As a youth I had known only the middle Ernest; he was cunning, and a man of sly lust. (I remember winking at him as I wrote that. He grinned his dementia. Lust, cunning; all gone.) Later I came to know him better than he knew himself. After all, not only had I pored over his writings, but I had been very intimate with his little probings, his ‘investigations’ to see the colour of my skin where the sun had not reached. He used to part my hair to see the scalp beneath and—when I was older, and recovering under his care—run his fingers through my curls, and all over me. ‘Looking for traces of colour,’ he’d mutter, stretching my cheeks apart. ‘There (mumble, mumble), a purple tint where we are pink, and that bluish tint to the whites of your eyes.’
He would begin this way, clinical, but—soon enough—was shouting, urgent with power.
‘Keep your eyes open. Eyes open,’ he would say, one hand clamping the back of my neck, the other my shoulder. ‘Keep them open.’ At least he accepted that I could not look directly at him on such an occasion, and so I stared at the wall as he thrust, in his stilted way, trying to get deeper within me, and if that was not violation enough, wanting to remain there even as he shrivelled.
Having tucked into me, and tucked himself away, he primly fussed in his efforts to smooth the bedclothes and pillow.
Of course it is difficult to forgive him; I was at his mercy, and weak, and grieving the death of my father.
Need I write of Ern’s self-deception, his scheming? I could not trust him, but he was family. ‘He’s family, that’s all you’ve got,’ my father had said. ‘You can’t change your family.’
And he was all I had, back then.
The younger Ernest had found himself in a backwater, and a salty one at that. He did a little work here, a little there.
He worked on a salt lake close to Wirlup Haven. When the breeze came up of an afternoon, the sea came gurgling and chortling with it. Thick salt water lapped at him, tonguing little nicks and scratches in his skin, opening them into clean raw ulcers which grew alarmingly.
In the early days of sharing our stories, I helped him revisit this memory. I bathed him in salty water, was slow and gentle with my touch. The wounds I’d given him grew, and in unforeseen ways. Letters I’d taken so much trouble with changed shape, and the words became hard to decipher.
Ernest talked to Sergeant Hall, revealing very little except the reflection of the sergeant’s ideas. As if the sergeant was a client, and Ern was about to build for him. Inevitably, perhaps—one being a Protector and proud of his patch, the other introduced to the country through a parish connection to the very Chief Protector of Aborigines—they spoke at length of the Native Problem. Generously, distantly; after all, it was not their problem. Ern, if he considered it at all, would say his interest had been aroused by Auber Neville and the words of the Travelling Inspector. He would never admit to the way his thoughts curled back to the memory of his first night off the ship, and—stiff and obstinate—returned to his present loneliness.
How he had spurted his ecstacy on that night. And he had felt so powerful, even as he turned his back and returned to the light.
Sergeant Hall’s face was pained as he stressed his concern for the welfare of his domestic, Kathleen, who’d been like a daughter to him. He felt a genuine love for her, he said, blushing at having expressed such sentiments. A father’s love. She’s not like most of them, he said. Never been in a camp, not that she could remember anyway. We’ve brought her up, really, like a white girl.
And so they had. She worked for them, yes, and hard, but they let her eat with them, taught her the niceties of etiquette, and she attended the church as one of their family. At picnics it was Sergeant Hall, wife, and domestic. Ernest was invited along.
There were nights of cards, when Daniel Coolman came, and Ern—despite the difficulties demanded by the conversation—would shepherd things along, listening attentively. He was exhausted at the end of such evenings.
Sergeant Hall was a good policeman, the whole town knew this. People would beam at the girl, the policeman’s girl. She showed them that they were tolerant, that the ones they kept away from town were indeed wasters, deserving their poverty and exclusion. If they tried harder, they would be accepted. By arrangement, they could be allowed into town for shopping, providing they first notified Sergeant Hall of their intentions.
Ern was almost openly courting Kathleen. He was taciturn, and awkward; fingers clumsy at her elbow. They danced in the living room, from one wall to another, and Ern was careful to keep his body away from hers. He moved stiffly.
