The White Earth

by Andrew McGahan

  Vacant hostility dulled her voice. William became fully awake in recognition and alarm. Her bathrobe had fallen open to reveal the cleft of her thin chest, sweat sheened upon it. And lying nearby on the floor was a small bottle, empty of pills.

  ‘Are you okay?’ he asked.

  ‘I took him his breakfast,’ she said, her dead gaze finally drifting from the TV, up to the ceiling. ‘He wouldn’t eat it. He told me to get out.’

  William’s heart wrung with concern. He hadn’t seen his mother like this in months — not since the days after his father’s death. She was at a stage far beyond the migraines or the nervous hand-wringing. This was the mood of deep blackness that descended upon her at times, a dark river that swept her mind away and left her body behind.

  ‘It’s her he wants,’ she said. ‘I know it.’

  ‘Mum…’

  ‘She was here before.’ Her slurred speech became bitter.‘Your new friend. Your cousin. She was looking for you.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She glared at William from under her puffed eyelids. ‘Well? You’re the one who let her stay. So if she wants you, go.’

  ‘I didn’t…’

  ‘Go on!’ Fury roused her momentarily. ‘Before she throws both of us out on the street!’ She lurched forward and her robe fell open further, revealing scrawny breasts. ‘She’ll do it! She’s turned your uncle against us! That’s why she’s here!’

  William fled in dismay.

  He found Ruth on the front porch.

  ‘Will,’ she said gravely.

  He squinted at her in the hot light.

  ‘I saw your mother earlier. Is she all right?’

  But he couldn’t accept the sympathy in her voice. His mother was sick, that was all, she wasn’t to blame. And it was no one else’s business.‘Did you want me?’ he asked.

  Ruth nodded, seeming to understand. She brightened. ‘Are you busy today? I thought you might be my guide.’

  ‘Guide?’

  ‘I want to see some of this station of yours.’

  ‘It isn’t mine.’

  Ruth only smiled.

  ‘Where do you want to go then?’ he asked.

  ‘Wherever you think.’

  William thought wearily. His cousin was dressed in jeans and T-shirt and boots, as if she meant to go exploring far afield. And if she went far enough, she might come across the campground and the ring of stones. She might even discover the water hole. But those places were secret.

  ‘I can show you the graveyard,’ he said. ‘It’s not far. We can walk there.’

  ‘A graveyard?’ She considered the idea. ‘Actually, I’d like that. Better put a hat on though. That sun is pretty fierce.’

  So William went back to his flat. He could hear sobbing from the main bedroom. He blotted out the sound, grabbed his captain’s hat, then returned to Ruth on the porch.

  She was examining one of the pillars that supported the upper verandah.

  ‘It’s beautiful sandstone, this. They quarried it locally, you know. And all the timber was local too, red cedar and pine, from the mountains. The only thing they needed to import was the slate for the roof. The whole thing cost an absolute fortune.’

  William stared for a moment, puzzled once more.

  But they set out across the garden and over the crumbled section of the wall, then walked up through the paddock towards the crown of the hill. The heat was searing out there, the whole hillside dusty and dry, and grass crunched as brittle as glass under their feet.

  ‘I’ve got a confession to make,’ Ruth said.

  He looked up at her.

  ‘I know a little more about this station than I’ve let on.’

  ‘Like how the House was built?’

  She nodded. ‘It’s a funny thing. It’s like — well, imagine you were married, and your wife ran off with another man, someone you’d never met. You’d be angry. But you’d be curious too, wouldn’t you, about what this other man was like?’

  William screwed up his face. ‘I guess so.’

  ‘Well, I was curious about Kuran Station. So I did some research. And it wasn’t hard to find things out. You know that this place was quite famous once, don’t you?’

  ‘I know.’ But he found her admission disturbing.

  They came to the top of the hill, pausing to take in the view. There was little to see. Haze still masked the horizon, the plains were a blur, and smoke blanketed the mountains. It was a dreary world, a monotone of dead grass and scorched trees and bare earth. Droughts were pale brown, William decided. Not red or yellow or black, but the ugliest, drabbest brown imaginable.

