I had a new game. I had never been one for games, but I was unusually thrilled, I was giggling like a child with the pleasure it gave me to share this one with Uncle Will. I could see, even within the composure and dignity he liked to feign, that it startled and excited him.
At the same time—and this helped his appearance of composure—he was I think stunned, and in awe of such freedom.
Previously I had performed it solely for the pleasure of seeing the terror, and—later—the indignation it aroused in Ern.
I simply indulged in my propensity to drift. In the mornings I would attach strong fishing line to a reel on my belt, anchor one end of it to the house and, stepping out the door, simply let the land breeze take me. I rose and fell on currents of air like a balloon, like a wind-borne seed. The horizon moved away so that the islands no longer rested on its line, but stood within the sea, and it seemed that the pulsing white at the island’s tip was not a mere transformation induced by collision, but was a blossoming and wilting at some fissure where sea met land.
It was indeed a very long time after this—but it may have begun here—that I realised that I had come back from the dead, was one of those few. I may well be djanak, or djangha—so much so that I stumble at what is the correct dialect, let alone how I should spell it—but even then I had not completely forgotten who I am. I floated among the clouds, and even with a bleached skin, and an addled memory I nevertheless saw the imprint of the wind upon the turquoise ocean. I remembered the call of quails in the dune grasses, and thought of curlews crying from moonlit chalky paths, and the footprint such a bird would leave.
It was as if sunlight told me of the sameness of granite and sand, and—in the evenings—flickering firelight fed the fire of my life, of my breathing.
But I was telling of when Uncle Will and Uncle Jack had returned for me, and of when I was accustoming myself to this experience of drifting. I studied the pathways and tracks which ran along the coastal dunes, and saw the white beach as the sandy, solidified froth of small waves touching the coast. I noted how rocks and reef and weed lurked beneath the water’s surface, and saw the tiny town of Wirlup Haven and how Grandad’s historic homestead—as if shunned—clung to a road which was sealed and heading inland.
So it was not purely mindless, this floating on the breeze. It required a certain concentration, and I chose it not just for the fun, but also because I wanted to view those islands resting in the sea, and to get that aerial perspective. I couldn’t have said why.
The wind ruffled my hair as I rode its currents toward the islands. At first I worried when I saw boats or any sign of human life marking land or sea, but such sightings were rare along that isolated stretch of coastline and, after a time, I realised that I could not be seen at all, except by my family.
Grandad used to stare in shock. It scared him. I loved that.
Uncle Will said he envied my unburdened existence. More pragmatically, he suggested I take another line, and try fishing as I drifted across the ocean.
I liked it best when the breezes were soft, and I watched whales, dolphins, the schools of salmon moving below me. Late in the day the breeze blew me back to the house.
The very first time he found me so tiny and out of earshot in the sky, Uncle Jack hauled me in like some sort of airborne fish. A sharp tug upended me, and then I was bent double, my limbs flapping with the force of such a retrieval into the land breeze.
‘Shit, you made a mess of the line,’ I said.
He snorted. ‘You fuckin’ silly little shit. What? You kartwarra, that it? You’re something special, you know.’ He was insistent and angry. ‘I tell you you gotta go right back, you got something special there coming out. I can see where you come from all right. You oughta give away that reading and all those papers for a while.’
He wanted to take all of us?
Uncle Jack wanted to take us all driving. He wanted to show me some places. We could drive, and camp. We’d take Ern with us.
‘Will?’
Uncle Will nodded.
Uncle Jack reckoned that the main roads more or less followed traditional runs; along the coast to where his Aunty Harriette had been born. The roads went inland from there, up to Norseton, and back to here. It’s the waterholes, see. They used to follow the waterholes.
Rain still falls, water still gathers.
‘Bring your papers with you if you like,’ he said. ‘Do all that. You can even fly yourself high as a kite, if you like, if you still wanna. No matter.’
‘The main roads follow a traditional run,’ he had said. ‘And, you know, we showed all those white blokes.’ He looked at Uncle Will. ‘Your father, he was shown by your mother, and her mother. And there you were wanting to be a pioneer.’
It disturbs my clumsy narrative even more, of course, this sudden and contemporary journey. It disturbed me at the time also. I was scared, but seeing the reluctance in Ern’s face convinced me it was the thing to do.
We drove for the afternoon, humming along the sealed road. A ‘run’, I kept thinking; we once walked where now we skim? The wind roared outside our small and stuffy capsule.
I remembered the little Uncle Will had written—it was not much more than notes scattered among Ern’s well-organised papers. It was all about his father, as, perhaps, is my own.
