by Sue Woolfe
We both paused. But then she reached out a forefinger to touch my arm. She’d never touched me before. From her fine velvety finger, it was almost a caress.
I looked down at my arm, astounded to see her finger lingering on my skinny wrist.
‘Kate.’ She paused. ‘I sorry for what I done.’
Tears started in my eyes. I buckled with shame that I’d resented being bossed by someone in need, shamed that I’d resented someone who’d been coerced into servitude by my people, whose kin had been massacred by mine, a long time ago but still by my people, someone whose pain about that was incomprehensible to me. My shame became a sob, and tears flooded my face.
‘Adrian said you don’t know the Aboriginal people, what we do.’
I was jolted by the simple grandeur of her words. I had no words in return, just tears, just my body. I was only, irretrievably and exclusively, a European, though I’d unthinkingly expected her to be European like me, to be adept in what it means to be one. In that moment I disgraced myself. I stepped close to her, as close as I’d ever been with Diana, in fact, I forgot all about Diana. I threw my arms around her, my bag and all.
She flinched slightly in surprise. After the tiniest pause, her arms came around me to hug me back.
‘He’s right. I don’t know anything, Dora,’ I managed to say into her blouse.
When we drew apart, I remembered enough to downcast my eyes. I gazed at the verandah, then almost the colour of the desert around us, glowing dusty red in the dawn.
At that moment, Adrian came out the front door. He pretended not to see us, though he had to skirt around us in a wide circle, ducking his head under the droop of the clothesline.
I found something else to say to her.
‘Would you like me to sew up your blouse?’
It was a successful diversion.
‘It’s back at –’ her head was thrown in the direction of her house.
‘Any time,’ I said, in the hope that something would continue between us; I wanted her friendship, but I already knew that it was a hopeless wish. Gillian had told me Collins explained there was no word for friendship in Djemiranga. ‘Who needs friends when you have hundreds of relatives!’ she’d said, and there’d been yearning in her voice. She’d added, however, there seemed to be a word for life-lasting friendship, but that it was only for birds.
‘Dora – you did a great job on the house,’ Adrian suddenly called over his shoulder. He was at the gate.
She nodded. ‘Took a while,’ she called to him.
‘The house?’ I asked them both.
‘Took a while,’ she said again.
‘What do you mean?’ I asked.
But she’d scooped up her blanket and was walking her straight-backed, dignified barefooted walk out to the troopie.
I went into our kitchen. I’d never seen it so clean. All the washing-up had been freshly done, the plates and cups were gleaming and even the inside of the teapot had been scrubbed and was draining on a tea towel. The spills and spots on the cupboard doors and the stove had vanished, so everything looked new. The kitchen lino was swept and freshly mopped. The cobwebs that used to be tiny hammocks of red dust at the corners of the windows were there no longer. The wasp nests of red dust, like tiny edifices, were gone. The windows sparkled. In the living room, the carpets were swept, that windswept look that was the tell-tale sign of a stiff straw broom, not a vacuum cleaner. The armchairs were arranged conversationally, with no abandoned open books or out-of-date newspapers. The bathroom glowed clean and sweet-smelling. The beds were all made, the rooms tidied, the windows half-opened to let in the desert air.
I ran out the door to say something, something European, I didn’t know what, something like thank you, but the street was empty of everything except new sunlight. I could just hear the engine of the troopie labouring over the hillocks of the shortcut in the direction of town.
For the next twenty-four hours, I worked on my recordings, puzzling over them, charging my computer and battery in the times when I had electricity. It rained, so outside fires were impossible, and I cooked meals when the stove worked and ate biscuits when it didn’t. For a break, I hung around the shop and listened to the people. I was beginning, or thought I was beginning, to hear pauses between words so that I no longer seemed to be listening to an unbroken stream of sound. I thought I recognised a word every now and then – one word out of hundreds, and always only at a sentence’s end.
‘A politician is coming to the settlement,’ Adrian told me over breakfast when he returned, bringing back Daniel, Gillian, Sister and Sister’s daughter, but not Nick, who’d taken stress leave, or Dr Lydia, who’d resigned, much to Sister’s jubilation.