  ‘I’ve never seen it this bad,’ his cousin sighed. She was a little breathless after the climb. ‘I grew up on a farm out there, you know. Just like you did. We could see it from here, if it wasn’t so hazy.’

  ‘You could see mine too.’

  She looked at him.‘Do you miss it? Your farm?’

  ‘Sometimes,’ he said, thinking of his mother in tears.

  ‘I drove past our old place on the way here. It was all gone. The house, the sheds, knocked down and ploughed under. No sign we were ever there.’ Ruth lit a cigarette, gazed around at the hills.‘My father never liked it anyway. This is what he always wanted.’

  ‘It goes all the way to the mountains,’ William offered.

  ‘And the original station was even bigger, wasn’t it? I’ve seen the old maps. It reached about as far as we can see in every direction from up here.’

  ‘That’s what the settlers did. They stood up here and everything they could see, that’s what they got.’

  She smiled.‘Your uncle told you that?’

  ‘He said there was nothing here when they first came, and sometimes they died.’

  ‘Yes, some of them died, true enough.’

  But her agreement was offhand, and suddenly it seemed important to William that she understand what he was saying. ‘The explorer who found Kuran Station, he died right here. There was a statue of him, in front of the House, in the fountain.’

  She puffed on her cigarette. ‘You know, no one really found Kuran. And it wasn’t empty. Other people were already here.’

  ‘I know that,’ he insisted.‘They were the ones who killed the explorer.’

  Her smiled had thinned. ‘I’m sure my father told you that, too.’ She studied the plains again. ‘I was reading once about Allan Cunningham, the explorer. When he first saw the Darling Downs, it was in conditions like this — there were fires everywhere, and smoke.’

  ‘Was there a drought?’

  ‘No. It was summer, though. Cunningham thought that maybe the fires had been started by lightning strikes setting the grass alight. You know how this was all savanna, before it was settled? No forests or anything, just miles and miles of grass?’

  William nodded, remembering. Grass as high as men on horseback.

  ‘That’s what the fires were really about,’ his cousin said. ‘The Aborigines lit them. Every summer, apparently, they burned the plains clean through. That way they had fresh green grass every year, and so more animals would come down from the hills for them to hunt. The Aborigines never let any trees grow. The last thing they wanted was for the plains to be covered in scrub. The problem was, they did too good a job. A hundred and fifty years ago, the squatters came along and saw all that beautiful grass. And they thought, wow, won’t this be perfect for cattle and sheep. And aren’t we lucky that all this pasture is just sitting here, with no one using it. So they marched on in.’

  Ruth stubbed her cigarette out on her heel.

  ‘Can’t really blame the Aborigines for getting a little upset, can you? All that work they’d put in, year after year — gone. No wonder they speared the odd white man.’

  William blinked in uncertainty. His uncle had said that there were no trees on the plains because the black soil couldn’t support them. He hadn’t said anything about fires.

  Ruth turned eastwards.‘So where’s this grave
yard?’

  They broached the rise, and then tramped down towards the church. It looked even more ruinous than normal, now that all the grass and weeds about it had died. Ruth barely glanced at the little building, passing straight on to the cemetery. The headstones reared up starkly from bare earth. William followed her from stone to stone, staring at the worn inscriptions.

  ‘The Whites,’ she said, oddly satisfied. ‘I was hoping they’d be here.’

  ‘You know about them?’

  ‘Oh yes. Do you?’

  ‘I know they built the House.’

  ‘That’s right, the great homestead. Their finest memorial.’ She kicked thoughtfully at the dust.‘I’ll make another confession, Will. I actually agree with your uncle about one thing. I don’t want the House fixed up either. I wouldn’t care if it fell in a heap tomorrow.’

