The White Earth

by Andrew McGahan

  It could end that way, if William so chose.

  And he would have to choose soon.

  He gazed out at the plains. It was almost fully dark now, a dusky, somehow expectant night. From below on the hill came the sound of a man whistling. Presently the station manager, Mr Drury, appeared, walking up from the sheds. He passed by the front gate and lifted a hand, cheerful.

  ‘Heard the news?’ he called.

  He didn’t wait for an answer, disappearing around to the back of the House. The whistling faded away, and the silence of the evening bore down on William.

  What news?

  He went back inside. His mother was not in their apartment, but the television was on, the flickering screen bright in the dimness. William saw a satellite map of Australia. It was a weather report. Then suddenly he knelt before the TV, staring. For the northwestern edge of the continent was hidden under a swathe of cloud, a giant white swirl feeding in off the depths of the ocean. As William watched the map changed, and the clouds were replaced by a pattern of deep blue, shot through with intense pulses of green and orange. In time lapse animation the sheet of colour was moving slowly southeast across the continent. The weatherman chattered on excitedly, but William didn’t need to listen. He knew what the tide of blue, and the blazes of green and orange, signified.

  The rains have failed, the visions had told him. The rivers have run dry.

  But rain was coming now.

  Chapter Forty-one

  IN BED THAT NIGHT, WILLIAM ROLLED MISERABLY FOR HOURS, unable to sleep. His whole body was aching, and every time he closed his eyes he saw the lurid colours of clouds on a weather map. Why did that picture disturb him so much? Rain was a good thing — he knew how desperately the station needed it. And yet, after sleep finally came, those same colours pulsed ominously in his dreams. When he woke next morning he was almost afraid that rain would already be whispering on the roof. But when he climbed painfully out of bed and looked at the sky from the porch, the day was still hot and fine and crackling with sterility. Nor was there any hint of a change on the horizon.

  But William’s unease remained, as did his illness. He had no appetite for breakfast, and spent the morning lying in front of the television, drifting in a low fever. Waves of nausea came and went. His mother was getting ready to go to Powell, to do the Christmas shopping.

  ‘I’ll get decorations,’ she said,mustering a wan smile, belied by her eyes. ‘And a little tree. We can’t do up the whole House, but we can make it nice in here.’

  William nodded, barely listening.

  ‘Will…’ she began helplessly, then gave up and departed, purse in hand.

  At midday, the weather report came on. The satellite image showed the great sheet of cloud crawling across the map. It was still a vibrant mass of blue and green and orange, and the foremost fringes of it had already touched the western border of Queensland … but that was still hundreds of miles away. The whole system was moving slower than expected.‘Late tonight,’ said the weatherman, ‘for those watching in southeast Queensland. Or perhaps early tomorrow.’

  William closed his eyes and tried to imagine puddles in the yard, the rattle of water in the drainpipes. He couldn’t do it. Instead he was haunted by the visions he had seen in the hills. They had not spoken of rain falling, but of the drought, and of the rivers drying up. It had sounded like a warning, as if there was something urgent they wanted him to find, something that the drought had laid bare. Caves have opened to the sun. And yet William had found nothing. Unless it was something he had missed. Or something he had seen, but failed to recognise…

  ‘Your uncle wants you.’

  William opened his eyes. Mrs Griffith stood in the living room doorway. He sat up, disorientated. The housekeeper never came into their apartment.

  ‘Upstairs,’ she said.‘Now.’

  The summons was upon him.

  William stared hopelessly. He still had no idea what he could say to satisfy the old man, or if he even wanted to try. He was confused about so many things. But the call could not be refused. He rose and followed Mrs Griffith through the hallways, watching the bitter hunch of her shoulders. At least he understood her a little now. It was the House and the station that had made her the way she was. The lure of them, eating at her mind. William had felt the same thing happening to himself — and he had suffered it for only a few months, not an entire lifetime.