‘Stuck-up idiot,’ she said. ‘I knew when I first clapped eyes on her she wouldn’t last.’
Gillian and Sister would work double shifts to make up for having no doctor.
‘We need hands-on people out here. Not bookworms,’ she’d said, not quite looking at me. Coming out, they’d struggled for ten hours over almost impassable roads, which by now hadn’t been graded for months. While they’d been doing all that, I’d parsed two sentences.
‘A politician! An election must be coming up,’ laughed Daniel. Creak. Creak. I was pleased to hear his laughter again. Suddenly I knew I’d missed it inordinately. He’d just come in to the kitchen from his cold morning shower. His mop of hair was still dripping in spikes. His charcoal eyebrows were awry.
I’d boiled the billy on a small fire I’d made in the yard.
‘Tea?’ I asked, and it still seemed a small triumph to be able to offer hot tea from my cooking fire.
‘How do you know about the politician?’ I asked. We seldom heard news from the outside world. Everyone was usually too exhausted after a day’s work to turn on the TV when the electricity happened to be on. There were no newspapers in the shop, because only the few whites here would read them. The outside world had fallen away.
‘Craig stopped me in the street, boasting about how hard he’d worked on his submission,’ said Adrian. As usual he refused my tea, gulping glasses of water instead, since we could no longer keep his beloved pineapple juice because once he’d opened it, it needed the fridge.
‘Careful of Craig,’ said Daniel. ‘He’s great mates with Bruce. Bruce is always going to Craig’s house.’
‘That’s not friendliness. That’s flirting,’ said Adrian.
‘Flirting? The CEO is flirting with Craig?’ I asked, sipping my tea, enjoying gossip after my solitude.
‘With his wife,’ said Daniel. He’d had to raise his voice above Adrian’s snorts.
‘Craig doesn’t let her out,’ said Daniel. ‘Would your fire be good for bacon and eggs?’
I fried us all bacon and eggs in the iron camping pan in the front yard. Now that I often cooked on an open fire, I’d copied the local ways, just a ring of stones for the fireplace and to rest the pan on when it was hot. Adrian had refused to let us copy them on chilly nights, however, when small fires burned on a piece of corrugated iron on the cement porches of their houses all over the settlement. After the families had drifted away for the evening to the warmed room behind, the dogs inherited the fire, sitting upright and alert, straight-backed, their eyes on it like sleepy but well-behaved children.
‘What will people do with this politician?’ I asked Adrian as we ate. ‘Will people want to meet him – or her?’
‘Whites will,’ said Daniel.
‘Probably not your old lady,’ Adrian said, guessing what was on my mind. ‘Though in the old days, you’re right, there’d have been a big turnout. A ceremony. People will come for the barbecue, but they’ll take their meat home – you’ll see. Eating in a big group, that’s not how they do things here.’
‘Skin issues?’ I guessed, rather proudly because I knew more than when I came. He didn’t bother to nod.
‘Are we going to ask this politician for something?’ Daniel politely changed the subject. ‘Everyone will bring their
agendas. We should. Don’t you want to raise again the issue of a plane for patients? Especially with those roads?’
Daniel often looked exhausted after the frequent trips to Alice, though Adrian never did.
‘Craig won’t give me a chance, he’ll hog him,’ said Adrian. ‘He’ll say he can’t educate the kids because he’s got no money. And Bruce will blame the mess-up with the power on having no money for a second assistant.’
But he agreed to try.