  ‘But you said—’

  ‘I said the Heritage Trust wants it restored. I didn’t say I did. Oh, I know, it’s a pioneer landmark. And I’m sure you’ve heard how important the Whites were, carving out a station in the wilderness, and how that means we should preserve their House. But all they really did was get here first, grab as much as they could, and then keep everyone else away. When other people came out here, looking for a bit of land, there wasn’t a scrap left. Just ‘No Trespassing’ signs for twenty miles in every direction. Those people would have looked up at the House and hated it.’

  ‘But the station got broken up,’ William protested.‘It’s all little farms now.’

  ‘Now, yes. Not before a lot of misery, though.’

  They came at last to the biggest tomb, with its crumbling angels standing guard. William saw that the hole beneath the gravestone was still there, only now it looked like an empty crack in which nothing lived. Ruth shook her head, smiling tightly.

  ‘And here’s the great man himself — the last of the Pure Merinos.’ She crouched down before the tomb. ‘It’s strange — everyone thinks Edward White was so impressive. But I’ve read some of the speeches he gave in parliament. He was as slimy as they come. He lied and cheated and bribed, anything to protect his property. He held up development in this region for thirty or forty years. The best thing the old fraud ever did was die and get out of the way.’

  William stared at the grave in perplexity. His cousin was confusing him yet again. Why was it that nothing seemed simple or straightforward around her?

  Ruth had picked up a chunk of stone: a carved hand, from one of the angels, snapped off at the wrist.‘I’m surprised my father has left this such a mess. He always admired Edward. I think he wanted to be like him. And I guess he is, now. Another old man, clinging on to this bloody station for dear life.’ She glanced wryly at William.‘Sorry, I know you’ve been told how wonderful Kuran and its history is. But I really don’t like the place.’

  William watched her uneasily.

  ‘I was supposed to like it, you know. My father wanted all this for me, once. Or at least, that was his excuse. He never asked me about it though. And, in the end, when I told him I wasn’t interested, he threw me out of home.’

  She tossed the angel’s hand aside, and it cracked in two against the tomb.

  ‘That’s what happens when you don’t agree with him.’ Something cold danced in her eyes.‘Lucky that he found you then, isn’t it? You’ll always agree.’

  William felt his face reddening.

  ‘It’s all right, Will. What else could you do? But just remember, he’s not really doing you any favours. Or your mother. This inheritance business is for his sake, not yours. So that his precious station survives after he’s gone.’

  Ruth lifted her gaze once more to the hills, and the coldness faded.

  ‘But maybe it shouldn’t survive. I don’t think this piece of land has ever brought anyone much happiness. Not the Aborigines. They just saw it get taken away. Not the Whites. It only made them hated. Not my mother. It cost her a husband, and me a father. I don’t think it’s even made Dad happy. Not really. Just look at him.’

  She stood up, dusting off her hands.

  ‘In fact, if I were you, I’m not sure I’d be so keen to take what he’s offering.’

  And, finally, William understood.

  His mother had it wrong — Ruth didn’t want to turn her father against them, or to throw them out on the street. It was the other way around. She wanted to turn William against her father.

  Chapter Thirty-five

  THEY STRUCK BACK TOWARDS THE HOUSE.

  William walked in sullen silence. He felt tricked. All Ruth’s talk, all this time she had spent with him — he saw now that it was just to make his uncle sound hateful, and the station too. She was trying to convince him that the inheritance wasn’t worth accepting. He even guessed her deeper purpose here. What she really wanted was for her father to be left to die alone, without anyone to follow in his footsteps, or to keep his station alive. Because that was exactly what she had done, long ago. It was a terrible thing to want. And she pretended to be so kind!

  They crested the hilltop, and there was the House below them again. This was the worst angle from which to see the building, with the swayback roof revealed, ill-patched with tin, and the walls scabrous with ivy that had died and shrivelled and turned brown. But it had been beautiful once, William knew. It didn’t matter who had built it or what those people had been like. It was his home now. Ruth had no right to make it sound like something shameful.

  They walked down and climbed over the wall. Finally they stood before the fountain, its truncated pedestal sticking up from the empty bowl.