  They came to the stairs, but William paused, for at the end of the hallway the door to the office opened, and Ruth emerged. She had a pen in her mouth and a sheaf of papers in her hand, and her grey head was bent, reading. She looked up and saw them there.

  ‘Will,’ she said, sounding surprised.

  He had forgotten all about her.

  She came down the hall, her eyes serious.‘Should you be out of bed?’

  ‘I’m okay,’ he said. But her presence threw him off balance. He realised that he had not even had the chance to thank Ruth for saving him.

  ‘You don’t look okay.’ She glanced disapprovingly at Mrs Griffith.

  The housekeeper returned the glare. ‘His uncle wants to see him.’

  Ruth ignored her. She squatted down to William’s level. ‘You don’t have to do anything he says, you know. Not after what he’s done.’

  ‘He … I wasn’t supposed to get lost.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter what was supposed to happen.’ Her gaze held his, until William had to look away. ‘Okay,’ she decided. ‘But I’ll come with you.’

  William looked up at the housekeeper. Her eyes darted back and forth between them, the daughter and nephew. ‘It’s none of my doing,’ she declared, and made off towards her own apartment.

  Ruth watched her go, shaking her head.‘Come on.’

  But she led William back down the hall, not upstairs. He felt swept away. His uncle was waiting, but his cousin had intervened and the day was veering off course.

  ‘Thank you for finding me,’ he mumbled.

  She waved a hand. ‘I don’t blame you. I blame my father for sending you out there in the first place. And your mother for letting him.’

  ‘She had to,’ William broke in. ‘She has to do what he says.’

  ‘And how much longer would she have left you there? A week? A month?’

  They had reached the office. It was even more of a shambles than usual. William could see that Ruth had ransacked the drawers and cupboards. Piles of yellowing papers and maps were spread across the room. She cleared some space on a chair for him, returned to her own behind the desk.

  ‘Sorry about the mess. There were some things I wanted to make sure of, and I didn’t have much time.’ She paused.‘Have you seen the news on TV?’

  ‘About the rain?’

  ‘No, not the rain — the Native Title legislation. Remember? The Senate has almost finished debating. Parliament rises for the Christmas break tomorrow, so the vote is set for tonight. The minor parties are making their last-ditch amendments right now. It’s close. It’s literally down to a vote or two.’

  William was nonplussed. What did it matter? His uncle had told him that the station was safe, whether Native Title was law or not. But Ruth was watching him, aglow now with some suppressed excitement.

  ‘Believe me, Will, if it does pass, nothing is going to be the same around here.’

  William’s brow wrinkled in puzzlement.‘Why?’

  ‘Information has come to light, that’s why. I’ve been doing some checking in Brisbane. And then on my way back here, I stopped in at Cherbourg.’

  He stared at her blankly.

  She smiled. ‘It’s a small town a couple of hours from here, on the other side of the mountains. It used to be an Aboriginal mission. These days it’s an all black self-governing community. I told you about it, remember? It’s where the last people from Kuran Station were sent to in 1911.’

  William felt an abrupt shifting of the ground.

  ‘It’s a strange place to visit — off away on a dead-end road, and yo
u can still see the gates that would have been shut when it was a reserve, to keep whites out and blacks in. But in other ways it’s quite nice. There’s a cultural centre now. That’s where I started asking. I wanted to know if anyone in town could trace links back to Kuran Station. They got all suspicious. Who was I and why did I want to know? It seems that all sorts of people have been visiting the community lately, asking questions about who came from where originally. White people, worried about land claims.’

  Her smile had gone sharp.

  ‘The folk at Cherbourg thought that I was trying to stop a land claim, you see. Once I cleared that up, they were more helpful. But getting answers still wasn’t easy. After all, families from right across Queensland ended up at that mission, and everything is mixed up now. But they asked around, and finally they brought in an old woman, and she said yes, she knew a bit about Kuran Station in the old days. What’s more, she could name other people who did too.’