The yard in front of the council building thronged with people. There was the hot salty smell of cooking meat in the air from the giant barbecue out the back, bought especially for occasions like this, despite the locals’ non-attendance. I’d come to suspect more and more that public things were done in the settlement only in the white way, not in the Aboriginal way, as if the whites didn’t know, or didn’t care. The politician had arrived in a plane; because of the rain the roads were more treacherous than ever. His pilot was sitting in a white plastic chair nursing a cup of tea while he waited to fly the politician to the next settlement. Bruce was shaking his hand and introducing him to Skeleton, who’d unexpectedly returned, now so thin he seemed almost to float. I’d been expecting Bruce to be an old man, but he was about the same age as Craig, thin and still handsome, with an exuberant head of prematurely white frizzy hair. He’d brought back from town a most unlikely dog which he carried under one arm, a well-fed, perfectly groomed fluffy toy dog, a Bedlington terrier adorned with little white curls all over its fat body, a canine copy of its master.
Craig, in tight jeans, was proudly brandishing a thick document.
‘I’ve given the kids the day off school,’ he told me without irony. ‘I’ve got an appointment to tell our leaders why education doesn’t work here.’
‘Why doesn’t it?’ I asked.
He looked at me in surprise.
‘Because I’ve got no money,’ he said.
I’d seen Dora and the other women in the crowd, excused myself and headed towards them. They didn’t greet me, but I smiled, looked down and sat in the dust quietly surveying the scene. After a while, Dora spoke.
‘Lot of people.’
‘A lot!’ I agreed. So I felt included.
The women seemed excited as they spoke with each other. Something was in the air. Once more I wished I could understand what they were saying, but at least I could make out their word for ‘not’. Each of them at one point said ‘not’ to Dora, though what they were refusing, I had no idea.
The politician emerged, accompanied by Bruce still carrying the toy dog, to a smattering of white applause, but black silence. I saw Craig edging near him. Daniel and Adrian arrived just as the politician began a speech about his government and its achievements.
The women around me examined the ground.
At the speech’s end, men thronged around him. He talked to them, but after a while I was astonished to see that he was heading towards us. Craig stood in his path and handed his document over. But the politician wasn’t to be deflected. He kept advancing, and the men fell away. My surprise at that was taken over by a further surprise – another couple of words popped into my understanding: after hours of uncomprehending listening, I could suddenly make out the women around me saying, ‘You ask.’ ‘Not.’ ‘You ask.’
The politician was amongst us, holding Craig’s document behind his back.
‘Greetings, ladies,’ he said. ‘I’ve come to confide in you. The real purpose for me in flying here is to talk to you.’
He was in his early thirties but his hair was already starting to retreat towards the back of his head, as if it planned to abandon him. Nevertheless, he had deep-set eyes, a practised, winning smile, knife-edge ironed trousers and a shirt so white it almost hurt my eyes.
‘I had other pressing matters, it’s true, but closest to my heart –’ He spoke softly, as if he was sharing a secret, ‘I believe in talking to the grandmothers. That’s where the soul of a community is. You’d all be grandmothers, right?’
Dora nodded politely, but the others gazed at the ground, unmoved, perhaps overwhelmed by the important government man talking to them, or simply uncomprehending.
‘I loved my grandmother. She got me where I am today,’ he smiled. ‘I owe it all to her.’
I heard again, ‘You ask,’ muttered in Djemiranga by the women around me. The politician didn’t notice, but anyway, since he didn’t speak Djemiranga, he’d just hear it as extraneous noise.
‘I didn’t want to go to school – like any child.’ He was confiding in us about this, his peccadillo that he’d triumphed over. ‘But my grandmother cared about my future. I’d be in my little uniform, my little white shirt and little navy shorts I was always growing out of –’ He smiled winningly again. These grandmothers, they’d be vexed with the problem of boys constantly growing out of their new clothes, especially since they lived so inconveniently far from the shops of Alice.
‘She’d wash them every weekend –’ His smiled wavered at the lack of response. ‘She always washed my uniform on Saturday so it’d drip dry on the line bright and beautiful, and on Sunday night she’d get out the iron –’ He faltered, suddenly aware that no one in his audience seemed to have ironed their dresses today, but he had to go on, ‘And get to work on it.’
He decided to solve the problem by miming ironing, twisting his body to and fro in a most unlikely mimicry that suggested it wasn’t he who’d ironed his knife-edged trousers.
