Paris Savages

This morning, the day before we are to leave, we made impressions in plaster of our friends’ feet and hands so that we might gift a set to Mr Sheridan who has been so generous, sending a new hat for me, rimmed with a sky-blue ribbon, and continuing to provide Papa with a wage, despite our meagre achievements here. Papa had the idea to make the prints some days ago, and straight away ordered from the Maryborough doctor’s surgery a bag of plaster, intended for broken limbs. Our friends regarded the sack curiously when it arrived via a local cutter early today and Papa mixed its white contents with fresh water from the stream. He poured the slurry into a shallow dish right there on the beach under the blazing sun.

‘It is like making a footprint in sand,’ Papa told Bonny, whom he had asked to go first. He spoke in Badtjala, not badly but still not well. ‘Except it last for all time, like Yindingie’s.’ He pointed across the strait to where the spirit’s footprint had been immortalised in stone on a mainland beach.

Bonny tentatively pressed his foot into the mix and we waited for some time for the plaster to be dry enough for him to lift his foot out without the impression’s sides and tiny details collapsing. In the heat it took perhaps a quarter of an hour I am guessing, although I had removed Mama’s pendant watch for the occasion in case it became damaged, Papa having told me I may need to assist. All of us looked on in wonderment at the perfect likeness, the delicate ridged rings of each toe print replicated exactly alongside a perfect copy of a eucalyptus leaf that had landed in the dish when the plaster was still wet. The impression was passed reverently between us like something sacred, and Papa and I had to find as many dishes and bowls as we could muster to meet the sudden demand. I tried to make a dish from a palm frond, but the plaster slurry ran from it in a swift, white stream. Dorondera crouched low and made a print of her right hand and, in a separate dish, Bonny did the same. Little Bonny bent down and was about to press his face into a fresh bowl of plaster when Old Jack and I told him not to.

‘How would you breathe?’ Old Jack asked him, nipping the end of the boy’s nose between wrinkled fingers.

Dorondera’s cousins laughed as they pushed their small fists in a ring around Dorondera’s hand, the plaster already quite firm and the resulting outlying impressions, which reminded me of flower petals, consequently shallow. Even one of the camp dingoes, which here are called wang’ari, was enticed towards a dish, a piece of meat placed as bait on the other side so the animal had to step onto the wet plaster to retrieve its meal. We all laughed, scaring the poor creature, its paw print smudging in haste. By day’s end, as the sun sets over the strait and our view of the vast continent on the other side dims, there will be more ghostly prints laid out on the sand than there are Badtjala people looking on.

When Papa was no longer watching, I removed my gloves and mixed a slurry from the last few handfuls of plaster dust left in the sack. I made an impression of my own hand. Again, Dorondera’s cousins pressed their fists around the perimeter making a flower shape. Once Papa had returned to us on the beach, I asked him which print was mine and which was Dorondera’s but he could not tell them apart.

Hilda sat beside Dorondera at the campfire as she had done most nights since arriving on K’gari. Tomorrow the ship would arrive to take them across oceans to distant shores. Dorondera clapped two sticks together, cutting open the stillness with the sharp rhythmic sound, steady as a heartbeat, and Hilda wondered what her friend would make of Europe and how that crowded continent would understand her. The other women seated around the fire joined in the music-making, slapping the palms of their hands against their bare thighs. Bonny sang with the old men, some of whom were now striking shields with nulla or clashing together bar’gan, which others called boomerangs. As they sang their stories, Hilda translated in her head, sometimes hearing her mother singing, for she had learned the songs, too: when the bu’boo flowers, it is time to climb trees for the gu’ru’i – forest possums; when the fruit on passionfruit vines are ripe, wangai – carpet snakes – are fat and good for eating; when the waterlily blooms, collect babaram – river mussels; when the wi’ri – currajong tree – is in blossom, the bream will run and the time is right to search for yams on the beaches; and when the chestnut blooms, then you can hunt mi’bir – turtles.

The fine hairs on Hilda’s arms and neck rose as the singing moved through her.