Ern was proud of himself; of his daring, his open mind. But—we must be frank—he was also thinking of the wood yard, and Daniel’s health. When the big man died, what would happen to all that timber, and the land? They’d talked, see, Ern and Sergeant Hall, about the danger of leaving any property to Harriette. At present, because of the marriage, she may legally be a white woman, but once Daniel went ... Well, it was risky. A matter of interpretation.
Daniel would point out to Sergeant Hall that he was not the only one who regarded Kathleen as a daughter. He felt the same, more so. The two men competed as to the strength of their paternal feeling.
And Ern’s dreams of property (‘dreams’ sounded more innocent than ‘plans’) were more humble than they had been, certainly. A salty backwater? He had to start somewhere. He saw it as a place where he could become someone. He had plans—dreams—for all that timber. There was no market for it in this town. He was the only one who would be able to use it. He could build several houses on that block of land, he could build this town. Just as soon as that railway connected ... There would be wheat. Industry.
Of course he realised that the economy had slowed. He understood. A bad year for wheat prices. An aberration.
Ern applied for the contract to collect and dispose of the town’s nightsoil. ‘Go on,’ Jack Chatalong said in an aside to Kathleen. ‘Go on, the Goona man on the goona cart!’ He said it quietly, but Ernest and Sergeant Hall heard their laughter. They put their heads together and arranged that Jack take on the job, for appropriate wages.
Ern had his first employee.
Jack Chatalong and Kathleen were brother and sister. Perhaps that helps explain what Jack did. Perhaps Sergeant Hall told him of his father’s identity. Or his anger may have been of a more general kind, and never intended to achieve so final a result. Quite likely he did not think at all, but simply acted on the spur of the moment.
Slowly, they made their way to the mine shaft. Slowly, because it was a long time since Harriette had been there, and how the bush had grown. Slowly, because there was no hurry. Slowly, because of Daniel. ‘No,’ he had insisted, ‘I can walk.’ He wheezed, stopped to lean against some thin tree. ‘There can’t be anything here, this isn’t much more than dunes where the creek used to finish.’
There was a small, spindly looking construction above the shaft, which was itself very narrow, once you got past its opening. Jack told them he had left something at the bottom.
He descended while the others waited at the top.
As he came creaking up again he thought of Daniel’s continuing rejection of him. Of Kathleen, what she had told him.
He changed his mind. They would not wish to see these old bones he’d hidden, would not wish to be reminded of all this. What for? What good would it do? Jack Chatalong dropped the small burden he carried.
It was not a deep shaft but still, coming up, he saw its entrance as a fissure in the darkness. He saw a wound bleeding light, and imagined inserting his fingers in this opening. The backs of his fingers would be together; and then, opening his arms slowly, in an arc, as if they were wings about to launch him, he would thrust them down. He would pull the world inside-out. It would be another world.
He resumed the pulley, and his jerky, mechanical ascent.
To Harriette and Kathleen it seemed he was materialising from a diluted wash of light and bottomless darkness. And Jack Chatalong, looking up at his sister and aunty, seeing with their eyes as well as his own, saw both himself rising from the dark earth and their silhouettes dissolving in the wound of light.
He had reached where the ladder should be and remained standing in the bucket, bemused and blinking. The ladder was not there.
A few feet above him, his aunty and sister lowering the ladder. And Daniel’s voice muttering, ‘Yes all right all right. All right.’
As he came up the ladder Jack Chatalong took Daniel’s outstretched hand and squeezed it, hard, as men do. And leaning backwards, still holding tight, he hung all his weight on that hand. Jack Chatalong imagined geometric shapes—squares and rectangles and diamonds—suddenly exploding, suddenly being blown apart. He pulled on Daniel’s arm and, despite their relative weights, Daniel’s body came arching over his own. Clumsily, flailing, a balloon body and bloated tongue arms legs brushed Jack’s back. Who would have thought Jack had such strength?
Daniel’s echoing scream was abruptly muffled. Stopped.
