The Yield

by Tara June Winch

  When Jedda first disappeared August used to daydream about all the ways she herself would end up dying in Massacre Plains, a recital played in her head: Hang myself, choke on diesel fumes, drown in the manure pumps, suffocate in the hay bales, sink into the wheat seeds, get sucked into a thresher, tumble down an abandoned well, fall in a mining shaft, a horse hoof to the head, trampled by a cow, crushed by a tractor without a roller bar, crushed by a tractor with a roller bar, a grain bin without a harness, an aerial sprayer falling from the sky, killer water disease, killer viral disease, dying of thirst, dying of infection, a gun to the heart, a gun to the head, drowning in the dam, burnt in a wildfire, snapped by a venomous snake, swallowing poisonous berries, deadly spider bites, a swarm of wasps, a murder of crows, buried in a silo.

  Years after Jedda was gone August had read about pilot whales in the newspaper. She’d read how if one of those mammals were sick, and beached itself, then the rest of the family would do the same thing. That the pod couldn’t exist with one of their own gone, and so they went too. It was natural, August thought a long time too late, that it was normal to want to go as well. That in the face of loss, only losing oneself seems like an answer. August was about to unlatch the main door of the second silo when Eddie pulled up on a 50cc dirt bike beside her. His arrival brought her back to the living.

  ‘Girl’s bike?’

  ‘Yep,’ he said, and revved it weakly. ‘You want a double?’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Just a turn.’

  August climbed on. They drove right out to the end of the crop – five hundred acres distant. They swerved through hardened tractor-tyre marks in the once-muddy groves. She watched their shadows as they passed the dam. They were separate, two bodies. They looped past the farthest fence, down past the sheep sheds. Near the river flocks of cockatoo screeched and beat their wings and flew for cover in the gums. Eddie stopped the bike at the stables. ‘Where’s Mister Ed?’ August asked, but knew the answer. No-one had mentioned him since she’d arrived. ‘He was old’ was all Eddie said. The girls had begged Eddie’s mum to name the white horse Mister Ed, after the old TV-show horse that could talk. She relented to the two barefoot girls who saw him arrive by trailer and ran along up to the stables to see. He’d been dusty white, he’d smelt of dry grass, of turned earth.

  August drove the dirt bike on the way back, proud she remembered how to do the thing she’d almost forgotten. Eddie wrapped his arms around her, leant into her back. She felt exhilarated, alive, rushing through daylight. She looked to the side again at their shadows – together they looked like a sphinx.

  She pulled up at the driveway, her hands slick with sweat. She dismounted the bike and held one handlebar until Eddie took the weight.

  August stood with her hands on her hips. ‘Remember how summer used to be the beginning of everything, how the world got so much bigger every year at the same time, that there was no end and beginning and we forgot we even had to return to school?’

  ‘Sort of,’ he said, and rolled his eyes.

  August heard the collective bleats from the sheep shed.

  ‘What are you doing with the rams and the ewes?’

  ‘Stock and station agent will be out tomorrow. They’re off to auction.’

  August scrunched her face, ‘Hope they don’t have to go too far?’

  Before Eddie could answer they both turned to the sound from the driveway and watched the car pull into Prosperous.

  ‘Leave you to it,’ Eddie said, and waved to the car and pushed the motorbike away.

  August approached the driveway and stopped under a mallee, reached her hands to the branch above her head, let her body drop. She swung gently from the tree watching her nana exit the car carrying a flat cardboard box. August hung there and looked above the peppermint-tree arch to Kengal, she could make out a few silhouettes. She closed her eyes, imagining strange Mandy leaning into her face, kissing the lids of each of her eyes that she thought were beautiful.

  ‘You look just like you did as a little girl,’ Nana called out warmly.

  ‘I feel like a little girl.’ August smiled and released herself from the branch and padded towards the car to help. ‘Where’ve you been?’

  ‘Looking at old-lady homes.’