Bonny stood from the circle and moved closer to the fire. At almost six feet, he was of average height among Badtjala men, his body strong from hunting and good food. Naked except for a loin covering, he started to dance, making shadows against the surrounding vegetation. Dorondera’s young cousins nestled in behind Hilda and giggled as they played with her long red hair. Little Bonny dozed across Hilda’s lap, holding a plaster impression of Bonny’s handprint. Every now and then the boy opened his eyes and put his own hand in the impression his uncle’s hand had made. What future lay ahead for this boy, Hilda wondered. What stories would he tell his children? Christel had sourced English books in Maryborough and sometimes read fairytales to Little Bonny and to Dorondera’s young cousins. She had said she would one day write a special story for Little Bonny, whom she had taken a special liking to, but, to Hilda’s knowledge, she never started it.

‘He’s a good dancer, your uncle,’ Hilda said in English, looking away from Bonny briefly to kiss the boy’s forehead, which felt hot from the fire. It would help the child, she thought, to learn some more settler words. German would be of no value to him. ‘And he knows a lot, so listen to him.’

Generations of experience and knowledge were stored in her friend’s head; more, she sometimes thought, than in the many maps and books on the natural world her father carted about, although she would not tell either of them that.

At Hilda’s feet, a dingo twitched, then leapt to standing. Ears alert and forwards, it stared into the forest and howled. The men stopped singing, and Jurano reached for his spear. In the other hand he held a nulla-nulla, its heavy club end hanging at his side. Hilda held Little Bonny tight and tried to read whether Jurano was concerned, but he gave nothing away. Neither did Bonny. Dorondera was sitting beside Hilda, totally still.

Jurano waited. A dull thud, then a scamper. Jurano threw the spear and ran forwards. He lifted the weapon and gave a high-pitched laugh. The possum hung off the spear’s end, its legs briefly persistent in their wild scrabbling. In the next arc of movement, Jurano threw the animal onto the fire before covering it with hot white sand and flaming coals. The dingo sank again onto the warm ground and rested its head on its front paws, its ears searching front and sideways still. Shh, listen.

Hilda pressed her lips to Little Bonny’s ear and whispered in the language of the Badtjala that all was well again, his confused expression revealing she had been alone in her fear. Jurano and the others, even Little Bonny, knew well the sound of a possum. Still, Hilda could not shake her sense of disquiet. According to Old Mary, the thirty people in this settlement were among the survivors of a population that just a generation before had numbered in the low thousands during winter, when the group travelled from the mainland to the island for the seasonal influx of gaar’ba’nya, mullet. There were more Badtjala living a few kilometres further south on K’gari, and several dozen more still on the mainland, but the greatest number now lay under the sand in unmarked graves.

Hilda stroked Little Bonny’s forehead. His parents were amongst the dead, his mother from disease, his father from a rifle bullet – a single shot to the back.

Careful not to step over his elders’ legs or walk between them and the fire, Jurano resumed his place. Hilda urged Little Bonny to return to sleep, and the two girls once again took hold of Hilda’s hair and tied the long tresses into impossible knots. One of the girls whispered to the other and they began to tie Dorondera’s and Hilda’s hair together, although Hilda pretended not to realise.

‘Hold this piece,’ one of them said in her native tongue, and Hilda obediently held out the tangled section of hair, freeing the girl to concentrate on her knot tying. Later, Dorondera and Hilda would release themselves and the girls would laugh. Tomorrow, Hilda would complain, as she did most mornings when she tried to make sense of the mess the girls had made, but not tonight.

She reminded herself that long journeys were nothing new to the Badtjala. In previous decades, before the escalating wars with settlers, they had gathered with other groups in large mainland corroborees when the bunya trees produced their bountiful harvest of nuts. There they had performed songs, competed in boomerang- and spear-throwing, and traded information on bush medicine. They bartered what they had: weapons, tools, stories, and, later, tobacco carefully wrapped in leaves. Hilda’s mother had written all of this in her journal, itself a jungle decorated with fronds of leaf and vine and notations about the ailments that each plant could mend. She had recorded Badtjala words as she heard them pronounced: yuangan for dugong, paiy’um for pipe, kum’bar or kun’du for bark canoe. Sometimes she wrote in brackets beside the words the spelling that Louis insisted was more correct, gom’bar for canoe, for example, or baiyum for pipe, although it was not the way the words were spoken. Occasionally, Christel read aloud from her journal, sections in which she tried to imagine how life was for the people they were living amongst. ‘It’s important to listen, Hilda,’ she said. ‘But also to imagine. There is more than one way of seeing.’ It would be Hilda’s one day, that book. For now, it remained with her father, packed into the nailed-shut crate of artefacts.

