A Long Way From Home Read online

  Mrs Carter clicked her tongue. I did not wish to hear what followed.

  ‘All youse fellows. And they were at the Crossing Inn until after midnight but in all that time not a single one of the boys had come to drink with him. This was for the simple reason that blacks were not permitted in the bar. But they were Kev’s boys and he expected them to go where he ordered them to go. It was not reasonable in this case, but he was an emotional man. When he had finished drinking he paid his tab, as normal, but he was offended and that was preying on his mind.

  ‘He starts up the truck and toots the horn until finally the boys all come drifting back, and he sets off without a word about anything. But it’s a long drive home and by the time they get to the crossing at the Nine Mile his hurt feelings have got the better of him.

  ‘“Alright, you lot.” He stops the truck.

  ‘The engine was running. The headlights were on. He lined them up and dressed them down like a bloody sergeant major.

  And it was: you so-and-sos. And: you ungrateful pack. He was easily hurt, Big Kev. He says, I offer to buy you a drink, and not one of you shows up. And they said, ah boss, you know, we’re not white. We can’t drink in there.

  ‘Ah, says he, is that all it was?

  ‘Yes boss, we bin with the blackfellahs.

  ‘So Kev strolls over to the back of the truck. And he yells to one of them, lift that flour over there, Hector. Put it in the light. Kev always had a knife on his belt and now he slices the bag and lifts it, a hundredweight, and then he walks along the line of them and drenches each and every one of them with flour.

  ‘Alright, he says, you can drink with me now.

  ‘And he gets back in the truck and drives away. What a character, Big Kev Little. They don’t make them like that any more.’

  Alice was my mother’s sister. She filled the boss’s plate with the grey beef and white potatoes. I saw her worn black hands and then my own, Kev Little’s hands, with knife and fork. I thought, The Hands of Orlac.

  I have read too much. I should shut up. I can be a bore with what I know. But The Hands of Orlac was directed by Robert Wiene in Austria in 1923. Orlac is a brilliant pianist. He loses his hands in a railway accident. His wife pleads with a surgeon who transplants the hands of a recently executed murderer and of course the hands have a life of their own. In truth I never liked the film but now I had Kev Little’s hands and I must rush outside.

  When I had believed I was a German I suffered a phantom homesickness that gave its distinctive colour to my soul. But now I was in my real birthplace and finally knew my father’s name, that nagging feeling had become a searing pain. I slept badly. I woke in fright. Panic, like sheet lightning, continued through my day and night and soon it was better to sit at Carter’s table than think of who I was. Better than this was to be with my pupils who came to fetch me every morning, who held my white hand as if they loved and needed me, who called me Uncle Redex and chatted to me or brought me, say, a grass snake and taught me its name and showed me how it moved through the red dust and left its cursive script behind.

  We spent our first hour of school with showers and laundry and then they changed into their school ‘uniform’ which was nothing fancier than a pair of shorts and a shirt bought from Coles in Perth.

  But I met unexpected resistance to geography. I was not used to failure and did not appreciate Carter coming to observe it. Once or twice, when my class had left for the day, he brought his boy and girl and drilled them on the names of states and cities. That is, they could do what my class would not.

  Trees began to flower, a bush orange, a kind of wattle. I learned their names. We wrote them down. Then the crocodiles and snakes were laying eggs and I made an English lesson out of that and I used the opportunity to have them teach me their language. Only then did I discover how many tribal languages were in that cave, all those broken pots with all their shards swept in together, including little Charley Hobbes who was one of a dozen descendants of a slaughtered tribe. They were prisoners of a war not mentioned by the education department.

  To my great white wall I added the road from Melbourne to Sydney and this had uses for arithmetic. The scabies epidemic passed leaving dull black marks on my children’s perfect skin. They now drew pictures of speeding cars which they enjoyed. I constructed popular puzzles where the correct answer was a car driving at two hundred miles an hour.

