by Bruce Pascoe
Am I irascible, Marlo? Ask your grandmother. Don’t ask if I am irascible, just ask what it means. Am I a bitter bigot? That’s what I ask myself, Marlo, because I can’t help watching these magnificent white administrators and their contempt for the people they are remunerated to serve.
The first white people came here in 1956, and that’s just sixty-five years before you were born. The lady missionary was aghast at their nakedness, and gave them each a piece of red cloth to keep them modest, and so they wore them as head and neck scarves. The man who skippered the boat to bring the news of God to these people later became famous because he could use a beer box as a drum. Talented man. So they made him governor. You know, it makes sense.
Marlo, of course there are good white people up here. The sewerage maintenance man married a Yolgnu woman and is sensitive to the culture; the visiting vet refuses to put down a dog without the consent of its owner. All the white people are going, ‘Kill the dogs, kill the dogs?’ The truth is, Marlo, there’s a shitload of dogs but the people are bringing their dogs to the vet to get spayed because they’ve learnt after five years to trust him and so in another five years, if the government can refrain from changing its mind, there won’t be as many dogs and they’ll be in better health.
Of course there are good white people. The lady in the women’s centre speaks to black women as if they’re her sisters, whereas a colleague, immensely qualified you know, can hardly keep her eyes or nostrils within range: ‘Zey don’t love zere dogs, zey are cruel, zey hurt zere little poppies.’ She’s French. Joan of Arc of dogs. Has four of her own. Gets me to load them all into the truck to get de-sexed. At Yolgnu expense. No greater love, Marlo, no greater love than a refined French woman.
And then there are the real Aussie whitefellas. In blue singlets and Akubras to prove it. The Australian flag tattooed on their dicks. Talk about tough. One of them runs over a Yolgnu dog and sends his missus up to tell us. The family who own the dog are stricken. Vet looks at the animal but it has massive wounds and would need plastic surgery, which we can’t do. ‘Waste of good money, anyway,’ says the killer’s girlfriend.
The family don’t want to lose their dog so it is given painkillers while they make up their mind. Next morning they know the dog can’t survive and I go around to pick it up. The skin has been ripped off from shoulder to toes and the abdomen is torn. It’s been flayed after being dragged along by the car, which didn’t stop immediately. Heroes don’t. You can see how the claws attach to the foot bones. Anatomically interesting. I take the dog, the vet gives it the green dream and I dump it in a hole and shovel red dirt onto its beautiful golden coat.
Next day the killer brings his own dog in for treatment. Kennel cough. Hard to believe because whites look after their dogs so well. Guess what kind of dog Akubra man has, Marlo? Upper reaches North Manchurian mastiff. Wouldn’t look out of place on a rugby field or at a mafia funeral. And he’s got three of them. You know, it makes sense. They’re a fashion statement. Match his nature.
There you are, Marlo, see how I did that, started finding white people to praise and ended with my keyboard awash with sarcasm. Of course that man loves his dogs. No one else has bigger or more ferocious dogs, even though they have one tiny flaw. They attack black people. Of course the French woman loves her dogs, Marlo, cuddles them, pets them, pampers them, but seems blind to the love her neighbour showers on her dogs and children.
Yesterday I went to the house next to the French woman and sedated a few dogs prior to spaying. ‘No more pups,’ the lady of the house declared. She was wearing a red sarong I knew she had screen-printed herself, and I can tell you, Marlo, man to baby boy, she looked a real picture.
Anyway, her daughter raced over and looked up at me and pointed to a mango tree and, there in the purple shade, all her pups were lined up in sleep, each with a tiara, earring or necklace. One had an earring attached to its navel like a body piercing. The little girl waited for my approval and I knelt and tickled their tummies and they squirmed, like only puppies can, and all the jewellery fell off and we all rolled about with laughter. Well, you had to, it was the funniest thing.
When that little girl showed me her dog art, it was such a relief to have the tension fall away. Irascible bigots tense up, Marlo, their shoulders tighten like steel hawsers straining to hold the boats of asylum-seekers to a penitentiary wharf. Ask your father to analyse that last sentence, he’ll notice that if irascible bigots insist on getting political at the drop of a sarcasm then they deserve tense shoulders. Anyway, puppies with bling is the cure.
