My ancestors—Fanny, with Sandies One and Two—had followed a rocky ridge, and when they could see it continue into the sea and gradually became little more than a tumble of rocks and bubbles they turned away, and descended to the shallow bay its persistence had made possible.
There were massive cloudbanks on the horizon, and when my family looked back around the coast to where they had begun they saw the tiny and isolated islands of home huddled close to the mainland, seemingly less substantial than the clouds.
The setting sun had coloured the sky and tinted the sandy crests of the old dunes but—even as the sky rapidly darkened—the ocean shimmered with the blue light of day held within it. And gliding toward them across that strangely lit surface was a low, white-tipped, violet cloud. No. No, it was not a cloud. Inhaling in surprise, my family realised that a vast fleet of jellyfish, driven by their white sails, was silently invading the bay.
A storm raged for days. Young Sandy Two huddled beneath the small wagon and moaned with the wind as trees writhed and flailed about him. The rain drummed the earth, the shrubs, the wagon above his head. Sandy Two opened his mouth and drank from the runnels hanging from the edge of his shelter.
Once, he undressed and went out into the wind and rain and let it lash and sting him until he was almost numb. Then he dressed beneath the wagon, wrapped himself in canvas and blankets and talked and sang to himself until he was warm again.
He awoke in a pale, thin light, and even though his mouth was stale, and his body aching, the new calm of the air communicated itself to him. He saw his father crawl from the shelter of tarpaulin and saplings and trees, and walk away through the dunes.
The two Sandies walked along the devastated beach. The air was still, and the sea rocked this way and that, and rose and collapsed heavily upon the sand at its edge. It seemed as if birds had lost their wings, sea creatures been spewed from their element. The beach was a ruffled crowd of various birds fastidiously picking their way among the debris. A flock of parrots raked their beaks through a pile of seaweed, and—still further away—two sea-eagles feasted on a dead dolphin.
Colour had been washed from the sky, and the ocean was dirty with torn weed and sediment. Even from the beach father and son could see the ocean striking the island, and vast blossoms of white rose and fell onto its stony back.
It must have been the smell that distracted them, made them wander—perverse and curious—through the dunes and toward the grove. Despite the relative shelter there, some trees had been ripped from the ground, and others clung tenaciously to their roots by little more than a strip of bark.
It was certainly the smell—well, call it a stench—that brought Sandy Two back to his senses from the drifting daydream state he’d been inhabiting. There was a great mound of bodies, lying in a heap. Skinned kangaroos, obscenely naked. The two men followed small footprints to what was left of a tiny shelter, constructed too close to the carcasses to be comfortable. And in the ruin of that poor shelter lay a woman and baby. The woman and child were certainly not comfortable; not with breathing, not with life.
The mother was Dinah—daughter to one Sandy, sister to the other. The daughter and sister of the two men lay staring up at them. Apparently she did not see them, because they came close enough to discern the reflection in her eyes; of the one kneeling, the other partially obscured and framed by what was left of her shelter, and still she did not react. Dinah could only see—or so her boy would one day speculate—dead and yellow leaves, scabby twigs and, beyond that, torn and thinning clouds racing across the sky.
The baby at her breast was wrinkled and thin, its umbilical cord loosely knotted. Sandy One saw flies at his grandchild’s eyes, and could discern its bones. Mother and child lay among blood, shit, the stale mess of birth.
Dinah stared deep into the eyes of Sandy One, the father, and saw herself, the remnants of shelter, the hollowness of him and his promises.
Sandy Two turned away, and there were two shivering children. The girl was perhaps four years old; the boy a little younger. His nephew and niece. The girl was a quiet one, but not so the boy. Despite his years he could talk, he was happy to talk, and he talked as he warmed in their arms. Their names, his sister’s and his, were Kathleen (my sister) and Jack, Jack Chatalong. Chatalong you see, because of talking so much. I talk a lot. I don’t know why.
The girl was quite fair. A surprising fairness. How the white skin wins.