  I was nervous about snakes but took long walks by myself at dusk, a time when the campfires produced an unworldly glow and my foreign place of birth was as depressed and mournful as a prison yard. The pastor had known, of course, that my ancestral home could never have been a Schloss in Germany. Then what did he feel to see me pining over that engraving on my bedroom wall? Nothing cruel, of course, and yet he had suckled me on lies. Did he know that I had been carried in the talons of an eagle and dropped into a camp of humpies, bones of rusty cars with smashed out windows? Would he have been upset if he had seen me, finally, stumble into my inheritance, my family seat? Excuse my bitter joke. It was a back seat passed down from a smashed up car. It was here I sat, in the gloamin’, in deep despondency because I had been unable to teach my class geography.

  It had been a bad day for the hunters at the camp, or perhaps they had eaten in the afternoon as they sometimes did or there was nothing but flour and water to fill their guts. I found Doctor Battery sitting by his humpy with Oliver Emu who was his grandson, and shy tiny Charley Hobbes.

  I sat. Doctor Battery turned his bad eye on me. ‘See longa that?’ He was pointing to a fence that cut from the Big House to the horizon. ‘What that?’

  ‘You mean that fence?’

  ‘Blackfellahs got no fence. No fence, no bloody map neither. ’How that last bit stung. To hear my map attacked by friends. ‘Whitefellah have fence and map,’ said Doctor Battery.

  ‘Whitefellah cut’em up my country,’ he said, counting with his long fingers. ‘Surveyor map. Whitefellah peipa. Western Australia.

  South Australia. Kartiya lock the gate. Blackfellah stay out.’

  I felt my colour rising.

  ‘Why these kids need map?’ the old man insisted and every teacher can imagine how I felt.

  ‘So they don’t get lost,’ I pleaded but he would not go easy on me.

  ‘How can they be lost langa country? You know nothing Billy,’ he said, not kindly either. It was his job to be guardian of many stories. This one involved an ancestral being who seemed to be a snake.

  Oliver took my hand and in his comfort I felt my failure, his sorrow for me, my loss of face. ‘Snake and man. Both, together,’ he said.

  Doctor Battery nodded in approval. He flicked the dirt off a plug of camp tobacco, and tucked it inside his lip. He said his snake ancestor had been looking for a place to live. He had pulled boomerangs from his body and thrown them and tasted what the water was like in the places where they landed. With these boomerangs the ancestor made the floodplains then the creeks.

  Oliver, all the time attentive to his grandfather, illustrated his story as he told it, drawing with a stick in the dirt. It was a map, I cried. A bloody map. Was not that a map?

  ‘We don’t need map,’ said Doctor Battery. ‘This my country. The story, ’e hold that Law, ’e know the waterholes. That snake man wants living water for his camp. That is called a jila. Whitefellah can’t see that living water don’t know story for country. Maybe that whitefellah die of thirst there, langa jila, langa living water.’

  Oliver grasped my hand again and I wondered if I was the stupid whitefellah or if I was the blackfellah inheriting the story. In any case I was the teacher. And I did not wish to be diminished by an elder. So I insisted the story was like a map to find water.

  But the old bugger would not help me, and I left the camp knowing that Carter had been correct, and I had failed to teach third grade geography.

  That night I set up the kerosene lamp and obliterated the state borders on my classroom map. And then I painted out the coastline and left a pe
rfect field of white. Here I would have my pupils drawings the paths of ancestral beings from one place to another. I would not call them maps.

  Next day I brought Battery into my class and invited him to draw his story for all of them. He was perhaps the first black elder to be invited to stand in that room and my students knew this and were very quiet and watchful. He broke bark to make a brush. He dipped it in ink and drew his Dreaming story on the wall.

  Oliver Emu wrote the place names as his grandfather said them. Little Charley Hobbes did not know the alphabet but I noticed how seriously he traced his finger over the letters JILA.

  Later I would make this lesson the subject of a 10,000 word essay, but at the time there were more important things to do. Foremost, I was obliged to invite Doctor Battery into my residence and explain how I would wish him and the old men to help in class. I served him tea and Anzac biscuits and explained my teaching plan.