  Ruth considered it. ‘An explorer you said?’

  ‘He’s buried under the House. Mrs Griffith told me.’

  ‘Mrs Griffith? I wouldn’t put too much stock in that, then.’

  ‘Uncle John said they found the bones.’

  ‘Maybe. There are probably a lot of bones around here — but mostly they’d be black, not white. And you don’t see any memorials to them.’

  William had had enough. The ache in his ear was back, and all he wanted to do was get away from the heat and the sun. And from his cousin.

  ‘Can I go inside?’

  ‘No.’ The friendliness was gone from Ruth. ‘I see your face, Will, whenever I mention Aborigines. It closes right up. So you’re going to hear this. God knows, no one else in this House will ever tell you.’ She settled herself on the lip on the fountain. ‘When I was a girl, I used to help my father on our old farm. Sometimes the plough would dig up sharpened stones. But what were they doing in the middle of a black soil plain, where there should be no stones at all? My father said they were axes. The Aborigines had carried them there — from the mountains perhaps. But he didn’t seem very interested, so neither was I, at the time. Did you ever see anything like that on your farm?’

  William shook his head stubbornly.

  ‘Well, they’re quite common. Now a stone axe would have been important to its owner. They didn’t grow on trees. They took time to make. And yet they’re lying all over the plains, as if they were just thrown away like Coke cans. Why do you think that is?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Because their owners died, that’s why. No one knows for sure how many Aborigines lived here on the Downs. Maybe three thousand, maybe six thousand. No one bothered to count. At least, not until about fifty years after Europeans arrived, when the government did a survey. By then, in the whole region, there were just over one hundred Aborigines left. The government gathered the last of them up in 1911, packed them off to the Cherbourg mission, and that was that.’

  Impatience simmered in William. He didn’t care about any of this. And anyway, nothing she said could be trusted.

  But his cousin wasn’t finished. ‘The same thing happened on this station — for all that my father would like to forget it. This land belonged to the Kuran people. No one knows how many of them there were either — but after a few decades of settlement, they numbered less than twenty. The survivors used to live righ
t here around the House, and if they were lucky they got blankets and flour. But by 1911, time was up. They were shipped off with all the others. And that’s why, to this day, you’ll barely see a black face in this part of the world.’ She eyed him knowingly. ‘And my father is lucky it happened that way, otherwise he might really have a Native Title claim to worry about.’

  William stayed silent.

  ‘Come on. I’ve read your uncle’s newsletters, remember. Don’t try and tell me you don’t know about Native Title. What do you think that whole rally was for?’

  He spoke at last, out of resentment. ‘It was about stopping a bad law.’

  ‘A bad law?’ She appeared to ponder the notion.‘Maybe it is bad. Most likely it’s unworkable. Black, white, no one’s really happy about it.’ Her eyes were on William again. ‘But I’m interested — why do you think it’s a bad law?’

  ‘It’s unfair.’

  ‘Unfair? To who?’

  William felt the importance of the question. She was challenging him, and his uncle too, so he strove to be defiant. ‘People will lose their farms,’ he said.

  ‘Rubbish.’

  ‘They will. Out west.’

  Ruth shook her head patiently. ‘You’re talking about pastoral leases. And this new law actually rules out claims on those sorts of properties. Of course, the Aboriginal land councils won’t stand for that, they’ll test it in court, so who knows — but at most, it’s only about sharing access. And only if the tribes can prove that they’ve had a continuous connection with the land in question, which is going to be a big problem. But no matter what, absolutely no one is going to get kicked off their farm.’

  William knew that he was missing some vital point of the argument, but he was becoming furious with her.‘It’s a stupid law. It’s just what people in the cities want. They don’t care, because nothing will happen to them.’

  She shook her head, disappointed. ‘That’s your uncle talking.’

  He dredged his memory. ‘The blacks are gone. You just want to rewrite history.’

  ‘And those racist idiots in the League…’

  ‘They’re not idiots!’