  William listened through his growing uncertainty. ‘She came from here?’

  ‘Not just her. There were six or seven old women in the end. Of course, none of them had actually grown up on the station. It was over eighty years ago,after all. But their mothers came from here, or their grandmothers, and stories had been passed down. What stories, I wanted to know. But then they went all quiet and careful again. Whywas I asking? What businesswas it of mine? They thought I was just prying where I shouldn’t be. But I wasn’t just prying, Will. It is my business, as much as it is theirs. And this is the proof.’

  She picked up something from beside her chair, dropped it on the desk.

  ‘My hat,’ said William, startled.

  The smile was gone. ‘It isn’t yours. It belonged to my grandfather.’

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘But Uncle John said I could wear it.

  ‘Indeed. What was it you told me — you thought it was an army hat?’

  ‘I knew it wasn’t, not really.’

  She was holding up the hat, so that William could observe the badge. ‘You see the letters? QMP? I was right, they stand for Queensland Mounted Police. So I looked up the records. They’re sketchy, but yes, a Daniel McIvor is mentioned. He joined the force in 1888, when he was very young. He served for seven years and then left. And that was it. No big deal. Except that he wasn’t just an ordinary mounted policeman. He was part of a special detachment.’ She cast the cap aside. ‘They were called the Queensland Native Mounted Police. And that hat is a rarity. No complete uniform from the detachment survives. Not even the Police Museum has one.’

  William frowned. He already knew that her grandfather had been a policeman. Did it matter exactly what sort of policeman?

  Ruth was considering the painted walls.

  ‘You have to understand, Will — the history of Queensland settlement was a little different from states like New South Wales or Victoria. One of the differences was that there were more Aborigines in Queensland than down south, and so when white people tried to move out and settle the bush, there was more trouble. The tribes were warlike, and they weren’t going to stand aside and lose their land. They killed quite a few whites in the more remote areas. At times it got so bad, especially up north and out west, that whole white communities went into a panic and evacuated. The government decided they had to do something, so they set up a special troop. The Native Police. There were over one hundred of them, at their height. Quite an army for those days. And their job was to make sure that the Aborigines didn’t bother the white settlers. Their orders were to “disperse” any troublesome blacks. And the thing was, no one ever really defined what “disperse” might mean.’

  William too looked at the walls, at the faded images of old England, and then at the ghostly riders in Australia, trailing after their sheep.

  ‘The word itself means to break up, to scatter, to chase away. And sometimes that’s all the Native Police did. Ran the blacks off, or arrested them. Other times, however, they just shot them all. No one knows how often exactly, because the Native Police didn’t keep official records. The old reports speak only in euphemisms.“We dispersed this tribe, we dispersed that tribe.” It could mean hundreds of dead, it could mean thousands. But the Native Police operated all up and down Queensland, and they went on “dispersing” for over thirty years. It got so awful that it disturbed white people, even back then. There were complaints and inquiries. But that didn’t stop the killing.’

  And inevitably, William found his eyes drawn to that corner of the mural where the dark faces huddled. Were they lying in wait for the white men, he had always wondered, or were they hiding in fear? And now that he looked more attentively — were there rifles in the riders’ hands?

  Ruth’s voice was flat. ‘My grandfather was one of them. He slaughtered blacks for a living,and wore this hat while he was doing it. It’s an officer’s cap, by the way. The officers were the only white men in the Native Police. The private troopers were all Aborigines from New South Wales and Victoria, trained and armed. Who better to hunt down and kill blacks than other blacks, right?’

  Wide eyes stared out from the walls, and the glimmer of teeth.

  ‘Is that what happened here?’ William asked faintly.

  Ruth gave an odd laugh. Then she shook her head.‘Officially, the Native Police never had anything to do with Kuran Station. The first troop was only formed around 1860. By then, there was no need for them on the Darling Downs. The real troubles were further out on the frontier. As far as I can tell, my grandfather was stationed mostly in the far north, where the blacks kept causing problems right into the late 1890s. But after that the Native Police were disbanded, and he was out of a job.’