Dorondera began to strike her thighs with her hands and this time the old women sang until their voices filled the night sky, looping around the distant stars before returning. Bonny resumed his energetic dance, his body shimmering in the firelight, his concentrated expression breaking from time to time into a wide smile. Hilda shivered with the excitement of imagining Bonny performing like this for audiences overseas. She pictured the pale faces, captivated. Little Bonny was again awake. His eyes followed his uncle, whose chest and shoulders shone with stripes of white ochre, highlighting the rows of scars across his chest.

How those cuts must have hurt when they were made. Hilda imagined Bonny standing within the series of bora rings she had heard about – the place where boys became men – his fresh wounds bleeding. A circle of blazed trees marked the perimeter of the site. Or did the scarification happen elsewhere? She didn’t know. Neither did Dorondera. Women were not granted the right to witness such ceremonies, and whenever they heard the whirring vibration of the bon’da’ban knew to keep away under fear of death. The settlers called the bon’da’ban a bullroarer, and marvelled that a flat piece of wood tied to a piece of string could make such a terrifying sound.

The women had their own sacred places, where freshwater ran and special vines grew, vines that relieved pain in childbirth. When Hilda reached puberty, Old Mary showed her the plant, displaying a leaf from it on her open hand. Hilda had listened but her attention was on Mary’s smallest finger, the top part of which was missing as a sign of marriage. When a Badtjala girl married, a string was tied tightly around her finger. Over time, the end of the digit died and fell off.

Now, Bonny thumped the sand with his heels, and the dingo at Hilda’s feet twitched in its sleep. Hilda listened closely to the old women’s song. It was the story of their island home and how it was made. Sometimes, Christel had repeated the story to Hilda at night to help her go to sleep. Hilda’s mother used to look up at the stars, as if trying to see Beeral, the god who lived in the sky, as she whispered:

Beeral sent his messenger, Yindingie, to make the land and other things. The female spirit, K’gari, helped Yindingie and after working very hard, grew tired and lay down to rest. When she woke, she did not want to leave such a beautiful place and begged Yindingie to let her stay. Finally, Yindingie relented and transformed her into the most beautiful place imaginable. An island. He dressed her with beautiful plants, made lakes to be her eyes, and filled the flowing streams with the sound of her voice. He created animals to live in the forests and water and then made people. He taught the people the magic of making children so K’gari would never be lonely. The spirit Yindingie gathered the people at Moon Point and held out his arms to show them the extent of their land. He told them the laws that they must keep and pass on to their children and their children’s children forever.

How Hilda wished her mother was just asleep. A curlew cried. The death bird. Hilda pictured the tall, flecked creature hiding somewhere in the surrounding bush, its large eyes surprise-wide. She closed her own eyes and listened to the lonely sound.

Then someone was tugging at her hand.

‘Your turn,’ Bonny said.

Hilda laughed. ‘No,’ she answered in his language. ‘I am no good at it. You know that.’ She faced Dorondera, who had taught her some dances – Hilda and Christel had, in turn, taught Dorondera how to waltz – but her friend just smiled and, with her bare foot, pushed her forwards.

Yesterday, without warning, Dorondera had been sullen and quiet, and Hilda had not been able to reach her for trying. Dorondera hated being teased for her moodiness and had begun to silently weave a new dillybag. At least Dorondera was happy again, Hilda thought, deciding to dance for her as well as for Bonny, although she felt self-conscious. It was only when Hilda pulled a possum fur over her head, her arms curled in front of her, that she felt brave enough to try to become the creature whose skin she wore.

Bonny took his place by the fire and several of the elders whooped their approval, and their humour. It was rare to get Hilda to perform. Old Jack drew in a deep breath of tobacco smoke, his pipe made from the end of a mud crab’s claw. When he laughed it was in puffs of white cloud like a train. Jurano loaded another baiyum with fresh tobacco and passed it to his neighbour. That pipe was of clay and highly prized, although not as prized as the cigars, now finished, that Hilda’s father recently procured for them in Maryborough, where, since the arrival of the rail line from Gympie’s goldfields, most things could be bought and sold. Thankfully, the small camp here on K’gari was, for now, spared the scourge of opium.

Even under the fur, Hilda could feel Bonny’s eyes on her, watching her every step. Nervous but exhilarated, she peered out and saw Little Bonny raise a smile. Dorondera, too, watched closely, and Hilda concentrated hard, keen to make her young teacher proud. Hilda was a year older than Dorondera, but in many ways Dorondera was her guide.

