Albert’s desk seemed littered with stuff – electricity bills, water rates, books on birds and beekeeping, childhood encyclopedias, pamphlets from the national grain board, notices from the local grain stores, charts for aerial spraying, Bibles, dictionaries. But there was an order to the chaos – Post-it notes were on everything, appearing to be illegible scribbles though they were his own careful script, all in her poppy’s handwriting. One read S116 of the constitution – consent to destroy and was underlined several times – yet it sat beside a pile of books with no indication which one was relevant. August felt suddenly dizzy and placed her palms on the glass top and rolled her neck. The desk shifted easily with her slight weight. She inspected the other furniture more closely: the lightweight single bunk, the chipboard closet, and thought of downstairs too; the furniture could all be moved with a small heave, nothing was rooted to the floor in this Packawayable Forgettable House.
‘Cuppa!’
The mug of coffee sat alone. The Aunties were out on the deck and Elsie was awake and with them. August took a plastic kitchen chair out to join the women.
‘Feeling better, Nana?’ she asked as she approached.
Elsie hummed and lip-smiled and nodded all at once.
‘So what’ve you been up to in sunny England?’ Aunt Mary smirked, sitting her coffee cup beside her.
‘Washing dishes, mostly.’
‘Is it ever sunny there?’ Aunt Missy asked, as she swatted a locust from the side of her head.
August looked into her coffee cup and shook her head. She reasoned that of course the sun shone there, but it had felt like a long winter. Each year she’d lived in England the locals had talked about the arrival of winter as if it were a baffling thing, though she had always been ready for the relief of cold, as if her entire life she’d willed that frost on the rooftop. August honestly didn’t remember the sun in England; instead she remembered the things she couldn’t place in Massacre, those low clouds from the late morning until the early evening. The trees turning bare, ice on the windows. The narrow lanes, the stone buildings and fancy old things that they didn’t have back home.
‘Joey will be here Saturday,’ Aunt Missy said, folding August into the familiar while looking down at her phone.
‘How is he?’ she asked.
‘Deadly, aye.’ Aunt Missy shifted her chair to sit closer to August while Aunt Mary descended the steps to the vegetable garden. Aunt Missy propped her phone out between them. ‘He made an app, had this idea in juvie. They let him study computers and stuff. True god.’ She flicked her fingers gracefully on the screen, trying to find what August’s cousin had made. ‘It’s so good, it’s called Get ’Em. It’s this game where you fight the colonisers – you can pick your weapons and which country you want to fight for and everything.’ August looked alongside into her aunt’s hand as colours blipped from the screen and the phone became a smooth stone in her palm. ‘Fuck – battery’s dead,’ she said, dumping the phone into the mouth of her handbag, staring out away from the house. Then Aunt Missy let out a big sigh as if, August thought, suddenly her body remembered to breathe. ‘Dad had a good life,’ Aunt Missy added to the breath as she crossed her arms and patted the tops of her elbows, ‘And a hard life, too.’
Aunt Mary was pulling up the slender stems of the potato bed at the edge of the garden. August imagined Jedda, believed for a moment she saw her and herself in the same spot with her bare eyes, they were burying chook eggs in the garden in order to grow eggplants, the way they had before their childhood seemed rigged. And then poof! She and Jedda disappeared.
Her aunt called out to the three of them on the verandah with her head and shoulders dipping in the work, ‘This all needs to go, Els. Get it all out and into crates before—’
‘Before what?’ August interrupted, surprising herself.
Aunt Mary tossed a stem onto the dirt behind her and straightened her back, hands eased on her hips. ‘Before the move, darl,’ she said.
‘So it’s official – Nana has to leave the house?’
‘Yep.’
‘I don’t understand why. It’s because of the mining company, right? But just out in the field, isn’t it?’ August threw a single nod to where Eddie had pointed.
‘You know what they’re mining, Aug?’ Aunt Mary’s eyes were wide and her chin drawn to her chest like she had a story for her. ‘T-I-N – tin. You know what that looks like?’ She was laughing, shaking her head, ‘This whole thing …’ she stretched her arms out beside her, fingers spread wide, and then turned on the spot, shuffling her feet in a circle, ‘is gone.’
