by Thea Astley
Once old Clinger, who had maintained a more or less correspondence, had written to him suggesting he keep a diary, a journal of what pleased, what hurt. It could come in handy, he advised, if ever…If ever what?
There was a time, Vine wrote, I felt deeply about something—someone, actually—and I put that down, all of it, as if it were fiction. Oh, I can’t tell you the pain and hurt of the reality. But after it was written, and the years had passed, I found I couldn’t even remember the faces—the face, to tell the truth—or the words or the events. Not with any clarity, that is. It was as if the whole of that period had lost its reality and become absorbed as fiction and was as fragile and unmemorable as most fiction is. It had ceased to exist.
‘Fuckin fiction!’ Normie said aloud and bitterly, looking around the crowded shanty he shared with his family, four of them in a room twelve by ten. He was angry with the letter when he had managed to work out what it was Vine was trying to say. That wouldn’t work for me, he thought, seeing how it goes on and on, how it lives each day with me and my kids and the rest of us.
Still, something had happened to him then.
Normie brooded, wondering why he had ever bothered with that lousy school. What good had it ever done for him except those few moments of victory on playing fields? It done somethin, his eldest brother Manny said. You can talk to the bastards now. You aint scared.
The other young men who worked with him on the roads, on the buildings, complained about the pay, the rations, the limits to their freedom, and Normie found a new voice as he encouraged their complaints. We must do somethin, he whispered as they sweated, unloading crates on the jetty under the eyes of the bullimen. Gotta do somethin, he urged round nightly cooking fires, heady with revolt. We must show ourselves men, eh? We’re worth somethin.
He wrote back to old Clinger a month later, just one line: This fiction, it don’t go away.
They had patterns to follow, poor feller blacks.
There had been a long-running strike of Aboriginal workers in the Pilbara where they sought to lift restrictions on where they should live and how much they could earn. Rumours spread across the Cape that at reserves and missions their brothers might take a stand against the Act. Three years under this new man on Doebin were more than they could bear.
A new lockup was being built and the director had his work-gang toiling Saturdays and Sundays without respite. After an argument with the overseer, Normie Cooktown walked off the job and was soon followed by the rest of the gang. In the hot evening a group of Normie’s friends gathered at his house to discuss tactics. See them: Willie Omba, Moses Thursday, Hector Fourmile.
Gambling was forbidden.
A tactical presumption of gambling.
Willie Omba, given the gift of rhetoric before the director, became heated in his denials. He was ordered off the island along with his pregnant wife and the rest of his family. Three days later, Hector Fourmile was arrested. Then their spokesman, Normie Cooktown, was ordered to leave. Normie refused. ‘I’m an island man,’ he said to the director. ‘What are you?’ He walked out of the office, refusing to go to gaol and even the black police boys refused to arrest him. Rumours spread and spread like wait-awhile, spread and caught their tiny barbs on decades of resentment. Normie strode arrogantly in public view down Coconut Avenue, outraging the whites.
‘We scrub their houses,’ Normie complained to Matthew Vine in his capacity as legal adviser for their grievances, ‘for nothin. The men won’t do island dance for the tourists and they get put in the lockup. If they go up the mountain with their girls, they get twenty-one days. The girls get their heads shaved and have to wear bags. Did these buggers learn from the Nazis?’
No difference, Matthew Vine thought. None.
‘How can you do this?’ he demanded of the director.
‘Don’t you dare teach me my job,’ the director said icily. ‘Are you promoting immorality as well in your capacity as counsellor?’
‘No. Charity.’ It was hopeless. ‘Simply charity.’
A week after the arrest of Hector Fourmile a regular supply barge was due in. Normie Cooktown led a group of ten men to the jetty for unloading. In the mid-morning heat Matthew strolled down to the cove and found Normie’s workers busy but unloading food supplies only: meat for their families, the hospitals, the dormitories, the doctors and nurses. They left the rest of the cargo untouched and any bottles of alcohol they smashed or threw into the indifferent waters.
