by Kim Scott
Fanny had seen him first, anyway. Looking down a glary and dusty space between hessian, canvas, corrugated iron, she had seen that small, bandy-legged man who flapped his arms and held his head to one side.
She clutched her grandson to her breast and called out to her son, ‘Sandy’. They hurried. A fast walk, legs moving from the knees down only so as not to draw attention to themselves. They ran when they could.
Together, they glanced down another dusty corridor, one walled with the words of flour bags, metal containers pressed flat, and the many labels—Lucifer Matches Kiwi Polish White Washer Velvet Soap Mrs Williams Pink Pills for Pale People Seigels Syrup Bile Beans...
Looking for me, between even such walls of words as these. I can feel it.
And there was Sandy One beside the dray, once again cursing and stamping his agitation. Fanny and her son stepped into the unwalled space and the inspector came gliding by them; quiet, fast, and just a little above the ground.
He was standing with Sandy One, talking with him as they arrived.
Fanny did not look at him, nor speak. She sat in the shade of the dray and held the infant close. The boy moved into the space between her and the two men, and leaned on the shaft of the cart, ready to spring to its seat.
The stranger, this watcher, was a small neat man. He wore a cane hat, and a moustache that gleamed and curved like the handlebars of his bicycle. He didn’t let go of the machine.
‘Yeah, I married her.’ Sandy One reached across, and put his hands onto the bicycle. ‘Reverend Burton. He’s got one of these, as well. He married one of my daughters, too, to someone else; to a white man, I mean.’
Fanny could not help but feel her children beside her, all of us; even those who remain unaware of her today.
Sandy had hold of the machine’s metal moustache. He pushed it a little, feeling the wheels roll easily on ball bearings and air. He picked it up.
The inspector looked at the woman and boy, his trained mind slicing, delineating, making sense of what he saw. Full-blood. The boy half-caste. But surprisingly fair. And this fellow talking to him? A blackfella all right. As the baby must be.
Sandy One looked into the other man’s eyes, daring him. ‘My boy,’ Sandy One said to the Travelling Inspector, tilting his head to his grandson, Will. Fanny held the child tight, closer. Sandy One looked up at his son, Sandy Two, who had now climbed to the summit of the wagon’s load. Sandy One was about to take a risk, to try a new strategy on the inspector. He indicated the boy, said, ‘He was the first white man born in...’
The inspector raised his eyebrows at Sandy One, who didn’t finish the sentence. The inspector smiled, but not enough to offend. He didn’t want to make fun of any man, not to his face.
The inspector laughed freely as he recounted the story over a meal, some days later, to the young Police Constable Hall, the Resident Magistrate William Mustle, the Mining Warden Done, and company.
‘Of course, theoretically, that fellow—Sandy, you say?—had a point. His claim for the boy may be valid, at least by the letter of the law as it presently stands—we expect it to change, by the way—providing the grandson doesn’t associate with the family, and keeps away from his own mother.’
The police constable told the inspector, washed and relaxed after his day’s exertions, ‘We don’t get many Aborigines here. They don’t come here much, not anymore. There aren’t any that belong here, not now.’
The company nodded thoughtfully at these well chosen words.
‘Though there are some at one of our stations,’ added the Mustles. ‘A small family, perhaps the ones you met with. They work there. And we bring in the wild ones each year from the outer stations, for shearing. The sheep, not them!’
‘Yes, indeed!’ said the inspector. And, yes indeed, behind his laughter he did have some concerns about the use of rations in exchange for employment, and about white men cohabiting with Aboriginal women. But he had already presented his opinions on these matters to the Mustles.
The inspector was pleased. He had trimmed his short whiskers. He looked at the white boater he held in his tanned hands.
‘We expect legislation soon,’ he said. ‘It will enable us to protect and save them from contamination by whites. We will be able to force them to stay in designated areas. They seem more of a problem further inland. Why, in the goldfields ... in the north of the state...’
The inspector had been making notes each evening for weeks. He summarised his findings for them.
Unfortunately, he had found it a similar story in most places. The blacks had been horribly spoilt by contact with the whites. His mind parted people like a scythe. Oh, he was rigorous.
Most of the blacks were absolutely useless. The goldfields was worst. They hung about the town the greater part of the day, cadging tucker. Sometimes the women did a little work—if they obtained liquor in payment.
He had poked around—busier than you would believe!—and found numerous cases of venereal disease. Doubtless there were others. But it was not easy to get them to own up.
He had been surprised at the impudence of some of them, even half-naked they held their heads up to him, seemingly unaware of their degraded state.
They intimidated the public.
And it was not as if people objected to giving a little food, but ... well, giving water was a different thing. Water was a very expensive item on the ’fields.