Uncle Will had begun a little history of this region, and of his family. His motivation was the publication of a little booklet, a feeble local history, to which he had taken exception. He had written:
It was incomprehensible to me: Uncle Will, who had been refused ‘Susso’ in the Depression and told, instead, to go to the Aborigines Department for rations; Uncle Will, who had barely escaped being sent to a Mission or Native Settlement. Uncle Will desperately wanted to name his father as among the very first to ‘settle’ at Gebalup, and he scarcely wrote of his mother. Yet it was she who gave him his rights to be here.
He was of ‘the first’.
I thought of how Uncle Will walked. Proudly, cautiously; like one provisionally uplifted, whose toes barely gripped the earth.
Grandad had written very little, yet he had organised and collected an array of material. Uncle Will had written a few pages from memory, and that was all he had. But I saw the evasion, the desire to compete and to say he was as good as anyone and that this seemed the only way possible. In his rather formal, affected language, there was this hint of an alternative:
But then he’d faltered, and after a few hundred words had stopped.
My father had written nothing, and had just begun to speak to me when I killed him. Uncle Will was family, my father had said. Even your grandfather. That’s all you’ve got, your family. Even if, sometimes, it hurts to have them.
Of course, this was not in any of the material I had read to my grandfather, the so-close-to-smug-in-his-victory Ernest Solomon Scat.
We camped close to Uncle Will’s birthplace on our first night away. It was among ancient sea dunes, and nearby, behind a fence, there was a dam which, Uncle Will informed us, collected fresh water from a small spring.
The four of us sat around the campfire, sipping beer. It was a cold night and I was clumsy with the vast bulk of my clothing. I had wrapped a long scarf several times around both myself and a log, partly for the warmth, but also because, as Uncle Jack reminded me, drinking grog inevitably set me drifting off ‘something cruel’.
‘Somewhere here, eh? I was born somewhere around here,’ said Uncle Will, suddenly.
‘It was a hot day,’ he said. We allowed him the authority to tell us of his birth. We assumed the story had been handed to him and not that he was possessed of a most remarkable memory.
When Uncle Will was born the sides of the tent had been lifted and tied to catch any movement of the air.
Fanny and old Sandy One arrived at the camp, and then Sandy One went to find the other men and left the three women to attend to the birth.
What other men? Three women?
Uncle Will and Uncle Jack had to explain to me who all these people were. Be patient, have patience, their sighs said.
Harriette and Daniel? I knew about them, Will’s parents. Daniel Coolman of the missing lip and great bulk who was sown in a mine. Harriette, a shadowy but already powerful figure in my little history.
Dinah and Pat? I didn’t know them. Uncle Pat, they told me, was Daniel’s twin brother. Dinah was Harriette’s sister. Aunty Dinah was the other daughter of Fanny and Sandy One Mason.
I worried, as any reader must also do, at this late and sudden introduction of characters. Except that for me it was not characters, but family.
‘Yeah, well, there’s lots all of us don’t know,’ said one of the old men.
And then it was definitely Uncle Jack who spoke. ‘It’s hard to know where to begin—except with each place we come to, really. Where we are right now.’
It was hot, back then, by the tiny pool, here; the heat snapped twigs from the trees, and they bounced off the heavy canvas roof of the tent. Fanny and Dinah murmured to Harriette.
Deep and rasping breaths. The soak’s water is still. Campfire smoke grows straight to the sky. The women’s breath is very warm, and there is so much moisture, all this liquid pooling beneath the trees.
The place’s spirit continued to billow. Fanny felt so grateful.
As the wet child took its first breath they heard the leaves above them clacking and rustling. Will was rolled in white sand.
‘This sand is so fine,’ Uncle Will said, looking into our faces and letting it run through his fingers, ‘it’s like talcum powder.’
When Daniel took the child in his arms the women could not help but smile, he so thick and burnt and gnarled and the baby just a bundled heartbeat, mewing and clutching.
Daniel was happy. ‘Now, this is the first white man born here. No doubt about that.’
Uncle Jack was smiling at Uncle Will, teasing him.
So where was Uncle Jack born?
He said he’d tell me that later. When we got back to the other side of Wirlup Haven. He hadn’t been lucky enough to know his parents like Will had.
Harriette, Daniel, Dinah and Pat had come across from Dubitj Creek way (as you can imagine, I spent a lot of time consulting a map as we drove), where they had been carting goods to the goldfields. There’s water all through there, the old men told me, and it was true that my map showed many small and temporary waterholes to which the main road clung. But a new railway line from the capital city had depleted the need for teamsters, and there was various troubles to get away from.