Jack saw awe, something like fear, and even relief in the faces above him as he took on the light of day. What? They had not seen him pull. It was as if Daniel had dived in. They looked down upon the man jammed head down in the shaft. A last kick from the legs. Some strange plant that would not quite wilt.
Daniel’s coffin was huge.
And so, finally, Sergeant Hall—although uninvited—wound his way among the overturned water tanks and timber to what he thought of as the dead man’s shed. He was surprised to see a small crowd gathered under a sort of lean-to at the back, the adults drinking tea. Hall had expected to see merely the members of the household. But there were children playing, so many children. Although startled at such numbers, Sergeant Hall was composed enough to survey them with a professional eye.
There was:
The tall, old woman, Fanny (Full-blood. Widow, married an Englishman. Must be sixty, seventy, years old or more). Daniel had said she’d gone.
Her daughter, the dead man’s wife; Harriette (Half-caste. Recently widowed, married a white man. She’d be, what? fifty-ish?). Sergeant Hall saw the woman glaring at him and, uncharacteristically, he turned away.
His own Kathleen (Old Fanny’s niece? Granddaughter? Quadroon? Half-caste? Patrick Coolman presumably the white father. Aboriginal mother, Dinah; deceased?). Kathleen was no longer a girl. Yes, he was fond of her and wouldn’t want to lose her, and nor would the wife.
The boy, William. How old? Twelve? (Quadroon).
And that fellow Jack Chatalong, the shit-cart driver. He’d be late twenties, surely (Half-caste?).
And children. All looking at him, all suddenly quiet. So many of them, from toddlers to teenagers. His calculations faltered. He had to call them all half-caste, and ignore the range of hues. One—there—the backs of his legs covered with weals as if from an old or inherited whipping. Another with feet so long and thin they might have been worn flat from running, from being repeatedly chased from town to town. A third with a skin evidencing a startling range of colours; black, brown, tan, red and white and even blue swirling together in scars formed from burnt flesh. Hall’s eye was caught by a girl staggering as if drunk. The child was somehow damaged, unable to stay still or move properly. She rolled her eyes at him and held out a hand. A fifth had a shock of red hair, and freckles like spattered blood. He recognised a strong jaw, and saw youthful caricatures of people who lived, had lived, in his area. Mustles, Starrs, Dones; even Coolman. Hall? His memory flickered.
There was such a lot to keep track of. Sergeant Hall hoped he could avoid having to write all this up in a report. It looked almost like one of the missions, like one of the settlements. Here in his own street. His mind buzzed, settling into its rhythm of calculations. half-caste, quadroon, octoroon. What word next? One-sixteenth. No. It was all too much.
And there was Ernest, with his tongue practically hanging from his mouth. His face flushed and unable to keep his eyes off Kathleen. His hands, too, seemed to be blushing, or was it that they were scrubbed raw?
Sergeant Hall was due to retire in a few months. What would his successor think? What would he say?
The older women tried to explain, their fathers had deserted these kids, the mothers didn’t have a chance ... Where else? Who else? Fanny and Harriette hesitated, fearing they’d said too much.
But Sergeant Hall hadn’t noticed. Sergeant Hall waved her silent. All this, next-door to the police station. Where did they keep them all? The rainwater tanks, the shed...
It’s a wonder there hadn’t been more complaints from the townsfolk. His brain ached from the mathematics.
He saw Kathleen look at him from under her brows, behind her lashes; shy, like she did. He’d thought ... For a moment he wondered if he’d been made a fool of.
He was a policeman. He was the Local Protector. He reminded himself—and it came as a relief—that these people needed his help.
Had Daniel been deceived?
Officially, he was off-duty. He said his goodbyes gruffly, and left.
Ernest guessed ... Ernest thought about what could happen. He’d looked into the law, had listened to Auber and James Segal. There was every chance the policeman would sell the property, transfer the funds to the Aborigines Department, and send the lot of them away. That was what usually happened, and this case was only a little different from the majority because of the husband being—having been—a white man.
