Timmins knocked the cross in with a rock and read the words out loud: ‘The o’er-fraught heart.’
They saw an old gin limping from the abandoned Aboriginal camp. She was covered in dirt and held a dead butcherbird in her hands. She made her way into the kitchen and sat on the stained stones. Linklater peered in as she laid the bird in front of her and spread its stiffening wings as if trying to make it fly again.
The policemen rode away from the silent homestead knowing that the rivers would be running but they prepared themselves, deciding they would rather camp in the wet than stay in the house burdened with blood and ghosts. They waited by the creeks and rivers, watching for a lull in the flow, or tracked along the waterways to find a place where the water fanned out and was shallow. They splashed through, relieved to have another obstacle between them and the homestead.
15
Kathryn
The Nordic steamed a straight course into the port of Fremantle. Sailing boats jibed out of its way with their canvas pulled close to the breeze on a sea that sparkled with the ruffle of the afternoon wind. Beyond the wide sheds of the port, the town was a collection of low buildings of sturdy limestone construction, some two or three storeys high with open ornate verandas.
A crowd waited on the wharf with banners and bouquets of flowers. Kathryn could see there was an attempt to be like home, for the women and men were dressed in clothing suitable for London and the coming of a northern winter. Others were dressed loosely; men wearing white trousers with a thin belt at the waist, women with cloth of such lightness it clung to every contour of their body. Such was the contrast.
A dignitary in a dark coat suit waited for her at the base of the gangplank. He waved a white handkerchief and shepherded her into a shining vehicle. The Ford motorcar with padded open seats had been driven close to the ship. Beyond it were less stately motorcars, horses and carriages, and trams waiting on crisscrossing tracks. She searched the crowd, for whom she did not know. She asked the Governor’s emissary to wait. A few of the crowd and passengers had moved away but most were engrossed in immediate revelry and it seemed they would remain for many hours. No-one was waiting with a message for a passenger.
The motorcar travelled along the paved track that linked the port with the main city of Perth, nine miles inland. The road dipped down now and again towards the Swan River. It was the ocean slipping through the narrow port to become a wide blue estuary, and on its shores of stringy grass were large pale trees that had more branches than leaves, short blacktrunked trees with a shock of thick grass growing at the top and stunted prickly shrubs with dull flowers. Black swans glided across the waters as if they were in paradise and not in a land of such gangly awkwardness.
Even in the excitement of a new land Kathryn took out the worn telegraph from her purse. It had come several weeks after the telegraph from William bearing the sad news of the stillbirth of the child. She read it yet again, searching as always for clues between the words.
Dear Kathryn Lidscombe. Please come to Broome. Your sister is in trouble. Don’t tell CS. Jim Maley.
Of course she had telegraphed Cicada Springs but there had been no reply, no more word from William.
Kathryn was given fine quarters in the Governor’s house, and greeted by people of position and class as befitting her family’s rank. There were a number of telegraphs from her father beseeching her immediate return with Emily. There were no messages from Cicada Springs and none from the mysterious Jim Maley.
The Governor’s house was rife with the accent and customs she knew. When the formalities were completed she was free to roam. She observed that the general populace was different; they spoke in a lazy twang and didn’t seem to care that the flies were bad and that the tea houses were of appalling quality. The town prepared for the celebration of Christmas by placing stunted fir trees decorated in ribbons and gaily covered boxes on their verandas and painting snowflakes on their windows. Kathryn sat in parlours with the wives and children of civil servants and prominent businessmen, sweating in desultory conversation, their hands working hard flapping fans, waiting for the heat of the day to be tempered by the afternoon sea breeze. Kathryn held herself back from determining the land was brutish. She had much more to discover, she decided.
She read of the murder of a white man in the Kimberley, the murderer believed to be an Aboriginal woman. There appeared little motive other than a possible liaison and jealousy. The murderer was being tracked by an experienced policeman, Sergeant Perez, who was braving the harsh land of the Kimberley to do his job, which was justice. Kathryn reread the article. It unsettled her more than she felt it should.
