Benang

by Kim Scott

  He’d worked with my father on all the roads we drove along. I built this one, he’d say, and the camber on this corner is ratshit. We sped along, the motor grinding below the sound of the wind.

  The road headed inland. Sometimes we’d glimpse the river, or catch sight of the smoky green of trees in a dip far across a brown and dusty paddock. We sped between some salt lakes which reflected the sun like dirty mirrors. The usual dead and dying trees. The raw sky, with blue intestines of clouds tangled where the sun was heading.

  ‘You got family out this way.’ Uncle Jack didn’t look at me, but remained seemingly focused on the white line snaking before him. ‘Maybe we’ll drop in on ’em.’

  It was a gravel track, and we slid on its corners. There was a gate, hanging from a post, and I struggled with it, trying to lift the wire over the post, and then—once the car had gone through—struggled equally to close it again. Uncle sat in the car, watching the rear-view mirror.

  It was a sandy track, and we came to a sagging hut of asbestos and timber, with car bodies scattered around it. There were a few men sitting under a lean-to verandah and a couple leaning into the engine compartment of a car, with a light suspended from the bonnet above them. Its cord ran back into the house.

  They looked at us as we drove up, nodded, and came over grinning to shake hands with Uncle through the window of the car.

  ‘Tommy Scat? Oh yeah,’ they said, after I’d been introduced. ‘I know ’im.’ I think they looked at one another. ‘He was a Coolman, eh? You got a lot of people over the border, and...’ Uncle Jack interrupted them, and they got into the car with us and we were driving again.

  I struggled with the next gate, and no one said anything about how long it was taking. Another car came from the other direction, slowly, because of the state of the track, and soft branches brushed it as it rolled dustily along. It accelerated as I got the gate wide enough for it to pass through, and two women smiled at me as they rushed by. My own reflection, also, open-mouthed. I recognised them all; the two women, and—of course—myself.

  I turned on my heel and saw the men in the one car watching me, the other car continuing, leaving me. Its brakelights flashed red, and it stopped.

  Children in the car turned their faces to me. Doors opening.

  i say

  You can imagine; castrated, absorbed, buggered-up, striving to be more than a full stop, to sabotage my grandfather’s social experiment, to repopulate his family history ... Can you imagine how I felt, seeing these two women again? The girls—now women—the first two women, the only two women with whom I had...

  Well, as Uncle Jack put it, ‘White seed in black ground. Black seed in white ground.’

  Two women stepped from a car. Two children on the rear seat, turned to peer through the rear window. Two women, each side of the car, look at me.

  Uncle Jack, the others, all watching.

  Me.

  Us.

  I want to preserve the anonymity of those two women, in case my writing proves to be just another way in which I embarrass and discomfort people.

  The two of them helped me grow from my bitter and isolated self; let me reconcile myself to what it means to be so strangely uplifted; one who hovers, and need only touch the ground lightly. They brought others to hear me sing, and it is not their fault if I am unable to bring together people from beyond our very small core.

  They led me back to writing, after I had turned away from it because of the struggles with my grandfather’s words. They did not want to be central in such a story, which they understood must be about place, and what has grown from it. ‘Not us,’ they said. ‘Not yet. Our children, yes, but not us.’

  And what did I want? What did I want, as I floated above the keyboard, my hands clumsily dancing with the alphabet? I wanted to make something of which both my children and ancestors can be proud.

  The women and I ... This is no romance, it is not romantic love I speak. Negotiation, perhaps. We had shared experience, came to learn together. We shared responsibilities.

  I think they saw I was harmless enough.

  They smiled, laughed, teased me.

  ‘Looks like him, unna?’ One would say to the other, indicating one of the children. Or say, of a particular gesture or mannerism, ‘Who’s that remind you of?’

  And in fact there were several children. Neither of the women would confirm if the children, or either of them, were mine. But it was obvious to me—even if remarkably coincidental—that the two I had first seen in the car were mine. I saw myself in both of them. And Uncle Jack told me I was right.