Normie was beyond laughter as he tipped flagons of gutrot into the bay. The barge master tried to intervene but was held back by angry blacks. Meat for the administration staff rotted on the deck in the boiling afternoon and every attempt by the master and his assistant to lug the crates ashore was stopped by groups of shouting men. Finally the barge was forced to back water and pull out into the channel.
Matthew Vine, watching from the trees on the shoreline, found the director had come up behind and was watching as well, his face tight.
‘Happy?’ he said to young Vine. ‘Pleased about this? Spreading your communist notions to people who can’t understand them.’
‘Oh, they understand, all right,’ Matthew Vine said. ‘They understand only too well.’
‘You’re finished here,’ the director said.
Inertia spread.
For days a standstill.
Men failed to turn up at the sewage works, the sawmill. Slop buckets of the whites remained unemptied. House-girls neglected to clean administration quarters. And all of them, all of them, men, women and children, encouraged by Normie Cooktown, sauntered openly along Coconut Avenue, stopping to chat or simply sit in places barred to them.
At last, after a week of frantic pleas from the director to the mainland, a posse of white police was brought over by launch to guard the homes of whites peering fearfully through shutters as blacks strode the streets.
There goes Moses Thursday! There goes Freddie Sweetwater! There goes Normie Cooktown! All of them deliberately rousing rage behind those shutters as they squat beneath mango trees in the main avenue to smoke and laugh. White mind envisaged plots and stratagems. Black mind saw lotus-eating, chewing the rag, and only now and again gave amused thought to those white bosses forced to clean up their own droppings.
‘Ah shit!’ Freddie Sweetwater said. ‘This is the life, eh, bro!’
‘That’s it! You said it! Shit!’ cried Moses Thursday as he remembered the unemptied goona buckets of the whites and they rolled about laughing in the mango shade, looking up briefly as Matthew Vine came along the road to squat beside them. He felt hidden eyes scorch as he accepted a cigarette and lounged back on the unmown grass beneath the trees.
‘How long, eh?’
‘As long as it takes,’ Normie Cooktown said, moved from laughter to bitterness quick as a flash. ‘And how long you got?’
But their surmisals were wrong. For the start. The police wandered about the settlement talking casually to the strikers, dropping in at their homes, offering cigarettes, drinking tea, asking questions, storing replies.
‘They’re checking you out,’ Matthew warned Normie Cooktown. ‘They’re trying to catch you off your guard.’
The director and his staff remained indoors, skulking behind shutters. It was like a replay of that other time, old Leggat told the director. Those two nightmare days when the superintendent had terrorised the island. ‘This is now!’ the director shouted at crumbling Leggat. He was a stupid man who understood nothing but the raised voice, the instant application of force. On the jetty the stink of rotted food finally drove two of the burlier white staff to go down and shove the crates into the bay, where there was a frenzy of shark activity.
There were spies. There were whistle-blowers.
No gubbamin man came to discuss islander complaints.
The director refused consultation and sucked in breath and rage behind bolted doors, holding out, holding out, while the bullimen prowled the streets and even the islanders grew tired of inaction and
the insecurity of waiting.
After another five days the director, on the advice of the roaming policemen, made a further insistent call to the mainland demanding reinforcements. Matthew Vine shuffling paper in his little office heard the call, heard the busy consultations and knew his loyalties lay only one way. That afternoon he walked down the avenue looking for Normie Cooktown who was sprawled in his usual place beneath the mango trees.
‘Well,’ Matthew said, answering a week-old question, ‘not long now, I guess. Anyway I came to tell you something. There’s trouble today. The mainland’s sent over reinforcements. They arrived an hour ago. There’s a boat with a team of police anchored in one of the coves.’
He stayed there with the men, finishing his cigarette, lighting another, and even while they talked he saw from the edge of his eye two of the previously pally policemen marching down the road from the administration block, hands on batons, revolvers bulging at their hips like misplaced genitals. He said softly to the three men, ‘Don’t look now, but it’s on. For God’s sake don’t resist. Don’t fight, you hear? They’ll use that against you. Just get up quickly and saunter off. I’ll keep them busy if I can.’