Your mother would be repulsed by much that she would see here. Well, she’s a nurse, and a good one. But there’s rubbish everywhere up here, Marlo. Plastic bags, bent saucepans, broken toys, chip packets and soft-drink cans. No beer cans, not one. Dry community, Marlo. Imagine how I suffered. But the rubbish is unbelievable. I don’t understand it, Marlo. I can’t bear to pass a cigarette butt or bread tag in my own town, and here the crap is everywhere. It’s raked up into piles every so often and burnt, but can you imagine what that smells like? If I go to a campsite and someone’s burnt plastic in the firepit I go apoplectic. (Apoplectic, not epileptic. Your great-grandmother was epileptic. I’d never go epileptic over a bit of burnt rubbish.)
I don’t understand rubbish, Marlo, but then I don’t understand how a cardboard-box magnate who cheats 25 million people can be given $35 million as a reward. I don’t understand it, Marlo, but I know which is morally repugnant.
I can understand all the cast-off clothes at the beach, snagged in the mangroves, rolled in coils on the tideline. This mob here believe you should cleanse the spirit of the dead by washing their possessions in the sea and never touch them again. So the shirt, the pants, the mattress all get a good salty washing. I understand that, Marlo, but is it a good look?
Now, little mate, I can feel myself getting close to the guts of it. Today at Ankabadbirra we came to an outstation beside a river and a magpie goose swamp. Do you know that the Yolgnu word for magpie goose is exactly the same as the Wathaurong word, in Victoria? Exactly. Of course, there’s no magpie geese left in Victoria because the first thing the ‘settlers’ did was to drain the swamps and shoot any birds stupid enough to stay around. Bitterness, Marlo, bitterness; you can see that I keep sliding back into its seductive embrace. And ‘foot’ is the same as in Wathaurong, too. Almost all over Australia the word for foot is something like jinnang. That’s interesting, don’t you think?
Anyway, we turn up at this outstation and all the dogs howl. It’s remote out here and the dogs are the intercontinental missile defence shield. ‘Balanda, balanda,’ all the forty dogs bark. Three families, but forty dogs. It’s still only a dog each, I suppose.
An old man emerges from beneath a frangipani and motions for us to set up under a mango tree’s shade. Polite, calm, but not delirious to see balanda in his camp. Even if it’s to treat sick or explosively fertile dogs.
There’re plastic drink bottles and crap everywhere but most is raked in heaps awaiting the carcinogenic fire. Yet what you notice, as soon as you switch off the Toyota’s diesel, is the silence. Well, it’s not really silence because there’s always a dog muttering over a bone or a computer memory stick: ‘I’ll eat your memory, I’ll eat your memory.’ Funny things, dogs.
But there’s an incredible, overpowering peace here. My first instinct is to sit down and close my eyes, but that would have been a mistake because then two breathtakingly beautiful women walk out of a house and smile. I reel back at the scorch of absolute beauty – and I’m saying this, Marlo, because you’re a man and it’s my job to teach you about such things. All the women in Maningrida move with a grace that soothes your soul.
And these women walk towards us as if floating on air, wearing sarongs of such fine material and such warm colouring that their bodies are impossible to ignore despite the fact that they are as discreetly and modestly draped as devout Muslims. But you can’t mask beauty and grace, Marlo, and my heart falls l
ike a leaf circling in drift to the sand beneath the mango tree. Oh, the beauty of those smiles, the captivation of their languorous ease. Oh, mango sirens, how you gladden the heart.
Tell Grandma to stop huffing, Marlo. My job in the world is to observe beauty and honour it. It’s a serious occupation. This attraction is what makes the world go around and creates little Marlos. How to notice the world’s beauty and still honour Grandma, that’s the trick, Marlo. And she’s not really your grandma, but there’re no grandchildren of her own yet so you’ll have to do.
