Salt

by Bruce Pascoe

  Long after that pelican had passed, long after the people saw white people climb from the pelican’s back, the man from the cave visited the island of the passing pelican with his son and other young men. They made their knives from a stone from the sea. They ate lobsters and shellfish as a spirit man instructed them in their ordeal. Each day the men and boys dived into the sea for the lobsters, and they laughed because the sea was warm and the reef was safe, but in the backs of their minds were the stone knives wrapped in the cloth of kinny aha, the leaf marked by the serpent’s head.

  Every morning, an hour before grandfather lifted his golden head from the sea, they heard the wolves of the sea. Kwyy, wiii, yowroo, cried the spirit birds. The men and boys listened, their heads still resting on their rolled-up clothes, within which they had hidden their blades.

  Tomorrow, said the old man to the boys and the men and the man from the cave, tomorrow we will visit the whale and the shark. Do you have something for me?

  The men and the boys felt for the knot of their narguns that tied their stone to them and they nodded. Yes, we have something for you.

  Next morning, long before dawn, at the time when the wolves of the sea cried kwyy, wii, yawoo and the men and boys shuddered because the air from the sea was as cold as a snake’s tooth and was full of the sounds of wolves, they huddled in the heath and waited. From the corners of their eyes they saw the old man lead the man from the cave away, and they waited. They saw the light of bird blood leak onto the very margin of the sky until one by one they were asked to contribute their colour to the rising sun, and that’s when they saw looming above them the giant shark and the gigantic whale, and they stared between the two great figures and for the first time they realised that they had joined the contest of the deep sea.

  One day they would be asked to observe the passage of the whale, witness her sacrifice, witness her escape from the shark, follow the journey of the whale to a point where all the land ends. There they would be told how nothing they do will match the dedication of the whale and the serpent, because that is the lore and they are mere followers of the lore. They did not invent it and they cannot destroy it. For the lore is not about success or failure, greed or power. It is about the land and the sea and our role in its continuance. The whale swims, the serpent coils: that is all.

  EMBRASURE

  She couldn’t remember seeing a tree.

  Even though every stone and gate, window and tile, could be raised in her mind as clearly as a brother or a sister’s face.

  Eighteen years she’d lived in Rosecastle Street, until the man had come and taken her away, and now, although she could see the uneven stitches trimming the coarse ruche to her mother’s apron as clear as the veins in the back of her hand, she couldn’t remember a tree. Along the whole length of Rosecastle Street and even Hedley Road, not one. She roamed the streets of the old town in her mind, turning down this lane and that until, yes, the common, the three elms in the common, the three trees of her entire life until now.

  Oh, she’d read about trees, and tigers, ostriches, elephants, pyramids; everyone had in those days, they featured in the sentences on every blackboard, the exotic, the enthralling. That’s how they got you to read. Even the daughters of coal miners. Everyone was a coal miner or a coal miner’s wife or daughter, everyone. No, she couldn’t remember a tree or any man who wasn’t a coal miner. Except perhaps Edward Carmody at the shop … and Father Williams the priest … and old Fitzgerald at the school, but he died.

  And now there was this man. He should have been a coal miner, but he’d come into her street one day and said he didn’t intend to be a coal miner, no, he was going to be a landowner, on the other side of the world. She presumed he meant Africa and thought of monkeys and elephants in the garden, elephants cleverly spurting water onto the flowerbeds. There was a story like that in their reader, and she never wondered why the elephant didn’t eat the flowers or tread on them. All the children, it seemed, had believed the story about the elephant.

  And then this man came along and said to hell with the coal mine and she’d said to hell with Rosecastle Street and so here they were.

  She watched his back. It was nothing to see a man with his shirt off in this country – often it was too hot otherwise, especially with the work they had to do. At first she’d blushed fiercely and turned away from any half-naked farmer or builder’s boy, but gradually she’d learnt about backs.

