by Kim Scott
The hessian bags in Harry Cuddles’ buggy moved about and squawked. The fellow he’d got them from had shared a drink with him. A good man. You know, him and Harry could both get arrested for that.
Harry was going in for poultry farming.
Those same chickens were scratching about, clucking to themselves, and every now and then coming up straight and staring as if remembering something. Suddenly they were all squawking, and running about flapping their wings, and the dogs were barking.
The policeman appeared from between the trees, on horseback.
‘Hello, Constable.’
The new constable’s face was flushed, and his small round eyes moved quickly about the camp. Their home. He would have seen the two horses with their buggies; the hut, the tent with its little bush shelter next to it, the boughshed for meals.
The new constable was learning fast. He didn’t get down from his horse.
‘If you want to be treated like a white man, Harry, you know, you can’t mix with other natives. Who’s this?’ He gestured at Chatalong.
‘My nephew.’
‘No matter. You’ll still need to get a permit to employ him, just like anyone else, if you’re contracting. You can get on, that doesn’t mean all your family follows you. Not all your bloody relations.
‘Where’s this fellow, Sandy Mason?’
‘He’s away, gone to war.’
The policeman saw old Sandy One sitting erect and pale in the shady mouth of his bush shelter.
There was silence between the people standing in that little clearing with its track thinly snaking away among the trees. A solitary crow called from somewhere in a tree above them.
‘Who’s that?’
‘Oh, that Sandy Mason. I thought you meant the other one, his son.’
The policeman dismounted. He went across to Sandy One, bent over, and looked into his face for a long time before looking away, and the others saw Sandy One’s gaze drop for a moment, as if resting. But when the policeman looked back Sandy One’s eyes were staring into his own, same as before. The policeman waved his hands in front of Sandy One’s face and the eyes followed the hand. He raised one of the old man’s arms and let it fall. Sandy One had raised his right hand at the wrist as if attempting to offer it for shaking.
Fanny used her finger to wipe some saliva from the corner of the old man’s mouth. She spoke to the policeman as she did so, wanting to explain. She didn’t take her eyes from Sandy One.
‘My husband. The other one you said is my son.’ She had the marriage certificate ready to show him, she said.
‘Hey, where are you from? Where were you before you came here?’ The constable looked at Harry, gesturing at Sandy One as he did so. ‘He’ll have to go to an institution. You can’t look after him.’
His gaze shifted to the others, to the children, and to Fanny. ‘And you will too. Have to go, I mean. There’s a law.’
The solitary crow flew away, and Chatalong saw that there were little corellas also, scattered through the canopy on the far side of the clearing. Each one’s plumage seemed grubby and blood-spattered. They have small blue marks at their eyes. Once, he had found a nest. There were just two dirty white eggs among a nest of decaying debris. The birds had squawked, and harangued him.
The policeman returned to his horse and Chatalong noticed his short, bandy legs, and that he rocked from side to side with each short stride. The policeman took a track which entered among the trees. He turned, spat something from between his teeth, lifted his arms and was gone.
Another inspection was over.
The birds had also moved away. But not too far. Jack Chatalong listened to them squawking away among the trees somewhere.
I feel obliged to say that in my youth I particularly enjoyed the story that is to follow, of how Sandy One—paralysed, and probably imbecilic—wrote Fanny’s letters for her, for all of them. It reminded me of my own actions, with Sandy One in my grandfather’s place, and Jack Chatalong in mine. But there was nothing noble or dignified in what I wrote, in my grandfather’s hand, as it were. I squeezed Ern’s useless hand around the pen I had placed within it, and formed various words.
Ern Solomon Scat:
has failed
fucks chooks
fucks his children
fucked all our family before him.
I looked into his face for a reaction to what I—we—wrote. It amused me at the time, gave me a bitter pleasure.
I listened to the story Uncle Jack told many times over, around the campfires and—later—the kitchen tables of people to whom he was slowly introducing me.
Fanny had thought a lot about the schooling of Chatalong and Kathleen, and of Harry’s children. They needed letters demanding justice, and—if possible—a white citizen writing them. She thought they needed the urgency of telegraphs, the humming of wires, the business of getting it in writing. Justices of the Peace promoting them.
It took many drafts to get the writing not only legible, but neat. The letters sloped evenly, as if blown by the same strong wind.
Fanny placed her arms around her husband, and kept the small man steady in her embrace. Chatalong’s right hand kept Sandy One’s wrapped around the pen, and together they formed the words. Chatalong’s left hand held the old man’s right upper arm, and he could feel the old man’s tendons, the thin cord and wad of muscle still there.
Fanny spoke, and Sandy One muttered and made his noises; Chatalong heard each buzz, squeak and explosion for the word it must be. The words of the two of them flowed through him, ran like sap through the capillary of the pen, flowed to its very point. But they were not easy to form once there. It was clumsy, the two hands unable to quite move together.
