by Kim Scott
He finds himself among creatures he recognises. Dull eyes, and long narrow snouts. The fragile tinkling of a pair of bells. An occasional bleat torn away, disappearing.
He thought it was afternoon but then suddenly the clouds, the sky, dropped; and it was dark. The wind inside and outside him. He was shivering, wind-whipped. The sheep huddled together, and he huddled with them, those with bells allowing him close.
He was moving again at first light. A grey, woolly light. Crawling, shivering, touching his cheek to the earth and resting when he could. The edge of the creek, which is swollen with the rain. Everything shivering in his vision. The trees in this what-might-be-a-valley dancing, swaying with the madness.
Suddenly, no wind. Cold; and he felt nothing. A sheep beside him had fallen and the spear in its side knocked against him.
He was on his feet, and following the two men who carried the sheep away. They were in a hollow in the land.
He followed those legs moving beneath kangaroo skin cloaks. In the now painful quiet he fancied he could hear his own feet stumbling. The men looked back once or twice, saw that he was still following them.
Up a short rocky slope, across granite. There was a fire, and people surrounding it. He listened to their voices, and wanted the kangaroo skin and that fire. The whole world shook in sympathy with him and his vision.
The scent of meat on the fire. Mutton. Whale flesh? They were looking at him, must have been speaking about him. Laughing at this shivering, weaponless, naked him. He was on all fours again, stupid and staring, waiting—just like one of the sheep—and wanting to turn his back on them but he could not help thinking of those spears. There was fire, and food.
He lay down not caring, deranged and confused and blown in with the wind like one from the world of the dead.
He tasted mutton, stayed by the fire in the cave opening, and pieces of cloud began to fall. He saw how the snowflakes drifted and, touching the earth, disappeared. Oh, except for some that eddied back into a small drift beside the mouth of their cave. He took some in his hand, tasted it.
I’d say they noticed his smile, his resigned confusion; the look of one dreaming and accepting.
He saw clouds racing across the distant sky and also right close in front of his eyelashes; and that the granite a few body lengths away was dark with rain. He was warm, dry and close to the fire. He was among.
He ate. Slept.
Must’ve felt their warmth, perhaps their nakedness, and it was these things that played through his wind-addled thoughts as he dozed.
When he awoke the slope was in deep shade, and little of the morning’s warmth remained, although there was a small fire either side of him, and a kangaroo skin, soft and grimy from long use. He saw all the sheep, not far.
Next daylight he was led, following the sheep, to where a new homestead was being constructed. Stone walls first, and very small openings for windows.
Fanny and some others—I don’t know who else—had gathered shells from that edge of the rocks where the water is very deep, is blue and black, and even when there is a swell running the sea barely reforms itself, but simply rises and falls on the granite slope. They walked down the rocks, collected shellfish, saw the sea coming, quickly stepped higher. A graceful dance with the sea, really. To their right, and behind, was where the whale had stranded itself. Some of its skeleton still there.
Now they crushed the shellfish, piece by piece, and dropped small quantities into the water. It was a patient exercise; and they were hoping to make a groper appear from the deep, the way you can; make it slowly appear, and come circling closer and closer, to eat almost from your hands.
The whale boat, which had been making its slow way toward them, was close enough to require them to leave. The women turned from the sea.
There were men—at least three or four white men—standing among the huge broken rocks where the sloping sheet of granite became scrub. They must have landed the other side of the hill, and walked over.
This scene was one the women knew and feared. There appeared no escape.
The men stayed where they were, able to cut off any retreat.
The boat arrived; two men in it.
Fanny recognised one. Had been told. Trapped like that in a closing space, she walked straight at where the boat bobbed in deep water beside the rock. She heard the oar’s blade scrape and scratch the granite.
Fanny walked at the boat, and now its hull nudged the rock. She brushed a man’s hands aside, stepped light and quick into the boat, and put her own hands on Sandy One Mason’s shoulders.
Maybe it was something about the way the sun lit his hair, maybe she saw a youthful, ancestral hero, but she went straight to him, and she grabbed him. She looked boldly into his eyes, wanting to take him on, this one among others closing a trap.
The men laughed. ‘Looks like Sandy’s all right.’ And when the two of them—my ancestors—got out of the boat, because after all Sandy was all right and he may as well stay here now, it was all the easier to get others in.
It was crowded, that boat, and they were all moving about too much. It was crowded, but only a few hundred metres from shore...
My ancestors could hear the screaming as clear as that of sea birds. Quickly, the two of them ran away.
At least Fanny and Sandy acted, and did so with some dignity. Whereas—pursued—I was frightened and ignorant. I killed my father, almost killed my children and their mothers, and found myself in darkness, scrabbling up rocks and looking straight into the torches of my pursuers.
It is not always so easy, to speak from the heart. It is not an easy choice, and it is not so easy to find your way out from the heart. And neither is it necessarily a subtle thing.
Sandy One Mason was among those stalking the women, yet one turned to him, and stuck with him. It limited the violence, solved some immediate and pressing problems. She saved herself, and she saved him.