‘How big?’
‘Two kilometres.’
‘They can’t.’
‘They can.’
‘Southerly?’
‘Gone.’
‘They own the land?’
‘Nup.’
‘Why?’
‘Crown lease, ninety-nine years.’
‘When?’
‘When Eddie’s granddaddy got back from the war, I think.’
‘What war?’
‘First one.’
‘What about the wheat?’
‘How much you think they make a tonne?’
‘Don’t know.’
‘Diddly squat.’
‘What’s a tin mine look like?’
‘Big hole.’
‘Is it bad?’
‘’Member Wizard of Oz?’
‘Yeah.’
‘’Member Tin Man?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Well there’s a reason he doesn’t have a heart, darl.’
‘What’s that mean?’
‘That tin don’t love anyone or anything back.’
August took a sip of coffee and looked at Elsie listening to them. August felt that her nana was young and old at once, but masking that, that she was full to the brim with the type of sad that makes the face look otherworldly, as if returned from the River Styx. Elsie looked at August square, choked for a moment and put her hand to her mouth, blinking with the drought in her eyes. Successfully swallowing back tears. Aunt Missy rested her hand on her mother’s lap and winked at August, ‘Let’s see if they can get us to leave first.’ She flashed a cheeky grin just for her niece.
‘Do you know where you’ll go, Nana?’ August asked.
‘Not yet, honey.’
August felt for words, but they all seemed clumsy. August wanted to take her nana’s hand in her own and kiss it, tell her that she wouldn’t let her lose the house, that she could make everything better. But that wasn’t true. August couldn’t say anything of consequence, she knew she hadn’t paid her dues; hadn’t lived through the house buckling in the years, or been in the streets where she’d double-take, swore she could have spotted Jedda, or stayed in a town where she second-guessed even a smile. August hadn’t given the time of day to the sorrow they’d meant to be united by. She could taste the guilt then, it came from her throat, thick and wet and as black and dirty as diesel, welling up around the tongue. She looked around for the smell and the taste, but there wasn’t an engine turning in sight.
‘I need a toothbrush and stuff.’ She stood and gripped the back of the chair. ‘Do you want anything from town?’
‘No thanks, Augie,’ Elsie said, as August lifted the chair, and with her free arm lightly held Aunt Missy and waved to Aunt Mary. ‘See you on Saturday,’ she said, and her aunts yes darl’d in unison and let her leave, each bending into the dirt and the handbag as she turned.
TWELVE
Reverend Ferdinand Greenleaf ’s letter to Dr George Cross,
2nd August 1915, continued
II
I was once a simple clergyman and almost thirty-five years ago, in 1880, I opened Prosperous Lutheran Mission for the Native inhabitants of that particular cattle town, and its surrounds.
Officially our Mission will now come under the authority of the Aborigines Protection Board where I believe it will be run as a Station, and no doubt run in order that the child of Go
d become useful and where the teachings of the Bible, Mathematics and English instruction might be put aside for other economic practicalities, as is the case at Stations and Reserves I know of in the district. On learning of the impending change I might have left the Mission then, having done little to unburden the Natives for whom I have come to care deeply. I might have returned to a small cottage and lived the rest of my days on an acre of peace, though with scant peace of mind. Alas, it seems the past is not dead and I am being made to suffer for this war that Britain has declared against the place of my birth – a situation I had no say in. Yet it is not my fellow countrymen of German and Prussian descent that suffer this war at a distance the most. It is, as I will detail in this letter, the Natives – mere children! – who have been forced into servitude because the Government wishes them to fill the gulf in the industrial labour force. I challenge you to scrutinise what I will detail on these pages and not agree.
As I mentioned previously, my family arrived on The Skjold from Sachsen, Prussia in October 1841. My Father was to join the vinedressers with his abundant knowledge of tilling the earth and producing table wine. My mother, in the role of homemaker and with the backbone of an immigrant, another set of working hands. We rode on the bullock wagon on that first journey through the inland to the south, my mother and father leading me towards our destiny. On that voyage I saw vividly – through young eyes perhaps – the Natives in a state of nature among the verdure and plenty of the land. It made a quaint impression on my mind. When we finally reached our new home there was already an established community of good people who spoke our language. The townspeople were made up of those who had escaped religious persecution from Prussia and Germany and were willing, and able, to begin new lives in this great country, a country that promised opportunity and safety to the dispossessed.