In one draft—perhaps it was the third—the old man’s feeble left hand somehow came across the wet ink. Irritated at the mess, Chatalong flicked at the hand and it slid away like a dead thing.
By way of apology, Chatalong squeezed the almost lifeless hand and once again inclined his head to the work.
It was a new pen, new ink, and the new, expensive white paper was thin and crinkled like a ghost’s sloughed skin.
Dear Sir,
I am writing to you on behalf of my son, his cousins, and our future children.
These children, all of whom are at least half British, should be allowed to go to the State School. I wish to know what reasonable objections there can be to this.
I myself am crippled now, but I have worked all my life to make a better life for my children and now my grandchildren are the only ones left to me and I want them to finish their schooling.
My boy (and his cousins) are as deserving as any other persons of being allowed to continue their good education which they had already begun before my accident.
I don’t want to see my offspring degraded which seems to be what the law wants for them just because of the colour of their skin.
The signature was difficult. Chatalong practised for much of the afternoon before he was able to run it, slowly and fluently, across the bottom of the page.
Did that letter go by sea, around and slow? Or did it go by railway line, cutting across to the capital, reaching out from the heart of Fanny’s known world? Telegraph lines hummed with the passage of brief words.
Harry Cuddles also wrote, and he and Fanny took it further. They rode through the main street, collecting signatures on a petition. Several people signed, including the schoolteacher. However...
Chatalong had a stub of chalk, and a board fashioned from the blackened base of a water tank. With the stub of white chalk he wrote the word ‘black’ on the board. It looked like nothing, and a lie. The word said black, it was written in white. He rubbed it with his hand, making a white smear, and then wiped his hand clean of it.
He was under a tree, in the dappled light. Sandy One, sitting in the little bush humpy beside the tent, looked like something carved from cuttlefish shell.
Fanny was hanging out washing. She moved, solid and secure, and alth
ough the pale clothing swayed and danced around her, she stayed in her place.
Chatalong rubbed at the letters until they were completely gone.
who is exempt?
‘Well, what could I do?’ said Will, although no one had accused him of anything. ‘Yeah, I went back to the school. Dad was thinking of the best for me, and for Mum.’ Will believed there was no place left for him in this story, and that it was Chatalong who must continue. Will said he didn’t know this stuff, it wasn’t for him to say. He had just ignored whatever people said, held his head up, walked carefully, gone to school, kept on. Most of the time he lived just like anyone else in the town, really. He kept to himself, he said. They kept to themselves, just the family. They knew who they were. A little family.
‘Nah, I can’t. It’s the law. I can’t employ any Aborigine under sixteen years old.’
Why, you know, that could be years into a man’s working life.
‘And, even if he was old enough, I’d need a permit. It means more trouble. More money.’
School had left Chatalong, and that meant he must find something to do that somebody else wanted done. That was the way of things.
But what? There wasn’t much; not clearing not anything, not even for anyone thinking he was a white man so what chance a boy, a dark boy.
At least with the rabbits—more and more of them all the time too, and moving beyond the fence put there to stop them—there was extra food. The rabbits and the new people, moving toward one another.
‘Tell you what, Harry,’ offered the senior Starr, a storekeeper branching into farming considerably east of Gebalup, where he hoped to become one among a pioneering community. ‘Tell you what, I want you to get work as much as anyone. Why, I remember when you were just a boy. And, of course, I want you to pay back what you owe me at the store. Business is business. I could hire you, but if you agree to have the others here’—his hand swept around to Harry’s family, extended to old Sandy One, Fanny, Chatalong, Kathleen—‘working with you; then we could do a deal. I’ll pay you generously, of course. You know that. But, of course, apart from yourself and ... Well, you’re the only one I can expect a man’s work from. I want to help you, see. And him.’
Mr Starr waved his hand in Sandy One’s direction, shook his head ruefully. ‘I remember better days.’
They camped on Mr Starr’s property. It was the only way to try to raise some money so Harry could develop and improve his own land in the way he had to, when he could get back to it. Since there was no school even the children could help.
Propped in the shade somewhere—against a tree or under the rickety wagon—Sandy One oversaw it all.
They picked wool from dead sheep. Or plucked the stones and sticks from the soft soil, their legs aching from the effort to lift their feet from its clutches. They wore leather aprons with a pouch, which they repeatedly filled and then emptied at a growing mound of stones. Chatalong thought they might be building their own memorial.
His back ached from the bending the bowing the carrying the weight, and after a few hours it was silent work, even for him. Words dried up, windswept sand stung their eyes, dust coated their lips, and the skin wore from their fingers which, in the evening, they soaked in the methylated spirits Mr Starr supplied. ‘It’ll toughen them,’ he said.
It was clear Chatalong shared his Uncle Sandy’s gift with horses.
The horses snorted like trains, and their heavy muscles rippled. Some mornings there was frost on the chains, and Chatalong had to resist the links fusing with his fingers.
He followed the horses back and forth across rectangular paddocks, cutting the earth. His heavy feet appeared misshapen and roughly hewn, as if they were no longer toes or bones but were torn from the earth itself, and he was some weak sapling growing from them.