Ern had got on well with Daniel. He had understood the man, which was no mean feat when confronted by a speech impediment like that.
It was a gamble, whichever way you looked at it. But Ernest had plans, and did not yet suspect that he may have erred in reckoning on the railway coming across this far.
Auber had sung the praises of these native women. James too, more intimately. Ern had seen the results himself, those children of Daniel and Harriette’s, for instance; they were practically white. Should be free, he thought.
Ern, already, wanted to make them as I am; free to drift away like bright fair flowers, free to float out to the islands.
And Ern elaborated to himself what Daniel had implied. After all, what do you need a woman for anyway? There’s no trouble, they make great mothers, great wives, and it’s easy to let ’em know they’d be in the shit without you. Ernest did not dwell on his choice of metaphor, did not think that it might one day be he who crept up behind the white townsfolk as they turned their backs on him and squatted.
It was a matter of who he was going to save, and where the best investment lay. Course, he was getting lonely. Know what I mean? I know all about loneliness.
And yes, I felt lonely, even in writing that, as I hovered over the keyboard, my fingers tap-tapping and my heels in the air. I feared I was losing my people, that options narrow down all the time. That I was losing. Even when family welcomed me back, they did so warily—but it became easier when I no longer carried my grandfather on my back wherever I went.
I was frightened, I remain proud.
When I first began to sing around the campfire, my body rising and falling with my voice, a cousin to whom I had been introduced offered to accompany me on the didj, but we could not get it right. He cried out, ‘Relax, loosen up, you be singing like a wadjela next,’ and stomped away. Almost weeping at that I let the song come, and my hovering body resonated something like a didgeridoo itself, except that the notes were so high and varied, and then my cousin came back into the campfire light.
But my singing still makes people uncomfortable. It is embarrassing I suppose, someone looking like me, singing as I do.
But...
Sergeant Hall looked at Ern warily. This was some proposal; he was not sure what to make of it.
It bettered his own plan, and it would hurt Kathleen less. Yes, again, he had to admit he’d grown very fond of that girl. It seemed a fair plan. All things considered, it seemed best for all concerned. Everything correct and in order.
Sergeant Hall said there was no need for permission from the department. ‘I am the Local Protector. And I judge Kathleen, unequivocally, a white girl.’
Sergeant Hall was a good policeman. He could only blind himself for so long, could only bend the rules to a limited extent before bending them back the other way. His successor was about to arrive, and Ern and he agreed that this much was clear;
1. These people weren’t white.
2. There was no hope for them now with Daniel gone. (And surely he had never known that they gathered like this.)
3. It would be unfair to burden Kathleen with them. They would drag her down.
4. The townspeople would not like it, and the children would never be accepted at the local school.
5. It was necessary to act for their own good.
Sergeant Hall hired a good solid cart. He couldn’t get anything too luxurious, the Aborigines Department was not a wealthy one. And, anyway, there was nothing else available, not for so many. Although in fact, there were less on the cart than there legally should have been because Harriette had remained, subject to Sergeant Hall and Ernest’s goodwill. The two men had assured her, had assured them all; things were different now. This place the others were being sent to had a school, it was like an agricultural college. It was a place to learn, to gather skills, to equip oneself for life.
Harriette had no choice. She wanted to believe them.
Sergeant Hall tried to reassure them. ‘I have a friend,’ he said, ‘who will care for you.’ He handed them over to another policeman, and gave them one last (unreturned) wave.
At the siding there was a man to guard them. He made a little sign, and wired it to the carriage. Niggers for Mogumber.
The farmer told himself he was affable and egalitarian, leaning against the fence post like this, and speaking to Jack Chatalong.
‘You got a job lined up after this one?’
The farmer leaned very hard against the post as he spoke. He was looking for a discount, but the fence post did not move.
Jack shook his head, tightened the last wire.
‘I hear they found a mob at Daniel Coolman’s place, they’re moving them all.’
Jack was on his bike. He slewed through sand, through alternating shadow and light, concentrating on the path his wheels must take, and it was as if the shadows were of people, silently willing him to maintain balance and momentum.