Where were we? Ah, yes, the magical mango tree, surrounded by broken toys, canine computer engineers and impossibly beautiful women. And art. This is an artist’s community and would make Ubud look like a day in Altona. I’ve been to Ubud and was terrified by the number of people and the stench of sewer drains and piles of garbage in the street. But Ubud is the pinnacle, I was told, the ultimate Shangri-la of art, the oasis of the creative impulse. I was so alarmed I had to catch a bus and sit by a remote beach in the north of Bali. Ubud: artists’ colony my eye.
I’ve got to catch the dogs so they can be sedated prior to surgery, so I follow a gorgeous woman in a sarong as she sings to the dogs in a treble so light that I faint and the dogs melt. ‘Ice-cream, Chocolate, Battery,’ she calls, and the dogs simper to her feet. What’s the odd among the dogs’ names? Yes, old Battery. How did he miss out in the sweetness stakes? Not because he’s a mad charging animal, he’s as friendly and docile as any male is sure to become in this vicinity. But somehow he got called Battery, and everyone laughs when they say his name. The dog has developed a complex. Though he hides it well.
When all the dogs are recovering, I bring them to the rear of the house where there’s a Rupert Bunny idyll. The old Rupert didn’t work plastic bread bags and cordial bottles into his paintings: how could he, they weren’t invented then. In those days we used things we could reuse, like glass and … don’t get me started on the modern world, Marlo, or we’ll never get this story finished.
So I bring old Ice-cream back and they examine her stitches and the woman croons, ‘Oh, Ice-cream, Ice-cream, you poor little dog.’ What about me, I think, I had a tooth out once, don’t I get a bit of a croon? Stop it, Grandpa, you’re obsessed. Who said that? Was it you, Marlo, or your mother? Look, there’s nothing wrong with loving women, as long as you keep it tidy. And you examine my life, and you’ll note the extraordinary discretion and restraint I’ve shown! I’ve never been unfaithful. As long as you don’t count the celebration of beauty as being unfaithful. Men can look, Marlo, but your grandma says it depends on how you look. I’d learn that look if I were you, my boy.
Anyway, back to Rupert Bunny. He’s painted the deep green shade of the mango tree and the whole family reclined in it, enjoying the breeze. One woman feeds her baby while combing her older daughter’s hair. The man of the family, who makes a point of rarely meeting my eye, has a tiny baby in his lap and occasionally picks up one of its hands and kisses the fingers. He’s separating grass fibres that have come out of the dyeing tub. He lays bundles of them carefully on an old blue tarp and then kisses his baby’s fingers or foot. He wears a pair of electric blue shorts with plenty of electricity in them still, and in this company I can understand that.
The beautiful woman, the really beautiful one, is making an intricate table mat with a gradation of coloured grasses so fine you have to look twice to see that the colour is not uniform. Or three times if you want to sneak a look at her hands. Her old uncle sits alone at the edge of the shade, on a car seat from a Hillman Minx if I’m not very much mistaken. He’s turned away from Rupert Bunny’s other subjects. Probably irascible. He’s making a six-foot-long crocodile out of charred strands of nobbly bark. The section he’s putting together looks like charred strands of nobbly bark but the part he’s finished looks like a bloody crocodile. Which reminds me to apologise to you for biting your arm on the day you were born and all the subsequent days and going, ‘Look out, Marlo, a crocodile’s gunna get you.’ Have you developed a fear of northern salty streams, Marlo? I’m sorry, it looked like fun at the time. And you were always kind enough to laugh.
One baby has been asleep on the concrete for the whole time we’ve been here, but a dog sometimes checks to see if it’s okay by licking its bum crack. ‘Cyclone,’ the woman warns. Poor old Cyclone, get blamed if the cat had kittens. One baby crawls away on an adventure and finds an old sauce bottle. ‘Lily, Lily,’ she croons to the child, who looks up at her mother with a face like a sunrise. As you would.
They all speak in Yolgnu and I recognise one word in fifty, but a voice is never raised except at Blackie, a dog that refuses to take its medicine. Even so, the call of ‘Blackie, Blackie, Blackie, pup, pup’ sounds to me like the sweet breath of angels.
During the course of the day I collect and return four dogs and always find an excuse to sit down and tickle a dog or remove a compact disc from a baby’s mouth. Ah, Rupert, I think, paradise with bread bags and dirty mattresses. Although Rupert never painted black people. Maybe they never looked good in muslin. What do you think?
