Bettany's Book

by Thomas Keneally

  At heart, Prim believed she neither had nor needed the capacity for love and its attendant exultations and horrors, its retching tears, yowling ecstasies and general unnecessary fuss. She understood from some of her younger lecturers that falling in love was a bourgeois construct, a metaphor for the sort of deep hormonal craze which was capable, if both partners played along, of leading to a mutually shared belief that their particular compulsion was worth a year’s, or two or ten years’ most testing and intimate investment.

  She was thus taken by storm to find herself, in her first year as a postgraduate, bitten by the construct of falling in love with her graduate adviser, Professor Robert Auger. This occurred in an open-sided tent pitched at Turner Creek reservation in desert country two hundred and fifty kilometres south-west of Alice Springs, near a plug of conglomerate rock named Mount Bavaria or Gharrademu, a landmark which was the subject of a court hearing. Primrose and three other graduate students were seated on campstools in boiling air near the rear flaps of the tent that constituted the court. Since the other three were students well advanced on their dissertations, Prim had come here thinking of herself as Auger’s best first-year MA, the only one invited to this land rights hearing in Central Australia.

  Robert Auger, an American, had first come to this desert country in 1967 as a snub to the Vietnam draft and to study the Burranghyatti desert people. His being in Australia at the time was a matter of principle – he could have sought an exemption, but would not stoop to play that game. He ‘got’ the Burranghyatti at the right time, just as they were beginning to reconcile themselves to missions and reservations as a near full-time option.

  While the mysteries of the Vietnam War possessed the attention of the bulk of his fellow citizens, American and Australian, Auger spent his research time in the presence of Tracker Tagami, a man then of about sixty years. Tagami was an elder of the tribe, in so far as the Burranghyatti possessed shared elders. For traditionally they travelled their sparsely watered country in small family groups – coalescing with relatives only at such major ceremonial sites and waterholes as the one at the base of Gharrademu, Mount Bavaria. Tagami, who had made Auger’s repute, was deceased, but now his son, Noel Yangdandu, was the principal party to a land claim under the Land Rights Act for possession of the Mount Bavaria area. Professor Auger was the expert witness who could vouch for what Yangdandu’s father had told him long before. If Mount Bavaria was a locus of primary meaning to Tracker, it was necessarily so for his son.

  A Federal Court judge, appointed to hear the land claim under the Land Rights Act, sat in shorts and knee socks at a table deep in the tent’s shade, listening avidly to the respected Professor Auger, advocacy anthropologist, now a man in his early forties, authoritative in a casually American sort of way. The middle-aged judge asked Auger to describe the number and frequency of the interviews he had held with Noel Yangdandu’s father, Tracker Tagami, and whether there had been onlookers who disputed anything Tagami had said. Robert Auger – in country-music shirt, jeans, boots, and seeming more an anthropological ranger than a narrow scholar – referred smoothly to his notebooks, which had been the basis of sundry distinguished articles. According to Tracker’s evidence, his hero ancestor, Baurigal, journeying in the void, had made stars descend, had hurled stones, turned beasts and two protean sisters, with one of whom he had copulated, into rocks. He had endowed a cave at Bavaria’s base with his sustaining blood.

  Tracker Tagami, Auger remembered, had been outraged by diamond drilling which had occurred west of Mount Bavaria in the mid 1960s. It had turned the earth inside out and chemicals had fouled two seasonal water holes in the rock plugs known as the Sisters. Later mining, said Auger, had destroyed tracts of land in which foods such as silky pear, flax onions, bush tomatoes, acacia seed and ngurturl trees with their succulent gum had been plentiful. This despoliation had been a powerful influence upon Noel Yangdandu to make the claim. ‘Without Yangdandu’s ceremonial knowledge and use of this country, the earth loses its significance, botanical, zoological or human,’ Auger assured the judge, ‘Though to us it might still seem peopled, to the Burranghyatti it will become a void, a fatal hole in the earth’s fabric.’