They tried roo shooting which—in those days—gave them enough cash for what they needed.
The truth is, the Coolman twins were happy. It was a decent life. Moving slow; hunting, drinking. There was always the chance of gold. They had wives who knew the country; who found water, food, a place to camp. The women could do everything. They could work like men, feed off the land, embrace their men and make them strong. And Sandy One Mason, their father-in-law, that enigmatic fellow they laughed at between themselves, was known by people all around this way; pastoralists, old miners, carriers, all of which could prove helpful when and if they needed to get work again.
There was no fear of attack, as was prevalent with some travellers. When the Premier Man John Forrest had come this way less than thirty years before, he and his party had kept a rostered watch each night. A publication of 1900, In Darkest Western Australia, devotes several pages to the threat of attack by the blacks. But when Daniel and Pat met any who were not like themselves they stood close behind the women. It was what Sandy One had advised them. Their faces would echo the expressions of those speaking this peculiar language, as they half-listened and tried to understand.
They gathered kangaroo skins. Or rather, the women gathered them. A trip back to Kylie Bay every few months meant they were making money. Do you wish to hear how they suffered; of their endurance, hardship, deprivation? In fact it was almost too easy a life. It was practically a relief to run out of grog and so they purposely deprived themselves, brought less of it with them—and even that they sipped with their wives.
They moved between the coast and the goldfields; between the old and the new telegraph lines; between the railway to the north and the ocean to the south. Finding where they could take a heavy cart. And, always, there might be gold.
Drinking. Fucking. They wandered, following gossip and getting Harriette and her sister Dinah to take them as far as the goldfields, where they thought they saw their women’s people slumped in the dust, rotting from the inside out. The women brought them back, always, to no further than a day or two from the ocean.
No gold. Then suddenly you needed a license to sell roo skins. They found themselves ‘Gebalup’ way, near the outer limit of the women’s country, and fell in with the Mustle and Done families. The landed gentry of this story.
The four of us sat around the fire until late in the night. Perhaps it was the beer, but I felt very heavy, as if burdened. Old people surrounded me.
‘Listen to the voices in the trees,’ said Uncle Jack.
In the firelight the three men looked exceptionally old, ancient beyond their years. Grandad’s face glistened with the tears which now so often came to him. Uncle Jack and Uncle Will’s arrival had given him some protection from me, and I had not harmed him for months.
The intervals between Grandad toppling, and being propped up again, grew longer. The eyes of my uncles reflected the fire. I remember noticing my own hands, and being frightened at how old they looked in that light.
‘Daniel was my father,’ said Uncle Will.
‘Our mothers, Harriette and Dinah were sisters,’ said Uncle Jack, ‘and Patrick might have been my father,’ he continued, ‘but probably not.’ The two men looked at one another, hesitated. ‘The Coolman brothers mined with the Dones and Mustles, even took a contract building the rabbit-proof fence with some of them. They shared a contract hauling goods between Gebalup and Wirlup Haven.’
‘They worked with the Mustles and Dones,’ Uncle Jack went on, ‘and this is a very hard thing for us to understand, and forgive. A very hard thing for us to accept.’
‘No doubt about it, they were partners with the killers all right. But I dunno that they helped with the killing, that was long before they got here.’
The words were coming out—Uncle Jack had started it—but I could see that Will knew the story too. Grandad fell over yet again, groaning as he did so, and this time Uncle Jack—without seeming to take his eyes from the fire—reached across and absently pushed him back into a sitting position.
Did those two Coolman ancestors help toss the bodies, haul the timber, burn it all? See the limbs crooked and dangling in firelight, the limbs akin to our own but lifeless?
No, of course not. All that was years before, at the Done’s station. Harriette was only a tiny child.
‘Sandy One and Fanny were our grandparents,’ said Uncle Jack, waving his thumb to and fro between Will and himself—‘and that is going no time back, not really.’
They were to take supplies back to the new lease at Dubitj Creek, and had almost finished loading. Sandy One left Fanny and their child, Harriette, and went to the stables.
Fanny glanced about, thinking of how the women she knew had got away at sunrise, and how these Dones had no respect for who they took, or how they treated them. Such thoughts left her, suddenly, when she saw an old man at the woodheap. He must’ve been lying there the whole time, in the sun, among the timber, and had only now raised his head. Less than a dog, he had no bowl of water, and a chain was looped around his throat. Like Fanny he would have been able to look down the slope of paddock to the bigger trees where the creek ran, and that strange outcrop of rock.