There was no one at the yard and there was only quiet among the water tanks. A couple of late magpies danced before him. He looked at the ground. How far to the railway?
As the night closed in around him, his breathing grew ragged. He rode until he was exhausted, slept, and rode again in the morning.
It was dark before he got to the siding. He heard the train shriek. And then he was rushing past the siding; the train moving away, trailing its plume of steam. He moved in steam, or was it now mist?
The bike twisted under him, and he was running, stumbling on sleepers, chasing the train, knowing even then how foolish he was. He called out into the darkness, his thin voice joining the giant hissing and panting, the rumbling of metal on metal. Then his hand got hold of something. The train dragged him, and his breath had been left far behind, when he saw a figure leap stiffly from the carriage, hit the ground and roll, and roll, and roll. He saw this even as the train dragged him. Fanny?
The train slowed, stopped.
The guards pulled him to his feet, counted those in the stock car. With this one, who had obviously tried to leap off, there were seven. Okay.
Those on the carriage were thinking of old Fanny, somewhere out there in the bush. She would not have been able to survive such a fall, surely. Should not have even been able to leap like that.
The train continued on, its unhappy passengers in the stock car now a little less sullen, and strangely cheered even though Jack Chatalong had his hands cuffed. Just in case, you know. It would look bad, now that it had been decided, if anyone were to escape
Some of these are heading, inexorably, toward the first proper white man born. The others, irrespective of caste or fraction, will mostly make a different future. I fear I have lost them. I fear it is being proved once again, I am so much less than I might have been. I fear that once were we, and now there is only I.
Nevertheless, I can offer a further glimpse. In some ways it corresponds to my own experience, the treatment I took at Ern’s hands. This is from what I have been told.
Someone at the carriage, opening it. The sand felt luxurious at first, and you let your feet sink into it. Earth.
‘Someone will be here for you in the morning.’ What could you do? You didn’t know where you were. Some of us were about to find out we didn’t know who we were.
In the morning you saw a series of unconnected carriages which had been released of their human cargo. Not just your family’s. You were rounded up by a few fellas in half uniforms; a jacket, a whip, a spear tipped with glass, sticks and waddies.
‘This way,’ they indicated. ‘This way.’ You were driven to the settlement like animals, really, but of course it was not for slaughtering. For training? Yes, perhaps. Certainly it was for breeding, according to the strict principles of animal husbandry.
And one, of pure but rejected strain, must have been absorbed into the earth further back along that long railway.
The children were distributed variously.
Wire mesh on the windows. As soon as the sun falls you were locked into a dormitory. Insects in the mattresses stung your shivering body. You heard bare feet padding across the floor. Muffled cries. Whispers. Other bodies slipped into your bed, to investigate the newcomer.
Small children shat on the sandy floor of one room, and like cats they covered their heap.
If you were very lucky, a woman who worked in the kitchen said, ‘You call me Aunty. Aunty Dinah.’
They ran a comb through your hair, speaking of your scalp. ‘White, really.’ Someone jerked at your clothing. ‘See, where the sun has not been?’
‘Elsewhere. We need somewhere else for the lighter ones.’
They kept you at the compound for a few days.
In the schoolroom the teacher was shouting across the room at a girl. A thin web of spittle trailed the words, and fell as short of the mark as the words themselves. The girl was dragged from the room.
A young one on the floor, tied to the leg of her desk.
A girl returns to class with her head shaved, wearing a sack for a dress. Those who quietly snicker nevertheless suffer with her. Because you never knew. It might be you.
The evening meal. You sat together at long benches, and did not talk. Cold. A thick yellow skin formed across the bowl. You tapped something solid at the bowl’s centre. It bobbed, and the yellow skin broke apart.
Eyeballs floated across puddles of greasy soup, and crusts of bread showed signs of having already been gnawed by tiny mouths. If you were lucky there was a dull spoon.
Locked up of an evening, wire over the windows. Things in the mattress bit you, and you welcomed the others into your bed. Because of the warmth, see, and the company.