Shadow into shadow. The avenue emptied, islanders slipping away, becoming invisible, as they had learned from childhood to avoid white presence.
‘Hey!’ one of the bullimen yelled, starting to run. ‘Hey, you black buggers! Stop, you hear!’
Big men running through heat heavy as canvas, pushing through fever-folds down an empty road to an unruffled young white stubbing out midday with his cigarette.
*
The night is filled with the splintering of wood, the thuds of kicked-in doors, shouts and screams, the howling of kids and women, the three a.m. raging of bullimen rattling handcuffs and chains.
In the muddling dark the ringleaders’ huts are torn apart and the men, shackled before their terrified families, are dragged out as a warning, a symbol of what follows defiance of white codes, of the retribution of noncompliance.
See them—there goes Moses Thursday, there goes Freddie Sweetwater, there goes Normie Cooktown—prodded at gunpoint through the streets of administration along the avenue to the sea-front.
The whole settlement is awake and Matthew Vine flings from his bed and drags on clothes before racing outside. His work colleagues huddle with their wideawake eyes, interpreting the purge, with their ears absorbing the cries and shouts of angry islanders. They obey the rules. They maintain distance.
Despite the anger of police, Matthew follows the shadowy procession of prisoners as they stumble and trip in their leg-irons. Behind the men trail wives and children, faces snotty with fright and tears, their clutching hands struck aside by batons, pleading bodies thrust roughly back. More and more of the blacks come from their huts to thicken the crowd, keeping up a wailing in language, a fearsome night-ghost of unknowns that worries the bullimen and now even the director who has emerged from his house and is striding at the rear, impatient to see the finish of this act played out in starshine and the cold phosphorescence of the sea.
Normie Cooktown is at the front. Blood runs down his face and clogs his lips. One eye is swollen. He keeps his head high and looks neither left nor right, does not bother to check his shackled feet. Fifteen years since he went, full of hope, to that school on the mainland. Fifteen years since old Clinger told him to maintain his dreams, his sense of self. He spits in derision and a gobbet of blood and sputum lands on the face of the bulliman by his side.
‘You filthy bastard!’ the copper shouts. ‘You stinking black bastard!’ He mops at his face and delivers a hard punch to the side of Normie’s skull. Normie trips and falls sideways, smacking the ground with a thump. ‘Get up!’ the bulliman yells. ‘Get up, you bugger!’ He stands there and watches as Normie struggles, lurching upright for a few seconds only to topple off balance and pitch to the ground again. ‘Maybe a boot’d help,’ the copper says and he pulls back one foot and delivers a massive kick to Normie’s guts.
The mob has come to a standstill.
Matthew finds himself bawling, ‘Stop that, you hear! Stop that!’ He pushes through the knot of women and children until he finds himself standing above his friend’s body. ‘Hey, Normie,’ he says bending over and ignoring the copper’s wrenching arm, ‘it’s me. Matt. Let me help, mate.’ ‘Leave him!’ screams the copper. ‘Leave him, you stupid faggot!’
Matthew turns and looks the policeman straight in the eye. Someone is playing torchlight on them and its wavering beam catches jungle that has become enemy, battalions of leaves against which the terrified faces of the actors swing like masks. The director has trotted up pussy-foot behind.
‘I saw that,’ Matthew accuses. ‘I saw you kick a prisoner. I’m a lawyer, friend, and I’ll give sworn evidence against you. I’ll see you charged with brutality. I’ll fix—’
‘Ah, piss off!’ the copper says. ‘Pick the bastard up and piss off!’
Matthew bends over his friend. ‘Come on,’ he urges. ‘Let me give you a hand, see you down to the boat.’