Little mounds of earth showed where he’d covered his shit.
Fanny and the old man knew one another. Perhaps he called to her.
Fanny saw all the ropes in the stables where the women had been tied, and one of the men—either a Done, a Mustle, or Moore—working at a grindstone with his back to her. She studied his vulnerability, and retreated. She stepped over more ropes on the verandah, and into the gloomy house. The air was stale, and she pulled the child closer to her breast as she crossed the cold stone floor. An even darker room, and the smell of gunpowder. Another, a bedroom, but nothing like keys nearby.
Back to the kitchen. Above the fire, a shelf.
The keys were heavy, and jangled their malice. The child grabbed them, and Fanny—holding the child’s hand in her own to keep the keys silent—slipped back into daylight. The house was like a deep cave which faces away from the sun.
Fanny unchained the old man, and he embraced Fanny and the child as one. Then, indicating that she must return the keys to the house, he moved toward the stables.
Fanny heard the scream as she placed the keys back on the shelf. It was a scream which froze everything, and it seemed a very long wait before that moment moved onto the next and she was able to rush outside and see an agitated Sandy One at the wagon.
Their eyes met across the space between them, and they turned together to see the old man Fanny had released hurrying away from the shed. The old man glanced across at Fanny, and then at Sandy standing with the horses. Although he held the axe in only one hand, he did not wave but simply veered away and disappeared into the scrub by the creek.
Sandy waved Fanny across to him, and she hid herself and the child among the wagon’s load. Sandy continued to fuss at the horses and Fanny listened. The voice of one of the Mustle brothers called out to Sandy, who pulled up the horses. ‘Nah,’ said Sandy One Mason. ‘Didn’t see anything. Nah, haven’t heard nothing.’
Fanny heard other men arrive, rush away again.
The wagon creaked and shifted. Not far from the homestead Fanny—cautiously peering from the load, peeking over bales—saw a small group of men women children, running and falling before station men on horseback.
And suddenly the child, Harriette, had somehow fallen from the wagon, and was stumbling toward the distant violence, calling something in her shrill voice. Sandy One leapt to the ground, and ran after her. He threw her up to Fanny, who once again concealed herself and the child amongst the load on the wagon.
My family left and did not return for many years. It was such a sorry place. Fanny and Sandy One huddled within small campfires, and talked of how the firelight changed the look of them, how it made them appear aged and sacred. Fragile and forever.
And so it was that we—my uncles, my grandfather and I—turned back toward Gebalup the next day and deviated from a humming and stale journey along bitumen roads which, Uncle Will informed me, my father had helped build.
Uncle Jack took us through a neglected farm gate somewhere between the townsites of Wirlup Haven and Gebalup.
‘They got a permit,’ I said. ‘From the police. To kill.’ I had seen a reference to police permission for a revenge killing among my grandfather’s papers. ‘Eighteen, they were allowed to kill eighteen.’
Uncle Jack snorted. ‘More than that, they killed just about everyone around here. Most Nyoongars still won’t come here, just wind up the windows and drive right through Gebalup.’
Perhaps it is most exciting to gallop and shoot and blast holes in people as they turn and fumble with whatever slight weapon they might carry; to keep the horses stomping and rearing, to turn around and around, to reload and shoot; to think these which the dogs seize and fling about are not humans, these are not men women children.
But it is afterwards that the words come. Oh, they are not really human. Not like us. We are superior (and here is our proof).
Forget it.
But there has been such a lot of suffering. Again and again.
The bodies were dragged away from the creek to prevent contamination and damage to stock. A fire. Maybe heap the bones together.
We stopped the car and walked to an old mine shaft, the construction above it seemingly frozen in the act of falling. Little gullies showed the ground in cross-section. ‘I had the bones hidden away in there,’ said Uncle Jack, ‘for a time.’ Large ones, small ones. Skull, hand, the tiny what-names bones of a foot. Jack Chatalong did not know the names. Fanny would have, in her own tongue.
There would have been femur, pelvis, tibia, spine, vertebra even, and many funny bones. Is there pleasure to be found anywhere in this pain?
They had all been collected, and placed together among the granite rocks, high where the water would not reach and the sun might bleach them pure. What could be done? Bones white like the skin of the young ones will be, the children flowing from these, the survivors growing paler and paler and maybe dying.
Well, Fanny had collected the bones, and sung here. Uncle Jack sang once again, when he took us there, and Uncle Will muttered some prayer or other.