  And this back. She knew this back. Knew how the muscles corded beside the spine, plaited and stiff, like salted rope. She’d run her hands along those ropes and feel him squirm, run her thumb around the blade of the shoulder, along the collarbone, into the cavity of the neck, and let her fingers drift across his lips, find them wetted by the tip of his tongue, and then that was it – his back arched and he swung around and grabbed her by the waist, lifted her and brought her down on him. Naked and brown. You could do that in this country. No one to look in the window, no one to tell your mother, no one to see it as wrong.

  Tonk. The mallet struck the wedge into the cleft log and the sound echoed off the trunks of red gum and wilga by the river. Tonk, he struck, and tonk again, the wedge popping the log, springing a fence post clean away from the timber, hard and solid and yet moistly pink, like a filleted salmon.

  She looked across to where Violet was lying on her back in the cane basket, arms behind her head, legs splayed, boneless as a tulip. Just a nappy on. You could do that here. Not in summer, but in autumn – what they called autumn. In the dappled light beneath the tree, the tree she’d begged him to spare, her baby slept naked and tea-coloured, not at all like the babies at home, who all looked like unhealthy whey.

  With the red dog asleep on the step, those little birds had come to creep among the twigs and leaves, piping to one another so quietly you could miss it if you didn’t listen, not at all like the sparrows of Rosecastle Street. These were timid birds, secretive, innocent things, finnicking with insects so small they were invisible to her. And not at all like the red-and-blue lorikeets, whose military plumage and three-note bell songs seemed to promise a complete tune, but perhaps they only needed to remind one another of the opening bars so they could return to slicing gumnuts with their pincer bills, dropping the fragments, astringent and lemony, all around her. And on the baby once or twice, so that she made a mew with her tiny bright lips but returned to sleep without opening an eye or disturbing her dream of milk and warm-pressed breasts. You could do that in this country.

  When she brought him a couple of scones and a cup of tea he drank it standing, keen to get on with his work. She slid her hand across the tight curve of his waist and a finger between the top of his trousers and his skin, let it slide into the hollow of his groin to feel his body tighten, his eyes flaring at her like a horse’s and she, she shimmied at him. What would her mother have said if she’d seen that sliding finger, the shameless shimmy? But there was no one to see, no one to say it was wrong.

  He drew her to him and showed her how he was going to plane the flitches of timber to make the frames and shutters for their windows, and then he whispered a promise into her ear, so hot it burnt her cheeks. But you could do that in this country.

  He was clever. She watched as he put a bevel on opposite corners of the timber, planing the sweet scrolls of wood from the plank so that the air became heady with eucalyptus. Without a word he held two pieces together at a right angle, looking up at her to see if she understood how they worked, that the bevel would set the frame out at an angle from the stone and make a slightly flared aperture. Do you see what this allows, his eyes seemed to ask.

  All day he worked like that, and before the afternoon had passed he had framed up the two tall and narrow windows and fitted shutters to the other two. He’d cut the shutter timbers with a small notch so that, when brought together, they formed a heart just like those in a Swiss village she’d seen on the tins of the Wasser biscuits her mother used to buy at Christmas.

  She stood back and admired th
e completeness, the neatness. They leant to the front of the house, her house. But the sun was getting low now, almost below the crowns of the great trees by the river, and so he’d taken the red dog and brought up the flock of sheep, and the cows with their calves at foot, and penned them in the yard beside the shed. She’d already pitched in forkfuls of the sweet wild hay they’d cut from the riverbank their first summer here. And they looked at each other then with the first hint of uncertainty either had felt that day.

  Magpies and kookaburras watching from the trees seemed to accept the yarding as the cue to roll out their impossibly wild and heedless songs, ending the day with bawdy riot, flagrant pipers of a contemptuous army.

  The shutters brought darkness to the house earlier than before, so they lit lamps and polished chimney glass even before dusk had purpled the valley. She turned her back as he took the gun from the shelf and set it by the narrow aperture he’d fitted earlier, the timber still oozing with sweaty sap.

