‘We followed them, watching what they doing. We didn’t even know after watching but they went towards camp. We knew Country better than them we got in front stopped them.’ He turned then to look back the way he had come, as if trying to catch a glimpse of his distant country. Maybe, thought Esperance, looking that way would help him remember. Was that a tear in his eye?
‘We had no weapons, except for hunting, we needed no weapons except for hunting. It not matter. Their weapons, better than ours, they make a loud noise, and we die, simple as that. We had to hide, then kill whoever we could catch –’ something like a mix of pride and despair was written on his face, if Esperance could read it right ‘– we caught some, they went away, for a while, then others came. They killed the camp, whoever could, ran away, I ran away, we cannot go home, they can’t live there but they camp there at our waterhole. My people are everywhere, every direction, I hope we will find each other again one day.
‘We survived, have always survived,’ he said with pride, ‘that Country where I belong, where my family belong, we have walked it forever, we belong there. It looks after us, and anyone else who tries to go there, it doesn’t look after them so well.’ Esperance could tell from his tone that he saw it as fact: the Country chooses who can live there, it punishes those who don’t belong.
‘People from other places came before, those white fellas, they came before, long time ago, but they couldn’t live there, in that country. The white fellas let us have our Country because they couldn’t live there. These grey fellas, they don’t much like the hot and the dry, they like it less even than the white fella do.’
Chapter 10
This is Not an Invasion
I am writing this report from under a camouflage tarp somewhere north and west of the Murray River, in what once I would have called the desert. Which is the only reason I am able to write it at all.
We are not being invaded, we are being colonised, and there is absolutely nothing we can do about it.
When they first arrived we did not know whether they would be coming to invade or coming in peace. Having never left our planet, indeed not even having made contact with life from outside our atmosphere, we had no context in which to understand them when they arrived suddenly, without preamble. How could we have expected the total disregard with which we would be treated?
Bear in mind, they do not fear us, they do not hate us, we simply do not conform to their narrow definition of ‘people’. Rather they look upon us as merely part of the fauna of this planet they are settling and intending to tame. We are animals, to them, and thus to them this is an empty planet ripe for their settlement.
There is no use appealing to them person to person; they will ignore it as the terrified bleating of sheep, the aggressive yapping of dogs. They will ignore us as the Colonial powers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries ignored the Natives in the lands they invaded.
There is nothing we can do but fight them, although we will almost certainly lose; many would say we have lost already. I am one of that many. Not since Europeans armed with guns, with cannons, and with complete conviction that settling in Australia was their right, has a Native population been as hopeless and relatively unarmed as we are now. Our most powerful weapons are to them what wooden spears were to men with muskets. Certainly if we catch them unprepared in the right situation we can kill one or two, but that is the anomaly.
Our larger weapons, all of the technology of the world – missiles, cannon, even our terrifying nuclear arsenal – are reliant on our primitive understanding of electronics and electromagnetic fields. In their superior knowledge, their seemingly infinitely superior technology, they can simply switch our machines, our bombs, even our nukes off, remotely.
Now only a few places remain where humans are free, and those all have one thing in common: they are all dry and hot. The Sahara Desert surely still has some free humans – heavily armed Arabs and Bedouins, returned to a nomadic existence, trying simply to survive in certain knowledge that confronting the enemy would be death. In the hottest parts of the desert in the USA there are militia, built up from survivalists and Native Americans alike, who surely finally have a common enemy. Kenya, Ethiopia, Mexico – surely they have free people, hiding in their paucity of cover from the invader’s aircraft.
Surely the Afghans, experienced as they are at resisting better equipped armies and overwhelming odds, a people whose homeland is intolerably dry, are still living a similar life to the one they always have. Well, a similar life to that they lived under Soviet occupation, and under every other attempted occupation throughout their long and unpleasant history.
How do I know this? I don’t for certain – there is no longer any long-range communication system under human control at all. Those places were the last places we had contact with before contact was lost. We do know one thing. The aliens don’t tolerate heat and dry air well; the most heat-intolerant humans love heat compared to them. That is why Australia, the hottest, driest continent in the world, was the last to be taken by them. That is why we still have a resistance at all. That is why this newspaper is still being published and you can read my words.
All is not well, though. The cities of the east coast, most of the east coast country and all of the Australian Alps are theirs now. Tasmania is crawling with them – it is after all our coolest, wettest state – and the cities of Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra and Brisbane, previously home to eighty per cent of the continent’s human population, are now subjugated and the population exterminated or in ‘reservations’.
The last human city to fall in Australia, maybe in the world, was Alice Springs, being so deep in the desert they did not, could not, settle there. Even Alice must have died, though; fearing a city they did not understand, where they could not live, they would have bombed it flat. We have lost contact with Alice Springs but we can hope people survived, we can hope humanity has a city somewhere.