They had been kangaroo shooting, it was three men, and his mother helped; she cooked for them but then she began having that baby, and the men left. His mother, the boy said, trying to explain, looked after the kangaroo shooters. Oh, they pulled sandalwood too. She cooked for them. But she got sick, it was the baby, and there was a storm and the men got blown away. He smiled. This seemed satisfactory. He kept talking.
They had been lifted into the sky...
Sandy Two saw his father nodding, and two blood-spattered men were lifted into the stormy sky. The men were laughing and, having waved a little goodbye, randomly fired into the sea, and into the birds and kangaroo hides dancing around them in an ever upward spiral. It was the ending of a spree. The men’s crotches bulged, thinking of the mother.
Sandy One continued to hold his daughter’s blank stare. His son picked up the boy, pulled the girl close to him. Flies buzzed and covered the mound of carcasses with a black and living skin.
Unbidden, unwanted, the memories of earlier sprees must have returned to the two men.
These are not things handed down to me by Uncle Jack or Uncle Will yarning around a campfire; they are things you might prefer not to say, not directly, to any younger person in your family.
Sandy One and Fanny had learned that it was best for women and children to keep away from the homestead, from any homestead. If there was a white woman it was sometimes easier, but it was never safe.
Especially when there was a spree. When there was a spree, stay clear away. It was not safe.
It was that combination of things called Christmas. It was a spree. A party.
Fanny must’ve been reminded of the hanging tree, and occasionally she heard shots from the direction of the homestead. The buzzing of flies replayed in her head. The girls were still upset.
That buzzing. She had found a sister, uncovered and dead on the ground. The stench, the buzzing of flies had led her there. She made a mound of earth, left some things...
Sandy One came back drunk and stupid and snarling at her, through a fug of vomit and alcohol. ‘It was three bullets, they put three in her.’ Someone. She was rotten with the pox, the bitch, and a hazard to everyone. He spat, was sobbing, lay down snoring.
The boy was fine, was still back there, somewhere.
Sandy Two had gone with his father, so that he might help him home again.
He remembered white light flashing, popping, and music. Everyone laughing yelling looking at him.
There was a house, of mud and stone with extra rooms of thin timber, hessian, iron. Sometimes they put a sign up above the door, especially for the parties.
Men came from other stations and from the ’fields, days away. There was a big tank of grog on the back of a wagon. A spree, they whooped. A spree, a spree.
Sandy Two stepped from among the women and children at the woodheap and followed the red-haired Coolman twins beneath the sign— Tavern—and into the homestead.
Christmas. Oh, there was a crowd of white men. Sandy Two trailed the twins, miming them, so that he was the very essence of their back-slapping, winking selves as they swaggered into the noisy crowd. Laughing faces turned to the three of them.
Sandy Two performed as if he was with his mother and the others in the camp, but the laughter and shouting under this low roof was so much louder and uplifting. The twins were unaware of him and—warming to the crowd’s response—they enthusiastically shook hands with everyone, and their gestures became all the more extravagant as if it was they, now, who were miming the boy. Men held out their hands a second time, and repeatedly winked at each of the twins, and gave them yet another drink to pour into their upturned mouths until, eventually, the twins had nowhere else to move. It was a small room after all. It was not really such a crowd. They turned to one another, turned back to the ruddy, laughing faces and realised all eyes were upon a space just behind them.
It was as if they had rehearsed. Each moved his gaze to the other’s face, and then, perfectly synchronised, Daniel and Patrick slowly and, yes—sheepishly—turned around.
The boy. In a pose which echoed their own. The room of men roared, and cheered; they laughed as the boy was knocked down.
The homestead was dark, and the roof low. Music bounced within the close walls like a vicious wind.
Sandy Two thought he could smell each and every person, and the rum most of all, disguising the stale air of the room.
A group of men sat tightly together, their charcoaled faces grinning starkly, with a sign— Black and White Minstrels—at their feet. His father was dressed in women’s clothes and had pumpkins stuffed down the front of his shirt.
There was a photographer. You had to stay still, and not grin. Sandy One sat on Patrick Coolman’s knee, and they embraced like man and wife. Sandy swung his leg, and kept dropping his gaze, giggling.