  They prayed perfunctorily over their plates and looked up at each other briefly before dropping their gaze to the meal. She’d braised chunks of lamb, such big chunks she felt shame lest her mother find how profligate they’d become. Her own onions and carrots thickened the sauce, a chutney from the tomatoes that had sprung up of their own accord beside the pig’s sty. A stack of bread and butter that threatened to topple from the plate. But you had to feed the man, he’d laboured from before dawn with barely a moment’s rest, for they were hurrying, preparing the house.

  They lay in bed, naked but for the sheet, and held to each other, she with an arm crooking his neck and the other straddling his back, and he likewise, except that one hand cupped her breast, the nipple standing out between his fingers fat and proud, dimpled, gauzy with its own dew. But they were listening.

  Violet’s breath was regular and sweet. No catch of croup or congestion, no muffled splutter from bedclothes too close. She, like them, could do with just a sheet, sleep resplendent with tossed limbs. You could do that here.

  They weren’t listening for her breath; they’d come to expect its unbroken regularity. But still they listened.

  He settled himself so he could look across her shoulder at the dog, and when it lifted its muzzle, ears slowly pricking, he slid his arms from his wife, and crept from the bed to the tall window slot and levelled the gun through its aperture.

  A cow coughed, a sheep gave a bleat, and they could hear the stamp of her defiant foot, the one the others saw as their leader. Again she stamped, bravely facing whatever there was to face, her yellow eyes swivelling about the moonlit yard, knowing but not seeing. And then the gun blasted silence from the blades of leaves, tore it from the mouths of sheep, caused cows to duck their heads to their calves, troubled, knowing but not seeing. Again the blast of the gun, and again. Not another noise. The moonlight resuming its delicate silvering of leaf edge, shovel blade, cheekbone and air.

  She lay in bed staring towards the man at the window, Violet sucking at her breast, surprised to find herself in her mother’s arms. What did they want, these people? Why did they keep coming back? Couldn’t these people see they meant no harm, that all they wanted was to run a few sheep and cows, enough to raise their child – well, children soon, if she knew what was happening inside her.

  He stood by the window, the gun arcing back and forth, the fortification allowing him to cover most of the yard. The particularity of the embrasure’s angle a witness to their consternation, their fear, their knowledge that not all agreed with their claim.

  Why didn’t they leave him alone? Unconsciously he rested the fingers of one hand on the frame before becoming aware of the workmanship in it, the pride he’d invested in its construction. It was his: his window, his house. He’d made them and he’d keep them. He meant no harm to anyone, so why didn’t they leave him alone?

  All night he stood by the window, occasionally resting his weight on one leg, easing the tension in the muscles of the other, his forehead against the sweet timber, mouthing thanks that he’d got the job finished, windows shuttered, door secure, and the embrasure built from which to defend his right.

  FRANKS IS DEAD

  Everybody agrees that this is what happened: Franks and Flinders were killed by blows from steel hatchets landing so heavily that Franks’ skull was driven into the turf.

  And that’s the point at which agreement stops.

  The Champion arrives at Point Gellibrand in Port Phillip Bay in 1836. On the ship Charles Franks has brought 500 sheep and a partner, George Smith, and a shepherd called either Flinders or Hindes, but nobody seems certain.

  The waters off Point Gellibrand are shallow, clear and calm, crowded with mussels, oysters, flounder, flathead and garfish. Only twelve months earlier, Bunurong, Wathaurong and Woiwurrung people feasted on this bay of plenty; their ovens and houses are evident but already the people are scarce, avoiding the frenetic activity of the white people.

  It is winter, but even so the days can be brilliant with mild sunshine, the wavelets scattering light as if from a shattered mirror. It is God’s own country. A man might become anything here. In those days women could please themselves.

  In this mood of limitless opportunity Franks removes his sheep from the Champion on 23 June and, on the advice of George MacKillop, decides to take up land around Mount Cotterell, on the headwaters of the Barwon River. It takes until 2 July to cover the 20 miles (32 kilometres) of flat volcanic grasslands. After depasturing the sheep, George Smith returns to Point Gellibrand to bring up more stores.