You dreamt that you were punished, like the boy you’d seen put into a bag and suspended from a rope tied high in a tree. Swinging. Trying to keep your head above your feet. Feeling that you were not quite drifting, but released; set free, thrown out and abandoned. It was dark, the weave of the hessian making rectangles of light. You could not distinguish trees, but only sky and earth.
Cut down, crawling out of the bag. You could not walk, and fell, kept falling; the earth had moved away, rolled away and left her behind.
In daylight you were bundled into a train again. A proper carriage this time, and a man in a suit watched you. A woman dressed in stiff white clothes receives you at the station.
You walked, almost breaking into a trot at the woman’s side. It was very hot. The sky blue. Heatwaves everywhere, rippling the air above road, red brick. So many lines against the sky and rumbling trams reach up to them.
And yes, the children here were all paler, as you must’ve realised, taking the cue from your inspectors. It was all so much nicer here.
So do you disappear from me, from us? Accept this kind of death? Keep secret your many miseries, your joys and laughter too?
I laugh at the reports of the visitors to the settlement, just as some would have at the time. But it is a peculiar kind of laughter. The Ugly Men’s Association sent a delegation there. I am sure some of our white uncles and fathers were among them. It was written up in a church newsletter:
I do hope I am being useful, I used to say to Ern. I do hope I am being useful.
At least they were together, and sharing. Things are never so bad when you’re together, or so I have been told. It was what made Uncle Jack strong enough, eventually, to lead me back. Whereas my closer family—say, Harriette’s children—were weak and floating, and becoming free.
Uncle Jack Chatalong?
The supervisor accompanied him to the camp. Too old for the compound. Male. Too dark to be sent elsewhere. It was tents, huts of packing case and flattened drums, and snotty-nosed kids. The adults watched him. A few welcoming grins.
‘You can put him up,’ the supervisor said to an old couple. Jack wanted to apologise, and his expression must’ve shown this. ‘They’re blind, you can help them.’ He wanted to refuse, felt quite numb. ‘We’ll try you at the kitchen. Charlie here will collect you in the morning.’
Uncle Jack learnt many things in the kitchen, and there was an awakening, just as there have been many awakenings. There was much Dinah, his mother, could tell him.
So suddenly; death, and then a wedding. The soil still settling in the grave, and Daniel and Harriette’s daughters were hurrying their white husbands from various small towns around and beyond our traditional country.
Sergeant Hall, having decided Kathleen was unequivocally a white girl, said there was no need for permission from the department. And even though Kathleen was sick in the morning, she glowed at the wedding.
Yes, Kathleen glowed. Wore white. Sergeant Hall insisted that he give her away. With great respect to the recently departed. The sergeant stood beside her for so long in front of the priest that his good, quiet wife was forced to hiss at him and give Ernest a little shove into position.
I hovered over that wedding. A wedding. A white wedding. A couple of photographs of it exist, and I inspected them with a magnifying glass, wanting more, more. I used to hope that they loved one another. He married her. I wanted some help, some support for the fact that I stayed with the old man.
There was even a reception, a few presents on the table. A tablecloth, white, and patterned in a lace of straight lines and right angles which gives its edges teeth. Teeth which saw at the shadows beneath the table. On the table there is a clock, which I recognise as the one in Grandfather’s study. There is also a cake, of two tiers; a china teapot; cups and saucers; a vase, with roses in it.
I concentrated so fiercely upon that photograph, and yet was otherwise so often floating and drifting toward the ceiling, that it must have appeared to my grandfather that I balanced upon an eyeball, upside down upon a lens of glass.
Deep in that photograph, there is another photograph, of a couple. White man, black woman; it must be Daniel and Harriette. The man stands at the rear and one of his hands is on his chest, the other on the shoulder of the woman seated before him. I can make out only the shape of her dress.
The man’s hands are so pale they glow, and look like mittens or even paws. He is probably wearing gloves, and I imagine his hands ineffectually and clumsily groping, perhaps wishing to cling to something or someone always about to leave.