  Prim was enchanted by the vigorous subtlety of Auger’s arguments, the way in which the judge set possible barriers to the success of the land claim, and the casual elegance with which Auger vaulted them.

  Within the tent flap’s shade, she could see the unmoving back of the claimant Noel. She knew him to be a handsome man, preternaturally thin and bow-legged from working as a stockman. From the students’ campfire last night she and the other three aspirants had watched Auger and Noel drinking tea and laughing loudly but clannishly with other Burranghyatti men. The one male student had been invited over, and later went out with Noel and Auger in a four-wheel drive shooting feral cats, now a greater plague than miners in Noel’s country.

  And now, in the tented court, maleness rose and excluded her again. Some of the liturgical details of how Yangdandu and other men communally maintained and restored Baurigal’s inheritance could not be uttered in front of women. Various aged and ageless women, square-bodied, thin-legged, with the broad stable features of desert Aboriginals, had already departed before the judge asked the three female students sitting in the last of the shade at the back of the tent if they would mind leaving.

  Prim and the others gathered their studious notes and stepped out squinting from blue shade into brutal light. She saw the Burranghyatti women ahead of her, swaying to their own shade – the shade of brush dwellings fortified with sheets of plastic, wooden panels, corrugated iron and an occasional car door. Three such female householders who had not attended the court sat around a blanket in the shadow of a desert oak and began dealing cards, and in her giddiness Prim thought that they looked like world-makers as they passed magic tokens to each other, frowning, barely speaking. These women possessed the other half of their people’s mysteries, the part that could be uttered only to women. Why couldn’t she research the women’s cosmos, on which the literature was thin?

  Later, of course, she would blush for her vanity, for seeing a distressed and confused group as her potential material. Even then, in the early 1980s, Aboriginal peoples had begun demanding their totems be returned, the bones of their dead be restored to them from museums as far away as Scotland. It was an age in which a clamour arose about sacred and other native designs that had appeared, without acknowledgment of moral property, on tea towels and postcards. And anthropologists were the informers of the moral sense of the white majority. She felt her own moral sense, more than her vanity, blazing in the sun.

  She and her fellows had been so careful not to intrude at Turner Creek that they had brought two tents with them – one was shared by the male student and the more senior of the women, who were lovers. Prim shared the second with the other unattached woman. The students had their own campfire, to which Auger began to bring some of the Burranghyatti people at night. They were mainly men who sat shyly on desert oak logs or on the red ground, and whose eyes confronted the flames rather than the faces of the eager researchers.

  After such campfire meetings, Prim and the other students washed in an ablution block at the side of the clinic. On the second night in Turner Creek, Prim was returning damp-haired towards her tent, in a garden of soft darkness that burst into roses of fire here and there. Auger’s clever face and lithe body appeared before her. His handsome mouth was creaked open in a smile which was very nearly silly.

  ‘Hi, Primrose,’ he said. ‘Getting something out of this experience?’

  Prim made the expected complimentary remarks.

  ‘Yeah, but it’s more complicated than they think. Mount Bavaria used to be the preserve of the Yurritji, but the Yurritji were wiped out by police and settlers while an overland telegraph was being pushed through in the 1880s. And so the Burranghyatti, who were related, reached out to absorb it. They began as kind of caretakers. They became the inheritors.’

 
‘But isn’t that a normal mechanism?’ said Prim, brushing aside her wet hair from her brow.

  ‘I don’t want to confuse this guy, the judge,’ said Auger. ‘I’m taking things slow.’

  He put a hand on her left shoulder. She wondered what it was doing there, professional mateship or something else. It seemed an honest enough, confiding gesture, yet it made her sweat. ‘It’s easy as pie to tell the full truth in the case of European property rights. We’ve got deeds, we’ve got fences. But … the judge is aware, he’s a bright guy.’