  On 8 July Smith arrives at Mount Cotterell. He sees no sign of Franks or Flinders but the stores appear to have been ransacked.

  He takes fright and returns to Point Gellibrand, where he conscripts the help of Mr Malcolm, Mr Clark, Mr George Sams, Mr Armytage, Dr Barry Cotter, Charles Wedge and Mr Gellibrand. Gellibrand asks Henry Batman to accompany him, with William Windberry, George Hollins, Michael Leonard, Benbow, Bullett, Stewart and Joe the Marine. On the way they fall in with Mr Wood and his large party, which includes David Pitcairn, Mr Guy, Derrymock, Baitlange, Ballyan and Mr Alexander Thomson.

  So, a party of well over twenty-three people are curious enough to drop what they are doing to investigate the upsetting of a cask of flour at Mount Cotterell. Or have they already mounted similar expeditionary forces since the establishment of the first Yarra settlement less than a year before? Are they at war with the Kulin Nation and recognise this as a beachhead in the battle for possession of the Port Phillip plains? When Captain William Lonsdale is appointed police magistrate of Port Phillip in July 1836, the frontier community is under token jurisdiction, but it is an indelible indication of the true activities of the previous twelve months that when George Smith notices an upturned barrel of flour he has no trouble in mobilising a small army to investigate the cause.

  These men, who do not believe a delinquent possum is rampant, mount a force of heavily armed volunteers. They are not involved in casual reprisal but a calculated vigilante campaign. The party follows a trail of flour and discarded stores and comes across a band of about seventy to one hundred Wathaurong people. In responding to Lonsdale’s investigation of the incident, Henry Batman says he yelled at them but they didn’t move so he fired his gun once above their heads and they ran; John Wood says several shots were fired but none could have caused death because they were fired from too great a distance; Edward Wedge believes that the nature of the cuts to the heads of Franks and Flinders, whose bodies were found near the stores, indicates infliction ‘with a particular type of long-handled hatchet’ that he gave to the natives earlier in the year ‘to conciliate them’; Michael Leonard says several shots were fired but to his knowledge no one was injured; William Windberry says that the party went after the blacks to retrieve the stolen property but he does not think any were killed.

  William Lonsdale receives the evidence and advises the colonial secretary that no harm has been inflicted on the Aboriginal people despite it being common knowledge in the colony tha
t at least twelve have been killed. The Wathaurong say over thirty-five but, of course, they are never invited to give evidence. No investigation is made of other attacks that follow the first punitive expedition.

  The court hears that the murderers of Franks and Flinders are Goulburn Aboriginals Dumdom and Callen. The Daugwurrung are the people of the Goulburn River, and this evidence places them in Wathaurong and Woiwurrung country, but given known clan movements of the time this is unlikely. But to the avengers, one group of Aborigines is much the same as any other.

  George Smith says it is impossible that Charles Franks could have provoked the murder because he ‘had a great aversion to the native blacks, and would not give them food, thinking it the best way to prevent them from frequenting the station’. He arrived for the first time only days before at a ‘station’ at the headwaters of the Barwon River, heartland of the Wathaurong and Woiwurrung people, a land they would defend with their lives.

  Mr Franks is ‘very mild and gentle in his general conduct, and I do not think he would molest anyone’, concludes his partner, Mr Smith, but Robert William von Stieglitz, in a letter to his brother, casts a different light on Franks’ gentle demeanour. Stieglitz went to Franks to buy lead, which all knew Franks had in great supply. Franks told Stieglitz that the lead was excellent for ‘making blue pills for the natives’. Some historians take the word ‘pill’ literally and assume it is a euphemism for the manufacture of strychnine to lace bullock carcasses in order to poison Aborigines, a common practice in the colony and further refined in Port Phillip. When challenged about this practice, it was a common defence to say that the poison had been for the crows. This was a popular jest in Port Phillip because at the time many referred to the blacks by the American euphemism ‘Jim Crow’. It’s more likely, however, that Franks was making his own shotgun balls.