  He listened very carefully and asked many questions, most particularly how much they would be paid.

  I said I was sorry there would be no pay.

  He had been a stockboy for Big Kev Little, he said. He was the best stockboy. He would be sent out on muster with no whitefellahs. He as good as ran the station in the end. After all of that, his horse fell and Big Kev had left him five days in the bush with a compound fracture in his leg.

  ‘He finish me Billy. I could not walk no more. Maybe you buy a jeep.’

  Then I saw that was his price. He would come to my classroom and in return I would give him a jeep, which was his name for any motor vehicle. Then I could drive him to his country and he could do whatever rituals were required. Was he serious? Did he believe I was so rich? Was he simply putting a price on the damage done to him at Quamby Downs?

  ‘If I had a jeep,’ I said. I stressed the ‘if ’. We agreed we understood each other perfectly.

  9

  It was soon decided that Doctor Battery would bring two more old men to my class and I would pay them a few shillings from my own pocket. These men were both drawn from what had become the ‘Uncle Redex shooting party’ and included me (Uncle Redex) and Old Mick and Peter Stockman. I would never have thought that the rather haunted Punka Wallah would be welcome in this group, but clearly he thought otherwise and so came to hover at the edges of my class, uninvited, dressed oddly in a formal waistcoat, tie, and a pair of calico pyjama bottoms I never saw him wear in other circumstances. In any case, they ignored him and on each occasion, prior to his departure, he made an indignant speech in pidgin, which for all its incorporation of English words was as inaccessible to me as any of the tribal languages. I assumed his complaint concerned his treatment by the others.

  Now I pushed my kids towards the subject of ‘blackfellah business’. I discouraged them from drawing the cowboys and Indians for which they had expected praise. When the old men arrived in class my pupils, contrary to my expectation, lost their normal animation. When I gave the old men ink and a cutting-in brush the kids became very still and apprehensive and I thought, of course, they are overawed. They know themselves too young to be initiated in the mysteries of Law. But then, later, they came to me, one by one, in confidence, fearful I would be ‘growled’ by the boss.

  The old men, on the other hand, were clearly happy to have their great authority recognised in the white space of the schoolroom. Their presence meant that the class must now be conducted in a mélange of languages and I would have lost all control had not sixteen-year-old Susie Shuttle become my trusted interpreter. Susie’s mother was from the river mob and her father from the desert so, apart from her very reasonable English, she was fluent in pidgin and the common tribal languages. It was she who made the class possible. She translated the old men’s stories, and helped me read their stick talk, the concentric circles, the marks for travelling feet, the slithering calligraphy of the rainbow serpent. She was a natural, and not above administering her own punishments when she felt them called for.

  I was, in terms of knowledge, the equivalent of four years old. Thus I was informed by handsome Old Mick (he with the splendid military moustache) that Doctor Battery was effectively my father and it would be his job to pass on information about my country. He would introduce me to the jila and then I would learn my ancient obligation.

  I said I had a job to do.

  He assured me this would take ‘a couple days’ and in this time I would learn some lessons, but I better leave my whitefellah peipa at home.

  When Doctor Battery arrived in the humid dark of a Saturday morning, I failed to tell him that all his careful plans for my education were a waste of time. I planned to flee Quamby Downs at the first opportunity. Thus, in effect, I accepted an engagement ring with no intention to be there at the altar, and it was with a very guilty conscience that I observed his wonderful good mood, his considerable excitement, as he packed a box of my matches and two empty cans of Sunshine milk powder into his rucksack.

  Surely, you will ask, I must have expected that his injury would prevent him from performing his duty? But he showed no hesitation. He set off so full of beans, with a hip and hop and scarecrow rattle. It was me who was tentative. I was there to follow.

  Only when he announced a sit-down did I understand. His leg was bugger up. He could never do this walk again. He sat in the red dust with his back to the station and I asked him how I could help him achieve his goal.