She could find out little more. The Aboriginal question was not a topic for the ladies and the men turned away as though she did not have sufficient knowledge or authority even to begin that discussion.
Almost all advised her against going to the north on her own, some offering to accompany her. She argued against a chaperone, stating that Emily and William Lidscombe would be there to meet her in Broome.
It was frustrating that it would be ten days before the coastal steamer, the Minderoo, left for the north.
Trevor, Charcoal and Janarra crossed the road that linked the port town of Derby with the pearling town of Broome in the south. It was another day’s travel due west across the scraggly pindan to the coast. They moved easily between the slender trees and salt-scathed bushes. Soon they heard the roar of the ocean and the red pindan became pink with the blown white sands of the beach. Fleshy vines with wide purple flowers snaked from the dunes into the desert scrub. Paperbarks with low branches and bunches of elongated leaves clustered behind the dunes, protected from the wind and nourished by the evening moisture.
Charcoal held Janarra’s hand, holding the excited boy back, trying to tell him things and laughing at his craziness, for the boy tasted the salt in the air and heard the rush of the waves and just wanted to see.
They climbed the dunes and Janarra rolled in the sand. He reached the top of the last dune and called out in fright, scurrying back to Charcoal. The three climbed together. The immense sea crashed on the shore in long rolling breakers.
Behind the surf, the wind picked up the foam from the choppy waves in a deep green sea. The sky was clear except for a few grey clouds, some low and brooding, others drifting high and fast. Seagulls sailed or dipped along the shore in scalloped flight looking for whitefish and herring, or stood in twos and threes on the shore judging the wind. At one end of the beach was a wide arc of brown muddiness where a creek in flood had discharged its hinterland life. Here were mixed flocks of waders, brown, white, red and yellow, moving back and forth as though they were one animal feeding on where the creek streamed across the sand into the waves of the ocean.
Charcoal led Trevor and the boy to a camping spot. It was among low paperbarks, a meeting place thousands of years old. In front was a midden, where families had gathered and cracked oysters and clams, and shelled crabs and crayfish. Over time the dune had become a sturdy hill of interlaced shells and sand.
The boy took only a day or two to understand the strange country. He was driven by hunger and the need to take care of his elder. He saw quickly that the tide came and went and left food for collecting. They shucked the mussels and cracked the small crabs he gathered and added the shells to the midden. He was learning quickly the language of the sea.
South of the midden the dunes gave way to a rocky cliff face, and here the ospreys hovered and plunged at breakneck speed, feet first, their sharp talons spread, disappearing below the surface to clutch a twisting fish and rising, shaking the water from their bodies, their mighty wings touching overhead and the fingers of their feathers splayed wide as they pressed down and away with their load. The sea eagles, whitebellied and black-winged, soared high patrolling the coast and out to sea, swooping to pounce on fish close to the surface or playing with the ospreys, cormorants and seagulls until the harried birds dropped their prey.
The two men and
the boy fashioned a raft and they fished with lines and spears when the ocean was calm or in the mangrove estuaries where the land met the sea and the tayiwule were fat and muddy with feasting.
They saw the plump dugongs with their old-man smiling faces feeding in the shallow warm waters, and large turtles rising to the surface, peering all around and sinking away. Charcoal held up his hand and Janarra put his spear down. There was a season and a ceremony for killing turtles and it was not now. On the low tide, a great turtle with a patch of yellow behind his eyes would move slowly over the reef in front of the midden, his feet slip-sliding over the coral. He’d stay for a while and glance back at them as he made his way to the blue and white wash that let him float and took him to deeper waters.
In the shallows they speared the stingrays. Charcoal showed Trevor and Janarra how to remove the innards and fry them in the wing flaps. They hunted for the big crabs in the mangroves, among the forest of roots that stuck out of the mud taking air through small breathing holes. They searched for the telltale burrows or the scuttle and flash of the bright orange shell. They dug furiously, beating the crab at his own game and grasping him behind by his back. Janarra seized the claws using both hands as Charcoal pierced the shell with a sharp digging stick.