In our new homeland we were assigned fifty acres and Father worked the land of the rocks, cut the trees and dug up the stumps until the ground was flat and workable. Having no dray, his work was laborious, and yet he was full of faith that our small family would increase, and that this country would be his beloved and final home. Mother conducted her own business in town on Wednesday afternoons, when the wives brought their homemade butter, cheese and honeycomb to sell. In that way the week was measured twice by nourishment, from Sunday morning mass until the produce market, and I, I was preoccupied always by my study of the Bible.
We settled very amicably into the town’s life. My early years consisted of learning English at school and speaking it at home with my parents; only on special occasions, with vinedressers and their families gathering for particular meals or prayer, did we employ the language of my homeland, or ever discuss the politics of a place that all agreed remained in the past. Perhaps fifteen good families were known to my own. All were very fluent in the English language, and their interests at all times were to be enfranchised in the fine country where we’d settled – where we had pledged beneath Britain’s flag – and with full hearts, the laws under Queen Victoria. As a further show of respect, my parents soon made the arrangements to anglicise our name – our passage had been inscribed on the ship’s logbooks as we had been known: Grünblatt, and on the 1st day of June 1844, we had officially and henceforth sworn ourselves as the Greenleaf family. I say all of this particular information because it is the truth, and because one must be reminded of this given the circumstances we are now facing.
By the time I had grown and was ready to pay heed to the Word and face the world beyond, I had become a religious man. Owing to the vastness of Australia, and as with most young apprentices of God, I had been travelling from Station to Station in the wilds of the interior. Myself alone covering great distances of thousands of miles, scattering the incorruptible seed of the Word amongst the white settlers, when, unexpectedly, I came into contact with the Blacks of Massacre Plains. There I found them in a condition most shocking to behold. I visited their camps and entered their wretched bark and bough gunyahs where they slept in cramped and vulgar conditions. I went from place to place, a spread of shambles a mile deep and wide, and each time I met with the same wretchedness and woe. In some instances, on making a first visit to a camp, the children ran away from me, terrified at my presence, whilst their mothers – some of them, alas! only children themselves – cowered in their little dens like so many wild beasts, doubtless afraid of my ghostliness. Such helplessness, such woe, caused by Christian White men! Yet this situation, I soon learned from good authority and from personal observation, was but an index to a ponderous volume of inequity existing throughout the interior. I believe it was then, having seen those depths of desperate subsistence, that I felt sincerely compelled to help the Aborigine of the camps. I was as sure of this as I had been of the Holy Spirit, my calling guided there by St Jude himself.
The camps I speak of were run along the outskirts of the town, where nothing, I suspect, in the shape of a township, could have been more unprepossessing to a stranger than the province of Massacre Plains. The town of low biding hills covered in gray volcanic boulders, sparse of vegetation except for the great white trees that appeared muscular from the hundreds of miles surrounding, marked purely for pastoral endeavours. In drawing comparison from the wet southern Colony it had given me the impression of sheer and onerous squatting country. What great difference I had witnessed from the bustling towns of the south; there hills and mountains were lush and many, and a crop took to the sun and frequent rain with the knowledge there would be continued good weather. Yet in Massacre Plains only a small number of houses had been established; two hotels and three stores, each bathed in the dry heat and endless clear skies. On strong recommendation I made my way to the most aristocratic of the two hotels, where a room had been engaged for me by the resident police sergeant, which was all that could be desired in being clean and comfortable.
