came into anyone’s presence because it was a privilege to know the Fishman. He was respected for what he had inside of his head. Too right! Nobody could know the highly confidential material in case someone like Mozzie had to do it all over again some day. Ignorant people would always ask, How did you stop the mine? And he would look at them for a long time with his steady eye, like he was making up his mind whether they were worth letting in on the secret. Finally, he would say, I have decided to give you the truth, and the truth was the very same words he had always used about what he would do to the mine from the day it got set up on our traditional domain. ‘I put broken glass bottles on the road to stop the buggers – that’s what I did.’ Somehow, this was the truth. Truth just needed to be interpreted by the believers who could find the answers themselves just like the Fishman had done. At the same time he offered another piece of advice, which was, a smiling man would live for a very long time. And he did.
A frenzied media from the bustling world of ‘Down South’ fuelled up, to fly back and forth over the mine in their helicopters like flies. Unlike any fly, the journalists saw the Gulf through virgin eyes. It was a place few Australians had been too, let alone those of any other country tied up with the Gulf of Carpentaria. It was a world apart from their own. Anything in this new world could be created, moulded, and placed on television like something to dream about, or a nightmare.
What stirred their souls was the pureness of silence and the intriguing sense of loneliness each had discovered on their arrival in single-engine charter planes at the aerodrome of Desperance. There, hours could go by, and the only thing happening was the sound of the weather funnel rattling against a steel pole – Twang, Twang! Twang! Under these circumstances, for the fascinated news people romancing the Gulf, no story became too big or too small, to give to the world.
Televised on-the-spot reports of the dead ore body lying across the ground like a fallen hero, filled the TV screens across the nation. Splashed into every news broadcast was a badly composed identikit picture of Will Phantom which bore no resemblance to him. A lot of people in Desperance started asking questions. They wanted to know who that person was that they saw on television every night, who was running around calling himself Will Phantom. It was a good question, because mix-ups and things like that did not help, if Desperance people felt they were complete strangers to one another, and they could not understand the truth of television. For mind you, they were still recovering from the shock of the mine. There was a thin feeling in the air. A tension. It became as though anything could snap at any moment over the very idea of life itself. Anything could fall from a loose hinge into full-blown hysteria.
The multi-million dollar mine, from infancy to its working prime, was probed, described and paraded to network viewers. Interviews and footage of scenery went jig-jogging along in soap opera intensity, before finally shifting to pan, and viewers were encouraged to dissect what had become of this showcase of the nation. They watched forensic scientists fully covered in white protective clothing, risking their lives, hunting through the rubble. Who could even breathe while watching these brave men and women slowly prod through each piece of debris in this solemn post mortem, carried out with the meticulous thoroughness of an ant? It became a televised spectacular, just like the death of an icon, woven with the interactiveness of Nintendo. Viewers could call up. They could hear their own voices via satellite and underground cable, coming back to them from the mine itself on television. Ordinary people living thousands of miles away, who had no former interest whatsoever in the mine or its location, joined the growing numbers of bereaved viewers gandering at the still untameable, northern hinterland.
The face of a scientist, speaking behind his glass-fronted mask with a muffled voice which had to be transcribed into English on the bottom of the television set, like the SBS channel, became the anchorman for the task that lay ahead. On the first day he reported that a fire had spread from the main transport hangars to the fuelling bowsers. It was lucky no one was killed. On day two, the wash-up at the end of the day was like at the beginning, this was a major explosion in the remote Gulf of Carpentaria at Gurfurritt, the biggest mine of its type in the world. The scientists viewed viewing what lay on the ground were trying to discover what caused the explosion. There had been no fatal casualties. And so on.
After a week of the hooded scientist, another bald, Mars-faced scientist appeared on the television screen. He was at home with a sad expression on his face which popped out of fawn-coloured clothes. He gave the scientific explanation on the news: ‘The fire at Gurfurritt mine initiated from a grassfire. Spinifex exploded and the intensity of the fire it created quickly spread to the bowsers. (Pause.) This caused a major explosion to the underground fuel tanks. I understand that this explosion spread through the underground fuel pipes up to the mine. This action quickly reached the main fuel tanks, which caused another major explosion, causing major damage to the mine and machinery.
‘The fuel line to the mine operations connected to the main fuel tanks caused further major damage to occur. The intense heat rising into the atmosphere from the initial explosions generated a chain reaction of explosions throughout the mine. (Footage to air of mass destruction.) An incidental fuel leakage running throughout the 300-kilometre pipeline to the coast caused it to be extensively damaged. (Pause.) This damage was caused by an explosion throughout the buried pipeline which was only running at a third of its capacity at the time of the incident. The force from this simultaneous explosion uncovered the entire pipeline and pieces were found many kilometres from their original site. (Pan shot: bits of pipeline sticking out of the ground and throughout the surrounding bushland like an exhibition of post-modern sculpture outside the Australian National Gallery or Tate Modern in London on the Thames.) At the end of the pipeline, there was extensive damage at the dewatering plant where storage tanks were destroyed.’
When the explosions stopped, the Fishman’s men picked themselves up from the ground. They agreed that only the greatness of the mighty ancestor had saved them. It was a miracle they were still alive after the earth shook so violently underneath them, they had thought it would go on forever. A heavy red fog of dust and smoke hung in the air as they moved away, their visibility limited to just a few metres. The fine dust fell slowly, and when it settled on those men who were trying to regain a sense of the enormity of what had happened, they took on the appearance of the earth itself. One by one, camouflaged by dust, they began spiriting themselves away, quickly, carefully, as dust covered their tracks, back to the lagoon of the dancing spirits.
The ancestral trees at the lagoon danced wildly in the ash wind around the Fishman sitting on the ground staring red-eyed from weariness in the direction of the mine. He had been sitting in that position for hours visualising what was happening at the mine, waiting for his men to return. Their return seemed to be taking forever, and those extraordinary followers watching the master, were making other rare discoveries. They were convinced that the Fishman had shrunk in front of their very eyes. They were sure he was growing smaller and smaller with every passing second of precious time. The chances were, if he continued to shrink, there would be nothing left of him by the time they would be compelled to flee. In this perilous locale, they nodded, he would become an obscure beetle left crawling around the edge of the lagoon.
It was true, Mozzie Fishman did seek obscurity. His instinctive trait was to crawl away from adversity, at least metaphorically, into invisibility and nothingness. What caused this peculiarity of his tangled personality was something that went berserk in what he called his stupid brain, whenever he had anything to do with white people. It seemed it was white people who could tug on his conscience, making him degrade himself like this. The truth was, Mozzie Fishman was shrinking, waiting for his men, Oh! Great spirits of God, let there be no casualties, he longed, moaning to himself. He was so full of the anxiety and shrinking up into a beetle, he could not see the young men who ran through the bush hoping to evade capture, jumping for cover as skilfully as hares.
Yet, on the other side of his mind, he fought like a rabid dog to maintain an octopus vision of himself, where all arms lead to great glory and success. In this view of the world, there was no room for doubts to interfere with the great spirits of destiny whose permanent home was etched into the land itself, in this place. No one tampered with these arms of destiny which belonged only to Mozzie, as though he had put out a single hand to catch a true stone after it was fired from a shanghai. His general mood was downhearted somewhat and forlorn, yet in spite of the world of calamity he had created, he felt calmly sated as he sat, alone in contemplation.