It was their last night on the island and Hilda decided that there was little to lose. She raised her arms and eyes to the stars and to the twisting curls of smoke that hung in the forest around her. The possum fur slipped from her head and back and landed on the sand.

She moved her body to the music the way she’d been taught and tried to forget her audience, their inevitable chuckles. She was no longer a possum. Instead, she thought of the dance of the sea eagle and tried to imitate it.

The waves hissed just a hundred feet away. They were louder than before, and Hilda realised the wind must have shifted. The breeze cooled her skin, wet now with sweat. She was aware of Bonny still watching her.

The sand was warm and soft under her feet. Was this also her home now? Her father had forbidden her from adopting many of its customs and, even when her mother had died, Hilda had been prohibited from cutting herself in mourning as Dorondera had done, ash smoothed over her head.

‘Yes!’ Bonny called out in the language of the Badtjala. ‘You are dancing like one of us now.’

A heavy clapping drew Hilda’s eyes away from the centre of the firelight to its edges. She saw her father approaching, a smile wide across his broad face.

‘Indeed you are dancing well,’ Louis said in German. ‘You will need to adopt a more restrained style when we are home.’ He chuckled, but she knew he was serious.

Hilda, proud but embarrassed once more, dropped her arms and resumed her place beside Dorondera at the fire. Her father skirted the circumference of the group, nodding to Jurano as he passed. He crouched behind Hilda.

‘Are you packed?’ he asked. ‘We will need to board promptly when the ship arrives.’

She nodded. ‘Everything except my journal.’

‘It’s too late tonight to write.’

‘I have to.’

Her father laughed warmly again behind her. ‘You are so like your mother. But tonight you must sleep. I insist. You will have three months at sea to write.’

‘Papa –’

‘At times like this, a person can think too much.’

Hilda held a twig in her hand and pushed with her thumbs against the middle of it until it snapped. She leaned forwards and threw the two pieces into the fire. The fire spat and, instinctively, she spat back, along with the others. When a fire spits, a spirit has sat down amongst you. It is important to acknowledge that spirit by spitting in return. Then no harm will come to you.

Jurano used a long, strong branch to turn the possum. He then used two sticks to lift a roasted fish from the coals. With his finger and thumb, permanently calloused from the handle of the fishing net, he peeled back the fish’s scaly skin and handed the steaming flesh first to his wife and then to Hilda and his niece to share. He did not have a child of his own. Not yet.

The fish was delicious and tasted of the sea and the sun. Hot juice ran down Hilda’s neck and onto her chest. Earlier they had feasted on shellfish, sweet and smoky from the fire. The possum would take much longer. Hilda turned her face from the unpleasant smell of burnt fur and listened to the flesh hissing under the hot sand, the skin cracking and popping with the heat.

‘Are you sure about this, Papa?’ Hilda asked, without looking at him.

His hand was firm on her forearm.

Evening, 24 February 1882

Papa is asleep, so, my memories, before I forget:

My dear mother. I remember holding her hand as we walked and sometimes ran along the beaches, the pandanus whispering their secrets, the wind harsh on our sun-browned faces. My mother’s laughter when she first tried the women’s dances and her amused delight when she watched how much more quickly I learned them. I was a child then and not so self-conscious.

I remember Mama’s nose in her books in the evenings. I can see her reading the Bible by lamplight, the air about her abuzz with winged insects that crashed into the light like confused spirits trapped on the wrong side. I remember her golden hair aglow around her face, her brow furrowed in concentration, her green eyes. I remember her teaching me English, French and, of course, German. Her frown when I confused my languages, and her insistence that I practise until I got them right. Her own attempts at Badtjala. Her kindness, even when she was cross with my father if he spent too long with his own face in books – scientific texts. Mama was a firm believer in God over science. ‘What is so fascinating in the ideas of scientists that you can sit there for three hours straight, Louis?’ she would ask, embracing my father from behind and peering over his shoulder, her hair bright against his tanned, creased neck. And then her curiosity when he handed her the book to read herself, and the surprising magic it seemed to wield over her, too. I remember the discussions that followed long into the night. Evolution was a common theme, especially as it related to mankind. The strange thing was they both agreed on the central point, but couldn’t see it. ‘We are all brothers and sisters,’ my mother said. ‘All made by the hand of God.’ She would quote from the Bible on the subject of unity, ‘That they all may be one.’ To which my father would reply, ‘Yes, but there are distinct differences, Christel, it cannot be denied. Progressive changes. I’m not saying that makes any of us necessarily better or worse. And I’m not arguing, as others are, that the origins are not the same.’ I remember lying in bed listening, frustrated. So much over so little.