  ‘I thought you were staying with Aunty?’ August looked to Aunt Mary climbing out of the driver’s seat, and back to Nana.

  ‘I’d have a cot in the sunroom and no privacy. I love you,’ she turned and touched Aunty on the arm, ‘but no thank you.’

  ‘Are they paying?’ August nodded towards the Rinepalm trucks in the field.

  ‘No, I won’t get a cent. We’ve saved next to nothing over the years. Enough of this talk – it bores me, August. Go back to your tree.’ She chuckled to herself a little then and they carried the box inside. August followed. She badly wanted to listen to Jedda and her tapes to Princess Diana. ‘Have you seen the old tape player, Nan?’

  ‘Albert was using it for his book. Don’t know, darling.’

  ‘Okey-dokey. I’m starting to feel like the book has just disappeared from the face of the earth.’ She swung her arms from behind her to in front of her. She wasn’t bored, exactly, but moving her arms like that, she felt like a teenager, like she was part of a home again, standing there with her family, doing nothing in particular. Nana and Aunt Mary ignored her, instead they began sorting dishes of food from the chest freezer. August looked through the sliding glass door to the dam.

  The brolga was back. Burral-gang, she whispered, and went outside. Spike followed her and they crouched together under the banksias in the setting sun. August watched Jedda dance again. She looked back to the house. Her nana stood in the doorway braced against the frame, smiling and wide-eyed at August.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Reverend Ferdinand Greenleaf ’s letter to Dr George Cross,

  2nd August 1915, continued

  VII

  The family of Wowhely bequeathed his fishing spear to me. It was a sight to behold, notched and smoothed, the entire length in Yarrany tree wood and six darts protruding at the end – its workmanship was evident. It was grander than mahogany furniture, in that its veneration began before the tree was even cut. Fearful of it being stolen and burnt by the White men returning and razing my hut in my sleep, which they might have done with ease, I sent it with Baumann on his next visit to the city to deliver up to the museum, which I know he would have dutifully done.

  Throughout the past decades, bullets and spears had travelled between the Natives and the Whites. The old gunyahs were razed. Other camps of free Blacks were also razed and word reached us that in other parts, the west of the land, blood ran even thicker. Many events occurred, and in each incident, those men responsible for causing us such distress were never brought to justice; understandably, there was retaliation, much to the detriment of my nerves.

  I myself lost my naivety a long time ago. I have witnessed the cruellest acts that man can inflict upon his fellow man with clear vision and sound mind. It seemed every White man was cut from the same cloth, born disgruntled by the Natives. During the trips I made for service and enquiry, I continued to come face to face with brutality. Sometimes I passed the thin remains of my fellow man, cracked and discarded like the mussel shells I’d seen by the riverbank. In 1891 for instance, I saw two Native boys running along a track twenty miles from our residence, both boys’ bodies were sheened with fear. I stopped them and asked them to explain themselves. The two boys explained in English that they had been in the employ of a local Station master, the eldest being fourteen, and both had run away after being flogged. The eldest boy turned to have me see his back. An inch-deep slice was evident, blood congealed and the white of inner skin wept as if it were fresh. I dismounted the horse and as we were conversing, the Station owner in question arrived on the stallion, he didn’t regard my presence, even when I demanded he address me, but instead drove the boys back with the stockwhip those twenty miles. I regret not taking pursuit, as I learned
that the elder boy was later lashed to a fence in a crucifixion pose and then flogged until he fainted. The second boy was treated in the same manner, and after one lash wore out, the settler began to attach another when the boy, in his agony, screamed out, ‘Oh, master, if you want to kill me cut my throat, but don’t cut me to pieces.’ The brute, unmoved, continued flogging until the second lash had worn out. News of this horrible deed reached our town and the inhumane monster was brought in. He admitted to flogging the first as much as he had the second boy because ‘they could bear it’, adding that he had ‘lost his temper’. The magistrate inflicted a fine of £5 for flogging the younger boy and £1 for the one who could bear it.