The inspector, like his informants, found the very idea that the public should be obliged to supply the natives with water offensive. He suggested that a condenser be placed at one of the salt lakes, one of those a good way out of town. If the rabbits advanced this far—which seemed likely—the natives could catch and bring them in to exchange for water from the condenser. Something must be done to make them earn an honest living.
‘They must be kept out of town, otherwise they will certainly not attempt to hunt for their own food. Not when they can get it simply by begging.’
But he had also written of how, in most areas, there seemed a dearth of game, a lack even of vegetation.
This Mustle’s place was not so grand as some of the others, although even they had those coloured cords hanging from their ceiling.
‘We’re pulling back the land we’ve got,’ the one said. His brother nodded. A wife was in the other room.
‘We’ve got mines, now, after all. And we’ll hold onto land along the river.’
‘What can we do?’ They talked to Sandy—they hoped—as men who shared a common past, and have sympathy. It was not like it used to be, twenty years ago, Sandy would remember.
‘That government man here, a travelling inspector for the Aborigines Department, of all things. He reckons he’ll put a stop to us issuing rations. We’ve got this last shearing season to get through,’ they said. ‘Then they’re out. All of them, on all the other stations as well; Kylie Bay, everywhere...’
Perhaps the brother remembered Sandy One’s family, because he added, as an afterthought, not quite sure how they stood; ‘Well, most of them...’
Sandy would know how it is, wouldn’t he? The families; all those relations.
Once again, a brother interrupted, and led the conversation over what was a sticky patch.
‘You remember how it used to be? If they didn’t get a daily dole of flour they entered our paddocks and speared our sheep. They cost us. They cost us eighty pounds a year. They are on the land, and someone has to feed them.’
‘Or they did it at our expense,’ said a brother, leaning forward.
Sandy was silent. It was unusual for him, but he had this continuing trouble with his tongue.
‘Why should we maintain any of them—at our own expense—when a fund is set aside, from our taxes, for them?’
They told Sandy they had written to inform the Chief Protector of their opinion, and of the incompetence of this inspector who had been traipsing about on his bicycle and horse and cart and costing the government—taxpayers—God knows what.
; ‘The constitution prescribes for a tax to provide for them, the natives, and our natives should receive their fair share. That bloody inspector. If they refuse us rations, refuse us flour then we shall simply be compelled to turn a number of unprofitable natives adrift. Let them apply to the local magistrate for their maintenance.’
They asked Sandy to cart for them. They had the dray and the beasts; horses, donkeys, ‘Even a camel if you prefer,’ they joked. ‘Cart ore to the coast; sometimes wool from the soak, where they’re sheared. You could bring fruit and vegetables back, for the town. There’ll be a town here before you know it.’
If he preferred, Sandy could help with the sheep. ‘Black shepherds are worthless, unreliable. Even rations won’t get them here, let alone do the work that is required. It’s hard to make them work for their keep.’
‘If we must pay our workers, let it be a white man.’
It was like they shared the one head, these men, the one intelligence.
‘The past is the past,’ they continued. Sandy was watching the sky, behind their heads, bleeding. But it was too early in the day, he thought. His tongue was numb again.
‘The past is the past,’ one of them—both of them?—intoned. Sometimes it was the one, sometimes the other speaking at him but it was all one sentence and even if his tongue was as nimble as it had once been he would not have been able to interrupt them.
‘Your children, they’re all of them white, aren’t they Sandy, really?’ The two heads were grinning at him. ‘You claimed them, you raised them.’
One of them glanced at the door beyond which his wife sat.
‘We didn’t. That’s the only difference.’
‘And that boy, Sandy. He looks like you, I can see you in him.’
It was true, Sandy felt a power the boy gave him.
‘You’re a character, Sandy. You’re an original, we need you around here.’
‘Look. Come and work for us. And your son? Count him in. If he’s good enough for you he’ll do us. We’ll make it worth your while. What do you say? We need good men, with everyone still after gold—they’re mad—we need men we can rely on. What do you say?’
Through the doorway, Sandy saw what I only read about much later. He saw Mrs Mustle, with one of her sisters-in-law, beckon one of her old and crippled slaves to the door. She had the old man tilt his head back, and she tipped the tea dregs from her fine china pot down his throat. The women leaned together on the closed door, weak with laughter.
Despite his stinging tongue, despite everything, Sandy formed the word for agreement easily. No stutter, but a consonant hissed softly. It is a strange and sibilant tongue this one I share with, among others, he and the inspector.
And what else do I share with Sandy One? This man who for so long I assumed was a white man, and wondered at why he should register and educate his children, marry the mother, do all these things and be such an anomaly, for a white man in such times. Strange things for a white man to do, still stranger—maybe—for a Nyoongar.
Sandy One found himself, like me, bereft, bleached, all washed up. His memory? Nothing! Yet he had returned. Had to act.