‘So I’d look clean and neat.’ He stopped the mime, which hadn’t really accomplished anything. ‘But I’d be playing with my train set –’
Faced with twenty or so ladies gazing at the dust, he again wavered. Then it came to him how to win our attention, and he was down on his knees in the dust, a six-year-old boy shoving a train around a track. He smiled up at us. A second before he did, I hoped he wasn’t going to do a train toot. But he did.
‘Toot-toot, toot-toot!’
He got back on his feet, a little sheepish but pleased with himself, for this surely was what a politician must do to reach out to the people. He dusted his hands and the knees of his previously immaculate suit, but red dusty patches adamantly refused to budge – his wife would be explaining proudly to the dry-cleaner that her husband knew how to get down amongst the voters.
‘I’d be hoping she’d be too busy to notice a little child. But she was never too busy. She’d tap the big clock on the wall –’ Despite his concern about his suit, he beamed his most engaging smile. ‘And she’d point out to me that it was ten to nine.’
The ladies merely gazed at the dust.
‘Ten to nine,’ the politician repeated, a little louder this time.
He was rewarded by the ladies lifting their heads a little, perhaps hoping his speech was finishing.
‘She’d say: “Off to school with you!”’
But he seemed to have lost them again; their heads bowed. He had to try harder; any audience could be won, he obviously believed, if you really tried. He put on a grandmotherly voice, found a high note but it became a squeak:
‘Off to school! Put down your train and go.’
Perhaps he was rewarded; the ladies muttered again. Against the previous stolidity, this was a promising noise. He went back to his normal speaking voice.
‘If I didn’t obey her, she’d go to the kitchen jug where all the big utensils were kept – the egg lifter –’ here, the egg lifter slid under an imaginary fried egg, ‘the potato masher –’ the masher crushed boiled potatoes that resisted so fiercely, he had to smash them, almost unbalancing, but he regained composure, ‘and the big wooden spoon.’ The big wooden spoon stirred a steaming pot full of nutritious, grandmotherly stew on a stove.
‘“I’ll give you a paddywhack if you don’t move,” she’d say. Often I didn’t move, hoping that this day I’d be allowed to stay home.’
I heard muttering again amongst the women. I made out again, ‘You.’
‘So she’d take the big wooden spoon out –
’ He paused again and I was astonished to see that his eyes were wet with tears. He was moved by his own memories, he was genuinely back in his grandmother’s kitchen, or perhaps the grandmother he wished he’d had, or at least he so desperately wanted us to believe he had. But he was baffled that the women had resumed gazing at the dust.
‘And you know what she’d do? She’d paddywhack me out the door with the wooden spoon.’
He repeated himself, the tears then running down his face.
‘Paddywhack me off to school!’
I heard more muttering, and suddenly I made out an English word. It stood out. ‘Grader.’
But I dismissed it. I must’ve made a mistake.
‘And look where I am now!’ said the politician. ‘All because of my darling grandmother!’
He dashed the tears away. His beautiful, deeply set eyes moved along the row so that every one of us was included in his gaze.
‘Because of my grandmother.’
There was a deep silence from the audience. Craig came over and hovered hopefully. White-haired, handsome Bruce and his white toy dog followed, the dog trotting obediently. Surely these old women didn’t deserve such extended attention. It warmed my heart that Adrian and Daniel kept their distance, leaning against the wall of the council building. The politician glanced behind him, perhaps sensing the approach of Bruce and Craig out of the corner of his eye, and flapped his hand to them behind his back, hoping the ladies couldn’t see him. Go away, go away, his hand said. I’ve nearly got them. They’re tough, but I’m nearly there.
Craig and Bruce backed respectfully away. Even the toy dog walked backwards.
This speech of his must become a turning point in the disastrous state of education in the Northern Territory. He would make his audience appreciate his conviction, feel his passion, act on it. His audience would from then on be inspired to iron their grandchildren’s clothes before school on Monday, be inspired to check the time on their clock on the wall, would reach out for their wooden spoons, be inspired to paddywhack children off to school. From that moment, the lives of Aboriginal children would improve, and Western education would succeed at last.