They sat in chairs arranged in a half-circle in front of the sign, Tavern, and the men had dressed in dinner suits. Charcoal-blackened faces showed their teeth, and rolled their eyes.
Someone grabbed Sandy Two.
‘The kid. Sandy’s kid.’
‘Here, you.’
‘Give him a drink.’
‘C’mon, let’s whiten him up, eh.’
Dressed in a man’s shoes and coat, ridiculously large on him, Sandy Two bent his shadow-thin legs akimbo, and—nestling the violin in beside his big grin—imitated the two violinists.
‘Crikey, keep the women out of the bloody photo but. Who let them in?’
‘No. Not youse, not now. Get out of it.’
Someone snarled, and took a half-hearted swing at two women who had come into the circle.
There was a piano accordion, and two, three violins. Sandy One, flaunting his huge breasts and lifting his skirts, danced. His son copied the gestures and postures of the two actual violinists so well they almost thought he played, too.
Everyone is laughing, and the women at the doorway shriek and bend wildly at the waist.
Sandy Two sounds the strings with his bow.
Stark grins in blackened faces.
The photographer hides beneath his black cloth. Five legs, one eye. Everyone is still, and the world whirls around Sandy Two; voices, laughter, music rushing away in a vast circle as the centre of silence grows and grows.
A blinding flash, and they are set in motion once more.
Over the next few days they did scenes for the camera again and again.
The boss, with a holstered revolver at his hip, leans on a reclining camel and looks into the distance. He wears jodhpurs, and a pith helmet. Sandy Two, in loincloth, stands at the camel’s head, holding its reins.
The men wanted photographs of themselves being attacked by the blacks, but the only possible male attackers on the station were very old and it was difficult to get them to participate, let alone look ferocious enough.
A boss bathing in one of the granite pools. On the rock towering above him stands Sandy Two, and, at the very top, out of focus, his naked and charcoaled father, holding a spear, and with one foot reluctantly resting on the arch of the other.
The homestead, what was it? Low, flat, stone and iron. There exists a surprising photo of the yard; timber stacked neatly, a stone wall in the background, three horses and a camel hitched to a flat wagon, upon which sits a dark boy. My Uncle Sandy Two.
What makes the photo unusual for one of the era is that the figures in it seem caught unawares, and have not had time to strike a pose. Two women by the front wheel are laughing at one another. The boy has swivelled on his seat, and stares down the lens. Two definitely white men in the foreground, very shabby and dirty, glare angrily at the camera, and one of them steps toward us.
And so it was with little Jack Chatalong, who was forever stepping forward, stepping up to have his say. He talked and talked, as he also did much later in his long life when he sat by campfires in those dunes, and came to say even the hardest of things, put them into words—his words. But we have met him as a tiny boy, and already explaining things...
Patrick? Patrick Coolman? The man had gone, left his wife, in-laws, his twin brother as well.
And Dinah would not let go of the dead baby.
Sandy Two stayed with Fanny and the children at their camp, and the old man took the woman and dead child into Wirlup Haven. The medical officer sent them on to Gebalup.
They had to lay her in the shade of a tree in the hospital grounds. Someone took the baby away. The Resident Medical Officer sent a woman to them with a tent.
‘It’s his own,’ she told Sandy. ‘He’s not supposed to treat people in a tent, but she can’t go into the hospital. It affects the other patients.’
Sandy One erected the tent.
‘She’s not well, is she?’ said the woman. ‘I’ll look after her, and keep the doctor informed. Off you go.’
Sandy One met his family before he got to the camp. They came together, under the telegraph wire, and Jack Chatalong was suddenly quiet. They were already so accustomed to his voice, his constant voice, that the absence of it was a shock, and a pleasure. In the new silence they heard the trees, and the telegraph wire whining in the wind.
‘We knew,’ said Jack, as we sat around a campfire so long after that event, but touching it because we shared the place again. ‘We thought she would die. Pop—Sandy—he complained to the Health Board, and we ended up making trouble that way. They wouldn’t let Fanny see her, even, and Harriette got there once, but Daniel stopped that, and well ... Dinah, my mother, she disappeared and I didn’t see her again until Mogumber.’