  The women acknowledged that it was good for the kids to have a man around. Even such a man as myself.

  I did not understand it myself at the time, but of course I was dependent upon them for some sense of a future, and of how I might simply be. I have no doubt that they were more pragmatic; I had a house, car, far more than I needed that way. Once they had adjusted to my one or two peculiar characteristics I was very easy to get along with. Was, in fact, very obliging. They sensed the measure of my dependence, and were flattered by it. So why shouldn’t they join my uncle and I as we slowly moved a little further, a little deeper into our family history.

  But now—having written such a very little of my people, both before and behind me—I would show you a place.

  I wanted to visit Dubitj Creek with the children. ‘Go alone,’ said the women. ‘No,’ they laughed at me, doing a duet:

  ‘Take the kids with you...’

  ‘We need a break.’

  ‘They’ll keep your feet on the ground.’

  I was happy. Flattered, really.

  Dubitj Creek is a national park, and we stayed in an approved camping spot. We walked a little, fished, read the plaque at the ruins of some homestead. We made a fire, sat around it in the chill night. This seems too simple, I know, but it is true. I felt at peace and as if belonging. I remembered places very like it, from my own childhood.

  We slept among old and gnarled ti-trees. Magpies woke us in the morning, and danced away into a little clump of paperbarks which showed, in the way the flaking bark had not yet grown back over charred-black wood, the signs of past fire.

  In the mornings the fine sand along the edge of the dune vegetation held the brushstrokes of sweeping grasses, and the delicate prints of small marsupials, reptiles and birds. The afternoon breeze lifted and swirled the same sand so that the creek and the base of the trees seemed indistinct and blurred as we approached them.

  I was still a lightweight, but as I walked hand-in-hand with my young children, I noticed that my footprints in the sand were almost as deep as theirs.

  There is a small granite headland which the sea wraps around, and banksia trees grow thickly on its slope. Fresh water seeps slowly from the granite, the south-west wind is kept away, and the banksia cones are like little heads looking out from between the serrated leaves.

  When you’re on that slope, among the banksia trees, yours does not seem the only head sticking up and looking this way, that way, everyway.

  I awoke under the stars, and heard the chill cry of a curlew.

  We were about to leave Dubitj Creek, but suddenly jumped out of the car to take a last walk across the headland to a place the maps name Dolphin Cove.

  We came to a line across the granite where the lichen had not grown and, our feet choosing the way, we followed it. There was no real reason.

  No, I am too offhand. There is a reason. Lichen does not grow on that thin strip of granite, because it is the path where, again and again and again, our people walked across the granite. And where they walked, year after year after year, the lichen did not grow. Lichen, unlike the rock from which it grows, is a very fragile thing.

  But, it is true, I only half thought this at the time.

  We weaved through shrubs, to the other side of the hill and a small beach only a hundred or so metres long, between our hill and the next granite outcrop. The beach faced east; its sand was talcum whit
e, and squeaked at us when we walked on it, and the ocean was broken into many small surfaces by the wind, broken grey, black, blue, green. Waves collapsed heavily on the steep, wet sand. I intended returning by walking around the headland on the rock which sloped into the sea. No sooner were we away from the beach than we were among precariously balanced brown granite boulders and irregular, massive sheets of stone strewn about as if thrown and broken by some powerful force.

  There were small crevices and caves, their entrances as smooth as skin. The rock sloped quickly to where the ocean must have been very deep, because its level merely rose and fell smoothly up the slope of rock as each swell swept past.

  Something on the edge of my vision attracted me. Further around the rocks, a bird, hovering. A grey and brown bird, mottled and immature, it hung in the air, intent on something below it and, constantly adjusting itself, remained in position despite the blustering, shifting and buckling air which it rode.