  His left hand had now been lightly lifted to the other shoulder. He dragged her towards him and kissed the side of her face in an inexpert way that delighted her and reinforced his character as no more than a brilliant, uncertain boy. And now he began uttering the banalities of desire, breathing hard – again, in the tradition of the boy-men she had known. ‘You’re so damned beautiful and you’re bright as a button,’ he said, feeling beneath the khaki shirt for her breasts.

  Since she would need to return to her companion in the tent and since she would be incapable of conducting the normal last-thing-at-night dialogue under canvas, she pulled away.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, as she knew rebuffed men did. ‘It won’t happen again, Prim. I suppose it’s the general intoxication of this case …’

  ‘Don’t apologise,’ she told him in a quick, strangulated voice.

  She returned to her tent by torchlight, fearing that once she reached her sleeping bag, if she did not immediately switch out that small baton of light it might evince from her the whole unutterable story. Her tent-mate yawned and murmured, ‘That sun draws everything out of you. But the air’s brisk at night. Christ, I wish my boyfriend was here.’

  Prim put on a sweater in the darkness, for the night air seeped through the pores of the tent. Even after what had happened, she had for Auger none of the normal revulsion she’d had for the men at the Labor Club. She had no sense that she had just taken part in a common and very nearly trite scene, in shared intellectual fervour between scholar and apprentice. But once she was in her sleeping bag, her pleasant fever was replaced by a distasteful question: Did he invite me to the Northern Territory just for this? Just to sound me out, to try it on? She was the only first year MA student he had asked. But if her looks had been more enviably normal, if people didn’t talk like that all the time about Dimp and herself, if she were a pleasant hefty girl, if she were graced with those Scots and Irish freckles not uncommon in Australia, brought out to riot by the sun, she would certainly know where he stood in the essential matter of her intellectual promise. It was the panic of not knowing either way which made her want to flee from this tent, from the cold smell of sun-screen and insect repellent.

  Prim fell profoundly asleep – the soothing sleep of the utterly disgraced, the woman of no conceivable future. She had a dream of attending a funeral and being forced to eat sponge cake by Auger’s wife, a political scientist. She woke in a divine daze, restored to happiness and life after the sharpness of the dream. Something moved within her, the serpent beneath the ribs, between the hips, in the bowl of her body. Real life was not now centred in the nuances of the patrilineal descent amongst Burranghyatti, but for the first time in her life in the nuances of her own body.

  Dressed, scrubbed, her brown hair pulled severely back and tied with a green ribbon in a way which she knew to be both strict and playful, she went off to breakfast with the others and then to the tent court. She listened as evidence about the Yurritji massacre during the building of the westward telegraph line was related by a newly flown-in historian from the University of Adelaide, who had discovered a confessional diary by an English surveyor. At the close of this evidence, Professor Auger was invited back to comment on this sort of acquisition: the taking over of the land and sites of slaughtered kinsmen. Handsome, righteous Auger seemed a different man from the uncertain caressing lad of last night. He was back in his realm of power, and reeled off similar recorded cases from New South Wales in the 1840s to Western Australia in the 1920s. It was tour-de-force stuff, and now and then his gaze moved down the length of the tent and latched on to Prim’s fixed eye.

  That night Prim stayed on by the students’ fire, which Auger had managed to make the centre of his social evening conversations. Noel Yangdandu and his tall cousins in their cowboy shirts and jeans talked in jagged, laconic English about working on cattle stations from Oodnadatta to the Roper River and west to Halls Creek. Their forebears had seen their first horse only two or at most three generations ago, but these fellows all looked like riders. The students asked about where this and that man’s country was. Men pointed into the night – north, south, east, west, into the ancestor-graced darkness. One by one though, the Burranghyatti men rose and vanished. The betrothed graduate students sneaked off to their tent to crack a bottle of wine they had smuggled into this officially dry reservation. Prim’s tent-mate staggered off yawning. Finally, only Prim and Auger were left before the dying fire.