This paper survives and we will continue to write and distribute it the best we can for we fear this could be the last free human voice. I will not tell you exactly where I am, where we have printing presses – the last free human press. They cannot survive where I am, where we are, but if they find us they will surely attack from the air.
They came in peace, their peace.
– Herald Sun, 21 September 2041 Author Unknown
Esperance’s grandfather was old enough to remember the Invasion, the colonisation, well and he was therefore sought after as a storyteller. For all her childhood she had sat around the fire listening to his stories as he told the entire camp, and visitors from other camps, about the world before the Invasion, about the arrival of amphibious invaders from the stars. She knew the story better than almost anyone.
That was when people could still have a fire at camp; they had learnt early that you could only have fires in summer, when it was so hot the fire was unnecessary, or during the day in winter. Winter nights were the only time the Settlers would overfly the desert. Their fliers were noisy but fast; by the time you heard them there was no longer time to quench the fire. By the time you heard them you were under attack.
Fires could not be risked.
It seemed quite unlikely that the Settlers were still looking for the camp, still seeking out any humans, looking for resistance. It was almost as if they had decided that any Natives left, any humans, any earthling animals, were safely contained in land the Settlers didn’t want and couldn’t use. Surely they must believe most of the human remnants to be harmless. The humans had lost the war – what little fighting there was – years ago.
Maybe the aliens, the Settlers, were right – maybe they were harmless. They had done nothing to prove otherwise, had not fought, had not taken back land, had not even killed a noticeable number of Settlers once the first flush of invasion was over. What they were not was subjugated; they remembered, they kept the stories alive, they knew what humans were and one day
could be. Everybody in the camp agreed with Esperance and her grandfather: they would die before they gave up their freedom. If anyone disagreed they had never spoken to Esperance about it.
Then one day, maybe they would fight back. There was no way at all they were going to be able to fight back any time soon, and unless something changed it was only going to get worse. Most of the men were drunk whenever they could get the grog, high when they could get their hands on the strange alien psychoactive substances the Settlers used. Those little red pills, they were a scourge, they were deadly, though it was surprising they worked on humans at all. The women, those who did not join the men in destroying their brains, were dispirited and sick. If the chance came tomorrow to fight, they would miss it. How do you fight when you have already lost, when your world has been taken from you? This long after colonisation it was hard to find a way to keep spirits up. Out-gunned when not outnumbered, there was little hope.
She tried to hold as many people together as she could, tried to keep people hoping. The older generations – they had less spirit, less life left than the younger. The longer someone had been oppressed by the Toads, the longer one had lived without hope, the deeper the quagmire became. Therefore she worked harder on the younger generations, those who had little or no memory of any life but hiding from the Settlers. She took their hands, pulled them out of the depression, for to them it was not so deep.
Esperance hated the Toads – the Settlers – and tried to remember, always, what her grandfather told her whenever she felt useless. Humans are as good as the Toads – it was like a mantra – humans are as good as the Toads.
They had taken Earth for reasons of their own, for reasons that were opaque to Esperance. Why could they not be comfortable on their own planet? They hated it on Earth so why did they want it so badly? Maybe they had used up too many resources at the place she had heard they just called ‘home’, refused to live on what they had, ‘like a child spending their pocket money too fast’ was what Grandfather always said. Esperance was not sure what he meant: money was too rare and precious to be given to children.
Maybe it was like when the hunting ran out at the camp, and they had to go further and further afield looking for food. If they hunted too hard, too successfully, they would have to move camp. That might be it – they moved camp a long way, these Toads. Maybe it was like when they cooked a feral sheep and ate it all rather than saving some meat for the next breakfast. A feast then hunger, that is what can happen if you are careless.
It was the middle of what winter they had and not yet dawn – there was still a chance of a fly-by. Listening carefully for the sound of a flier, for the skittering whirr of its engines, she checked over the camp. Everyone was camped in the scrub, under mallee, in depressions in the ground covered with tarps, twigs and debris. Hopefully here was nothing that could betray them to an overflying Settler.
It was only a couple of days ago they had finished their last move, after a flier crossed over them and then banked and returned. There was no certainty that it had seen them but something had made it turn back. The council had decided it was better to be safe, so they moved, they ran. They were still settling in, still hiding all traces of their meagre food stores. Their sanitary arrangements, little more than holes, were not yet camouflaged.
It had been a rough move, a long walk in the scorching heat for many, as the braver souls searched before the group in their few battered old cars. Nobody wanted to walk at all but the vehicles were too risky, too noisy; whoever was driving them would be lost if Settlers heard or saw them. It had been decided they would lead the Settlers in a chase away from the main group of travellers if spotted. Better to sacrifice volunteers and the cars than have everyone captured. If such a move was necessary, it would be unlikely any would return.
The cars were treasures as much as they were hard work. Hunters found them from time to time, abandoned, almost never working. Father had taught son, mother had taught daughter, the skills needed to keep them running. It was fuel that was hard to obtain.