  Around the same time of the year, with my own eyes, I’d happened upon a Native woman owning to another settler being debauched, violated viciously, out in the open upon the ground seventy miles north. I was ordered away by firearm by a fellow brute keeping watch, no doubt intent on having his turn. I needn’t tell anymore; it is all a horror. I reported the incident to His Excellency the Governor, but nothing came before the Courts.

  The few cases I came to hear of that were brought before magistrates I made an effort to attend in the viewing stalls. All cases of this nature were indulged in by the judges turning their heads or at most imposing the cost of a paltry fine. In Australia where so much is said to overseas officials, written in the bulletins of the humane treatment of our Aborigines, the conduct of the settler and local magistrate are not enquired into. It demands strict enquiry, it has for so many years, yet I had and remain resigned to a ceaseless state of bewilderment, anger and fear. I do hope someone of influence, as yourself, dear Dr Cross, might read these words and be willing, surely abler than myself, to do something?

  I will continue …

  By 1892 we had incurred a great interest from the Aborigines Protection Board once more in our activities at the Mission. They once again sent out observers and once again we made provisions to welcome them, our hopes desperately pinned on securing a regular income. What great surprise then greeted us that the Board was interested in the wonderful craftsmanship of our residents. A contract was delivered by hand from America, a request for items to display at the World’s Fair, a celebration of Columbus and his great social achievement for humanity, to be staged the following year. All colonies of the world were participating, and they’d made direct interest in exhibiting the Aborigine. The Colonial Secretary refused to have a Native leave for Chicago, but they wanted evidence of the progress of Darwin and someone to present the evolution of our Aborigine. This story you know firsthand, Dr Cross.

  My passage would be paid and I was to be engaged at £90 per annum for the duration of the Mission activities and my part in it. There was no question in not accepting such a firm commitment to our cause, and so with great enthusiasm, we set about instructing the residents on how to make the display pieces. Captain Everill sought to procure illustrations by the Native children and self-portraits of the Aboriginal race of the Colony, statistics connected with the initiatives of the Protection Board, together with any collections of weapons of war. Dr Cross, you requested all available information connected with the physical development of the Aborigines from the leading districts of the Colony. In the letter it stated the need for ‘plaster casts of the skull of three Aborigines’. On my writing back to ask on what grounds, you responded it was ‘for collections of ethnology’ and expanded to make clear the casts were to be used to ‘prove cognitive development of savages’. You must remember I made clear in my reply that I would only have my residents participate in the submission of crafts and weaponry, and not the scientific details you were after. It was gracious of you to relent in the end.

  Within two months we had thirty fine pieces of cross-stitching, lace and needlework patches with Psalms and domestic invocations, each measuring a square foot. Mary stitched one of the finest that was trimmed with neat yellow rosebuds, it read Cleanliness is next to Godliness. We were supplied with fine varnished wood, glass and small nails in order that they were framed.

  During this time we continued to instruct the children to ask God to bless them and preserve the Empire in its unity. We taught them to love, honour and respect the country in which they lived, and moreover the flag that waved over them. At that time, in 1893, 150 residents remained. The depression of 1890 was felt there on our little Mission and for many years hardship reigned beyond comparison. Some of the residents took to supplementing school lessons and assisted the remaining seventeen children in my absence.

  Keller and the other residents carried on the managing duties during my expedition. My absence totalled 143 days where a second-class cabin on the SS Margot was provided for me. The ship had fine iron balustrades throughout and a salon. On disembarking in New York City I took the Great Northern Railway by passenger locomotive to the City of Chicago and was put up in a clean boarding house for my assigned three days of the Exposition. There, I spoke with you and others of the excellent progress made by our Mission residents and within New South Wales, but said nothing of all the woe. The Exposition, I admit, was quite remarkable, and I was glad to be informed months later that hundreds of thousands of spectators had viewed the Australian display. I conversed with many interested people and petitioned some interest into supporting our endeavours from keen philanthropists, and promptly wrote to Keller to express my brimming hope that our House of Mercy would prosper once again. It was, in looking back, but a blinding hope in me to ignore what I had seen and hope for what I had not. Perhaps, like the thousands of visitors tossing coins at the feet of the human zoo, I too had been tricked by the rush to progress, and by the pillars of gold and copper, and dazzling light of the White City.