The clouds built up in the evening, plum-coloured and high against the red flame of the fire on the midden. The sun came through cracks in the dark sky and lit the sea in patches of radiant jade. When storms came with jabs of lightning and the growl of thunder the men and boy stayed in the bower, nestled deep amongst the paperbarks, roasting scallops and lily bulbs. Charcoal told stories of the bush and the dreaming. Trevor told stories of the war and was embarrassed that Janarra was hearing that men did such things.
All the time Charcoal watched the bush and the birds along the shore and over the ocean, and Trevor watched Charcoal, waiting for the first sign that the women had come.
Emily and Wirritjil continued travelling west. Day by day the world flourished at their feet. Wirritjil looked for places from which they could catch birds, usually a fallen tree trunk with leafy branches or a rock next to a pond already starting with reeds and lilies. They hid and observed and when the birds’ alertness was low Wirritjil would slide silently into the water. The first time the flock of ducks flew away in a mighty rush and a strident chorus and Wirritjil rose, slapping the water and laughing. She soon remembered how to be an eel and the flocks no longer sensed her swimming underwater. Emily sat concealed on the shore, wondering which bird Wirritjil would pick. Soon she learnt to do the same, to swim low, deep, and zoom up behind an outlier bird, grasping the bird’s feet and pulling it down until it drowned. Ducks were the tastiest. Wirritjil could capture a young goose but the geese and swans were too heavy for Emily. Cormorants and snipes were easy to grasp but hard to drown, for they could breathe for a long time underwater. The small coots were fast and their short legs difficult to grasp.
They pinched black-flecked eggs from the floating nest of the red-crested bird as he absorbed himself in hunting dragonflies, striding on his long thin legs across the lily pads. The geese needed distracting from their nests and Emily grew used to being chased as Wirritjil stole a few big delicious eggs.
Emily learnt to sing songs with the sounds of the birds and make the chants back to the land to make all things grow.
They headed south at a good pace. Emily’s hips swung and around her waist she wore a belt of animal fur, human hair and grass. Hanging from it were dead lizards, usually a bird, her slingshot, her digging stick and a bark pouch full of seeds and another full of fine bird bones to make fish hooks. They tied long straight sticks under their feet so they didn’t sink when walking in the thick mud. The grass came up soft and green, gentle on their feet, the babblers and the honeyeaters called to them and sometimes a bunch of lorikeets, the wirrilijkel, would follow them, flying in a noisy rainbow from tree to tree.
Wirritjil became fussy with her food. She checked all the lizards. She wouldn’t eat woman lizards and she wouldn’t eat sugarbag or chew on bush gum. Her belly was round and high, the skin tightening across the front.
16
Turtle man
For many days Emily and Wirritjil travelled south. The rain had settled to light showers and the ground was moist and steamy in places but easy to walk across. They came to the Fitzroy River. It was wide and brown on the flat plain and seemed sluggish, but the swirling eddies of leaves and sailing branches of torn trees revealed the underlying speed and power of the swollen waters.
Wirritjil pointed downstream. ‘Thatta away mebbee janpawurrum.’
‘What is that, janpawurrum?’
‘Big one, eat ’em, fish, fella.’
‘Crocodile? Saltwater crocodile?’
‘We stay here bit,’ said Wirritjil.
Emily crouched at the edge of the brown water. The wetted mud was higher than the shoreline. The river, for the moment at least, was subsiding. The eastern sky had been clear of storms for a few days and to the west were only threads of fine cirrus clouds.
Wirritjil hooked floating pieces of wood out of the water. She made a raft of strange shapes, tying the broken branches with ropes of string and vine. She tested it and frowned as one log darkened quickly, soaking the water. She undid the bindings and began again. Emily kicked the fine-grained slurry of mud at the water’s edge and wondered how she had ever thought that mud was dirty.