Everything is on the ground so everything becomes the colour of the ground. You see babies asleep with dogs on mattresses strewn with clothes and footy boots. And yet the babies are clean. The children’s faces shine. No snotty noses here. Their clothes are bright and fresh. Who does the laundry? Where do they do the laundry?
Three girls sneak up to the operating table to watch the intestines being drawn out, edited and returned. They murmur and sigh, but only in sympathy with their dog. There’s no shrieking or covering their faces. They’ve seen their uncle paint the intestines of animals a thousand times. They know where the bits are and what they do.
‘This is the baby bag,’ the vet says as he snips the sack. They murmur, ‘Oh, Sheba.’ No longer Queen. But they’re neither dismayed nor shocked. The older girl shows her sister where the organ is located in her own body. They speak in language so I don’t understand, but you only need to watch their faces to follow the conversation.
As the older girl explains the procedure, the sister looks up and her face is a beautiful sun. Well, we know where she gets that from. Her hair flies away in cool auburn flames and she is unbelievably, classically gorgeous.
The older girl’s face is a study. She has heavier features, more like her father, almost sombre until she smiles and then you see an old-fashioned, austere beauty. Her skin is blue-black and it is the blue that shines when she smiles. Bewitching.
When we were young, my sister and I bought a painting for my mother of an Islander woman whose cheekbones shone green. The height of sophistication, it was at the time. My sister said it was art. This blue-black sister wears a spotlessly clean Footscray footy jumper. The middle sister, a vivid shirt dyed in the same tub as the grasses, if I’m not wrong. A rich, warm umber. Stunning against her skin.
There’s a younger girl, who is just a ratbag, and she skips away after a dog with that hoppity-go-kick joy of the untroubled child; the feet dance and you wonder what would happen if some genius got 300 Yolgnu kids together and taught them gymnastics and hurdles. Gold medals would fall like fruit from the trees. Beats pampering drug cheats and bar-room brawlers.
Alright, Marlo, I will apologise to the vast majority of Australia’s hard-working Olympic athletes. Of course, their skill and honesty should be defended at every opportunity. But there is a black disc among the Olympic rings, isn’t there? I’m hoping my country can leapfrog hatred. Javelin prejudice. Gold, gold, gold for Australia in the tolerance marathon over innumerable hurdles.
Is it the strangeness or the difference white Australians find most unsettling, or the effort required to tell one from the other? Difference is black compared to white, clothing style compared to clothing style, four people in a house compared to twenty. Strangeness is that most Australians wouldn’t be able to point to Maningrida on a map or say what language they speak there, even though it’s in their own country. Difference is superficial but
strangeness is deep inside the brain.
That’s all, Marlo: I just want you to be a good Australian. It is what I hope for myself. Despite my irascibility.
RENE OF RAINBIRD CREEK
Right bower. On top of the left. And the ace. Good hand. Winning. What a nuisance.
She sighed and hoped someone would go no trumps or misère. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to win – just not tonight. She was a bit nervy again. Didn’t want to attract attention, even good-natured congratulations.
She loved card night, but sometimes she needed to hide a bit. Lie low. Like tonight. She knew by the breathiness at the base of her throat, the flutter. Let me just sit here and listen to the talk, the scandalous stories, the retelling of impossible bedroom dramas, the breakfast barneys.
And then she got the queen and the ten. Blimey.
The cards were flipped, the tricks fell, Roma finished a story about what he said and what she said: ‘… big time, and then he goes, Oh well, that’s it then, and she goes, Yeah, and he goes, Right then, and … Jesus, Rene, you had every trick. You lose points for that, calling six hearts and then winning the lot. Aren’t you concentrating or something?’
Rene scratched at the edge of her beer coaster, and mercifully Kerry asked, ‘So what’d she do then?’
‘Nothin’,’ said Roma, ‘he just left, packed everything in the ute and left. Jesus. Yeah. She’s better off. Yeah. You wouldn’t think so, bawling her eyes out she is.’
‘Is she?’
‘Yeah, desolate she says … wouldn’t come to cards or nothin’.’
‘Jesus.’