He pulls Normie upright and gives his arm an encouraging squeeze. ‘Like old times, isn’t it?’ he says, not wanting to enlarge, but both of them remembering the cement floors and walls of the change-rooms, the cold-water showers, the school bullies, the snide cracks, the knotted towels and fists. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll see you get a fair go. Promise.’
Behind him Normie’s wife and babies are gulping with terror, afraid to let out the cries that are shaking their bodies apart. The little girl is trembling so much she can hardly stand. Normie’s wife Cassie gathers the child up and begins moving again and Matthew continues walking with his friend down to the beach, the jetty, watched every step of the way by the police.
Surprisingly, old Leggat, the deputy whose malice like wine has aged with him, is waiting by the steps that lead to the police launch and when renewed wailing bursts from the wives and children he crams them onto the boat as well. ‘The lot,’ he says spitefully. ‘Take the lot.’
At the back of the crowd under the witnessing trees and shaded by his own sour victory, the director stands impervious. With narrowed eyes he watches Matthew Vine and then walks down to the landing.
‘I heard what you said. There’ll be no trial.’
‘What do you mean, no trial?’
‘Exactly what I say. You and your promises! They’re being taken to another reserve where their troublemaking abilities will get no sympathy, believe me.’
‘Where exactly?’
‘A long way from here.’ The director half smiles. He feels he has handled the whole thing pretty smoothly. ‘And as for you, you can start packing the minute you get back to your quarters.’
Matthew turns away from his rancour and runs along the jetty. The launch motors snarl and catch and the propeller churns the pre-dawn water into a foam of ghosts and links and memories.
Dry-eyed he looks at the sad little huddle of prisoners and he shouts, ‘Normie!’ once, twice. But Normie, looking straight ahead, indifferent to manacles and leg-irons, wobbles to his feet and raising his voice begins to sing in language, making a new songline for all of them, and just as suddenly the wailing and lamentations of the watchers on shore cease, the crowd silent dark shapes against the dark.
Normie stares blindly across the bay, his wrecked face stony, body rocking with the rocking boat.
‘Shut that bastard up!’ one of the coppers yells, maddened, but the noise of the motors drowns the order.
Yet still Normie Cooktown sings and sings for all of them: for his wife and children, his two friends and their families trapped with him, for the grieving blacks on the island.
Ngana dungaydu
Ngana kari binal
Yinya burrir bama-mu
Ngana kari binal
Yinya ngangka ngulkurrijin
Marri marri marri
Yinya ngangka nganjay
Ngana kari binal.
It is not one of his people’s songs. H
e is weaving words learnt from Moses Thursday and Freddie Sweetwater in a gesture of brotherhood. As the boat churns the sea-miles he becomes a poet:
We are leaving now
We do not understand
That island belongs to our people
We do not understand
Those flowers were beautiful
Long time, long time, long time
Now they are wilted
We do not understand.
And as he sings Moses and Freddie join in the refrain. Ngana kari binal—we do not understand. Nothing stops them.
Over and over he sings the words. Jirrbu-jirrbu. Lonely. Sad.
Over and over and over, eyes fixed on the looming coast, he sings all the way to the mainland.
Dancing on Coral
Glenda Adams
Introduced by Susan Wyndham
The True Story of Spit MacPhee
James Aldridge
Introduced by Phillip Gwynne
The Commandant
Jessica Anderson
Introduced by Carmen Callil
A Kindness Cup
Thea Astley
Introduced by Kate Grenville
Reaching Tin River
Thea Astley
Introduced by Jennifer Down
The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow
Thea Astley
Introduced by Chloe Hooper
Drylands
Thea Astley
Introduced by Emily Maguire
Homesickness
Murray Bail
Introduced by Peter Conrad
Sydney Bridge Upside Down
David Ballantyne
Introduced by Kate De Goldi
Bush Studies
Barbara Baynton
Introduced by Helen Garner
Between Sky & Sea
Herz Bergner
Introduced by Arnold Zable
The Cardboard Crown
Martin Boyd
Introduced by Brenda Niall