  They had nothing to say for a few minutes. He placed his hand on her wrist and said, ‘Oh Prim.’ She was delighted. She had reduced him from the polysyllabic cosmos he inhabited in the courtroom to just two syllables.

  How does one woman betray another? By the superior authority of her desire. Its claims are greater than the mere retentiveness of wives. In a camp that seemed to her blind to their movements, Auger put his arm around Prim’s shoulders and walked with her to his tent. Tearing at her clothes, laying his lips to her bared shoulder, he mentioned that there was a beautiful, star-struck place along Turner Creek that would be a better place for all this, but the evening cold was against it. ‘I’ll take you there one day,’ he told her.

  So occurred Prim’s first experience of berserk, multiple, howling, wakeful, engrossed, transcendent sex. For the first time she knew that disabling sense of mutual congratulation which lovers bestow on each other once the summit is achieved. The only two mountain climbers in the world, ready to descend into a brief saddle of contentment before hauling each other skywards again!

  She dragged herself back to her tent at 1 a.m., late enough to provoke talk, early enough to make talk not quite credible. In fact, in the drunken vanity of the hour she wanted her fellow graduate students to be at the one time ignorant and amazed.

  On her return to Sydney, her addiction to Auger seemed more substantial than the known world, than the literal streams of traffic on Missenden and Parramatta Roads, whose purpose was purely to hem in Auger’s scholarship at the University of Sydney. Auger had early told her that his marriage was loveless, and the mistake of his life. In loving Prim, he said, he was liberating his wife from lovelessness too. Again, this observation came to Prim as if it were extremely novel, rhetoric without pedigree, not just a stock cliché of affairs between eminent older men and worshipful disciples. His wife was an emotional manipulator, he told Prim. Her possessiveness had very nearly destroyed him, and his only solace had been his work. But now he went into his unhealthy contests with his wife arrayed and armoured in Prim’s light. ‘Let me tell you, Prim, there’s nothing out in Gharrademu to compare with the perils in desert places of the heart, the waterless stretches.’ His wife had delayed having children specifically because of their unhappiness, but he said he wanted children of Prim.

  At the time, Prim and her sister were renting another place in Redfern, this time a dim nineteenth-century worker’s cottage, into whose stairwell a light shaft had been cut to give the place a sunnier, more modern air. It was all too convenient that it should become the chief place of assignation for herself and Auger.

  Hence Dimp got to meet Auger. Dimp, who was worldlier, who was not only beautiful but had robustness and an earthy common sense in matters of the heart, and had once or twice been where Prim now was, was at the moment there again with Brendan D’Arcy. And though Dimp frowned a great deal about Prim’s affair while making coffee for herself, her sister, the visiting Professor Auger, she said little. But there was ultimately a fight in wh
ich Prim, who wanted the entire visible world to be engorged with her own passion, attacked Dimp for not liking Robert Auger.

  ‘I just don’t believe what he tells you about his marriage,’ said Dimp. ‘I’ve heard that sort of guff before.’

  When the affair began, Prim had thought that it would be at most weeks before the Auger’s avowedly failed marriage was abandoned. She was as yet innocent of the potency of a failed marriage over a triumphant affair. After four months, another journey to Central Australia together, a weekend of hiking in the Hunter Valley, a reconnaissance of an embattled Aboriginal settlement in Queensland, Dr/Mrs Auger had still not been told. His wife was unhappy in a vague sense, suspicious, Auger said, and would prove indifferent and scornful when she knew. He was waiting for the right moment to tell her that Primrose Bettany was willing to free her from her sour possessiveness. ‘I have to wait until she’s a little more stable,’ he told Prim. She would be told once he was satisfied she had a grip on herself.

  At first Prim followed an instinct that she must not be insistent. A further month passed and she became anxious. Another one, and she decided to take up the duty of stridency, and spent part of her time hating herself for asking the same question over and over, and the rest hating Auger and his wife. This was a time of angry, less languorous penetrations of her body. ‘There you are, you bitch,’ said Auger one day on her bed, conceding her his angry seed.