Their only method of communication was outdated even before the Invasion – UHF radio, a medium that Settlers were certainly capable of listening in to but that they seemed to have, so far, ignored. For those on foot – waiting for the crackle of the radio, baking in the heat that was the only thing protecting them from the Settlers, dry and hot yet maintaining a forced silence – it was not a good day.
Most of them, in the camp, had white skin. As good as they were in the heat when compared to Settlers they were still poorly adapted to the scorching sun. All of them were tanned from years of outdoor living, and yet, that day, they burned red then peeled. The agony of the raw skin, the dehydration, the pain of the excruciating heat . . . There should have been moaning, screaming, yet they travelled, they hid, in silence.
Everyone was far too tired to complain, to moan, to scream.
That was only the first day; they had bivouacked at night in the trees, in the dark and the cold, too terrified to start a fire. It was a long night, that first night on the run, everybody cold and scared, huddled in groups under not enough blankets. Men, women and children lay in desperate silence. The trees that normally brought comfort, that hid them from the roaming Settlers, loomed like silent monsters in the feeble moonlight. Above the group fliers could be heard quartering the woodland, searching for any sign of them. No one could understand why the Settlers were, this time, so interested in finding the refugees.
Led by their new friend Paddy, the stranger from the desert, they went further inland, into the desert, than ever before. They were relatively safe there but only during the scorching, deadly heat of the day, when it was so hot not even humans could tolerate it well. At night it was even cooler than it was closer to the coast, which would have been a relief if not for the Settlers. It was still too dry for them but they seemed to manage better in the cool and dry than they did in the hot and dry.
Moving at the pace of the slowest, the humans took a week of painfully hot days to get deep enough into the desert to feel safe. It was the fifth night when the alien sound of the fliers ceased passing overhead. Five nights of the same tiredness, the same fear, the same cold, the same impenetrable darkness.
When the radio Esperance held crackled on, when a forward scout informed the group they had found a potential safe camp, she had no water, no energy left to cry in relief even if her eyes could have spared water for tears. Two days they had been in that camp, she hoped it was safe enough. With meagre supplies and little water many would not survive another move if the Settlers came again.
Paddy from the desert had decided to stay with them; he would have relative safety, company and security there while he waited until it was safe to look for his people. He had travelled lightest of the group, carrying only his blanket – someone had spared him a blanket – hunting rifle and knife. Accustomed to living rough he had not even built a shelter when they stopped. ‘It’s not gunna rain,’ he had said. He was a better hunter than the rest of the group, teaching them to catch the game of the desert.
Tireless, indomitable, he had gone out every day to learn the country around them, finding more water, finding materials to build shacks. Taking out other men he had taught them to find the food he knew better than they. The food out there in the desert was different to what they were used to, nobody wanted to eat lizards, nobody understood the desert plants. In the end hunger and desperation had converted even the most resistant.
Esperance moved carefully, keeping to the trees whenever possible, just in case there was a silent flier above. The Settlers seemingly had no such thing as a silent flier. Maybe they didn’t feel the need for stealth so had never developed quieter engines. However, years under occupation had taught caution. The last weeks of frantic flight after flight on foot deeper into the desert had encouraged, enforced, outright paranoia.
It was Grandfather who had taught them how to hide their camp, how to
build the sanitary, yet hidden, latrines. Grandfather had been leading them for so long, teaching them how to survive, and finally his health was failing. He was an old man, nobody knew quite how old, yet if he remembered before the Invasion he had to be ancient. Nobody expected him to live long and when he died there would be a problem. The fight over leadership might tear the camp apart. Why would they stay together in a group without him anyway?
Survivors had arrived more than once from other groups, groups that had died, had fallen apart over leadership squabbles. Her group had no leadership as such, just a council of elders who ruled by respect, and all deferred to Grandfather as the eldest, the wisest, their natural leader. So old, everyone merely called him Grandfather, he had no need for a name in their mob.
Even visitors from other groups, even ragged refugees arriving half dead, nearly starved, on the run, called him ‘Grandfather’. Some had even heard of him before arriving; some came looking for him.
Chapter 11
Terra Nullius was a legal fiction, a declaration used to justify the invasion of Australia and subjugation of its people hundreds of years ago by the United Kingdom, a more technologically advanced people. In translation from the long-dead language Latin it means ‘Nobody’s Land’ or ‘Empty Earth’. There were people in Australia when the United Kingdom came; there had been for tens of thousands of years. The declaration of Terra Nullius had the direct effect of defining the Native inhabitants as non-people. I use that term now because in your colonisation you have done that exact same thing.
Since the invasion, you call it the settlement, of this planet you have acted as if humans do not exist. If you acknowledge at all that we were here before your arrival you believe we were rendered extinct by your expansion. This has happened before: the English believed they had exterminated all of the Tasmanian Aborigines, the Palawa; in fact they survived the invasion, they still exist now. You act as if humans are extinct: that is news to me.
Terra Nullius Page 12