  So it was with no small measure of relief finally to return to Massacre Plains and our home, where I dutifully set to work making repairs and storing rations for our residents, purchased with the promised wage.

  As a new century began, it was plain that challenges would still beset us. In 1908 Prosperous Mission nearly halved in numbers to only ninety-five residents after a terrible bout of consumption that was made worse with the flooding of the Murrumby. The Natives who were in the habit of frequenting the Mission to stay a night or two and converse with relatives had mostly disappeared.

  And the children had grown up. Little Mercy, one of the first children our Mission welcomed, was in love and I had the great and honourable joy of presiding over her union to another resident, a dear and clever fellow named Solomon, whose father had been decorated with a brass plate many years before by explorers. Its inscription read ‘King Billy of the Badlands’. Solomon carried it in a dillybag at all times.

  In 1909 dear Mercy gave birth to a healthy daughter, whom she gave a lovely Lutheran name, Augustine. The celebration of the event was quickly muted as that same month the Protection Board sought to impose tighter restrictions on the Mission and ordered that all but the full-blood Natives should be handed over for employment, scattered like numbers.

  Well, we locked the gates. The mothers cried out and I wouldn’t allow the division. The full-bloods and the half-castes saw no division in each other, and I complained at length on this matter to the Constable who came to enforce the law by delivering me a petition. ‘After all I have done for the Board,’ I said, aghast at this draconian decision-making. He merely shrugged. I felt I were eating my words and they were inedible.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  house, dwelling place – bimbal, ganya When we arrived to make Prosperous our home once again, before the whirly-whirly arrived and stayed, the ancestors would walk with me for hours down along the riverbank. I listened and looked carefully. And they tried to show me things while I was working the field, they’d run alongside the stump-jump plough, pointing things out, but I was busy a lot of the time. Once they showed me the houses that used to be in Massacre Plains, how they were round, made from the red stringybark – gundhay. How the wood was easy to handle, how the roofs were reinforced with clay mouldings and gum branch
es. We had a home, they tried to show me. A real bimbal.

  husk, of seeds – galgan All life comes from the seed – yurbay. When you harvest you make sure you keep your husks safe. There are companies like the mining company trying to own the seeds. This is a scary thing to me, people trying to put a price on the farmers’ seeds. In Mexico, in India, everywhere crops are grown – even in this very country there’s a monopoly of bad guys trying to own the seeds. Can you imagine! Owning the centre of life, one company!

  hunt – barra-winya The women would collect berries while the men hunted for kangaroo in the mornings. After they had dealt with the catch they’d take some fat of the animal and go hunting again for the sugarbag. First they’d find the honeybee on the purple flowers, gently they’d catch one and with a hair from the hunter’s head, slid through the animal fat and then he would entwine the hair around the end of the bee. They’d let the honeybee – ngarru go and follow him, as he became heavy and stressed. The first place he’d want to go like that would be home, and so the hunters would follow and were always led to the sugarbag hidden in the tree.

  gaol, shut place – ngunba-ngidyala When your own daughter and then your grandson get put in gaol it must make the family look like trouble, I’m sure. But it isn’t so simple. Both Jolene and Joey made mistakes but the punishments outweighed the crimes. As much as the government wants to convince the population otherwise, it is an old thinking – locking us up as a solution. I think in this country there are divisions that run further than the songlines. The closed place, the shut place – the ngunba-ngidyala – is first built in the mind, and then it spreads.