11

I have to confess I am transfixed each time Bonny addresses the thierpark audience, pausing at intervals to allow Hilda to translate whichever Badtjala legend he is telling. It was Bonny’s idea to incorporate legends into the performances, for without them he said the dances and songs were empty of meaning. I suspect he is pleased with the way the crowd responds to his telling. Each time, as he begins to speak, I watch the audience still and fall silent, mesmerised by his every word. Sometimes, after everyone has gone, Bonny asks Hilda to tell him German stories. It is a kind of trade, I suppose. But back to the story of the boomerang, which in this telling Bonny refers to as a burrakun rather than a bar’gan. I do not know why, although said aloud and fast, the two words could be mistaken for each other. But do not listen to me, listen to Bonny, his voice, low and melodic between dear Hilda’s translations:

A long time ago a little boy and his sister were playing on the beach. He was showing off and killed the little bird which was his own ‘meat’ or ‘eurie’. Yindingie became angry and decided to punish the children. He appeared as a large sea serpent and carried the children out to sea. Hearing their cries, the fighting men picked up their spears and rushed to the beach but when they saw it was Yindingie, they were all afraid except the children’s father, who threw his nulla-nulla at Yindingie. It hit the serpent on the head, bent, and spun back swiftly, almost killing the father. Yindingie dropped the children and they turned into two rocks. The father was disgusted when he saw his good nulla-nulla bent out of shape and he threw it out to sea at the rocks. It returned again and again. The tribe hailed this new weapon as a great wonder and many came to try to circle the rocks with the burrakun or boomerang, thinking it might return the children to them.

Bonny bows before casting his bar’gan high over the crowd, to many cheers.

‘And tell your children that they must behave or the sea serpent will come for them in their beds!’ Bonny says, winking at Hilda, who again translates. Bonny is eyeing a young boy who threw a pebble at him earlier in the show.

Many of the parents laugh and look at their terrified children as if to say, I hope you are listening.

Jurano meanwhile is shaking his head in frustration, doing his best to make a new spear from a piece of bent timber that Herr Hagenbeck had given him. Jurano’s own spear was broken the day before by a German man who cast it poorly.

Jurano tests the new spear, but it misses the apple pinned to the elm. Many in the crowd boo, and Jurano yells back a series of Badtjala insults, which Hilda does not translate.

‘Jurano!’ Bonny shouts.

‘I am a better thrower than you, but not with that!’ Jurano points at the new spear.

‘If you anger the audience they will not pay.’ Bonny turns away, smiling to a man near the fence and handing him a spare boomerang. The man throws it badly and it becomes caught in a tree.

‘You see?’ Jurano says. ‘Don’t give them our weapons.’

Bonny climbs to get the bar’gan, and the audience grows even more impressed by his climbing abilities than they were with his spear or boomerang throwing. The whites’ clapping is as raucous as a flock of cockatoos taking flight.

Herr Hagenbeck tells the crowd about the unique way Aboriginal men climb. He takes a monkey from its cage and holds it on his hip, splaying its feet and recounting theories about Aborigines’ ape-like thumbs and toes. I have not heard him tell this tale before. A German man leans over the fence and inspects Bonny’s and Jurano’s footprints, observing aloud that their feet must be flatter than his own. Herr Hagenbeck holds up one of the monkey’s feet in comparison.

I am aware of a great wind building in the elm above us. The wind swoops down into the park, stealing Herr Hagenbeck’s voice and taking with it hats and shawls. Can-o-bie swirls these items of clothing into the sky and tosses them onto the ground.

In the mayhem, Jurano retreats to the hut, coughing as he goes, his footprints disappearing in the dust behind him.

It is night, and a group of German visitors is allowed inside the Australneger enclosure, although Herr Hagenbeck asks them to maintain a distance of an arm’s length from the Aboriginal visitors. I think he fears disease. I am alarmed to see a fat, unsteady woman approach the cooking fire. Jurano lit the fire just outside the hut and is cooking a bird and a squirrel that he killed with Bonny’s spear. The woman leans close and the hem of her long skirt catches alight. Bonny, quick thinking, slaps the woman’s legs hard to extinguish the flames, smiling when it is done and the shelter is still standing. I see what is about to come but cannot warn him. The fat woman’s husband roars and strikes Bonny in the face, and I have never seen the young man appear more shocked.

‘Keep your dirty hands off her!’ the German man shouts.

‘Your wife was on fire!’ Bonny answers in the same language. He clutches his Jun Jaree in his pocket, and I imagine he is asking it to help keep him calm.

Once the people have gone, Jurano’s coughing worsens from all the smoke. Bonny speaks aloud to his Jun Jaree, with a message for Beeral, this time to help strengthen Jurano’s faltering resolve and cure his cough, which is growing worrying. The cough has not been helped by the medicine Herr Hagenbeck’s wife gave Jurano when she returned from her journey to Berlin. Jurano said the ‘Hamburg Breast Tea’ tasted like piss, and he pushed it away. He said the firewater soothed his throat better, but Bonny told him it also allowed the Melong to get into his head.

Every week Louis gives Bonny, Jurano and Dorondera several coins, in addition to the money they earn selling boomerangs. Other things, too: red handkerchiefs and more ribbons for Dorondera, but she is not permitted to wear them in the thierpark during the day.

When it comes time to go to the grand city of Berlin it is very warm, the beginning of Juli. Herr Hagenbeck, Bonny and his friends, including Louis and Hilda, take a train, which from my vantage point I see leave from a large railway station in Hamburg and travel the countryside fast like a giant, rattling snake. Is that what Bonny thinks also? Perhaps it makes him think of Herr Hagenbeck, for snakes are the only animal the German is afraid of, although he has great admiration for trains. He says they have changed the world.

Bonny tells his Jun Jaree that he does not like trains. He says the villages go by too fast and are known by long and difficult words that the people here form in the back of their throats as if they are trying to expel thick phlegm. Bonny stumbles over the names of the places they pass, repeating them until they are correct.

‘The ocean is now very far away,’ Hilda says, and I watch Bonny put his hand to his chest. I imagine that his heart is pounding as fast as the rhythmic bumps the train is making as it runs along its seemingly neverending path – two lines that extend as far as a person can see. A ghost, however, can see further. At a certain point, the lines enter vast, shell-like stations, and within them the trains stop.