He leaned with the horses and they pulled old stumps and vast networks of mallee roots from the soil.
Starr offered Kathleen a place working in the house, but she wanted to stay with the rest of her family. So, well; there were plenty of others more than ready to do the work.
They tried hunting possum again, staying east of the Great Southern Railway Line. It was good country there. They pegged the skins out on the ground and scraped them with the glass of broken bottles. Sometimes, the children scraped and scraped until, suddenly, there was the ground coming through the animal’s hide and into their daydreaming.
The scraping, and then the sun, cleaned the skins sufficiently for them to be sold to a man with the piece of paper, the license required to deal in possum skins.
They piled the wagon high with skins. Harry had worked like this before, made money enough to help get that block of land, but the money was not there now, not with no license.
Fanny and Harry dressed up for town and the annual agricultural show. All the kids, too.
But that policemen, and a partner, visited again.
‘You need licenses for possums, if you’re selling. Oh, kill as many as you want for food, for yourself. It used to be your country.’
The police took away pieces of wire and rope which might be used for snares.
Smiling, they took Harry’s gun. ‘It’s the law.’
They shot the dogs.
‘This is private property,’ tried Harry.
‘So’s that of your neighbours, their land’s private too, and your dogs are trouble to them.’
‘You get two pounds a scalp for them dogs. Who gets that money?’
‘You can’t be too hurt, if you’re talking about money. Anyway, we’re the police. The law’s the law. These dogs, they been killing sheep.’
The second policeman came and stood very close, chest to chest with Harry. He grinned.
‘Yeah, we’re your protectors. Just helping you.’
‘They got wheat, now, my neighbours,’ said Harry. ‘How dogs worry them?’
‘They have valuable sheep. Poultry. And the white ladies, they don’t need to be upset by the likes of you. They don’t want to see you.’
Harry had once organised whole teams of people to work for him; clearing, picking sticks and stones, even cutting wood. They might have tried stripping the bark from trees, as once they had. Sometimes the farmer would go halves in the money you made; others might let you collect it all. You stacked the bark and ignored the startlingly naked trees at your back.
But suddenly, no one wanted bark any more. The whole of a tree was going, all of it. All of them. So there was nothing. And now acres of wheat rippled closer and closer toward them.
Starr reminded Harry that he still had a problem with credit at the store. Harry owed Starr money.
What could Harry Cuddles do? There were more and more farms all the time, more and more people, and those farmers worked on one another’s property, and Nyoongars had to work for next to nothing—for shelter, and a bit of food.
These new people, they were growing a community like they grew their crops. They focused on money and time, on cause and effect, and knew they would have to modify what was around them if they were to grow as they wished. They were not of this country but, looking outward, believed they understood its potential. It was necessary to believe that the land’s people and ways were inferior, and to ensure that there was proof of that.
Starr’s customers certainly believed they knew all about those others, those dark ones camped on the fringes of towns, edging closer and having to be chased away; away from the school shops and oval, off the footpath, off the fence, away from the water trough, away to the tips.
Starr’s customers had words; darkness, shadow, savage ... and they made sharper ones, harmless to their own ears. Boong. Coon. Nigger. Just the launching of them gave satisfaction, inflicted pain. And if they curled their lips, maybe laughed and sneered, believed what they said then their very sincerity itself could cause pain.
Once you shared this tongue, you could taste it. Evolution. Light out of darkness. Pyramids and pinnacles. With such a language, it is hard not to accept such conce
pts.
Harry couldn’t get a loan from the bank. It was the law. His property wasn’t securely his. ‘What if you should die,’ smiled the bank manager. ‘It’s nothing personal,’ he added, after a pause. ‘It’s the law, it’s the colour of your skin, Harry. Who your mother was, and your father too.’
Mr Starr called again to see him. It was about that debt at his store in town, and, well, really. Something’d have to be done.
Harry looked to Chatalong and Kathleen. Could they work for him, work off the debt?
‘No,’ said Starr. But he looked at the girl for a long time. ‘No. Too long, too big a debt, too difficult with their age, and the law and all.’
‘The law? The law? How long’s there been this law? That says I’m a lesser man than any of you?’
Mr Starr never got angry, not any more. ‘Oh, ages Harry. Nearly ten years now. The 1905 Aboriginal Protection Act. A new amendment, just a few years ago.’
‘Protection Act? I don’t need it, I don’t need that. Just fair treatment same as anyone. That’s what I want from a law, any law, new one or old one just the same.’
‘I know, I know. Anyway, why worry, we know you’re all right. You got an exemption, haven’t you? But you don’t want to let the others drag you down, Harry. You don’t want that. Look, I tell you what I can do.’
And Mr Starr said Harry could mortgage his property to his store. ‘It’s like a loan. It is one. As a reserve sort of thing, in case you can’t clear this debt. Plenty of time, say a couple of years. Just till things got sorted out.’