  She fixed William with her stare.

  ‘He kept hold of his gun, though. He used to carry it with him, when he worked here. And obviously he kept that hat. I know you don’t really understand, Will, but my father’s had you dressed up in the Australian equivalent of an SS uniform.’

  William studied the cap. No, he didn’t understand her, but it seemed darker now, and heavier. And yet he remembered the feel of it on his head, the pleasant weight of the badge. And he remembered the men from the League, Terry and Henry, and the way they had laughed and saluted and called him Captain Bill. They had thought it was all for fun.

  But then another memory came, of night, and of cicadas shrilling, and of a shapeless creature with glaring eyes. You bear the mark, boy. Yes…he had borne that hat like a beacon the whole time he was in the hills. The murderous shepherd had recognised it, and drawn away. The explorer had saluted its authority. And the bunyip had regarded it with ancient hostility. But why? The Native Police had never been on the station, his cousin had just told him they hadn’t. Whatever her grandfather had done with his black troopers, it had happened miles away from here, in some other part of the state.

  Ruth was gathering her papers.

  ‘So, those women at Cherbourg, I said to them,“You bet it’s my business. My grandfather was out there wading in Aboriginal blood.” That got through to them. But I didn’t tell them the very worst thing about my grandfather. I haven’t told you yet, either. I’m saving that for your uncle. He’s the one who needs to hear it first.’

  William gazed at her, shaken by doubts.

  ‘Do you still want to go up to see him?’ she asked.

  He didn’t know. He felt dizzy again, half drawn back into the dream-world of the hills. The things he had seen and heard, the messages, the warnings, the hat, the coming rain — they were all linked somehow. And the answer seemed to dance tantalisingly close.

  His cousin held out a hand.‘C’mon then. Let’s go up.’

  Chapter Forty-two

  HIGH IN THE WHITE CHAMBER, JOHN MCIVOR FOUGHT AGAINST delirium as he waited for his nephew.

  A fever throbbed within him, mirroring the heat of the room, and he could feel his twice-scarred heart beating febrile in his chest. He was seventy-nine years old, and he was probably dying. Not his mind — his mind was alive in a way it had seldom bee
n before. Oh, but his body…

  Pain flared, and he strove to shift his limbs, sweating with the effort.

  He was so weak. How he hated the indignity he had suffered these last months, having to be fed and nursed like an infant. And by the boy’s useless mother, no less. In fact, he was surrounded now by women he did not want. Veronica, and the old housekeeper, they were vultures the both of them, circling, eager to pick at his carcass. But worse by far was his daughter, the poisonous child. If only he could rise from his bed and physically cast her out. Cast all of them out.

  He groaned, rolling his head across the pillow.

  And for a bewildering instant it seemed as if his father was there in the room with him. A stern, silent, giant of a man, his gun at his side, and dressed in a uniform.

  That was Ruth’s fault as well. This fuss about William’s hat. In some ways, she had seemed angrier about the hat than she had about William being sent out alone. You’d think he’d given the boy a snake to play with. And yet, there was no denying the rest of it — his daughter’s revelation had been an unpleasant surprise. John had never known the details of his father’s police career, until now.

  ‘You didn’t tell me,’ he complained to the empty room.

  And for a moment, something inside John quailed. The Native Police — was that the taint that had smeared his father so long ago?

  He banished the doubt. Of course not. It was no shame to have served with the Native Police. They had performed a necessary duty, that was all. Did his daughter think that Australia had been claimed as easily as walking onto the land and taking it? No, it had been fought for, like land anywhere in the world. Declarations of war and treaties meant nothing in the end. There was only the reality of occupation, and it was a brutal business.

  ‘Whites were dying too, remember,’ he muttered.