Sandy One was washed up, rolled in the beach sand.
It is a powerful place he was washed into and upon. It is so powerful that when I first went back there the birds spoke to me. Looking east we saw, through the sea haze, a headland far across the bay.
It was very cold when the dolphins brought Sandy One to the fire on the beach, where one man stood, singing and tapping sticks. There were others hiding there, waiting to spear the salmon the dolphins herded in. But this time there were no salmon, because the dolphins had brought a sick whale with them. It had a spear in it, and a rope at the end of which was tangled a sandy-haired man. He seemed like he was asleep, and the rope was wrapped around his arm.
That blond man was washed up here in this place now called Dolphin Cove, and he knew nothing. He didn’t know what was going on. He lay down and was rolled in the white sand, and he crawled to the creek. His skin was all loose and wrinkled and pale, as if it did not fit him, as if he had shrivelled within it.
Like myself, caught up in a long and most unbecoming process, he had returned.
Fanny must have known it, been told.
Whether they were the dead returned, or not, they brought death with them. And the world changing all the time. After all it was she—variously named in the documents as Pinyan, Benang, Wonyin, Winnery—who became, simply, Fanny Mason.
Her people. Then came the whalers and sealers. Bits of the islands detaching themselves, and bearing these mostly white skinned ones ashore. Those skins the colour of ... skins like the sky, sometimes; like clouds, with the sun on them.
In the sun, those sails like bleached skin, billowing, blowing to us in the sea breeze.
As a little girl, for a long time she was among those kept out of sight. But there were fewer and fewer available to give such shelter.
Let us disregard those shot, brain-bashed, stolen. Forget those poisoned, those chained and force-fed with salt until they led the way to water.
Forget whalers, sealers, explorers, assorted adventurers.
Fanny Benang Mason saw her people fall; saw them trembling, nervous, darting glances all about them. Some became swollen, felt themselves burning up. Their skin—too hot to touch—erupted in various forms of sores. People itched, and scratched the skin away, and writhed on the ground with their arses raw from so much shitting, until eventually even that ceased and there was only an ooze of mucus and blood.
And always, again and again, even in Grandad’s sources, but never underlined. They shot a lot.
Children, becoming white, gathering at the woodheap, learned to work for indifferent and earnest fathers.
Yes, the birth of even an unsuccessfully first-white-man- born-in-the-family-line has required a lot of death, a lot of space, a lot of emptiness. All of which I have had in abundance.
And also—it must be said—some sort of luck. I mean in that I am still here, however too-well disguised.
Uncle Jack said to me, ‘To start with, what you are is a Nyoongar.’
Sandy One was no white man. Just as I am no white man, despite the look of me and the sudden silence—the temporary laughter and disbelief—of distant nephews nieces cousins grannies when they see me come gliding in above the fire. I hover in the campfire smoke, and hum with the resonance of that place.
Those nameless women from my past invited friends and relations to come visit, see me perform.
Some talked tourism, business possibilities—an abhorrent thought, I need not tell you. Grandad would have loved my involvement in any version of his bed-and-breakfast establishment.
Such talk came to nothing, anyway, because there was so much fluctuation, and so very slow an increase in the number attending my performances. I caused embarrassment, and made many people uncomfortable.
Yes, I am something of a curiosity—even for my own people.
We thought it strange, but possible, that we might reach more of you this way; from practised isolation, and by scratching and tapping from within the virtual prison of my grandfather’s words.
I have written this story wanting to embrace all of you, and it is the best I can do in this language we share. Of course, there is an older tongue which also tells it.
Speaking from the heart, I tell you that I am part of a much older story, one of a perpetual billowing from the sea, with its rhythm of return, return, and remain.
Even now we gather, on chilly evenings, sometimes only a very few of us, sometimes more. We gather our strength in this way. From the heart of all of us. Pale, burnt and shrivelled, I hover in the campfire smoke and sing as best I can. I am not alone.
I acknowledge that there are many stories here, in the ashes below my feet—even my grandfather’s.
I look out across the small crowd, hoping it will grow, hoping to see Uncle Will’s children, and those of his sisters, and theirs in turn. And my father’s othe
r children? There is smoke and ash in my skin, and in my heart too.
I offer these words, especially, to those of you I embarrass, and who turn away from the shame of seeing me; or perhaps it is because your eyes smart as the wind blows the smoke a little toward you, and you hear something like a million million many-sized hearts beating, and the whispering of waves, leaves, grasses...
We are still here, Benang.
Also by Kim Scott
True Country
An exploration of unforgettable realism
With straightforward prose, which is often poetic in its energy and rhythm, Kim Scott captures the ambiguities, the troubles and the rewards which accompany the brutal and the delicate nuances of relations when particles of one culture pass, as if through a not so fine sieve, into the heart of another culture.
Elizabeth Jolley