Fanny recognised him by his blond hair, that Sandy One. It is something to do with what Uncle Jack said, some of those places we came across; something about some blond ancestral hero.
She later saw me looking for her, and came to save me, too.
Anyway, those two ancestors turned back toward the mainland. Turned their backs on what happened on the ocean that day.
The pastoralist, Oliver Mustle, wanted Sandy to stay, help work the station. The blacks were only trouble. Mobs of them had appeared from who knows where—it was frightening to see so many—to feast on a whale which stranded itself at Dolphin Cove, and now they were all away again.
Mustle noted that his new shepherd, Sandy Mason, had quickly acquired a companion. Sandy gave—and she took—the name Fanny, and put it on paper. It was the same name Sandy’s own mother had used, and Fanny accepted it. She knew of his mother.
There are others of her names, or her father’s, which have been variously preserved on paper. Father’s name: Wonyin, Winnery. Her name: Pinyan, Benang.
None of these make sense to me now, although there is a Nyoongar word, sometimes spelt, benang, which means tomorrow. Benang is tomorrow.
Sandy One and Fanny took the sheep out, for months at a time, to where there was good feed and water, and away from the narrow-leafed poison bushes. She taught him, prepared a camp each evening, found and cooked food.
Sheep moved slowly behind them across a plain of waving grass, and this after days of scraggy saltbush plain which, on his own, Sandy would not have tried to cross; he would have veered away and not come so far north.
The sheep grazed greedily, their eyes focused on the grass just beyond the end of their snouts.
Following Fanny’s pointing finger, Sandy One saw a small ridge rising from the plain. Soon, standing upon that same ridge they saw, between the distant shrubs and trees, pieces of pink sky. But some of it was so low. And there, below them, a large piece of sky rippled as birds moved across it although—it was true—these particular birds flew with their wings folded and heads upright.
; That bony ridge my ancestor’s feet gripped was the highest part of a low, rocky outcrop which, its crevices pink and brimming with the dying sky, stretched into the distance.
All that water and, in the distance, great red rocks.
Sometimes they saw smoke from small fires, and waited to be approached. Benang spoke to the people, and Sandy stood weakly behind her, making soft sounds in his throat, pushing his lips out.
The water shrank, and the pools in all the whorls and crevices of the granite diminished, so that the land showed less and less of the sky within its self. But still, when they looked close, it showed their reflections. A man’s bearded face, and then a girl’s gliding in behind it, grinning, and spitting to break up the image.
They slept in a shelter of mallee branches woven and laced over a burrow in the ground. It was a nest they entered in darkness. And what was he being called? A penguin? A bird becoming a fish, flying in water? And she a curlew? Wilu? Wee-low? Is that what was said?
Returning, for the shearing, Sandy One told too much. Trying to impress, he said the wrong words at the wrong time to the wrong people. Always a danger. Soon there was a pastoral lease taken where that water was, and you could follow waterholes all the way to the goldfields, and back again to where, within a few short years, there would be a tavern and a place for Christmas sprees.
Of course, all this did not come without a lot of work; even my grandfather’s notes admit that, but they assure us that:
Natives like working to help their white boss, and do not think of it as work. You could hear their laughter and chattering from a distance. They were all together, and worked for only a few hours at a time, in shifts throughout the day. Picking and shovelling, carrying the soil in a sack held at each side by sticks inserted in the material. A man would be at each end with the handles in his hands. They enjoyed the sense of industry.
Well, as I have been at pains to point out, I am a very fair man. I know that the early pastoralists worked very hard, and so did their employees. But those pastoralists must have had some moments of satisfaction, too. Even, I trust, of pleasure. After all, they had been given the land for free, were able to use government rations to train themselves a workforce. As cultured people, they even gave themselves the delights of theatre, and of performance—witness the sprees—and the often associated delight of dispensing justice.
Mustle, as did so many others, held trials in his homestead. People were chained up on the verandah, and given their chance to speak in whatever English they may have had. Mustle liked to wear a wig on these occasions, to use the proper legal language, and make his impressive voice boom.
A gavel striking our wood; rap rap rap. Tap tap tap. Hollow sound of wood on wood. Already there were coloured ribbons hanging from the wall, and old Mustle sat there with the coils of a silver wig falling over his shoulders. He was enjoying himself, was grinning to an audience which contained, beside his own brother, a Moore, a Starr, and a Done. There was enjoyment, certainly; but it was malicious, and angry, and the laughter was cruel, even its restraint.
‘Send them to the islands.’
Sandy One, because of his skill with boats—he had been whaling, after all, and his mother was the child of a sealer—was enlisted to take the schooner back to Wirlup Haven, from where he could return with a wagon load of goods.
Fanny was with him, and the wind lifted the boat, and as they skimmed by the islands they saw the station boat rowing away from the island, and that a fire had been lit on the island the boat had so recently left.
blooms its heartbeat
Once he was on the island, the scrub was set afire.
The black smoke rolled with the wind, the fire crackled, and even from the boat they could see the flames glow and gather and leap.
The name is Wonyin. (Or, something like that ... You understand, the difficulty of this, all I have is a misspelt name on a certificate.)