I remember, also, my mother’s shared hatred for mosquitos and the way she sometimes stared off into the distance as if recalling an easier life. Her determination to wash our blouses and my father’s shirts in the stream to keep them white and her disappointment as they faded and yellowed as they hung, headless, from the wire drying line she had strung up in the tea-trees. My mother grew most upset, however, when the fire spat its hot fury at us and our clothes received small holes that were difficult to repair.

Now, my memories of my father. He and I will naturally remain together on this, our next adventure, so I do not fear forgetting him, but will include my recollections of our time together so that there exists a full account. If his worst nightmare were to come true and I preceded him in death, I would want him to know my true feelings.

If my father believed at all in God, he does not any longer. Not since Mama died, and perhaps not since the bridge collapse. He puts no stock in the idea that the Lord looks down on us, seeing that we come to no harm. No. He sees himself as my sole protector. It is a burden he does not wear lightly. He does not like it when I venture too far from the camp, even in the company of our friends.

He buried my mother in the small cemetery up by the grounds of the old failed mission, the Aboriginal women sitting about my mother’s head wailing as he dug, the comet’s tail still visible in the sky, moving northward. I cut a lock of my hair and buried it with my mother. It is a lonely place, the cemetery here on Fraser Island’s west coast. Apart from my mother, there lie just two men who died in a shipwreck, a missionary’s child and three gold diggers, a Chinese man amongst them, quarantined on the island because of illness. In the Aboriginal cemetery, there are many more graves than this.

My father has changed so since his time here. For some weeks, I secretly blamed him for my mother’s death but, seeing his immense grief, I have forgiven him, just as my mother forgave him the deaths of the twenty-four people who fell with their horses and carts into the frozen river. He hurts as much as I and there is no way he would have brought us here if this was the end he foresaw. In Germany he was always impeccably dressed and mannered, yet when I think of him now he is shirtless like the Badtjala, building wooden structures that he promised would better keep out the summer rains, although they did not. I see his annoyance at the limited tools and materials that he had at his disposal and the crooked structures that resulted, but also his joy that he made our hosts happy by giving the first hut to them. We, of course, still had our canvas tent. Our new friends appreciated Papa’s sometimes humorous efforts, if not the imperfect result, and made a show of at least starting out the night in the dwellings he made.

Papa is angry at the treatment many of the settlers mete out to the blacks here and on the mainland; and not just the settlers, but the police and the native troopers, also. He tells them that the Badtjala are intelligent and wise, and that the poor treatment they are enduring must stop. During our time here Papa has added to the ethnographic notes that our patron, Mr Sheridan, requested. Papa's own tests included measurements of people’s bodies and strength, although Mama and I never liked such invasions. As Mama said, we do not need rulers and lengths of tape to see that our friends are as human as we are. ‘The act of measurement reduces us, Louis,’ she said, not unkindly, taking his hand into her own. Mama, like Mr Sheridan, preferred studies of what people do and what they know. But Papa argued that scientists overseas would demand objective facts. Although he arrived in the colony with the intention of rebuilding his reputation as an engineer, it was his study ‘Australneger aus Queensland’ that won him the fresh acclaim he sought and drew Mr Sheridan’s attention. Papa would not admit it, I am certain, but I think the delay in publishing his studies of the Badtjala has much to do with Mama’s concerns about his focus on physical differences, which I suspect ring louder in his head now that she is gone. Nevertheless, I must stand by him, as Mama asked of me when she was so very ill. ‘He will need you now, Hilda,’ she said, as if she had already departed this life. ‘He is not as strong as he appears.’

I will miss Papa’s and my long beachcombing walks, during which Papa speaks somewhat openly to me, although I still hope for more. On the last walk he held up a beautiful nautilus shell, its pearlescent end worn through so it was almost transparent. He told me that in Europe ‘the new buildings are of glass and steel and shine like this’.

It is difficult to believe I have only one more night’s sleep here, the sounds of possums fighting outside the hut. It will be nice to again sleep in a comfortable bed.