  In considering my question he removed his hat. ‘You want to help me Billy?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘One thing I remember,’ he said. ‘Maybe we try that.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘When I was a kid.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘My grandfather him stomach no good, he gotta go lookim country.’ He pushed his hat back on his head. ‘My Dedi carry him.’

  I considered the hot scoured country and was sorry I had said what I had said.

  ‘How many miles?’

  ‘Not so far. Up to you Billy.’

  The homestead buildings were still very close. I could hear the generator and the barking dogs. Of course I could have turned back home and who would have blamed me.

  Yet I had my hands of Orlac, and so I carried him, faltering, bitter in my heart, recalling the lost explorers, Burke, Wills, mad with thirst and hunger, white men stumbling towards their deaths.

  ‘You ask, I tell you anything Billy.’

  ‘Thanks mate, that’s very generous.’

  So the old fellah talked into my ear, I learned that the jila was normally dangerous to approach. It would smell me.

  I would be OK, he said. Don’t worry, he said. Rub dirt under your arms. Nothing bad could happen to me then. He would tell me everything. My ancestor was a snake with a long beard. He could bring misfortune or even death. We would sing when we approached him. Not just any song but the correct song Doctor Battery had learned from his father’s brother.

  The huge sun became high and Doctor Battery ’s weight increased and I no longer liked him. There was a low saddle in the west he needed me to keep my eye on.

  I was a good man, he said, strong and kind. He would care for me, teach me, keep me from danger. This was almost comforting until I lost sight of the low saddle. Then I must be blind as a bloody kartiya, he said, and I felt all my goodwill abused.

  Then some time after noon – I felt it like a horse must feel its rider’s indecision – he became uncertain.

  ‘You’re lost.’

  He did not answer.

  ‘Jesus. Lochy. You are lost.’

  ‘No, this is devil-devil country now,’ he said. ‘Sick country. Look at those bloody wattles growing there. No good.’

  I imagined he was blaming me, and although he would never hold me responsible for the sins of my biological father, I did not know that yet. He was my father, taking me to meet the jila, passing on his knowledge so I could keep the country alive. Now it had been neglected. A bloodwood tree was missing. It was always near the jila. Now it had gone. Well, I thought, it is n
ot my fault.

  Then suddenly he was off my back and hopping and skipping into the mulga in such a way I saw his pain, like a spring that could propel him higher. He ripped off a branch which he used to sweep the earth between some rocks. These were dead children, he told me. So we would see the bloodwood soon. We would light a fire, to signal to the snake that we were coming.

  As the white smoke ascended, a wedge-tailed eagle rose lazily from the mulga and then it seemed we must follow in the same direction. On the edge of the mulga, the country dipped and became sandier. I looked for the storied jila but saw no comfort, no certainty, no spring or waterhole. The only shade was offered from a burned stump of tree now sprouting shoots of green. I thought, I have let this crazy old man cause my death.

  ‘There,’ cried Doctor Battery, pointing. ‘Bloodwood.’

  What a sad sight, but not to him. No, he said, he was not lost.

  He was where he should be. He stood very tall with his head held high. I noticed, for the first time, the extraordinary broadness of his chest. He sang, without preamble, with a passion that surprised and moved me.

  Then he spoke, and I supposed he was introducing himself to the ancestral being.

  ‘What you see?’ he asked me when he had paused at last. His eyes were fierce and bright. He grabbed me by my shoulders and compelled me forward. ‘Look, look, what you see?’

  The earth was dead with no suggestion of any damp, desolation everywhere you looked.

  Doctor Battery moved on ahead of me, crouched, as if hunting, but singing softly. He gathered scrub branches, mulga needles, spinifex and set light to them, recklessly I thought, and then he danced around me, wreathed me in the smoke, white as muslin.

  ‘You want drink, you dig. You want water, you dig.’ He produced a rusty milk can from his rucksack and threw it at my feet. But dig where? There was no wet sand, no green blade.

  ‘Is it the right place?’

  ‘You dig. You strong one, you dig.’