Jogging down the south-west slope of the island, Wonyin sees the ship’s sail, itself like a cloud, drift in between him and the headland.
He reached the great granite boulders; black, and slippery from the sea’s drenching although today it is relatively calm. Nothing like the usual swell, but the sea throws itself against a rock shelf, and falls back again, hissing. He feels the fire racing at his back, feels its heat...
And is wrapped within the smoke, and amongst a flurry, a stampede, of soft footed animals rushing and scampering; tamar, wallaby, goanna ... Scorching heat, and a great wind at his feet.
Sandy and Fanny, sailing, skim by the seaward side of the burning island. A larger swell passes beneath the boat and then, looking back through the smoke rolling out to them, they turn and see the great moving hill of ocean break over the granite and, partially transformed, rise higher. It hangs, and they hear the further boom of a blowhole. Small channels of grey ashy froth run down the rock, and the heads of small animals bob about in the sea.
The vegetation where the fire had reached was black and still steaming from its drenching.
The salt bleaches our skin. The mist hangs above the rocks where the big sea blooms. Blooms. Booms. Booms its heartbeat.
continuing...
Sandy and Fanny sailed on to Wirlup Haven, and were left there to make their way back in the wagon. Payback, Fanny thought, but then was the further killing at Gebalup and they had to journey even further, to put us on paper.
Sandy One, perhaps returning to the practice of the sea and the salty taste of the knowledge his mother and grandfather had given him, sailed to and fro between Frederickstown and our home.
But for Fanny it was too much to be on a wind-tossed, water-swept boat, wishing to at least keep the land in sight. It was difficult adjusting to the constant knee-bent shift and stagger of standing above the waves, and to the shelter of tarpaulin only. She could not be always sailing, skimming to and from the edge of land, and only sometimes swooping into its shelter and perhaps a message on the beach.
Their children were all born in her home country, and then Sandy took them to Frederickstown to learn to read and write. There was a mission school where Sandy One had been educated as a boy.
Sandy thought it was the thing to do, the way to save them. He said, we’re teaching them to read and write, teaching them all ways. They both knew Fanny had things to teach them, also. And to teach her man. She returned to the camps of Kylie Bay, travelled old trails. Was watchful. And Sandy worked the boats with the exwhalers, and visited her regularly.
Sometime she might have sailed back to Frederickstown with Sandy. Did she huddle at the town’s edge? Or walk its streets? Visit her children? She did.
My family were reunited, and gradually, we edged our way home. There was roo-shooting, there was simple living from the land, and the following of old ways, even while they were carrying goods from the coast to the pastoralists. ‘This is the way it must be now,’ Sandy had explained to her.
I know that Sandy One Mason was glad to have Fanny Pinyan Benang Wonyin with him, and glad to return to country rather than remain forever floating upon the sea’s skin.
It was never random, it was never just wandering, it was never wilderness. I think it was more like my own wondering, even as I made my way through my grandfather’s papers, looking for traces, for essences, for some feeling of what happened, for what had shaped it this way. Fanny led her family through a terrain in which she recognised the trace of her own ancestors, and looked for her people. She brought them back. I would like to think that I do a similar thing. But I found myself among paper, and words not formed by an intention corresponding to my own, and I read a world weak in its creative spirit.
There is no other end, no other destination for all this paper talk but to keep doing it, to keep talking, to remake it.
For Sandy and Fanny it was companionship, it was reminders that somehow this was the same story despite the surface confusion. Even where strange animals had stripped the land to its essentials, to bone, to the bare contours of the land, it
just made you turn inward all the more, to the bones of yourself.
We have always been surrounded by others. Needed to communicate with them, and yet be wary and watchful.
In strange country, where no clear voices remained, she turned inward, sometimes brightly blossoming out to those few she saw, still springing from the land. And blossoming, too, at the growing response in her fair man.
Flowers, fragile, nod in the dry wind.
They learnt to stay away from the goldfields, from the crowds, the noise and stench and stirred-up earth. It was there that, with Sandy away, those men stopped Fanny and the children one day, even though they were on a wagon, and took Harriette. The child born from that was lost in the goldfields, and came back to haunt them, came back coughing, lungs again bubbling black stuff and blood, bowels oozing. They saw how its smooth, soft skin had erupted in pustules, and—being a baby—it could not walk, but drifted in its dream motion toward them, and away again.
It was many years later, with the children grown, that they met with the Coolman twins and Sandy tried to commit them to paper and his family. Sandy and Fanny pursued Patrick, who had left taking their daughter Dinah with him.
They found Dinah at one of the Mustles’ homesteads. Campbell Mustle, at Dubitj Creek. She had been kept there, working. There were rope marks on her wrists. But now Mustle’s wife had come to stay. Cammy told Sandy that one of the red twins was working for him, and was due back soon. It was many years since Wonyin’s exile, and they had avoided the place since.
Even as they left the homestead the wind was growing, gathering itself. A strange and resentful wind, it worried at them, put dust into their eyes, made the animals nervous. It came from the sea off the bight, and so they set off with it at their backs. It would have been better not to go, but the Mustles had to get there.