I subsequently reported myself to the indisposed Bishop of the Uniting Church, whom I soon judged to be a gentleman in the true sense of the word. My first duty was one connected with my functions as a clergyman when I was called away to visit a dying lad. After which, with a Native police guide, I rode two and a half miles down the Murrumby River to a Station where I was engaged to hold service. On returning to my accommodation I told the lady of the house what I had heard and what I had seen earlier in the day. She replied, ‘Reverend Greenleaf, I have often thought what a sin it must be for Christian ministers to pass through these parts and never to speak a word to the poor Blacks. I can assure you that of all the clergymen who have called here, you are the first who seems to care anything about them. If some earnest and kind-hearted minister would only take the matter up, something might be done to induce the Government to take steps to alleviate their condition.’
A long conversation followed, in which this lady, a resident of Massacre Plains for twenty years, drew a picture most sad to contemplate. The conversation sent me to my room filled to overflowing with the wants and woes of these unhappy people.
I threw myself upon my knees, and wept before God, and said: ‘O Lord, show me Thy way, teach me Thy path, tell me what to do for these perishing Aborigines.’ The answer did not come freely, though I knew that if I followed the right and just path I would be instructed. I rose from my knees calmly resigned to the Divine will; but not even then for a moment thinking it was my duty to become a Missionary. If I had known then what great burden would befall me, would later exhaust me, then I think I wouldn’t have rested on my knees that night at all. If I had known the dark deeds, and if I had heeded the words of the apostle John when he said: ‘Men love darkness rather than light because their deeds are evil.’ And if I had realised that in the vertical sun of the interior, in all its dazzling light, that none shone from the Great Sun of Righteousness; instead, hidden within the blinding light were beliefs opposed to the principles of justice. Rife here are the darkest deeds ever performed by man upon his fellow man, which makes countless thousands mourn. That vile inhumanity practised by the white-skinned Christ
ian on his dark-skinned brother in order to obtain land and residence, for ‘peaceful acquisition’ – that includes capture, chains, long marches, whipping, death on the roadside, or, if surviving all these – the far more terrible fate – being sold like brutes of the field as unpaid labour to the highest bidder.
How could it be that Australia, professedly the new home of liberty and light, had become a theatre of oppression and cruelty? A land not only blessed by the Great God, with cloudless skies, and widespread prosperity and happiness to those who have been privileged to make it their own. And moreover a land that professes to reflect the noble institutions of Great Britain, those Godly and philanthropic fabrics, which are not only England’s glory and boast but the envy of all the world beside – is shrouded in dark deeds? That a land so circumstanced and blessed by Divine Providence, had become the nursing mother of injustice. That deeds of infamy should be encouraged. What I have seen constitutes the foulest blot to rest upon the emblem of Australia’s fame. If I had known I would not have knelt that evening. I would not have called out, O Lord!
THIRTEEN
scattered all about in confusion – dandan The ancestors never come when the whirly-whirly is about. The whirly-whirly is called the dust devil by some people because it scatters everything about in confusion. We call them dandan – they are bad spirits, tunnelling across the whole world, throwing up coal dust, sand, dirt, water and snow. I saw them on two occasions during my life. The first time was as a boy, when we took the train to the big city to perform in the sesquicentenary Flower Show for all the gathering crowds. Our performance was called ‘The Development of Australia’ and I was playing Half-Caste Boy Number Two and the other boys played the characters of Full-Blood Boy One, Two, Quadroon Boy One, Two, Octoroon Boy One, Two, and the big boys played Priest and Schoolmaster, one boy played Governor too. We had to act like gentry, the octoroon boys the most, the full-blood boys not at all. We ended up winning second prize. First prize went to the re-enactment of the landing of the Endeavour ship. At the end of the day a big whirly-whirly came through the back of the stage and the Koori actors had to be pushed up there by their guardians, that’s how scared they all looked. Even the adults. I asked Tommy – Octoroon Boy Number One – why everyone was scared and he didn’t have a clue, so I made certain to ask next time I visited my ancestors. They told me, ‘That’s a bad spirit, and if you get close to him he’ll catch you. Never come and see us if you ever see the whirly-whirly man is around and making dandan.’ I didn’t see another whirly-whirly for years. Yet I felt all that confusion all my life. I think we all have. Many years later the dandan arrived at Prosperous and stayed a long, long time, and after that I didn’t time-travel again.
The Yield Page 6