The clock chimed an hour.
In the clock’s face there is even the reflection of the photographer, bending at his tripod. Ern had hired the photographer. It seemed only right that he contribute to the costs of the wedding. Other than the photographer’s reflection the only indication that anyone other than myself admired these presents is the hem and cuff of someone’s jacket, and part of a pair of trousers. There is—of course—a body inside these clothes, and indeed there is a hand protruding from the jacket, holding a celebratory glass. Ern told me the hand was his own.
In another hour the clock chimed beautifully, its sound all the purer because there was no one there to hear it.
There is a photograph of what I assume to be the wedding party. Ern is surrounded by women; Harriette, and her daughters. The women are frozen in a moment between glancing at one another, but their faces reveal that they are sharing the occasion. They hold their chins high in what seems an extravagant manner. Kathleen has flowers in her hands. There is another, smaller, woman beside her who I cannot account for. A darker woman, plump and grinning. Who can it be? It cannot be Fanny, surely? Knowing the conventions and equipment of the era, she must have had to hold that grin for some considerable time.
A magnifying glass reveals that she is looking straight into the camera, is defiant, and that it is a very serious smile, intended for me.
Ern is also staring intently into the camera, but he looks a little anxious, as if trying to read his future.
Following branches of my family tree, I discovered a series of white men who—because they married Nyoongar woman and claimed their children—were exceptional. But their children grew in a climate of denial and shame that made it difficult for even a strong spirit to express itself. And there were other children those same fathers did not claim. Witness Ern’s first spree on arriving in this nation. What came of that? He dismissed it; a moment of weakness only. Another aberration. And another, another, another, regularly repeated. Ahem. And Kathleen, my almost-grandmother, was rejected by her father which, whatever foster-father and policeman might say, hurts. He was a white man, like them. And then there is my own father...
Once again, I am confusing things, not following an appropriate sequence. I wish to note that at this wedding there were other white men, those who had married Daniel and Harriette’s daughters. After the wedding, these white brothers-in-law shook hands with Ern, grabbed their wives, and rushed off in different directions.
Searching the archives I have come across photographs of ancestors which have been withdrawn from collections, presumably because evidence of a too-dark baby has embarrassed some descendant or other.
My family, my people, we have done such things. Shown such shame and self-hatred. It is hard to think what I share with them, how we have conspired in our own eradication. It was my Uncle Will who taught me something of this.
But I was writing of when he was still a very young boy, and of how my grandfather first married a Nyoongar woman, despite the law. Why was it Kathleen? Because she was there. Because he was advantaged. Because of greed. Because it was the challenge of a long-term plan, spanning the generations. Because of the power it would give him over her. Perhaps it was because his brief experiences of drunken sprees in native camps had excited him, and Kathleen promised similar excitement—with the added attraction of greater control of personal hygiene. Oh, and perhaps it was love. Perhaps it was love.
Ern and the policeman protector had a long talk about this. Or rather, as long a talk as was possible, given the pressures of time, and impending retirement. There were many and various pressures. The policeman protector—the Local Protector of Aborigines—worried as to Ernest’s motives. But, as Ern assured him, if that was all he was after then he needed only to make a short trip to the native camps. Nudge, wink. As men of their world, both knew it happened all the time. And, of course, legally she was a white woman. Parents married; a white father. Living like a white person, of course—goodness—right next-door to the policeman and working for him. (Hall, once again, felt a moment’s unease.)
Perhaps Ern felt guilty, having bought the house, the wood yard, all business contracts, and split up the family. But, as he explained to Kathleen, he had little choice. He paid a fair price, and otherwise the Aborigines Department would have it all. That’d be worse.
At Mogumber Settlement, Jack Chatalong cut and carted wood for the old couple. He took them water. They knew him by his voice. In the evenings he sat stoking their fire, seeing its reflection in their blind eyes and listening to words he may not have understood, but which reached deep within him, made him feel like an instrument being played. But such a poor instrument because although he felt the humming alive within him, it was more like a struggle to breathe than articulated song.