  I walked on that smooth and sloping rock. The sea on my right; to my left, massive boulders and shards of rock with small and wiry coastal scrub sprouting in every tiny place where there was a little soil, sun, and shelter from the wind. Even then I felt something particular about the place, reminding me of something, somewhere, some other occasion.

  I stopped to wait for my children, and always there was that bird; dipping, rising, but remaining.

  ‘That bird wants us,’ I said. Was I talking to myself, or my children? Was I talking in such a way? ‘That bird is trying to tell us something.’

  My children were tired. I wanted to comfort them.

  Another bird; did it appear from nowhere, or suddenly swoop up, as if out of the sea; as if out of the hole left when the sea recedes as it sometimes does where there is deep water beside sloping rock, and a powerful swell running?

  It was a white bird with bright red at its beak. Mollyhawk, I called it. An adult. Flying low at the edge of the rock, its wing beats regular and powerful, it arrowed straight to where the younger bird was hovering, and then arced up to join it.

  I looked to my children, and—oh, this was sudden, not at all a gradual or patient uplift—I was the one poised, balanced, hovering on shifting currents and—looking down upon my family approaching from across the vast distances my vision could cover—I was the one to show them where and who we are.

  Uplifted, I was as I have always been; must be. From me came that long cry which has made so many shiver, and think of death.

  And should you ever hear this, or see it ... Well, yes, it is terrifying. Uncomfortable. It is the sort of thing it is easier to avoid.

  I told Uncle Jack and the others of what had happened, and as I was speaking I found myself suddenly aware of how they listened. How they looked at me so closely, so attentive as I spoke.

  ‘Those birds. That was the spirit in the land talking to you. Birds, animals, anything can do it. That is what Aboriginal people see.’

  He and the women began encouraging friends and family to visit us. We lit a fire, and people would make themselves comfortable, and I would walk in that strange way I have to the fire, float above it, and ... sing.

  Now, it may not be for me to put a name to myself, to who or what I am. Call me one of whatever you will of these; Wadjari, Kwetjman, Mirning, Runaways, Southern People, Coastal People, Shell People, Ngadju, Nunga, Nyungar, Noongar, Nyungah, Nyoongar...

  If I am one of the Runaways, then it means to runaway as in to withdraw. If one of the Shell People...

  A mollusc withdraws inside itself, and stays there, until it is safe again. So we ran away inside ourselves to wait; we withdrew. And a shell cannot always tell what life it holds.

  Periwinkle, mollusc, abalone ... Shells grip granite rocks. It is hard to get those things away from the rocks and sea. It is very hard to get at them. Soaked in salt water, dried in the sun, the waves pounding again and again.

  One of the shell people. One of those hard, and eroding slowly to the ridge of itself, eroding to the ridge on the sand dunes. Further back is where the plants grow. Here, there is white sand, granite, ocean. Here the shells stubbornly cling, birds hover, and the dolphins—like old dogs—herd the ailing sea-things into shore.

  Call it what you will. I say Nyoongar.

  not beginning

  How necessary, then, is it to acknowledge, let alone discuss, some very-first-white-man? Well, to be fair, even if it took some time to arrive at me, there must have been some first-white-man involved. However, my grandfather was not first-anything, whatever he may have liked to think. He merely attempted to hasten things to their conclusion. The persistence, perhaps, of what he would have called the ‘spirit of empire’.

  A first white man is not the beginning of anything much.

  Consider a sandy-haired man. One out of his country, and merely touching this one’s shores, now and then, as if seeking replenishment. While John Forrest plodded, squelched, slipped; while the likes of John Forrest used various shackles to force us to lead him to water (Here, you must dig for it. Here, lift this shard of granite), this other man sailed upon salt water and shackled himself to the great things beneath it or to the very wind itself.

  This Sandy-Mason-One helped bring the wire for the telegraph line. It was left on the beach, then strung up from post to post across the land.

  One man coming from elsewhere, staying. Belonging.

  Why?