‘Wirritjil, what if you could choose a moment and make it last forever—what moment would you choose?’
Wirritjil was squatting beside the jumbled wood. She looked up. ‘Moment?’ she said uncertainly.
‘Yes, a moment is like right now, or that moment when we were swimming yesterday.’
Wirritjil shrugged. She had learnt that from Emily.
‘I liked that moment that day in the clear pond when we couldn’t catch the ducks and they skidded across the water and all that gold and silver from the sun was falling through the water onto us.’ Emily laughed. ‘More gold and silver than Lady Josephina could ever dream about.’
She squatted next to Wirritjil. ‘Little bit time.’ She held the tips of her thumb and index finger close. ‘Moment.’
Wirritjil waggled her hand and got back to work.
Emily sat back onto the ground. ‘It is all one big moment for you, isn’t it?’
Wirritjil pushed hard with her feet on the wood, pulling the binding tight. She took a couple of strides into the bush and came back with a limb stripped except for the leaves at the end. Emily watched as the Aboriginal woman stood on the side of the river bending low, stroking the water, demonstrating how to use a tree-branch paddle.
On the third day, the edges of the water had receded several feet and the small whirlpools and eddies had slowed. The cirrus clouds in the west had thickened with round deep edges, overlapping each other like fish scales.
‘We go,’ said Wirritjil.
The raft dropped with their weight so that there was an inch or two of water above but it did not sink. Emily paddled furiously but Wirritjil just dipped her branch in now and again. They swung in a circle. Wirritjil pointed to a large tree on the other side a distance downstream. Emily realised then that she did not have to fight the river; small movements of the paddle would take them gradually across to the other shore. The two women eased the raft across. Wirritjil jumped into the shallow water. Emily scrutinised the water and the banks for any hint of crocodiles and stepped in. The raft spun slowly back into the main flow.
They headed south-west. The rain came in patches and in between the fierce sun dried the land.
They saw the straight line of smoke that comes through a chimney long before they saw the homestead. Wirritjil tugged at Emily to go around, but Emily was drawn to it.
‘We need clothes again, Wirritjil. We are getting close to Broome. Kathryn will be waiting for us. We should not appear like savages.’ Emily laughed at her own words and took Wirritjil’s hand. ‘Come, my savage sister.’
Dar
k clouds, broken by the sun and chased by high winds, skidded in black pockets across the sky. The women crept past empty sheds and a yard that had a few horses and two chained, heat-bitten dogs that did not bother to look up. They paused at a line of stunted she-oaks at the perimeter of the homestead yard. The trees had tubular leaves knotted with cobwebs and the branches were dusty and smelt of possums.
A woman dressed in a floral shift to her ankles and oversized riding boots pegged clothes on several strands of wire hooked up between two poles. A breeze whipped her dress close to her body and the clothes flapped on the line. She shaded her eyes and peered at the sky, then picked up her washing basket and walked into the house.
There was one window in the back of the corrugated-iron building. It was a panel of iron and wood that had been propped open with a piece of wood. The back door to the house was a sheet of corrugated iron already rusting in places. The woman closed it behind her.
Emily searched for a face at the window, but there was only darkness. She and Wirritjil edged back so they could see the front of the house. There the woman sat on a chair on the earthen veranda, sewing. Wirritjil pointed to a swirl of birds disturbed in the distance, and then another, closer to the homestead. They had to act quickly. Emily ran to the clothesline. She slipped the pegs off, pulling the clothes into a bundle, then paused, overawed by the feel of the fabrics. She wanted more.
Emily’s arms were full. She ran to reach Wirritjil and they headed away through the scrub.
They stopped where the bushes were close enough to give them cover from the house. They examined the clothes; dresses, underwear and men’s shirts. Emily laughed. She threw away the torn miner’s trousers hanging from her belt.
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