Inside his head he tried the sounds, attempted the rhythm, felt the vowels slipping together.
Chatalong had been struck dumb. What happened to that easy way with words, the easy launching of them, the unthinking way he could set them into flight?
Strange, that the first words for a long time were, ‘No. No, no, not me.’ Jack continued to refuse. A corroboree, at the camp, but he would not dance. He wouldn’t do that stuff, couldn’t do it, it was strange to him.
But he watched. From a distance, in darkness veiled by leaves, he watched. The dark bodies marked with the river’s white clay making these people he recognised from the camp, these strangers, stranger still.
Sometimes, even the superintendent came to watch.
The old couple sang, their voices searching out the silent Chatalong, refreshing some other ‘inner man’, and dismantling an outer one.
Chatalong saw the superintendent staggering into his house in the evening. Saw him sleeping face down on the floor. Saw.
A great feathery bird was trapped within the little crowd that had gathered, perhaps attracted by its calls. The people watched its clumsy distress, its stumble from a doorway and out among them. Beyond the silence of the large bird standing among them, Jack Chatalong heard the mocking voices of the white women.
Small feathers spiralled behind the bird. Not a bird. Not a bird, but a man. And his calls were strangled ones of frustration and fear. He ran to the centre of the yard, moved in a few small circles. He stopped and turned, sagging at the knees. The feathers were in bunches, this way and that, stuck to the black tar which covered him and stretched in long drops from his eyelids and nostrils. Tar must have filled his ears.
His eyes and mouth looked so vulnerable.
The bird boy was sobbing. Head bowed. Chicken feathers and tar stuck all over him. Silence. Snorting from where he had come.
Being taught a lesson. Something about being uplifted?
Our Jack Chatalong was learning. It was whispered to him as he spooned his watery soup, grateful that he could serve himself, and pick the choice bits. His mother, beside him, said softly, ‘Whatever you think about, you keep it to yourself. Careful what you do, you might end up someone else otherwise.’ Tilting his cup to drink, Chatalong saw the reflection of his nose, eyes, long lashes within its closed circle.
They heard the bird man talking in the little hut of corrugated iron. It had no windows. There was barbed wire on top, and a big iron door locked with handcuffs. A tracker in a shabby military jacket led Jack from the kitchen across a dusty yard which had been swept of all footprints. He motioned with his head for Jack to leave the small battered can of water, the heel of stale bread, at the door.
‘Want me to lay them an egg, that’s what they put me in here for. I got no time for chooks. I’m no chook.’
Jack looked into the hot darkness. He saw the stakes on the inside walls, the small holes in the walls growing tiny stars of light, and how barbed wire slashed at the bellies of the clouds rushing overhead.
Leaving, Jack softly dragged a hand along the corrugations of the iron wall.
‘You wanna keep out of here brother.’ It seemed a different voice.
In the afternoon a flock of cockatoos flew over the compound, screeching. They flew low to show how their glossy black feathers, so neatly side-by-side, felt the wind. Seeing the white tail-feathers, Jack remembered the clay on the dancers’ bodies. The birds flew in, over, showing themselves off and Jack realised that this was a dance too, and how wonderful it was.
The bird man heard the birds, must have seen them through some pinhole in the iron around him, arcing twice across the little sky above him. The birds, in turn, would have heard him.
He kept up his screeching even as theirs faded.
Jack had heard others in the little prison hut, when they first went in, singing, ‘You are my sunshine...’ They came out, dressed in hessian, heads shaven, squinting and with a hand shading their eyes. It might have been that they tried to smile.
But no one saw the bird man emerge in that night’s heavy rain. He got away.
Dinah said, ‘See? You can get away.’ Jack let his skills be known. Good with horses; handling them, caring for them, and he could mend wheels and wagons. Yes, he could even drive a car.
He’d be valuable on a farm, if they sent him to one.
Some of these, my people—let us call them ‘characters’—are distributed variously. Some gathered together and gained in strength. Others ran to where they could.
My grandmother. Plucked from our family tree, falling toward me.