  For a long time I puzzled over that, trying to understand. Why? Why such an anomaly? Why claim the children? Why marry the woman, and remain within her traditional country?

  Few thought him a worthy man in his own time. But, he helped us read and write. He chose to put us on paper.

  A strange gift.

  There were a scattering of pastoral stations along the southern coast. The remnant of a last tiny whaling base close to one of them, Dubitj Creek. The land-based whaling industry was almost dead.

  Whalers had touched this coast for years and years. It had become necessary to hide the women away. Sealers bashed out the brains of not only the seals. They plucked people from the shore, raped them, clubbed out their brains, dumped bodies in the sea.

  They ate human flesh. And one man lay under the water for a very long time, his too wide grin shifting with the current, until the fish came and took him away. It was then, so soon, that we first began to go to the islands.

  Sandy One Mason was in the whale boat. It was a lark, a one-last-time before they took the gear back to Frederickstown, or sold it to Mustle at the station. And Sandy One was close enough to see that what they said was true; a whale hides its face in its shoulder. And this one had its eye on him.

  Someone threw, thrust, pierced.

  A very last fling.

  The rope suddenly alive; a loose coil spinning a straight line spearing the sky’s shifting reflection. The rope sang its passion.

  Flick. One man gone. A kink in the rope? Someone too slow with the hatchet, and the rope not cut. The boat diving, men sluiced out.

  Sputtering to the surface they see the boat flip up—its dragging bucket gone—and skip away across the sea at a great speed. And there—impossibly—is Sandy One Mason still holding onto the boat, flapping like a rag doll and last in line.

  The boat’s speed! Silent, supernatural. It became small, and then disappeared beneath the surface.

  As I said, Mustle’s pastoral station crouched on land about this place. Remarkably, written records assure me that it has snowed along this coast only the once, ever, and that it was at about this particular point in our history. But I am not surprised by any of this, really; not the claim for singularity, not the reality that it was so very cold. It is like ice dreaming, and of course there is always a storm. Squalls. Hail. And there are variously sized and delicately shaped flakes of white, ephemeral except where they are by chance tossed together in some shelter.

  The sea spews you up into the chilling wind, a deep and numbing cold.

  In the uplifted state provided by my grandfather, such a sc
ene reminded me of Phantom comics. An ancestor is washed ashore, ‘four hundred years ago’. But it was only one hundred years to when I began this great fat bunch of words. Like the Phantom, after a fashion, I have my chronicles, my secrets. But I’m no phantom. I’m no phantom.

  And as a child I always identified with tubby little Guran, anyway. The harmless, grinning apologist. And, yes, some may still see me this way.

  I suppose this is what made people wary, when they came to my little performances. I was so pale, there were strange scars marking my burnt and wrinkled skin, and yet I had that way of hovering, and of singing ... Those who met me were further puzzled by the fact that—away from the performance—I was so meek, so weak.

  Who is he? What family? From where?

  Can he be trusted?

  But once again I digress. The mind of a child. No sticking power. Some atavistic fault, I hear someone say, in the character of the narrator.

  Something more than one hundred years ago, Sandy One Mason is washed ashore.

  It was the same south-westerlies that drove him now, on land as they had at sea. He had some dim sense of fire, of sticks rhythmically tapping, but his rational mind told him that it was too close to where he had come from—the water—and so, blind, he followed an opening in the land and let the wind take him into scrubby dunes, where it moaned and insinuated itself into the very curves and whorls of him, upsetting him again. He faced into the wind—a measure of his determination (once, my grandfather’s eyes lit up when I read such a thing to him)—and fell down the slope.

  Water flowing there, a narrow expanse of it, warmer than the air but salty still. And the wind has gone, is kept away. The shrubs at the creek’s edge seem frozen, rearing back in surprise, as if startled to see him. He hears the firm white sand squeak at his hands and knees, and becomes aware that his skin is loose and wrinkled, suddenly the wrong size for him. Gradually—but realised all at once—there is warmth, and company.